A real encounter with existence

Question 1:

Prem Taranga, the problem you are encountering is almost everybody"s problem, because man is not born fully developed just as other animals are born. A dog is fully developed; nothing else will be added in his whole life to his basic individuality. A lion is born as a lion, will live as a lion, and will die as a lion.

Only man is born as a possibility. He can be many things, all his doors are open; he is not a finished being. He has a potential, but the potential is always vague. From one point of view, it looks very confusing that the highest animal in the world is born unfinished. But looked at from a better and higher standpoint, it is a prerogative of human beings to be born only as a seed and then to evolve with total freedom into whatever their innermost longing is.

That certainly creates many problems. He is not fully aware what is going to be his destiny. He is not able to predict his own future. It is always moving into the unknown, always hoping for the best, but without any certainty. Hence a continuous trembling inside, a fear - are you going to make it or not? Are you going to attain your destiny, or will death take over before? Are you moving in the right direction?

You cannot be certain about anything. This causes one of the greatest difficulties: people start imitating others, because that seems to be easier. Everybody is going in a certain direction, the crowd is moving on a superhighway. It is better to be with the crowd - at least you are not alone.

And somewhere in the mind there is the feeling that so many people, millions of people cannot be wrong. But this is the strangest thing about life, that the crowd is always wrong, because each individual has an individual destiny. There is no destiny for the crowd as such. So whenever you are moving with a crowd you are committing suicide.

The moment you become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, you have destroyed yourself utterly. Now there is no hope for you; you have lost track of your individual, original destiny. At the most you can now be a beautiful carbon copy, but never the original. And without being the original there is no satisfaction, no contentment, no joy, no fulfillment, no feeling that life has been meaningful, that life has been a celebration. On the contrary, there is a feeling of despair, anguish, boredom, meaninglessness and a feeling of continuous suffocation.

But it happens to millions of people because their mind has a simple arithmetic: it is better to follow where everybody is going than to be alone and find your own pathway. But only those few people ever achieve who drop out of the crowd and who trust their own intelligence and who trust in life, in nature, in existence, and who with deep trust start moving alone in the search of their destiny.

The more you trust in your intelligence, the more your intelligence blossoms. In the crowd there is no need for any intelligence; in fact, in the crowd intelligence is dangerous. The crowd does not want intelligent people at all. It wants believers, it wants faithful people, it wants loyal people - loyal to the crowd, to the nation, to the race, to the church, but never loyal to themselves. All these loyalties are nothing but beautiful names of slaveries. And a slave cannot attain to his destiny, that much is absolutely certain.

If you want to be free, you will have to start your first step in freedom. The last step can be of freedom only if the first step has been taken in freedom. If the first step was taken as a slave, your last step cannot be anything other than slavery - absolutely confirmed.

You say, "I find myself in conflict." What is the conflict? The conflict is between ideals, between moralities, between ideologies: to be or not to be, this way or that way. The conflict means you are trying to choose, and until you drop choosing you will remain in conflict.

I teach you choiceless awareness.

Stop choosing and conflict disappears.

Be spontaneous, don't decide about the future. Then there is no frustration, no failure, no feeling that you have missed. All these feelings are born because you are deciding about something which is not in your hands. The future is not in your hands.

The old saying is, man proposes and God disposes. There is no God to dispose. In the very act of proposing you have disposed yourself; the very act of proposing means you are trying to make the unknown certain, you are trying to make the living flow of life a frozen pond.

If you live choicelessly and if you live spontaneously, moment to moment, responding to every situation that arises in front of you, your growth will be in leaps and bounds, and you will never for a single moment feel frustration. Each moment will bring greater joy and greater fulfillment. Instead of feeling despair you will feel a great gratitude: "Existence is so compassionate that it goes on giving to me each moment new opportunities to grow, new opportunities to flower, new spaces to discover, new mysteries to experience."

But if, out of your fear, you start disciplining yourself for a particular ideal in the future, you are going to be a failure. And on each step you will see that things are not happening according to your visualized concept, visualized future. Naturally frustration sets in, conflict becomes even bigger and bigger. On every step you think whether to take it or to take some other step. And as every step goes on failing, you become settled in sadness, in gloom, in a state which is not healthy, which is spiritually sick.

You say, "I find myself in conflict between a part of myself that tries to be clear and intelligent with others and a part that is emotional, unpredictable, very unclear and somehow unconscious, but perhaps more real." Listen to the real. However unpredictable, however dangerous, but listen to the real. It may not be rational, it may be emotional, but still, listen to the real, because only the real can lead you to a more authentic life, to more real spaces, and ultimately to truth.

But if you listen to the clear ... and what is clear? The path that is clear is borrowed: because everybody is saying it, so it is clear; because everybody is supporting it, so it is clear. And you are using the word "intelligent" wrongly; it is not intelligent. The feeling that something is clear is rational but not intelligent. And these are two different things. It is logical but not intelligent.

Intelligence is always a search of the unknown, and the search of the unknown is always vague, it is never clear. The seeker is always moving in a chaos. But those who have known have agreed on the point that it is only out of chaos that stars are born. The unclear, the vague, something that seems to be there and yet not clear enough, hidden in a kind of morning mist, is an indication of a dawn approaching. Don't go against it. It is an indication of a sun that is going to rise soon. It is also an indication of the mysterious; the mysterious can never be clear. And life is nothing if it is not mysterious.

The intelligent person is one who listens to the real, who listens to the unclear, who listens to the vague, who listens to the mysterious and who is courageous enough to go deep into the mystery of existence. Those who follow the clear, the rational, the mathematical, remain mundane. They remain with the crowd, they remain ordinary, and they always remain retarded because they have never given their intelligence a chance of adventure. They have never risked, and without risk intelligence goes to sleep. It is only in risk that intelligence awakens.

When your house is on fire, suddenly you find a great release of energy and intelligence in you. You may have been tired just a moment before, so utterly tired that you wanted to go to sleep and not to do a single thing. But if the house is on fire, immediately all tiredness disappears; immediately you find yourself more full of energy than you have ever found yourself before. Suddenly you are no longer old, you have become young.

Sometimes instances have happened ... of one I have been an eyewitness. A woman had been for almost ten years paralyzed. She could not move from her bed, she was a burden to everybody.

But one day the house caught on fire. Everybody ran out of the house, and everybody forgot about the woman - obviously, when it is a question of survival you first think of yourself. But when everybody was out, then they suddenly started thinking, what will happen to the poor woman? She was somebody"s wife, she was somebody"s mother, and she was somebody"s someone ... they were all related. But nobody was ready to go in.

The whole crowd, the whole neighborhood was there and they were all in for a great surprise, because they saw the woman coming running out of the house. Nobody could believe it: she had not moved from the bed for ten years, and doctors had declared that she will remain paralyzed her whole life, she is not going to be cured. But everybody saw that she was running, and as she came out and people said, "What are you doing? You have been paralyzed for ten years," she said, "My God, I simply forgot!" And she fell down, again paralyzed.

I said, "At least now drop this whole idea of paralysis. You have proved that you are not paralyzed.

It was just an idea in your mind that gripped you, and gripped you so greatly. And for ten years continuously it has become more and more emphasized every day. The imprint has gone deep into your unconscious, but the fire ... and you suddenly forgot the whole idea. Now there is no need to fall down again, get up." And listening to me and seeing that what I was saying was true, hesitantly ... but she got up.

I said, "Now never mention paralysis again. It is good that the house is burnt - at least you are saved, you are cured. Now I will see your doctors. They don't understand a thing about what they are talking about. You have proved all those doctors completely wrong."

Intelligence needs opportunities, risks, adventures, dangers - then it becomes sharpened.

Intelligence goes with the unpredictable because that is risky; intelligence goes with the unclear because there is some work to do to make it clear. Intelligence is almost attracted, as if towards a magnet, to every mysterious situation because there is something to be discovered.

So your conflict is simply between fear and courage. Reduced to the basic realities, choose courage.

Never act out of fear and your growth is certain. Act out of fear and you have committed suicide.

You are saying, "I tell myself just to be authentic." It is not a question of telling yourself to be authentic - be authentic! When you are telling yourself to be authentic it is certain that you are not being authentic; otherwise, what is the need of saying it?

There is a small community who are part of the Christians - a mystic school - called Quakers. They have been harassed, persecuted for a very small thing: they are not willing to take an oath in the court. And their reason is perfectly clear; I am absolutely in agreement with them. Their argument is, "If we take the oath that "I will speak only the truth and nothing else," it means that without the oath there is a possibility that I may be speaking an untruth. By implication I am accepting that without the oath I am not trustworthy, I may be lying. But it is our religion," they say, "to be true; hence we cannot take the oath. We always speak the truth. The oath is for those who don't always speak the truth, not for us."

They have been jailed, they have been fined, but not a single Quaker has ever taken an oath in any court. And I have great sympathy for them. On many grounds they are very beautiful people. They are the only people in the whole world whose prayer does not consist of words, whose prayer is only silence. They are the only people in whose communions no scripture is read.

They sit silently in darkness and if somebody - there is nobody as a preacher, they are all just sitting - suddenly feels a spontaneous urge to say something, he stands up and he says it. It is not a question of whether he is a preacher or not. It is not a question of whether he is a man of wisdom or knowledge. No, the only valuable thing is his spontaneity.

If he feels that he has some message coming from the beyond, not from his mind ... and it is very clear when something comes from beyond your mind; you can see the difference. It is absolutely new and fresh, you had never known it before. Mind is a gramophone record; it goes on repeating the same thing - what it knows. And most often it gets stuck. Then there is great difficulty.

When I was a student it happened once .... I used to go all over the country to university competitions for eloquence, or debates. In Varanasi, in the Sanskrit university there was an all- India competition. Because the scholars of the Sanskrit university did not know any English, and all the other competitors were perfectly educated in English, the debaters from the Sanskrit university must have carried a certain inferiority complex - although the debate was in Hindi so that everybody could participate, whether they knew English or not, whether they knew Sanskrit or not. At least everybody knew Hindi.

After I had spoken it was the turn of a student from the Sanskrit university, and because of that inferiority complex he must have crammed a quotation from Bertrand Russell. So four or five lines in Hindi he spoke perfectly well, and then he quoted Bertrand Russell in English and got stuck in the middle of the sentence. I was just by his side, so just to help him I said, "Start again." I thought that perhaps ... sometimes if you start again, maybe you won"t get stuck again. I had not told him to start the whole speech again, but he had crammed the whole thing as one piece.

He could not start from the quotation of Bertrand Russell, so he started again from "Brothers and sisters ...." The whole convocation hall of the university was full and people started laughing and clapping. And he again went through all those sentences, came to the quotation - and people were clapping, "Go on, go on!" - and he got there and the needle got stuck again. He looked at me. I said, "Start again."

The situation was very embarrassing - what to do? because he could not go ahead. That was the only way, to go into reverse and start again. Rather than standing there and looking like a fool, he started again, "Brothers and sisters ...." It was such a hilarious scene that even the judges started laughing, and he came exactly to the same point and got stuck.

It was a great blessing that by that time his time was finished; otherwise he would have had to start again, because there was no other way. When he came back and sat by my side, I said, "You did great."

He said, "What great? You are the person who put me in the trouble. If you had not said to start again, I would never have imagined the very idea of starting again. But I was in such a bad situation that I had to accept your idea, knowing perfectly well that this was foolish. But standing without saying anything in the middle of a sentence, it is better to start again. Who knows? - you may pass through, the needle may move on."

Mind is a gramophone record. So when you feel something coming from the beyond you can immediately recognize it, because you have never heard it before, you have never learned about it, you have never read about it; it is just absolutely from the unknown. Only then does a Quaker stand up and allow the unknown to be shared. And many times it happens that their meeting will end up without anybody speaking, because nobody can speak from outside the mind - that is the ugliest sin according to the Quakers, because your mind speaks only what is borrowed.

Put the mind aside ... but that is risky, because one does not know where one is going and what one is going to say. But this spontaneity makes your intelligence such a joy, such a sharp sword that it cuts all that is rubbish and brings you fresh experiences, introduces you to new mysteries. There is no need of any conflict.

Taranga, you are creating your trouble yourself. You are saying, "I tell myself just to be authentic and then I get really confused." You are bound to get really confused. "Meditation takes away the immediate tension but I have found no way to get to the root of the problem." You will never get to the root of the problem, because the problem is very superficial, it has no roots.

In India we have a creeper which goes from one tree to another tree; it has no roots anywhere. It is a parasite. It simply digs into the tree and sucks the juice of the tree and goes on moving and spreading. Sometimes you will find it spreading on hundreds of trees, just a single creeper. But if you try to find its roots, you will never find them anywhere - there are none. It exists as a parasite, without any roots. Your many problems are just like that.

Its name is very beautiful; its name is amarbel: a creeper of immortality. It has no roots, so you cannot kill it. You can take it away from the trees and throw it anywhere, and it will again somehow get attached to something and will start growing again. It is a very dangerous creeper because it kills the trees. It does not allow them to blossom, it takes all their juice. It does not allow them to come to fruition. But it itself has no roots.

You are creating more confusion and more trouble for yourself if you want to find out the root of the problem.

You say, "Meditation takes away the immediate tension." Then your meditation is not real meditation.

At the most it may be a little relaxation; that"s why it takes away your immediate tension. If it is meditation it takes away your tension forever. That is the very definition of meditation: not only the tension is taken away, it takes away your very mind which is the root cause of all the tensions. Not only one tension, but all possibilities of ever being tense - meditation simply takes all that away and gives you an open and clear sky for your intelligence to grow ... as much space as you want.

So learn rightly how to meditate. Relaxation is good, but it is only a beginning; it just prepares the ground for meditation. But meditation is a totally different affair. You have to become aware of your mind stuff. Whatever goes on in your mind you have to become a watcher, and the watcher has to be so deep-rooted that slowly, slowly your mind disappears and only the watcher remains. Then all possibilities of tension, anxiety, anguish, disappear and you will not find even the conflict.

Meditation will give you a clear-cut insight to be authentic, to be spontaneous, and to live dangerously, because there is no other way of living. Those who want to live without any danger should dig their graves and get into them. Those are the safest places in the world.

"Now, now, just relax, Mr. Goldberg," said Hymie Goldberg"s psychiatrist. "I have helped a great many others with problems far more serious than yours. Now, let us see. You said that in moments of great emotional stress you believe that you are a dog, a fox terrier. Is that so?"

"Yes, sir," mumbled Hymie, "a small fox terrier with black and brown spots to be precise. Ah, please help me doc, I just can"t continue living in this madness."

The doctor pointed to the couch and said calmly, "Don't worry, Hymie, the first thing to do is to lie down on the couch and we will see if we can get to the root of your problem."

"Oh no doctor, I can"t do that," said Hymie seriously, "I am not allowed up on the furniture."

That is his problem, that he thinks that he is a dog and nobody allows him on the furniture. How can you get to the root of this man"s problem? This is not a problem which can be solved. This is sheer madness, which cannot be solved, which can only be dissolved - and these are two different things.

This man has not to be just advised that this is stupid, this is mad. All this advice has been already given to him by many people. Those things don't help; on the contrary, they continuously emphasize the fact.

What he needs .... He is living in an illusion; he has created a hallucination around himself. He has hypnotized himself in some way that he is a dog. You have to cut through his autohypnosis. You have not to take him to a psychoanalyst, you have to take him to a hypnotist who will take him into a deep hypnotic sleep and who will give another suggestion, canceling the old suggestion that he is a dog: "You are not a dog. It was only an illusion and it is no longer there, it is finished."

This has to be repeated for a few sessions continuously, so that it goes deep into his unconscious to the same point where the autohypnotic suggestion of being a dog has reached. Once the anti- suggestion reaches to the same point, the problem will dissolve. It will not be solved, it will simply disappear, it will evaporate. Hymie Goldberg will simply laugh and say, "What kind of nightmare had I fallen into?"

Every one of you has many, many auto-suggestions. You have hypnotized yourself, and society has supported it if those suggestions are useful for the society. For example, just today I was informed that in America a certain group of scientists are emphasizing a certain hypothesis against the evolution hypothesis of Charles Darwin. They are all fanatic Christians and they are saying that the theory of evolution is against the HOLY BIBLE, because the HOLY BIBLE says that God created the world in seven days in its completion. There is no question of evolution.

And the most surprising thing is that many of the states in America have made it mandatory, compulsory that in colleges, in universities, in schools the theory of creation should be taught, not the theory of evolution. And when these so-called scientists were asked, "What is the evidence?

because everything goes against the hypothesis preached in the BIBLE" their argument was so hilarious ....

But all the American politicians are ready to accept it. Already governments of different states are passing laws. Books of the evolution theory of Charles Darwin are banned; they have been removed from libraries, they have been removed from university courses, and now in their place an absolutely absurd theory has to be taught, as mandatory. You cannot make it optional, you cannot even say that it is not scientific. And the reasons that they have given are just laughable.

Their first reason is that this theory is right because God himself has written in the BIBLE. Now, somebody should ask these idiots, "Do you have any proof that God has written the BIBLE except that the BIBLE says it itself?" So God writes himself that "I am writing the book." I can write in the book, anybody else can write in the book - that "I am the God who is writing the book" - and then I can write any nonsense, and that has to be accepted; it is not just hypothetical.

The Hindus believe that the VEDAS are written by God. And on many points they are absolutely against the BIBLE. The Mohammedans believe that the KORAN is a direct message from God, and on many points it is absolutely against the BIBLE. Moses has encountered God directly - he is the only man in the whole of history who had a direct conversation, face to face - and his statements are different from the Christians".

There are thousands of pieces of evidence that this earth is four million years old, and our sun is nearabout sixty million years old, and this universe is at least a few billion years old. And science has come to these conclusions on very solid grounds. According to the BIBLE the whole universe is only six thousand years old.

And these scientists are trying to enforce on educational systems that it should be taught that God created the world four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ, completed it in seven days. And all the evidence that goes against it is not even to be discussed; it is banned. In one of the most advanced countries of the world, such a stupidity ... and naturally the students will repeat whatever is being taught to them. That will become their hypnosis. And from childhood until university - almost one third of life - continuous repetition. You can create any kind of hallucination.

Most of the things that you believe and you see and you experience are because of your hallucinations. For example, in China for thousands of years it was thought that a woman is beautiful if her feet are very small. So small that she cannot even walk - because her body needs a certain length of foot, as a support, to stand. Rich families, royal families who could afford it, made it a torture to the women. Girls, when they were born, were given steel shoes and they could not take them off, even in sleep. So their whole body grew up and their feet remained so small that they could walk only with two servants supporting them. That was thought to be real richness, real beauty. Such a nonsensical idea ... but it prevailed for thousands of years.

Everywhere you will find such nonsensical ideas in people"s minds. They are not problems, they are social hypnosis, and unless your social hypnosis is taken away .... And the only way is to negate that hypnosis by another hypnosis. You have to be deprogrammed. Every human being has to be deprogrammed so that his state of mind is absolutely clean, and from there you should start developing. Then you may come to the state of a Gautam Buddha or a Jesus Christ; then you may come to your ultimate destiny: utterly fulfilled and absolutely satisfied, and grateful to existence that it gave you such a great opportunity.

A Sunday school teacher had just finished explaining about heaven. "Now," she said, "hands up, all those children who want to go to heaven."

All the children raised their hands except for little Hymie in the front row. "Don't you want to go to heaven, Hymie?" asked the teacher.

"I can"t," said Hymie tearfully, "my mother told me to come straight home."

Question 2:

Puja Melissa, if it is possible for you to go more and more deeply into the silence of this mystery, of this life, of this existence, then there is no need to be worried about questions. All questions are superficial, and all answers too, because the reality can neither be questioned nor can it have any explanation or any answer. It simply is. Questions and answers are games you can play with.

I allow you to question because if I don't allow you to question, they will go on and on inside you, whirling and driving you mad. I allow you to question so that they can come out. My answers are not answers to your questions, my answers are simply a death to your questions. I destroy your questions, I don't answer them, because if I answer them you will only become more knowledgeable.

You will now have instead of questions, answers, but you will remain in the same mind which had questions - now it has answers.

At least questions were good because you were humble, knowing that you are ignorant. Answers are more dangerous; they will destroy your humbleness and they will give you a feeling that "I know."

That will be a great nourishment to your ego.

I cannot give any nourishment to your ego, so my answers are totally different to those you will find anywhere else in the world. Everywhere those answers are imparting knowledge to you so that your question can be dissolved. I am not imparting knowledge, I am not interested in giving you information. I am interested in bringing to you a transformation, and that is a totally different dimension.

I have to destroy mercilessly your questions, so if it is happening on its own that you cannot complete your questions, you are blessed. Don't complete them. Let them die incomplete; they have to die anyway, so why complete them? Why waste energy? And if you feel that you are capable of going into silence and you can enter into the mystery without any questions, nothing can be better than that.

The old white-haired spinster was rocking on her front porch with her tomcat at her feet. Suddenly a fairy appeared and offered her three wishes. "Ah, go on," the old lady said disbelievingly. "If you grant wishes, let us see you turn this rocking chair into a pot of gold."

The fairy waved her wand and the spinster found herself in the center of a pot of gold. Her face lit up. "And I get two more wishes?" she asked. "Anything your heart desires," said the fairy.

"Then make me into a beautiful young girl," she ordered. Another wave of the wand and her wish was granted. "Now," said the old lady, "make my tomcat into a handsome young man."

The good fairy waved her wand and disappeared as the third wish came true, and the man of her dreams stood where the tomcat had been sleeping. The young man approached the once old lady and took her in his arms, and murmured gently, "Now, aren"t you sorry you sent me to the vet?"

Bringing your questions to me is dangerous. You will be sorry for it, because my whole work is to destroy your questions, to demolish your mind and to clean you completely from all past and all inheritance from the past. I want you to be as fresh as Adam and Eve, as if there has been nobody before you, so that you can start completely fresh. Then each moment is such an adventure and such a deep penetration into mystery. And you don't know fear because you have never experienced fear. You are not conditioned because you have never been with anybody.

Meditation is my method to demolish your past, and your mind is nothing but your past. Meditation is my method to give you a new birth, a new beginning, a revolution in your being, so that you can find reality as an experience for your thirsting soul, not answers for your questions.

Questions and answers are just intellectual. You need a real encounter with existence. Only that can help you to blossom, to be liberated, to be enlightened. Silence is perfectly the right path. If your heart has heard and felt something of silence and is entering into the mystery of existence, then forget all about your questions and forget all about answers. Just be silent. And as you become more and more silent, the mystery will go on opening its doors to you. Door upon door, peak upon peak ... there is no end.

Life is such an eternal miracle, and it opens its doors only to the magic of silence. Whoever has understood silence has known the science, the magic, the art, the knack of entering into reality as if it is your own home. In fact it is.

Questions and answers will keep you outside the temple and will never allow you to enter the temple.

Leave questions and answers where people leave their shoes, and enter into the silence of the temple. Silence is the way. That will bring you a new dawn, a new explosion of light, an overwhelming dance - a dance in which the stars and the trees and the ocean will be your partners. The whole existence will be your music.

I don't teach anything about God, I teach simply about experiencing the dance of this mysterious life ... and you will know about God. God is not a person, but only the fragrance when you have come to your ultimate actualization. When you have attained to your destiny, you will know a quality that can only be called godliness. You will not meet a God confronting you, you will see God radiating from your heart, from your very being, as rays of light and love and compassion and beauty.

A dentist and his assistant were busy pulling a man"s tooth when a sharp cry from outside caused them to look up. They rushed to the window just in time to see a good friend of theirs go hurtling past.

A couple of moments later someone burst into the office shouting, "Hey, did you hear about Johnny Jones? He just jumped off the roof and fell sixty stories. He is lying down there on Madison Avenue right now and he looks pretty bad."

"That"s funny," said the dentist. "We saw him go by just a minute ago and he looked fine."

Life is so mysterious. If you are open you will find everywhere so much to laugh at. It is simply hilarious. So enjoy this life, its hilariousness, its mystery, and be just like an innocent child without any questions, without any answers. Don't be bothered about knowledge and I promise you, wisdom will be yours.

Those who are knowledgeable are preventing wisdom from entering into their beings. Knowledge is not a door, it is a wall; it is a China Wall - very thick. It does not allow anything so fragile as wisdom. It does not allow anything like light, fragrance, joy, music, anything that can make your life meaningful, significant ... and you can declare to existence that it has been a great blessing to be here on the planet. "There is no way to pay it back. All that we can do is to show our gratitude, our thankfulness." That thankfulness is the only right prayer. It has no words in it, just a feeling of gratitude.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.