Everybody is enough

Question 1:

It is something very essential to understand, that people who are really worthy always feel unworthiness, and the people who are really unworthy never feel it. Not feeling it is part of unworthiness; feeling it is part of worthiness.

The question is from Kirtan.

It is good that one feels it, because there are no limits to unworthiness -- you can go as high as you desire; it is just like the sky. And to feel it means the ego is dissolving. The ego never feels unworthy; it wants to prove that everybody else is unworthy and only it is worthy. It is humbleness that feels unworthiness and pain which can give birth to a new life.

So don't take it as a problem. Accept it as a blessing. Let the ego completely dissolve. It cannot stand the feeling of unworthiness. There are a few things in life which function in a strange way. A real lover never feels that he is loving as much as he should. He is always feeling something more can be done, something better can be done. These feelings are part of real love. And a hypocritical lover always feels that he is the biggest lover in the world. He is fake, he has no love; hence the feeling that more can be done does not arise in him. On the contrary he will try to prove that the other is not loving enough.

Life in one sense is very simple, and in another sense, very complex. Don't take it at its face value. It is perfectly good to feel unworthy on the way. It will create humbleness, egolessness, gratitude, selflessness. And once you have understood that this feeling of unworthiness is one of the most beautiful gifts of life, once you start enjoying it, then it goes on opening doors of more mysteries. A point comes when you disappear, and with your disappearance unworthiness also disappears, because it cannot hang on without you.

So go on keeping it as a religious phenomenon, as part of your meditation, and it will lead you to the right place, where the last trace of your self disappears. With it, unworthiness also disappears. That does not mean you start feeling worthy; it simply means that worthiness and or unworthiness become irrelevant. You are beyond both.

So what is happening to you is perfectly right. Go deeply into it, and go on rejoicing -- not with a sadness, "I am unworthy." That sadness will prevent... Not taking it as a problem that has to be solved, no. It has not to be solved, it has to be dissolved, but the dissolution is not in your hands. When it reaches to its ripeness, is dissolves itself. And when one does not think in terms of worth, one becomes part of the vast isness that surrounds you.

There are millions of flowers. No flower feels unworthy -- it may be just a grass flower -- but neither does the lotus feel worthy. Those qualities don't exist in nature because the ego does not exist there. All our problems are somehow or other related with the ego.

If you were feeling worthy then it would be dangerous: that will feed the ego, nourish the ego. But you are feeling unworthy. That is perfectly the right thing to go deeply into.

Question 2:

I was really going to say, "Kaveesha, one... two... three!" But I thought, "Dehypnotizing Kaveesha before everybody else is not good manners!" so I remained silent. But she heard it anyway.

What she is saying is exactly true. My talking to you has not the ordinary purpose that talking serves: indoctrination -- that is not the purpose of my talks. I don't have any doctrine; my talking is really a process of dehypnotization. Just listening to me, slowly, slowly you will be free of all the programs that the society has forced you to believe in.

Just by listening with an open heart, with a receiving gratefulness, it is bound to happen.

There have been hypnotists but nobody has ever tried speaking itself as a method of dehypnotizing. It can become a music in you; it can relax you, can make you silent, can give a new rhythm to your heart... a new feeling of my presence, a new perception of reality.

And I may be talking about anything. It is not the question that I am talking about these things; these are by-products. I may be talking about A or B or C -- which are absolutely unrelated to dehypnosis. The question is your way of listening. If it is right, then whatever I am saying will relax your being totally, and slowly, slowly your conditionings will start falling apart.

And I want to do it this way. I don't want to hypnotize you -- that means to make you first unconscious. This way there is no need to make you unconscious. You become more conscious, more alert. You are becoming conscious and alert in order to listen to me. But my purpose is not to teach you something, but to use teaching as an excuse to make you conscious, alert, so you can start touching the superconsciousness in you.

And from superconsciousness a higher quality of hypnosis arises.

The ordinary methods of hypnosis can be dangerous; you can be in the hands of a person who can use you against yourself, because you are unconscious. You are not in a better state than your normal consciousness.

Nobody before has used speaking to help you to become superconscious, so I need not say to you, "Drop this, drop that" -- I do not have to give you post-hypnotic suggestions.

Everything will be happening here-now, and it will be happening in your fully-alert state, so you cannot be used, cannot be misused; you cannot be exploited.

Hypnotism became condemned because people started exploiting it. Anybody who is as unconscious as you are can use the technique of hypnotism. That's why it became condemned; otherwise such a beautiful phenomenon which can help you towards meditation would not have been condemned.

My way cannot be misused. And when people say to you that you are hypnotized, don't feel hurt. Tell them, "Yes, we have been hypnotized to wake up. We have been hypnotized to enter into superconsciousness. We have not been hypnotized to go into lower realms of the mind, but to the higher superconscious or collective superconscious" -- and finally if you simply go on listening to me, doing nothing, the cosmic consciousness is going to be your experience.

But I have never said it before, and people have always wondered: if I don't have a religion, don't have a doctrine, don't have a teaching, then why do I go on talking to people? I could not tell them; they would not understand. Only those who will experience the relaxation of superconsciousness will be able to see the point. And then certainly, as Kaveesha says, they will understand how long I have been waiting, and how long I have been patient, and how I have been condemned for things which have nothing to do with me. But I have remained silent -- because it does not bother me; the only thing that I am interested in is that my people should attain to the state from where they cannot fall before I leave the body.

I cannot give you anything more precious.

Question 3:

It is not difficult.

Only individuals can relate; personalities cannot. Personalities are like shadows. They cannot meet, they cannot merge, because they don't exist. Personalities are fake. That's why in the whole world people are talking of love, but there is no love. They are talking of friendship, but there is no friendship -- even talking of trust. But for that a tremendously powerful individuality is needed. Personalities cannot trust; they are always afraid -- afraid that their reality may be exposed, may be known.

As far as my people are concerned, there is no problem; it is not a question of fighting for individuality. I declare you individuals, so your individuality is not a problem -- that you have to protect it. You can mix and merge, you can be friends, you can be lovers. You can work together; you can work under each other without any fear because you have dropped the personality, which was always afraid. Now you have individuality, a solid rock which is fearless.

I have told you the story of Diogenes, that he was caught by four thieves. They wanted to sell him in a slave market. They were very happy to find such a beautiful, healthy individual. First they were afraid and they were hiding behind the trees near where Diogenes was sitting, thinking, "He alone is enough to finish all four of us!" He was a strong man.

Diogenes was listening to their whispers, What to do? We are four, but he alone is enough..." Diogenes finally said, "Don't bother -- just come and take me where you want."

They were very much afraid: what kind of man is this? They said, "We are thieves and we want to take you to the slave market, because for you we can get the highest price anybody has ever got. We cannot normally find slaves of your individuality, beauty, proportion, strength."

Diogenes said, "Don't be worried." They started trying to tie him up; he said, "Stop, there is no need to bind me. You come behind me, I know the way."

They could not believe it -- that man is mad or what? And he started moving towards the slave market. And everybody who saw them on the way thought that he was the master and they were the slaves. Those four poor thieves were so afraid: "This man can do anything. We got unnecessarily involved with this man!"

And this is what he did: he stood on the pulpit where the slaves have to stand so every buyer can see them, go around and look at them, and he shouted, "Listen, all you slaves who are here! For the first time a master is for sale. If any one of you has guts, you can purchase me. And these poor fellows, four fellows you see -- they need money. And it does not matter to me where I am. My individuality cannot be destroyed."

There was great silence. The whole marketplace became utterly silent, because he had said, "A master is for sale." One king who had come to look for a few slaves became interested, and he was ready to pay any price. Diogenes asked the thieves, "How much do you want? Don't be shy -- just ask it. Get the money and get lost!"

They got the money. Diogenes sat on the chariot with the king, and the king said, "This is strange. You should not have done that."

Diogenes said, "Those poor fellows were in need, and as far as I am concerned, wherever I am I will remain myself." Even the king became afraid, because only those two were in the chariot, and the man was so strong: grabbing the neck of the king, he could have simply finished him.

Diogenes said, "But don't be worried. I could finish you right now, but I will not. You have helped those four poor men. I will come with you, and I will serve as a slave, because even in slavery my freedom is intact. I am choosing it; nobody is imposing it upon me."

Do you see the difference? Only a slavery imposed is slavery; a slavery accepted, chosen, is the highest expression of freedom. You are so certain of your being, of your individuality, that you are not worried, even of becoming a slave. The king was happy.

He said, "No, I will not make you a slave, but a friend. As far as I understand you must be Diogenes. I have heard about the man, and I feel that there cannot be many Diogeneses. You must be Diogenes."

Diogenes said, "I am," and he lived with the king in the palace, naked, as he used to live in his own way. The king told him, "In the palace it looks odd, embarrassing. You should use clothes."

Diogenes said, "Then it is better you don't make me a friend; you make me a slave. If friendship cannot allow freedom, what kind of friendship is this? You make me a slave, then whatever you say I will do." But the king had started loving the man. His sincerity, his authority, his power was magnetic. He freed him. He said, "I cannot make you a slave and I know I cannot make you a friend. In the palace, living naked, where other kings come and stay, it will be always a problem."

Diogenes said, "This is your decision. I am simply your slave. If you make me free, that's perfectly okay. I am happy that those four poor people have been helped. And I have found a beautiful way to help poor people: if sometimes somebody is poor I can tell him, `Take me to the slave market and sell me.'" Here with me your individuality is accepted, declared, so you need not be worried that it will be taken away, that it can be crushed by others, that somebody may enslave you, force you to do things.

Don't be worried -- nobody can force you. You have always the choice. Ultimately, you are to decide, and it is good to decide in a way so the people who are with me don't feel any antagonism between them. They love me -- that is a joining thread. There is no organization. Each sannyasin is connected to me individually, but because he is my sannyasin... Other sannyasins who are joined with me have to be respectful of each other, because each of my sannyasins somehow represents me. Your love for me must be shared with my people too.

Question 4:

The conscious mind has to be made aware; otherwise there will be no change. The contents of the unconscious mind are repressed by the conscious mind. To reverse the process, they have to be brought back to the conscious mind, and the conscious mind has to express them instead of repressing them.

Because of repression they had gone into the unconscious; unless the reverse process of expression is there, they will remain. They can be available to the hypnotists, but the conscious mind does not know about it. For the conscious mind they are still repressed, and it is only through the conscious mind that they have a way to go out of your being.

From the unconscious mind directly, there is no door. A contact can be made, but there is no way for any content to go out of the unconscious mind directly; first it has to come to the conscious mind. It is just like your main gate. You have entered at the main gate. If you want to go out you will have to go to the main gate; otherwise you will remain confined.

The deeper you go into the unconscious mind, the thicker the walls become. The collective unconscious mind has even thicker walls, and the cosmic unconscious mind is almost unapproachable. It is very difficult even for the hypnotist to find out what is hidden there. For the first time the unconscious mind's contents are released through the conscious mind, bringing them to the notice of the conscious mind -- not only to the notice, but the recognition, acceptance and expression. That's why I said it should be recorded as a proof; otherwise the conscious mind will deny it.

If you say to somebody, "You want to marry your mother," the conscious mind will simply deny it, "It is all nonsense -- what are you saying? I have never thought about it."

And he is right, he has never thought about it. But his mother was the first woman in his life, and he loved her and he got her love, and he has been jealous of his father since then.

That's why every society has made it a discipline to respect your father. That is just to prevent the natural tendency of being jealous and disrespectful.

And every society has made it a point that you cannot even be allowed to think that you would like to love your mother; even to think of it, you will feel that you are just being mad. But there was a day in your childhood when you had longed for it. Slowly, slowly you repressed it; it was not allowable.

If the hypnotist just tells you that this thing is in your unconsciousness, you are not going to accept it. So it should be recorded, and not one time but many times so that you can be made clearly alert that this content is there. Then you can relax and let that content come directly to your conscious mind -- not through the information from the hypnotist.

You follow me? He is telling you, but that will not help. His telling can only do one thing: if he can convince you that such a content exists in your unconscious mind, and you allow it in your silence to surface to the conscious mind, from there it can be released. You know that it is absurd; it has no meaning.

Perhaps in your childhood you had the desire, but now you can understand it is meaningless and you can release it; rather than repressing it inside, you can throw it out.

And as the unconscious becomes empty, then the collective unconscious starts speaking - - only then. As the collective unconscious becomes empty then there is a possibility for the cosmic unconscious to speak. And once the whole lower part of your mind, the depth of your mind, is cleaned away, it is such a freshening experience, as if twenty-four hours a day you are taking showers. And once this lower part is unburdened, then you are ready to move upwards very easily.

But the conscious mind is the only door for the higher, for the lower. So anything that is going to happen has to happen through the conscious mind.

Sigmund Freud and his school have not been very successful for the simple reason... You will be surprised to know that first he had been an apprentice of a hypnotist, a very famous hypnotist in France. It is only there that he developed the idea of psychoanalysis, that what comes up in deep hypnosis, can be brought up through dreams. But he forgot one thing, and that's what is missing in psychotherapy.

First, you cannot remember all your dreams. For six hours you are dreaming; you can remember perhaps one dream -- the last, when you were just waking up. Secondly, you cannot be convinced that a dream is a reality. Thirdly, the dream is not going to repeat itself; and for any scientific work, repeated experimentation is absolutely necessary, so that you can come to a conclusion without exception. A dream may come once and may not come again, because there are so many dreams. So the person's conscious mind is never convinced that this dream content has any reality.

Fourthly, the dream is a different language. It is not the language of the conscious mind, it is pictorial, it is not alphabetical. That is one of the greatest troubles, and because of it, psychoanalysis has to disappear; it cannot continue. So the whole thing depends on the psychoanalyst interpreting. You can tell him the dream, but the dream says nothing unless he interprets it.

Now that interpretation may be just his personal prejudice. That's how, if you go to Freud, everything comes to sex. Whatever you dream, you cannot dream anything which he will not conclude is sexual repression. You take the same dream to Jung and it will be from the collective unconscious -- a myth, a mythology from your past lives. Take the same dream to Adler and it is nothing but ambition, will to power. So if there are thousands of interpreters, there will be thousands of meanings to the dream.

In hypnosis it is not a pictorial language that the unconscious uses. It uses the same language as the conscious mind uses, because it is talking to a person's conscious mind -- the hypnotist's. So it is very simple and very clear.

Sigmund Freud thought that he had developed a better method, for the simple reason that it discarded hypnotism -- because it was condemned, condemned by the society. But psychoanalysis has not helped.

What I am doing here... if you are just listening to me and your conscious mind becomes silent, the unconscious mind itself starts releasing its vapor. No language is needed, neither of dream nor ordinary language; it is just a repressed energy that starts coming up to the conscious and is released through the conscious. Once we have cleaned the lower mind, then we can easily move to the upper realm. But for that too, one has to go through the conscious mind.

And the upper wing does not have anything; nothing is repressed there. So there is no question of psychoanalysis ever discovering it, or any other school of psychology ever discovering it, because it has no dreams, it has no repressions. It is utter purity.

Clean the lower mind and just a simple method of meditation will give you the wings to move upwards. There is no barrier. You get more and more into light, deeper and deeper into bliss, and finally you come to a point where even you are no more... nirvana.

Question 5:

It is because you have been distracted. You have been directed where nature has not meant you to be. You are not moving towards your own potential. What others wanted you to be, you are trying to be, but it cannot be satisfying. When it is not satisfying, the logic says, "Perhaps it is not enough -- have more of it." Then you go after more; then you start looking around. And everybody is coming out with a mask which is smiling, happy looking, so everybody is deceiving everybody else. You also come with a mask, so others think you are happier. You think others are happier.

The grass looks greener on the other side of the fence -- but from both sides. The people who are living on the other side of the fence, they see your grass and it looks greener. It really looks greener, thicker, better. That is the illusion that distance creates. When you come close, then you start seeing that it is not so. But people keep each other at a distance. Even friends, even lovers keep each other at a distance; too much closeness will be dangerous, they may see your reality.

And you have been misguided from the very beginning, so whatever you do you will remain miserable. Nature has no idea of money, otherwise dollars would have been growing on the trees. Nature has no idea of money; money is a pure invention of man -- useful, but dangerous too. You see somebody with much money, and you think perhaps money brings joy: look at that person, how joyous he seems to be, so run after money.

Somebody is healthier -- run after health. Somebody is doing something else and looks very contented -- follow him.

But it is always the others, and the society has managed so that you will never think about your own potential. And the whole misery is that you are not being yourself. Just be yourself, and then there is no misery and no competition and no botheration that others have more, that you don't have more.

And if you like the grass to be greener there is no need to look at the other side of the fence; you can make the grass greener on your side of the fence. It is such a simple thing to make the grass greener. But you are just looking everywhere else, and all the lawns are looking so beautiful -- except yours.

Man has to be rooted in his own potential, whatever it is, and nobody should give him directions, guidance. They should help him, wherever he is going, whatever he is becoming. And the world will be so contented that you cannot believe it.

I have never felt any discontent, even from my childhood, for the simple reason that I never allowed anybody to distract me from what I was doing or what I was trying to be.

That helped me immensely. It was difficult, and the difficulties went on growing, and now the whole world is against me. But it does not disturb me. I am perfectly happy, perfectly content. I can't think that I could have been otherwise. In any other position I would have been miserable.

I don't have a home, I don't have a place to live, I don't have any money. Still, I have something that gives me absolute contentment. I have lived according to my potential, and even if death comes it will not upset me. I have lived my way. The whole world may be against me -- it does not upset me. People get upset even if one person is against them.

They get so upset; I cannot even understand it.

Hasya was saying, "Osho, soon we will be running out of countries."

I said, "That does not matter. First we will run out of countries, then we will find something else. We can have a big boat and live on the boat." Because I said in Crete, "If you don't allow me any land anywhere, I will have a jet plane and I will be living on that," they immediately started a movement that I cannot land at any airport in Europe.

I am really enjoying that a single person who has no power can make these pygmy politicians just go out of their minds! I had just mentioned it, and immediately the European parliament tabled a resolution, which they will be discussing soon and passing, that I cannot land at any airport in Europe.

But we will find some way... In Europe there are communist countries -- Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia -- we can land at their airports. They cannot prevent me just landing. But we can have a big ship with thousands of sannyasins on it, and just live on the ship. And let them do what they can do -- bomb the ship or do whatsoever they want to do -- but one thing is certain, they cannot upset me.

They tried in the American jails to upset me in such ways that anybody would have been upset. They would wake me up at four o'clock; sleep was impossible, so it was not a problem to me because I was just lying down with closed eyes. They would wake me at four o'clock, saying, "You get ready. At five o'clock the U.S. marshal is coming and he will be taking you to the airport." So I would get ready and wait. From five o'clock in the morning till five o'clock in the evening I was just sitting, waiting, and the man would appear at five o'clock in the evening.

And I said to him, "You must have got into some trouble -- twelve hours late, and you just live three blocks away..." As we became friendly, after three days he said, "These are the tactics used to harass people. You forgive me. I was going to come at five in the evening but I said that I would come at five in the morning, so the whole day you would be sitting and waiting."

But I said, "What is upsetting in it? Anyway I would have been sitting and... there is nothing else to do."

The world is against individuality.

It is against your being just your natural self.

It wants you just to be a robot, and because you have agreed to be a robot you are in trouble. You are not a robot. That was not the intention of nature, to make a robot of you.

So because you are not what you were meant to be, what you were destined to be, you are constantly looking: "What is missing? Perhaps better furniture, better curtains, a better house, a better husband, a better wife, a better job..." Your whole life you are trying and rushing from one place to another. But the society has distracted you from the very beginning.

My effort is to bring you back to yourself, and you will suddenly find all that discontent has disappeared. There is no need to be more -- you are enough. Everybody is enough.