Forget trying to get it!

Question 1:

Devageet, it is a good sign, the headache -- the beginning of the revolution. Only one thing you misunderstood. I have not said that sex will fall off, you will fall off -- but enlightened, don't be worried.

Here people die only enlightened; otherwise they hang around, hang around, go deep and go hard... and one day they drop off. And this dropping off is really entering into eternity.

You would not need any meditation. Meditation is needed for those who cannot think too hard and too deeply. The headache indicates what is going to happen to you...

But it does not matter whether sex falls off or you fall off. Your physical, mental, social personality is what you know about yourself. The moment sex drops off, you become for the first time really alone -- because sex is your relationship with the world. For the first time you become immaterial, because sex is binding you to matter. For the first time you become transcendental to your body and biology.

The death of biology or chemistry or society in you is, in other words, the resurrection of your real life.

I have always loved the story about Jesus. Christians have misunderstood him, as usual; they thought that it was really a factual resurrection -- bodily, biologically, psychologically. That's where they have missed the point. He certainly resurrected, but in a spiritual sense. He died on the cross as a physical personality, and he resurrected as a spiritual being.

So whether sex drops or you drop -- because you and sex are almost synonymous -- what remains is your authentic life.

So, Devageet, you are moving on the right path. Headache... and the head will drop off; then other aches and other things will start dropping off. Finally you will be left only with that which is immortal. And that is our whole search, that's what we are seeking. These things which can be taken away will be taken away; only that which cannot be taken away from you is yours.

A reporter once asked Winston Churchill whether he agreed with the prediction that women would rule the world by the year 2000.

Churchill replied, "Yes, they will still be at it."

'Woman' is also a symbolic word. To man it represents nothing but sex. If you take it literally, then Churchill is to be condemned for condemning women. But if you take its metaphorical meaning, then 'woman' is replaced by 'sex'; that's what it represents in man's mind. And sex has been ruling over the world from the very beginning, if there was any beginning, and is going to rule man to the very end -- if there is an end.

Only a few people have transcended the physical, the sexual, the psychological, and have entered into a different dimension that I call enlightenment. And unless the enlightened are listened to, understood, there is no hope for the world.

It is not that millions of enlightened people are needed; just two hundred enlightened people on the earth, and the whole earth will be dazzling with their light, with their being.

And those two hundred will create chain reactions: they will provoke you for the great pilgrimage, they will remind you who you are. Just looking into their eyes, suddenly inside you will click -- it is only a click -- and the whole dimension changes.

Paddy and his friend Sean were sitting in a bar moaning to each other, talking about how ugly their wives are -- a common topic among husbands.

"My wife is so ugly," said Sean, "if I want to make love to her I have to put a bag over her head."

"That's nothing," said Paddy. "My wife was so ugly when she was born that the doctor slapped her mother."

But these statements have become ugly in the sense that they have forgotten that instead of 'woman' they should use the word 'sex', because that's what it means in the deepest core of the mind of the male.

As far as women are concerned, they are not interested in man's physical body; they are not interested in his ideological, philosophical, mental gymnastics. Their approach is far more direct: they simply see your spirituality. The thing a woman is attracted to is the charisma, the aura of spirituality around a man; hence they never talk about the ugliness or beauty of men. That is not their concern. That is a great difference between the approaches of men and women.

Women go directly deep inside men. That's why it is one of the most difficult things to keep a secret from the woman: where will you keep it? -- she goes directly inside you.

And she is capable of going directly inside you because man has lived very superficially.

Many men are not aware that they have hearts. Yes, they know they have lungs, but the lung is not the heart; neither is the brain the mind, nor is the mind your being. These are superficial layers.

No woman in the whole world has created any ideology, any great metaphysics, any great philosophy. Her concern is not the outside; her concern is the inside. That's why I have immense respect for women. Perhaps no man in the whole world ever had as much respect for women as I have.

Women have been loved, but not respected. And without respect the love is nothing but lust; you label it with a beautiful word, but deep down inside you it is always sex, always sex. Man has reduced woman and her spirituality to such a state that she has become only an object of sex.

And if the American trend has to be followed -- where everything has to be used once and thrown away -- the ultimate consequence is coming closer: use the woman once and throw away. They are already doing it in a way....

In America, three years is the limit for everything. People change their jobs every three years, they change their cities every three years, they change their wives every three years. But those three years will get smaller and smaller -- perhaps even by the time the honeymoon ends, everything has ended. Most probably it has ended. But people go on pretending that it is still continuing, because they have given so many promises, so many words to keep that now it looks very awkward to go against their own promises.

But a woman loves in a different way. Her love has some quality of spirituality. Man's love is only physiological, biological. You may not have found a single joke in any language of the world from women against men. It is below her prestige. All jokes are from men against the woman, because for him woman is not a spiritual being at all.

In China for thousands of years the woman was accepted by law as a commodity that a man possesses. He can bargain, he can stake her in gambling, he can sell her, he can even kill her -- the court was not concerned. If you kill your chair you will not be arrested... the woman was not more than that. And the whole past has been so ugly that man has not even asked forgiveness for it.

Women have been treated like cattle. But the woman has not, in spite of all this ugliness that has been done to her, changed at all. She still loves... and her love has a purity and a beauty and a grace. Man's love is ugly, animalistic; it is not more than a sneeze -- he is just relieving himself. But the woman is not relieving; she is living it with its totality. It is a prayer to her, as sacred as any prayer can be.

These are the differences that have to be bridged. At least for my people I want these differences to be bridged. Just as we don't discriminate between religions, we don't discriminate between nations, we don't discriminate between races, the final discrimination that has to be dropped is between men and women. They both are beautiful. If they become a little more alert, they are in fact two complementaries of one whole: man is half, just as the woman is half.

My effort, in spite of the whole world's condemnation of me, is to bring man and woman to a space where they can accept each other as their other part, as their other pole. I don't care about the condemnation of the world; it simply brings giggles to me. Who cares about idiots condemning you? -- they are not even worth any reply. But even if a small section of society starts respecting each other, there will be a tremendous revolution.

My own understanding is that as your love deepens, your sex disappears -- because love is so fulfilling, what is the need of this bullock-cart sex? It is out of date....

And soon the day will come when children will not be born out of men and women's sex.

We have suffered very much: blind children, retarded children, have had to live their life in utter agony and suffering... but there were no means to clear the situation. But now we have the means, now love can be completely a fun, a joy, a celebration, with no responsibility, no fear of making the woman pregnant, because that keeps her in bondage and that keeps you also in the bondage. You are partners in creating a child; now you have to be a partner in bringing him up.

I have heard... in a court a man, ninety-five years old, and a woman, ninety-one years old, appeared for divorce. The judge had seen many cases but this was really shocking. He could not believe it: one foot is already in the grave; for what do they want a divorce?

He asked, "How long have you been married?"

They said, "It is very difficult to remember. Maybe seventy-five years, or it could be a little more."

The judge said, "I cannot understand: you managed to live together for seventy years, and now at the very end you have come to divorce."

They said, "We had to wait for all our children to die. Now we are completely free, no burden."

Man's past history, Devageet, has been really not human. It can be human only if the woman and the man are no longer just sex partners; that drags them both to the very lowliest spaces. If they can love each other with respect, not using each other as commodities, men and women both will have a great uprising of consciousness.

The more your sex energy becomes love, the more you are a spiritual being. Sex is only a reproductive process forced by nature on you. Nature has been using you just like a factory -- and you don't have even the dignity to declare, "I am not a factory."

But this can happen only if you are alert, aware, conscious of what you are doing, what you are thinking, how you are behaving. And that brings such grace and such beauty, that the physical beauty simply disappears. I have seen many beautiful women with very ugly minds. I have seen many beautiful men, but their beauty is not more than skin-deep. And this is the trouble: beauty is always skin-deep, and ugliness goes to the very bones. Go on digging to the bones, to the marrow, and you will find it... it is there.

Love is the alchemy to change that ugliness from within. And once it disappears from within, even an ordinary face, a homely face, starts shining with the bliss and joy of the beyond.

Don't be worried about the headache; the headache is simply an effort of biology to drag you back. I have not suffered almost for thirty years from a headache. Slowly, slowly I have forgotten how it feels. And because I have not suffered from headache, I don't feel my head either. It is only pain that makes you feel anything. But thirty years before I have also suffered from headache, and the headache is certainly concerned very deeply with sex.

No medical researcher has come to the conclusion, but I say it from my own discoveries that I go on and on making -- I'm an incurable discoverer -- and sooner or later science will have to agree with me. The sex center exists in the head, not in the genitals -- that much science has come to know. And if the sex center exists in the head and not in the genitals, then sex deprivation can create a headache. It will not create genital ache because there is nothing... it is only an extension of a certain center in your mind.

Why have people started thinking -- and doctors have started even advising their patients -- that sex is good for your mental health? And they are right: all the people who have repressed sex in the past in the name of religion, have suffered tremendously with headaches. Even a man like J. Krishnamurti suffered for forty years continuously with such great headaches, migraine, that even he, a man of such understanding, used to think of hitting his head with the wall and be finished -- the pain was too much.

J. Krishnamurti was brought up by people with all the old ideas: Repress your sex. He was not allowed to meet young women. Even when a woman who was almost the age of his mother once had been taking care of him when he was sick, immediately great turmoil started in the leadership of the Theosophical Society: "They have fallen in love. Remove the woman" -- and the woman was removed. It was sheer stupidity: Krishnamurti was not more than fifteen, and the woman was nearabout fifty. But the woman was a beautiful woman, very understanding. No man can take care of anybody else the way a woman can take care even of strangers.

I was in jail in America. They had put me in the medical ward, so that nobody could say that I had been tortured, harassed. In the medical ward there were six women nurses and a doctor, and one male nurse. It never used to be that way in the past. In fact, in this country you cannot find a male nurse; in this country 'nurse' means a woman. A male nurse looks awkward, unpsychological.

I watched the way the woman doctor behaved with me -- with such respect and such love.

And all the nurses... the oldest nurse -- a very womanly woman, almost a Jewish mama -- took care of me so much that during the three days I was there she dropped one of her holidays. She said, "I cannot go out...."

All the nurses behaved as though I had been known to them forever: I was not a stranger but part of their heart. But the male nurse was a trouble. One day only was given to the male nurse in seven days, but that one day he tortured me -- not physically, but he would come into my cabin and he would start asking questions... and religion and theology and philosophy....

I told him, "Listen... with great difficulty I have got these few days' holiday, and you are destroying that. I have forgotten all about religion, all about philosophy, I don't know anything. Just don't torture me."

But the male mind functions only intellectually; it does not know anything about the heart. Not a single woman in the medical ward ever asked a single question. They brought my food, they managed... the doctor managed that I should not go to the common toilet, she gave me her own bathroom: "We will feel ashamed to send you there, it is dirty. All criminals... While you are here just use my bathroom, and I will remember it:

because you have used my bathroom, it becomes a temple for me. The moment I enter it I will remember you."

The head nurse has never gone in her life to purchase things for the prisoners; they come on a fixed routine basis. But for me she used to go every day -- and she was an old woman -- to purchase fruits, vegetables, anything that was vegetarian. I asked her, "You are unnecessarily taking trouble. Things come, they are perfectly good. If they are good for other human beings, they are good for me too. Just take care because I am a vegetarian."

She said, "No, those things come mixed with non-vegetarian food. And you are here only for a few days."

The last day when I left the first jail, all the nurses and the doctor and the sheriff and the whole staff had tears in their eyes. The doctor said to me, "We don't want you to leave."

I said, "It is a jail. As far as I am concerned there is no problem, I can remain here. But millions of people around the world are waiting for me to get out. Your tears prevent me... it looks very heartless."

She said, "No, I understand. Just in three days you have become so much part of us, we have forgotten completely that you are a prisoner here" -- because the whole day I was sitting in the doctor's room. To make me comfortable, she had moved to another room -- because there prisoners will be coming, patients will be coming -- and they did everything that a loving family can do.

She said, "Forgive my tears. Don't take any note of it. It is my problem that we will miss you from tomorrow."

When I shook hands with the nurses they were all trembling. They had all cut photos from newspapers and they said, "Please, give a signature and write my name. This is our most precious gift. We are enough rewarded... otherwise this jail is a torture house. Even in the medical part the torture continues; it is just a strategy to show to the world that a sick person is not tortured."

But because the whole staff was in such a deep loving attitude, they could not do anything to torture me. The nurses brought soaps from their homes, new combs from their homes. If they cooked something which was vegetarian they brought it from their home. I said, "Why are you taking so much care of a prisoner?"

They said, "You are not a prisoner. You have changed the whole climate of the medical ward."

But it is to happen all over the world.... The woman has to be respected, not only used.

And slowly, slowly you will see that sex is the lowliest form of relationship. It will drop.

Just go a little higher in your consciousness... But I don't want you to drop it with effort, deliberately, because then it will cling around you. Go into it. It is our destiny to pass through that fire test.

And once you have gone through it and come out of it into the clear, meditation becomes so easy that you don't have to do it. Just sit by the side of any tree and from all over a subtle showering of a new silence, of a virgin serenity, starts falling over you, just like rain, or just like flowers of madhukamini falling in thousands.

I have not seen any other plant which has so generous a heart as madhukamini. The word madhukamini means 'honey woman'. Its fragrance is incomparable. And the most beautiful thing is that it goes on showering almost like water, rainwater. The petals of its flowers go on falling the whole night. You can sit underneath it and you will be all covered with flowers.

Something like this is bound to happen, Devageet, if you allow the false personality that surrounds you to die. Then love and meditation are not two things -- they become one.

The loving is meditative, and meditation is nothing but the radiation of love.

Question 2:

Hello, Hareesh.... But this will not be enough. It will be just plates without anything to eat, to drink. It will look like a desert where nothing grows.

And people are saying "hello" to each other without any reason; so I say... but I would like to present you also something, so "Hello Hareesh" is not empty. My first present:

A man sitting in a bar is complaining to the bartender: "After one year and three thousand dollars with that psychiatrist, he tells me I'm cured. Some cure! A year ago, I was Nancy Reagan -- now I'm nobody."

A Roman Catholic, a famous priest, and a Protestant minister, also very famous and well- known, had a heated discussion over the merits of their respective faiths.

Finally they agreed to differ, and as they parted the Catholic said, "Let us go our ways -- you continue to worship God in your way and I will continue to worship him in his way."

The minister's wife... my second present... was becoming upset that her husband exclaimed, "Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus!" every time he reached orgasm.

"It's perfectly proper, my dear," he assured her, "and in accordance with THE BIBLE where it says, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'" And the third:

The Catholic priest heard a number of women confess that the grocer's new delivery boy had seduced them all. He made them each put ten dollars in the poor box.

The delivery man appeared last, and the priest asked angrily: "What have you got to say for yourself?"

"Just this," replied the boy, "either you cut me in on those ten dollars or I take my business to another parish."

Hareesh, keep your business here!

I can understand a deep desire in everybody to be loved, and I love you all whether I know your names or not. Names are just labels stuck to you. You have come here in the world without names, and you will leave this world without names.

As far as I am concerned you don't have a name; and if you look within yourself, you will not find any name there. You are a nameless reality -- and it is good, because every name creates a boundary around you, makes you small.

But your question is significant. Attention can do two jobs: if it is forced, it nourishes the ego; if it is prayed with gratitude, it nourishes the soul.

I cannot say anything against your question. Your question is so full of love, gratitude, that I can repeat as many times as you want, "Hello, Hareesh." It will not strengthen your ego, it will weaken it. And so many people here, hearing me calling to you, "Hello, Hareesh," are also repeating the same. Then it becomes a tremendous energy field, a brotherhood of spirituality, where everybody is to share his abundance.

It is perfectly right. Many would have liked the same, but could not gather the courage.

You are a courageous man. And you are asking "... and everybody else knows I am existing as your lover and fellow dance-partner." Here we are not gathered to talk about nonsense -- about God, heaven and hell. Here we have gathered to rejoice, to sing, to dance together in such an ecstasy that individualities melt into each other and it becomes one organic whole.

I have seen it becoming one organic whole many times, when you all laugh together.

Even the Germans don't understand why they are laughing -- but they are intelligent people: seeing that everybody is laughing, they also participate. In fact, they laugh louder than anybody else, so nobody suspects that they are Germans. Of course, outside Buddha Hall they enquire of people, "What was the matter? Why were people laughing so much?

I could not get it."

My suggestion to all the German sannyasins is: Forget trying to get it -- that is what is troubling you! You are engaged in trying to get it and the moment passes.... Everybody is laughing, and you are always second; you cannot laugh first because you have not got it yet.

Here it is a temple of celebration, utterly pagan. Nobody is serious, nobody is bothering about how to reach heaven, how to get a harp, sit on a cloud and go on singing for eternity, "Alleluja, alleluja...." Those are the idiots. They have been taken up just to relieve the earth.

If you can rejoice with me you have understood me.

If my music has touched your heart, it is enough.

I am not here to convert anybody; I am just here to help you learn a little dance of the soul. This is the most religious phenomenon: the dance of the soul -- no fear of punishment, no greed for any reward.

This moment is all in all.

Question 3:

Hari om tat sat... that is the starting of any Eastern holy scripture. It is a very beautiful thing: hari means a thief, OM means the ultimate music of existence. Tat sat means this eternal music of existence... the thief is the only truth.

This question is from Dhyan Om. He is back. For a few days he had disappeared -- not from the ashram, but he had stopped asking questions because I loved him so much that I gave him good hits. The greater hit you get, remember, your reward is much... you deserved it.

First he is asking, "Would you tell me a joke or give me some sutras, or anything before I leave?"

In the first place, why should you leave?

In the second place, you are a joke unto yourself; you don't need any jokes. But I will not disappoint you.

A few sutras for you:

A curved line is the loveliest distance between two points.

Get it?

I have also been a German in one of my past lives, so I understand the Germans more than anybody else.

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we are young. The young sow wild oats, the old grow sage.

It is really difficult.... But I will go on telling sutras until you get one.

A cigar gives a wise man some time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth.

The principle thing an inquisitive child learns is how little adults know.

You know you have reached middle age when weightlifting consists merely of standing up.

We are all born mad; some remain so.

I will not say to which category Om belongs. Most probably he has remained so.

Behind every successful man is an astonished woman.

A Japanese proverb: Nothing is as ancient as progress. It started from the very moment Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden.

I have heard the first words of Adam to Eve were, "We are passing through a great crisis...." These are the first words, and they continue to be relevant every day. Thousands of years have passed, but we are passing through the greatest crisis every day.

Any child who gets raised by the book must be a first edition.

There are books on how to raise your children, how to be a mother, how to be a father; it is so unbelievable that all the animals are raising their children without any difficulty, without reading any book. Only man seems to be utterly retarded. He needs to read how to raise his children. He has forgotten even the simplest things which any animal, any bird, knows perfectly well. Still we go on calling it evolution, for the simple reason that nobody objects. And even if they object -- for example this bird is objecting -- we don't understand their language.

Temptation usually comes in through a door that was deliberately being left open.

A man may know his own mind and still know next to nothing.

The latest thing in clothes is usually the woman you are waiting for.

When you don't know what you are doing, do it neatly.

Beauty is only skin-deep, but ugliness goes right to the bones.

What no wife of a philosopher can ever understand is that a philosopher is working when he is staring out of the window.

You can be positive of anything of which others are as ignorant as you are.

It is because of such fundamental principles that God goes on existing, the devil goes on existing, heaven and hell go on existing, sin and virtue go on existing. And you can be positive, absolutely positive... because neither you know nor anybody else knows, so nobody is going to contradict, nobody is going to negate. Only an innocent person may perhaps start saying things which go against all the ignorant people of the world.

One of the hardest decisions in life is deciding when to start middle age.

One: old age is when your symptoms are the most interesting things in your life.

Two: old age is when your face in the morning has more wrinkles than your bed.

Three: old age is when you not only cannot remember when you first made love, but also when you last did it.

That is real old age!

And you ask for a joke also. A joke that I hope can be understood... otherwise I will try another -- but I will not allow you to leave this place disappointed.

First: Rabbi Gideon Finkelstein died and went to heaven. He saw only three people there, reading by a dim light. One of them was reading PLAYBOY, another PENTHOUSE, and the other POPULAR SCIENCE. He decided to see what hell was like.

The rabbi got to the devil's domain and it turned out to be a big night club with every kind of music being played. There was an eight-piece Dixieland band, a thirty-piece swing band, three discos, and all the people were dancing.

Rabbi Finkelstein went back up to heaven and asked for an audience with God. "I don't understand it, Lord," he said, "there are only three people here in heaven and they are all reading. Down in hell everybody is dancing and having a good time. Why can't we have that in heaven?"

The Lord said, "I can't hire a band for just three people."

And second..if you have missed the first joke, this certainly you will miss.

Three old ladies were sitting together on a park bench when a flasher walked up to them, opened his coat, and exposed himself.

The first old lady had a stroke, and the second old lady had also a stroke, but the third old lady's arms were too short to reach.

Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here