Mind is a con man

Question 1:

Shridhar, it is ambition, it is some desire, it is some hope in the future that keeps the body moving.

The word for this ambition, desire, hope used by Gautam Buddha is tanha. It contains all these things. You are always looking ahead for something to happen in your life; you have not lived yet.

The past is empty; you know it has been a desert. The only way to move is to keep your eyes far away on some star. It is just your imagination, but it is enough to keep the body moving.

If it has not happened up to now, there is no guarantee that it will not happen in the future. Tomorrow is always open, and it is the tomorrow that keeps the body moving and the mind moving and not only in one life: the Eastern understanding is far deeper than the Western understanding about the inner secrets.

All the mystics born in the East may disagree on every other point, but on one point their agreement is absolute, and that is the point of reincarnation. It is not only in one life that you go on moving because of some desire or many desires. You go on moving from one life to another life, from one womb to another womb, but the reason is the same: movement means you have something in the future to be achieved.

Your future is alluring you. You are fascinated by all the possibilities that can be yours. You are not at all finished, because the past was empty. The future can be fuller, richer, better. It is this hope that keeps on and never dies. Every day you will find it disappointed, every life you will find it disappointed. But still the future is there, always available, open, and giving you as many chances as you want.

It can happen in a deeper meditation that you come to a full stop, to a state of unmoving, just a feeling that there is no need to move, no need to go anywhere, because there is nowhere to go. You have been running after shadows for so many lives, yet everything has proved to be meaningless, and you never arrive at any goal.

In deep meditation the realization can come that there is no goal and all movement is futile. If there is no goal, there is no need to move, since all movement is goal-oriented; they are together. If the goal disappears from your mind, you will find yourself slowing down, in your body, in your mind.

A deep relaxation will start settling. It is one of the most beautiful experiences. The meditation is actually meant to bring you to this full stop, where for the first time you are no more motivated by any desire, by any ambition, by any longing.

For the first time future has disappeared. It has never been in existence, it was only your imagination.

Future is your projection of unfulfilled desires. The more unfulfilled you are, the bigger a future you have. The more unfulfilled is your being, the richer the dreams you have of the future. But it is just in your mind.

We divide time into three tenses: the past, the present, the future. But it is a wrong division. Time consists only of the present, and mind consists only of past and future. You are mixing two things together.

Meditation will help to give you the clarity to divide them exactly as they are. Mind is memory of the past and mind is imagination for the future. But time itself is undividedly only present. You never meet yesterdays, and you never meet tomorrows. What you actually encounter, always, is the present moment.

The moment you realize this, you start settling withinwards. All movement is outwards, all movement is extrovert. No-movement is introvert, no-movement is going inwards, just settling at the very center of your being - not even a ripple, no thought, no dream, no desire.

This is actually the state of meditation. Mind has gone with the movement; it was another name of movement. It kept you busy and occupied with the future, with the past, with everything except the present. It was very reluctant to come to the present. That's why people find it difficult to meditate.

Mind pulls them either towards the past, where it is perfectly happy, or towards the future, because only in the past or in the future can it live. The present is nothing but death for the mind. But death for the mind is the beginning of your authentic life. Mind keeps you living an unauthentic life. All your despair, all your agony, all your misery are the children of your mind. As movement stops, mind stops. Suddenly you are here and now. For the first time you touch existence. For the first time you are awake. The dream of the mind, the sleep of the mind is no longer there.

In this awakening moment you find yourself - not the ego that you used to think is you, not the old personality that you always believed in and had remained identified with. That personality, that ego, was all part of the mind; with the mind, they have all disappeared. All that fog is no more there - just a crystal-clear clarity, a transparency, a silence, alive, full of peace and a subtle joy so deep that you have never known such a depth before. You could not have even conceived or dreamed of it.

This is not only your self, this is the universal self too. Because it is also the universal self, Gautam Buddha decided to call this experience 'no-self', simply to emphasize that you are no more.

Existence is: you are gone. Now the whole has taken over. You are conscious, conscious for the first time in totality.

And new things start happening to you. They are just the opposites of what mind was creating.

Instead of agony, you have ecstasy; instead of misery, you have tremendous blissfulness; instead of despair, you are utterly at ease; instead of feeling a meaninglessness, for the first time you see the significance and the beauty and the glory that has been bestowed upon you by existence. And without any effort on your part a tremendous urge arises to thank the whole, to be grateful, to dance in gratitude, to sing in gratitude.

To me, the only true prayer is that which comes out of gratitude, not addressed to any god, not addressed to get anything, but addressed to the whole of existence for all that it has already given to you. It is so much. You suddenly see that you don't deserve all this. You have never earned anything of it: all this beauty, all these blessings, all this ecstasy. You cannot conceive that it is your earning.

It is simply a gift from the beyond. You can only bow down to it - not to anybody in particular, just to the whole that surrounds you. As a fish is surrounded by the ocean, you are surrounded by the whole.

Shridhar, you are saying, "During the awareness walk in the Vipassana group today, I observed that my speed was slowing down and had stopped. There seemed no need for moving. To where, for what? There was simply no goal anymore." There is certainly no goal. Existence is enough unto itself: a goal is needed only for those who are feeling empty. Once you know your fullness, you don't have any space for any goal left within you. You are not only full, you are overflowing. And the question of going anywhere does not arise, because wherever you are, you are in the whole, wherever you are, you are in the same ocean.

Hence a tremendous transformation arises in you. All your past lives ... continuous movement, from one body to another body, from one life to another life. But the same desires, the same greed, the same anger, the same violence, the same competition, the same jealousy.

The Eastern word for the world is sansar. And sansar means the wheel. You go on moving on a wheel. It is the same wheel. It goes nowhere, you are just clinging to some spoke of the wheel, and the wheel goes on moving. You think you are reaching somewhere; you are not reaching anywhere.

But because you continuously think that you are reaching somewhere, you never look inwards to find you are already there where you want to be.

The home that you are searching for is within you. And the god that you have been seeking is within you. You are the greatest treasure of consciousness in this whole existence. The moment you realize your glory and splendor, you see yourself as an Everest high in the sky, you cannot conceive that anything more can be added to you. Your fulfillment is so complete that there comes an absolute stop and this stop becomes the explosion of enlightenment, of awakening, of your buddha nature.

What has been happening to you, Shridhar, is tremendously beautiful. Allow it to happen more and more; go deeper into this stopping; go further away from movement and you will be closer to yourself. Don't be again caught into the net of the mind. It does not leave so soon. You may have a few glimpses, but it does not allow you to have more than small glimpses. Immediately it grabs you back, again a desire arises, again the tomorrow becomes real, again the future becomes significant and the movement and the thought process - and the whole mind is back.

On an extended business trip overseas, the Englishman is asked whether he misses his wife. "I don't miss her all that much," he replies. "One day a week I hire a local woman to come in and nag."

Mind is your wife. Whether you are man or woman, it does not matter. Mind is your wife and a constant nag. It goes on nagging you and you have become so accustomed to it that sometimes you even have to hire a woman to nag you, because life seems to be so empty without somebody nagging you. Mind is continuously giving you new illusions, new hallucinations, new delusions; it is very inventive. It goes on creating new goals for you. If old goals are finished, if you have realized that there are no such goals, it will invent new goals.

That's how religious people have come to invent paradise, heaven, God - these are new goals. Old goals have been dropped, but the mind is very clever. It immediately comes from the back door with a new goal. It says, "It is very good. Money is not the goal of life. And power is not the goal. Neither is respectability nor anything of this world. The real goal is God."

God is a mind invention, just as money is a mind invention. Heaven is as much a mind invention as is respectability, name, fame - they are all mind projections. I emphasize it again and again to you that there is no God. I have nothing against God; I cannot have because he does not exist. My emphasis is for a different reason - I am not an atheist - my emphasis is so that when mind starts stopping in your meditations, it cannot give you goals like God, paradise, heaven, because those are the last tricks in its bag.

I am removing them, for the simple reason that it is very easy to get rid of greed. But it is very difficult to see that heaven is nothing but your greed. It has come in such a beautiful name with such a great religious aroma around it, with such spirituality. Nobody thinks that God is your greed. Nobody has exactly said in the whole history of mankind that God is your greed, that God is nothing but the last effort of the mind to nag you again to move.

All that mind wants is to go on moving. Don't stop, because when stopping, the mind starts trembling.

To stop means digging a grave for the mind, and of course, nobody wants to die. And your mind has been with you so long, it wants to remain with you - an old friendship, a long companionship. In misery, in happiness, it has been with you. It has done everything that you wanted. It has played all kinds of roles: it has lied for you; it has always been a support for you; when life was continuously dark, it was giving you glimpses of a faraway star: "Don't be worried. If today it is dark, tomorrow it is not going to be dark. It is not going to be dark forever. One day, the sunrise is certain."

This long, long friendship - and suddenly you stop; the mind tries in every way to push you, to nag you into some new project. Old projects are no longer working; it is a great salesman.

I have heard ... A man was complaining to a real estate agency, "Where is that old fellow who sold me land?" The owner of the agency asked, "What is the problem?"

He said, "What is the problem? I am going to shoot him. He has sold me land which is at least twelve feet deep below the road. In the rainy season it will become a lake. And I have purchased it to make a house for myself. My house will be drowned. Just tell me where that old fellow is!"

The owner said, "Right now, he is not in the office. But when he comes back I will talk to him and if something has gone wrong, we will settle it. I will send him to your house."

And when the old salesman came, the owner was very angry, "This is too much. What have you done?"

He said, "I told him everything. I have told him that he will have the most magnificent house within the lake. Make the house and wait for the rains. And it is surrounded with such beautiful hills."

The owner said, "Beautiful hills?"

He said, "Yes, but they are thousands of miles away. They are very difficult to see. Only once in a while, when the sky is very clear, you can see them. And I have shown him."

But the owner said, "Something has to be done. He is very angry. He wants to shoot you."

He said, "Don't be worried. Just give me those two boats that we have been stuck with for many years and we have not been able to sell to anybody. They are getting completely rotten. Just give me those two boats."

The owner said, "What are you intending to do?"

He said, "I am going to sell those two boats to that man who wants to shoot me."

The owner said, "If you want to try, good luck to you! Take those boats, but be careful. That man is really angry. I am not joking."

And after an hour the man came and he said, "I have sold those two boats. When I again described the beauty of the lake and when I said, 'How secure your house will be. Nobody can reach it. And these beautiful boats ... You can just go in the boat to your house. And unless you want somebody else to come, nobody can come in. No beggars to torture you, no guests, no neighbors - just think of it. And in a beautiful lake, surrounded by hills and the hills reflected in a full-moon night.'"

The man said, "Done. You give me the boats."

And the old salesman said, "Now, remember: don't give my address to that man, because this illusion that I have given to him is not going to last long. Soon he will come to his senses, because that place is really not worth anything. First to make a house there, and then the house will be half drowned. No electricity, no telephone, no neighbors, and the mountains are thousands of miles away; they don't reflect in the lake.

"That man is going to be angry and now he is stuck with those two boats. He does not know that they are not going to work, and he will not know until the rains come. He will be drowned in those boats; he will not reach to his house; you know those boats perfectly well."

But a salesman can manage to create an illusion. Just the description, and the mind is a great salesman. It goes on selling you new goals and you never think that all that it has ever sold you has failed. Nothing has ever succeeded. It is really a con man. It goes on creating, inventing new ideas and you are ready, because you are empty, to be filled by any kind of rubbish. Your present is not a rejoicing; your past has just been tears; you get caught in the future dreams very quickly.

Shridhar, deepen your experiences. Let them happen more often. This is the whole purpose of all the meditations that are happening here, to bring you to a full stop. Then suddenly, the energy that was moving outwards, starts settling inwards. When all your life forces have centered at the very roots of your being, you will start growing in a new direction.

Now it will not be a movement, it will be a growth. Movement is always horizontal; growth is vertical.

The tree grows vertically; you move horizontally. The world is horizontal; spirituality is vertical.

Once your energies are all concentrated in the roots, there will be new sprouts, new foliage, new branches, and you have started moving upwards towards the stars. And this is not an old movement, it is a totally different phenomenon. The horizontal movement we know, when we say somebody is growing old. The vertical movement is when we say somebody is growing up.

Just becoming old is not going to lead you anywhere except to death and a new life with the old desires again - the same circle. Once your life starts growing instead of moving, it takes a totally different dimension upwards, against the gravitation of this world towards the open sky. And only in this growth, one day your potentiality blossoms.

The day you see your flowers opening up and releasing their fragrance, you have come to know for the first time something that can be called spiritual. And it is not a goal. The trees are not growing towards some goal, they are growing towards their potential, which is intrinsic, which is hidden in them. They want to come to a point where what is hidden becomes available to the whole of existence. What is in the seed comes into the flower.

Enlightenment is your flowering.

Meditation will bring you to the point from where your existence takes a new dimension - the dimension of enlightenment. You can call it sachchidanand.

Question 2:

Anand Pankaj, the innocence of a child has a similarity to the innocence of a sage. But it is not exactly the same. Because of the similarity, many mystics have used childhood as an example. You don't know anything about what happens in the innermost world of a sage. You need some examples of something that you know about. So one thing has to be remembered: all those examples are not exactly what will happen in your ultimate state of realization, but they are certainly some indication.

The child is innocent, but his innocence is more ignorance than wisdom. You cannot call a child wise. His innocence is natural. But his ignorance is also side by side with his innocence. They are almost together. The child's innocence is overshadowed by his ignorance.

The sage also has the same innocence, but there is no longer any overshadowing ignorance. His innocence is absolutely pure, unpolluted. And because his innocence is no longer associated with ignorance, it brings a transformation to the very quality of his innocence. It becomes wisdom. The child is ignorant, the sage is wise.

But the innocence has the same quality: the association has changed. The child has the same innocence, but associated with ignorance; hence it has no value. The sage has the same innocence, but no longer associated with ignorance it has immense value; wisdom has blossomed. The child does not know, but he does not know that he does not know: the sage also does not know, but he knows it - and that makes a great difference.

Because the child does not know he is ignorant, he is bound to accumulate knowledgeability to cover up his ignorance. He also wants to be knowledgeable like anybody else - as quickly as possible.

The wise man is no longer ignorant, hence he does not need any knowledge. With ignorance, knowledge has also gone. It is just like when you are sick, you need medicine. And when you are healthy again, the medicine is thrown away.

Knowledge is a medicine for ignorance. But when there is no ignorance, what are you going to do with all your medicines? Give them to the Lions Club. These people go on accumulating all kinds of medicines.

The wise man is not knowledgeable.

His wisdom has a totally different quality.

He sees. He is a seer.

He is not informed, but he is transformed. He has come to a new stage of consciousness from where he can see far away.

P.D. Ouspensky uses this for an example - his master Gurdjieff also used to use the same example.

You are sitting under a tree. You can see the road on both sides to a certain extent and then it goes beyond your vision. You cannot see more than that. Somebody is sitting in the tree. His vision of the road will be far bigger than yours. He will see miles on one side, miles on the other side. If from the left side a bullock cart is coming on the road, he will see it, but for you it is still in the future. For him it is in the present. For you it is in the future, because you don't see it. A time will come, soon you will see it. Then it will become present for you.

And a time will come when it will move away on the road towards the right and soon you will not see it again. It will become past. But to the man sitting in the tree, when it was future for you, it was present. When it was present for you, it was present for him. When it has become past to you, it is still present to him. He is seeing from a higher viewpoint.

The man of wisdom is innocent, but on a far higher level; he is not childish. His innocence is out of maturity; his innocence is out of tremendous experiences. The child is without any experience; the sage has passed through all kinds of experiences, good and bad, and he has transcended them. He has again become a child, but his childhood, the second childhood, is based on a very solid ground which cannot be taken away.

So what you have been feeling, Pankaj, is beautiful, but remember, it is not the place to stop. It is the place to begin. It is beautiful to have a childlike innocence, but it is still far away from the authentic innocence of maturity.

Paddy climbs the flag pole and begins shouting as loudly as he can. The cops arrest him and he is charged with disturbing the peace. Later he is sent to a psychiatric hospital for examination.

"How do you explain your behavior?" asks the head shrink.

"It is like this, doctor," replies Paddy. "If I didn't do something crazy once in a while I would go nuts."

An innocent man is saying something immensely wise. He is saying, "If I didn't go crazy once in a while I would go nuts." It is a well-known, well-established fact that women go crazy once in a while - any excuse. And if there is no excuse at least nature has provided them with the period. Then whatever they do is acceptable. Their craziness cannot be condemned; they have a rationalization.

But even without the period they can go crazy at any moment. That saves them from going nuts.

It is only men who go nuts, because they don't go crazy once in a while, they go on accumulating.

Rather than going crazy in installments, they go wholesale. Just look in the madhouses of the world:

there are four times more men than women.

It is not a small difference. Four times more men go mad. And what is the strategy of the woman so she avoids that much madness? She often goes crazy. So in installments - just a little bit of craziness today, and a little bit tomorrow - she divides it, and all the time she remains sane. There is no need for her to be in a madhouse.

Man has been told from his very childhood: "You are not supposed to go crazy like women. You are not even supposed to weep and cry. Tears are not allowed to men. Even if somebody dies, you have to keep yourself together; you are not to behave like a woman." Because of this nonsense teaching, four times more men than women are in madhouses.

I have made it absolutely compulsory that every day in the morning you do the Dynamic Meditation.

That is nothing but giving you a chance every day of installment craziness, so the whole day you remain sane. It is enough for twenty-four hours. Then again comes another morning and you go crazy. None of my people is ever going to be mad. (A LOUD LAUGH CAUSES GENERAL LAUGHTER.) You look! Sardarji is going crazy. But he goes crazy once in a while, so he is going to remain the sanest man.

After five days locked away in their hotel room, the honeymoon couple finally decide to go out for the evening. The husband calls the front desk to find out what is playing at the movies. "Darling," he calls out to his wife, "do you want to see Oliver Twist?"

"Honey," she calls back, "if you show me one more trick with that thing, I'll scream."

Two old cows are standing together in the pasture chewing the cud, when one of them looks up and says, "Look, here comes that cross-eyed bull. We had better separate or he will miss us both."

Different women have different reactions when their husbands kiss them in bed. The French woman says, "Ooh-la-la, Pierre, ooh-la-la, your kisses are ooh-la-la." The English woman says, "Jolly well done! I say, Winston, your kisses are jolly well done." The Jewish woman says, "You know, Sam, the ceiling needs painting."

This is a crazy world. From your innocence, if it is childlike innocence, the ways depart in two directions. Either you will end up in this big madhouse that you call the world. Or if you move in a different direction and the path is available, you can end up with great wisdom: you can be a sage.

You just have to remember what is the difference between these two paths. The path that goes to the madhouse, the big madhouse you call the world, is very crowded. Avoid crowds. Be certain that where everybody is going is the wrong path. The ordinary logic says, "That is the right path, because everybody is on it; how can it be wrong?"

But I say unto you: find the path where nobody is going. There is every chance you will end up being wise. Your very first step alone is the right step towards ultimate realization. It is the cowards who go with the crowd. And I have never heard of cowards becoming enlightened. They can become Christian sheep, but they cannot become lions. And I would like my people to be lions. Choose a path which leads you more and more deeply into aloneness. Choose a path which is not traditional, which is not orthodox. Choose a path which is basically revolutionary. Each step is a revolt against all that is past and old. That rotten crap is driving the whole world mad.

And on this path you are no longer a Christian. You cannot be, because to be a Christian means to be part of a crowd. You are no longer a Hindu, because you are no longer part of a crowd, you are an individual. And only individuals have ever become awakened. Crowds never become enlightened.

Only individuals, only people who have guts and courage to be alone are capable of stopping the movement of the mind and can settle into their inner innocence.

The deeper you go within yourself, the purer the sources of consciousness that you will find. When you reach to the very center of your being, you have reached the center of the universe. Then blossoms wisdom; you become a sage. This is a rebirth, a resurrection. You die as the world wanted you to be and you find exactly what existence has been longing for you to be. Existence gives you all that you are asking, longing for.

The so-called mad world will only promise you, but the goods are never delivered. People die in this world after a whole life of simple despair and anguish. If you want to live ecstatically and die ecstatically, you will have to choose the path of aloneness. And that is the path of meditation too, because your absolute aloneness is always inwards.

Outside you will always meet with a crowd - on any path. You may have chosen a path which seems to be silent with no traffic, but ahead you don't know. On every path you will find some crowd.

Sometimes a bigger crowd - Catholics - sometimes smaller crowds, but you will find them.

There is only one path, which goes inwards, where you will not find a single human being, where you will find only silence, peace. Then you will find yourself, and after that even you will not be there.

The aloneness becomes so thick and dense that you cannot be there, you cannot have an 'I', an ego, a sense of separation from existence. Your 'I' is nothing but a sense of separation. And when you find yourself one with existence, no knowledge is needed. In your innocence, you will know all that is great, all that is beautiful, all that is true. But it will not be a repetition from any scripture and it will not be anything borrowed. It will be truly yours, it will have your signature on it.

And this is one of the greatest blessings in life, to have some experience which is absolutely yours and not a carbon copy. Only that which is absolutely new, original, arising from the very sources of your being can give you satisfaction, fulfillment, contentment and a deep understanding of all the mysteries of life and existence.

It is good to start with innocence, but remember there are two kinds of innocence: one is of the child and another is of the meditator. The meditator also becomes a child, but that is on such a different level, at such a great height - as if the child is in the valley and the enlightened man who has again become a child is on the sunlit peak. The distance is tremendous. But there is a certain similarity, a thread running from the child to the heart of the sage. The child cannot understand the sage, but the sage can understand the child. Always remember it as a fundamental rule: the lower cannot understand the higher, but the higher can always understand the lower.

And in your life, if anything can be compared with that high peak, it is your childhood. Try to rediscover it. Don't cover it with knowledge so that you can forget it. Remove all knowledge, so that you can rediscover your innocence. As you remove your knowledge, you will be removing your mind itself, because your mind is a collective name for your knowledge. It is not any entity - just as we call these trees around here 'the garden', but the garden is only a collective name. If you go looking for the garden, you are not going to find it; you will always find individual trees, rosebushes, seasonal flowers, but you will not find the garden as such anywhere.

Remember, we get lost with collective names many times. We start thinking that those collective names are realities; they are not. Society does not exist. Organized religion does not exist; it only pretends. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism don't exist - all pretensions. What exists is the individual.

The mind does not exist, it is only a collective name for all your knowledge. Take out by and by all that you know and when all that you know has been taken away, you will not find any mind there, not even a container in which all that knowledge was contained. There is no container. Being purely innocent, centered in yourself, knowing that life is a mystery and there is nothing to know, that knowledge is by its very nature impossible, we are surrounded by the miraculous. And it is beautiful that we are surrounded by the miraculous, because that makes life a continuous excitement, an ecstasy.

You never tire of discovering new spaces within you. You are never bored, because there is always something new the deeper you move within yourself. And the deeper you move within yourself, you are moving towards existence itself, because deep down you are rooted in existence. If a tree moves deep into its roots, it will find the earth, it will find the ocean. It is rooted in the earth, deriving water from the ocean.

If we move into our center ... You will be surprised to know that our center also has its roots in existence, though they are not visible roots. Our consciousness is just like air. It is not visible, but you can feel it. You can feel when the air is cool and you can feel when the air is hot. You can feel your consciousness in many ways: when it is pure, it is cool; when it is impure, it is hot. Impure with anger, impure with greed, impure with desires, impure with goals - then it is hot, then it is not at ease, then there is no peace inside. But when all these desires have left you, there is a tremendous coolness which goes on growing.

And as you come closer to yourself, you are coming closer to the universe. And the greatest moment in your life is when you accept the mystery of existence as it is without asking any question. You have understood one thing, that existence is mysterious and is going to remain mysterious. There is no need of any knowledge. That means you have settled with the universe as mysterious and you have settled with yourself as innocent.

This is the second birth. In India we have called this state dwij, the second birth. And this is our search here.

Now, here is something to make your silence deeper.

Herman is an eternal optimist, and whatever happens to him, he always says, "Well, it could have been worse."

One day his neighbor, Amos, comes home and finds his wife in bed with a strange man. In a fit of rage, Amos shoots them dead, and is later arrested for murder.

While everyone is discussing the tragedy, Herman says, "Well, it could have been worse."

"How could it be worse?" says an angry neighbor. "Two people are dead and a nice guy like Amos is going to prison for the rest of his life."

"Well," insists Herman, "if Amos had come home on Thursday afternoon, I'd be dead!"

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.