Spiritual pregnancy

Question 1:

Premda, I hope it is me. In fact, every disciple has to come to this stage where he feels almost pregnant with the divine. It is a spiritual pregnancy. But because we are too much identified with the body, it may even seem that the body is also pregnant.

But something is growing within you. It is not part of the body, you need not be a Virgin Mary. And, of course, holy ghosts are not available anymore, only unholy ghosts - there are a few: one lives with Anando; another has been found in the Vipassana go-down. But they are all unholy ghosts, they don't do holy things. So you need not be worried about them.

Moreover, even the holy ghost has not been able up to now to do a miracle, to make a man pregnant.

It would have been more in tune with the Christian ideology if Joseph, rather than Mary, had become pregnant. That would have been a great miracle. A Virgin Mary, a poor girl, becoming pregnant - it is not a great miracle, anybody can do it.

But the disciple, Premda, certainly passes through a stage of immense value and beauty. And something transcendental, something more than you have ever thought about yourself, something beyond the grasp of your mind, is growing within you. This is the lotus I have been talking to you about. This is the flowering that brings a man or a woman to the ultimate opening towards the unknown, unknowable, inexpressible.

In a way, through this pregnancy, you are born again. You give birth to your own authentic self which has been up to now only a seed. But the seed longs to become a flower. And on the way, you will feel something very similar to pregnancy. You will feel light - you will not be feeling heavy like a pregnant woman - because it is not something material that is growing in you. It is something spiritual, nonmaterial that is opening within you. It will bring you more and more light, make you more and more unfettered, more and more free.

Meditators for centuries have felt that when deep in meditation, they suddenly find as if they have lost all weight, as if gravitation no more functions on them. And in a certain way, it is right. It no more functions on their spiritual being. The spiritual being is not matter. Hence gravitation cannot have any pull on it. And the weight arises because of the gravitation and its pull.

You don't have weight, not even your body has weight. Weight is a normal name for a scientific fact and the scientific fact is the gravitation force on the earth. You are pulled by that force. It is good for you - otherwise you would become like balloons, moving upwards, and you would not be able to find how to come back down to the earth.

It happens to astronauts when they move beyond the gravitation field. The gravitation field of the earth is two hundred miles around the earth. The moment the rocket passes two hundred miles, the strangest experience happens to the astronauts. They suddenly lose all weight. If they are not sitting with their belts on, they start floating inside the rocket, just like birds. Even birds feel the gravitation, that's why they become tired. They can fly only for a certain time. Then they have to rest.

But the astronaut in the rocket has no gravitational pull. On the moon, when astronauts have landed, they have another very strange experience: because the moon has only one eighth of the gravitation of the earth - it is eight times smaller than the earth, hence its forces of pulling are also eight times less - so the astronaut feels very light, not as light as he was feeling on the way to the moon, but still eight times less.

If you were eighty kilos, you feel only ten kilos. And because the astronaut feels eight times less weight, he can jump eight times further. He can simply jump over your house, just from this street to another street. He can jump to your terrace with no difficulty. There is no problem, because it is only the pull of the earth that is preventing him.

He has to walk very carefully on the moon. He is afraid, because he is feeling so light. If the same thing happens as was happening on the way - in the rocket - then he is finished. On the way, between the moon and the earth, he was able to come out of the rocket, he can float around the rocket. Tremendous experiences, but still they are physical.

But as your spiritual being starts growing within you, or starts coming into your vision - just a faraway vision of a mountain peak, covered with eternal snow - suddenly you can start feeling, even from far away, a certain coolness and a certain ancientness and a certain eternity. As you will become more aware, Premda, of your inner being, it will appear, as now, as if you are pregnant. You will see that you are not pregnant with anybody else, but that your own potential, your own ultimate possibility, is trying to unfold its petals.

You must have seen Gautam Buddha's statues ... always sitting on a lotus flower. In the East, the lotus has always been the symbol of ultimate flowering, because there is no other flower so big and so beautiful and so symbolically significant. The lotus grows in mud, dirty mud. That is one of the similarities: your body is nothing but dirty mud, and the lotus grows in the dirty mud. The lotus emerges from the water and its petals are so silky that the water cannot touch them. They remain always untouched by water. Even dewdrops settle on them in the night - particularly in winter - and in the morning you can see the dewdrop is sitting on the petals of the lotus, but the lotus is not wet.

The dewdrop and the lotus are still separate. And soon a little breeze ... and the dewdrop will start falling off the lotus leaves or the lotus petals.

That is the second symbol for a spiritual man who lives in the world: just like a lotus flower he is untouched by the world, as the lotus flower is not touched by the water in which it grows, in which it lives, in which it dies - but remains untouched by it.

These two things: growing in the dirty mud, growing beyond the dirty mud and the water, and still never being touched .... That is the essential quality of a sannyasin: being in the world, but not of the world. Being in the world, but not allowing the world even to touch you.

The authentic sannyasin does not escape from the world. He is not a coward. But in the past unfortunately the cowards became sannyasins and they gave a bad name to the whole spiritual regeneration of man. Cowards found it very rational that they were leaving the world, because the world corrupts. But the world corrupts you only if you are corruptible, the world corrupts you because you are ready to be corrupted, in fact, you are hankering to be corrupted. If you are not ready to be corrupted, nothing can corrupt you.

These cowards created a strange situation for future humanity - for you, for everybody. They created a kind of rift between the ordinary world and themselves. They were spiritual beings, because they left the ordinary mundane marketplace and moved to the Himalayas or to the forests or to some desert.

But they were really moving away from a situation of which they were afraid. They knew that if they remained in the world, they were going to be corrupted. They were fully aware of their tendencies:

their desires, their lust, their greed, their anger, their violence. They were fully aware of the whole range of things that corrupt your spirituality, that bring you down, deep into the mud.

But just escaping from reality does not transform you. You may live for thirty years in the Himalayas, and if you come back to the world you will find yourself the same man, with the same greed, with the same ambition, with the same anger, with the same lust. Perhaps in these thirty years you have gathered too much of all that made you afraid. You are more cerebrally sexual than you had been before, because thirty years of repression is going to collect the sexual energy and the sexual dreams and the sexual mind. And it will become such a great force that it will be beyond you. It is going to drive you insane.

And the same is true about all that is ugly - the greed, the desire for power, domination, anger, violence. Remember one thing always: whatever any man has ever done, you are also capable of it. If somebody has murdered, never think that you are not capable of doing it. If somebody has committed suicide, never think for a single moment that you are incapable of doing it. If somebody has gone mad, don't feel good that you have not gone mad - you are also carrying the same possibility.

But as we all have the possibilities for evil, so we have the possibilities of becoming a Gautam Buddha. If one man was capable of becoming a buddha, an awakened one, every man from that very moment should remember he is capable of the same. But unfortunately, in the past, it became almost synonymous that to be a sannyasin meant renouncing the world. It was a very ugly and unfortunate association.

My whole effort is for you to remember that you have to become a lotus flower, not a coward. You have to live in the world and yet live in such a way that you remain untouched. If everybody starts renouncing the world, where will you go? If everybody goes to the Himalayas, then buses will be reaching there - teashops, restaurants will be needed. The whole marketplace will be there. And for all these people you will need a movie-house too, and television sets and transistors. Every sannyasin having his own transistor in his ear, deep in the Himalayas. It will be simply stupid. The whole idea is wrong. Where can you escape if everybody goes there?

You can see it happening in the West. On every weekend, on every beach, there is not a single inch of space. All kinds of ugly bodies filling the whole beautiful beach and they are doing the same things they were doing at home: they are lying down and reading the same newspaper, looking at the same PLAYBOY, listening to the same radio. And they have been driving for eight hours, bumper to bumper - tortured, irritated, annoyed.

It is very difficult for a driver not to be angry. If you can drive - particularly in America - without any anger, you are a saint. Just a few days ago I heard that people have started carrying guns in their cars, because the traffic is too much, and horns don't help. Just a few weeks ago six persons were shot dead just because there is a limit to patience. You go on honking the horn and the person ahead does not listen, and he is not responsible, because there is somebody ahead of him who is not listening.

Thousands of cars and the speed has gone back to the primitive age. Now a bullock cart in India goes faster than the best car goes in America. You can walk and you will reach earlier to your destination than if you were driving.

People became so angry that six people were shot with no enmity - they were strangers. And there was fear that this will spread. Last week, the news came to me that millions of people have purchased guns, just in these last few weeks. It has been the all-time biggest sale of guns.

And the government has relaxed, has become very lenient. It was first taking much care whom to license. Now it is not much of a problem at all. Anybody can get a gun if he has the money. And millions of people have purchased guns. They are carrying their guns perfectly visible to the other drivers - listen to the honk, otherwise ....

Great traffic, and where are you going? To the sea beach - for what? To be alone? For once at least, to be alone, on the weekend to lie down on the sea beach and to rest and relax ... with the gun. And eight or twelve hours driving and then one hour's rest in that ugly crowd - then back home, twelve hours driving.

In the whole world more accidents happen on the weekends than on any working day. More people are murdered on the weekends than on any other day. More people commit suicide on the weekends than any other day. Working days are more peaceful. But what is the problem, that everybody is renouncing the world and going to the beach ...?

It is good that people have not become renouncers. They have listened to all kinds of teaching. A few crazy people went to the monasteries, a few crazy people went to the Himalayas, but only a very small minority. Most of the people simply felt a little guilty, and to cover that guilt they worship those people who have renounced the world.

But I don't teach you renouncing the world. I teach you rejoicing in the world. This is an absolutely new method, a new definition of sannyas: not renunciation, but rejoicing, and still remaining beyond everything that surrounds you. This is your true spiritual birth.

Premda, you are pregnant with your own potential. You are pregnant with your own new life, new birth. This is going to happen to everybody. It is something to feel blessed about. It is something to sing and dance about and celebrate.

Question 2:

Prem Islamo, freedom has two sides and if you have only one side of it, a single side, you will feel freedom mixed with sadness. So you have to understand the whole psychology of freedom.

The first side is freedom from: from nationality, from a certain church, from a certain race, from a certain political ideology. This is the first part of freedom, the foundation of freedom. It is always from something. Once you have attained this freedom, you will feel very light and very good and very happy. And for the first time you will start rejoicing in your own individuality, because your individuality was covered with all those things that you have become free of.

But this is only one half and then there will come sadness, because the other half is missing.

Freedom from is fulfilled, but freedom for what? Freedom in itself has no meaning, unless it is freedom for something, something creative - freedom to sculpt, freedom to dance, freedom to create music, poetry, painting. Unless your freedom turns into a creative realization, you will feel sad. Because you will see that you are free: your chains are broken, you no longer have any handcuffs, you no longer have any chains, you don't have any prison, you are standing under the starry night, completely free, but where to go?

Then comes a sudden sadness. What path to choose? Up to now there was no question of going anywhere - you were imprisoned. Your whole consciousness was concentrated on how to get free, your only anxiety was how to get free. Now that you are free, a new kind of problem has to be encountered. What to do now that you are free?

Just freedom in itself does not mean anything, unless you choose a creative path. Either you go deeper into meditation for self-realization - that's what I was talking about: unless you become like Premda, pregnant - or if you have a certain kind of talent that has not been allowed to develop because of your fetters - you could not compose music because your hands were in chains, you could not dance because your feet were in chains ... If you have a talent to be a dancer, then be a dancer. Then your freedom is complete, then the circle is complete.

Freedom from and freedom for - this is not something new that you are facing. It is being faced by every person who struggles first for freedom and then suddenly finds, "Now that I am free, what am I going to do?" Up to now, he was so occupied, so engaged, so very busy. Even in his dreams he was thinking only of freedom. And he has never thought about what he is going to do when he will get freedom.

Prem Islamo, what has happened is beautiful. But something more is needed. You have to become a creator. You have to find some creativity that fulfills your freedom, otherwise the freedom is empty.

You need either to create something or to discover something. Either bring your potential to actuality or go inwards to find yourself, but do something with your freedom.

Freedom is only an opportunity for you. It is not in itself the goal. It simply gives you the whole opportunity to do whatever you want to do. Now you are free and you are feeling sad, because you have not used this opportunity yet. Meditation will do, music will do, sculpture will do, dancing will do, love will do. But do something with your freedom. Just don't sit with your freedom, otherwise you will become sad.

Freedom has to be a creative force in your life, not just a negative kind of freedom. The first part is negative: it is simply getting rid of the prison, it is getting rid of the chains. That you have done: now you are standing underneath the sky, completely lost.

Perhaps you have never realized that the imprisoned person has a certain reason for remaining imprisoned. That's why millions of people in the world remain prisoners of religion, of caste, creed, nation, color. All kinds of prisons they go on tolerating - not without reason. Their reason is that when they are imprisoned they don't have any responsibility, they don't have to be creators, they don't have to find some positivity in their freedom. It is enough for them to remain imprisoned, because then others will go on taking care.

Why are people Christians, why are people Hindus, why are people Mohammedans? Because Jesus will take care. You need not be worried. All that you have to be is just a slave of the Christian church. And the Christian church will take care of all your sins and of all that is needed. One feels absolutely unburdened with responsibility - no responsibility.

But remember one thing, fundamental to the whole question of freedom: responsibility and freedom are together. If you don't want to have responsibility, you can't have freedom either. They both come together or they both go together. If you leave responsibility, you have to accept slavery in some way or other.

Now, you had dreamed about freedom without ever thinking that great responsibility will follow.

Freedom you have, but you have not fulfilled the responsibility. Hence, a sadness lingers around you. You are absolutely capable of destroying this sadness. If you were capable of destroying your slavery, your chains, you are certainly capable of being creative. If you were able to destroy prisons, you can certainly make, create something beautiful.

My own experience is: unless you become a creator in some way, your life will remain empty and sad. The only blissful people are the creators. It may be simply the creation of more consciousness, more experience of sachchidanand, more truth, more consciousness, more bliss. It may be simply an inner world of creativity or it may be something outer. But freedom has to become responsible, positive.

Your freedom is still negative. It is good that you are out of the prison, but it is not enough. Now you have to earn your bread. Up to now, they were supplying the bread. With the chains, they were supplying you a shelter, they were giving you clothes.

In American jails I asked many prisoners who were with me, "How long have you been here?" One young man was with me in the first prison. I asked him how long he had been in, because he was not more than twenty-five.

He said, "I was twelve when I was first brought to prison for selling drugs. But in prison, I found that I am free of all responsibility. Everything is supplied, medical care is available. No problem, no worries about tomorrows - from where the bread will be coming tomorrow. There is no worry. So since then, I have been coming again and again back to the prison. When they release me, I commit some small crime and I am back. And I love the place and I love the people. The first time I was afraid, but soon I found this is a better home."

This is how people become jail-birds. He was absolutely happy. Everybody knew him - the doctor, the nurses, the jailer - and he was a nice person. He was very much interested in health. I watched him because there was nothing else except him to watch. As many times as he will find time from television ... Otherwise, he was sitting before the television, and even watching the television he will start doing pushups. He was known as "the prince" by the other prisoners, because he was a nice person - no bad habits, nothing. He just found that the jail seems to be the most simple way of living. And I asked the nurses, "Why do you call him 'the prince'?"

They said, "He wants the best clothes, and he fights for them and he gets them - because he is known to everybody. He wants the best food. He wants everything that is available for the prisoners.

He does not allow anybody else to be his partner in the cell, because he has so many of his own things. One bed is for his sleep and on the other bed he has all kinds of things.

"He leaves those things with the nurses when he has to go out of the jail, and he says, 'I will be coming within a week at the most, so keep my things ... I will be coming.' And within a week he is back, and the magistrates know and everybody knows that he will be coming back - there is no point to it."

Even the doctor told me that there is no point in sending him out, because he comes back hungry, with dirty clothes. Nobody gives him any service, nobody gives him any employment. Again he becomes a street person. Here, he is the healthiest prisoner, because he does so much exercise the whole day. Even while looking at the television, he is doing exercise too. And he sleeps without any anxiety for tomorrow. Everything will be available in the morning.

So many people inside the churches, inside synagogues, inside temples, attending the mass ....

Almost everybody is a member of a religion, a member of a nation, a member of a family, a member of an association, a political party, Rotary Club, Lions Club. People go on finding more and more chains. It seems to be very cozy. You have so much protection and no responsibility. Freedom means: you will have to be responsible for every act, for every breath; whatever you do or don't do, you will be responsible.

People are really in deep fear of freedom, although they talk about freedom. But my own experience is: very few people really want freedom; because they are subconsciously aware that freedom will bring many problems that they are not ready to encounter. It is better to remain in a cozy imprisonment. It is warmer, and what will you do with freedom? Unless you are ready to be a seeker, a searcher, a creator ... Very few people want to go on a pilgrimage or to go into deeper silences of the heart, or to take the responsibility of love. The implications are great.

Prem Islamo, you will have to dispel that darkness, otherwise sooner or later you will enter into some prison. You cannot go on burdening yourself with sadness. Before the burden becomes too much and forces you back into some slavery, into some imprisonment, change the whole situation by being a creative person. Just find out what is your joy in life, what you would like to create, what you would like to be, what you want to be your definition.

Freedom is simply an opportunity to find a definition for yourself, a true, authentic individuality, and a joy in making the world around you a little better, a little more beautiful - a few more roses, a little more greenery, a few more oases.

I am reminded of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society. She used to carry two bags in her hands, always. Either going for a morning walk or traveling in a train - those two bags were always in her hands. And she was throwing something out of those bags - from the window while sitting in the train - onto the footpath outside, by the side of the train.

And people used to ask, "Why do you go on doing this?"

And she laughed and said, "This has been my whole life's habit. These are seasonal flower seeds.

I may not come back on this route again" - she was a world traveler - "but that does not matter.

When the season comes and the flowers will blossom, thousands of people who pass every day in this line of railway trains will see those flowers, those colors. They will not know me. That does not matter.

"One thing is certain: I am making a few people happy somewhere. That much I know. It does not matter whether they know it or not. What matters is that I have been doing something which will make somebody happy. Some children may come and pluck a few flowers and go home. Some lovers may come and make garlands for each other. And without their knowing, I will be part of their love. And I will be part of the joy of children. And I will be part of those who will be simply passing by the path, seeing the beautiful flowers."

A man who understands that freedom is nothing but an opportunity to make the world a little more beautiful, and to make himself a little more conscious, will not find himself sad.

It is good, Prem Islamo, that you asked, because if you had not asked, you might have carried this sadness which would slowly have poisoned your very freedom. A negative freedom is not very substantial, it can disappear. A freedom has to become positive.

Question 3:

Milarepa, it is not just superstition. And it is beautiful that it is not a superstition. The world needs the variety. Just think - a world where only men exist or a world where only women exist ... it will be a poor world, very poor. Man and woman are polarities. It is between them that the world becomes colorful, beautiful.

Yes, there are problems too. Flowers don't come alone, they come with their thorns also. Days don't come alone, they bring their nights with them.

Existence believes in polarities. It functions by what Karl Marx has called the dialectic. The very process of evolution is dialectical. It is between the polarities that the whole of existence develops.

The woman is more intuitive, more instinctive. If she is not a meditator, she will be only instinctive.

She thinks with her body. She is more rooted in the body than man, she is more aware of her body than man; and the body is our whole experience of the past evolution of millions of years.

Man is more in the mind, more intellectual. But intellect is a very late development. While instinct is very ancient and very deep, intellect is very superficial and very new, very childish. If man becomes meditative, he will find it more difficult to get rid of the intellect, because his whole education and upbringing is based in the mind, in the intellect. And to be a meditator, he has to drop all that he knows.

The woman can become more easily a meditator, because the jump from instinct to intuition is very simple. The jump from intellect to intuition is very difficult. But unfortunately, through the centuries the woman has not been allowed to participate in the world of meditation. She has been, in fact, rejected by almost all religions. The reason is clear: because all religions were against the body, and the woman is body-oriented. Rejecting the woman, they were really rejecting the body orientation.

They were all against the body. All their religious ideologies were intellectual.

And certainly the woman cannot participate easily in intellectual activities. She feels bored, she thinks, "What nonsense does man go on talking about when there are so many juicy things happening?"

Man thinks the woman is good just to be used for her sexual body. But she is not good for any intellectual conversation, or any philosophical conversation. Men and women both know that the other is a little off the wall. And they both agree on that point.

I have heard it said that man was made before woman to give him time to think of an answer to her first question.

Mendel Kravitz is stark naked in front of the open window doing his morning exercises. His wife enters the room and calls out, "Mendel, you idiot! Draw those curtains. I don't want the neighbors to think that I married you for your money." Absolutely a different logic - that man may not have thought about it.

The priest with a reputation for his sermons on hellfire was leaving the neighborhood.

One old lady comes up to him and says, "I am sorry you are leaving, Father. We never knew what sin was until you came."

A handsome tomcat had just moved into the neighborhood, and all the other cats were very interested. One of them has the first date. "Well," they all cry the next morning, "how did you get on?"

"A completely wasted evening," replies the pretty cat. "All he would talk about was his operation."

There is certainly a great difference between man's and woman's ways of thinking, looking at things.

But it makes life juicier, spicier. The world needs all kinds of musical instruments to create an orchestra. Just one kind of musical instrument will be really boring. The woman has not been respected by the past. That has kept the world in many ways poor, because the woman has not been allowed to express her way of looking at things.

She has been forced to think like man, to behave like man, to be just a shadow of man, but not to be herself. This was something absolutely ugly and to be condemned. I condemn it unconditionally.

The woman should be allowed her way. She has not to be a carbon copy of man, she has not to think like the man. She has to think like herself, she has to be herself, and this will give the world a greater polarity.

And the further away are the individualities of man and woman, the deeper will be the attraction between them. They should be strangers to each other - only then can they fall in love with each other. They should remain mysteries forever to each other. Only then can their love be a joy, a continuous discovery.

But the woman has been crushed. Her mysteries have been crushed. She has been used only as a production factory - not given the human rights which are basic. And that has made the world boring, ugly. Man has dominated to such an extent that the whole history is filled only with wars. If the woman was allowed as much equality of opportunity for growth, the world would not have seen so many wars. Because in every war it is man who is killed, but it is woman who suffers.

It is easy to be killed, it is far more difficult to suffer. The mother suffers for her sons who are killed.

The wife suffers when her loved ones are killed. The sister suffers when her brothers are killed. And their agony is going to last for their whole life. For those who are killed, it is a very small thing. It happens within seconds - and you are gone. But the woman for centuries has been just suffering.

No woman wants war because she is the ultimate victim, not man. It is man who creates war, it is man who fights war, but it is the woman who suffers. The woman is half of the world - if this half of the world was also allowed to have its say, history would have been different. It would have been more peaceful, more loving, more sensitive, more aesthetic. There is still time to allow woman to be purely herself, unpolluted, unimpressed by man. And we will have a better world and a better humanity.

Milarepa, it is not unfortunate that they think differently. It is immensely significant and something to be deeply rejoiced in. But the woman needs her whole freedom. The world has lived under man's domination too long. It is time that woman had her share in participating in everything that is happening in the world. She has to contribute her part, which is going to be different from man's part.

And it will create a more harmonious whole than we have been able to create up to now. It has been a half circle. It has to be made a full circle. Life has to become total - man and woman together, contributing to the world all that they are born with: their different potentials, their different languages, their different ways of thinking, seeing, being.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.