Behind the drama a witness

Question 1:

Prem Nishavda, one has to be very much aware of the mind creating problems which do not exist in reality. Mind is almost a problem-creating factory; whatever you do, whatever happens to you, mind is going to raise problems about it. That's its old strategy to disturb you.

If you are feeling perfectly okay, then listen to the heart, not to the mind. One has to learn the knack of not paying too much attention to the mind, trying in every possible way to listen to the heart.

Your question is that for you, sitting with me every day is so fulfilling that your desire to be with someone else has almost disappeared.

It is how it should be. The desire for the other is not something great. It is poverty of the soul. You cannot be alone; hence, the desire for the other arises. Because you cannot feel peaceful, silent, centered, fulfilled, contented, just by being yourself, the desire arises to be with someone; perhaps someone can give you what you are missing.

Nobody can give you what you are missing. Most probably you will meet another beggar, just like you, who has been in search of someone who can give him fulfillment, contentment, blissfulness. And when two beggars start begging from each other it is really a pitiable scene, but it is being repeated by millions of people around the earth every day. Because you are brought up by these beggars, amongst these beggars, when for the first time you start getting out of this begging, the mind wants to pull you back. It raises questions, doubts; it persuades you with beautiful names.

For example, now your mind is saying, "Today though, the fear arose that I am too miserly with my love and therefore avoiding a relationship." If you have love enough it will start showering on others by itself. You cannot contain it; it becomes an overflowing, so there is no need to worry about it.

Nobody can be miserly with love.

Let me repeat it: nobody can be miserly with their love. Either one has love -- then it starts overflowing in its own time; you don't have to push it, you don't have to force it -- or one has not. When one has not, one can only pretend. Millions of people are doing that. Everybody is pretending to love and they have not known what love is.

Love can be known only as a fragrance of meditation, not before it. You have not known even the flower. You are not acquainted with the fragrance. Once the flower opens up, it is beyond the capacity of the flower to be miserly about fragrance -- what can it do? The fragrance will go with the winds, it will spread all over.

The flower cannot be miserly, neither can love be, because love also is a flower that grows in your meditation.... So you just enjoy being alone; this is your meditation. And the spring will come, it always comes. Trust existence. The flower will blossom, and love will flow from you.

Nobody can be miserly about love; that is an impossibility, for the simple reason that love follows a totally different economics. In the ordinary economics, if you go on giving you go on becoming poorer; one has to be a hoarder to remain rich. Love is not part of these mundane economics. The more you give, the more you have; if you don't give it you will not have it. In giving it grows, in sharing it becomes more and more purified, more and more beautiful, more and more a blessing.

But mind will go on creating a thousand and one questions. Don't listen to your own mind! That is part of the disciplehood. When I am here, listen to me. If you are going to listen to your own mind, then there is no need for you to be here. You already have a master within you who will guide you to hell....

While on vacation, Ronald Reagan asks for a girl for the night. Three gorgeous girls are sent up to his room -- a blonde, a brunette and a redhead.

He says to the blonde, "I'm the president of the United States. How much to spend a night with you?"

"Four hundred dollars," she replies.

"Too much," says Reagan.

He asks the brunette the same question, but just then the redhead runs in and says, "Mr.

President, if you can raise my skirt as high as your taxes and screw me the way you are screwing the people of America, you can have me for nothing."

Prem Nishavda, you are in a very harmonious state. The mind will try to disturb it, and your harmony is so new and the mind so old and so strong that if you don't stop it from disturbing your harmony, it is going to be disturbed. All that mind wants is to disturb your meditation because they are enemies. Mind knows perfectly well that if meditation grows, mind has no place in your life; it will be reduced from being a master to a servant.

Just try to feel... if you are feeling good, if you are feeling at ease, at home, then tell the mind to shut up! Take the reins into your own hands.

Becoming a meditator means an effort to get out of the slavery of the mind and to become the master, which you would naturally have been if the society had not turned things upside down. You were born with your meditativeness as the master, and the mind just as a servant, but that is not convenient for an insane society. To make you also insane, the easiest way is to make the master the servant and the servant the master; then everything in you is messed up.

The new man I have been talking about will be a master of his own self. And the strangest phenomenon is that when you are the master, the mind functions far more efficiently than it functions when it is a master, because naturally it is destined to be a servant. As a servant it is perfect, but when it pretends to be the master, it cripples you. It does not know how to be the master -- that's one thing -- and it does not allow the master hidden deep inside you to have any say in your life. This is one of the psychological sicknesses of mankind.

The new man will be healthy, and his health will consist of everything being in its own place. Then only can we create an orchestra, not a crowd of noises.

Question 2:

Shantidevi, man is asleep. It has to be repeated again and again, to remind you that you are still in the middle -- neither asleep nor awake. You can go either way: you can take a turn and pull the blanket over yourself and go to sleep, or you can jump out of the bed and take a cold shower and be alert and awake. But you have to understand what is meant by spiritual sleep.

You say, "When you spoke about Sharda, the wife of Ramakrishna and her immense love towards him, I noticed that I felt guilty and sad." Why should you feel guilty and sad?

You can have immense love, just like Sharda, but you have to know much more about Sharda.

She was a meditator, and after Ramakrishna died she became, without any declaration, without any announcement, naturally the head of the order that Ramakrishna had created.

The disciples of Ramakrishna became disciples of Sharda. She was no ordinary woman in love with a man. Ramakrishna was not a man for her; Ramakrishna to her represented life, consciousness, and its highest flight.

Rather than feeling guilty and sad and wasting your time and energy, use the same energy for being a meditator, so love can grow out of your meditation. I teach you the real love, not the phony love that you find all over the world.

Everybody is saying to everybody else, "I love you," but on the whole there seems to be no love in the world. People are simply like parrots, repeating the words "I love you."

They don't know even the meaning of what they are saying.

Do you have the quality of love? Do you have that richness? Do you have that fulfillment out of which love arises?

Love does not arise in a desert.

It is a flower, it needs a garden.

Have you planted a garden in your being?

We are gathered here to become gardens. You come here as deserts, but the most unbelievable phenomenon is that even a desert can hallucinate that it is a garden, that it is an oasis.

You say, "It seems that I cannot love a man at all." Who is asking you to love a man?

You can love trees and they are far better people. They don't feel jealous, they will not create trouble for you, they will not become an anxiety. You can love the clouds, you can love the stars....

Man is such a tiny part in this whole universe. Why are you after this tiny part? Leave it alone, let the poor fellow live! You can love the whole universe; just exclude man -- for the time being, at least. When you become so capable of loving that you can love even man, then it will happen on its own accord.

And Ramakrishna was no ordinary man. Through his eyes the whole universe looked into you; through his hands the whole existence made gestures significant and meaningful to you; through his words the whole spoke. He was so simple, so egoless, just a hollow bamboo -- which can be made into a flute without any difficulty. And you can sing a song; the song will be yours, he will be only the vehicle.... And he allowed the whole universe to sing as many songs as possible through him.

You can also find a man... but for that you will need a sensitive heart, open and available, and you will have to drop all this garbage of being guilty and sad.

People think that they already know how to love. They have taken it for granted that they know how to live. This is one of the greatest fallacies. Neither do you know how to love, nor do you know how to live. All that you know is how to go on towards the graveyard.

From the cradle to the graveyard you are a perfect pilgrim; otherwise you know nothing.

You will have to learn. You have the possibility to learn, but the possibility becomes dormant because of your idea that you already know.

You say, "Out in the world the relationship with my boyfriend was so juicy." You cannot deceive me. I have known thousands of boyfriends and thousands of girlfriends, and how juicy their relationship is... unless you decide to call poison, juice -- then it is a different matter. And if it was juicy outside in the world, what is the trouble? Here are juicier people!

Outside in the world there are Christians and there are Hindus and there are Mohammedans, there are Jews and there are Buddhists, and they are all against what you call "being juicy." They want you to be dry bones.

But illusions can be created very easily. One strategy of the mind is that it always looks at the past and chooses a few beautiful moments out of thousands of ugly situations, and then magnifies them and starts believing in them; that's why everybody thinks his childhood was great. Ask any child, and he is in a hurry to grow up, because he can see the grown-up people are living juicy lives.

I used to live by the side of a post office and every morning very early, when it was almost dark, I used to go for a walk. One day I saw a small boy with a mustache -- I could not believe it.

I said, "This is something impossible!" The boy started hiding behind trees, but I followed him and got hold of him. He said, "Don't tell anybody."

I asked, "But why are you having this false mustache.?"

He said, "I would love to grow up. I have got a cigarette also. When I see people with a mustache and a beard and having cigarettes, I feel so sad. How long is it going to take, this miserable boyhood? Nobody takes any notice of me, but if I start doing anything, everybody stops me saying, `you are still a child; don't do that!' I cannot even ask questions because I am a child -- `When you will grow up you will know.'" Then I realized that he was the postmaster's son. He said, "Don't tell my father; otherwise I am going to be given a good lesson. He beats me."

I have known thousands of children and I have enquired of them, "Are you feeling great that you are a child?" They were all feeling miserable about being still a child; yet these same children in their old age will remember their childhood as really golden. They will make it golden.

You are saying that outside your boyfriend was so juicy. If he was so juicy, why have you come here? People start thinking of meditation if their life is not juicy. If their life is already juicy, who bothers about meditation and God and truth?

I don't think that you have ever known anything juicy; it is an ego fulfillment to exaggerate your past. And if you know how to make a relationship juicy.... Here there are many people from the same outside world. They have not come from other planets; they have also lived very juicy lives outside. But it seems strange: the moment they come here all their juiciness disappears; because here my insistence is to be sincere with yourself -- don't deceive. Outside they were deceiving.

You are saying "... and seemed to be the only way to stay alive." Then have you come here to commit suicide? If that was the only way to be alive and you think it was so juicy, what accident happened? Did your ship get wrecked, and you landed in this desert? Just stop exaggerating -- that is a childish approach towards life.

Look at things straight, as they are. Nobody leaves juicy places. One gets so caught because juicy places are sticky too; there is not much juice but there is much glue. So whenever you have a juicy relationship, in fact it is nothing but a very glued relationship.

You can call glue "juice," that is another thing. Only the words differ, but the reality will be the same.

Meditation and the search for truth, or the search for oneself, starts only because you find life is not juicy. It is a vast desert. Only once in a while do you see an oasis somewhere, but by the time you reach there, there is no oasis. All oases prove mirages. Frustrated, you start searching for something deeper than life makes available to you.

You are saying, Shantidevi, "... whereas here there is a never-ending conflict."

Conflict with whom? Have you forgotten to create juice? Or have you become aware it is not juice, it is glue? The first thing is to be clearly aware about your situation, howsoever bad it may be. Don't exaggerate and don't hide it; if you hide yourself then it is impossible to transform you. You will have to put away all your masks, because masks cannot grow. Only your original face can grow.

"The conflict I feel is one of longing to be alone, feeling totally contented within myself - - yet I do not want to lose my boyfriend out of the fear of being lonely and vulnerable. I am so puzzled."

I can see you are puzzled, but your puzzle is your own creation. First, you want to be alone -- why? Life is so juicy with the boyfriend, so live it! Why do you have a longing to be alone? Life with the boyfriend cannot be juicy, that's why.

"... feeling totally contented within myself" -- so you don't like juice. You want to feel totally contented within yourself -- what about the juice of the boyfriend? Just be real, authentic; say that you have been living in a hell. But even people who live in hell pretend that they are living in heaven.

I have heard that the people who live in hell have changed the board on which it was written, "This is hell." They have written, "This is heaven." At least that much gives great consolation. And the people who are living in heaven, I have heard, are continually asking for a holiday from this continuous repetition of hallelujiah, playing on their harps before a dodo God. He must be a dodo, always listening to hallelujiah, for eternity.

Perhaps this hallelujiah has killed him and he is just a corpse sitting there.

Your so-called saints want holidays; where will they go for holidays? There is only one place where they can go, and that is to hell -- and that's where they go, because there they find restaurants and discos and juicy people! Hell is full of juice -- people are almost swimming in it. You just have to be clear why you want to be contented. What was wrong in your love relationship? Was there not contentment?

And then comes the fear, "Yet I do not want to lose my boyfriend." You want your boyfriend also in your pocket while you are meditating, so that he cannot escape. While you are totally contented, the boyfriend has to remain in your pocket. What kind of boyfriend do you have? Is it a teddy bear?

Your whole puzzle is very simple to solve. The first thing: you have to forget and drop the idea that you know what love is, that you know what a juicy relationship is. Be alone, be meditative, be contented, and out of this contentment will flow the juice. Then there is a possibility of having a love which will be a joy, a constant joy.

Non-meditators cannot love, they can only pretend. But because man is so asleep, he goes on believing in his own pretensions, he goes on believing in his own dreams.

A racing car driver picked up a girl after the race and took her home. Later that night, after a passionate bout of lovemaking, the man drifted off into sleep. He awoke suddenly, with a very angry woman astride him, smacking his face.

"What is the matter?" he asked.

"You were talking in your sleep," she shouted. "You were feeling my tits and saying, `What perfect headlights,' and you felt my legs and said, `What a smooth finish.'

"Well what's wrong with that?" the driver asked.

"Nothing," cried the woman, "but when you felt my pussy and yelled, `Who left the garage door open...?'" People are asleep, talking in their sleep -- "I love you". Meditation is an effort to be awake, to be alert, to be conscious. Anything else should follow, but cannot precede it:

love can follow it, friendship can follow it, worship can follow it, prayer can follow it, gratitude can follow it. But everything has to follow only when you have attained an integrated consciousness; otherwise you are having only dreams, nightmares, and you are believing in them as if they are real.

Shantidevi, as you are already here, have a taste of meditation and aloneness. Don't be afraid that you will lose the boyfriend. There are so many boys; if you lose one you get one dozen -- they are queuing! And if you are meditative, contented, silent, you are bound to find a man of the same qualities, because we can relate only with people with the same qualities, who speak the same language. And a love affair after meditation can become a tremendous help to both, for their spiritual growth.

Drop the fear about losing the boyfriend. These boyfriends are so stupid that even if you want to lose them it is very difficult. You can ask my people here. It is so difficult to lose a boyfriend or a girlfriend; they cling. I have told you the reason: what they think is juice is not juice, it is glue. And here in this place, everything is German; if it is Indian glue you can escape, but the German glue... you are finished!

There is an ancient story... man asked God, "God, why did you make women so pretty?"

"So you will like them," God answered.

And man asked God, "Why did you make women so soft? "So you will like them," God answered again.

"And why," asked man again, "did you make them so stupid?"

And God answered, "So they will like you."

There is no worry at all!

Question 3:

Deva Nutan, your question is significant because you say, "Looking at my own reality, I still discover possessiveness, narrow-mindedness, unlovingness, greed, lack of humbleness, desires, jealousy." Just one thing you have forgotten -- that none of these things is you.

You are the awareness of all these things: possessiveness, jealousy, greed. Who is being alert? Certainly jealousy cannot be alert about itself, neither can possessiveness be alert about itself.

There is, behind this whole drama, a witness. That is my hope and that is your hope -- and it is the hope for the new man and for the new humanity. If you can be aware of these realities it is not a difficult thing to drop them, because you are not them; they are separate from you. You have learned them in a society which is greedy, in which if you are not greedy you cannot survive.

In a commune where there will be no possibility for greed -- because with no money to accumulate, nobody poor, nobody rich, you will easily forget all about greed. Why are you possessive? -- because you are in a society where everybody else is possessive. You cannot protect yourself if you are not possessive; you will be destroyed by the other possessive people.

All these things: possessiveness, unlovingness, greed, lack of humbleness, desires, jealousy are a by-product of living in a world which is full of these things, which requires everybody to have all these poisonous attitudes.

In a commune you cannot be greedy, because there will be no support for greed. There will be no question of imitating anybody. There will be no question of ambition because people will be respected as they are. There will be no requirement that they should be presidents and vice presidents, prime ministers, and then they should be respected; they will be respected as they are. Whatever they are doing, if it is creative and is needed by the society, they will be honored. Narrow-mindedness is created by your religions, by your political ideologies. These are all learned things nurtured in you. They are not part of your consciousness, they are not part of your being.

So I am not being too optimistic and I am not taking a too positive view of you. I am simply realistic. I know why you are what you are -- because you are living in a wrong world, and to exist you have to be wrong.

If you are allowed to live in a sane commune where people are naturally humble because humbleness is respected, where the egoist will be sent to a psychiatric hospital, where people are non-possessive because all their needs are fulfilled, and all the opportunities they need are given to them... why should they worry about hoarding for tomorrow?

They know that they need not be worried; they are not alone. Five thousand people are taking care of them, and if they can create today a beautiful life, they will be able to create an even a better life tomorrow. The fear of the future will disappear.

Possessiveness is out of fear for the future, because if you don't possess, what are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do in your old age?

In a commune the older people will be loved and respected for their experiences. The older people will become the teachers, the guides. Old age will not be thought of as something ugly, but as something immensely graceful. One has gone beyond all childish and all youthful foolishnesses; one has come to be very centered and silent, and a life- long meditation....

Every commune will have its own old people who will be almost Gautam Buddhas, sources of wisdom who can teach you life, who can teach you love, who can teach you how to grow old beautifully and gracefully, and who can teach you how to die -- because when they die they will die with such a grace and such joy. That will be their last gift to the commune.

I am not taking a positive side only. You are corrupted by the society because the society is corrupt, and it is simply a survival measure to be corrupted in such a society. All that you need is a better atmosphere -- more loving, more healthy, more sane, more in tune with nature. All these things, which religious founders have been trying to get people to drop, people cannot drop, because if they drop them, the whole corrupted mass around them will destroy them. So they listen to Gautam Buddhas, to Jesus Christs, and they know what happens to a Jesus Christ: if you follow his teachings, soon you will be on the cross. You can understand that his teachings are beautiful, but the society is so ugly, you cannot live those beautiful teachings.

All religions have failed, because they have not been able to create a culture which is supportive of the great teachings. It is not only not supportive, it is against.

The commune is a totally new concept. It is an effort to change the whole atmosphere in which these poisonous mushrooms grow. And once your whole atmosphere is different, you will find different people arising, totally different people arising -- because then love will be needed to survive, meditation will be needed to survive, compassion will be needed to survive.

A commune is a transformation, a total transformation. The old society was very schizophrenic. On the one hand it worshiped people who were teaching things which were not possible for ordinary human beings to follow -- because the whole society was against them. So man was living in a schizophrenia: he knew what was right and he was doing what was wrong, so he was feeling continuously guilty, ashamed of himself.

I want a totally new order in which man's dignity is not hurt, and all these things that have been taught by great teachers need not be taught at all.

We should create real values. Rather than telling people not to be possessive, we should create a commune where possessiveness is useless. Anybody who possesses will be thought stupid, idiotic; he will lose his respect and his dignity. And what would he possess? Once money is removed, you cannot possess. You cannot possess milk, you cannot possess fruits. If you have too much milk you will have to share; if your trees are giving too many fruits, you will have to share. You will really enjoy children coming to your garden and stealing fruits. You will give them chocolates also, as a reward -- "come again, because the trees are too heavy with fruits." And what are you going to do with so many fruits? You cannot sell them.

What has been taught by the founders of religion was illogical. What I am trying to do is a double process -- changing the individual through meditation, and changing the society through the commune.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.

The Golden Future