Darshan 25 September 1978
Veet means beyond, chhitijo means horizon - beyond the horizon, beyond the horizontal. Life consists of two dimensions: one is horizontal, the other is vertical. Millions of people simply live in the horizontal - they crawl and creep, they remain asleep. That's why in sleep you have to go to the horizontal position. It is easier to fall asleep in the horizontal position; if you are standing it is difficult to fall asleep.
Hence, animals have remained unconscious; they are in the horizontal position. The great revolution that happened on the earth happened with a few monkeys. They took the greatest revolutionary step ever - they started to stand erect, they changed the posture of the body, they became vertical.
With that verticalness something immensely important changed in their very being: consciousness entered. Man's standing erect has been the greatest evolutionary step in existence. But this is only a physical verticalness. There is, parallel to it, a spiritual verticalness, and that is the work of meditation: to help you to become vertical in your inner consciousness, in your awareness.
The Christian symbol of the cross represents these two dimensions. The one part - on which Jesus' hands are nailed - is horizontal. The other part - on which his whole body is nailed - is vertical.
That cross is an ancient symbol, more ancient than Christianity or Christ. It simply shows: don't exhaust your life in the horizontal. Life does not consist of the horizontal only. To become mindful of the vertical is the beginning of a journey that ends in God. The more aware you are, the more vertical you are.
So become more alert, even in ordinary day-to-day functions: walking, don't just walk - be alert too.
Otherwise you walk like a sleepwalker. Then you are physically vertical, but spiritually horizontal.
If you are alert you are physically vertical and spiritually vertical, and when both these are vertical, great ecstasy starts happening. Something from the beyond penetrates you... you become open to the beyond.
The horizontal is the dimension of the world and the vertical is the dimension of religion. I am not against the horizontal, because that is the very base. I am not against sleep either - it is relaxing; but it is relaxing only if you know what it is to be vertical. And the horizontal is a base only if you start creating a vertical temple; then it becomes a foundation. Otherwise it is only a foundation - futile, meaningless. Hence the meaninglessness in the world. Everybody feels that life is meaningless because it is just a foundation and there is no temple - there is no house to live in; just the foundation is there. You cannot live in it, it cannot give you a shelter, it cannot protect you. It is useless unless a temple is raised.
Once the temple is raised the foundation is useful, utterly useful. Without the foundation there will be no temple either, but only with the temple does the foundation start having significance. The moment you are vertical your horizontal life becomes meaningful. The vertical brings meaning, significance.
The very touch of it and life is a poem, a song, a celebration.
And the vertical is born by becoming more and more alert. While you are eating, be alert too. Why does it happen that by being alert one becomes vertical? There is a fundamental law behind it:
when you are alert you are in the present; when you are not alert then you are either in the past or in the future. The past and the future are parts of the horizontal; the present is part of the vertical.
The past goes on like a line moving backwards - a line, a vertical line like the horizon. So does the future: in the opposite direction again a line goes on moving into infinity. But the present is not a line.
It does not move backwards or forwards; it has height and depth. Its movement is totally different. It is an entry into eternity, not in time.
Time is horizontal, eternity is vertical. When you are utterly in the present there is no mind, because the mind consists of the past and the future, memory and imagination When you are in the present - alert, utterly alert, awake, watchful, mindful - there is no mind, there is only silence. In that silence you start falling into the abyss. That abyss is God. That emptiness is God. Hence God is indefinable.
It has no form... it is pure emptiness, and only a very few courageous people gather enough courage to take the jump.
But once you have taken the jump, you know that by dissolving you have come home, that by dropping the mind, you have become a being, that by dropping time you have become deathless.
Deva means divine, urjo means energy - divine energy. There is a very famous statement of William Blake; it says "Energy is delight." It is one of the most profound statements ever made by any poet or any mystic. He was both - a poet and a mystic. It contains a great secret. Delight is nothing but overflowing energy. When you cannot contain it - it is so much that it starts overflowing - that is delight. All that is needed is to become a container, all that is needed is to become a great reservoir.
People are unnecessarily searching for bliss. They will never find it. In fact in searching for it they will dissipate more energy. In their very pilgrimage they will be wasting all possibilities and opportunities of being blissful.
The man who attains to bliss is the man who does not seek, because seeking is dissipating energy.
All searching is wasting energy. Once this is understood one becomes a container. One simply does not dissipate energy in any way. Such a man will not get angry. Not that anger is bad, not that to be angry is not gentlemanly, not that to be angry is immoral, not that if you are angry you will fall into hell fire - no - but just because he knows that the energy is wasted and he will have missed an opportunity of being blissful.
Such a man becomes very alert about what he is doing with his energy. And the more you become alert, the more you will be surprised: almost ninety percent of things that you have been doing and wasting your energy in are utterly useless. You could have avoided them very easily, with no loss to yourself. And the remaining ten percent is not harmful to the energy; the remaining ten percent is nourishing to it.
So that which nourishes your energy is religion and that which dissipates your energy is irreligion.
This is my definition of religion. That which preserves, conserves, is moral. It has nothing to do with the other, it has nothing to do with the Ten Commandments of the Bible - it simply has something to do with the SCience of energy. Hate is immoral because it dissipates energy. Love is moral because it nourishes energy. The more you love, the more you have; the more you hate, the less you have.
Hate takes something out of you and love brings something in.
Whenever you love you will immediately find that you are soaring high, that you are more than you were before. The feeling of expanded consciousness is a byproduct of love. When you hate, you shrink; when you become angry, you become small. Not only in the eyes of others, in your own eyes you become small. Something inside you starts hiding. So let this be the criterion: whatsoever helps your energy to become more is good. Whatsoever destroys it, dissipates it, harms it, is bad.
And you will be surprised that thousands of things simply become impossible - you cannot do them, because they are foolish. Not that they are going to take you to hell or you will be punished on the last day of judgment - all that nonsense... nothing. The punishment is immediate. God cannot wait that long! The moment you dissipate energy you become miserable; the result is immediate. It is not going to wait for the last judgment. It happens this very moment, instantly. And so it is with reward: whenever you do something nourishing, health-giving, that brings well-being to you, you are rewarded.
So this is a valid criterion, an existential criterion. Always keep it in mind.
Whenever you are doing something, remember: if it is existentially valid in the sense that it nourishes you, fulfills you, makes you healthier, holier, more integrated, more centered, more alive, aflame, then it is good, then it is virtue; otherwise it is a sin. There is no need for any other, outward criterion.
No authority has to be consulted. No moral code has to be used as a criterion for judgment, but this simple existential experience: you feel nourished, it is good; you feel starved - a kind of sinking feeling, shrinking, you become less than you were before - then be aware, you have been wasting your energy.
Modern science has discovered a significant law. The law is that every qualitative change is basically a quantitative change. First the quantitative change happens and then the qualitative change comes.
The qualitative is not really different from the quantitative change. For example, if you heat water it remains water even when it is ninety-nine point nine degrees. Point one degree more and it evaporates; at one hundred degrees it evaporates. So you go on giving more and more quantity of heat to the water and then suddenly a jump, a qualitative change. Now, vapor is totally different from water. In many symbolic ways too it is different: water moves downwards, vapor moves upwards; water can be seen, vapor soon becomes invisible. If you are thirsty water can be of help - vapor will not do. It is qualitatively different now, but the change was coming through the quantitative change.
And exactly the same is the case inside, in the inner world: you go on conserving energy - at a certain degree, at one hundred degrees, a qualitative change happens. Suddenly misery disappears, misery is no more found. You are blissful, you are overflowing.
I totally agree with William Blake: energy is delight. There is no need to go anywhere - just become a great container of energy. The first thing is: drop useless activities... minimize; all that is useless cancel it. Because each person is born with infinite capacities, but we dissipate those capacities and then we remain poor, beggarly. We live like beggars and we die like beggars. But we are not born beggars; we are born emperors. Then we start losing our treasures in utterly futile activities.
You don't know how much we dissipate when we are anxious, when we are tense. You don't know how much we dissipate when we go on thinking utterly foolish and mad thoughts. Now there are ways to measure it. Fifteen minutes of anxiety dissipates as much energy as one hour's physical activity - digging a hole in the garden or chopping wood for one hour. Fifteen minutes of anxiety dissipates as much energy as you will dissipate in one hour's chopping of wood. And after one hour you will at least have chopped wood with you, and after fifteen minutes of anxiety, nothing - just an empty person, lost, angry with himself, boiling, almost in a state of madness.
So first one has to drop all unnecessary physical activities, then all unnecessary mental activities.
This is the path of meditation. Slowly slowly you conserve so much that one day you have so much that it starts overflowing out of no motivation at all.
When energy flows, overflows, without any motivation, it becomes delight. That is the moment when you have started pouring into God. And the moment you start pouring into God, God starts pouring into you - it happens simultaneously.
[The new sannyasin says: I don't spend much energy in searching these days; I'm more concerned with healing my body... And in trying to balance up this.... ]
This is going to happen - that's my message. Just be here, do a few meditations, sit silently. Just enjoy! Just enjoy the sheer being, the sheer joy that we are... the sheer joy of the sky and the trees and the birds and the people, this miracle that is happening around you, this fantastic world, this incredible existence. Just enjoy it and it will start showering many new flowers on you. Simply remain still, silent, absorbing, and the energy will accumulate, will become a reservoir, and one day it starts overflowing for no reason at all - not that it is going to search for anything, not that it has any motivation, not that it has any goal, nothing... for no reason at all but simply because it is too much and you cannot contain it. And it is not that you are trying to pour it into existence, no. It is happening on its own - you are just a watcher. And there is delight, and there is celebration.
[A sannyasin says that he is leaving, and though while doing groups he felt an opening, now he feels he's closing off, that something odd is happening to his energy.]
The group is a very artificial situation. One should not expect that what happens in a group will remain the same after the group. The group only gives you a glimpse; it cannot change you. It only gives you an experience. That experience becomes proof that change is possible. But the group cannot change you, no group can change you; otherwise change would be very cheap. But still the group does great significant work: it gives you proof that, yes, change is possible. Even in you change is possible. You need not believe in darkness - you have seen something. But that vision is like when you are lost in a dark night in a jungle and suddenly, the lightning. For a moment all is light and you see the path winding through the trees, then the lightning has disappeared....
You cannot expect to go on seeing that path, but now you know it is; and that is tremendously significant. Now you have to search in the darkness again, but now you will be searching with a trust. Before the lightning there was no possibility of trust; you were searching utterly in darkness.
Maybe there is a path, maybe there is none. Who knows? How to believe it? There is no evidence of it. In fact all the evidence is contrary to it.
You are lost - that is enough evidence that there is no path - and you have been searching long, and still you have not found. Maybe it doesn't exist. Maybe the people who say that it exists are deceivers, or, even if they are not deceivers then maybe they themselves are deceived. They have seen something in a dream, they have been hallucinating. Who knows? Or they may have auto-hypnotized themselves. Who knows? Or they may just be cheats and trying to exploit innocent people, giving them great ideas and ideals of finding the path and reaching God... just driving people unnecessarily crazy, and exploiting their craziness. Maybe they simply want to become leaders and they are in search of followers - they are on an ego trip. All these are possibilities.
But once you have seen the lightning and once you have seen the path, again there is darkness; in fact, more darkness than before, because when light happens and it goes it leaves you in more darkness than before. Your eyes have to become accustomed to the darkness again; the light has been such a disturbance. A group is a lightning experience....
One should not become a group addict. You can become a group addict if you start thinking that a group is going to change you. No group can change you - only you can change yourself - but the group can give you insights.
So it was just an insight, an opening. Now you are out of the group and that insight is no more there; you are closing. Now you will have to work it out in your day to day life. You cannot live in a group forever. Now you will have to seek and search in your ordinary day to day life how to remain open. You will have to look and see what you were doing in the group. Why can't you do it outside?
How were you relating with people? Why can't you relate the same way with your woman, with your friends, with your parents, outside? You will have to risk, you will have to experiment. And there will be many mistakes and many errors, but that's how one grows; by trial and error one evolves. Soon you will find that even in ordinary day to day life, one can remain open. But for that you will have to work. You cannot depend only on the group. That dependence is what I call "addiction." This is just a withdrawal symptom. It is just like a drug: you take a drug and you feel good. One day you stop the drug, then there is a withdrawal: your whole body hankers for it, your whole mind asks for it and creates trouble for you. So when you go into many groups - and it is good to go into them, but a danger is there - you may become addicted to groups like drugs. Then there will be this withdrawal symptom. Then you will suffer, you will miss. You will feel that you are not as alive as you were in the group, that you are not as open as you were in the group, that now things are closing again, and it will create much anxiety in you and sadness. But that is natural.
After each great opening in a group this is going to happen. This will only not happen to those people who remained closed in the group; then the group didn't work for them. So they are perfectly happy - outside, inside, they are the same. But something has happened to you, and that is good, you are fortunate. A window opened for a moment and you have seen something beyond yourself.
It was a fleeting moment; in the beginning it has to be that way. So now you will have to work hard for it in your normal life.
The group life is not a normal life. It is a very artificially created situation in which things happen, are forced to happen, which may not have happened in years. Within days and hours they are forced to happen. It is a very very special situation. You will not find that situation readymade outside, but you can use outside situations. Now that you know something is possible you can start working.
For example, if you love a woman, be utterly honest and sincere to her. And that becomes a group; let it be an encounter. And tell her also to be sincere and honest, whatsoever the cost. It is costly, because it will hurt. It will hurt like hell many times, because you are walking with your woman and suddenly she sees a man walking and she says, "Look. I am attracted towards that man - for a moment I had completely forgotten you." She is being honest, but it hurts. Nothing is wrong in being attracted to that man; she is not comparing you to that man. In that moment you were not there so how can she compare? In that moment you were simply forgotten.
Now, ordinarily we don't say these things to each other. It is said that if every person starts saying the truth, then there will be no friendship in the world, no friendship at all - no lovers, no friendship, no marriage, nothing. All these things will simply disappear Then it will be a group, the whole situation will be a group. Then everywhere you will be continuously in a group situation.
But one can work slowly, particularly in intimate relationships. And if both are willing to go into the depth of sincerity and honesty, it pays. Your love will become deeper; it will have something of the beyond in it soon. If you can be honest and yet together, if you can suffer the agony that honesty brings, then one day the ecstasy that honesty, only honesty, can bring also follows.
So small groups you can create with your friends, with intimate people, slowly slowly. And as you become more and more integrated and centered, more and more open, you can start being more honest to people who are not very intimate either, because then you will know how to tackle the situation of being open. Then even with strangers you can be open. Nothing will be lost, and incredible, immense will be the gain. But that will take years.
A group simply gives you a key. Now you have the key, try to open locks in life with the key. And whenever you are able to open a lock on your own, without the group leader and the group situation, your joy will be far more important, far deeper, far more profound, because you have done it on your own. You will have the feeling of freedom too, and you will know now that you can use this key.
You will have to work on it. Something good has happened, now follow the track. And don't start doing too much, otherwise you can spoil the whole thing. Go slowly slowly - first with the person you are very closely related to, and that too in homeopathic doses, just small doses so that one becomes accustomed slowly slowly; then go on increasing the doses. Don't start with allopathic doses, because sometimes even nectar can become poison if you cannot absorb it, and vice versa:
if you can absorb poison, slowly slowly it can become nectar. It all depends on how much you can absorb. And to absorb truth one needs great preparation.
So go and start small experiments in life on your own. You are ready for that, and within six months' time you will be able to open up on your own, and that will be very very healthy. You will have the feeling that now you can open on your own - it is your freedom: you can choose whether to remain closed or open. And you don't depend on anything, you are not addicted to anything. To be addicted is bad. It gives you a kind of dependence. And all addictions are bad. There are no good addictions - addiction as such is bad. So go and experiment.
My whole idea here is to just give you a few glimpses of life so that you can go and experiment in the greater world. I am not against the world - I am all for it - but if you can live in a totally different way in the same world, you will be surprised: this very earth is the lotus paradise, and this very body the Buddha.
Prem means love, sudheer can mean two things: one is patience, the other is wisdom. It means both, because wisdom comes through patience, and also only wise people can be patient. The fools are in such a hurry, always in a hurry. And this century is proving itself very foolish because of its hurry. If we have lost anything important in this century it is patience. And because we have lost patience we have lost God, we have lost wisdom. Now people are more knowledgeable than ever, but less wise than ever. Buddha was not so knowledgeable, nor was Jesus. Any schoolboy knows more than Buddha and Jesus, but even if we put all our professors together they are not wise compared to a single Buddha.
Wisdom is something totally different from knowledge. Knowledge is information gathered from outside; it is borrowed, it is never original. Hence it has no beauty and no life; it is a dead weight.
Wisdom is a growth inside. In wisdom you become a tree... great foliage, fruits and flowers, and they come from you! Wisdom is original, it is yours; hence it is authentic. It has strength and it has beauty and it is alive. Its very touch is enough to transform anything into gold.
So you have to learn a few things. One: love. People have a wrong notion; they think they already know what love is. Nobody knows. Everybody is born with the capacity to be loving just as everybody is born with the capacity to swim. But still one has to learn swimming, and in the same way one has to learn loving. They are both alike; swimming and loving have something very similar.
What do you do when you learn swimming? It is not really an active process. You have only to learn how to float. Floating is a passive phenomenon - but not utterly passive either. It is neither only activity nor only passivity, but something higher than both, transcendent to them both. If you are absolutely passive you will be drowned. If you are absolutely active you will never learn how to swim and you will be exhausted very soon. You will be tired by your own activity. The real swimmer knows how to cooperate with the energy of the water, how to be in harmony with the energy of the water, how to use the capacity of the water in such a way that he is not in conflict with it.
That is how to learn cooperation, so there is no conflict at all. You are neither active nor passive buy in a total understanding with the water element. It is a kind of love/awareness relationship A great love is needed for the water; only then does water reveal its mysteries to you. And great awareness is needed so you are not drowned. You have to be passive so that you don't start fighting with the water, and you have to be active so that the energy of the water does not become too much and drown you. You have to keep a balance.
That's what in China they call action without action - wei wu wei. That is the whole secret of Tao and that is the whole secret of love too. Love cannot be active, otherwise it becomes acting. Love cannot be absolutely passive either, otherwise it becomes dull, dead. It has to keep a certain balance between activity and inactivity. It has to be action without action. It is a great art, the greatest. If one can know love, and be love, one has known all that this life has to give, that is worth knowing.
And to know love one has to be very very patient. Love is a slow-growing plant: it needs time, intimacy, patience. You cannot pull the plant forcibly upwards, you cannot pull the leaves out of the plant, you cannot force the buds to become flowers; otherwise you will cripple the whole phenomenon. Love needs the climate of patience, and if one is loving and patient, wisdom comes of its own accord. It simply showers on you.
I teach love, I teach patience, so that wisdom becomes attracted towards you, starts moving towards you. This existence is full of wisdom. That is the meaning when we say that the existence is full of God. That is another way of saying the same thing - that existence is utterly intelligent, it is full of wisdom It is just that we are stupid because we don't know how to relate to this wisdom, how to come to terms with this wisdom that fills the whole existence. It is a superb masterpiece of wisdom.
So become loving, become patient. Drop all hurry, all impatience. There is no shortcut to wisdom. If somebody tries a shortcut he becomes a victim of knowledge Wisdom comes of its own accord, in its Own time; one cannot force it. One has to wait... with great love, with an inviting heart, with great longing, aflame, but still waiting patiently....
[A sannyasin in the Indian movie business says he is going through hell in his work until he can be finished and come to the new commune. Osho tells him to be finished in six months.]
It will be good. These six months, let them be hell but enjoy it! Because hell also has a few beautiful things in it, and when you are in heaven, you start missing hell, so you have to go through the experience.
Just be finished with it - six to eight months at the most. Mm, you have to come to the new commune.
And tell [his wife] also - she is going into a far deeper hell. So let her... mm?
It is good - you will feel very good coming back. This suffering will make you aware of what you are missing. Otherwise if you had remained in Poona you would never have known. So sometimes it is good to go away from home and suffer; then one comes back and rediscovers the home. It is going to be real discovery. And the more you suffer, the better! Good.