Chapter 18
[A sannyasin says: I've been able to open up to people in a way I've never experienced before, and people have come to me. I'd just like to say thank you.]
One never knows. One never knows unless it happens, because we remain confined with our past experiences, with all that we have known before. The unknown we cannot even imagine. We cannot expect it because we don't know what it is. Whenever it comes it takes you by surprise.
And all that is beautiful, true, always comes as a surprise. So retain the capacity to be surprised.
That is one of the greatest blessings of life: the capacity to be surprised. Once you lose that capacity you are dead. If things can surprise you, you are still alive....
And the more you are surprised by things, the more alive you are. That is the aliveness of a child; he is surprised by trivia. One cannot even believe why he is surprised - just an ordinary tree, or bird, or dog, or cat, a pebble on the shore.... He is even more surprised than you will be if you find a kohinoor, a great diamond - even then you won't be surprised. But because he is surprised and has the capacity to become surprised, each pebble becomes a diamond. If you are not surprised, even a diamond becomes an ordinary pebble.
Life carries as much meaning as you carry the capacity to be surprised - the capacity to be surprised, the capacity to wonder. So always remain open. And always remind yourself again and again that life is infinite. It is always an ongoing process; it never comes to any end. It is a non-ending, eternal journey, and each moment is new, each moment is original. When I say each moment is original, I mean each moment throws vou back to your origin, each moment makes you a child again.
Relax and look at it, and tremendous beauty and tremendous treasures simply become yours for nothing; just for the asking they are yours.
People lose much because of their knowledge. The more that you think that now there is nothing in life which can surprise you, the more that you know, the less capable you become of wondering.
The more you know, the more you become a repetition; you are no longer original. Now things come and pass but your eyes are full of dust and your mind is full of thoughts. You are confined so much in your knowledge that the unknown cannot penetrate.
And God is not only unknown - He is unknowable. The mind is the known, meditation is to stand in the unknown, and God is the unknowable - which always remains like an horizon just bordering on the unknown. The closer you come, the further away it recedes. It is always a rainbow, and you can never catch hold of it. You can try, and every effort should be made to reach it, but it is always unreachable.
God is impossible, and because God is, life is beautiful. Because the impossible is, life is a tremendously beautiful loses its meaning.
That's why in the West life is losing more meaning than in the East. Because science has made you more knowledgeable and because of the dust science has poured on you, the capacity to be surprised is becoming less and less. You are becoming almost insensitive to the unknowable. This is the only grave, the only death - that you think that you have known.
Always remain available to the unknown and the unknowable....
[The Tathata group had darshan tonight. The leader of the group said: Sometimes I don't feel it's right for me to let my feelings come out at certain times - and that's where I'm confused. At one point I just felt like laughing the whole thing seemed completely absurd - but I held the laughter back.]
No need to hold anything back, because if you do then the bridge between you and the group is lost; you become untrue. And if you are not authentic, you cannot lead them towards authenticity. If they feel, and they will, that you are holding something... you cannot hide the fact: it shows in a thousand and one ways that you are being untrue, wearing a mask, that you are trying to be something that you are not; your tension will show it, your very vibration will make everybody alert... then the bridge is broken. Then you can talk but there will be no communication. You can try to lead but you are no longer the leader. They may even follow vou, but the path is missed, the point lost. Then it is a sheer wastage.
The whole effort is to create a situation in which nobody holds anything, and everybody pours out his heart. The whole thing is to allow each participant to be as totally nude as possible, so that the burden, the heaviness that society enforces, is thrown away. The clouds disappear and for a few hours, or for a few moments, the sun shines and one can live in the sunrays naked, as if on a beach taking a sunbath.
But if you hold back, your communication can no longer be a real communication. You can talk but the talk will become phoney. You will say words but they will be meaningless. You will assert something but now those words will have no poetry, no life in them. They will be dead, lead-like, almost stinking.
Never do that - whatsoever the cost. Even if people think you are foolish, stupid, idiotic, there is nothing wrong in it. One should have the courage to be stupid too, to be foolish and idiotic - and it needs courage. Those moments are also part of life; why deny them? If you deny them you lose contact with tathata, suchness.
What can you do? In a certain moment you find yourself laughing like a clown. That is as true as another moment; it happens as naturally as any other moment. Who are you to prevent it? The manipulator has to be dropped, because the manipulator who tries to control the laughter creates a division in your being - then the spontaneity is lost.
So remember that - that the group is not only a growth process for others; it is a growth process for you too. They are playing the role of the led, you are playing the role of the leader, but in fact both are participating in a process. In fact nobody is a leader and nobody is a led - those are just roles. The whole group is the led and the whole group is the leader. But if you are holding then the participants will also, because they will imitate you.
So if there are certain moments when your mind says that this is not good, drop the mind, but never drop the moment. This mind is a social by-product, it comes from the society - when to laugh, when not to laugh, when to cry, when not to cry. The society goes on in so many ways controlling you from the outside and the inside too. It has created a conscience inside.
If you really want to be liberated from all these confinements, from all these bondages, and you want to change, just be true whatsoever it is. Absurd - that too is okay. Say amen to it, let it be so, swaha.
Accept it, relax into it, and suddenly you will see out of that absurd laughter, something which is not of this earth, something which is not part of the mind, a ray of the unknown. And it will always happen through the absurd, because absurdity is the most suppressed thing in society.
Society had been suppressing three things: sex, death and the absurd. And the absurd is the most suppressed. There are Freuds against the suppression of sex, and they have created a little atmosphere so that people can be freed of that. More than sex, death is the taboo. Death still needs a Freud to fight against the suppression so that people can allow their feelings about death; can think and meditate upon it, and allow the fact that death exists so it is no longer a taboo. But even deeper than that is the absurd. My whole effort and fight is against the taboo against the absurd.
I would like you to be absurd because that's how existence is. It is meaninglessly meaningful, illogically logical. All the contradictions, all the paradoxes are in an inner coherence in it; they are complementaries. Just try to allow the fact that whatsoever is, is. Don't make a judgement, don't say absurd. Once you say it you have started denying it. If it is absurd, it is - what can you do and who are you to do it?
Just think about the fact - are you yourself not absurd? How can you prove that you are needed here in any way? Does existence need you? Existence can be without you, perfectly without you; there is no problem. You were not, existence was; you will not be and existence will be, so what is the point of your being here? What purpose are you fulfilling?
That is the fear against the absurd, because if you allow it, one day suddenly you will see the absurdity of yourself. You are here tor no reason at all. You cannot prove why you are here and
not somewhere else. Why are you with me at this moment and not with someone else? - sheer absurdity. Just look at the absurdity of it - no reason, no cause. That is the fear. So if you allow laughter and you feel that it is absurd, just hidden behind it is the real absurdity - not the laughter, but the one who is laughing.
Allow it, and soon you will see that it releases you to the infinite sky. Even the confinement of logic is dropped. Then you simply live; you don't ask for meaning. Then each moment is intrinsically meaningful - or meaningless; both are the same. Enjoy it, delight in it, dance it, but don't make a system out of it.
[The group leader then says: Sometimes in the group I feel a need to hit someone physically, to get a point across. Should I do that?]
You can do it, but hit very respectfully - then the quality of the hit changes. Hit with deep respect.
First bow down and touch the feet, and then hit, but with deep respect and reverence. Then hitting is a tremendous act of compassion. But one has to learn the art; it is the subtlest of arts.
You should not hit in condemnation, you should not hit as a judgement. The sheer humanness of the other should be respected unconditionally. If you are hitting, it is because you love, because you respect. So make it a clear point that by hitting you are not condemning. Rather, on the contrary, because you respect the person, because you feel for the person so much, that's why you are ready to even go to the far extent of hitting him.
So make it a point to bow down, touch the feet respectfully, and then hit hard. By and by you will see the quality changing. You will see a tremendous change in your being. It will not come out of anger; it will be coming out of compassion. And when you hit out of compassion, the other will feel a tremendously beautiful moment of grace, and you will see people touching your feet when you hit them. Then energies meet and there is a communion. So there is nothing to be worried about, just change the quality of it.
[The assistant leader says: It was a lot of fun. I laughed a lot and my stomach hurt when I came out.
But today I felt terrible. I felt just like a garbage pail with flies around my head - really empty, and just down.
Osho said that soon things would settle, and that she was feeling tired and empty because she had laughed too much, perhaps forcing laughter when it was not really flowing from her, so she had gone to the opposite extreme from the leader. He said it was a fun but one should not take it as fun, or should take it as serious fun. He said she would feel empty after it was finished if she took the group just as fun, because it was just like a game that was now finished. He said it could be like an addiction, a drunkenness, so that once the group was over one didn't know what to do.... ]
Fun is not the right word. Delight in it... delight is a little deeper. Rejoice in it, celebrate it. They have different qualities to fun.
You go to a circus - that is fun; in a way, silly. It never touches your depths, never touches your heart; it is clownish. People seek fun just to pass time; it is superficial.
So delight more, rejoice more, celebrate it. Move gracefully in it. Fun is a little profane, delight is sacred - so move on holy ground. It is a serious question in a way because people's lives are involved. It is not a circus, it is not a volley-ball match; you should not be a spectator. So if you laugh, your laughter should come out of your rejoicing, not out of a ridiculing mind which says that these people are ridiculous and what foolish things they are doing. If there is even a slight notion lingering in the unconscious that the whole thing is ridiculous, then you will feel this way.
But if you have delighted in it, then you will feel very very silent, not sad; very very silent, but not empty. That silence will have a quality of fullness in it. Next time just watch... but good.
[A participant said: Things changed after last darshan.... you told me not to worry about anything....
When I went into the group I was looking for heavy blocks and problems, and crying came up and sadness and....
I don't feel positive, but I don't feel negative either.]
That's very good - because when you feel positive, sooner or later you are going to feel negative; they change. To feel neither positive nor negative is the right thing to feel. If you remain in it, it can become a permanent state of being.
It is not very exciting I know. The positive is more exciting and the negative too - in a negative way, but exciting. This state is absolutely non-exciting; it is silent. But if you can go in tune with it, this is the best, mm? Better than positive.
[The participant adds: I've been living with false positivity.]
Mm, so don't be worried. Just get more and more in tune with it - this tranquility, this silence where opposites are no longer functioning. It feels as if one is empty, sad; it is neither sad nor empty. One feels strange, empty, different, but this is your interpretation. We don't know what silence is. When it comes it feels like sadness. We know what sadness is, and silence has a certain quality of sadness too. Sadness is familiar, silence is unfamiliar, so when for the first time you encounter silence, you immediately interpret it as sadness.
[The sannyasin says: It came in a strange way... just through someone slapping my face - and it just came up.]
Mm mm, it can happen - and one can never know what situation can become the cause. Sometimes out of trivia truth is born. Sometimes just out of an accident something settles and changes. Life is mysterious, and that's why the science of life cannot be really made; it remains more or less a hunch, an art.
So just try and get in tune with this state. As I see it, it is perfectly beautiful. It is not sadness - it is silence, stillness. It is not empty but is filled with something that you are not aware of yet. It is just as when there is water in a jar. You empty the jar and then you say that it is empty. Now it is full of air, but your mind is still concerned with water so you say that it is empty. It is something of a different dimension that is penetrating you....
Everything is good, just enjoy it... it will settle. Within a few days you will come to be in tune with it, and you will see that it is a silence, not a sadness.