Darshan 19 March 1978

Sindhu means the ocean. The small is beautiful, but the small is not really small; the small is big.

Every atom contains the whole universe and every drop, the ocean, because only one exists - in the drop, in the ocean. Only the form is different, the content is not. Even in the smallest grass leaf, the earth and the clouds and the sun and the far-away stars, are contained. It appears small but it is not. Nothing small exists, things only appear small: everything is huge, enormous, infinite.

So let this be your meditation: think of the infinite. Look into the drop and search for the ocean, and you will find it, because it is there.

Just the other day I was reading....

A man had listened to J. Krishnamurti for at least twenty years. He was an intellectual, a philosophical man, and by and by he got fed up with the constant repetition of the same awareness, awareness, awareness, and the way Krishnamurti goes round and round, and hints at the same thing; because there is nothing else to hint at.

So one day he stood up and said, 'Stop all this! It is just as they used to say about philosophy - that philosophy is like searching on a dark night without any lamp or light, in a dark room for a black cat which is not there.' Krishnamurti hit him on the head with his fist and said, 'But sir, it is there!' I liked it: He said, 'But sir, it is there.'

That black cat exists; if you search long enough you will find it. And the very search ultimately becomes the light. Searching creates light - there is no other light; seeking creates light - there is no other light. Just the intensity of the search, the passion of the search, makes you aflame.

And the cat is there. Look into the drop and you will find the ocean. But people are living in such unawareness that they look at the ocean and they don't even find the drop there.

Mandip. Man means mind, dip means light, lamp. Consciousness, Mind with a capital 'M', is the light. Mind with a small 'm', a lower case 'm', is the darkness. Mind with ego is darkness; it is a lower case 'm'. Mind without the ego is with a capital 'M'; it is universal mind, it is light. So both exist within you; it is only a shift of emphasis. These two words are very significant: I am. If you emphasise I, there will be darkness; if you emphasise am, there will be light.

Think of am-ness, existence, pure existence. Don't think in terms of I, ego, self, country, religion, church, man, woman. Don't think in terms of identifications, and suddenly you will find that the light was not to be searched for outside: it was already there but you never looked at it. The darkness is within, so is the light; the kingdom of god is within, so is hell. God is within, so is the devil.

When the I becomes too important you are in the grip of the devil. That is just a way of putting it; there is no devil. When the I dissolves you are part of god. That's again a way of putting it; there is no god. All that is meant is that when you are not, the whole is; and the whole is light and life, eternal life, abundant life.

The whole effort here is to drop the lower case 'm' and to create the capital 'M'. That is the meaning of... Mandip.

Varuna is the name of the sky god. In the East we have been thinking in terms of gods - everything is divine, so the sun is a god, the moon is a goddess, the sky also has its own god. That god is called Varuna. It is one of the most beautiful things to meditate upon because it has no form. The sun has a form, the moon has a form, but the sky has no form, it is formless. It has no face, it has no personality, it is impersonal, hence it is infinite, unbounded, it knows no limits.

A man should be like the sky, then he has arrived home. And the sky outside is not the only sky:

you have a sky inside too, and the inner is far more vast than the outer. If one goes in search of the inner sky one goes on and on; depths upon depths open. One never comes to a point where one can say, 'Now I have arrived.' Doors upon doors open and the mystery thickens, becomes more mysterious. It is an unending process. Outside it is infinite, inside it is infinite too. In fact these are not two infinities; this is one infinity, and the difference is just like breathing in, breathing out. It is the same breath, it is the same sky.

So get more and more in tune with the sky. Lie down on the ground and just look at the sky. Then close your eyes and look at the inner sky. Let the sky become your object of meditation. It is of immense significance. Looking deeply into the sky, thoughts start disappearing on their own accord.

They cannot live in such vastness; they need a very narrow hole, they are beings of a very dark, narrow hole. They cannot bear expanse; they simply die. Just looking at the sky and thinking starts disappearing, it becomes more and more distant and disappears. Then suddenly there is nothing but sky. You also are not there, because you are nothing but your thought process.

When all thoughts are gone, you are gone. Then it is a mirror reflecting another mirror, an open sky facing another inner sky. That meeting is the experience of god. God is not a person but the meeting of the inner and the outer sky.

Veet means beyond, samya means tradition - beyond tradition. Truth is always beyond tradition.

To search for truth in tradition is to search in vain. You will find words, great words, complicated doctrines, but you will not find truth. Truth leaves no mark. It is like a bird in the sky. It leaves no footprints, it creates no tradition. It is always new, it is never old. You cannot come to it by following somebody else's footprints. All footprints are false, but people are worshipping footprints.

Jesus and Buddha walked on the sands of time and people are just worshipping their footprints.

The footprint of a Jesus is not Jesus; you can go on worshipping it for eternity and it will all be futile.

Jesus leaves no marks. The footprint is of the body, it is of the physical, not of the spiritual; and truth has to be found in the world of the spirit. One need not go into tradition, in fact, one has to avoid going into it; one has to go withinwards. One has to go into one's own being, and that is absolutely non-traditional. Tradition teaches you to follow somebody else.

So I say, religion is not tradition. Religion teaches you to follow your own inner feeling and to stake everything for it, to risk all and to live your life and do your thing. Be an authentic being. Be a being in your own right; never be a carbon copy.

I am here to help you to be yourself, not to distract you from your being. I am not here to give you a discipline. I am here only to give you this insight, that you have to go withinwards. You are not to follow me, you have to understand me and go into yourself. And the difference between understanding and following is immense. People become followers. My sannyasins have to be not followers but people who understand, people who try to experiment in their own being.

Listen to me, understand me, but experiment in your own self. Don't believe in me. Trust in me so that you can experiment but don't believe. Believe only when you have arrived, believe only when you have experienced.

[A sannyasin has just returned to Poona, 'forever'.]

That's very good... welcome home! That's very good. I needed you here.

And I liked your idea of making a workshop for rugs. That is one of the old Sufi things we should do; it's very good. Start talking to sannyasins so that you can create a group and then start.

[The sannyasin says that experiences he used to find heavy in the Gurdjieff movement, to which he used to belong, have now become okay.]

It is far more difficult than Gurdjieff's work. People can manage work very easily because they are all workoholics; their whole life is full of work so there is not really much change. Maybe the direction changes but the same attitude, the same approach and the same work attitude remains. But to be playful is really difficult; that is a real change, a transformation, because it has to change your total life and its habits.

So it looks easy when I say to be playful, that work is not needed, just play is enough. It appears easy, it is not. That is the really difficult thing: simple things are the most difficult things. We have lost the capacity to be simple, we have lost the capacity to be innocent.

Gurdjieff appealed to the Western intellectuals very deeply. The reason was that he was talking their language: work, work hard that is the language of the ego. The ego is always ready to work hard.

The harder the work, the better the ego feels, because the more it is sustained by the work, the higher the peak to be attained, the greater the challenge, the more happy the ego feels, the more intoxicated.

What I am saying is that there is nothing to be done; relax! And that is difficult for the ego. I am saying to be a child again: start playing on the seashore with coloured stones and seashells, start running again after butterflies. That goes against the ego. People will laugh at you. That's why you started feeling naive there. But that's perfectly good: feel naive; that is how we come back to reality.

We have to attain our childhood again. That's what Jesus means when he says, 'Unless you are born again....'

In India we have called the enlightened person twice born; he is a child again, the sage is a child again. But it will happen easily here.

The work also has to be play. It has to be done joyously, not for any result but for its sheer joy. That's why I called it the Sufi work.

Sufis have been weaving, spinning, carving; rug-making particularly has been one of the most cherished Sufi works, but it was a play, it was a game. They were in fact not making rugs; it was just a meditation. The rug was just a by-product; the idea was just to be meditative, to be playful, to be silent, to be utterly there. It was a kind of absorption, a creative absorption. And I respect Sufis very much for that, because in India the monks have been very uncreative; I am altogether against that. They have been sitting in their caves, very very inactive; they became almost oppressive in this country. They exploited it, they never contributed anything to the country. Their whole contribution was this, that they were meditating so the country had to look after them.

Sufis are right, on the right track: meditate but contribute something to the society too. And if it can be done playfully, then it is not business; then it is meditation. And that's what I would like my commune to become slowly, slowly. We have to do many things. This commune has to be utterly creative, but the creation has not to become work - that is the whole point. It has to be playful, sincere but not serious, devoted; one has to be committed to it, involved, but not for the result's sake. It is art for art's sake: the joy is intrinsic.

Start talking so that you have a few people in your mind and when we are ready you can immediately start working.

And be naive! To be a fool is really the way to be wise.

[The sannyasin adds: One thing, Osho: I don't really believe that Gurdjieff himself ever called his teaching the work.]

Others called it work; he himself never called it work. He was really playful. But that's the problem that always arises after the master is gone. He was very playful, he was very non-serious, but the disciples can't be non-serious, that is the trouble. They will take even the non-seriousness very seriously.

Gurdjieff was almost a totally different kind of person than what he was depicted by his disciples.

He was a Zen man, another Bodhidharma. He needs a different kind of interpretation. But Ouspensky was a very serious man - a professor, a mathematician, a logician, a philosopher; that created trouble. And he became the most authentic interpreter. Gurdjieff has been known through Ouspensky. Without Ouspensky you would not understand Gurdjieff; Ouspensky has almost become a must. And it was absolutely certain that the two men would separate because they were worlds apart. Ouspensky was absolutely a professor. Gurdjieff was not a professor at all. But that is not new, it has always been happening.

Christianity was founded by Paul, not by Christ, and Paul was a totally different kind of person.

Buddhism was founded not by Buddha but by the brahmins who became his disciples. So was the case with Jainism: it was not founded by Mahavira but the brahmins, the scholars, who became his disciples. They are always the people who compile and make the discipline and laws and everything.

They are proficient at it, and once the master is gone nobody can prevent them. And they are very very articulate so you cannot argue with them.

Sometime Gurdjieff needs a totally different kind of interpretation; maybe we can create that interpretation.

[A sannyasin is leaving for the West to sell up then be here as part of the community. You have to come back, Osho says; I will need you here. Thousands of people are going to come - the organisation has to be as perfect as possible. You have to be a host to thousands of people who are on the way. You don't know: it is going to explode Once you arrange things, they will be coming, so the organisation has to be ready for it. It has to be something very big. It rarely happens, only once in a while.]