Watchfulness... your gift to yourself

Question 1:

Veet Niten, it is possible that things may be happening within you of which you are not aware, because your awareness is very small, and you are very big. Your whole consciousness is ten times bigger than your awareness, and that ten-times-bigger consciousness is absolutely in darkness. Much continues to happen in your dark inside. You become aware only when it surfaces and comes into the area of your awareness -- which is very small.

In fact, it is part of your biology, physiology, that you should not be aware of most things when they are happening because your awareness can become a hindrance to their happening.

You eat food, but do you know how it is digested? When it is digested, when your food becomes your blood and your bones?

Up to three hundred years ago, for centuries man had thought that blood is static in the body. The idea of the circulation of blood was non-existent all over the world. Just three hundred years ago, physicians became aware that blood is constantly moving at a fast speed -- the blood that is in your feet, within seconds will be in your head, and it goes round and round. Its circulation is absolutely necessary to clean all dead cells from your body, to take them away, to bring new oxygen to your cells, because each cell needs oxygen for its life.

But you are not aware of it all, and in fact if you were aware, you would go mad. So much is happening inside you that it would be impossible for you to maintain your sanity.

The child in the mother's womb sleeps twenty-four hours a day, for the simple reason that in those nine months more things happen in his body than will happen in the seventy years which are to follow after his birth. Much more is happening in those nine months than is going to happen in the body between his birth and death. Hence, he has to remain constantly asleep -- no awareness at all.

When you are tired, when you feel spent, you need a good sleep -- have you ever thought why? You need a good sleep so that your awareness does not interfere with the rejuvenating of your body. In the morning you feel fresh, again ready to work. What a miracle sleep has done to you! On a greater scale, when it becomes almost impossible for the body to rejuvenate itself, death happens. Death is nothing but a long sleep, a deep sleep, so that your soul can move into another body, into some womb. But your awareness can be a disturbance, so your

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself death almost always happens in a deep sleep. Before you die, you fall asleep; you lose all consciousness, all awareness -- it is the greatest surgery that nature does.

What is true about the body and about your physiology is also true about your psychology -- much is happening of which you are not aware. You become aware only when a certain situation arises: you are a peaceful man, but somebody insults you and anger arises in you, of which you were not aware. It has always been there, hiding in the darkness of your unconscious, but if somebody insults you, immediately it is ready to react.

I am reminded of one of the most beautiful stories, historical. A great Japanese emperor wanted to see Nan In, a Zen master. Because he was the ruler over all Japan, he thought that Nan In could be ordered to come to the court.

His prime minister advised him, "Don't be foolish. You may be the emperor of the whole of Japan, but there are a few people in the country who are beyond your domination -- or anybody's domination. You cannot order Nan In; you can kill him, but you cannot force him to do anything against his will. And he has not left his monastery for thirty years. If you want to see him, you will have to go to the mountains to his monastery."

The emperor said, "If that is the situation, then I will go. I don't want to kill him. I have a question, and many people have suggested to me that there is only one man, Nan In, who can answer the question."

He went to Nan In; he was sitting just in front of his house, on the lawn. The emperor bowed down, sat in front of Nan In, and asked him, "I have come to get an answer: What is hell and what is heaven? I have asked many people, but all that they give as an answer is not their own experience. They are not eyewitnesses, they are only scholars -- they have read about it. That I can do myself, but how can I know hell really exists? or heaven?"

At that very moment Nan In said, "You are such an idiot -- who made you the emperor of the country?"

The emperor could not believe it! He had never expected, never dreamt that he would be received with such rudeness. And he has not done anything wrong -- just asked a question. He was a warrior. He pulled his sword out of its sheath, and was going to kill Nan In, then and there. When the sword was just hanging over the head of Nan In, Nan In said, "This is hell.

You are standing exactly at the door of it."

Suddenly, a great realization... and all anger settled; a silence descended. He put back his sword, and Nan In said, "You have turned your back towards hell, and in front of you is the gate of heaven. This is my answer."

The emperor had never thought that answers can be given through situations too; in fact, real answers can only be given through situations. But he became perfectly aware that anger, violence, rage, jealousy and the whole gang of these kinds of qualities what constitutes hell.

And love, silence, blissfulness, compassion, joy... a moment-to-moment living in gratefulness towards existence, is what heaven is constituted of.

He touched the feet of Nan In and he said, "You have answered me -- and this is not the answer of a scholar, this is the answer of a man who knows. I am immensely grateful. But you really shocked me, I am still trembling! You are a dangerous man; I had come for a philosophical discussion."

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself Nan In said, "We are not concerned with philosophy, we are concerned with reality.

Philosophy is a game, children's play; reality is a risk, an adventure. Only those who are courageous enough travel on the razor's edge to find the truth."

In your psychology also, much is continuously happening. Even when you are asleep, your mind goes on working. Only a man who enters into meditation, slowly, slowly becomes aware of things which are happening in the mind, of which he was never before aware. And the miracle of meditation is that as you become aware of things, that which is wrong disappears and that which is right becomes tremendously strong. There is only one criterion, according to me, which decides what is right and what is wrong: that is your depth of meditation.

If you are going deeper into silence and something disappears -- you saw it receding, evaporating into the air -- you can be certain it was wrong, because the false cannot face you; it has not the guts. It cannot come in front of you, it cannot encounter you. And that which is real, good, becomes stronger, becomes more a part of your actions, of your thoughts, of your being.

A moment comes in the life of the meditator when his meditation has reached the point where his whole mind is silent and there is not even a fragment of darkness anywhere inside him -- all is light. Then, whatever that person does is right, and whatever that person does not do is wrong. In that state, one never thinks about what to do; what is right, what is wrong are no longer alternatives. The right becomes spontaneous action, and the wrong simply becomes impossible -- even if you want to do it, you cannot.

Veet Niten, you are asking, "Is it possible that things are happening inside me that I am not aware of?" Yes, things are happening within you and you have to make your awareness more sharp, more deep, more clear -- so that you can become aware. Otherwise, all your actions come out of an unconscious state; you don't know exactly why you are doing it, why there is such a deep urge to do it, because the urge comes from the unconscious where never a ray of light has entered.

In psychoanalysis you have to drop completely whatever you say in your waking hours -- it is not trustworthy. Psychoanalysis trusts your dreams more than it trusts you, because your consciousness is so small and it is not aware of all that is happening underneath. But when this consciousness goes to sleep, in your dreams the unconscious starts coming onto the screen of your mind. To know about your dreams is to know much more about you than you know yourself. Your dreams are more reliable because in your dreams you don't deceive; there is no question. Your dreams are so private, nobody is going to know -- why deceive?

In your waking hours, you have a certain personality to maintain to live in the society -- a certain morality, a certain code of conduct. In your dreams, all codes of conduct, all moralities, all principles disappear -- you are simply natural. Whatever is within you comes in its reality, as it is.

The only problem with dreams is that the unconscious knows no language; it is still the mind of the child. The child thinks in pictures -- his language is pictorial, not alphabetical -- so you dream in pictures. And that has created a great problem: who is going to interpret those pictures? What do they mean? -- because there are many interpreters, many schools of psychoanalysis with different explanations, and all their explanations seem to have some truth.

The East has never tried anything like psychoanalysis, and the West has never tried anything like meditation. The East has been working for almost ten thousand years, single-pointedly, on meditation. And meditation means going beyond the mind -- not getting

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself involved in the mind, not being bothered by the mind, not being interested in its dreams -- simply transcending it, simply becoming a watcher.

The West has become too involved in the games that mind goes on playing -- and those games are very complicated, and they are endless. There is not a single man alive in the world who is completely psychoanalyzed, and there are people who have been in psychoanalysis for fifteen, twenty years, working hard to bring out their dreams to the psychoanalyst. Whichever dream is psychoanalyzed, disappears, but other dreams go on coming -- it seems an unending process.

Perhaps somewhere far away in the past, of which no record exists, the East may have encountered something like psychoanalysis and found that it is a futile exercise. You explain one dream, another dream arises. You go on, and dreams go on arising. The East drops the whole mind with all its dreams, all its activities. They change their focus completely to a new area, a new space. Just be a watcher; don't interpret.

Sigmund Freud's whole contribution is interpretation of dreams, analysis of dreams. And the Eastern experience, which is very long, says, don't get involved in analysis or interpretation -- just watch. Don't judge, and don't try to find the meaning of it. Don't condemn either, don't appreciate -- just be absolutely indifferent, a pure witness who has nothing to do with it. If you become a witness, you will become aware that the mind starts functioning less and less; dreams start disappearing, thoughts are no longer so much, the crowd goes on becoming less and less. A moment comes when you are there, just a witness -- and there is nothing to be witnessed. The mind is utterly silent: all dreams, all thoughts, all feelings, are gone.

This is the moment when you will become absolutely aware of who you are.

Retrospectively, you will be able to see what you have been doing, and what has been happening inside you. But you are out of it; it is just a fading memory... slowly, slowly it fades away.

To live in silence, in serenity, is a totally different dimension of life where joy is simply natural; where life is in its absolute beauty, in its utter purity and aliveness; where love is so abundant that it goes on overflowing -- you cannot contain it, it is a bigger reality than you are. Life becomes a smaller phenomenon than love, and love becomes a smaller phenomenon than light. These three L's contain the whole discipline of inner revolution.

Veet Niten, just being here, things are bound to happen within you of which you may not be aware, because you have not yet learned the art of watchfulness.

You are asking, "Is it possible for growth to happen in this way?" Yes it is possible, but only up to a point. It cannot happen the whole way without your becoming a watcher, so be concerned about that.

Instead of that you are asking me, "I have heard You say, 'I've been watching you' to people. Have You been watching me? How am I doing? Am I missing something?" Rather than being concerned whether I am watching you or not, your concern should be: are you watching yourself?

I am certainly watching. The moment I see you, I see you in your totality. To me you are transparent -- I even see that which you may not be aware is within you. And I am continuously watching my people, how they are growing or not growing.

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself You are doing perfectly well, but something is certainly missing. And the thing that is missing is that you are not getting into the space of watching yourself. You cannot depend on me forever. In the beginning it is good, in the beginning it is helpful, but if it becomes a dependence, then it is dangerous. And I don't want anybody to be dependent on me, so my whole effort is to push you -- as quickly as possible -- into watching, into witnessing, into being a free individual, a free seeker, a searcher with total freedom.

All the religions of the world have been committing one of the great crimes: they want people to be dependent on them. They never want people to become independent, because that means losing customers. You are not my customers; to teach you is not my profession, it is simply my joy. I don't want any reward for it; just that you allowed me to share my heart with you is reward unto itself.

But the conditioning of the mind is so old, the conditioning that you go on hoping that somebody is going to save you: some savior, some messenger of God, but it is somebody else's business. You want to throw the responsibility on somebody else. Veet Niten, that will not be the right thing -- at least here in this place with me.

A young Irish girl was talking to the Reverend Mother about her ambitions in life. "When I grow up," she announced, "I want to be a prostitute."

The Reverend Mother gasped and threw up her hands in horror. "Did I hear you rightly?

What was it you said you wanted to be?"

"A prostitute."

The Reverend Mother sighed with relief, "Oh, praise the Lord," she said. "I thought you said a Protestant."

That has been the attitude of all the religions. Here, I want you to be just yourself. And that is possible only if you become a watcher. The deeper and sharper your watching, the greater is your individuality, the more is your human dignity.

Tremendous is the splendor of a person who has come to know everything that goes on within him, because by being aware, all that is false disappears and all that is real is nourished.

Except this, there is no radical transformation possible.

No religion can give it to you, no messiah can give it to you.

It is a gift that you have to give to yourself.

But the unconscious creates difficulties. Not that they cannot be dissolved, but you need a little patience, a little trust in existence. Difficulties will be there but don't take them as difficulties, only as challenges. It is a great adventure to go into your own being, to the very center of your existence -- because that is the center of the whole of existence too.

Mrs. Rappaport advertised a new Cadillac for fifty dollars. Goldstein answered the ad and the first thing he asked was, "What is wrong with the car?"

"Nothing," she replied. "If you don't want it, please don't waste my time."

Goldstein asked for the keys and went to the garage. He backed the car out, parked in front of the house, counted out fifty dollars, and handed it to the owner. "Now you have your money, what is the catch?"

"My husband just died," she said, "and in his will he instructed that the Cadillac be sold and the proceeds be given to his secretary."

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself You will find mind playing many games. It has been with you for so long, it will not be easy for it. If you simply drop it without giving a second thought, it will struggle to cling to you. But the secret is in watching. Don't fight with it, don't try to throw it away, don't condemn it. Just watch, like a mirror, with no opinion about it -- that is the greatest weapon in your hands. If you can remain just like a mirror, your mind soon disappears, and the whole sky of your inner world becomes so silent... and the silence is not dead, it is alive. It has a music of its own. It blossoms, it has a fragrance of its own. It is radiant with light -- it has a light of its own.

And it is part of the eternal source from where everything has come, and to where everything has to return.

Once knowing it, you are no longer the same old man. Your whole life will have a new dance, a new song, a new freshness, a new youthfulness, a new playfulness, a new laughter.

But my watching you will not help; you have to do it yourself. Whatever you are doing is perfectly good, but not enough -- because one of the most essential things is missing. And that is, you have not yet started on the path of a watcher.

Question 2:

Prem Vasumati, the observation in your question is very accurate. You say, "These mornings sitting in front of you, when you look at me I feel so completely seen -- so understood and accepted. And yet when I look at you, all I am aware of is my blindness, my fear and ignorance." It is immensely significant to see your blindness, because that is the beginning of getting out of it. The moment a madman knows he is mad, he is no longer mad.

You can go into madhouses and you will be surprised to know that not a single madman accepts that he is mad. He may condemn the whole world for being mad, but he is not mad.

The moment he accepts, even suspects "Perhaps I am mad," the madness starts melting, because it is a quality of sanity, of intelligence. Madness cannot accept that "I am mad" -- that will be a contradiction. The mad person tries to prove in every possible way that he is absolutely sane.

I have heard about a man who had gone mad -- and not an ordinarily mad person; his madness was unique. He started thinking that he was dead. He would not go to the office... his family would tell him, "Go to the office; otherwise how are we going to survive?" But he would say, "Have you ever heard of any dead man going to the office? Have you ever heard of any dead man helping his relatives, his family, his friends to survive? I am absolutely helpless, what can I do? Nobody has any control over death; I am dead."

People tried in every way: "You are talking and you are eating and you are sleeping and you are walking -- and still you go on insisting that you are dead?"

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself He said, "I know more about myself... I don't need anybody's advice. I feel absolutely certain that I am dead, and if a dead man feels hungry -- he eats. What is wrong with it?"

Finally they took him to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist said, "I will settle him. He is a little rare; I have never come across... There have been many kinds of people, but he surpasses them all."

He talked with the dead man, and the dead man's arguments to prove that he was dead were perfectly rational. Not only that: when his family left and he was alone with the psychiatrist, he pulled his chair close to him and told him, "You are also dead. I did not say it in front of those people; otherwise your whole profession would be disturbed. We are in the same boat; just as I died, you died."

The psychiatrist said, "This is too much. You are trying to convince me."

He said, "It is not a question of conviction: once dead, dead forever. Do you think somebody convinced me? I discovered myself that I am dead -- and because I know how to discover it, I have discovered that you are dead too. It is good that they brought me here; otherwise you would have lived with the wrong conception -- that you are alive."

The psychiatrist thought, "What to do with this man?" He took out his paper knife, to cut the man on his hand. Before cutting the man -- just to bring a little blood -- he said, "Have you ever heard that dead men don't bleed?"

The man said, "Yes, when I used to be alive, I heard the saying that dead men don't bleed."

The psychiatrist said, "Okay, now this will be decisive." He cut a little on the man's hand and blood came out, and he said, "What do you say now?"

The man said, "What is there to be said? It means the proverb is wrong: dead men do bleed. Now just give me the paper knife and I will show you." He cut the hand of the psychiatrist and blood came out, and he said, "Look! There is not only one piece of evidence; now we are both proofs that the proverb is wrong. It seems nobody has ever checked, and some idiot must have spread the idea that dead men don't bleed. Why shouldn't they bleed?

They have every right to bleed; it is not the monopoly only of the living ones."

The psychiatrist said, "You take your fees back and you go home before I become convinced, because I have a wife and two small kids, and I have to take care of them. And you are so logically convincing that once in a while the suspicion arises in my mind too: Who knows? perhaps he is right. What proof have I got that I am alive -- except that I have never thought about it. You are a great thinker, but go -- before it is too late!"

Vasumati, if you see your blindness, that is good news: it means you are starting to see.

The blindness will disappear. If you see your ignorance, that brings an alchemical change. The moment you see your ignorance it becomes innocence -- it is ignorance only while you remain unaware of it. The moment you understand that "I don't know," the doors of knowing have opened; if you see your fear, that's a good sign. All these things have to be brought before your consciousness. Fear exists in darkness, and seeing your fear means it is coming into light -- in the light it cannot exist.

So remain alert about your blindness, about your fear, about your ignorance, and just your alertness will dispel the whole darkness of blindness, of fear, of ignorance. They are not separate things; they are separate aspects of a single unconscious mind -- they all exist together and they all disappear together.

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself It is a good beginning. As far as I am concerned, my acceptance of everybody is total.

Whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you are, I don't want to impose any ideal on you that you should be something else. If you grow into something else, that is another thing, but I don't want to give you any "shoulds" -- that you must be this, that you should be this, that "unless you achieve this ideal you are unworthy of being called human." No, as you are, you are perfectly worthy. Existence accepts you, life accepts you -- and I am not against life, I am not against existence; I simply follow the way the river of life moves. If life accepts you, I accept you.

People have conditions when they accept...

I have heard about two lovers sitting on the sea beach on a fullmoon night, and they were discussing marriage.

The woman asked, "Will you always love me -- always?"

The man said, "I have told you a thousand and one times that I will love you always, always -- but because of your question, a question has arisen in my mind. In your old age, will you look like your mother? Then I cannot love you. If you are determined to become like your mother, then forget all about marriage."

In old age, far away in the future... nobody can predict how that woman will look -- like the mother or like the father, or like the chauffeur -- nobody knows! But even that far away there is a condition, and that future condition can disturb even the present. In the present, people are continually looking at you with all kinds of prejudices, judgments: how you should be, how you should behave, your etiquette, your manners, your morality.

Small things are enough to create barriers, and we are all living with our defenses so that others cannot know exactly what we are. We allow them to know only that part of our being which is acceptable to them. This is one of the foundations of our misery. People are different, and we should enjoy and rejoice in their differences, in their variety. Your judgment is not going to change anybody; perhaps your judgment may create a stubbornness in the other person not to change. Who are you to change the person?

These are the secrets of life. If you accept somebody with totality, he starts changing, because you give him total freedom to be himself. And a person who gives you total freedom to be yourself -- you would like that person to be happy; as far as you are concerned, he has given you the dignity and the honor of accepting you. It is very natural that if you see something in yourself which is not right -- although the other person accepts you as you are -- you would like to be even better, just for him; to be softer, to be more loving, to be more tender, just for him.

I accept you as you are. I don't have any expectations of you; I don't want you to be molded into a certain idea, into a certain ideal. I don't want to make you a dead statue. I want you to be alive, more alive, and you can be alive only if your totality is accepted -- not only accepted, but respected.

I have a deep reverence for everything that is alive, a reverence for life itself.

If my reverence changes you, that is another thing; I am not responsible for it. And it is going to change you -- I warn you beforehand; you cannot blame me later on.

You are fortunate, Vasumati, that you feel completely seen, so understood and accepted. If we could accept people with whom we are in some way related -- friends or lovers -- and

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself understand them, and allow them not to have any defenses so they can be completely natural, the world would be so beautiful and people would be so happy. But up to now we have lived under very wrong conceptions, and those wrong conceptions have to be dropped.

Two disciples of a famous rabbi came to visit him, and while they were waiting to be ushered into his presence, the rabbi's wife brought them two cups of lemon tea and a plate with two cakes on it -- one small, one big.

"After you," said one disciple to the other, offering him the plate.

"No, after you."

"No, no, I insist. After you."

"No, you take first."

Eventually one of the two helped himself first -- to the bigger cake. The other was outraged: "What! You helped yourself first, and took the bigger cake!"

"So?" said the other. "If you had chosen first, which cake would you have taken?"

"Why, the smaller one, of course!"

"Well, what are you complaining about? You have got the smaller one!"

All our manners, all our etiquette is so phony -- we don't mean what we say, we don't mean what we show. The whole of humanity has become part of a single ideology, and that is hypocrisy. One may be Christian, one may be Hindu, one may be Jaina, one may be Buddhist -- it does not matter; they are all hypocrites.

I want my people to be simply themselves, absolutely natural... and allowing the other also to be natural, accepting each other, trying to understand each other's mystery and helping in every way so the other can become more and more authentic.

Only authentic human beings can create a society which will be joyous, ecstatic, and in the real sense, human.

Question 3:

Anand Prema, my statement, "Jump before you think," was not concerned with outer reality, it was concerned with your inner space. This is how your mind can change the context and then create unnecessary problems.

As far as the outside is concerned, think first, think twice -- only then jump. Even if the risk is that too much thinking may not allow you to jump at all, this is perfectly acceptable to

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself you because in the outside world, what is there to lose? Doing anything without thinking in the outside world is simply stupidity.

But the laws of the outer and the inner are opposite. In the inner world, if you go on thinking you will never jump, because the inner is absolutely unknown. On the outside you are not alone; there are thousands of others. The outer world is objective, visible, and if you are not going to jump, somebody else will jump.

Albert Einstein was asked, "If you had not discovered the theory of relativity, what do you think -- would it have ever been discovered?"

Albert Einstein said, "At the most three months later... most probably three weeks later" -- because all the facts were there, and thousands of scientists around the world were working on those facts. It was only a question of who solved the puzzle first. And later on it was discovered that a German scientist had discovered the theory of relativity BEFORE Albert Einstein, but he had not published his paper. He was just going to publish it, but because it was so outrageously against all the old scientific findings, he went on thinking about whether to publish it or not... "I may become a laughingstock, I am going to say something absolutely contradicting the whole of scientific progress."

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity goes against the logic of Aristotle; it goes against the geometry of Euclid, which was well established for two thousand years. And it goes against so many things which have been accepted by scientists as facts -- who ever doubted that two plus two is equal to four? Even a man like Bertrand Russell, who wrote one of the greatest treatises on mathematics, took nearabout two hundred and thirty-five pages to prove that two plus two is really four. But against all these comes the theory of relativity. It says two plus two can be anything -- but never four.

Albert Einstein took the risk, and jumped ahead. But he was aware that if he did not take the jump, somebody else, within three weeks or at the most three months... how long can you prevent it?

In the outside world, there are millions of people, and everything is objective. In the inside world, you are alone -- you cannot take anybody as your guide, as your friend; no map exists, no guidebook exists. If you go on thinking, perhaps you will never enter into it.

My statement was about the inner world. Against the old proverb, "Think before you jump," I had said, "Jump before you think." What is the worry? You will be inside; you can go on thinking later on -- first jump. And you are not jumping from a hilltop, you are jumping inside yourself. I don't think that there is any possibility of having fractures, or falling into an abysmal ditch, or falling so deep that you cannot come out -- it has not happened up to now.

Thousands of people have jumped in, and they all have come out in far better shape than they have ever been.

There is no risk. The inner journey is really the safest journey -- absolutely insured -- because not a single case exists in the whole of history when somebody jumped inside and came out having multiple fractures. Those who have jumped in, have come out with such tremendous joy, with such deep sensibility, with such great understanding... they have found the greatest treasure which exists in existence.

Mr. Cohen comes home one night and starts to pack his bags. "So, where are you going?"

asks his wife.

"To Tahiti."

Watchfulness... your gift to yourself "Tahiti? Why Tahiti?"

"Simple. Every time you make love there, they give you five dollars."

Then Mrs. Cohen starts packing her bags.

"So where are you going?" asks Mr. Cohen.

"I'm going to Tahiti."

"Why?"

"I want to see how you're going to live on ten dollars a year."

Okay, Vimal?

Yes, Osho.