Darshan 25 October 1976

Deva Nisarga.... Nisarga means to be natural, to be spontaneous, to be simple and poor. And blessed are the poor - only they shall inherit the kingdom of God. Only the poor are rich. This inner poverty is really an inner richness. When you simply move with nature, by and by you disappear.

You are so poor that even you are not there - the poverty is total. When the poverty is total, there is nothing to possess and nobody to possess it. That's what Jesus means when he says 'poor in spirit'. A man can be poor but may not be poor in spirit. He may not have anything to claim as his own but at least he has his ego. He may not have possessions but he has the possessor.

The inner poverty, the poor in spirit, means that even the possessor is gone - no possessions, no possessor. Then you cannot be against nature because there is nobody to be against Then nature simply flows through you. You become like a, cloud: wherever the winds take it, it goes. It has no idea of its own. It has no destiny, no private goal. It has not planned any journey, so wherever it lands it is beautiful, because there is never any frustration. Frustration comes out of a private goal.

Whenever you come across a man who is frustrated, it simply shows that he has a private goal against the universe. Naturally he is frustrated. When you move with the universe, there is no frustration; there is tremendous fulfillment. Each moment is joy because everything is going right Nothing can go wrong because whatsoever is happening is how it should happen.

That is the meaning of nisarga. It is one of the most beautiful terms in Sanskrit. And I would like you to disappear completely, to die completely. And it is possible - that's why I am giving you this name.

You are just on the brink of it, on the very edge. A slight push and you will be gone. So just remember it, and this name will become a continuous reminding - what Gurdjieff calls self-remembering.

That is the meaning of changing the name. Ordinarily names are meaningless. They don't have any relevance to your being because they are given to you by people who cannot read your being.

Maybe they like the sound of the name, maybe they like the dictionary meaning of the name. Maybe the name was very popular. They heard it somewhere - some famous man also had the same name: some actor, some actress, some author, some musician, some singer, some poet It was famous in the same way and so the parents gave it to you. But they cannot read your being. When a master gives you a name, it is not ordinary. It has tremendous significance. It is like a seed which will start sprouting. In the right season and in the right climate it will become a big tree.

This is going to be your path. Tao is your path - to be natural, to be simple. Struggle is not for you.

A profound surrender - and out of that surrender your being will be born. And you can do it, you can do it very gracefully.... I have been watching you. Good.

[In explaining the meaning of her name to an indian woman, Osho said... ] Love is as eternal as God. In fact God and love are two names for one energy. And energy is always a process - dynamic, moving, river-like. It is not a thing. You cannot demark it You cannot draw circles around it; you cannot define it. It remains indefinable, it remains elusive. It is like mercury - the more you try to catch hold of it, the more difficult it becomes to catch hold of it.

So anubhuti is really a very different quality of experiencing. And I am giving you this name so that you can learn how to be always in process; how to always remain growing. There should never come a moment when you think, 'Now I am a grown-up. ' One can grow to the very last moment of life - even beyond that. Even in death one can grow. People who stop somewhere in life and think that now they have grown enough, they are dead. Then they live a posthumous life. They don't really live. And this happens in all the dimensions of life.

A real man of knowing never comes to a point where he can say, 'I know.' It never becomes knowledge; it always remains knowing. It always remains learning. He goes on learning and learning and learning, and he never accumulates; he is always like a clean slate. Time writes many things on it but he goes on washing it, and again it becomes clean so that more can be written on it.

So remain a process. Whether it is love or it is knowledge or anything else, always remember that life should not be confined and one should never demark. And any time that you come to a limit, you have to take a jump. You have to go beyond it. All limits have to be broken. No limit has to be accepted. Once you accept the limit, you are dead. So never accept any limitation on your being and you will be growing and growing. That unlimited process is what God is all about.

God is not a person sitting somewhere. It is just the very life process.

If you can remain in a process, and you are always available for the unknown, the unfamiliar, the strange, the mysterious, and you never become closed.... Experience makes you closed - in experiencing you remain open. It is a tremendous opening, a vulnerability. Experience is like a seed - closed from everywhere; like an egg, closed from everywhere. Experiencing - anubhuti - is like a bird, not confined to anything. Even the whole sky is not the limit, and one can always transcend oneself.

Nietzsche has said somewhere, 'The day a man thinks that all that he wanted to know he has known, all that he wanted to be he has become, then he is no more a man. He has failed. The day a man stops transcending himself, he is below human.'

This is the glory of man - and the danger, and the poetry and the struggle - that man is a transcending, a self-transcending animal. So whatsoever is attained, whatsoever becomes a transcendence, immediately one has to transcend it. Before it encloses you, before it becomes a burden, before it kills you and poisons your being, you have to get rid of it.

This is what I call sannyas. It is not that one day you renounce. No - you have to renounce every moment. Accumulation is natural. The way things are, one accumulates. If you have lived twenty- four hours, then in twenty-four hours you have accumulated something or other. It may not be money but then it is experience, knowledge. With just the very process of time, you accumulate.

A sannyasin is one who goes on renouncing every moment all accumulations, and always remains open, vulnerable, ready to learn... ready to be in some new way, never settled. A sannyasin is a wanderer - and the wandering is infinite. This is the meaning that I give to the word 'sannyas'.

In India we divide in two ways: the sannyasin is one who has left the house, who is no more a householder. And one who lives in the house is a householder. These are very ordinary meanings but beautiful meanings are hidden inside. I don't say leave the house but I say never make a house.

Nowhere should you make a house. Live in the house - that's not the problem - but never become so attached to anything that it becomes a confinement.

A householder is one who is settled, who lives a life of security, safety, who has dropped all danger, who lives with a bank balance, who lives with insurance. But if you have life insurance you are already dead; then you have stopped living.

A sannyasin is one who goes on wandering... a constant vagabond, a gypsy, who makes no household anywhere. Even if he lives in a house he knows that it is a caravanserai; it is an overnight stay - and in the morning we have to go. So he never clings with anything; he never clings to any relationship. He always remains open. If it is there, good. If it is not there, goodbye; that too is good.

[A sannyasin says: I feel more and more settled and very good, but why do I have all these terrible nightmares? I have such nice days and then in the night I have such horrible dreams.

Osho checks her energy.] Just come back - I will tell you what it is! Nothing is wrong in it.

It always happens when you start settling. It is your whole past trying to fight with your future. It is your mind trying to fight with your meditation. It is your ego trying to fight with your being. So it is going to be horrible, but you will win over it; nothing to be worried about. And it is good that it is happening because it happens only when the mind becomes absolutely afraid that now it is going to go; then it gives you the last Fight. It is the last bout of energy.

It is a good indication - one should be happy about it. It never happens in the early stages. It happens only when meditation is really going deep and one is flowing, becoming silent, settled, centred. Then the mind becomes apprehensive. Now, if the mind has to give a fight, he will have to give it right now. Now or never - that becomes the problem for the mind. It will create all sorts of nightmares - and it can create. It itself is a nightmare. It can give you great nightmares, black holes

in your being, and can make you very afraid. It can make you so afraid that you can forget all about your centring, meditation. If you forget about it, the mind has conquered you again. This is the last temptation of the devil.

So simply watch it. When it happens, it is okay; nothing wrong in it. Don't even pay much attention to it; just neglect it. Nothing kills the mind better than negligence, indifference. Don't become too concerned about what it is, why it is happening, because if you ask why, if you become too concerned, you pay it attention, and that's what the mind wants in fact - that more attention be paid to it. You have always given attention to the mind - everybody does. One day suddenly you start becoming a no-mind. Then the mind of course feels offended, humiliated. The mind feels that its prestige, its power is going. It starts breathing hard... it starts dying. It tries to cling to you. It is the last effort.

So simply watch - there is nothing wrong in it. It is just a dream. The mind cannot create anything more than a dream - whether it is a nightmare or a very beautiful dream that you have become a queen and that you have great power and great riches, or it is a very horrible dream.

Have you read Kafka?

... The dream can be like a kafkan story. Have you read his story, 'Metamorphosis'? Read it.

It will give you much insight into your nightmare - and you may start dreaming it too; it is very dangerous! Kafka lived through all these nightmares. He could not understand them himself, because no atmosphere of meditation existed around him. If he had been to the East he would have become a Buddha, but he died burdened with his nightmares. He couldn't figure out what was happening. He became more and more involved in the nightmares; he became pathological.

So now if you pay too much attention to your nightmares, you will become pathological. It will create a pathology, a sort of illness, a disease. Don't pay any attention to it. Whenever you have something horrible, just come and relate to me. You can just go into that horrible state and I can see it. Now it is for me to pay attention to; don't you be worried. That's what the privilege of a sannyasin is - that you can simply give all your nightmares to me! You can keep all beautiful dreams to yourself.

Once you are completely relaxed about it, once you are not disturbed by it, it will go. Then the points is not there. The mind stops knocking on the door when you don't pay any attention. When the guest is not welcome he forgets about you.

[The Hypnotherapy group are present. Osho checks the energy of one participant.] Come back. I am happy! Very good. Now you do the music group, and dance - and go crazy! Just have a mad dance. Dance is going to help you tremendously. There is nothing like dancing.

There is a very inner process of dancing and it is concerned with a certain fact about the body. The body is the only object in the world that you can see from both sides - from without and from within.

You can see no other object from both sides. If you see a rock, you see it from without.

So when you dance others will be seeing your body from the outside; it is not their body. There will be movement, rhythm, dancing steps; structure or no structure but there will be movement. This

is how others will watch you. If you start watching from within you will be surprised that the more the body dances, the more you will see inside that there is no movement. The body movement becomes a contrast to see the non-moving element within you. It is as if somebody has written with white chalk on a blackboard. You can write on a white wall too, but then it will not be seen. You have to write it on a blackboard. In the contrast the white becomes clear, loud.

When the body is in a whirlpool, is simply moving, enjoying movement, suddenly you can become aware of the inner witness who is a non-mover, who has never moved, who is the unmoving centre of the moving world. But when the body is in movement you can see it in contrast. Ordinarily we move - we walk, we talk, we take a bath, we go to sleep - but these movements have become routine. When you are in a dance and you go faster and faster and faster, and a moment comes when the movement is no more routine; suddenly you are going absolutely crazy - you become aware of the non-moving inside you. You see your own body moving. You become a witness; you start hovering beyond the body. That's why the Sufis became so interested in the whirling dervish dance. The more you whirl, the easier it is to know the non-moving centre inside you.

So start dancing - you are ready for it now.

[Another group member says: I had a terrible experience of body pains in the neck that came in the relaxation exercises. I did not know that I had them.] It can happen sometimes. Sometimes when you relax, you can become aware of many tensions in the body of which you were never aware, because you were never relaxed. So you were attuned with your pain. Now the body relaxes, but those parts cannot relax because they are loaded. When the whole body relaxes, the parts that are loaded with some tensions cannot relax. Then suddenly you become aware of the pain. In relaxation many people become aware of certain things that you may have carried your whole life.

One becomes adjusted - one has to become adjusted otherwise life would become very difficult.

There are so many aches and pains in the world. One has to learn to cope with them, one has to learn to forget about them, one has to drop them into the unconscious - but they remain there.

Sometimes in relaxation exercises, rare phenomena happen. Somebody may be sixty years of age and suddenly he starts feeling a pain in his leg that he had when he was five years old. Fifty-five years have passed, and now suddenly the pain is back. The pain has remained all along; he had just dropped it from the conscious. He has stopped paying attention to it.

Now scientists say that we only allow two percent of information to reach to the mind. Ninety-eight percent is blocked by the mind; it is not allowed, otherwise people will go mad. So much will be there that they will not be able to cope with it. Just a hundred years ago scientists used to think that the mind was a mechanism to bring in information from the outside world to the inside; now they say that is wrong. The mind is a mechanism to prevent too much information from the outside, and to select - it is a selective mechanism - just to select that which is needed, otherwise forget about it.

Only two percent is allowed.

So this must have been part of the ninety-eight percent that your mind has been denying. But when you relaxed, you became aware. It is good. Go into massage, and particularly of those parts. No Rolfing - just massage. Good!

[Another sannyasin says she has a pin below the navel. Osho had previously given her a laughing meditation for this, but she was unable to do it in case of waking everyone up.

She then asks if she should do good deeds.] No, you are not to become a doer of good deeds. Good deeds will happen through you but you are not to become a doer. And virtue cannot be practised. You cannot be virtuous by effort, by doing.

Virtue can only be spontaneous, natural. Virtue comes out of understanding; it is not a question of doing anything. So be aware of it - beware of it, because you can become a do-gooder, and that is a very dangerous thing. Never be a do-gooder. These are the most mischievous people in the world. Because of them the whole humanity has been suffering for centuries.

Never be a do-gooder. You are not obliged to do any good in the world. You have just to be here happy, silent, peaceful, loving, and then virtue happens, good happens. But it happens completely on its own accord. You cannot claim that you have done it. If you can, it is mischief. The ego will be strengthened throughout - 'I have done this' and 'I have done that'. The ego is always seeking and searching for something to do.

Virtue is when the ego is not, so virtue cannot be a doing. It happens... it is a happening. And that is my basic standpoint - that one should never try to discipline a certain character. One should never try to do good. One should never try to follow certain ideals. One should never be a perfectionist. Perfectionism is the root cause of all neuroses and do-gooders are dangerous because they humiliate other people. By doing good, they start feeling great. And to whomsoever they do good. they humiliate.

You are not here to do good to anybody, and remember, whenever you start thinking in terms of doing good, you start thinking in terms also of others doing good to you. That is natural; that comes as part of the logic: 'When I am doing so much good for people, they have to do good to me.' Then you start demanding.

You see demanders everywhere. A mother does something for the son and then goes on demanding - 'I have done so much for you; now you do for me. That s why children can never become capable of forgiving their parents. It becomes very difficult to forgive their parents. Children hate, they are annoyed by their parents. Not that they don't love, but the do-gooder is heavy.

You cannot live with a saint. You can pay your respects but living with a saint for twenty-four hours you will feel like committing suicide. Saints are not good people to live with. You can go and listen to a sermon but saints are such great do-gooders that they will humiliate you on each and every step.

They will make you feel so guilty. They will make themselves bigger than life and you will be reduced to being just worms of the earth. It will be difficult to be with them. Nobody wants to live with a saint.

It is better to live in hell than to live with a saint. If there are only saints in heaven I am afraid how people will manage to live there. It will be one of the most boring places in the world. Saints are very boring.

So never become a saint. To feel 'holier than thou' is a great sin. And do-gooders think that they are doing their duty; that they are great public servants and all that nonsense.

To be happy is to be virtuous. To be celebrating is to be virtuous. To be loving is enough. Duty is a dirty four-letter word. Loving is enough. So simply love, enjoy - and out of it much virtue is going to happen, but that has nothing to do with you. That will happen on its own accord.

Have you watched it? Whenever there is a happy person there is virtue. Whenever somebody is singing and dancing, there is virtue. When two people love each other, there is virtue. When two friends sit silently and watch the stars, there is virtue. I teach this virtue.

And for your pain, take massage. Join the Alexander technique, because the pain is very deep- rooted. It must have remained from your very childhood. And as I feel it, it has something to do with your sexual energy. Some pent up energy is there which has lost its way. It cannot move up, cannot move down; it is disconnected. So it is there, heavy, and the pressure goes on becoming more and more. Simply do the Alexander technique and then tell me. It will go.

[A group member says she feels peaceful but is still closed.

Osho checks her energy.] Very good! Come back. Everything is going perfectly well. This closedness will disappear. Just start one meditation and drop the sufi meditation; it has done its work.

Start doing a very simple method at least six times a day. It takes only half a minute each time so it is three minutes a day. It is the shortest meditation in the world (she laughs). But you have to do it suddenly - that's the whole point of it.

Walking on the street - suddenly you remember. Stop yourself, stop yourself completely, no movement. Just be present for half a minute. Whatsoever the situation, stop completely and just be present to whatsoever is happening. Then start moving again. Six times a day. More you can do but not less. It will bring much opening. It has to be done suddenly.

In my childhood when I entered high school, I had a teacher who was a little eccentric about a few things. One was that whenever he took the attendance, he would not allow anybody to say, 'Yes, Sir.'

When he called the names he would insist that we would say, 'Present, Sir.' And I loved it, because I started meditating. This is what I used to do: when he called my name, I would say, 'Present, Sir,' and I would be really present. I would forget everything and just stop and be present, pure presence.

He became aware by and by that I was doing something else. One day he called me after the class and said. 'What are you doing? You seem to be mysterious. When you say, "Present, Sir," what do you do exactly? - because suddenly your face changes, your eyes change, your movements stop, and I have started feeling some energy coming towards me. What are you doing? I feel very pulled,' he said, 'and sometimes now I have even started remembering you. In my home sometimes I suddenly hear you calling, "Present, Sir," and something happens to me. But what are you doing?'

If you just become present suddenly, the whole energy changes. The continuity that was going on in the mind stops. And it is so sudden that the mind cannot create a new thought so immediately. It takes time; the mind is stupid. It cannot work without time, so when you do it suddenly.... Gurdjieff used to call this exercise, the 'Stop Exercise'.

His disciples would be working - somebody might be digging in the garden, somebody might be cleaning the floor, somebody might be cooking, and suddenly he would shout loudly, 'Stop!' And everybody had to stop - whatsoever he was doing. If your mouth was open and you were going to say something, it had to remain open; you were not to close it. If your eyes were open they had to remain open. If you were moving and you had taken one step up, it had to remain there; whether you feel or not, that was not the question. You were not to manage anything; you were simply to stop as you were.

It was one of the most beautiful methods that he developed. In that stopping, suddenly the mind stops, and for a single moment there is a clearing. All thoughts disappear - there is emptiness, and in that emptiness there is an opening.

So start this - call it 'Present, Sir' or 'Stop Exercise' as you like. Anywhere, the moment you remember, just give a jerk to your whole being and stop. Not only you will become aware. Soon you will feel that others have become aware of your energy - that something has happened; something from the unknown is entering you. That will open your closedness.

There is something that man can do but there is something that only God can do. Whatsoever you can do, you have done. It is as if a tree has brought buds - that's all the tree can do. But for the opening of the bud, for the petals to open, it will have to wait for the sun. Then with the sunrise the petals will open. This 'stop' exercise is to allow the sun to enter you. It is always there but you are so occupied with the mind that the rays of the sun never enter you.

So six times or more... and don't prolong it because after half a minute the old mind will come back and the whole thing will be destroyed!