The secrets and mysteries of existence are infinite

Question 1:

Veet Mano, I remember I have said to you, "You are a good man," because I have given you the name, Veet Mano. Veet Mano means going beyond the good man.

Morality is concerned with good qualities and bad qualities. A man is good - according to morality - who is honest, truthful, authentic, trustworthy. But morality is not religion; even an atheist can be a good man, because all these qualities of the good man do not include godliness.

I have told you, you are a good man; so the work for you is not just to be good, but to transcend the duality of good and bad. The religious man is not only a good man, he is much more. For the good man, goodness is all; for the religious man, goodness is just a by-product. The religious man is one who knows himself, one who is conscious of his own being. And the moment you are conscious of your own being, goodness follows you like a shadow. Then there is no need of any effort to be good; goodness becomes your nature. Just as the trees are green, the religious man is good.

But the good man is not necessarily religious. His goodness is out of great effort, he is fighting with bad qualities - lying or stealing, untruthfulness, dishonesty, violence. They are in the good man but only repressed - they can erupt any moment.

The good man can change into a bad man very easily, without any effort - because all those bad qualities are there, only dormant, repressed with effort. If you remove the effort they will immediately erupt in your life. And your good qualities are only cultivated, not natural: you have tried hard to be honest, to be sincere, not to lie - but it has been an effort, it has been tiring.

The good man is always serious, because he is afraid of all the bad qualities he has repressed; and he is serious because deep down he desires to be honored for his goodness, to be rewarded. His longing is to be respectable. Your so-called saints are mostly just good men.

I have given you the name: transcend the good man - and there is only one way to transcend the good man, and that is by bringing more awareness to your being.

Awareness is not something to be cultivated; it is already there, it has just to be awakened. When you are totally awakened, whatever you do is good, and whatever you do not do, is bad. The good man has to make immense efforts to do good and to avoid the bad. The bad is a constant temptation for him. It is a choice: every moment he has to choose the good, and not to choose the bad.

For example, a man like Mahatma Gandhi: he is a good man; he tried hard his whole life to be on the side of good. But even at the age of seventy he was having sexual dreams - and he was very much in anguish: "As far as my waking hours are concerned, I can keep myself completely free from sex. But what can I do in sleep? All that I repress in the day comes in the night."

It shows one thing: that it has not gone anywhere; it has been inside you, just waiting. The moment you relax, the moment you remove the effort - and asleep you have at least to relax and remove the effort to be good - all the bad qualities that you have been repressing will start becoming your dreams.

Your dreams are your repressed desires.

The good man is in continuous conflict. His life is not one of joy; he cannot laugh whole-heartedly, he cannot sing, he cannot dance. In everything he continually makes judgments. His mind is full of condemnation and judgment; and because he is himself trying hard to be good, he is judging others also by the same criteria. He cannot accept you as you are; he can accept you if you fulfill his demands of being good. And because he cannot accept people as they are, he condemns them. All your saints are full of condemnation of everybody: you are all sinners.

These are not the qualities of the authentic religious man. The religious man has no judgment, no condemnation. He knows one thing: that no act is good, no act is bad; awareness is good and unawareness is bad. You may even do something - in unawareness - which looks good to the whole world, to the religious man that is not good. And you may do something bad, and you will be condemned by everybody - except by the religious man. He cannot condemn you, because you are unconscious. You need compassion, not judgment, not condemnation - you don't deserve hell, nobody deserves hell.

As your meditation deepens, your witnessing becomes great. That's what I was saying to you about witnessing and watching when you took sannyas seven years ago. I had forgotten to tell you, not to think that witnessing or watchfulness are nothing but good qualities. That's why, when you were leaving, I stopped you again and told you that you were already a good man.

So something more is implied in transcending the duality of good and bad. Coming to a point of absolute awareness, there is no question of choice - you simply do whatever is good. You do it innocently, just as your shadow follows you, with no effort. If you run, the shadow runs; if you stop, the shadow stops - but there is no effort on the part of the shadow.

The man of awareness cannot be thought synonymous with the good man. He is good, but in such a different way, from such a different angle. He is good not because he is trying to be good; he is good because he is aware - and in awareness bad, evil, all those condemnatory words disappear as darkness disappears in light.

Religions have decided to remain only moralities. They are ethical codes; they are useful for society, but not useful for you, not useful for the individual. They are conveniences created by society.

Naturally, if everybody starts stealing, life will become impossible; if everybody starts lying, life will be become impossible; if everybody is dishonest, you cannot exist at all. So on the very lowest level morality is needed by society; it is a social utility, but it is not a religious revolution.

Don't be satisfied by just being good.

Remember, you have to come to a point where you need not even think about what is good and what is bad. Your very awareness, your very consciousness simply takes you towards that which is good - there is no repression. I would not call Mahatma Gandhi a religious man, only a good man - and he tried really hard to be good. I do not suspect his intentions, but he was obsessed with goodness.

A religious man is not obsessed with anything - he has no obsession. He is just relaxed, calm and quiet, silent and serene. Out of his silence whatever blossoms is good. It is always good - he lives in a choiceless awareness.

That is the meaning of your name, Veet Mano: Go beyond the ordinary concept of a good man. You will not be good, you will not be bad. You will be simply alert, conscious, aware, and then whatever follows is going to be good. In a different way I can say that in your total awareness you attain to the quality of godliness - and good is only a very small by-product of godliness.

Religions have been teaching you to be good, so that one day you can find God. That is not possible; no good man has ever found godliness. I am teaching just the reverse: find godliness and good will come on its own accord. And when good comes on its own accord, it has a beauty, a grace, a simplicity, a humbleness. It does not ask for any reward here or hereafter. It is its own reward.

Question 2:

Sadhan, the very memory is preventing you from getting back into the same space again.

Remember one thing: in life, nothing repeats itself. And the moment you become addicted to a certain idea, a certain memory, you are living in the past - which is dead - and you are always comparing everything that is happening now, with a past memory. You want it to happen again, but you have forgotten one thing. When it happened, you were not wanting it to happen; it happened without your wanting, without your desiring, without your even being aware that it was going to happen. Out of nowhere, suddenly it descended upon you.

You are no longer in that state. You are waiting for it, you are asking for it, you are demanding it - and nobody can make any demands on existence. The more you demand, the more miserable you will become. Forget what has happened, because even better spaces are available. Never ask again for what has already happened, because it will be at the most a repetition - and a repetition can never give you the same joy.

I have a beautiful story about Mulla Nasruddin: He was chosen to be an adviser to the king. The first day, the king and Mulla Nasruddin were both sitting at the dining-table eating. The cook had made stuffed bindhis, and the king liked them very much.

When Mulla Nasruddin heard the king praising the cook, he started praising bindhis like anything.

He said, "In the ancient scriptures it is said that the bindhi is the most life-giving vegetable. It keeps you young longer than anybody else, old age never comes - and you start forgetting that there are diseases. It is almost like nectar on the earth."

The cook heard this, so the next day also he made stuffed bindhis. The king ate them, but did not say anything. Mulla Nasruddin went on praising them again. This went on happening for seven days, and on the seventh day the king became so bored with stuffed bindhis that he threw the plate away and said to the cook, "Are you mad, or something? - stuffed bindhis, stuffed bindhis...."

Mulla Nasruddin saw the scene had changed, so he said, "This cook seems to be an idiot. It is said by the ancient sages that you should not eat bindhis every day; it is dangerous to health. You will become old before your time, and death is not far away."

The king said, "Mulla Nasruddin, for seven days you have been praising bindhis, and now suddenly you have changed your mind. Your scriptures and quotations and ancient sages, have all changed."

Mulla Nasruddin said, "Master, I am your servant, I am not the servant of bindhis. Whatever is your opinion is my opinion - I don't know anything about bindhis. Because you praised them, how could I remain silent? Now that you are condemning them, I am condemning them. You give me my salary, not the bindhis. And as far as the ancient scriptures and ancient sages are concerned, I know nothing about them. Who cares about ancient sages and ancient scriptures? If they knew that bindhis are nectar, they would be alive right now. The bindhi cannot make anybody immortal, that much is certain. It is good that you stopped, because I was also dying - I was becoming a stuffed bindhi! Every day bindhi... I was becoming worried myself about how to stop this madman?"

The king said, "You are telling me I am mad?"

Mulla said, "You started praising... I am just your servant. Anything - howsoever beautiful, howsoever delicious - will create only boredom if repeated continuously."

Sadhan, simply think about it: if the space that you think was paradise is repeated every day, it will become hell. Then you will be asking me how to get rid of this space.

Don't ask for anything to be repeated in your life, because there are always higher things. Why waste your life with anything lower? Always ask for the higher, for the better. And of course, you don't know what is higher and what is greater; again you are just waiting for the unknown. Just as the unknown has given you a gift in the past, it will be giving you many, many gifts; but you have to have the same childlike innocent heart - waiting and longing, but not definite about what you are asking.

Just trust in existence, and you will find better spaces. There is no scarcity of paradises - there are paradises beyond paradises - one has just to be innocent and not cling to anything. You are clinging to a certain experience, and that very clinging is becoming a barrier to prevent another experience from happening.

If something great has happened, which gave you the idea that you have come home, that this is paradise - then forget all about it. The future contains much more. The past is dead and the future is alive, and the whole future is not exhausted by your past. Be open and be available, and you will find greater spaces - more precious.

Once you have learned the art of waiting without demanding, just trusting, nature goes on giving more and more gifts. It has to give, because it has in so much abundance. It cannot contain it within itself - it has to share.

But you are preventing existence from giving you anything. You are asking for something which has already been given to you; and nature does not want to bore you by giving the same paradise, the same home every time. Just imagine how many times it would take for you to become bored with it.

Because it has not happened again, you are carrying a golden memory of it.

Drop that memory. Be grateful that existence gave it to you, and wait. The future is vast, and the secrets and the mysteries of existence are infinite.

Question 3:

Milarepa, it is one of the destinies of those who are born with genius. A genius never finds that what he has created is enough. He is always discontented. He goes on creating more and more beautiful things, but nothing satisfies; he knows that he has much more to give. His heart has to pour out more songs, more paintings, more music. He is fully aware that whatever he does falls short of the target; his target is such a faraway star.

It is not just about Rabindranath Tagore - these words are true about any genius in any part of the world, in any time, in any age. These words are the very essence of the discontent - because the painter feels in his dreams that he can paint something unique that has never been done before. It is so clear in his dreams, but the moment he starts translating his dream onto the canvas, he starts feeling that what is happening on the canvas is only a far away echo.

Coleridge, one of the great poets of England, left forty thousand poems unfinished when he died.

During his life again and again he was asked, "Why don't you complete them? It is such a beautiful poem - just two lines are missing and it will be complete."

He always said, "It reflected something that was hovering in my being; but when I brought it into words, it was not the same thing. To others it may appear very beautiful, because they don't have anything to compare it with. But to me... I know the real poem which is within me, still trying to find new words."

Rabindranath himself used to write each poem many times. His father was a very talented man, though not a genius; his grandfather was a very talented man, but also not a genius. Both tried to convince him, "You are mad. You go on destroying.... You go on making beautiful poems and then you destroy them. Why do you destroy them?"

Rabindranath said, "Because they are not authentic representations of my experience. I wanted to do something, and something else has happened. It may look beautiful to you, but to me it is a failure, and I don't want to leave any failure behind me. That's why I am going to destroy it."

Rabindranath's father has written, "he has destroyed such beautiful poems... we cannot conceive how they can be more beautiful. He seems to be mad..." And when he used to write poems he would close his doors and inform the whole house that for no reason at all should he be disturbed - not even for food. Sometimes days would pass - two days, three days - and the whole family would be worried... he was constantly writing and destroying. Until he came to a settlement where something of his inner vision had been caught in the net of words, he would not open the door.

In this book GITANJALI - ?gitanjali' means ?offering of songs', it is an offering to God - Rabindranath says, "I don't have anything else. I can only offer my deepest, heartfelt dreams, that I have brought into the poems." Hence he gave the name GITANJALI - ?offering of songs'. These are the very few chosen poems which he has not destroyed. They are immensely beautiful. But he was not satisfied even with these poems, although he got a Nobel prize for this book.

The original was in Bengali, which is a very poetic language - just the opposite of the Marathi you will hear in Poona. If two or three Maharashtrians are having a conversation, you will think that soon there will be fight. The words are harsh - the language seems to be very good for fighting, but for no other purpose.

Bengali is just the opposite polarity. Even if two Bengalis are fighting, you will think they are having a very sweet conversation, the language is so sweet. The words of Marathi have corners; Bengali is very rounded - no corners. Even prose in Bengali sounds like poetry; it has a certain music in it which no other Indian language has.

Rabindranath wrote GITANJALI first in Bengali, and for ten years the world remained absolutely unaware of it. Then, just an accidental suggestion by a friend: "Why don't you translate it into English?" - and he tried.

He was dissatisfied with the original Bengali, but he was more dissatisfied with the translation.

Because there are a few nuances to every language which are not translatable. Particularly a language like Bengali is almost impossible to translate word to word. You can translate, but the sweetness, the quality of music in each word... from where you can bring it? Still, he got the Nobel prize for the translation. His friend said, "Now you must be satisfied."

He said, "I am more dissatisfied than ever. This shows that humanity is not yet mature enough to understand poetry. These are my failures, these poems of GITANJALI. I have saved them after many, many efforts. I became tired, and felt that perhaps something that is in my heart cannot be brought into words. The best I could do I did, but in my own eyes it was a failure, at the best, a very good failure. It can deceive everybody else, but it cannot deceive me."

This is the experience of all great geniuses - in every direction, in every dimension. The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh painted for one year continually only one painting - again and again and again. The effort was so arduous, and what he was painting was so difficult: he wanted to catch the sun in all its glory and beauty, with the songs of the birds.... Now, no painting can sing but you cannot argue with geniuses.

He was standing in the field the whole day, from morning till evening - just watching the sun in all its phases, with all the colors that the morning brings, or the evening brings. For one year he was continually painting and destroying, and one year with the hot sun on his head the whole day... he went mad. He was put in a madhouse by his younger brother. In the madhouse he continued to paint the sun, but nothing came closer to his vision.

He was one year in the madhouse. The world may call him mad, but I cannot - because the paintings that he did in the madhouse are so full of intelligence, so sane, that the painter cannot be insane.

And when he was released from the madhouse, again he went into the field to start his painting of the sun. And the day it was completed, the day he felt a little satisfied, he committed suicide.

He wrote a short letter to his brother: "My work is done. All I wanted my whole life was to paint the sun in its full glory. I cannot say I have succeeded totally, but I can certainly say I have succeeded more than anybody else in the whole history of man."

Nobody has ever tried so much - almost two and a half years on just one subject. He said, "Now I don't have any desire to paint, therefore there is no need to exist. My existence has come to a point of fulfillment and contentment. I am dying, not because of discontent or failure, I am dying because I have been victorious, so now there is no point in living."

It seems nobody has ever committed suicide in such a way - because of victory, because of success.

Still, he has mentioned in the letter that it is not one hundred percent, but more than this, perhaps, is not possible.

These words of Rabindranath are worth remembering: "I am here to sing thee songs." His whole life was devoted only to one thing: to create songs; to sing songs. India was under the British Empire and Mahatma Gandhi and other freedom fighters were telling Rabindranath, "This is not the time to write poems; this is the time to fight. Freedom is the only goal in these moments."

He said, "I can understand your feelings" - and his participation in the freedom movement would have been of immense importance, because he was a Nobel prize winner, an international figure.

His books were translated to almost all the languages of the world. If he was also fighting for freedom it would have been immensely helpful, but he said, "I am here to sing songs. I understand you, and I love freedom, but that is not my heart's desire. Freedom or no freedom - I have searched within myself and I have found only one thing: that my destiny is to sing. If I do anything else, that will be going against my nature."

I have far more respect for Rabindranath than for Mahatma Gandhi, because he never went against his nature; he was one of the most relaxed men you can find - immensely happy in singing, in creating more songs, more plays.

He is talking to God.

In this hall of thine I have a corner seat.

In thy world I have no work to do:

My useless life can only break out in tunes without a purpose.

Everybody was saying, "You are good for nothing. When the whole country is afire with the idea of freedom, you are one of the greatest sons of the country, and you are involved only in small things:

singing, playing on instruments. You are utterly useless."

He accepts it: "I am useless... my life is useless; it can break out only in tunes without a purpose.

I am so useless that even my songs don't have any purpose - just as the birds sing, just as the flowers blossom with no purpose at all. The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day."

This was written while he was getting old. But even on his deathbed his last words were, "The song that I came to sing has remained unsung. My whole life I tried to sing it in different ways, with different tunes, with different instruments. People have loved them, people have appreciated them - but deep down I have a wound: I have not been able to sing the song I came to sing."

And this is the experience of all great mystics, all great poets, all great painters. Greatness is bound to have this feeling. Only small things can be completed, and only small desires can be fulfilled. The greater the desire, the more profound the longing - you are always coming closer and closer to the goal, but you never arrive. The distance between you and the goal remains almost exactly the same as it was the day you started your pilgrimage.

"The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day"... then what have I been doing all my life?

"I have spent my days in stringing and unstringing my instruments"... just trying to find the right instrument, the right tuning of the instrument - but it has not happened.

"The time has not come true. The words have not been rightly set. Only there is the agony of whishing in my heart." I am going with a deep wound and agony in my heart.

"The blossom has not opened: only the wind is sighing by." These words are immensely important, because they don't describe only Rabindranath Tagore's inner experience, they also describe that of thousands more geniuses of the world.

A genius has so much to say and so much to share that there are neither words to contain it, nor are there people to receive it.

A Sufi mystic, Bayazid, was once asked by a stranger, "What is your business?" He was not aware that Bayazid was a mystic; and Sufis live just like ordinary people. Unless somebody introduces you from their inner circle, you will never come to know that this man is a Sufi. When asked what his business was, Bayazid said, "My business? I sell glasses in the city of the blind."

The man looked at him: "What is he saying? What will the blind do with glasses?"

Bayazid said, "That is not my problem; that is their problem. My problem is somehow to persuade them to purchase a pair; whether they can see through them or not, I don't know."

The man said, "You seem to be mad."

Bayazid said, "That's true."

But this will be said by all the mystics - that they are selling glasses in the city of the blind, or that they are singing songs in the city of the deaf, or that they are teaching dances in the city of the crippled. Naturally, on the one hand they have a great ecstasy, which they want to express; and on the other hand they have a deep agony - that whatever they want to express always remains inexpressible.

If you can understand this statement of Rabindranath, it will help you immensely to understand the anguish of all the mystics, of all the great poets. It will also help you to understand why many mystics have remained silent. Seeing that there is no way of succeeding, only very few mystics have spoken. They have spoken, not because they think they are able to express what they have experienced; they have spoken so that perhaps listening to them, something may be triggered in the hearts of the listeners - something may be touched. Not that their words are going to convey the truth, but their constant effort may awaken something within you which is asleep. If not their words perhaps their presence, perhaps their silence, perhaps the depth of their eyes or the grace that surrounds them... hoping against hope that among millions, at least there may be one person who may be turned on.

Hence, they are not disappointed if nobody listens to them. They are not disappointed if people desert them. They are not disappointed even if people betray them. All this is expected. The miracle is that a few people don't betray, that a few people go on with them in deep love and trust.

Their minds may not be able to understand the mystic, but their hearts have heard the call, the challenge.

In this hope I have been speaking for thirty years continually. Even if a few people are turned on to God, I will feel utterly fulfilled. I will not die with the same agony as Rabindranath Tagore.

Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.