Darshan 27 September 1978

Veet means beyond, prabhavo means impressions, influences, conditionings - beyond all impressions, beyond all influences, beyond all conditionings. That is where truth is. That's why the mind cannot know it, because the mind consists only of conditionings. Whatsoever has been taught, whatsoever has been put inside you from the outside is your mind. It is a deep effort, a cunning effort of the society to control you from within.

The society tries to impress children, influence children, to condition children. Hence the child becomes a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a communist, an atheist, a theist. This is the manipulation of the parents and the parental society; and the child is completely unaware of what is being done to him. His mind is being fed with certain ideas Those ideas will become intrinsic to him and he wili think later on that those ideas are his ideas. They are not; they are all borrowed. The society has exploited the situation - the child was helpless. It was just a coincidence that he was born in a Christian family, in India or in Japan; it was a coincidence, but he was helpless. His sheet was completely blank and then the parents and the society started writing on that blank sheet.

That's what the mind is. The mind can never know the truth because truth cannot be taught. It can only be experienced, it can only be original; it can never be borrowed. All the methods of meditation are nothing but an effort to disconnect you from the mind. Once you have started seeing yourself separate from the mind, you are free from society, you are free from the past, and you are free to live in your own way... free to be yourself. That is the meaning of your name: one has to go beyond all influences. All influences create slavery, bondage, imprisonment.

A sannyasin has to be utterly free from all influences. He has to be himself or herself, authentic, true, and at whatsoever the cost, whatsoever the risk - because life is more valuable than any other thing, and to be respectful towards life means one has to be authentic, true. Truth is not something that can be given from anybody else to you; it cannot be transferred. Only you can go into it... alone,

absolutely alone. Hence meditations prepare you to go into your inner being, in utter aloneness, solitude, silence. It is there that one meets truth or God. And the moment you have seen your truth, life becomes love.

Love is a consequence of the realization of truth. Love is a shadow. Only a true person can be a loving person. A false person cannot be loving. He can only pretend, he can only put up a front. That is the meaning of the word "pretend": he can only play a role, he can wear a mask, he can smile.

He can go through the empty gestures, the motions of love, but there is no love possible because he himself is a lie, and whatsoever he is doing is Iying. Even in his very very intimate moments he remains a pretender because he has not yet recognized himself as something beyond the mind.

Once you know who you are, not as taught by others but directly, immediately, the truth is achieved and love follows like a shadow....

But love can come only when truth has arrived. There is no other way for love to Come. Love is a byproduct. One cannot be loving unless one is true. So whenever you are true, you are loving - of necessity. The man of truth is full of love.

[A sannyasin says in the last few months there were moments when he did not know who he was - much sadness came up... as if something in his throat opened.]

It is a beautiful experience - just your interpretation went wrong, and the mind always interprets in a wrong way. The mind can only interpret in a wrong way, because it is beyond the mind to understand what is happening when such moments come. Those moments are incomprehensible.

For excample, the mind believes that you are a person, and you are not; you are only a presence, not a person. A person is a static thing, defined, well-defined, structured, with a name, form, label.

A presence is an undefined, vague cloud. You can feel it but you cannot say what it is. The person is definable - you can pinpoint it; the presence cannot be pin-pointed.

This is a great experience, to know that you don't know who you are. This is the beginning of a transformation. This is what I call real knowing. It is not knowledge, it is knowing. It is not information, it is transformation. The person is dissolving and the presence is arising. The presence is vast, infinite. The person is really a false entity that we have created to cling to. It will be very difficult to live as a presence. We live as persons. It is manageable, it is utilitarian. But when you start meditating and the meditation goes deeper, it is bound to reveal one day or other that the person is only a utilitarian device... you are not a person.

One cannot know who one is. This is the beginning of knowing oneself. This is the state of innocence. This is what Socrates means when he says, "I don't know," or, "All that I know is that I don't know anything." This is a blissful moment of ignorance... utterly clean, clear, transparent. Yes, it is not a moment of knowledge, so you cannot say who you are - there is no need to either.

Relax into this presence. Become more and more available to it. Invite it more and more, and whenever you can find time, just put your person aside and become a presence, a nonentity, a nobody, a nothingness, a no-thing-ness. This is how God comes in! This is what Buddha calls nirvana. Ceasing to be is the real beginning of being.

This no-thing-ness is the gate. Enter into it and you will arrive at absolute being. But that too never becomes knowledge; it remains an existential taste, utterly inexpressible. That is the difficulty of all the great mystics: they cannot say what has happened to them, they feel dumb. They can only give their love. They can share their presence, but they cannot say a single word about what it is. They can show the way, they can point the way, but they cannot say where you will arrive. They cannot indicate the goal, because the goal is so vast.

Man is not separate from the whole. Man is just a wave in the ocean. When the wave thinks, "I am separate from the ocean," it is a person. When the wave comes suddenly to know that it is not separate from the ocean, it is a presence.... This is the difference between a person and a presence.

A Buddha is a presence, a Jesus is a presence; they are not persons. If you go into them to search for a person you will never find anybody there; the house is utterly empty. That is the beauty of it, that is the silence of it. This is what Zen people call "the sound of one hand clapping." If you ask me, it is even deeper really: it is the sound of no hand clapping. There is neither one nor two; there is nobody. If you Come into me there is nobody. The deeper you go into me, the less and less you will find me, and at the deepest core, just an open sky, with no boundaries... unbounded.

These moments were beautiful these moments are the moments of meditative consciousness. But our minds cling to the idea of a person, the ego - "I am this, I am that." So when these moments come the mind starts feeling restless. It cannot digest these moments, because to digest them will be a death to the mind. The mind rejects them, condemns them becomes sad. That sadness came from your mind That was an effort of the mind to contaminate the whole experience so you would forget all about it. It is a sad experience, an experience of despair, of emptiness... not of nothingness but of emptiness.

Emptiness means a negative nothingness, and nothingness means a positive emptiness. Not that there is nothing - when the wave comes to know that it is the ocean, it is not an emptiness. Yes, as a wave it is nothing, but as the ocean it is all. It is very very positive.

But the mind will give a fight, it will struggle to survive. It will try to convince you, "This is a very sad thing. Don't go into it again." Yes, it is sad for the mind because it is death for the mind, it heralds nothing but death for the mind. But the death of the mind is your life, real life.

A person is a facade, mm? That is the meaning of the word "person" - it comes from persona. In Greek theater the actors had to put up a mask in front of their faces and they would speak from behind the mask. Sona means sound; persona means sound coming from the mask. You cannot see the real face of the person - you can simply hear the sound. You know the mask is false; somebody else is behind it, but who, nobody knows. The word "person" comes from persona. A person is a mask.

And not only do we have one mask; we have masks upon masks, because we need different masks for different situations. When you are talking to your friend you need one kind of mask. When you are looking at your enemy you need another kind of mask; you cannot use the same mask. You cannot smile the way you smile when you see your friend. When you are talking to your wife you have a different mask. When you are talking to your servant, of course, a different mask. And when you are talking to your boss, certainly a different mask. So we have many masks, subtle, and we go on changing them moment to moment. This is what our person consists of: a pile of masks which automatically change; they go on changing.

There is a Russian story of Turgenev's: Two policemen are walking on the street and they come across a man who has been bitten by a dog and the man is beating the poor dog badly. So one policeman catches hold of the man and says, "What are you doing? Do you know whose dog this is? It is the dog of the Inspector General of the policel" And he hits the man. The other policeman picks up the dog and starts patting the dog. Then the first policeman looks at the dog and he says, "No, I am wrong. This is not the dog of our boss." So the dog is immediately thrown down, and the policeman hits the dog, saying, "These dogs have to be killed, poisoned. And that man was doing a good job - these dogs create trouble for people." But the first policeman goes on looking at the dog and he says, "No, it seems it is the dog: it belongs to our boss." They again pick the dog up and again start patting him. This way the story continues and they go on changing: immediately, the moment they think it is the dog of the boss, they start beating the man, saying, "What were you doing here? - creating a nuisance on the road. Do you know whose dog this is?" And the moment they recognize that this is not the dog, they are confused; they start appreciating the same manl And it goes so fast that you can see how the masks change.

It is not so apparent in our life; we have become very skillful. The mask changes so slowly without making any noise, without making any stir anywhere .... This is all that our person is, our personality is. It is just clothes. And this person has been imposed on you by others - it is not a growth. Only presence can grow. Personality remains static. It is never dynamic, it cannot be. How can a mask grow? Your real face can grow but the mask cannot grow; it is dead. Your real face, your original face, is not a face at all; it is only a presence. You will never know who you are. To know this is to know oneself. This is positive ignorance... this is blissful ignorance. It is called by another word, "wisdom." Wisdom is blissful ignorance. Knowledge is just a deception. You don't know really because you can't know. The truth is beyond knowledge. But you pretend, you believe that you know. Knowledge is really the barrier, not ignorance. Ignorance is the door. But those moments of ignorance, nothingness, indefinable presence, are difficult in the beginning, because they are so vast that you cannot contain them. They are bigger than you. You cannot hold them in your hands, you cannot possess them - on the contrary you have to be possessed by them. And that is the fear of the mind.

The mind will always give wrong interpretations, and the mind will become sad. Don't think that you were sad. Next time it happens, see it, that you are not sad, it is the mind... just something around you which is sad, which feels afraid, shaken. Why should you be sad? There is no reason. You should be really joyous. These are the moments when one should rejoice, because one is becoming bigger, vaster, is entering into infinity. And once you start rejoicing, those moments will start coming more and more. Make them invited, welcomed guests, because they are your reality.

And this is what I teach. I teach real positive ignorance. Hence I say drop the whole mind and all its knowledge, all its prejudices, concepts. Drop all the luggage that it has been carrying all along. Just be a child again, innocent, able to say "I don't know"... and the door suddenly opens. Whenever you can say totally, truly, sincerely, "I don't know," suddenly a great transformation happens. You are transported into another world. I don't teach knowledge here - that's what I destroy, that's what we are going to bum completely. Slowly slowly my sannyasins will become really ignorant, not knowing a thing at all.

Then you function from that state of not-knowing and then everything is beautiful because everything is true, sincere. It comes from the very core of your being; you are not pretending. Then you start living. Life has a different flavor. That flavor is religion.

So allow these moments - they will be coming more and more. And now that you have come here forever, this is what is going to happenl You have to disappear - only then can you be.

[A sannyasin dentist wrote to Osho on his arrival, asking that he might be allowed to help survey the site of the new ashram for health-ensuring-and-maintainability.]

I received your message, and we are after a new place and after eight or ten days you will be able to go and see it. You will be perfectly satisfied; there will be no problem. I am also worried - so many people fall ill unnecessarily, energy is wasted. It has to be stopped. But in Poona it seems difficult.

The water is not right and everything.... But in the new place we are making everything absolutely as perfect as possible. Good.

[A sannyasin says: In the West I am known by my Christian name in my architecture business in the university, and there's a certain practicality in keeping that. But I don't want to compromise with any of the sannyasin in me. I'm confused.]

There is no confusion... there is no question. If it creates some problem, then change it. Go to a court and it is so simple - change the name.

You can have two - if it creates some trouble in your mind. Otherwise there is no trouble. That old one is okay for the world and the new one is good for sannyas... nothing to worry about. It is okay, utilitarian, nothing to worry about.

But if some duality arises in the mind - sometimes it happens to a few people: having two names can become a little difficult, identity gets confused - then it is better to go to court and change it to the new, drop the old completely. That is up to you: if you can manage with two with no problem, perfectly okay. If it is a little dividing and makes you split, then it is better to change. It is so simple, the procedure is so simple to change the name; there is no problem in it.

So go and change it. But be clear - don't remain in confusion. And never compromise! Because there is nothing in life worth compromising for. Every compromise disintegrates and slowly slowly one is lost in compromising. So I am not saying to keep the old name. If it creates trouble in your mind, drop it. If it, creates no trouble and you feel just playful about it, then it is okay: you can have both. When will you be back?