Your ego is the distance between you and me

Question 1:

Prem Nityamo, language is useful, but not always. Words have a utility, but not everywhere. There are spaces where language falls short, words prove impotent, and in fact those are the only spaces which have any significance.

That which can be contained in language is mundane; that which always eludes language is sacred.

Hence, nothing has ever been written anywhere, in any age, about love, about peace, about silence - although these words have been used as a necessary evil, as a human frailty, because man cannot speak through silence, cannot just speak through tears. He has to resort to something which is too small to contain the vast experiences; it distorts everything.

Hence there is no need: if you feel contented, if you feel something beyond words is arising in you ... it comes out through your tears, which are far better an expression than words.

Words have a limited meaning; tears have only hints about the unknown, just fingers pointing to the moon. If it is coming through songs or through music, it is far better. If it is coming through a dance, it is far more authentic.

But even if there is no expression at all - it simply remains within you like a flame in a temple where no wind is blowing, unwavering, utterly calm and quiet but still radiating the space inside you - some of that radiation is bound to come out of your body, out of your eyes, out of your hands. It is not your doing; it is happening on its own, and then it has a beauty. Then it can express without expressing, can say something without saying.

But I can understand your problem: you listen to others" questions .... This is not only your problem, this is our whole upbringing. We always go on looking at what others are doing, and if they are all doing it, there must be something in it. So many people are asking questions, and you cannot manage to reduce your feelings into a question. You may be feeling as if something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong except the idea of comparison, the idea of imitation. Those who are asking questions may not have such deep experiences. Their experiences may be very superficial - language is perfectly capable of translating their experiences into words. Their questions may be only intellectual, nothing to do with anything beyond the mind.

They may be very articulate, well-versed, scholarly. But even a parrot can be a scholar - only parrots are scholars. But the parrot does not understand the meaning of what he is saying; neither do the scholars understand anything. But they know a vast vocabulary, they know many, many words, with different nuances. Their capacity to express is great, but they don't have anything to express - their words are empty.

So some may be asking out of intellectual curiosity; some may be asking just to show their knowledge - not that they want to know the answer but that they already know the answer. They are just checking whether I also know the answer or not. There are different categories of questioners.

A few are very childish. One man is continuously asking that he should be allowed to sit in the first row. It seems he has come here only to sit in the first row, because he is threatening that if he is not allowed to sit in the first row, he will go away from here, be against me, propagandize against me.

The qualifications that he is showing in his threats certainly prohibit him from the first rows - he will never be allowed to be in the first rows. He seems to be absolutely stupid. Does he think that he can threaten me, or blackmail me?

And the very desire to sit in the first row is nothing but egoistic; here you are to be humble. The people who are sitting in the first rows have been here for years, and they have disappeared long before. That"s why they are in the first rows - just posthumous existences. Once they used to be; now they are no more. You are too much - you will have to remain in the very last row. If you want to be in the first row, disappear. Your question is coming out of your ego and you must be blind, utterly blind, because you cannot see what kind of question you are asking.

And I don't determine who should sit in the first row. It is something autonomous: slowly, slowly, as people drop their egos, they start moving closer to me.

Your ego is the distance between me and you.

If you want the distance not to be there then you have not to ask, you have to destroy your ego and the distance will disappear. One day you will find yourself sitting in the first row.

Nityamo, there are questions and questions. A few people are asking because I have said something before and now I am saying something which appears to them to be different or even contradictory.

Neither were they hearing at that time, nor are they hearing at this time - because those who have listened to me are not going to find any contradiction anywhere. Their deep listening will make a great harmony out of all statements that I am making. If the statements look opposite, that means you are incapable of creating a harmony. You have not heard, you have not understood.

A few people go on asking questions just to show others that they are growing spiritually very high.

One day they are touching the very sky; another day their girlfriend has left them, and all their spiritual flight is finished! One day they are beyond jealousy, beyond ego, and the next day their question comes: "What to do with jealousy? Perhaps it has come back ...." It has never gone anywhere. They were just enjoying the idea that they don't have any jealousy. Perhaps there was no opportunity for jealousy to show, and now the opportunity has arisen.

You are asking, "I look at other people"s questions ..." In the first place, that is wrong. You are here to listen to my answers, not to listen to others" questions. "I look at other people"s questions to see how they can express these feelings." How can you see their feelings? You can listen to their questions but whether they have those feelings within them or not, there is no way to see. In fact, the people who don't have those feelings find it easier to express; those who have those feelings find it almost impossible to express.

And you are unnecessarily worrying: "I just can"t find the words to express my tears or my love, although the longing is there." Your tears are enough. Your love is enough. There is no need to send the question; just drop a few tears on the paper and write underneath: L-U-V, love. Don't write the exact spelling, because that means it is coming out of the mind.

Or just make ... Many small children who are sannyasins send me letters - they cannot write much, they simply make a picture of the heart and an arrow. And they have said everything, far better than any poet. What more can any poet do? Just drop two tears also - then it becomes more heartful, more expressive. And it is not a question, it is simply an expression. Love is not a question; neither are your tears a question. They will show your longing; they will show the space you are in.

"Do I need to use words to expose myself?" There is no need. But if you feel the need - not because others are asking ... If you feel the need without any comparison and without any imitation, then ask, use words. There is no harm in it. But I repeat again: don't imitate. Don't do just anything because everybody else is doing it and if you don't do it, what will people think? - perhaps you don't have any love, perhaps you don't have any tears, perhaps you don't have anything to ask.

Here, nobody is going to think about you. Even to think about somebody is an interference in his freedom; it is trespassing his territory. Who are you even to raise a question in your mind about somebody else? My whole effort is to make you respectful of the dignity of everyone else, and his absolute freedom.

Even to think about him is a very subtle interference.

Mrs. Isaac was dying. "Rosen, dear," she pleaded weakly, "I want you to promise me that you will ride in the same car with my mother at my funeral."

"Okay," sighed Rosen, "but it is going to ruin my whole day."

There are a few things which should not be expressed; it is better not to express them.

Little Hymie was taking his bath with little Becky before the Sabbath. They were making soap bubbles, when suddenly little Hymie looked at Becky and said, "And now I am going to duck you."

"Ha!" said Becky with contempt. "You don't even know how to pronounce it!"

It is better sometimes to keep silent.

Question 2:

Puja Kavina, it is certainly a great problem for all sannyasins when they go back into the world: if they remain the way they are here, they will certainly be thought abnormal, unfit. They may lose their jobs, they may lose their wives, they may lose everything. They may find themselves in an insane asylum. So it is exactly what you are doing that everybody else is doing - when you go into the world, be normally mad; just fit with their style.

Only one thing has to be remembered: that it is your acting, that you are acting simply in order not to create unnecessary trouble for yourself and for others. And you can act, because you have been in the world; you know all the roles there. There is no need for anybody to prompt you. You have lived your whole life in that big madhouse; you know its language, its style, its functioning. Act it!

Don't become normal, just act normal. Deep inside remember that it is madness.

In other words, with awareness adjust yourself to society - but with awareness, so that your consciousness remains floating above and there is no compromise as far as your consciousness is concerned.

Outside, if people like to use lipstick, you can use it - there is no problem. Although it is ugly ...

but what else to do when the world has painted lips? It is dirty and in countries where people are kissing each other, when you kiss one woman you may be kissing hundreds of people because the same lipstick has been moving all around. It is highly unhygienic, and recently it has become the most dangerous thing in the world because you can catch a disease called AIDS, just by kissing someone.

The hygienic way is such that you will be immediately caught, for being abnormal. The hygienic way is what Eskimos do: they rub noses when they are in great love, they never kiss. For centuries they have known the fact that kissing is a dirty habit; mixing each other"s saliva cannot be called a healthy and hygienic thing. When the Eskimos first saw the Christian missionaries who had reached their land, they could not believe it. What kind of people are these? - because their way of showing love was absolutely hygienic.

The nose is so clean, and so cold and cool, and just rubbing the nose is a little playful too. But don't do it in any society where it is not known. If you start rubbing noses with somebody, you will be caught immediately: something has gone wrong with this man!

It is better to adjust and be normal. Just remember inside - a clear division - what is acting and what is your reality. You will have to hide yourself behind a personality. Here you can drop the personality outside the gate and you can be a real individual, but the moment you go out of the gate, just pull up your blanket of personality around yourself; it is absolutely right, there is nothing to be worried about.

"Betty," called the teacher, "tell me the meaning of the word "trickle"."

"To run slowly," said Betty.

"Quite right," said the teacher. "Now tell me the meaning of the word "anecdote"."

"A short funny tale," said Betty.

"Good girl," said the teacher. "Now see if you can give me a sentence with both those words in it."

Betty thought for a moment: "Yes, I know," she said. "Our dog trickled down the street wagging his anecdote."

Now, children have their own perception of things, and when you are talking to children you have to understand their language and their perception. What Betty is saying is perfectly right according to her perception. She had already given the meaning of both the words separately; but the teacher understood it according to her own understanding - the dictionary meaning, of which Betty is unaware. She has certainly seen the dog trickling down the street wagging his tail; she is talking about her experience.

When you go into the world don't suddenly start talking about experiences that happened here; otherwise people will think you are becoming a little lunatic, something is getting loose in your head.

If you start talking about ecstasy, blissfulness, silence, love, they will listen to you but they cannot understand - and it is not their fault. When you go back to them, speak their language. Unless you find someone with whom you can share your experiences - who has some idea, who has entered into some inner space; he may not have reached to the ultimate XYZ, but he has started the ABC - then there is some possibility.

Sufis, because of this problem, have been underground for twelve hundred years, because Mohammedans are fanatic people .... Sufism was born in the Mohammedan areas of the world; it is the pure essence of Mohammedanism, but only for those who have that deep insight. Otherwise it appears to be against Mohammedanism. The superficial organized religion is always against its very own foundations; it is always against its own founders.

Jainism is against Mahavira, and Buddhism is against Gautam Buddha, and Christianity is against Jesus, for the simple reason that these people were rebels, and what they said was impossible to organize. Their words had to be diluted, their words had to be interpreted; their words had to be changed to fit with the existing collectivity. They had to be made "normal."

Christianity is normal, Jesus is not. Jesus belongs to this company - he belongs to our circus; here he will completely fit. Even if he comes with his cross, nobody will take any note and nobody will object to it. People will help him to put the cross aside and sit down - "We will not need it here, you can leave it outside." Here, anybody will be absolutely welcome. But in Mohammedanism, or in any organized religion, the problem arises ....

The Sufis were the true Mohammedans - but Al-Hillaj Mansoor was murdered, and Sarmad was killed. Then Sufis had to go underground; there was no other way. And "going underground" can be understood to mean that they started behaving normally. With the society they will behave exactly the way the society expects from everybody.

If you want to see a Sufi mystic, it is very difficult - and it may be that he is just sitting in front of you. He may be a shoemaker, or he may be a carpenter; he may be a potter - he may be anybody ordinary. You may have passed the man many times. You may have enquired in the whole village, "I have heard there is a Sufi mystic in this village" - but even the village people don't know who the Sufi mystic is. They will say, "We don't know any Sufi here."

Unless you come across someone who belongs to the inner circle of the mystic ... and there may be only a few people, a dozen people at the most, who know the reality of the man. They meet in the middle of the night in secrecy. If you come across somebody by chance - if you go on searching, you will come across somebody - and if he is convinced that you are really a seeker, he will tell you, "I will get the permission of the master and I will take you for the first, initial meeting." Then he will inform you, "On such and such day, in the night at such and such time, you meet me."

And he will take you to a place where you will be surprised to know that twelve persons are sitting around a man you have been seeing every day, for all this time that you have been searching for the Sufi master. He is no one but the shoemaker, but now he is no longer in the dress of the shoemaker; he is sitting in the dress of a king. And all those twelve people are sitting around with such deep devotion and love, the whole atmosphere is fragrant.

For twelve hundred years, thousands of Sufi mystics have been living a normal life in the day, and in the middle of the night - just for one hour or two hours - they meet with those who can understand each other. Then they expose their hearts.

So when you go outside, behave normally but remember it is only an act because you don't want to be an unnecessary nuisance in the society - and it is not going to pay you either.

Tom went to the boss" office: "Can I have tomorrow afternoon off, Sir?" he asked his boss. "It is my grandmother"s funeral."

"Come off it, boy," said the boss. "Did you not have an afternoon off a couple of months ago because your grandmother died?"

"Yes," said Tom, "but Granddad married again."

In that mad world, where granddads are marrying, behave in the same way. Don't become a focus of people"s attention; they will decry you, they will condemn you. They have stoned people to death; they have never shown any mercy - they are almost incapable of being merciful. There is no need to provoke their anger and their violence; there is no need to be a martyr.

Your purpose is to attain your unfoldment, silently. If the day is not the right time for you, no need to be worried: there are flowers which only open in the night when everybody has gone to sleep.

One of the most fragrant flowers in India is the Night Queen. It is a very small flower, but it comes in thousands, simultaneously - the whole tree becomes just flowers. And it is so fragrant ... in one place I had a tree in front of my bungalow. My neighbors started complaining against the tree, saying, "You have to cut it down, because we cannot sleep; the fragrance is too much." The whole neighborhood used to become full of fragrance.

I had asked many gardeners, "This is a flower which is called Night Queen; there must be a parallel plant which opens its flowers in the day. If there is such a flower as Night Queen, there must be a flower known as Day King." But no gardener could help me to find it.

I found it in Kashmir. I was certain that there must be a parallel flower because in existence there is always balance; this Night Queen is a woman, so there must be a man, a male flower. And I was surprised to see, the male was very poor. It was exactly the same kind of flower - a bigger size, male chauvinistic size. It blossomed in thousands in the day. But there was no fragrance.

So don't be worried: you need not expose yourself in the open daylight in the ordinary world. There, you will be in unnecessary trouble. Keep growing inside, and remain alert that you don't get identified with your act. It is only an act that you are playing - you are playing the act out of compassion; you don't want to disturb anybody. And your real growth is something inner.

Sufis say that your prayers should be in the middle of the night, when even your household people are fast asleep. Nobody should know that you pray. Your prayer will be just a whisper between you and the unknown; you should not be an exhibitionist.

Question 3:

Milarepa, the mango is certainly more appropriate than the poor apple. But the problem is that the story about the apple is a Christian story, and in the Christian countries mangoes don't grow.

Otherwise it is absolutely certain: if mangoes were present in the Garden of Eden, God would have forbidden Adam and Eve to eat the mangoes rather than to eat the apples. Apples have nothing to be compared with mangoes. But mangoes grow only in the East - countries like India - in many varieties. In India the mango is called the king of all fruits; the apple stands nowhere in comparison with it.

But to fit the mango in a Christian story is very difficult - the Christian god does not know the taste of mango at all. It would only be possible if the story of forbidding had happened in India. Every story has its geography, its history, its atmosphere. It does not come out of the blue.

The Mother Superior of the orphanage called three girls, who were leaving, to her office. "Now," she commenced, "you are all going out in the big, sinful world, and I must warn you against certain men.

There are men who will buy you drinks, take you to a room, undress you, and do unspeakable things to you. Then they give you two or three pounds, and you are sent away ruined."

"Excuse me, Reverend Mother," said the boldest girl. "Did you say these wicked men will give us three pounds?"

"Yes, dear child," said the Mother Superior. "Why do you ask?"

"Well," the girl said, "the priests only give us apples."

Not even mangoes! But in a Christian framework, mangoes don't fit. They need a different territory and a different world. In the Garden of Eden there was not a single mango tree, and here .... You have been forbidden - but not absolutely forbidden - because the mango tree was planted by the gardener, the old gardener who used to take care of the garden here twelve years before.

He planted it for me. And when you inform him that the tree is ripe enough, and has started giving fruits ... And you have been keeping those fruits because mangoes have to be taken from the trees.

If they are fully ripe, then before you can reach them, the parrots reach them.

And the parrots don't understand any language - neither Hebrew nor Sanskrit nor English nor Hindi - you cannot forbid them. They have been eating in the Garden of Eden from every tree. They are eating in this garden from every tree, and they come with a big group. If the mangoes are ripe - and they certainly smell so beautiful - they attract the parrots in dozens. So mangoes have to be taken from the tree just before they start ripening. Then you have to keep them in your house, in some hotter place - maybe hidden under the grass, dry grass, or hidden in dry wheat. There they ripen.

Milarepa is now my gardener. There are many gardeners, but by chance that mango tree has fallen in his territory. So I can understand - it is very difficult to sleep. He is ripening those mangoes in his room. Then nobody can sleep - as they become more and more ripe, they will disturb your sleep.

You are not absolutely forbidden; once in a while, don't bother about anybody - just get up and enjoy one fruit, and that will give you a good sleep. But not more than one, because after all, you have to be under a certain discipline. Don't destroy your freedom by licentiousness.

That"s what has to be understood - you are free, and one fruit is more tasteful than two. The more fruits you eat, the less tasteful they will become. That"s a well-known economic law: the law of decreasing returns. If you go on eating mango and mango and mango, then you will jump out of the room and run away, shouting, "Mango and mango!" ... you have gone crazy.

There is a limit, and I am making the limit just so that you can enjoy it in its totality, because it is only one; one every night. And a mango is not a small fruit. One is good, just in the middle of the night.

Sitting silently, take the mango in your hand. Meditate over it; don't be in a hurry, because you are not a thief, you are allowed. Then eat it slowly - not in a hurry. Chew forty-eight times every bite.

That is the science of digesting a mango fruit. And if you chew forty-eight times each bite, one mango fruit is almost forty-eight mango fruits.

It depends on you, how many you want to make out of one. And you will get tremendous joy out of it. Then go to sleep. And your every night will become an Arabian night.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.