Chapter 24
Deva means divine and satyarthi means a seeker of truth - a seeker of divine truth. It has a very specific meaning of great significance. It does not mean a seeker of truth in the sense of a philosopher. That is not the real seeking. The philosopher invents the truth; it is not a discovery. It is his own intellectual invention. He theorises; it is guesswork.
Truth is not to be invented. All that is invented will be untrue. Truth is already there - or here. One has to uncover it, to discover it. There is no need to invent it because whatsoever you invent is going to be false. You don't know what truth is; how can you invent it? Not knowing truth, it is impossible to invent it. In ignorance, whatsoever is invented will be just a projection of ignorance. Truth cannot be invented; it can only be discovered, because it is already the case.
And the curtain is not on truth; the second thing. The curtain is on your eyes. The truth is not hidden.
The truth is absolutely clear, right in front of you. Wherever you look, you are looking at the truth.
Whatsoever you do, you are doing to the truth. You know or you know not, that is not the point.
Even fast asleep you are sleeping in truth. Unconscious, you are in truth; conscious, you are in truth.
So the curtain is not on truth itself, it is on your eyes... as if you are standing before the sun with closed eyes. The curtain is not on the sun, it is just that your eyelids are functioning as a barrier.
Open the eyes and the sun has always been there, just waiting for you.
A satyarthi, a real seeker of truth, means one who will not invent, one who will not guess, one who will not infer, one who will not make a logical syllogism; one who will simply be receptive, open, responding, vulnerable, available to truth. A seeker of truth has to learn one thing, and that is how to be infinitely passive and patient and waiting. Truth happens to you whenever you are open. So seeking is not active. That's the difference between science and religion.
Science tries very actively to penetrate the mysteries of life. Religion awaits in deep trust that when the right time comes, it will be revealed.
One prays, one hankers, longs, meditates, but one waits for truth to reveal itself. One prepares oneself, but one cannot do anything with the truth. When you are ready and ripe, truth happens.
That is the meaning of satyarthi.
Deva means divine and Meera is the name of an indian woman mystic. It is one of the greatest names in the East. She was a poet, a dancer, a mystic and a great devotee. There have been very few people who have approached God through dancing and singing.
Ordinarily religious people become very serious, long faces. She was ecstatic, almost mad. She danced all over India, from one town to another, singing the name of God. Her whole being was a festival.
And I would like you to dance and sing.
... Sometimes it happens that people go on missing their own destiny. Once you start doing the thing that you are meant to, then you feel tremendously happy for no reason - just happy. As I see it in you, dancing is your way . . . that is your prayer.
Dance your way to God, mm?!
[A sannyasin says: I'm leaving tomorrow. i've only been here six weeks and so much has happened.
I just want it to continue. And I feel I have to return.]
It will continue; it will not stop. It will continue there also. It is just a beginning. Much more is going to happen.
Life is always at the beginning, always. Wherever you are, it is always at the beginning. That's why life is so beautiful, young, fresh. Once you start thinking that something is complete, you start becoming dead. Perfection is death, so perfectionistic people are suicidal people. They want to commit suicide, hence they want to be perfect. It is a roundabout way of committing suicide.
Nothing is ever perfect. It cannot be, because life is eternal. Nothing ever concludes; there is no conclusion in life - just higher and higher peaks. But once you reach one peak, another is challenging you, calling you, inviting you.
So always remember that - that wherever you are is a beginning, always a beginning. Then one always remains a child... one remains virgin. And that's the whole art of life - to remain a virgin, to remain fresh and young, uncorrupted by life, uncorrupted by the past, uncorrupted by the dust that ordinarily gathers on the roads on the journey. Remember, each moment opens a new door.
It is very illogical, because we always think that if there is a beginning, then there must be an end.
But nothing can be done. Life is illogical. It has a beginning but no end. Nothing that is really alive ever ends. It goes on and on and on. You love, and it goes on and on and on. You meditate, and it goes on and on and on. So it is a beginning. Don't be satisfied with it.
Be fateful for it, but never be satisfied with it, because higher peaks have to be searched for.
Wherever you are, work for me, because if you work for me, you remain in continuous contact with me, and that helps tremendously. Keep this box with you. I'm coming with you.... And come back as soon as possible.
[A visitor says: I'm looking for the master.]
Very good. The master is here. There is no need to look anywhere else. One thing has to be understood - that there is no way to look for a master, because you don't have any definition of who the master is. Only the master can choose the disciple, not the disciple the master. Even when the disciple thinks that he has chosen the master, then too it is the master who has chosen him.
The disciple is in complete darkness. He has known no light, so even if he comes across light, he will not be able to recognise it. He won't have any means, he won't have any definition. There is every possibility that he will miss, because whatsoever he knows is irrelevant. The master exists in a totally different dimension. It is not the dimension of the mind.
You can look only through the mind, and if you look through the mind, that will become the barrier.
So if you are really looking for the master, then let the master look for you. When you are called, don't hesitate.
And I am calling you. Would you like to become a madman? [laughter] Mm?
Anand means bliss and kamalesh means 'the god of the lotus'. The full name will mean the god of the lotus of bliss.
The lotus is very symbolic in the East. It is the central symbol of the eastern consciousness. It means the ultimate opening towards light. When one really comes to one's fulfillment, one opens like a lotus. So remember this and forget the old name.
Forget the whole past, your biography as if it happened in a dream, or to somebody else, or you had seen it in a movie. Just this very idea that it happened in a dream will make you free of it. Start absolutely new from this moment, from ABC, as if you are born again. It is a rebirth.
And I call it becoming mad because it is a shift of consciousness from the head to the heart. Now live more lovingly and less logically. Listen to the unconscious more than to the conscious. Feel more than think, and immediately things will start happening.
So change to orange and just mix with my other mad people. Mm? Mm! Good!
[A sannyasin says: I feel that I'm fighting all the time. I like fighting, but I don't really like it. It's just a role I know.]
Mm, fighting is suicidal. It is a wastage of energy.
Simply say yes to things - start saying yes! Learn saying yes. Even when the no comes out of old habit, say yes.
... Let it come - you just say yes. Try - because old habits can be broken only with hard effort, otherwise they will never be broken. And the more you go on following them, the stronger they become.
No-saying is one of the very very poisonous habits... because people are your life. If you say no to them, you are saying no to life. They bring life to you, they bring God to you, they bring love to you.
If you say no to people, you are saying no to life. You will feel lonely, and when you feel lonely you will become annoyed and then you hate, you become angry and then you say no more forcefully, but that is self-defeating.
So no-saying won't help. Start doing just the opposite. For seven days be a yea-sayer. Try for seven days.
At least say yes to me. Start ! Say yes. It is difficult I know, but try. Say yes !
... Try for seven days. It is nothing, I don't see any problem in you. It is just an old habit you must have learned from your very childhood. Sometimes it happens that a child has to learn saying no because that is the only way to be independent, that is the only way to protect one's own space.
You must have been brought up in such a place where everybody was trespassing and everybody was overlapping your space. So there was only one way to protect and defend yourself - by saying no. No has become habitual. But it was just an old tape. Destroy it. Don't go on playing it again and again, otherwise it will destroy you. Now there are only two possibilities - either this tape destroys you or you destroy the tape.
... And it is very easy. Sometimes even a simple thing like saying yes can destroy it, because it brings a totally different world.
[A sannyasin said he stopped doing meditations when he started working in the mala shop: I miss some kind of meditation but I don't know what kind, how to go into it. I resist so much... I'm so lazy.]
I will give you something... something that a lazy man can do. There are methods for lazy people also [laughter].
... Mm, the mala shop is very good, but sometimes it happens that when you are working with your hands and the work is new, your mind is engaged. When by and by you become efficient, then the hands work robot-like and the mind is free. Then you can go on working with your hands and the mind can go on its own trips. So only when you are learning new work is your mind kept alert and in it.
By and by when you become efficient, there is no need; the hands go on doing it. The hands have a tiny mind of their own, a local mind, so they go on working with that. You are needed only when some emergency arises, otherwise not. You are free. It is just like when you learn driving. In the beginning you have to be very alert. Once you have learned, then you can go on thinking a thousand and one fantasies. Listening to the radio or talking to a friend or smoking or singing, the car is run automatically by feet and hands. You are not really needed. So that can happen.
But I will give you something. Start this meditation tonight - and you have to do it for at least forty minutes. Sit facing a light - your eyes should be facing the light; any light will do. Just go on looking at the light; nothing else is to be done. Do it sitting, and for forty minutes minimum, sixty minutes maximum. This will help you.
And you are not far away. It is just because of your thoughts... too many layers of thoughts around you, so you seem to be very distant, otherwise you are not. Once thinking drops or ceases, you will simply see me so close, almost beating in your heart. Then don't get scared!
It happens sometimes when you are here continually for long, you are so close that you become by and by oblivious of me. Many people report when they get back to their home....
[Osho gently attaches eye cones, made from cardboard and cellotape, to the sannyasin's face, covering up his eyes. He indicates the electric light to be looked at.]
Look at this light... and just go on looking at it. It will make you very very silent and quiet. After ten, fifteen minutes, there will come a moment that you will see darkness coming just in the middle of the eye. When that darkness starts that means that alpha waves are running in your mind now - and that is the wave of meditation.
Go on watching that darkness then and you will be really going deep into tranquillity. Do this for fifteen days and then tell me, mm?
[The technique that Osho gave is based on what has been termed the 'Ganzfeld effect', the word 'Ganzfeld' meaning the entire field, which refers to the visual field that is being experimented with.
Scientists had observed that alpha waves are produced by the brain when it slows down its activity in some situations, meditation being one of those situations. Working on eye movements for some other research, scientists needed to provide a constant and unmoving visual field for the person being experimented on and hit upon the idea of occluding the field of vision by covering the eyes - with the halves of ping pong balls!
As Osho said that if one sits with these shields attached to one's eyes and facing a light, after a time one becomes aware of a kind of darkness in the field of uninterrupted light. As soon as one becomes conscious of the darkness, it moves away so that one only becomes conscious of the white field again. If one relaxes and allows the mind to be inactive, the dark field returns.
One can learn the knack of retaining this so called darkness, which is in fact more like a nothingness.
Alpha waves soar high as the subject feels calm and relaxed, and appears to be in a state comparable to that of meditation. This has caused some to regard the Ganzfeld effect as 'instant meditation'.]
[A sannyasin asks about a new relationship: From moment to moment nothing seems to carry over.
Nothing's going anywhere.]
Mm, allow it that way.
... don't seek even. Allow it that way because that is the only way, the right way. Each moment is atomic and there is no need for two moments to have any sequence, no need. That is the one- dimensional mind which is continuously asking for some meaning, some running meaning through all the moments - that everything should be connected by a cause-and-effect chain, that everything must move somewhere, reach somewhere, that everything must conclude somewhere. That is the logical mind, the one-dimensional mind.
Life is multi-dimensional. It has no goal really, no destiny. And it has no meaning in fact - meaning in the sense that all the moments are following each other in a queue, reaching somewhere. No, life is not moving anywhere. It is simply dancing here. The right word is dance, not movement.
Movement is going somewhere but dance is simply going nowhere. A dancer is simply here in this moment. Each moment is a dance and one should enjoy each moment as it comes, as it happens.
Then your burden will disappear completely. That's what freedom is - to be in the moment, to be of the moment, never worried about the past, never worried about that which has not come yet, and never trying to make a logical sequence.
Because whenever you are making a logical sequence, you are sacrificing the present for the future.
You are saying there is some goal to be reached. Then you start manipulating time. You say, 'This moment cannot be allowed this way. It has to fall in line. It has to support the ideal, the idea.' You are going somewhere, so each step has to become part of that going. But there is nowhere to go.
Life is just herenow. It is a dance.
[The sannyasin adds: It's like this big blackness in the back of my head... just empty and black.]
Very good, very good. It's perfectly good. If you allow moments to have their total freedom, you will become empty, because one is full of ideals. Nothing else is there. One is full of tensions - going somewhere, reaching somewhere; one has to become someone, one has to prove something.
Once each moment is allowed to have its own being, total freedom, then there is nowhere to go, no tension. This is real meditation.
Then you will feel a darkness coming, but that darkness will turn by and by into deep light, luminous.
That darkness becomes luminous once you start enjoying it. In the beginning it looks like darkness because you have always been full of many thoughts and many ideals, many plans and this and that, and all that is going. The furniture is being removed and the room seems to be empty, but the room has its own being. By and by you will become acquainted with it; the room has its own presence.
Just empty space has its own beauty, its own chaste beauty, pure... nothing foreign in it, just itself.
It will look dark in the beginning.
... Just be this way and don't try to manipulate.
[The girlfriend says that everything with us is very beautiful but she keeps thinking of the boyfriend whom she was with before - and that gets in the way.]
Accept that too. It is natural; it is nothing to be worried about. If you start being worried about it, then you are creating a barrier. It is just natural. What can you do? Sometimes the past makes
a shadow on you, it's okay. Accept it... it is your past. Sometimes shadows move from the past because we have not yet learned how to live each moment totally, so incomplete moments remain hanging inside.
You were in love with someone but you never totally moved in that love, so something incomplete hankers for completion. That's why the idea comes again and again. It is not really the idea of your ex-lover or boyfriend. It is really the idea that is knocking at your gate because you have not completed it. So complete it in fantasy, that's all: That's what the mind is doing, so don't push it aside, otherwise it will come again and again.
Give twenty-three hours to [the new boyfriend], one to the old boyfriend. For one hour just close your eyes and be with him; in fantasy at least, complete it. Within a few days you will see that you are sitting and one hour has passed and that boyfriend is not coming. Just complete it. This is incompleteness, hence it persists. Once completed even in fantasy, it is finished. And don't do the same mistake with [the new boyfriend], because who knows - some day he may become an ex-boyfriend.
Be with him so totally that when you are with somebody else, [the new boyfriend] does not bother you. Right? It is difficult to understand right now, but that continuous memory simply shows that you were not with your boyfriend totally, so don't this time make the same mistake. Otherwise ex- boyfriends will stand in a queue and they won't allow you to be with anybody. Their number will go on growing and they will all come as a crowd. They will not leave any space for the immediate lover.
And when you are in fantasy thinking about your old boyfriend, don't feel guilty, because one has to close the account. So whatsoever you feel like, do. In fantasy at least, love him so you can say goodbye. One can never say goodbye to incomplete experiences, never. Only a complete experience can simply be dropped. You can go out of it just like a snake moves out of his old skin and never looks back. Otherwise you will again and again look back. Something is hanging. This is a hangover - but learn from it.
When with [the new boyfriend], be totally with him. This time be total and if you are total it may not happen that you have to seek another lover. This may be your eternal lover; the possibility is always there. But make it total at least. Eternal is not the question; make it total.
Even if love stays only for a single moment and it is total, it is divine. And even if you stay with a man your whole life and it is not total, it is ugly. It will not satisfy you, it will not satisfy the other. So drown yourself in him and let him drown himself in you.
But that old boyfriend needs a little time, so give that time to him - and don't feel guilty about it. One has to reckon with the past - unless you start living so totally in the present that a past is not created.
Then there is no problem. Then simply each moment, complete, drops out of existence. You don't carry any psychological memory of it. A chronological memory will be there, but no psychological memory. If you come across your boyfriend you will recognise him but you will not remember in any way, will not fantasise about it.
So do one hour's meditation. You owe something to your old boyfriend, so finish it. Never be in debt; finish it. And this time, go totally and deeply.
[A sannyasin had previously written Osho a letter: I felt energy but I didn't know how to connect with it. But I've started work in the garden and I feel a little bit better now.]
That's good. It happens whenever energy explodes.... If it happens again, remember that you have nothing to do with it. You have simply to delight in it. There is no need to put it to any use, and there is no need to get worried about what to do about it. Just delight in it, dance, sing, sway... just delight in it. Just feel it and enjoy it ! It is pure energy. If you can enjoy it, it will give you such deep celebration in your being. There is no need to do anything else.
When energy is flowing and you are flowing, flow with it and continue your daily routine work...
nothing special to be done.
But even the daily routine work will have a different meaning when energy is in flowing. You may be working in the garden and the trees will become green as they have never been, because your eyes are full of energy. You may be seeing an ordinary stone and it will look like a diamond because your eyes are so full of energy. In fact there is nothing ordinary in life. Everything is tremendously valuable, only we don't have the eyes to see it.
And now the scientists say that we only allow two percent of information to reach the mind. Ninety- eight percent is debarred. So when you are full of energy, suddenly it explodes. There is no censor.
Your eyes see as they should see and your ears hear as they should hear. Your hands touch as they should touch and the censor is removed. There is no guard on your senses and everything is flowing in and out.
In that moment, simply enjoy it. These moments are rare. If you enjoy them, they will be coming more and more often. But don't try to put them to any utility. Ultimate energy has no utilitarian purpose. It is a celebration. It is meaningless joy... purposeless, absolutely purposeless... just a delight, pure delight, intrinsic delight.
So next time when it happens, simply enjoy those moments, and when they go, don't hanker for them. They come on their own, they go on their own. When they come, they come; when they don't come, they don't come. You cannot force them. simply remain available and whenever they come, they will find you ready to receive. simply remain a welcome, that's all. When they come, feel grateful, enjoy. when they go, thank them, feel grateful and forget.
But it has been good. Soon, some day, it will happen again.... And continue working in the garden.