God is the ocean you are in

Question 1:

Prem Turiya, all that is needed from you to raise the consciousness of humanity, is just to raise your consciousness to its fullest peak. You don't have to do anything else. So there is no puzzle at all - the puzzle is created by your mind; because mind always separates, divides: you, and the world.

And then the problem arises: if you have to put energy into raising the consciousness of the world, what about yourself? Your own consciousness is still not on the wing.

But as far as I am concerned - and it should be remembered by all, it is not only Turiya's question - you are the world. There is no division. The moment you are raising your consciousness higher, you are raising the world's consciousness higher. If you can become enlightened, you have done everything that was possible, within your capacity, to raise the world's consciousness. No extra effort is needed. In fact, every extra effort will be a hindrance. You should concentrate totally on your own being and its blossoming.

There is a secret law of life: just as water tries to be on one level, consciousness also tries in the same way to be on one level. If one person's consciousness reaches a high peak, soon many people will find explosions happening within them. It is also a well-known fact that if you are awakened, your very awakening triggers processes around you.

It is not by your action, not by any doing - but just by being awake: suddenly all around you, sleep starts disappearing. Just as when you bring light into a dark room: you don't ask, when we have brought the light into the dark room, now, how are we going to dispel the darkness? Do you think some extra effort will be needed? Just the light itself will dispel the darkness.

Become a light unto yourself, and you have done all that was possible within the capacity of a human being to raise the whole world's consciousness.

It is perfectly right: be totally drunk, be totally blissful, be totally silent, and dance so intensely that the dancer disappears and only dance remains - and your very dance... with such intensity and such totality, will make thousands of hearts suddenly dance. They may never know who is the source; they may never know who has triggered the process... you may never know how many people you have transformed. But that is unimportant; your drunkenness will become the drunkenness of many; your dance will drown many into the same blissfulness; your song will be sung on many lips, and your silence will resound in thousands of hearts. You just change yourself.

I repeat again: you are the world.

Question 2:

Kavisho, I am exactly doing the magical surgery you are asking about. Do you think my work consists only of communicating words, concepts, and philosophies to you? You are lying down on my surgical table.

There is no need for you to remember the past. Whenever I have talked about the past, it is just to make you aware that you have missed many opportunities before. Make it a point that you don't miss now.

Thousands of lives have passed, and you have been moving in a wheel, in a routine. This time, come out of the circle. And if you can come out of the circle this time, there will be no future life for you - eternity will be yours.

And that's what you are asking me: Is there any possibility to stretch this moment into eternity? This is the opportunity: this silence, this dance, this blissfulness can help you to come out of the vicious circle, and you will never enter another womb again. You will remain here - not embodied, but just as pure consciousness, spread all over existence.

My whole effort is to persuade you to take a jump from being a dewdrop and become the ocean.

And the surgery is not very difficult; it is one of the simplest things possible: just get out of your mind. Become a witness to the mind; watch all its traffic pass by. Don't be part of the traffic; stand by the side of the road - because you are not the mind.

Once this statement becomes your experience - that you are not the mind - then there is no question of being born into another stupid routine. It is the mind and the identity with the mind which is the cause of continuously moving in a circle. Disidentify. You are neither the body nor the mind. You are simply the pure watcher.

It is a simple method - the simplest possible method for the greatest experience - the most shortcut way. Whenever you have time - lying down on your bed, no special posture is needed, or standing under your shower - just remain a watcher: of the body, of the freshness of the water, of the coolness, and of the thoughts that are passing in the mind. Just by watching, mind disappears.

One day, you suddenly find an absolute silence within you - no traffic... the road is empty. The surgery is complete. You will not be born again in another body, although you will remain as part of eternal life.

And don't be worried - I will be there. I am already there just calling you all to the sunlit peaks of consciousness from your dark valleys. Start climbing.

You can miss me only in one way, and that is: if you choose your mind, then you cannot choose me.

If you choose me, you will have to drop your mind.

In the eternity of life, we all will be meeting - of course, without our old photographs, without our old faces. But nobody loses his individuality of consciousness even in the universal. He becomes part of the universal, and yet that universality does not destroy his individuality but enhances it. So not only me, but all the souls that have moved into time and gone beyond time, are still here now.

There is a beautiful story in the life of Mahavira. The followers of Mahavira have not been able to explain the mystery of the story. The story is certainly not historical; it is a parable, poetry, an indirect way of saying the truth. It says that Mahavira never spoke. The historical fact is that for forty years, he spoke continuously. But the story is that Mahavira never spoke. He was always silent, and in the audience there were three categories: one was of those who had left their bodies and had not entered in bodies again. They were all around - only visible to Mahavira, not visible to anybody else.

In the second category were human beings - seekers and searchers who had come to him, pulled by his great magnetic, charismatic personality.

And there was a third group, of his most intimate disciples - eleven disciples. They were also human beings, but they have to be put into a separate category because they had come to such communion with the master that they could understand his silence.

He never spoke - but those eleven disciples, called ganadharas, spoke to the people who could not understand silence. They said to people what Mahavira had communicated to them in his silence.

And there were two pieces of evidence whether they had heard rightly or not. One was that all the eleven had their own disciples: there were eleven branches of the disciples; if they all spoke the same message, that was one evidence that nobody had heard wrongly, that nobody was trying to make up the message himself.

And the second piece of evidence was that whenever those ganadharas, those eleven disciples spoke, the unembodied souls showered flowers, because they were able to understand the silence directly. And they were rejoicing because if these eleven people had not been there, Mahavira's message would have been lost. Those unembodied people could not communicate with human beings. The flowers were showered on the eleven ganadharas as a proof to all human beings that souls - which had become enlightened before - were still supporting and giving evidence that what these people were saying was exactly what had arisen out of Mahavira's silence.

It is very difficult to give historical proofs for it. But my own experience is that it may have some basis in reality, because I have come to know a few disciples of my own who can understand when I am not speaking. And whatever they understand is exactly what I wanted to convey, but kept it within myself. Here, also, many of you not only understand my words, but also my silences.

The day the electricity went off many times, I received many letters saying that it was such a great experience to sit silently for those few moments. In any other gathering in the world that would have been a disturbance; but in this gathering it was a tremendous experience - people loved those gaps.

Perhaps those electricity failures were managed; but those people must have come to know that we enjoyed it - and since that day, those electricity failures have stopped.

Kavisho, do not think of the past and do not think of the future. I am here with you and I know your heart. You are here with me, and there is no need to fear that you will miss the opportunity. You are coming closer and closer to the fulfillment - to the ultimate contentment. You are going to be one of my most blessed disciples.

Question 3:

Prem Anutosha, you have got a very beautiful name. It means "love" and "total contentment." Love is total contentment. The greatest misery in life is that one's love remains unfulfilled. That unfulfillment is not only of love - it is the unfulfillment of one's very soul.

You wanted to hear your name from my lips... I have fulfilled your desire. I would like that this name does not remain just a name - it becomes your reality too.

The name is beautiful but the reality is going to be a million times more beautiful.

Question 4:

Prem Amrito, it is your duty to be worried. He is my personal physician, and if I go to the Vatican, he will have to go with me.

But it is not going to happen. The pope is such a coward that he will not allow the Italian government... for one year he has been preventing it; and the message has come from a personal friend of the prime minister of Italy that it is the pope who is absolutely stubborn that on no condition should I be allowed entry into Italy.

Now another difficulty has arisen: my personal physician does not want me to go to the Vatican.

The Catholic situation is getting worse and worse. They are certainly a high-risk group, Catholic priests, where ten times more homosexuals exist than anywhere else; and ten times is not the actual figure, because they are hiding it in every way.

Many Catholic priests have died of AIDS, but the Catholic Church declares that they have died of this disease, they have died of that disease. The church does not want to accept that they have died of AIDS.

It is from the medical profession that things started leaking out, because the medical profession became afraid that it was dangerous. A priest, particularly a Catholic priest, comes in personal contact, in private contact, in confessionals. Those confessionals are private....

And the disease is not just ten times... ten times is now accepted. They were denying for years that there was any homosexuality; now they accept that there is ten times more homosexuality than in any other profession. And how many of these Catholic priests are suffering from AIDS? The church is silent - and these are the servants of the people.

In America, two priests were found to be suffering from AIDS. Immediately they were transferred to faraway cities. They were not thrown out of the church for fear that they would expose it. They blackmailed the church: "If you throw us out, we will expose the fact that we are suffering from AIDS - and not only us, but many more of our colleagues."

So they were transferred to other churches, to spread the disease to other cities. And when those cities became aware, then it became a problem, because they insisted that these people should be relieved and they should not be given another church. But the problem was that if they were released, they would expose it. So they were promoted and sent into monasteries with all their salaries, all their benefits. The whole church management seems to be so stupid: the monasteries are full of homosexuals, and sending these two priests to be hidden in the monastery is a danger for all the priests and all the monks in the monastery.

In one monastery in Europe, half of the monastery is homosexual - and there are almost fifteen hundred monks. Now there is such a conflict, because it is not a small number - seven hundred and fifty are confirmed homosexuals. They have divided the monastery into two parts, and one part is a homosexual part. They have chosen their own high priest, and they have declared homosexuality not to be against the Catholic religion.

Now, you cannot throw out seven hundred and fifty monks. They will expose you before the whole world. And in all the monasteries this is happening, because the pope goes on insisting every day....

Anando has brought the latest data on Catholic monks: Every day the pope is asking the governments of the world to condemn homosexuality as a very fundamental sin, a crime - at least ten years in jail. Why has he suddenly become so interested that homosexuals should be sent to jail, and that all the governments should make it a crime, a major crime? Man's retardedness is such that nobody bothers that homosexuality is only a symptom. And one can see that even in the twentieth century we cannot understand simple logic. The pope on the one hand says, "Condemn homosexuality as a crime; and praise celibacy from all the pulpits in every temple of every religion, as the only cure." The fact is: Celibacy is the cause of homosexuality.

Why are Protestant priests not suffering so much from homosexuality? Why are Jewish rabbis not suffering from homosexuality? Why only Catholics? And soon you will find the same situation in Hindu monasteries, in Jaina monasteries, in Buddhist monasteries - wherever celibacy is the rule, homosexuality is bound to come in.

And every effort is being made to throw the responsibility onto somebody else. Nobody has the courage to say the simple thing: Celibacy is the cause. Let celibacy be the crime! Ten years of jail for anybody who wants to be celibate... and homosexuality will disappear. Let all the nuns and monks be married; if not married, then let nunneries and monasteries become one, mixed - and homosexuality will disappear.

But nobody wants to see celibacy as the cause, because it is their fundamental, religious discipline.

So they are completely blind.

Just the other day I had another report: in Africa, where AIDS has perhaps spread to the greatest area - and the report was from there - that a scientist who was working to find out why AIDS has become so widespread in Africa, has discovered that it has come from monkeys. He found that eating the meat of the monkeys creates AIDS.

But he should know that his own conditioning is still working: from where did the poor monkey get AIDS, that his meat is full of the virus? In Africa it is a common thing that in deep jungles people make love to female monkeys. It must be man who has created AIDS in monkeys - and now the poor monkeys are blamed for creating AIDS. But this is stupid, because if in Africa monkeys are creating AIDS because people eat them... Catholic monks in Europe and America don't eat monkeys - so this cannot be the real cause.

All the religions, for thousands of years, have insisted that celibacy is something spiritual. It has nothing of spirituality in it. But it could have been tolerated: if somebody wants to remain celibate, it is his freedom; but if he becomes homosexual, it is not his freedom - he is entering into the life of another person. Still it could have been tolerated, because it is a question only of two persons - and if they both are consenting....

But now the problem has become of tremendous importance. It is creating a disease for which there is no cure, and a disease which has strange ways of infecting people. You may not come into sexual contact with any AIDS patient - still you can get it. Anything coming out of the body of the person carries the virus - even tears. If some child is crying, it is better to let him cry. Don't wash his tears with your hands - because many children are born with AIDS, if their mother or father was suffering from AIDS.

And AIDS takes a long time to mature - up to eight or ten years. Once it has matured, then it takes two years for the person to die. Within two years he is bound to die. But during these eight years he can go on producing children - and those children will all be born with AIDS.

Sooner or later even kissing has to be stopped, because saliva carries the virus. Only the Eskimos are right - they have never kissed in the whole of their history. When they saw Christian missionaries kissing for the first time, they could not believe it: "How dirty these people are - mixing each other's saliva, playing with each other's tongues - French kissing!" The Eskimos could see the ugliness of it, the dirtiness of it. They have never kissed each other; instead of kissing, they have a far more hygienic way of showing love: they rub noses. It is far more hygienic, clean - except for the few days when you have a cold; at that time it can be dangerous. When your nose is flowing, nobody wants to make love to your nose.

Amrito, I have said that I would like to go to the Vatican, but the Vatican is not ready to welcome me. And this is not the first time I have said it - I have said it many times, particularly to all the newspapers and news media that come from Italy. Yesterday I had to say it because there was a woman news reporter, Julia, and those were her questions.

The Pope has no religious understanding or philosophical depth. Christianity itself is such a poor religion that it has not been influential over the intellectuals in any country. For example, in India, now there is a large minority of Christians - they are the third greatest religion in India. But all the people who have become Christians are beggars, aboriginals, orphans, prostitutes, widows - who as Hindus cannot be married again, but can be married again as Christians. And these people have not become Christians because they are convinced of Christianity's superiority over their own religion.

Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism are far higher in their analysis of human consciousness, in finding ways and means to help humanity to come back home. Christianity has nothing comparable to it; and whatever they have can be easily destroyed by argument - and the pope understands that; all Christians understand that. I have come in contact with many bishops, and I have seen their embarrassment - because they cannot support any of their fundamentals.

So, Amrito, there is no need to fear - neither will they allow me there, nor will you allow me to go.

But once in a while, just allow me to hammer the pope.

Question 5:

Anand Katyayani, this is an old parable. But this is one of the beauties of parables - that they never become old, they always remain relevant... because the parable is about you - not about the fish, not about the ocean.

Everybody is searching for truth; everybody is searching for God; everybody is searching for the miraculous, the mysterious source of life. And the situation is the same: the younger fish is asking the older fish, "Where is this thing they call the ocean? I hear so much about it."

And the older fish said, "You are in it."

And naturally, the younger fish said, "But this is water and I am searching for the ocean." She was so disappointed that she said, "It is better to go away somewhere else to find the truth - what the ocean is."

God is the ocean you are in, because God is another name for life. You are breathing God in and out every moment. It is God who is beating in your heart. It is God who is flowing in your blood. It is God who is your marrow, your bones, your intelligence, your very consciousness. But because the fish is born in the ocean - it is so close - she thinks, This is only water.

This is only air that you are breathing in and out. And people are searching just like the fish, and they will never find - unless they stop searching and just start looking at what they are, what their consciousness is, what their life is. And they will be surprised that there was no need to go anywhere.

All that they were searching for they were surrounded by on the outside, and they were filled by it in their innermost being.

The whole existence is God. It is the religions which have created the fallacy that God created the world - so they have given you an idea that the world and God are two, so that you will have to search for the creator.

I want you to destroy that duality completely. God is not the creator, but the creation itself. He is in the trees and he is in the rivers and he is in the moon and he is in the sun and he is in you.

Except God, there is nothing else.

The seeker is the sought, the hunter is the hunted, the observer is the observed. And the moment you realize this, such a deep relaxation comes, such a peace descends deep in you that you have never dreamt of before. Such clarity comes to your eyes that everywhere you start seeing immense beauty, immeasurable beauty, tremendous goodness. In the smallest things of life you start feeling the heartbeat of the universe.

This is our temple, and this is our God, and we are part of it. The worshiper is not separate from the worshiped.

To understand this organic unity is the true religion.

Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.