Darshan 25 April 1976

[A sannyasin leaving for Scotland said he was feeling apprehensive about going home.

Osho said it was good to pass through different situations, changes, otherwise one began to stagnate and to have a false sense of security. Life takes care of one, and though there may be change and upheaval, things always settle again, and slowly one begins to have a trust in life... ]

And once this happens, you are free of tomorrow. Tomorrow is the anxiety. If it is settled you feel there is no problem. If it is not settled there is anxiety. With the dropping of anxiety and fear, one is free of the future. In fact one is free of time itself; suddenly you are no more part of time.

A timelessness enters your being. Then whatsoever happens you are calm and quiet. And you accept... you know that life will protect you. Even in death you know it must be the way of life to drop unnecessary things, to drop rotten things; to drop that which is no more needed... to make you new.

Then death is resurrection.

[A Japanese sannyasin who does not speak English says through an interpreter: In your lectures I don't understand anything so when I'm sitting there I try to receive things into my body, and then after the discourse I try to listen to my body.]

Absolutely right... that's the real way. Words are not very important, but the vibrations that you feel from me. You have stumbled on the right thing.

The body absorbs those vibrations and you can listen to them later on. So while listening to me, drink me, and then later on you can feel your body and they will be there. Perfectly good.

[A sannyasin says: I'm just able to see only a little bit, that's all.]

Right! But even a little bit is very good, mm? Because then more becomes possible. In the beginning it is always a little bit, but once you have the knack of it, it grows.

You are beginning to see... You will know more and more.... And you are getting in tune with me...

[The Encounter group was present at darshan tonight.... ]

The whole point of the group is that you relax completely. Whatsoever happens in the moment, you live it. You don't follow any ideology, morality, immorality. You just respond to the moment - not from your past ideas or future fears.

[A visitor who is a group member said: I'm full of hate and anger, but I've not worked in the group yet... I don't want to show myself to others.]

But you have to decide about it.

This is one of the most basic things to understand - that you are responsible for yourself, nobody else. You have to take the responsibility. If you want to grow, open. If you don't want to grow then remain closed - but it is your responsibility.

When I use the word responsibility, I don't use it in the ordinary sense, in the sense of duty - no. It is exactly the opposite of duty. Duty is always something that you don't want to do and you do it.

The duty to your father, the duty to your mother, the duty to the country, the duty to this and that is that which you don't want to do, but you do it because it has been forced on you, taught to you, and if you don't do it you will feel guilty. If you do it you will not feel happy but at least you will not feel guilty. You will gain nothing out of it.

When I say responsible, I mean respond to the situation in which you find yourself. If you don't respond, that is your decision. Remember always that if you don't want to grow, there is no way to help you. It is nobody else's business. The groupleader, the group, will help, but if you want to hide there is no way to enter you.

If you see that it is foolish to hide, foolish to hold on, then drop that nonsense. And don't ask how to drop it. There is no how to it. You simply see the point - that it is useless - and you drop it. By dropping it one learns how to drop it.

Whatsoever you are trying to hide is not worth it. It is not a treasure to hide! It is your disease. And why be afraid of these people? They are not sitting there like judges. You will never find another opportunity in life where people are not judging you. That is the whole point of the group - that the people who are there are not judicial. They are not in any way condemning you.

If you show your anger and your hatred and your real face, they will not say that you are bad, that you are a criminal, a sinner. They are not popes and priests, and they will not judge. In fact they will say that you are true. They will appreciate that you are honest, sincere about yourself; that you are conscious and can open your heart with no fear. You are not a coward.

This is the beauty of a growth group - that it gives you an opportunity that is not available in the ordinary world. If the world would grow rightly, this opportunity would be available all over the world

- everywhere: in the marketplace, in the temple, in the church, in the school, in the college, in the university. Then there would be no need for groups and you would be accepted everywhere. Nobody would be judging you and everybody would be trying to help you. People will appreciate that you are sincere.

This is not possible in the outside world, hence groups have evolved; just twelve or twenty persons in a group, a closed family, in which everybody is ready to open. But when others are opening, it is easier to open; it becomes infectious. When you see that somebody has opened and nobody has condemned them, nobody has taken any judgement about it, and by opening the person has come to feel a freedom... you can see on the face, you can feel the vibe, you can see some changes happening around his space. He is no more the same constrained being. He is like an opening flower, and you can see the after-glow that comes after opening. You can see the relaxed grace, the dignity that comes to a person.

If you go on seeing this happening and you cannot open, where will you open? It has to function like a chain. One person opens and suddenly another starts feeling that something beautiful has happened and thinks, 'Why shouldn't I take courage?' He opens and then a third takes courage.

This is a chain-reaction.

That's why person-to-person therapy has failed. People have been in psychotherapy for ten years, twelve years, even fifteen and twenty years, and nothing has happened. Within a ten-day group, that can happen which cannot happen in ten years of psychoanalysis, because there is no situation really - just the therapist and the person. It is not an environment in which somebody can flower, can take hints from others, can see what flowering is; can actually be a witness when somebody flowers and opens, and can see how beautiful one becomes. Suddenly the ugliness disappears from the face.

So don't miss this opportunity. Just watch people... they are just like you; they also have the same problems. Nothing human is alien. Whatsoever problem you have, they are just the same; maybe degrees differ. When people are being angry and their hate is coming up, their sexuality is coming up, their greed is coming up - they are crying and weeping and laughing and things are opening, pent-up energies are finding release - watch! Get caught up in the flow! Ride on the wave! Take a jump!

It will happen. There is no technique in it, just courage! And if it is not going to happen in this group, then in the next - but be yourself. Don't let it continue this way otherwise you will miss the whole of life. A person who is closed is almost dead. He lives just for the name's sake. You will miss - and it is nobody else's responsibility.

It is not my responsibility to open you. If you remain closed, you remain closed. If you open you have done something beautiful and good to yourself. It is absolutely selfish. So remember this, because we have been trained to have a certain idea which particularly psychology has given us. If you are not feeling good, you say, 'My mother was not good to me - it is her responsibility.' Freud shifted the whole responsibility onto the mother. And poor mother! Now nothing can be done; the mother is no more there. You cannot become a child again, so it Is finished. You accept yourself whatsoever you are - doomed!

Freud says it is the parents, Marx says the society, and there are others. analysts, who find out something or other, but nobody says that you are responsible. That's a very tricky and fishy affair.

And you are responsible - not your mother or your father or the society. I know that they have given you a certain environment, but still it is your choice. In the same environment somebody else has grown in a different way.

I have grown in the same atmosphere in a different way. Why can't you? Your brother in the same family may grow in a different way to you. So it plays a part, but it is not very basic. The basic thing is your attitude.

There are people here who think that it is my responsibility to help them become enlightened. If they are not becoming enlightened, I am the culprit! What am I to do about it? And they create all sorts of barriers - and then I am responsible! They will go and say that they have been here for one or two years and nothing has happened.

Your responsibility is absolute. Once you understand that, suddenly now you will see that something has to be done, because there !s no point going on throwing responsibility on somebody else's shoulders. It is foolish because you are wasting your life. So from tomorrow morning you start opening in the group.

(addressing the rest of the group) And help him, mm? Force him into the whirlpool... jump on him!

(laughter) And break his ice. He is such a good person... he will grow into a beautiful man. Just try, mm? It will happen.

[A group member says: I am starting to open myself, but I have much fear in doing it... just after one or two hours I lose that contact again.]

It is natural. It is so with everybody because we have not been in touch with ourselves for so long - maybe for many lives - so we have forgotten the language of contact and of connectedness, of integrity, of being at home. We are continuously wandering here and there.

The fear is also natural. When you come in contact with yourself, you come in contact with a voidness; that's the fear. Everybody has an emptiness at the very core of one's being, just like the hub of a wheel. The wheel has spokes and they are all joined at the hub, but at the exact centre of the wheel, there is emptiness. That emptiness holds the wheel. In exactly the same way, your whole life-wheel is centred on emptiness, on non-being.

But these words are very very scarey - emptiness, non-being, nothingness, death - because we have misunderstood them. We have become afraid to go into the emptiness so we go on moving on the wheel and never come home. We go on finding new occupations, new engagements, new business; something to be engaged with. If you are alone and you start feeling that you are falling into the emptiness, you start reading the newspaper, cleaning the house; you start doing this and that - preparing tea, smoking cigarettes - something, so that you can hold onto the wheel. Action is on the wheel, Inaction is at the centre. But that inaction has to be lived.

That's the whole effort here - to throw you into your emptiness. Once you enter into it, you will laugh at the whole absurdity of what you were doing up to now. You will see that this emptiness Is absolute fulfillment. It is absolute fulfillment.

It is exactly like when you make a house. What do you call a house - the walls or the emptiness inside? The walls are not the house... they simply protect the emptiness. You live in the empty house, you don't live in the walls. You make a wall, but you cannot pass through it, so you make an empty space which we call a door, and you pass through that. We make a vase or a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that is used. This is the real significance of the pot - that inside it is empty and just has a mud wall around it. Exactly the same is the case with your body.

The body is just walled emptiness. Deep inside you are empty, pure sky where nothing ever stirs.

One has to taste it to know what it is. Once you have known it, it is deep rest. It is life ... it revives you, rejuvenates you. It is just as in the night you fall asleep. Where do you go? Have you ever thought about where you go when you fall asleep? You go to the emptiness.

If a man is going to live for sixty years, for twenty years he will be asleep. Twenty years of emptiness are needed for this life - to revive you again and again. Each morning you are again fresh and young; again moving, doing. By the evening, tired again, you fall into sleep. Sleep means falling to the hub.

It is the darkness of your inner being where you move and rest. You almost disappear. In deep sleep you forget your name. You forget who you are - man or woman. You forget black and white, your language, the society that you belong to, whether you are rich or poor, old or young; you forget everything. Suddenly, in the emptiness, there is no identity, and out of that identityless state, you gain life.

So just allow it and take courage. Enter into that emptiness. Fear will remain until you enter - so don't ask me what to do with the fear. Fear will remain. In spite of the fear you have to enter.

Once you enter, fear disappears - once you have known that you can come out of it and go into it again; disappear and appear again; go into chaos and come back again into a system; move into disorder and then can become ordered... just as every night you go to sleep, arid in the morning you are back.

There are a few people who become afraid of sleep. In fact that's my observation - that people who suffer from insomnia are really suffering from a deep fear of sleep. They don't want to sleep, that's why sleep has disappeared. They go on saying that they want to sleep and sleep is not coming, but that is not the case. Somehow they have become afraid of sleep. They are afraid to move into the darkness of their innermost core. Because of that fear they cling.

Drop that fear... disappear. I am here to bring you back.

[A groupmember said that she wanted to be near Osho in the ashram, but did not like the routine.]

It is... it is me. All that routine is also me (a chuckle).

You decide. Once you are in the ashram you have to follow everything absolutely. I don't tolerate any nonsense at all. You have to follow absolutely - otherwise be outside. There is nothing to be worried about.

... Feel that for yourself, mm? Because if I say something, that will create a conflict in you. Just be patient and feel. If you feel good outside, it is good. If you don't feel like falling into any routine, that too is good. But don't come to the ashram half-heartedly. That will create trouble.

[She replies: I so much wish I could be total in one thing, but there are always so many voices.]

Just try to listen to the chief and main voice. It may not be total, but at least the chief voice! Tonight, sit on your bed and listen, mm?

[A sannyasin says: I've done a lot of groups in the West, and it seems like I'm right back at the beginning... For most of the time I feel dead in my body.... but I feel that this is more real.]

It has brought you to your real situation. And it happens that when you are doing groups for the first time, you are excited, full of so many expectations, as if enlightenment is going to happen through them, mm? (chuckling) One is excited and passionate and in fever. When you have done many, that expectation, that excitement, goes and you become more cool and calm. You see things more in their reality than through your expectations and projections.

This is the real thing. You are dead in many parts of the body, and the group has brought you to a deep understanding of this. So use this insight and do something to bring life to your body.

T'ai Chi will be very good... the music group and the ethiopian dance group will both be very good.

These three things will be very helpful to help more life flow into the body.

This is a simple mechanism. If you dance, first you have to make an effort, but by and by your energy takes it over. Then you don't dance, the energy dances; you simply forget. If you sing, a moment comes when the shift occurs. You are no more singing - the song is singing in you. So, T'ai Chi will be very good to bring energy to the body.

Remember, the body is never dead. At the most it is frozen, so it can be melted. The right word for it is what you call hibernation. The frogs after the rains go into hibernation. They move into the earth and lie down there. Right now, in summer, they are in hibernation; they are almost dead. If you dug them out you would find them almost dead; but only almost dead - not really dead. If you put them in a pond they would become alive. They are simply waiting for the rains to come. When they hear the thunder they will come out of their sleep. It is a very deep sleep. The same happens to many animals.

In the siberian snow, animals go into hibernation. When everything freezes, they also freeze inside and they wait for the right moment to come back, to return.

The same happens to the human body. If you don't use a certain limb, that limb goes into hibernation.

Not that it is really dead, because if it is really dead, then there is no way to bring it back. You have not used the hand for so long, the energy has not moved into those meridians, those passages, so the limb has frozen. Let energy flow again in that limb, and it will become alive again.

T'ai Chi is very good to bring the body back slowly, to fill the body again with chi, with energy. But there are very slow movements in T'ai Chi because the work is very very slow and very cautious.

You are working with a very dangerous thing, mm? your own life energy, so one has to be very respectful. You are moving on sacred ground. You have to take your shoes off with deep respect.

This is one way... the other is ethiopian dance. It is totally different.

T'ai Chi hits the very core of the small nerves, of which there are millions in the body. By and by it infuses life into those small nerves, the body cells, and makes them alive.

Ethiopian dance, or things like Karate, are very vigorous. There is a sudden onrush of energy, and it is so much that it by-passes the small cells, but for the bigger musculature it is perfectly good and very very helpful. Both are needed, so join both, and the music group.

Sound is very very helpful. If it is harmonious you Will start a soaring of energy within you. Music is very simple, but very deeply ecstatic. It is very sexual and very sensual.

Sex is ordinarily local, confined to the reproductive system, but music spreads it all over your body...

spreads it into every part of your body and gives it a very subtle glow.

So join these three groups, mm?

[A sannyasin says: I'm discovering a lot about myself. I seem to always be creating problems.]

But that is nothing to worry about, because if you can always create problems, the same energy can be used to destroy problems. If you are feeling happy, you can create sadness; the same skill can be used.

The mind cannot function when you are happy... it is not needed. The need is only when you are unhappy. Mind has a function, and the function is to help you to be happy, so it is needed only when you are unhappy. It is just like a doctor; he is needed only when you are ill. If you are not ill the doctor is not needed.

If you are rich the doctor will not allow you to be healthy because it is against his whole interest.

Once rich people get ill, they never get healthy again! Only poor people have the possibility of getting better again, because no doctor wants them to come again and again; every doctor wants to be finished with them.

The mind is needed when you are unhappy. Once the mind sees that you are feeling too happy, he immediately changes into unhappiness because the need for the mind is finished. A happy man becomes more like a no-mind.

So just try to understand this and don't be worried.

[A group member said: I feel free, but lost and confused about myself. Does it have a lot to do with my own self or my being japanese, my conditioning and background?

No, it has nothing to do with your self. Everybody's self is perfectly beautiful. No problem exists as far as the self is concerned. All problems are of conditioning. Your innermost core is completely beyond problems. It is absolutely innocent. It knows nothing of problems. But the wheel goes on moving around it, that's the whole thing.

Every country has a different structure - every religion, every society - and it goes deep; so deep that you almost start feeling it as yourself. From the very beginning you become aware of it. And nobody teaches you how to go into yourself. The whole society teaches you that this is yourself. It is all conditioning.

The whole spiritual work consists of trying to decondition you. Once you can see yourself for even a few moments, absolutely unconditioned, in your true nature, you will never get trapped. Then you can use the conditioning - because it has to be used. When you speak you have to use a language, and that's the conditioning. You will have to move in a society and follow the rules. But all the time you know that you are beyond it. Then nothing disturbs you. It is just a game, and every game has rules. One has to follow the rule, but one is not to get identified with it.

I was reading a joke just the other day. A man stayed in a haunted house. Of course he was trying to be brave, but fear was there. Just in the middle of the night, suddenly he saw out of the blue, a beautiful lady. He became scared!

When the beautiful lady came close, she took her head off and put it on his pillow (laughter). He ran! He jumped out of the bed and ran downstairs and there the whole family was gathered playing some card game.

He said to them, 'Look, I can't believe my eyes!' He was trembling and perspiring. He said, 'A lady came just out of the blue, and can you imagine what she did? She took her head off and put it on my pillow!'

They said, 'This is nothing - anybody can do it.' And they all took their heads off!

So when you are in a ghost country, you have to know their rules. (chuckling) That was nothing for them! They were all ghosts - the whole company!