Darshan 15 September 1979
Become a prayer of rejoicing. Jesus says again and again to his disciples: Rejoice, rejoice, I say unto you, rejoice! He is telling them the true meaning of prayer: dance it, sing it, let it be a gratitude, a great thankfulness. Then it reaches, it succeeds, it is heard. Then it becomes a communion between you and God, it becomes a bridge. But only a prayer that arises out of bliss becomes a bridge. Any other prayer is a wall instead of being a bridge.
[Make God the foundation for your life temple, Osho tells Deva Peter]
Except for God, everything will be destroyed by death, hence only God can be the true rock The rock represents the eternal, the timeless, the deathless.
Once God becomes the foundation of your life you move away from time into timelessness, you move beyond death into immortality. And that's what sannyas is all about: making God the foundation of your life.
[God is not the petals but the perfume]
God simply represents the totality of the universe. God is not separate from the universe. It is not that he is the creator and the universe is the created; that duality is manmade. God is not the creator; God is the very creativity of existence, the very creative energy, the creative force.
Calling him a creator creates unnecessary problems; call him creativity. Calling him vast creates unnecessary complications; call him vastness. Then you have a totally different vision of God. Then you need not create a temple, a mosque, a church; then the stars contain him, and the trees and the rocks and the people. Then everything contains him, because everything lives through him; he
is the very life of all life. He is the consciousness within you. He pulsates in your blood, he beats in your heart and he beats in the heart of the universe too. But he is not separate.
God is another name of that ultimate presence which holds the existence together as a cosmos.
The existence does not become a chaos because some great intelligence permeates it. But my emphasis is: don't call God intelligent, call him intelligence.
Change every noun into a verb and you will be on the right track. Then the person becomes presence, the creator becomes creativeness; then God becomes godliness.
That's what Buddha has taught and I agree with him absolutely. He never taLked about God but he talked about godliness. His flight is the greatest, and his vision of God is the purest. That's why he has been very much misunderstood, so much so that although he was born in India his vision completely disappeared from India. India could not understand him. India was too attached to nouns and he was changing everything into verbs. India was too attached with stagnant, permanent things and he was changing everything into a flux, into a river. India was attached to the ice, and he was melting the ice and making it a flow.
India lost contact with him, and he could gain roots in Tibet, in China, in Japan, in Korea, in Burma, in Ceylon, only because there the people who carried the message again changed the verbs into nouns. Seeing that the effort failed in India, they never tried it anywhere else. Then it succeeded, but then it lost its purity, its height. It again became mundane. It compromised with people.
My teaching to my sannyasins is: Never compromise. Live the truth in the purest possible way, because only then can you be liberated.
[Prem Aurelio: the golden phenomenon of love]
Nothing is more precious than it. It is the Kohinoor - the ultimate diamond, the inexhaustible treasure.
For centuries alchemists all over the world have been trying to transform baser metal into gold.
They were not really trying to change baser metal into gold. It was only symbolic; they were using metaphors. They created a facade around themselves just to protect them from the ugly church, because the established church was very much against anything that was not part of the church.
The alchemists were really working in a different dimension. Their chemistry was just a show to befool the church and the people; hiding behind that facade, they were transforming consciousness from the lowest point to the highest. That was their real work, and that's my work too.
This is an alchemist's school, and love is the bridge from the lowest to the highest. Love is the ladder: it touches the lowest - the sex center, and it touches the greatest, the highest, in you - the God center. Love is the only way to transform you. It can make you golden. Live a life of love and you live a religious life.
[Deva Prem - divine love]
Ordinarily love is animal, very rarely human, and very very rarely divine - but love has the possibility of all these three dimensions. Love is animal when it is simply biological, sexual; when it is confined to the body, when it has no other depth; when it is only a momentary desire under the grip of biology.
You are possessed by the biology; you are not free, you are a slave.
Nature tries to use you to perpetuate the species you belong to. It is nature's way of avoiding death.
You are bound to die, but your children may live. Before they die nature will force them to produce more children. This is nature's arrangement for immortality. Nature is not interested in individuals, it is interested in species. It has no concern with you or me; its whole concern is with humanity. But the animal love keeps you in a very ugly state. To be a slave is to be ugly, hence those who have never known anything beyond sex, have not yet become human beings.
When you start moving above the biology and the physiology, when your love starts taking a psychological dimension; when it is no more in the grip of nature, when it does not serve the purpose of nature; when sex is not only for reproduction but becomes a means of communication, becomes a way of sharing, becomes a joy in itself, becomes a sport, takes the form of fun and play... When your sex starts becoming music between two beings, a chorus, a harmony, when it has no biological purpose at all, it becomes human. Then it is not temporary, not on the spur of the moment; it starts becoming intimate. It creates longstanding friendships.
But there is still a higher realm: the divine love. The human love still remains possessive, jealous, dominating; there is some power politics in it. The lovers try to manipulate each other, the lovers try to impose themselves on each other in subtle ways, even in loving ways, but now deep down hidden in the unconscious is the ego. And because of the ego, human love never attains its fulfillment, it always remains an incomplete circle. Conflict continues; lovers become intimate enemies. They fight, they quarrel, they nag, and what started as a beautiful phenomenon soon becomes boring, tiring. One feels fed up.
It nourishes too, but it bores also. So you cannot leave it, because once you leave it you feel very lonely, you feel unnourished. And you cannot live it totally either, because the conflict, the quarreling, is too much. It is sickening: it drives you crazy.
If one can rise above possessiveness, domination, power trips, then love becomes divine. Then it is the sheer joy of sharing for its own sake. It asks nothing in return; it simply gives because giving in itself is such a bliss. It gives freedom to the other, because if you really love the other you would like the other to be absolutely free.
All conflict ceases. In fact the duality of the lover and the beloved disappears: in divine love they be come one. It is no more an I-thou relationship. There is no I, no thou, hence there is no relationship, because a relationship needs two, and divine love creates one. But to be one is to come full circle. It is fulfillment, it is contentment, and the person who attains to divine love attains to God. Hc becomes worthy, he has earned.
This is the real process of transforming your love from the lowest to the highest. Such a person has no interest in unnecessary philosophical questions. His problem is existential, not philosophical. He does not ask "What is love?" He lives it, enters into it, tries, falls many times, gets up again, and by experimenting, by trial and error, he learns. That's the only way to learn. The great questions of life cannot be answered philosophically: you have to live those questions, you have to become a quest.
I have heard a famous story . A young man was in search. For seven years he traveled from one country to another, from one Master to another, asking the same question, but his question was such that it could not be answered. Finally he reached the deepest caves of the Himalayas. He has heard of an old, wise man, the greatest wise man of the world. The journey was very arduous, risky, but he risked his life and finally reached the doorsteps of the great man. His joy, that he had made the journey, was great. He opened the door; the old man was drinking tea. The young man did not even wait for a single moment, he said "I have come to ask a question: What is life?"
The old sage said "What!" He looked very surprised, as if the question was utterly absurd.
The young man repeated it again, he asked again "What is life?"
The old man smiled and said "Life is a cup of tea."
Now it was the turn of the young man; he said "What!? Life is a cup of tea?"
The old man laughed loudly and said "Do you mean to say that life is not a cup of tea? Then you can have it your own way, you can find your own answer, but at this moment, in this moment, to me life is just a cup of tea, because I am drinking tea."
It is not a joke - it is tremendously significant. The old man is saying: "Life has to be lived moment to moment, then only do you know the taste of it. In this moment I am sipping tea; this is the taste of life." Never ask "What is love?" Start loving! We all have the inherent, intrinsic quality to love. We are born with it; just as we breathe, we intuitively know what love is.
Once you have known what love is, you have known the way to God. My only message is love.