Chapter 14
Satsang is a very significant word - it means the presence of the master. It cannot be translated into English because there has never been such a thing as satsang in English.
In India, in the whole of the East, this is the most precious thing - just to be in the presence of the master; not doing anything, just being there. the very closeness works like a catalytic agent. You don't do anything, the master is not going to do anything - nobody is a doer - but things happen, mm? Just the meeting of the energies and things happen.
Satsang means in the presence of the master - and that is going to be your sadhana. Remember me as much as you can, and feel me present everywhere, whatsoever you are doing. Let that become a constant milieu around you. Let me surround you and let me drown you....
[A sannyasin says: ... now you've made me confused!]
That's my whole business! If you are confused I make you clear. If you are clear I make you confused!
[A sannyasin said that she found she was becoming very disturbed by sudden noises when she was in meditation - particularly in the lectures, when the birds flew by.
In dreaming too, she said she was feeling physical sensations that were like shocks to her body.
She said she was overeating continuously. However many times she made a vow not to overeat, she continued to do so.]
So let us take one by one.
In deep meditation the body becomes very sensitive, and even a bird's noise can be a tremendous disturbance. When you are really sensitive and deep, anything - a small ripple - is disturbing. But it will happen in the beginning because you are not attuned to that much sensitivity.
By and by you will settle in it. Then it will become ordinary and nothing will disturb it. Then again you will go deeper, and then again a disturbance will come. This will happen on many layers. There are at least seven layers, and whenever one layer becomes sensitive for the first time, it will be a disturbance. You will feel very fragile and anything can hurt you deeply. You can feel as if you are falling apart, but don't be worried.
Only when you come to the abysmal depth, to the bottomless depth of your being, does it never happen again. Then disturbance or no disturbance are the same, sound and silence are the same.
Then opposites are no longer opposites - they have become complementary. Then there is no contradiction in life, and you remain a witness of everything that happens. Much will happen and nothing will happen to you. It will always be happening somewhere else, and you will be a watcher.
But whenever a disturbance comes just accept it, allow it. So in the lectures find a place where you can sit and allow it... just a jerk and it will settle. If you try not to allow it then it really becomes a disturbance, but if a sound is there and you jerk. then the sound passes through you and you will fall deeper into silence than before. Then each disturbance becomes an opening of a new door.
It is a good indication, and one should feel grateful and blessed. And this is going to happen many times - this is just the beginning. It will settle after a few days and you will see that there is no problem. Then the new sensitivity is no longer new, and you are rooted in the new ground. It has become common to you, an ordinary reality - no longer a separate reality.
Right now it is a separate reality because your soul is going deep, and your body feels somewhere else, far away. Soon the body will follow. It is a little slow; it is a gross thing so it drags, lags behind.
Soon it will come to the same point of sensitivity and things will settle. You will feel more capable of being. Many nuances will reveal themselves to you... you will see green more green, you will see flowers more beautiful. The world will remain the same but as if vast, clean... as if your perceptivity has come to a different clarity, has become more transparent. You can see better, you can love better, you can be better.
The key thing to remember is to cooperate with it. If you start fighting with it, it becomes a disturbance. The birds are completely unaware of you. They are not coming for you - they are doing their thing.
Just accept it, and not with any reluctance but with deep gratitude. Something beautiful is happening.
You are coming back home, closer home; just one step, but you will be closer now.
In the dreams too, the same will happen. Ordinarily people live very gross lives, so even nightmares are not nightmares. They live on such a nightmarish level that nightmares are part of their ordinary life.
But when you become sensitive and meditative, even dreams, ordinary dreams, will look like nightmares. They will pass through you like a sharp knife and the whole body will feel shaken and
uprooted. Accept that too, and when you go to sleep one thing should remain in the consciousness while you are falling into sleep - that everything is a dream; everything, unconditionally, is a dream.
That which you see with your eyes open - that too, is a dream. That which you see with closed eyes - that too, is a dream. Dream is the stuff life is made of. So with this climate fall into sleep; with this constant remembrance that everything, everything with no exception, is a dream. When everything is a dream there is nothing to worry about.
That is the whole concept of maya - that the world is illusory. Not that the world is illusory - it has its own reality - but this is just a technique to settle deeply into yourself. Then nothing disturbs you. If everything is a dream then it is pointless to be disturbed. Just think, if this moment you think that everything is a dream - these people sitting here, me talking to you, these trees, this night, the sound of the night - is a dream, suddenly you are transported into a different world: you are there, the dream is there, and nothing is worth worrying about.
So from tonight just fall into sleep with this attitude. and in the morning too, the first thing you have to remember is that everything is a dream. Let this recur many times in the day, and suddenly you will feel relaxed.
The moment we think something is real we become tense. If you can think of the reality as dream, even reality will not make you tense. right now even dreams make you tense because you give reality to them. While dreaming everything becomes real: a dog suddenly turns into an elephant and even then your mind accepts it as real. You don't say that this is impossible, it must be a dream.
Your acceptance is so total that you accept even the illogicality of it.
Fall into sleep remembering, so a subtle fragrance, the remembrance, will go into the dream world. and in the morning again remember so that the thread is caught hold of again. Your whole consciousness will start changing from that moment. Then again the world will close in and you will think it is real, but for a single moment it will be as if clouds are no longer there, the sun is shining.
By and by this becomes a more settled climate around you.
[Osho went on to say that one should never make decisions, vows, that one was not able to keep, because if one made a habit of it, one's self-confidence became undermined.
He said that she should decide that for seven days she would over-eat as much as possible, as much as she liked, not letting up even for one day. After that he would see what was happening, but now she was to simply do as she wanted.]
[The Primal group is present. A group member said his upbringing had been without trauma so there were no specific painful incidents that he could recall and work on. He said he felt very aware of the armour around his chest, shoulders and arms, and that he often had a sense of frustration, of being lost.
Osho said that he should do the Enlightenment intensive group because it went deeper than Primal Therapy.]
Unless you go deeper than your childhood the armour will not be dropped. There are two types of armour: one is created in this life, and Primal will help immediately - but you are carrying armour
from your past life. That's why you feel frustrated and that everything is blocked and feeling is not coming. Primal can help only because it is a method to help you to go back to this birth. It is working on you a little but cannot take you back so far that you move into another life.
Because Christianity does not believe in another life, in rebirth, the West has not had that awareness to work back further; they stop at this birth at the most. So Primal will be helpful to make you aware of the problem but it is not going to solve the problem. That too is good, because half the problem is solved once you know it.
So work hard in Primal; you will become aware of a very strong armour that you cannot go through.
The Enlightenment Intensive will be very helpful. It is a zen method and goes into past lives, into the very roots of life. So do that and then tell me how you feel.
Put everything at stake... and it is going to happen. When it does it will be tremendously beautiful.
It is not going to be gradual for you - it will explode, mm?
[Another group member said she was only experiencing anger, not pain, but that getting out the anger was making her feel a lot better. She was concerned that she seemed to have cut off any early experiences of her childhood that had been painful and needed to be recalled and relived.
Osho reassured her that she was on the right track, and that she should allow the anger because just behind that was pain.... ]
Anger arises as a protection against pain. If somebody hurts you, you become angry as a protection of your being against pain. So every pain is suppressed by anger - layers and layers of anger on pain.
So just continue working on anger, and suddenly any moment you will feel the anger has disappeared, that you are becoming sad, not angry. The climate will change from anger to sadness, and when it does you can be certain that now you are close to pain; then the pain will erupt.
It is just as if we dig a hole in the earth to make a well. First we have to remove the earth and many layers of stone, and then the water comes up. At first it is not clean water, it is muddy; then by and by cleaner sources become available. First anger will come - and it has many layers like earth. Then sadness will come like muddy water, and then pain, clean pure pain, will be available. And pure pain is tremendously beautiful because it will give you another birth immediately. The whole effort of Primal is to bring you to the primal pain that everybody passes through while coming out of the womb.
You are exactly on the right track. Any moment in these seven days it will happen, so don't be worried.
[Another group member says: Twice I've got in touch with feelings but there's... a judge inside that shuts me off, and it's my 'mother. I'm very hard on myself... ]
Don't be worried about it. In the beginning it always happens.
The pain arises, or some feeling spring is touched, something uncoils, and immediately a judgement will come, because you have been judging your whole life - everyone has. When something happens you immediately judge, the mind immediately says something. And when you say something, feeling, the door of feeling, closes. It is very shy.
Feeling is feminine, mind is male. The mind is never shy, the heart is always shy. Once the mind is looking at it, the door to feelings closes, you cave in.
It is natural in the beginning to judge so don't be worried about it, because that worry about the judgement will be more harmful than the judgement itself. Don't judge the judgement - just take note that you have judged and that is why the door has closed. Forget about the judgement and start working. Next time the judgement comes it will not be so strong or so harmful or so certain; it will be more hesitant.
Just by your being aware, by and by the judgement will disappear. Look at this: if thinking looks at feeling, feeling closes; and if awareness looks at thought, thoughts disappear.
So just look, watch the judgement, and by and by it will go.
[Another group member says: I feel I don't allow my heart to open... I feel that when I was very young I rejected my parents. I felt good about being a bad little boy. Now I feel that everything that I thought was love was nothing.]
This is a good insight. To understand that whatsoever you have called love up to now was not love, is one of the most meaningful insights. When it happens much becomes possible.
People go on thinking that they love, and that becomes their greatest illusion - and the sooner they are disillusioned the better. Love is such a rare thing that it cannot be so easily available to all. It is not... it is as rare as buddhahood, not less than that.
This insight is good but it will make you sad, very morose, and give you a certain gloom. But don't be worried, because out of a dark night the morning is born. When the night is darkest the morning is closest. You will be very very morose and sad because whatsoever you were thinking was love was not, and you have lived in dreams and have been missing reality. When this insight dawns on you, you become very sad, almost dead.
Don't try to escape from this state. Relax into it, let yourself be drowned in this sadness, and soon you will come out of it completely new. I can see even in your voice, in your eyes, in your very body, that a tremendous sadness is settling, allow it. The human tendency is not to allow it, to escape from it - to go to the hotel, to the cinema hall, to friends to talk nonsense, to do something to be occupied so that you can escape from this state. But if you escape you again miss something that was going to happen. Relax into it.
[Bhikkshu, another group member said he had a dull ache, that was underlying all his emotions.]
You also enjoy it a little? I know it disturbs you, but do you enjoy it a little? Is it there right now?...
I have the feeling that you enjoy it, and if you do it will be difficult for it to go. That's what I am pointing out. If you don't enjoy it, it will disappear.
If you really want it to go, it can go right now, but tell me if you really want it to.
[Bhikkshu replied that he wanted the pain to go. Osho motioned an indian man forward to whom he had talked earlier in Hindi, so we had no idea of who he was, or anything about him. He was a large, pleasant-looking man with a feeling of calmness, of centredness, about him.
He came to where Bhikkshu was sitting cross-legged in front of Osho, and placed a copper ring on his head and told Bhikkshu to hold it there. He then went to the corner of the porch behind Osho's chair.
He held both his arms up, one, the right, was pointed towards Bhikkshu, the left one he turned in circles or in a beckoning motion as if to draw something away, uttering spasmodic breathless sort of noises. He pawed, looked at Bhikkshu for a moment, then repeated the actions. He then moved towards Bhikkshu and removed the copper ring...
The man told Bhikkshu it would be good if he wore a copper bracelet around his wrist to allow cosmic energy to pass through him... ]
It is gone... don't be thinking about it anymore. How are you feeling right now?... If you want it back, it is another matter. If you want it you can come again, and we will give it back!