Darshan 20 September 1977
[Osho gives sannyasin to someone saying, just feel lost; lose control; don't hold yourself together; just fall into pieces, and if the body starts falling on to the floor, allow it. Don't be worried.]
The easiest is the most difficult; the difficult is not so difficult. The ego is always ready to do the difficult because doing the difficult the ego is enhanced; it feels good. It looks like a challenge, and the ego is ready to fight with the challenge. It is provoked out of its lethargy by the challenge. It fights back, it tries to conquer, it becomes aggressive. The greater the difficulty, the more aggressive the ego becomes. Aggression is its food. That's why the simple is the most difficult. The ego does not feel interested in it. The ego feels a kind of death through it. The ego cannot lose control because in losing control it will lose itself. The ego cannot lose tenseness because the tenseness is its very existence. If you are non-tense, if you are relaxed, the ego simply evaporates. It cannot exist in a relaxed state of consciousness; it is no more needed.
It is your disease, and you have to be alert about it. Unless your ego falls into pieces, is shattered, completely shattered, so utterly shattered that you cannot put it together again - like humpty-dumpty it falls from the wall and nobody can put it together again - only then will your real life start; only then will you be real. Otherwise you will remain unreal... and with unreality there is misery. Only the real person can be happy; only the real can be celebrated. With the real is festivity. With the unreal there is only dark, dismal depression. With the unreal we are in hell. Hell is not a reality; it is a nightmare created by the ego.
I wanted to see whether you could do it or not. It is good that you did not pretend - that part is good.
Sometimes it happens, when I say to relax, even if you don't feel like relaxing you just fall. So the bad news is that you have a very very controlled ego. The good news is that you are not a pretender, that you are not a hypocrite. Through that there is hope. That very sincerity will be helpful. We will use that sincerity as a key.
Deva means divine, samutti means agreement - divine agreement, divine contract. The meaning is that we exist by a deep agreement. When we agree with the divine, we exist. Whenever we don't agree with the divine, we start dying. Our life is in being harmonious with the whole. That is the meaning of the word 'health': to be in harmony with the whole. And that is the meaning of the word 'holy' too: to be in harmony with the whole.
Health is of the physical and holiness is of the spiritual, but the secret is the same: to be in agreement with the whole. The ego is always in disagreement; it w ants to say no. It is very hard for the ego to say yes; it doesn't come. No comes easily; no is simply there, always ready.
You will have to learn to say yes more and you will have to drop your no more and more. Be more conscious so that the no is no more supported, and support the yes more. And soon you will be able to see: whenever you say yes whole-heartedly to existence there will be a silence that comes out of it, a well-being and a kind of new quality to your being that you have never experienced before. It is just as if one has lived for years in a dark dungeon and then one day one is released and comes outside and for the first time sees the sun and the moon and the stars and the trees and the flowers and the birds. Exactly like that, when you are in agreement with the whole you will be in the open.
When you are in disagreement with the whole you will be imprisoned within the ego... and the ego is a very very small dark cell.
Learn to be in agreement with the whole.
[Osho suggests some groups for the new sannyasin.]
You have to go through many processes, mm? Slowly, slowly you will die and you will be born. The harder part is death. Birth is very simple; it happens on its own accord. So do everything that you can do to die, to disappear, and then suddenly one day, absolutely unawares, you are for the first time; the new, the utterly new is born into you. Nothing has to be done for that. We have only to make way for it, and that's what I mean by dying. So don't go on holding and don't go on controlling yourself; don't go on protecting yourself. Relax and be!
[Osho gives another seeker sannyas.]
Just visualise a rosebush. Become the rosebush. Don't visualise it as something separate from you:
let the observer be the observed. Become it.
Your head is nothing but a bud. The bud is opening, the petals are opening; open with it. And if something starts happening in the body, allow it - any moving, shaking, trembling.
Deva means divine or god and sarti means charioteer, the driver of a chariot. The meaning is: let god be your charioteer. Let him drive you; you vacate yourself for him. Just come down from the throne so he can possess you. That is the whole secret of religion: how to be possessed by god, how to be driven by god, how to surrender and to lose all kinds of ideas and plans and hopes and expectations of how one should like to be and what one should like to achieve. Drop all that is in this moment and you will never be frustrated. Expectations gone, nobody can frustrate you, no situation can frustrate you. Hopes gone, you will never feel hopeless. Desires dropped, you will not have any anxiety.
Let god take hold of you; this is what sannyas is all about. The ordinary person controls himself, keeps himself in the driver's seat. He is afraid to lose control. He is afraid that if he is not in control then something will go wrong, and in fact everything goes wrong because he is in control. You in control means ignorance in control. You in control means darkness in control. You in control means a part, a tiny part in control.
Let god be the charioteer - let the whole be the charioteer. The whole knows where it is going, where it is all going. The whole knows what your destiny is. You cannot know it; you can know it only when it has happened.
Having private goals different from the whole, contrary to the whole, in opposition to the whole, is madness. It is as if a leaf in a tree has a private goal and is trying to attain it. How can the leaf attain any goal privately? She exists only with the tree, in the tree, as the tree. We exist in the whole as the whole; we cannot have any private goals.
To have a private goal is to be ordinary. To drop that nonsense, that stupidity, is to become a sannyasin, and that is the meaning of your name....
In india we have a great epic, mahabharata, and whenever some westerner reads it he becomes a little puzzled about the story. The story is that there is a great war. Krishna is the master of those days - one of the greatest enlightened persons of all the ages - and in the war he becomes a charioteer and friend to one of his disciples. Now, the job of a charioteer is a low job; a chauffeur is a chauffeur. The disciple sits inside the chariot - arjuna is his disciple - and Krishna becomes the charioteer. He drives the chariot into the battlefield.
Western people are always puzzled: this looks a little odd; it should not be so. They cannot imagine christ being the charioteer, the chauffeur, and thomas or luke sitting inside the chariot; that is impossible. But the east has far greater insight into it. That story is a parable. It says that only god can be the charioteer. Only the master can be the charioteer; how can the disciple be the charioteer?
[The new sannyasin says he has been doing the meditations for two years, but finds that instead of growing through the groups and... I've been getting more afraid to love and more and more resistant and closed to people.]
I have given you one group, Vipassana, which will decide. My feeling is that in your past life you have been a Buddhist monk, and that is still there. Vipassana will decide; that is a Buddhist meditation.
How you go into it will be very decisive. If you really enjoy it, then your path will be very clear; there will be no problem.
Anybody who has done any Buddhist meditations in past lives for long becomes that way, because buddhist meditations are basically to bring you to your innermost core in absolute aloneness. They are not love methods. They don't believe in relating; they believe in dropping out Of all relationships.
That is happening. Don't be worried about it, because that is also one of the ways to reach to the ultimate. There are two ways: love and awareness.
The path of love goes through relating; it is more extrovert. The path of awareness goes through non-relating; it is more introvert. On the path of love you need the other because it is an l-thou
relationship. On the path of awareness you don't need even 'I', what to say about 'thou'? You don't need anything - you simply go into your aloneness.
In the West that has become very difficult because the whole western mind thinks that relationship is life; there is no other life. There is!
There is a different kind of life which has nothing to do with relationship. In the West there has not existed any religion like Buddhism. Christianity remains a path of love and devotion and prayer - so is Judaism, so is Islam. These three religions have impressed the West. Buddhism is for the first time now entering the western hemisphere. Buddhism will bring a new approach which has been missed for centuries in the West.
In the East both the paths exist, and both are valid. They look diametrically opposite but they are not; the ultimate aim is the same. On the path of love, the I and thou come closer, closer, closer and one day meet and mingle and disappear; nothing is left in the hands. It is the same thing that starts happening on the path of awareness from the very beginning.
Stop relating. And my feeling is that Vipassana will decide. Go into it totally, mm? so we can come to a conclusion. But nothing is wrong in it, not at all. It is not that you are not growing; you are growing inward. That's your growth. That is perfectly okay; be happy about it. And don't enforce any relationship unnecessarily if you don't feel like going into them. If this is how you feel then this is good. The natural is good and the spontaneous is good. My feeling is that you are on the right track, mm? but this Vipassana will be very decisive. After Vipassana, you remind me again. Good.
[Osho tells another initiate to feel as if she is making love. Let that radiance come to your body, to your being, and if something starts happening in your body, allow it. Even if you feel orgasmic - that the whole body is shaken by it - go into it.]
Love seems to be difficult!... and that is the thing to be developed. You are very withdrawn from your body; you don't pour your energy into your body. You are kind of afraid... if the body gets the energy it may lead you astray. And the body is your temple - it is through the body that we live. The body has to be very very sensitive and very alive; it has to be orgasmic. It is through the body that we are related to existence.
But this has happened to many people. Religions have condemned the body so much that the body seems to be almost the root cause of all sin. From the very childhood we are taught some antagonism about the body and by and by we start withdrawing. So millions of people have become non-orgasmic. Even while making love they don't have real orgasm; they don't go into wild joy. The fire is not there, it is very cold. They don't go into wild ecstasy. They go only so far, in a very miserly way.
So it is nothing special about you - it is so about many people - but I would like you to become more alive in the body. Love your body. By loving your body you show your respect towards god, because it is a god-given gift. By rejecting it, you reject god. By rejecting it, you reject his gift. And the body has so many mysteries in it; all the mysteries are there. If you start opening the book of your body and start reading it, you will find all hidden there. The whole cosmos is reflected there in a miniature form. All that exists in the whole exists on a smaller scale in the body.
The body has to be loved, the body has to be read. It is more valuable than reading the Bible or the Vedas or the Koran. If you can read your own body, you have read the real scripture.
So my first impression about you is that unless you start flowing in your body, you will not start growing. It needs just a little consciousness and it will happen.
Deva means divine, chayya means shadow - shadow of the divine. In the beginning it is just a shadow; by and by it starts becoming the reality itself. First become the shadow and then you will become the real. So start thinking in terms of your being divine, a reflection of god. Thinking about oneself as less than that is humiliating, insulting.
We are shadows of god. The shadow belongs to the real in a sense and yet is not real. It is just as if you have seen your face reflected in a water pool. It is your face and yet not your face; it is just a reflection. But the reflection is not a mere reflection either; it reflects the real. So the shadow is a paradoxical phenomenon: it reflects the real and yet it is not the real. This is the situation where man exists: he is a shadow of god. If he starts understanding it, starts moving, growing, one day he will become god. If he is not aware that he is a shadow of the divine, then he will remain a shadow and by and by he can become even a shadow of the shadow and so on, so forth....
[A sannyasin says that after he did the enlightenment intensive group, he felt deeply depressed and ideas of suicide came to him. Now he is feeling better. Osho checks his energy.]
It appeared like the idea for suicide, but it was not. A better expression for it would be to say it was a kind of ego suicide. The ego wanted to die in that moment, not you, but because you are so much identified with the ego you felt it as if you wanted to die. And that was a good experience. It was really good, but when it comes for the first time it frightens. It will come again. When next time it comes simply be a witness to it. Don't get identified; don't start thinking that you want to die.
Even if you want to die you cannot because you are eternal, you are immortal. Only the ego is born and the ego can die. In the real sense there is no way to commit suicide. You can try but nobody has ever succeeded. The soul cannot die. The soul means life. But we are too much involved with the ego... so much so that we don't think that we are separate. When in deep meditation sometimes it happens that the ego feels death coming, one gets very much frightened and scared. But it was perfectly good. Nothing to be worried about, mm?
You are not a person who can commit suicide. And once you have become a sannyasin it is almost impossible even to try - because these are alternatives: sannyas and suicide. You have already committed one, now the other cannot be done.
You will be surprised to know that in the east suicide has not been so much prevalent as in the west; in the west it is almost five times more. And the reason is when in the east somebody starts feeling depressed, he becomes a sannyasin! Why go that far and commit suicide? This is a more creative way of committing suicide!
[A sannyasin had previously written to Osho that she'd been having dreams about him.... ]
Mm mm, it is a great philosophical dream! You can dream - you are allowed, mm? Even being with me in a dream is better than being anywhere else. Even if it is a dream it is good. That's perfectly
good... You can continue dreaming, mm? One day you will find that it is really happening in reality too. First it starts happening in a dream because our existence is a dream existence. And things can happen only from that place where we are. You are in a dream and you are a dream. Even if I enter into your being it will be from the door of the dream because that is where you are. Unless you are real how can you be really with me? If you are fast asleep how can you communicate with me who is not asleep ? When you are awake you will be able to commune with me. But one thing is possible: you are asleep, you can dream about me, and that is going to help. So every night when you go to sleep, just remember me. Remain with that remembrance and fall asleep. And you can have me every night!
[A sannyasin says: I feel like this is a family but I'm sort of an illegitimate child. I don't feel close to anyone in particular.]
There is no need; just be yourself.
Mm mm, nothing to be worried about... because there will be every kind of people here. A family really means that everybody has the right to be himself - nobody interferes. That is the meaning of a family. If you feel good being yourself, isolated, the family is the place where it can be allowed, and you need not feel guilty. If you start feeling guilty then it is not a family, and if others start interfering and telling you that this is not right, then it is not a family.
The idea of a family is that everybody is allowed to be himself; nobody is going to interfere. Your space is yours and everybody will respect it. Nothing to be worried about.
And you are not illegitimate!...
It will happen on its own, mm? - you need not force it. Good!
[Earlier Osho had said: This commune is not an ordinary commune. This is an experiment to provoke god. You may not be aware of what is going to happen. You may be aware only of your problems - you may have come to me only to solve your problems. That is secondary; I am cooking up something else! (laughter) I am trying to create a space where god can descend more and more.
This commune will become a connection. The world has lost connection; god is no more a reality.
The connection is broken, and god can only be through the connection. God may be there, we are here, but there is no bridge so how do we know ? This commune is an experiment to create the bridge.... ]