Darshan 14 September 1978

Anand means bliss, vishram means relaxation - a blissful relaxation. The simple word "relax" contains my whole philosophy of life. To be in a relaxed state is to be in God. To be utterly relaxed is to disappear from the circumference and appear at the center. That is the only transformation; there is none other. When you are tense you remain tethered to the circumference of your life; when you relax you sink to the deeper levels of your being. And when the relaxation is total, suddenly you find yourself at the very core... and that's what God isl But man lives in a kind of constant tension, man is tension; a chronic state of tension, that's what man is. Man is not a being. Trees have more being, rocks too; animals and birds have more being than man. Man is the only being without being, because he always lives between that which has been and that which has to be... pulled apart between these two diametrically opposite dimensions.

He is never herenow but either in the past or in the future - either thinking of that which he has been or imagining that which he would like to be but is not yet. This is the tension, the constant worry, anxiety: whether he is going to make it or not. Man is never in a state of being. He is always thinking: to be or not to be... wavering, trembling, not sure who he is, not sure whether he really is or not.

This chronic state of tension creates misery. Misery simply means missing the real, missing that which is. Bliss means not missing that which is. When the real in you meets with the real outside you, bliss arises. When the real outside you never meets the real within you, misery arises. And if you are in the past you are unreal, because it is no more and it is never going to be again. And if you are in the future, again you are unreal; it is not yet. And there is no way to plan for it, there is no way to manage it. It is beyond human control. It is so vast, and our hands are so small. Wavering, moving between these two non-existential states, man lives in misery.

To be relaxed means to be in the present. The pendulum has stopped exactly in the middle, and when the pendulum stops, the clouds stop. When you stop in the middle, the mind disappears, time

disappears. The clock really stops and suddenly the door opens for the infinity, for God, for nirvana.

Hence I say that relaxation is the only cure for the disease called man.

Once you have learned to live in a relaxed way you are no more a becoming - you are a being, as much as the trees are. And with one thing more which trees cannot manage: you are a conscious being. Trees are unconscious beings.

So if man misses - and millions of people miss, the majority misses - then he is lower than the trees and the rocks and the birds and the animals. But if a man can enter into this moment, this herenow, then the Buddha arises in him, the Christ-consciousness wells up. Then he is God himself, because to know God is to be God. In that knowing the knower becomes the known; in that state the lover becomes the beloved.

This is the meaning of your name. And you will have to watch more and more how many tensions you are carrying within you and have been carrying for so long. You may have become oblivious of them. You may have started taking them for granted, as if they are what life is supposed to be. They are not. Start watching, and the more watchful you become, the more you will be surprised at how many tensions you are holding, for no reason at all.

Sitting by the side of a tree you are thinking of the past. It is utterly pointless, stupid - the tree must be laughing at you! You are behaving in a very ridiculous way. Or sitting under the moon and thinking of the future.... The moon must be enjoying your foolishness, because life knows only the present. It is always now. So what? Relax! And whenever you see a tension arising, just let it go. I am not saying to fight with it: simply let it go. Take a deep breath, exhale, relax.

Slowly slowly you will become artful, skillful, in being closer and closer to the present. Then one day the mystery of all mysteries opens up: suddenly you have entered the present. And a single moment of that experience is enough; then you are never the same again.

[The new sannyasin teaches at university and asks if he can meditate with his students.]

Perfectly good - help them to meditate. Create a small group in the university, start meditating, help them to meditate. It will help immensely.

[The sannyasin says he has a pressure in his forehead which is disturbing, especially when he did vipassana.]

That will disappear if you have understood my message to you. It is a chronic tension there. I can see it, it is there - hence the name! Much pressure is there, but that pressure will disappear on its own. You have not to be concerned with it but be concerned with the cause of it.

Ordinarily we become too obsessed with the symptom. That is a symptom - that simply shows that whenever there is too much tension, the third eye becomes very burdened; all tensions zoom in on the third eye. And when you relax, the third eye opens up and all tensions disappear from there.

Don't become too concerned with the symptom. Otherwise, there are cures for the symptoms, but all those cures are repressive because they don't change the cause. They can drug you and then you can forget about it, but it is there.

Forgetting is not of any help. In fact forgetting it may be even more dangerous, because deep down like an undercurrent it will go on becoming bigger and bigger, and some day or other you will have to face it again. And by that time it will be bigger and the encounter will be more dangerous. The sooner you catch hold of something, the better. It is better to destroy something in the seed or in the bud; there is no need to wait. But never fight with the symptom. This is the cause.

You are in a tense state - start relaxing. Whenever you are sitting silently, just relax, become a rock or a tree, and you will be surprised: it will disappear! But something can be of help: acupuncture.

So if you can take a few sessions of acupuncture that will be of help. Here you can take them or back home.

Anand means bliss, samarpito means surrender - a blissful surrender. That is the whole purpose of being initiated into sannyas. Sannyas means surrender. Sannyas means dropping the idea of separation from existence. The very idea that we are separate is our problem. We are not, but we live rooted in this idea that we are separate. We make our whole life around this idea, that we are separate; hence our whole life is false - because the basic foundation is untrue.

We are not separate; it is all one. Nobody is separate; no man is an island, no man can be.

We cannot exist even for a single moment in separation. We are breathing existence in and out.

Existence is continually circulating within us; the ocean is circulating in our blood and the earth is constantly feeding us.... Not even for a single moment does the process stop.

But we live with a very false idea that we are separate; we are brought up with the idea. All the societies of the world up to now have been teaching every child that he is separate. They have been teaching the idea of ego. There was a reason - it was a necessary evil there was no way to avoid it, so I am not condemning those societies. It was inevitable in a sense, because the survival of the child depends on that false idea. If the child thinks that he is one with everything then he may start playing with a snake or may jump into the fire. The child has to be taught that he is separate, that he has to protect himself, has to compete with others, that life is a struggle and if you don't fight you will be nowhere and will be nobody.

Our whole education consists basically in teaching the ego in a subtle way. We teach competition, we teach ambition, we teach people how to be the first, and we create the desire, the great desire, to be first, we prepare everybody to fight with others as if all are enemies. This is needed for the survival of the child. But if a person continues to live with this idea then he remains childish; he never grows up.

A moment comes in life when this idea has to be transcended. It is a very small garment - was right for the child but is no more right for the adult, for the mature person. It is a staircase: the moment you have moved you need not cling to it. It is a boat: when you reach the other shore you have to leave it behind you need not carry it on your head forever. It is arbitrary, a very very necessary idea, but utterly false... a fictitious idea.

Sannyas means becoming aware again of the oneness of existence and slowly slowly withdrawing that idea of separation. It is relearning the truth. The truth was known to every child in the mother's womb; hence the desire to know the truth, hence the constant search for truth. It can be relearned, it can be recognized again.

To be initiated means that at least with one person, with the Master, you are dropping all ideas of separation. That is the beginning. In a very small measure you are dropping the idea of separation with me, and that will give you your first taste of oneness. And then you will drop it with others more and more and more, and one day you will be capable of dropping the whole nonsense totally. Then only God is.

"Samarpito" is one of the most beautiful words... very pregnant, has great meaning in it. Just the understanding of it can take you into new heights of experiences. So keep this in your heart from this moment, let this seed sink deep down: "I am not separate." Seeing a tree, feel one with it... a rose flower, feel one with it, and slowly slowly experiment with the idea of oneness - with the river, with the clouds and with the sky. Soon the knack will come and suddenly in a single moment you can change your gestalt, you can start feeling one. That is prayer, that is meditation.

[The new sannyasin says she hasn't done groups because she has been ill with liver trouble; now she's getting better... but feels her sickness was mental.]

It is possible... it is possible. It happens to many people when they come, mm? because it is really a drastic change in your life pattern, in your mind. And you are moving into something very unknown; it is going against the grain. So the body wants to escape and it creates a thousand and one excuses the mind will create troubles. But they disappear. Within two, three weeks they all disappear. Once the body and the mind have understood that there is nothing to fear, but rather something to rejoice in, then all these symptoms disappear.

So I will give you one or two groups, and when you start feeling perfectly healthy I will give you some more, mm?

Anand means blissful, Hasya means laughter - blissful laughter.

Seriousness is a dangerous disease, and we have been conditioned to be serious. Seriousness has become the very way of people's lives; they have lost all sense of humor. And to lose the sense of humor is to lose something so essential that it cannot be replaced by anything else it is irreplaceable. To lose the sense of humor is to lose contact with God, because that is our only connection. Seriousness is the greatest barrier between man and God, and it has to be dropped.

It is very paying - that is the problem - to be serious in the world is very paying. It makes you more successful, more efficient, more respectable. All that is true, but the more you succeed in the world, the more you fail in the inner; the more respectable you become in the world, the less and less respectable you are in your own eyes. The more you have medals and rewards and degrees, the less and less rich you are. One starts feeling very beggarly.

Only laughter makes a man rich, but the laughter has to be blissful. People laugh - even serious people laugh - but then their laughter has the quality of hysteria; it is pathological. It is almost like a freak-out. They have been repressing and repressing and repressing and trying to be serious.

Then one day it is too much and they cannot repress it any more and it comes. But then it comes like an hysterical fit, looks mad. That's why in the madhouses you will find people laughing tremendously; they are laughing because they are no more repressing it. But that laughter has no serenity, blissfulness, wisdom. It is just a turmoil, a mad noise. It has no beauty in it... it is not prayerful.

I teach a laughter which is blissful and I teach a madness which is the ultimate in sanity. And that's what sannyas is all about: a madness with a method, and a laughter so meditative, so prayerful, so serene, so quiet, that it is almost silent music.

And that you will have to learn, because I can see something serious around your heart. That seriousness has to be dropped; you have to become a child again. You have to revive that quality of wonder that every child comes with, the quality of awe. You have to run on the sea beaches again in the sun, collecting seashells. You have to start doing non-serious things - painting, poetry, music.

You have been doing serious kinds of things your whole life.

Now sannyas has to take you into a totally different dimension: the dimension of the non-serious, the dimension of the festive, because unless one can celebrate life one cannot be grateful to God.

And only in gratefulness is God known. The only proof that God exists is in the gratefulness of people who know how to celebrate. Hence down the ages it has been told: If you wish to seek God then seek the people who can laugh, who can enjoy, who can celebrate. There you will find the first glimpses of the divine humor.

Particularly in the East we have not made God very serious. He plays a flute and sings a song and dances. He is a dancer and a painter and a poet and this world is his painting, his song, his dance. We don't think of God as a creator - that word is bombastic. We think of him as a player, and existence we call leela, a play. And that word "play" is the sense of humor.

We are participating in a great drama so there is nothing to be serious about... nothing at all. This has to be your fundamental insight. It will transform you and that will bring many many experiences, insights, blessings, to you. That will become the opening of the door.

Veet means beyond, anubhavo means experience. God is beyond all experience. You cannot experience God because he is not separate from you. You can live God, you can be God, but you cannot experience him. We can experience things only when they are separate from us. You cannot see yourself, and God is your innermost core - you cannot see God either.

So people who search for God as if God is an object are on a wrong journey from the very beginning.

They will be frustrated, and out of frustration they can start creating hallucinations too. Because when one has worked for thirty years and meditated and prayed and has gone to the monasteries and remained celibate and has wasted one's whole life and sees frustration, then the mind starts giving consolation prizes: the mind gives you hallucinatory experiences.

If you are a Hindu you see Krishna standing before you, and that is just an hallucination. If you are a Christian you see Christ. The Christian never sees Krishna, the Hindu never sees Christ; the Mohammedan is blissfully unaware of both. You see only that which you are projecting. Because down the ages God has been thought of as a person, hallucinations become possible. Because he was thought of as something that can be experienced, people went on wrong journeys and wasted their lives.

God cannot be experienced, cannot be searched for, cannot be seen, because you are it. You are already it, so what is needed is not search; all that is needed is to start celebrating. You are God! There is no need to postpone your celebration even for a single moment, because in the next moment also you will be God, as much as you are right now. Yesterday also you were as much a God as you are right now or will ever be. You are the same God always. Just a little daring is needed to celebrate it, a little daring to accept this tremendous truth of "I am God!" It is very difficult because the so-called saints have been teaching you that you are a sinner, that you are unworthy, that you will be thrown into hellfire - that's where you belong. How can you suddenly believe that you are a God? It seems outrageous, outlandish, but it is the truth, and truth is always outlandish. Lies are conventional, truth is always outlandish. People live in lies, they accept lies because lies are very consolatory. Truth is very shattering.

To recognize yourself as God does not mean that you are God and others are not God. To recognize yourself as God means that everything is divine, even your enemy. Not only is Jesus God but Judas too! That is very shattering... that is very difficult. Not only is the beautiful person God, but the ugliest, he too is God because nothing else exists. God is synonymous with existence.

So never search for experiences. All experiences are false and of the mind. It makes no difference whether you go into an experience through a drug or through yoga - it makes no difference, basically there is no difference. One can get high through LSD, marijuana, or, if one is conventional, through alcohol; one can get high through certain postures, through certain breathing exercises, standing on one's head. These are also ways to change your inner chemistry, subtle ways to change your chemistry.

LSD does it in a gross way, yoga does it in a subtle way, but both are changing your body chemistry.

Fasting also does it in a subtle way: it changes your chemistry, certainly, because you stop taking food which was always needed. Your chemistry inside has to change; it has to adjust to your non- taking of food. A few elements disappear, a few elements gather too much; the old balance is lost.

After a thirty-day fast you can be as high, as stoned, as on any drug. These are conventional drugs but the search is the same. The person who is in drugs is searching for experiences and the person in yoga is also searching for experiences.

My approach is that we are not searching for experiences here. We are trying to know the one who experiences all experiences. Our search is for the witness. Who is this observer? Who is this consciousness? Sometimes it feels sad, sometimes it feels happy; sometimes it is so high, flying in the sky, and sometimes so down. Who is this watcher of all these games? - high and low, happy, unhappy, in heaven and hell. Who is this watcher?

To know this watcher is to know God. And you are already it - just a little awakening is needed... no search but only awakening.

[A sannyasin says she is afraid of meeting her parents.]

I will take care - just go and don t be afraid. It is always difficult to meet the parents, the most difficult thing, because between children and parents so many barriers exist; they have been created by the parents.

The children are always afraid. The fear is that if they are true then the parents are hurt. If they want to satisfy the parents they have to be untrue; then it hurts them. This is the problem. Parents don t allow authenticity they don't want you to be yourself. They have a certain idea of how you should be, what you should be. If you are that, they are happy; if you are not that, they are unhappy. And nobody can fulfill their idea, nobody at all, because you are not here in this world to fulfill anybody's idea. And your parents cannot conceive who you are going to be. The future is open - utterly open and unpredictable - but each parent tries to control the future and each parent feels frustrated.

It is very difficult to find a parent who is satisfied. Not even the father of Buddha was satisfied. Now, where can you get a better son? But his ideas were not fulfilled. He wanted him to become a great king - naturally. He was a king and he wanted his son to become even greater. For centuries they had been kings - they had a long tradition of royalty - and they wanted the son to have more money, more power, a greater empire. And the son was really frustrating: he became a beggar! Just think of the man in his old age... and the only son simply escaped! The father was really hurt, he was really angry.

Nobody can fulfill the idea of the parents, and if you try to you will remain miserable your whole life because you will be carrying somebody else's idea in your head, which is not you. You will be false.

So if you carry the idea, you are false, you are untrue to yourself, and because you are false and you are miserable and you cannot bloom, you cannot forgive your parents either. It is because of them that this whole pseudo personality has happened. Or, if you want to be yourself and you start moving on your own way then the fear arises, and that is the fear.

Now you are a sannyasin - you are growing in your own way.... It is very wild for your parents.

They could never have dreamed of you in orange! Even in their wildest dreams they could not have thought of their daughter becoming a sannyasin, being hypnotized by some unknown man in India!

It is natural, but don't be worried.

Just go, be loving, be respectful. Just be with them, let them feel what has happened to you. The first few days will be a little embarrassing for you and embarrassing for them too, but after a few days, after the initial impact, once it settles, they will see, because they love you! Even if their ideas are wrong, their love is true. Even if their concepts of how you should be are not according to your nature, still their motive is just love and nothing else. They want you to be happy, they want you to grow and have a beautiful life. So when they see that you are really having a beautiful life - you have become better than you were ever before - the embarrassment will disappear. And soon you will find yourselves bridged more closely than ever before.

So just go. Don't argue - let them feel you. Arguments create barriers, arguments make people blind. Don't argue. If they say something against me, don't become irritated. They don't know anything about me. Just let them feel you. Meditate, dance, be loving, and just be there silently in the house, as if you are almost absent. When they feel this new quality - that you are present yet absent, that you are moving as if you are not, that you are so full of love, that you are not getting angry easily, that you are not argumentative, that you are not nasty to them - immediately the change will happen. And they will start coming closer to you. And if they can come closer to you, they will be able to come closer to me; that's the only way. Then introduce them too. Tell them about meditation and what has happened to you, but not from the beginning.

First let the initial embarrassment disappear. When you start feeling a communion arising, then talk about me - talk about what has happened here, what you have been doing here. And this is my experience: almost without exception my sannyasins have been able to bridge themselves with their parents very easily.

[A sannyasin says she has been sick with hepatitis and other diseases here. She has no sexual energy, and thinks about food all the time. Osho checks her energy.]

It is a very simple thing - you just have to see the point. One thing is: whenever you don't allow sex energy to move rightly it starts getting obsessed with food. Food and sex are polarities; they balance each other. If you have too much sexuality your interest in food will disappear. If you have too much non-sexuality your interest in food will become almost an obsession. So you cannot do anything directly about your food, and if you try to, you will be constantly in trouble. For a few days you can manage forcibly, but then you will have the problem back again, and it will be back with a vengeance. You will have to work on your sexual energy.

The problem arises because the first experiences of food and love for the child are very deeply associated. He gets food from the mother's breast and love too. When the child gets love he is not worried about milk; the mother has to persuade him. If the child is not getting love then he does not leave the breast, because he is afraid about the future. He has to drink as much as he can because he cannot be certain when the mother will be available. If the child gets love he is secure; he does not bother. Whenever there is need the mother will be available; he can trust her love. But if the mother is not loving then the child cannot trust; then he has to drink as much as he can.

He goes on overeating.

And the same is the situation... you can see: in poor families children will have big stomachs because the food is so scarce that whenever they can get food they overstuff themselves. The richer the family, the smaller will be the stomach of the child. It looks very absurd, because when you see poor people starving, their whole bodies are thin and yet their stomachs are too big. It doesn't look right, it doesn't look arithmetical. If they are starving then why do they have such big stomachs? Because they are starving they cannot trust tomorrow, so whatsoever they can get, anything they can get, they go on stuffing in. Their stomachs become their storage. So if the child does not get love he becomes interested in food. If he gets love he is not interested in food, or has just a natural interest - as much as is needed by the body.

That's what is happening to you: somehow you have been blocking your love energy. That blocked love energy is becoming your interest in food. If you want to change it you will have to move into love a little more, you will have to become more loving. Love your own body - begin from there; enjoy your own body. It is a beautiful phenomenon, it is such a gift. Dance, sing, feel and touch your own body.

The problem is that if you don't love your own body, you will not allow anybody else to love your body.

In fact the person who tries to be loving towards you will look ridiculous, foolish, stupid. Because you cannot love your body, what is he seeing in you? You don't see anything! Unless you start seeing the beauty of your own body you will not be able to accept somebody else's love. The very idea that he is loving towards you shows that he is stupid and nothing else. So be loving to your body.

And if any opportunity arises where you can be loving, hugging, holding hands, don't miss those opportunities. And you will be surprised: as you start moving into love the food problem will be solved automatically. To be in love is a great experience and to go on stuffing food is a very miserable experience. Not that food is not beautiful, but food is beautiful only when taken in certain quantities that you can absorb. When you take too much it is nauseating.

This is one thing beautiful about love: love is never too much. Nobody can love to the extreme, nobody; there is no extreme in it. Because when you eat, you stuff things in; when you love, you share, you give. It is an unburdening phenomenon. And the more you give, the more your energy starts flowing. You become a river, no more a stagnant pool.

That's what you have done; that's my feeling about your energy: you have made it a stagnant pool.

Break the walls! You are unnecessarily missing something beautiful which love and only love can bring, and instead are suffering with this problem of food.