A thirst, a prayer without words

Question 1:

Satyadharma, it is one of the traps every meditator is prone to fall into. The name of the trap is seriousness. You are taking things too seriously. The moment you become serious about anything, it creates tension. And tension is a great disturbance as far as meditation is concerned, peace is concerned, silence is concerned.

Anything that is known as spiritual becomes more impossible, the more tense you become. And remember the vicious circle: the more tense you are, the less you will be experiencing the joys and the depths and the heights of meditation. The less joyous, the more tense you will be; the more tense, joys will disappear completely.

Millions of people have tried meditation and dropped out of it because they took it very seriously.

Religion has been thought to be a very serious affair - it is not. One has to understand - at least those who are with me - that religion is a playfulness, a laughter. Take it easy; then things blossom without any tension. You are not taking it easy, you are making it difficult.

You say, "As meditation is deepening, I feel tension and frustration at not being okay with myself, melting more and more."

It is not you who is feeling frustrated and who is feeling tense. Your innermost being knows nothing of tension and nothing of frustration. It is your mind who is coming in.

The absolute criterion to know whether it is mind or not is the desire for more and more. That is the way mind functions in every field of life. If you are earning money, the mind goes on saying more and more. If you are after power, mind goes on saying more and more. If you are doing meditation, mind goes on saying more and more.

That "more and more" is the very basic quality of the mind. And mind is always serious. It disturbs everything that comes from the beyond.

If meditation is deepening, you should feel more joyous. But we think we deserve more, we are worthy of more; we are doing a great obligation to nature because for a few minutes we are sitting in meditation.

Don't make it serious.

One emperor of Japan went to see Rinzai, a Zen master who lived in the mountains with the wild animals, with the trees. The emperor had taken a great risk in going there. And he had taken with him a very beautiful robe studded with diamonds and precious stones. He had made it specially as a present for the master.

The master accepted it, because it would be an insult to the emperor not to accept his present. But when the emperor was returning he told him, "Please, if you don't mind, take this precious robe with you. Here in the wild if I use this robe all the animals will laugh at me, the trees will laugh at me. The birds will make a laughingstock of me. This will be the talk in the mountains, in the forest, the only talk: Look at that old Zen master. Now he is doing such a foolish thing!

"It is not going to impress anybody here in nature, because nobody is so stupid to be impressed by anything false. Here only the real and authentic is accepted. You take it back to the capital. You can use it, and there are enough idiots who will be impressed by it."

Life is hilarious. The moment you become serious you become closed to life. And one should always remember to be grateful, and one should not ask for more. Asking for more is a complaint. In other words, you are saying, "I am doing so much, and the blissfulness equivalent to my effort and my worthiness is not descending on me."

Don't have a complaint against existence. You don't have any right. Whatever is being given to you, be thankful for it; your thankfulness, your gratitude will bring more. And the more comes to you, be more grateful, be more humble, knowing that you don't deserve it at all. It is just because of the compassion of nature that it goes on pouring all kinds of riches into your being.

So the first thing is, drop this tension and frustration. It will destroy your meditation that is going deeper. You will be thrown back into your mind where tensions dwell, frustrations dwell, complaints, and everything that is ugly.

Secondly, you have misunderstood me. When I have used the words "divine discontentment", you have understood it in the same way as you are discontented with your wife or your husband, with your house, with your earning, with your boss or with your servants, with your children, with your parents. In short, with everybody.

When I have added to "discontent" the word "divine", it changes its very quality. Divine discontentment is not your ordinary discontentment with things. Divine discontentment is simply a thirst, a prayer, without any words. It is not a complaint such as "give me more." It is simply a prayerfulness saying, "I am in your hands. Make me more worthy so that I can receive more blessings from you."

See the difference. You are not asking directly for more blessings, you are asking, "Just make me more worthy. I am so unworthy, so undeserving that I feel embarrassed when flowers shower over me. I don't think I have earned them. Before you shower flowers on me, please make me worthy of them."

Divine discontentment has a totally different flavor. It is not ordinary discontentment; it is asking, it is praying to existence, "You are giving me so much. I am grateful on the one hand, and on the other hand I feel that I am not worthy of it. You should make me worthy also. My discontentment is about my worth, not about your gift." When it is about the gift, it is an ordinary discontentment. When it is about your worth, then it takes a totally new dimension. It becomes divine.

You say, "I remember once a friend said, "If you think this is it, you can be sure it is not."" Do you know if your friend has got it? You should have asked him, "What about you? Do you have it? If you say you have it, you don't have it. If you say you don't have it, you don't have any right to say such a statement."

You simply accepted a statement which can be made only by an enlightened man - not by any ordinary friend. He must have read it in some book. If you meet him again, ask, "Have you got it?"

and listen to his answer. In every way he is going to be wrong. If he says yes, he has not got it. If he says no, then you can say, "If you have not got it, how do you know? On what authority can you make this statement, that if you think this is it, you can be sure it is not."

Look at it from the other side: if you are sure it is not, do you think you have got it? The people who have got it don't say that they have got it. They don't say they have not got it either; they simply smile at the mystery of the experience, that it cannot be expressed as yes or as no. It is beyond the duality of yes and no, beyond the positive and the negative.

So if you use the positive you are wrong, and if you use the negative you are wrong still. Only silence is something which is beyond both - or a smile, or a laughter, which does not say yes, which does not say no, but expresses absolutely that you have got it. Your radiant face, your eyes, your grace - let them say that you have got it. Don't use words.

There are limits beyond which any word is meaningless. And don't listen to the advice of friends who are simply knowledgeable, because I cannot think you have found a friend who is enlightened.

He is simply repeating verbatim from a Zen master whose statement this is, and you accepted it.

Never accept anybody"s knowledge. It is going to disturb your own progress. "This pushes me on,"

you say, "to enquire more deeply. Laughter helps to move beyond tension, and with divine discontent I just need to remember to laugh at myself." You know what you need: "just to remember to laugh at myself." Then why don't you do it? You know the answer.

But the friend has disturbed you. Always remember, advice is the only thing in the world that is given freely by everybody and is not accepted by anybody. The whole day people are giving advice, knowing perfectly well that nobody is going to accept it and also knowing that they don't follow their own advice either. But a few people get caught into it, and then they make an unnecessary mess.

Avoid advice. You are right on the path; you are meditating. Just remember one thing, that whatever is coming to you is more than you deserve. And remember to laugh.

Existence loves laughter. You may have observed, or not, that man is the only animal in the whole of existence who is capable of laughing. Laughter is the only distinguishing mark that you are not a buffalo, you are not a donkey; you are a human being. Laughter defines your humanity and your evolution. And the greatest laugh is at your own ridiculous things.

For example, it is ridiculous to be frustrated and tense because more meditation is not happening.

It is laughable to accept the advice of a man who knows nothing. And then that advice becomes a problem to you, creates new problems in you.

Unable to manage his rebellious girlfriend, Walter asked his dad how he has dealt with similar problems.

"Well son," replied the father, "every time your mother began to act up, I would take down her pants and spank her."

"I tried that," said Walter, "but by the time I get my girl"s pants down, I"m not angry any more."

Nobody"s advice is going to help you. You have to work out your way yourself. And learn to laugh at yourself. Learning to laugh at others is very easy; it is easy because it is ego fulfilling. But laughing at yourself is a great achievement. It means you are becoming humble; you don't take your ego seriously.

Half way across the Atlantic ocean, the captain of the aircraft addressed the passengers, "I regret to say, ladies and gentleman, that one of our engines has failed. This puts us in no danger, since the aircraft can function perfectly well on the remaining three engines. But it does mean that our arrival in New York will be delayed by an hour."

A few minutes later, a further announcement was made. "I regret to say, ladies and gentleman," he explained calmly, "that another of our engines has failed. There is still no danger as this aircraft can function perfectly well on the remaining two engines, but it does mean that our arrival in New York will be delayed by two hours."

Half an hour later, the passengers heard their captain yet again, "I regret to say, ladies and gentlemen, that yet another of our engines has failed. There is still no danger whatsoever, as this aircraft can function perfectly well on one engine alone. But it does mean that our arrival in New York will be delayed by three hours."

"I hope," said the Polack pope, who was aboard the aircraft, to another passenger, "that the fourth engine does not pack up as well or we will be up here forever."

Just laugh! There is so much to laugh at in the world that the people who become serious are really doing something very great. With great effort and with great tension they are creating seriousness; otherwise nothing is serious. If meditation is deepening slowly, what is the hurry? Enjoy it, relish it as long as you have got it. And the more you relish it, the more you rejoice in it, the more you will become capable of receiving.

This has to be remembered: don't misunderstand me, because I have to use the words which are being used by everybody. But I try to give them a different color. That"s why I call it divine discontentment. You should have emphasized what is the meaning of divine. But you forgot the word "divine", you simply emphasized your old habit of discontentment.

So when you are interpreting anything said by me, be careful - where is the emphasis? Why should I add divine, why not just say discontentment? I want to change the quality of discontentment, I want to give it a new dimension. You forgot that; that"s why you are feeling tension that things are not going as well as they should. Things are always going as well as they should.

The whole existence is at ease except your little minds, which go on creating problems for you. Just put these little minds aside: "It is not your world, it is not your territory. Meditation has nothing to do with you. You just go out and play, and whenever I need you, I will call you in."

But you have to be aware that you are not the mind. And if the mind is feeling tense and frustrated, it is simply destroying the possibility of meditation - because mind is afraid of meditation. Meditation is going to be the death of the mind. The day your meditation starts functioning fully, mind will not be needed at all. So before it happens, mind tries in every possible way to create disturbances. It is just a question of its survival.

But if you want to be yourself and not a slave of a mind which was created by others ... just like the friend who advised you, and you never asked him; you simply swallowed the advice without any question. Mind is created by everybody around you from the very beginning of your childhood. By the time you come out of the university, almost one third of your life has gone into conditioning you.

And society uses such subtle means of conditioning that it is becoming more and more difficult to get people out of the conditioning.

Solzhenitsyn, one of the dissident Nobel Prize winners from the Soviet Union, who is now in America, has just said that what is being done in America is not different from what is being done in the Soviet Union. The only difference is that America is using more sophisticated means and Russia is using more primitive means: torturing people, harassing people, keeping them always in fear.

These are their ways of conditioning minds, so the people cannot think anything other than what the government wants them to think.

He says that in America this kind of thing is not needed. America is using education. For example, in America, the books of Charles Darwin are prohibited. No university in America can teach the theory of evolution, because it goes against the BIBLE and the theory of creation. Now, this is a very sophisticated way of bringing religion into education. And nobody will detect it because religion is not mentioned at all. But why are you prohibiting Charles Darwin? All his books have been removed from every library in America, from every course in the colleges, in the universities - because if the world was created then there is no question of evolution.

Man was created as man - that"s what the BIBLE says - not that we evolved slowly from fish up to man. God created the fish, God created the monkey, God created the man, God created everything.

The whole world was created completely. There is no question of evolution. To sustain the BIBLE"S idea of creation, Charles Darwin is prohibited even from being read.

Just a few days ago, the American Supreme Court decided that when somebody goes bankrupt, the bare essentials should not be auctioned. For example, his bed, his chair, his kitchen things, his clothes; the bare essentials should not be auctioned. Now they have added a television also to the essentials. And it seems to be essential because the average time each American spends looking at the television has gone from five hours to seven and a half hours per day.

Certainly it is essential. Almost one third of the day is devoted to television. And what is the television doing? It is propagating the same ideas, the same advertisements, the same philosophies, the same attitudes that the government allows. Watching television eight hours a day continuously for years is a conditioning. Those ideas become imprints on your mind - every day ...

Solzhenitsyn is right that what is being done by television in America is being done by very primitive means in the Soviet Union. It is possible that there may be a revolution in the Soviet Union some day - there is a limit of tolerance - but in America there will not be any revolution. You can"t revolt against such a sophisticated way of conditioning your mind.

Adolf Hitler has said that there is no truth and there is no lie. The truth is the often repeated lie. Go on repeating it and it becomes true. And he proved it by his own experiments. Absolute lies that anybody can see ... and he convinced one of the most intellectual races in the world that they are truths: for example, that the fall of Germany in the first world war was because of the Jews. There is no question of giving any reasoning, you just repeat the sentence continuously on every radio, in every newspaper, in every magazine.

In his great rallies he was continuously repeating it: "If we can get rid of the Jews then Germany will rule over the whole world. These Jews are the problem; they are sabotaging everything in such a subtle way that Germany can never come to the top. And they are sabotaging because they think they are the chosen people of God; they should rule the world. And of course they cannot allow anybody else to rule the world."

And he convinced the whole of Germany that Jews have to be completely eradicated. He killed six million Jews. No single man has ever killed so many people - and with consent of the whole nation. He proved it absolutely that a lie repeated continuously becomes an imprint on the mind.

Then people start thinking according to that imprint.

A meditator has to remember not to be imprinted upon by friends, by teachers, by parents, by priests.

He has to be very alert because everybody is so keen to make an imprint upon your mind - because everybody is so keen to make a slave of you.

An unconditioned mind is a rebel. It functions out of its own understanding, not according to conditioning. It functions according to its own light, not by what has been said to it.

So don't be gullible. Somebody says something and you immediately catch hold of it, it becomes part of your mind. And mind is a great antique collector. Anything rotten and the mind immediately collects it. It is a kind of cemetery where every dead idea, dead philosophy, dead religion, anything dead is immediately collected. That is the whole of your mind: a collection of things for which there is no use now. Life goes on changing and you are depending on things which may have been significant, useful at some time, at some point in history, but today they are simply out of date.

All minds are out of date. Let me repeat it again: every mind is out of date. Only meditation is fresh, young, alive, in the moment.

To move on the path of meditation is to move on the path of life ... life"s joys, life"s songs, life"s laughter. And take everything easy.

Easy is right.

Question 2:

Prem Komal, consciousness is the source of all. Consciousness is the stuff existence is made of.

But there is no source of consciousness itself. Consciousness is another name of God - a better name, more scientific, less mythological.

You never ask, what is the source of God? You know that that question is going to lead into an infinite regress. God is the source of existence, but you never ask what is the source of God. Those who have asked are thought to be atheists, and they are condemned: "You are asking an absurd question." They are not asking an absurd question. They are simply making your God himself an absurdity.

The religions have been saying that existence cannot be without a creator; nothing can be without a creator - that has been the argument of all the religions for centuries. But then the question naturally arises to any intelligent mind that if everything needs a creator, then God must also need a creator.

But then there is no end. God number one is created by God number two. God number two is created by God number three ... Where are you going to stop? There is no terminus. The train goes on and on. And finally you will become so tired.

People like Gautam Buddha, who had a greater clarity than anybody else ever had, say that bringing God in is in itself absurd. Existence has always been here. Nobody has created it, and nobody can destroy it. But that does not mean that Gautam Buddha is an atheist. It simply means he has a more scientific and less mythological approach.

He says existence consists of consciousness. Existence itself is made of consciousness. And consciousness has always been here, is here, will be here. It can be asleep, it can be awake, but it is consciousness all the same.

When it is asleep you work blindly, unconsciously. When it becomes awake you are enlightened.

But there is no source of consciousness, Prem Komal.

Consciousness itself is the very foundation of the whole existence. Nothing is deeper than that. You cannot go beyond consciousness.

An English couple wanted to have twins but also wanted them to be very polite and gentlemanly.

So they went to see the genetic specialist who reprogrammed two of the husband"s sperms and implanted them into the egg in the mother"s womb.

Very satisfied the English couple went home. After nine months, the woman was ready to give birth but nothing happened. After ten months there was still nothing. Then after a year she was still pregnant. This went on year after year.

After fifty years her husband died, and still she had not given birth. After seventy years the old lady felt that she might die soon, and so she went to the hospital and asked them to remove the babies surgically.

The woman was put on the operating table and the surgeon opened up her stomach. To the great surprise of all present, inside her stomach were two old English gentlemen, saying one to the other, "After you, I insist."

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

Just remember one thing: don't wait for such intellectual questions to be decided. They are never decided. But if you want to experience what is the source of all, go deeper into meditation, and you will find that there is nothing deeper than meditation. You will find that everything comes out of consciousness. Even matter is condensed consciousness, in deep sleep - perhaps in a coma.

There are degrees of consciousness. Man is the only being whose unconsciousness has allowed a little bit of consciousness to arise and to be awake. Now this little piece, this little layer of consciousness is enough, if you use it rightly, to bring unconsciousness more and more into a state of consciousness.

Right now it is one tenth of your whole consciousness. The day it becomes all consciousness and no unconsciousness in you, a pure awareness from abc to xyz, from the beginning to the end - you will find all questions have disappeared, because you are in a state of knowing without questioning.

You are consciousness itself and you know that it is the source of everything; it does not need any source for itself.

While questioning a suspect, the police detective flipped through the man"s folder.

"I see here," he said, "that you have a string of previous arrests. Here is one for armed robbery, one for breaking and entering, and another for sexual assault."

"Yes sir," replied the suspect modestly. "It took me a little while to find out what I do best."

Even the criminal, even the worst criminal has a little consciousness. But he does not allow his consciousness to grow. On the contrary, he allows his unconsciousness to use his consciousness.

The unconscious remains the master and consciousness is being used as a servant.

The day you became an initiate, the day you entered into sannyas, you took a quantum leap: "From now on consciousness will be the master and unconsciousness will be the servant. I will not allow unconsciousness to infiltrate into my consciousness. Howsoever small my consciousness is, I have to work only consciously so that slowly, slowly it becomes stronger, more crystallized, and capable of making unconscious parts of me also join hands with it."

Your unconscious will join hands with your consciousness only when consciousness is the master.

Who joins hands with servants? With a master the unconsciousness will certainly join hands, knowing that now it is reduced to a servant. And nobody wants to be a servant.

A firebrand women"s lib activist was invited to speak at a teamsters" convention. Addressing the all male audience, she declared that women were the foundation of the American republic.

"That may be so," rumbled a voice from the back of the room, "but remember who laid the foundation!"

People use their consciousness once in a while, but it is not the active part of their being twenty-four hours a day.

A sannyasin has to be conscious twenty-four hours a day. At least he has to make the effort. Slowly, slowly consciousness goes on seeping into the unconscious layers of your being. And it is not just a philosophy or an imaginary idea, because thousands of people have become totally conscious.

Those who have become totally conscious have been our highest flowering. In them is the argument for our evolution.

These people who have become fully conscious have all agreed on the point that consciousness is the stuff the universe is made of - different forms, different stages, but it is consciousness.

Asking a question, "What is the source of consciousness?" is simply an intellectual question. It is not existential. If you want to ask the question existentially, become fully conscious - and you will never ask it. The question will disappear. The question will look absurd.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.