What has god been doing for eternity?

Question 1:

Anubhasha, we are trained in wrong ways; otherwise, security is something to be afraid of, and insecurity is something to be rejoiced. What exactly is insecurity? It means tomorrow is not going to repeat today. It means tomorrow you may not even be alive. It means that one has to live each moment as if it is the last moment.

A life of security will be simply boring. It will be like seeing the same movie again and again and again - knowing every detail of what is going to happen. You can enjoy a movie only once. If you are an idiot, then it is another matter ....

Insecurity is the very fabric of life. If you don't understand insecurity, you can never understand life.

Seasons will change; climates will change; the fall will come, the spring will come. Everything will go on changing, nothing can be taken for granted; this is insecurity. You want everything to be certain,

permanent. But have you ever thought what will be the outcome of it if everything is permanent?

You eat the same food every day, you say the same things every day, you listen to the same things every day. And there is no death even to demolish this tragic living - you are living in a nightmare.

Insecurity keeps people fresh, alive, adventurous - knowing that things can be changed. Even without their changing them, they are going to be changed. So there is great scope for change, for transformation.

An ancient saying is, "The authentic man is one whom the sunrise never finds where the sunset leaves him"; or, "where the sunrise leaves him, the sunset never finds him there." He is always on the move, he is a flow ... he is not a dirty pond going nowhere.

But the whole training of our minds is such that we are made afraid of insecurity, and our whole life we are trying for safety. Financially, politically, religiously - in every dimension we want to be secure.

But security means death, a living death. It means tomorrow will be simply a repetition of today, and today is a repetition of yesterday.

Are you living? Is there a dance in your life? Are you moving, growing, risking, taking the challenges of dangerous paths? In the acceptance of the danger, in the acceptance that anything can happen any moment, life comes to its best, to its fullest.

Your question is, Anubhasha, "Lately, I have been feeling very insecure, and I see how much I dislike that space of not knowing." You are completely upside down; you will have to change your posture.

Insecurity is not a space that has to be disliked, it is a space that has to be loved and cherished, celebrated ... because tomorrow will bring new news.

And because of the fear of insecurity, you are also fearing not knowing; and not knowing is the highest peak of consciousness. But certainly you must be afraid of peaks because you can fall from there; you prefer the plain, asphalt road - no danger of falling from there. You would like to be at the lowest point in consciousness, because from there you cannot fall.

Millions of people have decided to live at the minimum out of the simple fear that from the maximum you can fall. It is safer to live at the minimum; it is even safer not to live at all. Nobody has ever heard that dead people are insecure; graveyards are the most secure places. Once you enter your grave, there is no fear: even death cannot do anything to you - one cannot die twice.

Man has been trying to create false props for security, knowing perfectly well that they all fall down, but still he goes on piling up props around him. Time does not care about your props, nor does life care about your props. In fact, it is compassionate of nature that whatever you do, you remain insecure. You can have a bank balance, you can have a big insurance - but these are just strategies to befool yourself. What insurance can there be against death? What insurance can there be against the constantly changing flux of life? You cannot prevent it: it is a mountain river flowing fast, dropping from high mountains into waterfalls, moving into valleys towards the ocean where it will disappear completely.

The idea of safety has created the idea of accumulating knowledge - nothing should be left unknown because the unknown creates insecurity. If it is known, you feel safe.

Even small things, you are continuously trying to know ... even if you are traveling in a train with a passenger, you immediately want to know his name, where he is going, what religion he belongs to, what his profession is. You may not have thought that this is a way of feeling safe about the man; otherwise, who knows? You may be traveling with a madman, and in the middle of the night he may sit on your chest.

That"s why people are always afraid of strangers. They become uneasy even if you start living your own style of life, not following the crowd. That means you are becoming an outsider, a stranger.

So people go on filling their heads with all kinds of knowledge, most of which is simply rubbish and crap; people become walking encyclopedias.

In my village, I used to know a brahmin. He was a little cuckoo - I have never come across another man like that. He had crammed the whole OXFORD DICTIONARY; that was his great achievement.

You could ask him the OXFORD DICTIONARY meaning of any word, and he was almost like a computer: he would immediately give you the exact words that the OXFORD DICTIONARY says.

And he was living under the wrong impression that he knew the English language.

By cramming the OXFORD DICTIONARY, one cannot know the English language. Language is a living phenomenon: it comes through dialogue, it comes through contact with living people. The OXFORD DICTIONARY may be marginally helpful, but just the OXFORD DICTIONARY .... He was not able even to make a single sentence, because in the OXFORD DICTIONARY there are only words. He knew the whole language, and still he was not able to make a single sentence.

This is the situation of the scholars: they are afraid of their not knowing; they go on piling up scriptures over their not knowing, covering it up with thick layers of knowledge. But underneath they are as ignorant as ever.

Ignorance has not to be covered, but transformed into innocence. Ignorance has not to become knowledgeability, ignorance has to become a feeling of the mysterious and the miraculous in existence.

This is the way of a religious man. The scholarly man is never religious - cannot be.

Your whole approach, Anubhasha, is categorically wrong - not in part, but absolutely. You have to understand that insecurity is the very nature of life; there is no way to avoid it. And when there is no way to avoid it, the only wise way is to enjoy it. When it is impossible to avoid it, why go on hitting your head against the wall? Then it is better to transform insecurity into a beautiful experience. In fact, it is that.

Man can never demystify existence, he can never become all-knowing. The desire to become all-knowing is dangerous. In this ambition of becoming all-knowing so that you can be safe, the possibility is that you may collect much information. And in collecting information, you will forget one basic thing: that you have to go through a transformation. Information is not going to help you at all - you need a transformation of your consciousness. By transformation, you will not become a knower, you will become more and more a mystic.

Each and every thing in life, from the smallest grass leaf to the biggest star ... it is all mysterious.

Neither holy scriptures have any answers for it, nor science has any answers for it, although they

both go on proposing hypotheses. Religion tries to propose a hypothesis of God: that he created the world. This is really pitiable; it has nothing to do with authentic religiousness, it is a childish effort to forget your ignorance. Nobody has witnessed any God creating the world. By the very nature of the fact, nobody can be a witness; otherwise the world is already there, somebody is there to witness it.

Man"s stupidity knows no limits. Christianity believes God created the world ... but this is not enough:

they have to know the exact year, date, day - in detail. And they have calculated - nobody knows how they have come to this calculation because they have not given the process of their calculation - that God created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus was born. Of course, it must have been Monday, and the first of January, because he cannot start in the middle of the year.

In fact, wherever and whenever he started, that was the first of January. How can the calendar exist without a world?

And it raises a thousand and one questions which Christian theologians have not been able to answer - not even a single one. What was God doing for eternity? And why did he create the world exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus was born? What is the secret of it? And where has this fellow been before? And the more basic question is: From where did God come? Who produced him? Is he an orphan, with no mother, no father? Who created him? If the world needs a creator, then God also needs a creator.

This hypothesis can satisfy only very childish minds, and can give them security. But millions of people are in that space. In temples, in synagogues, in mosques, they are praying to a God which is just a hypothesis.

Some day when man really comes of age and to maturity, he will laugh at us: "What kind of idiots is the whole history full of? They create a hypothesis, and they worship a hypothesis."

Two plus two make four: that is a hypothesis, but you never worship it - or do you? Just writing "two plus two is equal to four" ... and then flowers and devotional songs ... But your God is not better in any way than "two plus two is four".

But science is not in a better position either. They say that at a certain point, nearabout four billion years ago ... Their calculation is as bogus as the religious calculation: four thousand and four years, or four million years, or four billion years. How do you come to that conclusion? It is simply whimsical. They say the world came into existence out of an explosion. Explosion of what? They have removed God; now instead of God, it is an explosion of energy. But that means the energy was there. And if the energy was there, existence was there.

Gautam Buddha seems to be more logical, Mahavira seems to be more logical; they don't believe in the creation at all. They have simply denied that the world has ever been created: it has always been there, and it will always be there, changing its forms.

You cannot conceive a point when the world was not, and then suddenly it was there. It is not logic, it is magic: a moment before there was nothing and a moment after, there was everything. God seems to be a street magician! But the street magician knows only tricks. Out of an empty cap, he brings birds - but they are hidden in the empty cap. He creates the illusion that the cap is empty, but it is not empty.

Gautam Buddha is right when he says, "The very idea of the creation of the world is foolish. It will lead to more stupid answers and questions." But why do people want to know such things?

There must be a psychological need, and a universal psychological need. This is the need: safety.

Knowing that God created the world, you feel at ease.

Strange, I have never felt any unease about whether God created the world or not. Who cares?

In what way am I related to that creation? It does not affect me this way or that. I am ready to accept the mystery of life, and I am against all those people - whether religious scholars or scientific researchers - who are going to satisfy your fear of insecurity by giving you hypotheses.

Even science could not control its temptation and accept the mysteriousness of existence, that we don't know. Not even a single scientist has been so courageous as to say, "We don't know." In fact, the whole project of science is such that slowly, slowly our area of knowledge is growing, and the area of our ignorance is decreasing. Logically it can be inferred that one day, somewhere in the future - it may take millions of years - a point will come when everything will be known; the whole area will be covered by knowledge, and there will be nothing left to be known anymore.

I cannot agree with this. Yes, science tries to know things, but that does not demystify them. It simply pushes the mystery back a little. You split the atom - soon you will be able to split the sperm - and then you say that the atom consists of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and you think you have provided the knowledge. But the question is, why does the atom consist of electrons, protons, and neutrons? The mystery is not dissolved, it has become more subtle.

The man of understanding will accept that insecurity is the very fabric of life, and that not knowing is the counterpart of the miraculous and the mysterious existence. We know nothing. All that we know is very superficial, and all that we know goes on changing. That which seems to be so certain today becomes uncertain tomorrow.

Have you observed that for almost thirty years, no big volumes on science have been written? Only periodicals, monthly publications .... And people don't write big books for the simple reason that by the time their book is finished, it will be out of date - so great is the explosion. All old theories become wrong; new theories come in. All old hypotheses drop dead; new hypotheses arise like the phoenix, out of the ashes of the old hypotheses. And they know perfectly well that these are also going to fall.

If you are trying to write a complete history of something scientific, you are wasting time. So scientists only write papers, not books; they read papers, not books, because a paper can be read in a university or at a conference of scientists. At least it is real, true at that moment; nobody knows about tomorrow. People used to think that Albert Einstein will never be refuted. He has been refuted, he is no longer the giant he used to be. Inch by inch, his whole theory of relativity has been criticized, and better proposals have come into being.

But now one thing is certain - because three hundred years" experience of science shows that no theory is going to become authentic knowledge, it is only a temporary hypothesis. Somebody with a better intelligence, with more logical acumen, with better scientific equipment, is going to demolish it.

Charles Darwin is no longer accepted. The idea that man has come from the monkeys or apes is very appealing; looking at man, it needs no proof! But for millions of years, monkeys have remained monkeys, man has remained man. Neither do we see people falling back towards monkeys - going up the trees, and growing tails, and jumping - nor do we see another modern monkey getting down from the tree, standing on two feet, and declaring, "Now I am a human being."

There has not been a single scientific theory which has remained true. Everything has changed, and everything is changing so fast that perhaps in the future it will not be possible to read even papers.

One of the great mathematicians - perhaps the greatest mathematician, Goedel - was writing a book on mathematics. His lifelong effort - he wasted forty years - was to give to the world a complete book on mathematics; there would be no need of any improvement in it. He was a great genius. And when he was coming to the conclusion of his book, Bertrand Russell demolished the whole book of forty years just by a small puzzle.

Bertrand Russell was also a mathematician; he has also written a very great book on mathematics, PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, which I don't think anybody ever reads, except a few crazy people like me! He came to know about a problem: the government of Britain had ordered all the libraries to make a catalog of all the books they had, to keep one copy of the catalog in the library, and to send another copy to the central government library so that they could know how many books were in the whole country.

The librarians made the catalog ... and finally a few intelligent ones became very disturbed: what to do about the catalog they are keeping in the library? - because that has become a big book itself.

Should it be included in the catalog? If they don't include it, then it is against the order. The order says, "All the books in the library should be included in the catalog." So according to the order, the catalog also has to be included. But it looks very foolish that the catalog includes itself.

But they were just small town librarians. The idea came and puzzled them, but they thought, "We should not worry, we will just send them to the central library." But to the central library, the order was the same, that they should make a catalog of all the catalogs, keep one copy with them, and send the other copy to the government.

The man at the central library was far more educated, far more intelligent, but even he could not figure out what to do: whether to have the catalog included in the catalog itself ... That looks ridiculous, and hilarious. But not to include it goes against the order. So he asked Bertrand Russell, "You are a great mathematician, you have to solve this puzzle."

Bertrand Russell worked on it but could not find any solution. Everything was wrong: If you put it in the catalog, it does not look right that the catalog is cataloged in itself. If you don't keep it in the catalog, that is not right because the catalog is in the library and you have left one book uncataloged.

Remembering Goedel, the old man who was a world-famous mathematician and who was known to be completing a book on which he had worked for forty years - and perhaps no mathematical book would ever be so complete, so exhaustive - Bertrand Russell sent the puzzle to him. Goedel was just completing the final chapter, the last pages. His whole hypothesis was that mathematics can solve all problems ... but he could not solve the problem of this catalog: whether to include it in itself or not.

He became so shocked that just a small thing cannot be solved by his whole mathematical experience that he did not publish his book. He became so frustrated, he sent the puzzle back to Bertrand Russell and told him, "I"m not going to complete the book and I"m not going to publish it although I have wasted my whole life on it. What is the use? It cannot solve a simple thing."

Science is an effort to demystify existence in every way. And that"s what theology has been doing before science - trying to demystify everything. God created the world - that makes you safe. God is the father - that makes you secure; he will take care of you. Everything is decided by God; of course, it cannot be against you. God is compassionate ... that"s what Mohammedans say:

"RAHMAN RAHIM" - he is kindness, he is compassion itself. So don't be worried about anything.

Even all your sins will be forgiven, because his compassion is far bigger than your ability to commit sins.

How many sins can you commit in a small life of seventy years? If you go on committing sins day and night, without taking time for eating and sleeping and bathing - just sins and sins and sins, a continuum from the cradle to the grave - even then you cannot commit so many sins that they are greater than the compassion of God. You will be forgiven - it gives great safety, a great consolation - just believe in God.

Theology was trying to create safety, consolation, security. And now science has taken over from theology, on a more pragmatic basis, and is doing the same thing: just giving you a false idea that you need not worry, science knows all.

The very word "science" means knowing.

But I want to insist again and again to you: neither theology, nor science, nor philosophy - no effort of man can demystify existence.

You need to be courageous to accept the insecurity - not only accept, but rejoice in it. You have to rejoice in the mystery of existence: the trees, the oceans, the mountains, the stars ... everything is mysterious. From the smallest pebble on the beach to the whole universe, everything is so mysterious that there is no possibility of knowing it.

Not knowing is the way of the mystic. Insecurity is the way of the mystic. And to be a sannyasin is to be on the path of the mystic.

Anubhasha, if you change your basic standpoint - which is wrong, utterly wrong - then your whole problem disappears. And then you are capable of dancing amidst all insecurity; you are capable of loving and laughing amidst all not knowing.

Not knowing is nothing but innocence, and insecurity is nothing but a constantly changing panorama, always fresh and new. Nothing is repeated in existence.

You must have heard the saying, "History repeats itself." History repeats itself because history has consisted up to now of stupid human beings. Existence is so intelligent: it never repeats itself; it never creates another Jesus, another Moses, another Buddha, another Chuang Tzu, another Socrates. It simply never repeats. Its creativity is tremendous, inexhaustible.

Yes, the history of man repeats itself, because the life of man is a routine. If you look at your life ...

you go on repeating it. Slowly, slowly the repetition becomes your efficiency: you become almost a robot, you lose your consciousness. Consciousness is needed only if each moment is new, because you have to respond to a new situation. Old answers won"t do.

It is a great blessing that life is insecure, love is insecure, and fundamentally we are in a state of not knowing. We can be childlike - running after butterflies, collecting seashells on the beach, or colored stones, as if they are diamonds, and enjoy all of them.

In my childhood, I used to have as many pockets as possible. My tailor used to be very angry with me. He said, "You will spoil my credit; nobody will come to me for their clothes to be made. What kind of dress is this? - with four pockets in front, pockets even on the arms, pockets on the pants ...

not just two, four." He said, "You are mad, and you are driving me mad."

I said, "I need all these pockets because I love the river, and I find so many beautiful stones that all these pockets fall short."

Whenever I would come home with my pockets full of stones, I would even go to bed with all the stones. Everybody was angry ... "What do you think these stones are? Diamonds, or emeralds, or rubies?"

I said, "I don't know, but they are immensely beautiful and I cannot sleep without my treasure; it feels good that they are close to me."

Not knowing is nothing but innocence. These two things are very foundational: insecurity and not knowing. If you can relax in these two, you are a sage, you are awakened. If you go against these two, you are going against your own enlightenment, against your own possibility of being a sage.

Question 2:

Devageet, the tears of joy, the tears of peace, the tears of silence are the most precious things you have. Laughter cannot reach to that height. No words are able to express the beauty of the tears.

Your eyes are the most transparent part of your body, and your tears come directly from your very heart. It is a silent dance, a very silent music ....

One should not think of it as a shattering experience. In a way, it is shattering: it shatters that which is false in you. But it cleanses and brings into light that which is real in you. Don't pay attention to the dying false, it has never been alive - it was only a pretender. Focus your whole consciousness

on the uprising of the real. That is your very being. The tears are welcoming your very being and its discovery.

You are asking, "Is it possible, is it real?" Yes, Devageet, it is possible. It has to be made possible for everybody. And it is the most real thing in you. Nothing is more real than your tears. But the tears have a negative side too: if they come out of sadness and suffering and misery, then they are negative, then they create a dark night around you. But if they come out of joy and bliss and ecstasy, they create a great light within you and without you. And that"s what is happening.

You are saying, "It is a shattering, an upheaval from the depths. Tears pour through the cracks, washing the stones into jewels in the moonlight. My eyes are naked and unprepared for this garden:

blooming, silent, and unknown in the darkness - blossoms in the night. Is it possible, is it real? And tears, tears, tears .... I have become just eyes in the night, and your blessings are the morning dew."

Devageet, what is happening to you is expected to happen to everybody who has become intimate to me, who has come close to me - not physically, but spiritually. It is a great moment to welcome and to rejoice and to dance to abandon. You are coming out of your grave, you are going through a resurrection.

The funeral procession was reaching the top of the hill when the rear door of the hearse burst open.

To the horror of all the mourners, the coffin slid out, and then proceeded to bounce and clatter its way down the hill. At the bottom of the hill, its speed carried it right through the open doorway of a chemist shop. Before the appalled surprise of the chemist, it crashed into the counter, causing the lid to fly open.

"For goodness sake!" said the corpse. "Give me something to stop this coffin."

You are coming back out of the coffin. It must have been a long journey. It must have been very shattering, but it brought the dead man back to life! You are coming back to life. You have been dead ... now you will know life for the first time. And millions are the people in the world who are living in their coffins, and don't know what life is.

To experience life in its totality and intensity is to know the only significance and meaning of existence. That"s the only way. No philosophical thinking can make you aware of the tremendous meaning, and the beautiful blossoms, and the immortality of your being. Then the juice of life, drinking the juice of life is the only way there has ever been of finding godliness in the stones, in the trees, in the rivers, in people, in animals, in the birds. The whole of existence is full of vibrating light.

It is just that we should be tuned in - and then suddenly everything becomes such an ecstasy, you could not have conceived of it before.

Just to welcome your tears, a joke for you.

A layman and a vicar were playing golf, and the layman was not having a good game.

"Ah, damn, I missed!" said the layman at the first green. And then missing an easy putt, he said, "Ah, damn, I missed again!"

The layman kept on playing a bad shot, and kept saying, "Ah, damn, I missed!"

The vicar put up with this for half the round, but then he felt he owed it to the dignity of his calling to say something to the layman. "You really must not keep using such dreadful language, my dear Sir,"

said the vicar, "or the Lord may well strike you down."

And just as the words were out of his mouth, there came a jagged flash of lightning; and in a split second the vicar was burned to a crisp. Above the rolling thunder clouds, a deep voice was heard to say, "Ah, damn, I missed!"

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.