OSHO,
You have now been enlightened for almost thirty-six years. How does it feel
to be beyond the beyond the beyond?
P.S. can I meet you in the pub afterwards?
Vimal,
it seems you have taken too much drink, because we are in the pub! This place
can only be described as belonging to those who are drunk with the divine...
so drunk that they have forgotten their nationality, forgotten their church,
forgotten even who they are.
Vimal
is asking me if I can meet him afterwards in the pub, but beyond this pub
there is no other place so drunk with the divine dance and song. What I am
teaching you is to find a source within yourself which can make you a
drunkard.
The joy of this life, the bliss, the ecstasy,
belongs only to those whose wine is not coming from the outside -- that is
very ephemeral, very temporal, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of.
There is another wine which grows within you. The moment you start moving
inwards, there is no need for anything else to make you oblivious to all the
misery that surrounds you. There is no need for any other drug.
A few
idiots in the West have started calling a drug "ecstasy." Now that
is absolutely against all the laws of the world, because ecstasy has been for
centuries copyrighted by my people! And it is not an outside drug, it flows
in the very juices of your life. You don't have to move even an inch;
wherever you are you can be surrounded by all possibilities of blissfulness.
And these possibilities of blissfulness are not temporal; it is not that
tomorrow morning you will have a hangover. The more you drink, the more
sober, the more sane, the more alert, the more conscious you become.
Unless
a drug is found within your being, you are bound to look for it somewhere
else. It raises a tremendously significant question. As long as we can
remember in human history...the oldest, ancientmost scripture is the Rig
Veda of the Hindus, and the Rig Veda talks about a certain drug,
somrasa.
One of
the most intelligent men of our century, Aldous Huxley, became very
interested in searching for what this somrasa was, because the seers of Rig
Veda used to drink it and dance around the fire. Certainly it seems it
must have been a drug, and particularly to the Western objective thinker it
cannot be anything else than a drug.
Aldous
Huxley experimented with all kinds of drugs and finally he decided that LSD
seems to come very close to the description of somrasa. In the hope that in
the future LSD will be more refined -- because it is a synthetic drug,
manufactured; hence there is every possibility to improve upon it, to take
away all the ingredients which can be harmful and leave only that which
brings health, wholeness, awareness, and a tremendous insight into the
mysteries of existence.... Hoping that some day scientists were going to
discover it, Huxley had already named it soma, just to pay respect to the
ancient seers of Rig Veda.
But
Aldous Huxley was in a deep misunderstanding.
The
somrasa that is being described in the Rig Veda is certainly a drug
just like marijuana which used to grow in the Himalayas. Perhaps it still
grows there but we have not been able to find the place where it grows.
And the
fire they were dancing around has nothing to do with the inner fire of life.
I have looked into the Rig Veda as deeply, as sympathetically as
possible. The people who are talking about the somrasa and the fire ritual
were even sacrificing human beings, not to mention sacrificing other animals.
The Hindus, who go on continuously making trouble in this country because of
their insistence that cow slaughter should be stopped, should read their
ancientmost scriptures. All their priests were slaughtering cows as a
sacrifice to the fire god, and they were all eating the meat of the cows.
Now, these people cannot be said to be meditative.
I
absolutely deny the Rig Veda and the prestige that it has in the minds
of men, because people don't read it and people don't analyze it and people
don't see its stupidities and all kinds of inhumanities.
In the Rig
Veda women are just a commodity. You can purchase women in the
marketplace in any auction. Even the so-called seers had many wives, and they
were not even satisfied by that. That is an absolutely ugly state, that any
human being reduces so many women into cattle. Over and above all that, they
were continually purchasing beautiful girls in auctions.
People
have forgotten -- times change, words take on new colors. Now in India the
word wadu simply means the newly married woman. But in the times of
the Rig Veda, wadu meant a woman who has newly been purchased
from the market. Every so-called seer had two kinds of women: one group was
his wives and the other was wadus. The word wadu is not
respectable; it simply means a prostitute, purchased -- a commodity, not a
human being. It can be sold at any moment.
And the
miracle was that the children from the married wife would be the legitimate
children, and the children from the purchased wife would not be legitimate.
Man has done so much inhumanity to other human beings that it is
incalculable.
How can a child be illegitimate?
Parents
can be illegitimate, but a child cannot be. Every child is as innocent as any
other child. It does not matter whether the child is born to a prostitute or
to a purchased woman or to a married woman. In all cases the child is
absolutely legitimate. But people are very cunning in throwing their
responsibilities on others. Parents are never called illegitimate. Children
are called illegitimate.
These
seers accumulated immense wealth, had many slaves, used to eat meat -- I
cannot conceive that they had found the inner ecstasy I am talking about. All
the circumstantial evidence goes against them. And look at their prayers --
their prayers are so stupid that one feels embarrassed that these people were
called great seers. Their prayers are in the Rig Veda, and the Rig
Veda consists of ninety-eight percent prayers. Only two percent can be sorted
out, cleaned, interpreted in a way that makes some sense. Otherwise,
ninety-eight percent of it consists of such prayers that you will not
believe....
One
seer is praying to God, drinking that ancient LSD of Aldous Huxley,
"This time, my God, listen to my prayer: your clouds should rain only on
my fields, not on the fields of my enemies. You have never listened to me but
this time I am sacrificing so many cows, so many horses, and you have to
listen. Give more children to me, and don't give a single child to my
enemies." And who are the enemies? -- other seers, and they are also
praying! Prayers which look so stupid.… "If you are compassionate, give
a proof to me: the milk in the breasts of my enemy's cows should dry up."
These
are religious people? "Give victory to me, to my friends, and defeat to
my enemies and their friends." I cannot think of these people as
meditative. Aldous Huxley was absolutely wrong. Somrasa was nothing but some
horrible drug; perhaps it may have been marijuana, because it still grows in
Kulu Manali and in other parts of the Himalayas. There is no need to
cultivate it, it simply grows naturally. Those are the places where the Rig
Veda was composed.
As far
as I am concerned, my interest is that all the governments of the world and
all the religions of the world, all the moral teachers of the world have been
against drugs; still drugs are more predominant today than they have ever
been. The more they have been condemned, prohibited, made illegal, the more
attractive they have become. People used to drink and take drugs at a certain
stage, but the latest information from California is that school children are
taking drugs, and small boys and girls are suffering in jails because they
have been found taking drugs.
It is a
strange story
All the
religions are against drugs, all the governments are against drugs, all the
teachers, all the moralists are against drugs, and the influence of drugs
goes on growing. There must be something deeper in it than people have looked
into.
My
understanding is that unless man finds a drug within himself, which I call
ecstasy, he will go on finding some kind of drug as a substitute in the
outside world. Only meditation can stop a person from taking drugs. No law
can prohibit them -- all laws have failed. It only creates hypocrites.
I am
not against ecstasy, but when I say ecstasy I don't mean the drug that is
available in the market. I mean the ecstasy that you are born with, that you
are still holding inside you, and you have not touched. Just a little taste
of it and everything else on the outside immediately becomes meaningless.
You
have the source of the infinite ecstasy within you.
Yes, I
teach you to be drunkards, but your drink has to come from your own innermost
center. And the difference can be very easily understood: every outer drug
will make you unconscious, addicted, and every time you will need more and
more of it because your body will become immune to it.
Still,
in India, there are a few ancient traditions which have fallen into the same
fallacy as Aldous Huxley. But they have gone farther than Aldous Huxley; they
drink all kinds of alcoholic beverages, they use all kinds of drugs. A moment
comes when no drug can make them unconscious, no drug can bring them what
they have been trying to find -- a way to forget themselves, to forget this
miserable world, to forget all these people. The last resort is that there
are ashrams in Assam; they are the only remnants of a very long-standing
tradition. They keep cobra snakes as a last resort -- when no drug affects
you, the cobra is allowed to bite you on your tongue. Only then do you feel a
little shaken, but the miracle is that the cobra dies! The man is so full of
poison... but the poor cobra was not aware; otherwise he would have escaped.
I have
been concerned about why man has remained so much interested in poisons. The
reason is not too far away to see; you just need a clarity. Man is so
miserable that he cannot live consciously with this misery. He needs a few
gaps, at least a few holidays from this miserable anguish, anxiety, and all
kinds of tortures. Drugs have been a tremendous help. But not only the
chemical drugs -- Karl Marx is right when he says that the religions of the
world are nothing but opium for the people. These religions have also proved
to be consolations. They have also given hope, they have also given a certain
future and taken away your consciousness from the present and its misery.
That's
the function of any drug.
My
effort here, Vimal, is to make you drop all future, all hope, all illusion,
and just relax in the moment knowing perfectly well that this is the only
moment which exists. All else is either memory or imagination.
One who
is in the present immediately drowns in his own well...of something which is
not poisonous, but it is certainly ecstatic. And once you have known your own
source, there is no need to go anywhere, to any pub or to any church or to
any temple.
The
young doctor, inexperienced with operations, is instructed to stand at the
head of the patient so that without getting in the way, he can watch the
expert do an abdominal operation. He is also instructed not to speak, but
after a while he can't resist: "How’s your end, sir?" says the
young man. "All right," says the expert, looking up, "why?"
"I only wondered, sir," says the young man, "because my end's
been dead for ten minutes."
Because
he was told not to speak, he remained silent! The man is dead and the surgeon
goes on operating....
There
are a few things which all traditions have prohibited people to speak, and it
needs immense courage to go against the whole tradition of mankind. For
example, everybody has been told not to support any kind of drug in any way,
and people have remained silent. I have not come across a single statement in
which somebody has dared to say that the predominance of drugs shows
something immensely significant, and it cannot be simply outlawed; it cannot
be simply prohibited. But I want to say it.
Let it
be on record that unless man finds the authentic drug which is in his own
being, there is no force on the earth which can prohibit alcohol, which can
prohibit marijuana, which can prohibit hashish, which can prohibit LSD. More
and more drugs will be coming in, and the miracle is that the people who are
trying to prohibit these things -- ninety percent of them are themselves
using them.
Just a
few days ago in America there was an international conference of homosexuals,
and one MP from England represented the homosexuals of England. He is a
member of the parliament, and certainly he is a homosexual; otherwise why
should he be their representative? And in the conference he said, "You
must be thinking that I am a strange person, being a member of parliament and
representing the homosexuals, but I want you to know that at least fifty-six
members of the parliament in England are homosexuals." They may not have
the courage to come out... and these people will make laws against
homosexuality!
Perhaps
you have never thought about it that Jesus continued to drink alcohol, but no
Christian has the guts to say that a man with the qualities of Jesus should
not drink alcohol. Only if he has not found the alcohol within is there a
possibility to search for alcohol without. Every night it was party time --
and it is strange that even after two thousand years, people drink alcohol in
the name of Jesus. Naturally, if Jesus can be an alcoholic then why make it a
prohibition?
If even
Jesus needs it then I don't think anybody
can be in a position to say who does not need it.
I have
heard about a strange ritual that happens every year in the Vatican. The Pope
comes out in all his regalia, with the cardinals following, and the rabbi
from Rome comes with a big scroll. He hands over the scroll to the pope, the
pope looks at the scroll, gives it back to the rabbi and everybody wonders
what is the matter. What is written on the scroll? Finally one young man
dared to ask, "It has been going on for two thousand years; now we
should at least know the content of the scroll. The whole ritual... and there
seems to be no meaning."
The
scroll was opened for the first time, and it was found that it was the bill
for the Last Supper! And the question is who is going to pay it? Obviously,
Jesus was a Jew -- the rabbis should pay it, but the rabbis had denied Jesus,
they crucified him. They don't accept him as one of them; the pope should pay
it. But the discussion is such that there is no way to decide. Jesus is a Jew
-- of course his followers are Christians -- and why should Christians pay
for a Jewish party? So every year the bill comes, the bill goes back.
Vimal, the way to understand me is to always
remember that I am insisting -- from every corner, in every possible way --
only on a single target, and that is your innermost being. Whatever I may
have said... never be too much concerned with what is said. Be concerned
about what it indicates.
I want
you to drop all games -- worldly games, spiritual games, games that the whole
of humanity has played up to now. These games keep you retarded. These games
hinder you from growing into consciousness, into your own ultimate flowering.
I want to cut away all this rubbish that prevents you.
I want
to leave you alone, absolutely alone, so that you cannot take anybody's help,
so you cannot cling to any prophet, so that you cannot think that Gautam
Buddha is going to save you. Left alone -- utterly alone -- you are bound to
find your innermost center.
There
is no way, nowhere to go, no advisor, no teacher, no master.
It
seems hard, it seems harsh, but I am doing it because I love you, and the
people who have not done it have not loved you at all. They loved themselves
and they loved to have a big crowd around themselves -- the bigger the crowd,
the more they feel nourished in their egos.
That's
why I called even enlightenment the last game. The sooner you drop it, the
better. Why not just simply be? Why unnecessarily hurry here and there? You
are what existence wants you to be. Just relax.
Farmer
Giles is worried about the performance of his prize bull; he doesn't seem to
be interested in the cows. So he goes to the vet who prescribes a course of
pills for the bull.
A few weeks later, a friend comes by and asks Farmer Giles how the bull is
getting on.
"Just great!" says Giles. "The vet gave me these pills for the
bull and from the first day the old fellow has been unstoppable! In fact, I
am making a fortune; the local farmers can't get their cows 'round here fast
enough!"
"Great!" says his friend. "And what are these pills
then?"
"Well," says Farmer Giles, "they are great big green ones --
and they taste just like peppermints."
OSHO,
Has Jesus ever laughed?
Irven N. Resnich reports on the controversy between philosophy and theology
about laughter:
Aristotle, in his second book of poetics, raised laughter to the standard of
an art, whereas Christian theology has been against laughter since the days
of the bible. For monks, a life of penance does not allow laughter. Basilius
Caesarea and Hugo of St. Victor totally condemned laughter; in some
monasteries it was only tolerated if it did not spread.
The question came up of whether laughter darkened the human nature of Jesus.
According to Christian tradition, Jesus himself never laughed, although the
philosophical traditions of Aristotle, Quintillion, Porphyry and Boethius
emphasize that laughter is a typically human ability. The clergymen gave
various answers, but many of them pointed out that a lot of saints had never
laughed either, and that Jesus, as a human being, was of course able to laugh,
but he voluntarily renounced it. Not a theologically satisfying solution.
Doctor
Amrito, only on one point do I agree with Christian tradition: Jesus
certainly never laughed. As far as I can see, he had nothing to laugh at.
First,
he is a bastard. Others may have laughed, but you cannot expect Jesus to
laugh. Jesus was a poor carpenter, undernourished -- laughter needs some
overflowing energy. And to look at Jesus' statements -- he seems to be a
crackpot. Crackpots never laugh. They have to keep their seriousness.
Laughter brings you down to the status of ordinary humanity. Those who want
to pretend to be special -- how can they laugh? Such a mundane activity.
All
these controversies are absolutely futile. I will give you a few reasons to
contemplate which will make you clear why he did not laugh:
An
ancient tradition says:
Before Jesus Christ, nobody knew what a headache looked like.
True misery for a man is when there are no more problems to be solved.
And
Jesus had no more problems to be solved. He was the only begotten Son of God.
He knew everything. Not a single time in his whole life -- which was not very
long, just thirty-three years -- did he ever say about anything, "I
don't know." He knew everything, and whenever a person is so knowledgeable,
laughter becomes impossible.
Women
do have a sense of humor -- look at their boyfriends!
Poor
Jesus was never chosen by a woman as a boyfriend. And still you want him to
laugh? You are expecting too much from a poor carpenter.
His
teaching life was only three years, from thirty to thirty-three. And in these
three years his whole effort was to frighten humanity as much as he could,
because his whole business depended on people becoming afraid of hell. That
was the fundamental psychology he was working on. But when you are teaching
people about hell, laughter will not fit in.
There
is always more hell that needs raising.
And in
three years how much hell can you raise? You may not be aware, it is an
unrecorded fact but passed on by word of mouth, from generation to
generation, that when Jesus used to threaten people with hellfire,
particularly women used to faint. Men started trembling, perspiring. Now this
is not a situation for anybody to laugh, and particularly Jesus himself.
A man
can learn much by imitating the behavior of a duck -- keep calm and unruffled
on the surface, and paddle like crazy underneath.
Jesus
managed it perfectly well. All that unruffledness, all that seriousness is
just on the surface -- underneath he is also paddling like crazy, but you cannot
see it. So nobody has ever observed him laughing.
It is
said, a change of trouble is as good as a vacation.
He
never changed anything. In those three years of his teaching, he continuously
insisted on the same thing....
There
is a contemporary parallel -- J. Krishnamurti. He managed for a longer time
than Jesus. He started teaching when he was twenty-five, and he went on
teaching till he died at the age of ninety. Nobody has ever seen him
laughing. In fact, if you are laughing and by chance you come across him, you
will stop. Just his face...
He used
to come to India once or twice a year, and he used to speak only in three or
four places -- Delhi, Bombay, Varanasi, Adyar. I had told my sannyasins
everywhere to always sit in the front row, and the moment he would see my
sannyasins with their red clothes and malas, he would completely forget what
he had come to teach about. He would become so angry...his people came to me
to say that "This is not right; he is getting old, he may have a heart
attack. And you are making it such a trouble for him that wherever he goes,
he finds sannyasins sitting in the front row. Then he forgets everybody else.
Then he forgets for what he has come, what was the subject that he was going
to teach -- furious, so furious that he starts hitting his own head!"
Now seeing such a man, can you laugh?
The
happiest time in anyone's life is just after their divorce.
But
that time never came into Jesus' life. I have tried to find something the
poor fellow might have laughed at, but there was nothing in his life. Sitting
on a donkey, moving with twelve fools -- you are a laughingstock, you cannot
laugh.
And it
is not only true about Jesus.
It is
true about almost all your saints -- Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, it doesn't
matter to what church they belong. The saint is not supposed to laugh. The
reason is simple: the saint is supposed to be working hard, moving towards
the ultimate goal of life. There is no time for laughing. The whole thing is
too serious. And because ordinary human beings laugh, obviously, the logic is
clear: if you want to prove that you are extraordinary, you have to stop
laughing. You have to stop doing many things which ordinary people do. You
may even start doing things which are absolutely stupid and idiotic, but you have
to be certain only about one thing -- that ordinary people don't do those
kind of things.
You
will see saints standing on their heads. Now, if existence wanted you to
stand on your head, the feet would have grown out of your head. But any kind
of nonsense... Mahavira used to pull out his hair. He would not allow a small
razor to shave his head -- every ordinary human being is doing that. And
because he was pulling out his hair, thousands of people would gather to see
this tremendously sacred event.
If you
look at your saints and their histories, you are bound to come to the
conclusion that almost a hundred percent of them needed psychiatric
treatment. But we have lived under their influence, and they have such a long
tradition that its burden is heavy on our hearts, too.
He has
been warned that Paddy is a bit of a fool, but the postmaster decides to hire
him anyway, because the post office is really short-staffed. His first day on
the job, Paddy is given the work of sorting letters, and to everyone's surprise,
he separates the letters so fast that his motions are literally a blur.
Very pleased about this, the postmaster approaches him at the end of the day.
"I want you to know," he says, "that we're all very proud of
you. You're one of the fastest workers we've ever had."
"Thanks a lot," replies Paddy, "and tomorrow, I'll try and do
even better."
"Better?" asks the postmaster, astonished. "How could you
possibly do better?"
"Well," says Paddy, "tomorrow I'm going to read the
addresses."
All
kinds of idiots have become your saints. In fact, a man who is intelligent is
not going to become one of your saints, because to be a saint literally means
to be a slave of the crowd. The crowd dictates. The crowd tells the saint how
he has to live, what he has to eat, where he has to sleep. The saint is
simply the slave of a vast crowd and because he obeys, the crowd pays him
with deep respect.
And
remember one thing: in life everything needs a certain qualification, except
being a saint. Nobody is asked for any qualification, no interview.
Pope
the Polack goes to the optician for an examination. "I want to make a
few tests," says the optician, "so cup your hand and put it over
your right eye."
The pope cups his left hand and places it on his forehead.
"No!" says the optician. "Cup your hand and cover your
eye." This time the pope cups his right hand and covers his forehead.
In desperation, the optician takes a large paper bag and places it over the
pope's head.
Then, he cuts out a hole in the bag over his left eye. Before he can ask the
pope to read the chart, he sees his eye is full of tears. The optician
immediately cuts a hole in the bag over his right eye, and tears fall from
both the Pope's eyes.
"For God's sake!" shouts the optician. "Why are you crying?"
"Ah!" sobs Pope the Polack, "I was really hoping for something
more stylish."
Okay,
Maneesha?
Yes,
Osho
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