You are born as freedom

Question 1:

The freedom from something is not true freedom.

The freedom to do anything you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about.

My vision of freedom is to be yourself.

It is not a question of getting freedom from something. That freedom will not be freedom, because it is still given to you; there is a cause to it. The thing that you were feeling dependent on is still there in your freedom. You are obliged to it. Without it you would not have been free.

The freedom to do anything you want is not freedom either, because wanting, desiring to do something, arises out of the mind - and mind is your bondage.

The true freedom certainly comes after choiceless awareness, but after choiceless awareness the freedom is neither dependent on things nor dependent on doing something. The freedom that follows choiceless awareness is the freedom just to be yourself. And you are yourself already, you are born with it; hence it is not dependent on anything else. Nobody can give it to you and nobody can take it from you. A sword can cut your head but it cannot cut your freedom, your being.

It is another way of saying that you are centered, rooted in your natural, existential self. It has nothing to do with outside.

Freedom from things is dependent on the outside. Freedom to do something is also dependent on the outside. Freedom to be ultimately pure has not to be dependent on anything outside you.

You are born as freedom.

It is just that you have been conditioned to forget it.

Layers upon layers of conditionings have made you a puppet. The strings are in somebody else's hands.

If you are a Christian, you are a puppet. Your strings are in the hand of a God which does not exist, so just to give you the sense that God exists there are prophets, messiahs, representing God. They represent nobody. They are just egoistic people - and even ego wants to reduce you to a puppet.

They tell you what to do, they give you the Ten Commandments. They give you your personality - that you are a Christian, a Jew, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. They give you your so-called knowledge.

And naturally, under the great burden which they start giving you from the very beginning of your childhood, the Himalayan load you are carrying - underneath it, hidden, repressed, is your natural self.

If you can get rid of all conditionings, if you can think that you are neither a communist nor a fascist, that you are neither a Christian nor a Mohammedan.... You were not born a Christian or Mohammedan; you were born just pure, innocent consciousness.

To be again in that purity, in that innocence, in that consciousness, is what I mean be freedom.

Freedom is the ultimate experience of life.

There is nothing higher than that.

And out of freedom many flowers blossom in you.

Love is the flowering of your freedom.

Compassion, another flowering of your freedom.

All that is valuable in life flowers in the innocent, natural state of your being.

So don't connect freedom with independence. Independence is naturally from something, from somebody. Don't connect freedom with doing things that you want to do, because that is your mind, not you. Wanting to do something, desiring to do something, you are in the bondage of your wanting and your desiring.

But the freedom I have been talking about you simply are - in utter silence, serenity, beauty, bliss.

Question 2:

The camels are very difficult people! Whatever you do to them, somehow or other they will express their camelhood.

My whole life I have been telling you there is no goal!

Life is its own goal.

There is nothing outside life that you have to achieve.

All achievement is the projection of the ego.

The very idea of achievement is ambition.

What you achieve does not matter - money, power, knowledge; these are not in any way going to give you life. In fact, in achieving power, in achieving money, in achieving prestige, in achieving any other ambition, you are losing your life, you are sacrificing your life.

You are involved in stupid things, and by the side life goes on slipping out of your hands. You will realize it only at the time of death, with a shock: "I have been trying to achieve the goal of life and I forgot life itself."

The goal is always in the future, and life is always here. The goal is always far away, and life is in this very moment.

Trying to achieve it, you will miss it. You don't need to try to achieve life: you are alive.

Only dead people can have goals.

Living people live.

If you want goals to achieve, the grave is the right place for you. Just lie down in the grave. Of course a very big grave will have to be made for you - you are a camel still. Rest in death.

I have heard: a husband - naturally, a henpecked husband, because I don't know another kind....

Everybody understands it: you want to be a husband, soon you will be a henpecked husband - that is a natural growth.

This henpecked husband died. The wife ordered a beautiful marble grave for him, and ordered that his name should be written in golden letters with the words: "Rest in peace." But when the will of the husband was opened... he had given all his money, land, house - everything - to charitable institutions. Nothing for the wife! That was his revenge - because a husband can take revenge only when he is dead. His whole life the woman had tortured him; now was his time!

Listening to the will, she rushed to the craftsman who was making the marble grave, and she said to him, "You have to add a few words more."

He said, "But this is enough!"

She said, "No. It was enough before I came to know his will. Now write: Rest in Peace - till I come!"

You have a little time to rest in the grave! There you can imagine all kinds of goals because you will not be losing anything; you are already dead. But while living be a little more kind to yourself. While living, live. And live intensely and totally!

In India, I used to go to Ahmedabad, where I had the greatest number of sannyasins. In Ahmedabad I used to like only one place, and that was the place where Jayantibhai, who used to be my driver, would speed beyond the limit permitted. And I would say, "Why do you do it? I like this place!"

He would say, "That's why I speed here: I don't want you to remember Ahmedabad because of this thing!"

And what was the thing? There was a board on the bridge saying: 'Livva little hot - Sippa Gold Spot!' And certainly I have forgotten everything about Ahmedabad, but this 'Livva little hot ...' I cannot forget. This is the very essence of my religion: Livva little hot!

Forget about Gold Spot! There is no gold anywhere.

Existence is not moving to some target.

And it is good that it is not moving towards some goal, because if the goal is there, sooner or later it will be achieved. Then what? Existence is more intelligent than camels think. It has no goal, so it goes on and on - an unending, infinite process.

So drop the idea of goal from your mind completely, it is very destructive. It is the cancer of your soul. Live the moment that is available to you. And you never get two moments together, remember.

Existence wants you to be so intelligent and sharp and quick that it gives you only one moment at a time. Just a little thought, a little goal, a little desire - and it is gone, you have missed it.

To live in the moment needs a thoughtless awareness, because even a small thought is bigger than the smallest atom of time - the moment. Hence my insistence on meditation. It is nothing but a method to drop thoughts and to be available to the present moment.

Live it as deeply as possible. The next moment will be born out of this moment. If you have lived this moment totally, intensely, your next moment is going to be still more golden. And that's how life goes on growing - otherwise people only grow old.

If you have a goal you will grow old.

If you don't have a goal you will grow up.

And these are two different processes.

Growing old you reach to death; that is the goal.

Growing up you transcend death, because a man who has been alert, aware, in each moment, he will be capable of being aware even while he is leaving the body. He has lived life, he is not going to miss death either; he will live death too. And death for the man of awareness is the ultimate peak of life. It is not the end but the very climax.

To the goal-oriented man life comes to an end in death - naturally, because now he cannot have any goal. A goal needs the future. The future is finished, death has come, and he has wasted his whole life for some goal. But the tomorrow never comes. And naturally he is shocked that he has wasted his whole life, and this is the goal he has achieved: dying.

The shock of death makes him even more unconscious than he has ever been. Almost everybody before death goes into a coma, becomes unconscious. He has missed life; he cannot experience the climax of life - which is death.

Only a man of awareness realizes a tremendous phenomenon: death comes to him as the ultimate orgasm.

In his awareness he passes death without dying.

He becomes aware of eternity.

Now he knows he has always been here, and he will always be here.

He is part of an eternal existence.

But the goal-oriented people are the most idiotic ones.

Question 3:

Neither terror of death nor the process of death make man unconscious. He has been learning unconsciousness his whole life. Death simply gives him the final certificate: "Your learning of unconsciousness is completed; you are falling into a coma."

But this is not so for the man of awareness.

His learning is totally different.

He is learning the discipline of being conscious.

He will also die - but only superficially. Deep inside him the light of life will be still burning. He will leave the body, but the flame of life will go on moving into different forms till he comes to experience total enlightenment. Then this death is the last: he will not be born again. Now he is given the opportunity to become one with the whole... the dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean.

He is not losing himself, he is gaining the whole ocean; he is becoming oceanic.

Man has to pass through many deaths because of his unconsciousness. And if your awareness is also just wishy-washy it is not going to help.

Life is a school to learn the eternal truth of existence. But that is possible only if you are conscious.

You are not even conscious when you appear to be conscious. Walking in the street, talking to people, shopping in the Mall, going to the disco, it looks as if you are conscious; it is not so.

Just watch yourself. Watch; are you aware while you are walking, or is walking just a mechanical process, just like a robot? And you will be surprised to know the difference. Just try to walk a few steps consciously and you will see the difference - and the beauty and the joy and the relaxation of walking consciously. Your whole body is in tune with existence.

Consciousness bridges you with existence.

Unconsciousness closes you into yourself.

In unconsciousness you don't have any connection with existence.

In consciousness you are related to the whole - from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest star millions of light-years away.

A conscious man is just like you, but inside there is light; and inside you there is darkness.

You go on doing things but without knowing who you are... shopping for everything except yourself!

While you are talking, be alert and you will be surprised, just by your unconscious talking, how many troubles you have created, how many quarrels, fights you have created - just by talking. Just think:

if you were not talking and you were just a silent man, ninety-nine percent of your troubles would be dropped. They come out of your talking!

You say something, and your wife is bound to misunderstand it. And there is no way to explain to her because whatever you explain, she has her own way of interpreting it. Slowly slowly, husbands and wives stop talking because they both have understood that this leads to quarreling, and finally to crying and weeping and throwing things.

What a strange world! - a conversation leading to throwing things and screaming and tears and pillow fights. But the reason is not talking, the reason is talking unconsciously. And the same is true about all your activities. They bring more and more misery to you, more and more suffering to you, but you go on doing the same things again and again. An unconscious man is bound to fall in the same pit again and again.

A conscious man also commits mistakes, but one mistake one time. A conscious man learns even from mistakes. He has learned something of tremendous value - that this is a mistake, and now it is not going to be repeated again. Slowly slowly, all mistakes are dropped; his life becomes a silent, joyous dance.

It is not the terror of death. You don't know death, how can you have a terror of death? It is not the process of death, because people have died fully aware....

The day Gautam Buddha died, in the morning he gathered his people, the way you are here; perhaps it was just the same kind of morning. Buddha every day talked to his disciples, but that was a special day because he said, "Today I am going to die. I have been hearing the steps of death for a few days; now they have reached very close and it is only a question of a few hours. So if you have any question to ask, ask, because I am not going to come again - this is my last death. The wheel of life and death is going to stop for me.

"So don't feel embarrassed even if your question is stupid; otherwise later on you will always feel sad that Buddha was available, a man of total awareness, and still you could not gather courage to ask the question."

It is not that there were not questions in peoples' minds - they are always there. Just as leaves grow on trees, questions grow in the mind. But at the moment when the master is going to die, nobody was going to harass him. For forty-two years he has been answering their questions, and if in forty-two years your questions are not solved, what is the point of torturing the old man who is going to die? Nobody asked.

His closest companion and caretaker, Ananda, said, "Bante" - bante is Pali for Bhagwan - "we don't have any questions. You have answered all our questions thousands of times, and we go on asking the same questions, phrasing them differently.... At this moment we would like to just sit silently with you."

Buddha said, "That's good, because death has reached very close. So you allow me to die."

There were tears, people were sobbing.... They have loved this man their whole life, and it is very rare - once in thousands of years such a man comes into the world and rises to such heights of consciousness, love, blissfulness. And they were also crying and weeping that tomorrow morning all that they had - a master - would not be there. And they have been stupid, they have not learned anything.

Buddha said, "I will be dying in four stages. First I will close my eyes and remove myself from the body. In the second step I will remove myself from the mechanism of the mind. In the third step I will remove myself from the world of feelings, the heart. And in the fourth step, the dewdrop will fall into the ocean."

A man of awareness does not die in a coma. He can even give you a description of how the death is going to happen.

Buddha closed his eyes. At that very moment a man came running from the town nearby, and he said, "I have just heard that Buddha is dying - and I have a question. I know I am an idiot. For forty- two years he has been passing through my village, but there was always something holding me back. A customer would come to the shop and I would say, 'Buddha is always available - tomorrow I can go to see him. But this customer may not come tomorrow. He needs things now. He will go to another shop - and nobody wants to lose customers.'

"Sometimes there were friends and we had met after years, and I would say, 'I can go to Buddha anytime, but these friends have come to see me after many years; it does not look right to leave them and go to Buddha.' And so on and so forth. Sometimes it was a marriage, sometimes it was a party.... But this morning I heard that Buddha is going to die - I had to close the shop.

"My wife was shouting, my children were asking, 'What is the point? - you had just opened, and you are closing!' I did not hear anybody, there was no time left, there was no time to answer all their questions. I said, 'When I come back I will explain. Just right now get out of the way and let me go!'

So I have come with the question."

Ananda said, "But you are a little late. We have given our permission that the master can disappear into the whole, and he has already entered the first stage. So please forgive us, it is not our fault.

Forty-two years you have postponed; now wait a few thousand years more. When another Buddha appears, another enlightened man, then don't be so foolish."

But Buddha opened his eyes. He said, "Ananda, this will be a condemnation for me - that a man had come thirsty, and I was still alive and I could not quench his thirst. I can delay death a little bit, but his question has to be answered; otherwise the poor fellow will feel guilty his whole life."

A conscious man dies in a totally conscious way, step by step. And if he wants to return before he has taken the fourth step, he can come back. His death is simply dropping the body, the mind, the heart, and finally, the individual center, into the universal whole. Each thing is perfectly done in alertness.

So it is not the process of death that makes one unconscious. And it is not the terror - because you have never seen death, so how can you be afraid of it? You don't know what death is. You don't know even what life is. You are alive, and unaware of life. You are unconscious in life; that's why at the ultimate peak of life you become totally unconscious.

A man of awareness is conscious in his life; that's why at the moment of death he becomes fully conscious.

Your death says everything about your life.

Your death is the ultimate declaration of your existence, how you have lived. If you fall in a coma, that means you lived in unconsciousness, you have not lived at all. You have been postponing:

tomorrow, always tomorrow....

It depends on you, not on the process of death. It depends on you to prepare. Death is a great celebration if you prepare. But unprepared, you have to become unconscious. And it is good of existence that it makes you unconscious, completely unconscious before death, because death is a great surgery. Your being is taken away from the body, from the mind, from the heart, and finally from that individual self. This is the greatest surgery. Anesthesia is needed; existence provides it.

It happened in 1915, the king of Varanasi had to be operated on to remove his appendix, but the king refused to take any anesthesia, local or otherwise. And he was a man of tremendous power, not only the king. The best doctors of the world were attending him, but he said, "You have to do the surgery without anesthesia. Don't be worried - you need not put me in unconsciousness just for a small removal. I can die consciously, which is the ultimate in surgery; your surgery is just a small game." There was trouble. Doctors could not do the operation, it was against their training.

But they knew the man; he will not change his mind, he has never done that in his whole life. And the appendix is such a thing... it was in its last stage, it could explode any moment; and then there would be no possibility of saving the king - and the man was worth saving.

There was not time enough for doctors to decide what to do. There was no question either, because that man is not going to take anything that makes him unconscious. So finally, reluctantly, unwillingly, they operated on the man. Great surgeons were there; their hands were shaking for the first time.

They had done much surgery but they had never done surgery on a man who was lying there fully conscious, with open eyes, looking at the doctors and once in a while looking at his stomach, which was being cut. This was a strange experience!

The surgery was done, the appendix was removed, and there was no trouble from the king's side.

Not even a sign of pain showed on his face or in his eyes. This is the only surgery in the whole of history which has been done without any unconsciousness. The doctors were certainly amazed.

After the surgery was over they asked the king, "What is the secret? - because this has never happened before and we don't think it is going to happen again."

He said, "There is no secret. I have lived my life consciously - so consciously that there is no problem. I can die, too, consciously. And this was a small thing, trivial."

So remember, it is not the terror of death, it is not the process of death. Don't dump your responsibility on death! Accept the phenomenon that one becomes unconscious because one has lived unconsciously, and that is the ultimate outcome of one's whole life.

If you want a conscious death, then start from this moment being conscious, because - who knows?

- the moment may be death. And a man of consciousness starts almost six months before death comes - he starts feeling the steps, hearing the sound of the steps of death coming closer.

There is a very simple method - even camels can do it. Before a person dies, six months ahead, nature gives indications, but you are unconscious so you don't understand those indications. But a very simple indication I give to you, which I don't think you can misunderstand. Before death comes, six months before, you stop seeing the tip of your nose. Your eyes start turning upwards; it takes six months for them to turn completely upwards.

That's why whenever a man dies people immediately close his eyes. For what reason, all around the world, do his eyelids have to be closed? Just so that nobody becomes aware that his eyes have moved upwards and there is only white left to be seen. That may make many freak out, that may give them nightmares. It is to be hidden from them.

But it takes six months for eyes slowly slowly to turn upward; and when eyes start turning upward you cannot see the tip of your nose. This can be done by any camel.

But this will not help. You may become more frantic; the camel may go crazy, running here and there because now there is no time - how is his goal to be fulfilled?

And there are other indications which are more subtle, which can be understood only if you live meditatively, consciously, with awareness....

Question 4:

Because you don't have anything else - just your body, your possessions. And what are your possessions? Extensions of your body.

For example, no animal has created weapons, for the simple reason that animals are capable, strong; their teeth, their nails, are enough to destroy a man. Man is the most helpless, the weakest animal on the earth. Even if an Alsatian dog follows you, you have to start running, shouting for the police! You cannot fight even with a dog. What to say of a dog, even a cat is enough!

That's the reason man invented weapons - extensions of the body which are not given to him naturally. He developed bows and arrows because he is afraid even with weapons to come close to a lion. In fact you may have a gun, but if you suddenly come across a beautiful, strong lion, you will be frozen; your fingers will not function to trigger your gun. Most probably your gun will slip from your hand when you see the lion standing in front of you!

Man is so weak - but his weakness has proved a blessing in disguise. He had to invent bows and arrows so he could kill from a distance. He had to invent guns, machine guns, and even then....

I know many famous hunters in India. The king of Bhavanagar in his palace has hundreds of lions' heads hanging all around the walls. I have been with him when he went hunting. He said, "But why are you interested? You are not for violence, you are against hunting."

I said, "I simply want to see how, with your powerful automatic rifle, you face a lion who has no weapons." And it was significant that I went because there I saw that even with guns man is so powerless.

First a stage was made up high in the trees - and you have the gun! A stage is made for the king and for the friends who had come with him, far away. The lion cannot climb up the tree that far. Then all the branches of the tree below the platform were cut, so even if some crazy lion tries, he has no support anywhere. Then a cow was tied underneath the tree.

I was seeing the whole scene; silently I watched the whole scene. Of course when the lion smells that a cow is nearby, he comes; that cow is an invitation card. And the poor lion cannot see that far above in the darkness there is platform, and his death.

But they don't shoot the lion before he jumps on the cow and starts eating her. They wait, because when a lion is eating he does not want to be disturbed by anything, he is total in his act. The cow could have been saved. I said to the king, "The cow could have been saved. When the lion was coming closer, you could have used your rifle."

He said, "You don't know hunting. Even sitting on this platform I am shivering with fear, although I have killed hundreds of lions. Just to see the lion is enough to freeze you!"

And lions are very agile people. If you hit the lion - and you can miss, then you lose the game - the lion will jump into a bush, into a trench. He has to start eating the cow, because that is the habit of lions: while they are eating they don't want to be disturbed. And they become so absorbed in eating that it is easier for you to kill them.

I asked the king on the way, "If this is how you have collected those hundreds of heads of lions, please remove them - they are all proofs of your cowardliness. Have you ever thought," I asked him, "that you call hunting a game, when the other party has no weapons and is not even aware of you, that you are hiding above in the trees? You call it a game? Is it fair?

"You should be on the ground; you should be without a gun, because the lions cannot use guns.

Then even a single head would have been enough to prove that you are a brave man. These hundreds of heads, they don't prove anything except cowardice. If this is the way you have collected them - that's why I wanted to come with you to see...."

And if man kills in such situations, where he has the upper hand - no fear, no danger - it is a game; and if a lion kills a man, THAT'S a tragedy. Strange! The lion was also playing a game, and he was playing fairly without any weapons, naked, open.

Man is afraid of losing his body and his possessions. Possessions are extensions of your body.

Your house, your bank balance, your furniture, your paintings - everything that you have collected is somehow connected with your body. And you know only that you are a body, so when death faces you, you are afraid of losing your body and your possessions - naturally, because you don't know anything which is beyond death.

If you had known something of your consciousness, something of your being, you would not be afraid of losing your possessions, you would not be afraid of losing your body - because that too is a possession, given by nature. You would not be afraid to lose your mind or your heart. You would not be afraid at all, for the simple reason that death cannot reach to your real being; it is beyond death.

Your individual self is killed only through enlightenment. That's why I call enlightenment the great death. All other deaths only take your possessions; you go on living in different houses, in different bodies, with different possessions - but you continue.

Enlightenment is the great death, because after that you will not have the body, you will not have the mind, you will not have the heart, you will not have all your possessions.

You don't need them - because the whole universe is you.

Question 5:

Enlightenment is both - the easiest thing in the world, and the most impossible thing.

Before enlightenment it looks like the most impossible thing, obviously, because you don't have any idea, and you cannot have any idea; you can have only the experience. You are afraid too, because everybody is afraid of the unknown, the strange - and there is not a more strange phenomenon than enlightenment. And effort to become conscious is needed; great effort is needed.

You are so fast asleep and snoring that there is every possibility - many camels dream in their sleep that they have become enlightened! That is the greatest trick your unconscious can play on you.

I know a German sannyasin who used to become enlightened once in a while. Whenever he was in Germany he would become enlightened, and he would start writing letters to me, "I have become enlightened, and I am grateful to you." He wanted me to confirm it; all those letters were just ways....

I never answered him, because any answer would be dangerous. I simply informed him, "If you have become enlightened, come here." And the moment he would come to see me and sit before me, I would say, "Gunakar, don't be stupid!"

And he would say, "Osho, what to do? Whenever I go back to Germany, it starts feeling that I have become enlightened. The moment I start coming to India that enlightenment disappears! Before you I know perfectly well I am not enlightened."

This happened at least four, five times. It has stopped happening because he has stopped coming. Now he is enlightened. He understood that coming to this man is costly: you lose your enlightenment! It is better - he has a beautiful castle, he is rich enough - it is good to be in Germany and remain enlightened. Why go, waste money, and become unenlightened?

And of course amongst Germans, anybody can be enlightened. If Adolf Hitler can be accepted as the reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet, Elijah, then in Germany, anything can be accepted!

I received a letter - I had never imagined that in America also there is a Nazi party. And the president of the Nazi party wrote the letter to me saying, "You again and again speak against Adolf Hitler. This hurts our religious feelings."

Great! Underline the RELIGIOUS FEELINGS - about Adolf Hitler! If Adolf Hitler is a religious prophet then Gunakar is far better: he can remain enlightened there. He has not turned up here, but sooner or later he will have to come. He is taking his time so he becomes consolidated in his enlightenment, so when he comes here he does not fall apart. But he will come because he wants me to confirm that he is enlightened, and he knows that without my confirmation - he is my sannyasin - even if the whole of Germany accepts him as enlightened, he will not be satisfied.

So one day he will come. But whatsoever he does, the moment he comes in front of me he will be unenlightened immediately, because his enlightenment is only a dream. He has not made any effort to be conscious. Five times becoming enlightened has never happened in the whole of history, and is not going to happen again. Except perhaps in Germany it may happen!

Once is more than enough. And you cannot become unenlightened once you are enlightened. Even if you try hard, there is no way to go back.

Your question is significant. When you listen to me, you forget yourself. When you listen to me you start feeling, "My God! It is so easy." I also know it is easy - but only after enlightenment is it easy!

Before enlightenment it is an impossible task.

You can ask me then why I go on insisting that it is easy. Just so that you go on hanging around! If I say it is impossible then you will think, "What the hell am I doing here?" But when I say it is easy, I am not saying anything wrong. It is easy... but only after enlightenment!

So I will go on saying to you it is easy, just...(HE SNAPS HIS FINGERS)... and it is there!

If you can manage to hang around this Buddhafield, perhaps one day you will also say it is easy. But before that you have to make every effort to be conscious. And this is the most difficult thing in life - to be conscious about all that you do, all that you think, all that you feel. These are the three layers:

doing is concerned with the body; thinking, with the mind; feeling, with the heart. If you become aware of all these three layers, then suddenly you are there, at your very being.

That is enlightenment - to know oneself.

Question 6:

Of course!

Question 7:

My God! I am here - and without any disguise! Okay?