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Osho,
The other day I heard you mention the idea of an academy for meditation, and an academy for bringing the body into one, organic whole. Could you say more about this, and how you see two such academies complementing each other?
Prem Anubuddha, it is one of the
most complicated questions. It does not appear to be so because you are not
aware that for centuries man has been told all kinds of life-negative things.
Even to torture your body has been a spiritual discipline.
My idea of having an academy is
for science to become for the first time intentional and not accidental. Up
to now science has been accidental. People have stumbled upon some
discoveries, inventions. Even discoveries were made for which they were not
looking, but just groping in the dark with no sense of direction. And
obviously the politicians of the world -- who liked more and more destructive
power in their hands -- immediately got the idea to enslave scientists. Now
every scientist is a slave to some nation, to some government and he functions
only for purposes which are anti-life, destructive. The more destructive
things he can find, the more he is praised by the governments, the more he is
awarded.
My idea of an academy is of
creative science which will consciously avoid anything that destroys life and
will seek and search only for that which enhances life. This academy cannot
be only of science because science is only a part of human reality. The
academy has to be comprehensive, it has to be for creativity, for art, for
consciousness; hence it will have three divisions, major divisions, not
separated, but just for arbitrary purposes to be denominated as separate.
. The most fundamental thing will
be creating methods, techniques, ways of raising human consciousness, and
certainly, this consciousness cannot be against the body; this consciousness
is residing in the body. They cannot be seen as inimical to each other; in
every way, they are supportive. I say something to you and my hand makes a
gesture without my telling the hand. There is a deep synchronicity between me
and my hand. You walk, you eat, you drink and all these things indicate that
you are a body and consciousness as an organic whole. You cannot torture the
body and raise your consciousness.
The body has to be loved -- you
have to be a great friend.
It is your home, you have to clean
it of all junk, and you have to remember that it is in your service
continuously, day in, day out. Even when you are asleep, your body is
continuously working for you digesting, changing your food into blood, taking
out the dead cells from the body, bringing new oxygen, fresh oxygen into the
body -- and you are fast asleep! It is doing everything for your survival,
for your life, although you are so ungrateful that you have never even
thanked your body. On the contrary, your religions have been teaching you to
torture it: the body is your enemy and you have to get free from the body,
its attachments.
I also know that you are more than
the body and there is no need to have any attachment. But love is not an
attachment, compassion is not an attachment. Love and compassion are
absolutely needed for your body and its nourishment. And the better body you
have, the more is the possibility for growing consciousness. It is an organic
unity.
A totally new kind of education is
needed in the world where fundamentally everybody is introduced into the
silences of the heart -- in other words into meditations -- where everybody
has to be prepared to be compassionate to one's own body. Because unless you
are compassionate to your own body, you cannot be compassionate to any other
body. It is a living organism, and it has done no harm to you. It has been
continuously in service since you were conceived and will be till your death.
It will do everything that you would like to do, even the impossible, and it
will not be disobedient to you. It is inconceivable to create such a
mechanism which is so obedient and so wise.
If you become aware of all the
functions of your body, you will be surprised. You have never thought what
your body has been doing. It is so miraculous, so mysterious. But you have
never looked into it. You have never bothered to be acquainted with your own
body and you pretend to love other people. You cannot, because those other
people also appear to you as bodies. The body is the greatest mystery in the
whole of existence. This mystery needs to be loved -- its mysteries, its
functionings to be intimately inquired into.
The religions have unfortunately
been absolutely against the body. But it gives a clue, a definite indication
that if a man learns the wisdom of the body and the mystery of the body, he
will never bother about the priest or about God. He will have found the most
mysterious within himself, and within the mystery of the body is the very
shrine of your consciousness.
Once you have become aware of your
consciousness, of your being, there is no God above you. Only such a person
can be respectful for other human beings, other living beings, because they
all are as mysterious as he himself is, different expressions, varieties
which make life richer. And once a man has found consciousness in himself, he
has found the key to the ultimate.
Any education that does not teach
you to love your body, does not teach you to be compassionate to your body,
does not teach you how to enter into its mysteries, will not be able to teach
you how to enter into your own consciousness. The body is the door -- the
body is the stepping stone. And any education that does not touch the subject
of your body and consciousness is not only absolutely incomplete, it is
utterly harmful because it will go on being destructive.
It is only the flowering of
consciousness within you that prevents you from destruction.
And that gives you a tremendous
urge to create -- to create more beauty in the world, to create more comfort
in the world. That's why I include art as the second part of the academy. Art
is a conscious effort to create beauty, to discover beauty, to make your life
more joyful, to teach you to dance, to celebrate. And the third part is a
creative science.
Art can create beauty, science can
discover objective truth, and consciousness can discover subjective reality.
These three together can make any system of education complete. All else is
secondary, may be useful for mundane purposes, but it is not useful for
spiritual growth, it is not useful to bring you to the sources of joy, love,
peace, silence. And a man who has not experienced the inner ecstasy has lived
in vain unnecessarily. He vegetated, he dragged himself from the womb to the
grave but he could not dance and he could not sing and he could not
contribute anything to the world.
According to me a religious person
is one who contributes to the world some beauty, some joy, some happiness,
some celebration which was not there -- something new, something fresh, some
more flowers. But religion has never been defined the way I am defining it.
All the ways religion has been
defined have been proved absolutely ugly and wrong.
But they have not helped humanity
to rise to the heights of joy and beauty and love. They have drowned the
whole humanity in misery and suffering, they have not taught you freedom. On
the contrary, they have enforced on you all kinds of slavery in the name of
obedience. Obedience to whom? Obedience to the priests, obedience to those
who have money, obedience to those who have power -- in short, obedience to
all the vested interests. A small minority has been enslaving the whole
humanity for centuries. Only a right education can transform this ugly and
sick situation.
My idea of a World Academy of
Creative Science, Art and Consciousness is really in other words my vision of
a real religion. Man needs a better body, a healthier body. Man needs a more
conscious, alert being. Man needs all kinds of comforts and luxuries that
existence is ready to deliver.
Existence is ready to give you
paradise herenow, but you go on postponing it -- it is always after death.
In Sri Lanka one great mystic was
dying... He was worshipped by thousands of people. They gathered around him.
He opened his eyes: just a few more breaths would he take on the shore and he
would be gone, and gone forever.
Everybody was eager to listen to his last words. The old man said, "I have been teaching you for my whole life about blissfulness, ecstasy, meditativeness. Now I am going to the other shore. I will not be available anymore. You have listened to me, but you have never practiced what I have been telling you. You have always been postponing. But now there is no point in postponing, I am going. Is anyone ready to go with me?" There was a great pindrop silence. People looked at each other thinking that perhaps this man who had been a disciple for forty years ... HE may be ready.... But he was looking at the others -- nobody was standing up. Just from the very back a man raised his hand. The great mystic thought, "At least, one person is courageous enough." But that man said, "Please let me make it clear to you why I am not standing up. I have only raised my hand. I want to know how to reach to the other shore, because today of course I am not ready. There are many things which are incomplete: a guest has come, my young son is getting married, and this day I cannot go -- and you say from the other shore, you cannot come back. "Some day, one day certainly, I will come and meet you. If you can just explain to us once more -- although you have been explaining to us for your whole life -- just once more how to reach the other shore? But please keep in mind that I am not ready to go right now. I just want to refresh my memory so that when the right time comes..."
That right time never comes.
It is not a story only about that
poor man, it is the story of millions of people, of almost all. They are all
waiting for the right moment, the right constellation of stars... They are
consulting astrology, going to the palmist... inquiring in different ways
what is going to happen tomorrow.
Tomorrow does not happen -- it
never has happened. It is simply a stupid strategy of postponement. What
happens is always today.
A right kind of education will
teach people to live herenow, to create a paradise of this earth, not to wait
for death to come, and not to wait for death to come, and not to be miserable
till death stops your misery.
Let death find you dancing and
joyous and loving. It is a strange experience that if a man can live his life
as if he is already in paradise, death cannot take away anything from that
man's experience.
My approach is to teach you that
this is the paradise, there is no paradise anywhere else, and no preparation
is needed to be happy. No discipline is needed to be loving; just a little
alertness, just a little wakefulness, just a little understanding. And if
education cannot give you this little understanding, it is not education.
My conception of a world academy
means that the whole world should have the same education of meditation, of
art, of creative science.
If we can create a sane
educational system around the world, then the divisions of religion and the
discrimination between white and black and nations, the ugly politics that
exists because of them, and the stupid behavior of men preparing continuously
for war...
Whenever I see a soldier I cannot
believe that this man has a mind at all. Even animals don't become soldiers. But
man seems to have only one interest: how to kill, how to kill more
efficiently, how to go on refining instruments for killing.
A right education will teach you
how to find your own song and how to learn the dance and not be shy; how to
celebrate the small things of life and make this whole planet alive. It is
only one, as far as we know, where people can love, where people can
meditate, where people can become buddhas, where people like Socrates and Lao
Tzu can exist.
We are most fortunate to be on
this small planet. It is one of the smallest planets in the universe, but
even the greatest stars, millions of times bigger than this earth, cannot
claim a single Albert Einstein or a Jesus or a Yehudi Menuhin. It is strange
that in this vast universe existence has been successful only on this small
planet to create a little consciousness, a little life. Now it is in our
hands to grow from this small beginning into the infinite heights which are
our potential and which are our birthright.
Up to now education has not been
in the right direction. It has been torturing people unnecessarily with
history, with geography. If somebody is interested, these subjects should be
available. If somebody is interested to know about Constantinople, then let
him know. And if somebody is interested to know about Genghis Khan,
Tamerlane, let him know. But there is no need to teach people compulsorily
all the nonsense and garbage that has happened in the past. That is so stupid
and so unbelievable. To teach people that there have been persons like
Genghis Khan and Nadirshah and Tamerlane and Alexander the Great is to teach
people about the wrong side of their being.
I have been fighting in the
universities, "Why don't you teach about Socrates? Why don't you teach
about Chuang Tzu? Why don't you teach about Bodhidharma...?" These are
the right side of consciousness.
And teaching about the wrong kind
of people gives you an idea that it is perfectly good if you are wrong. If
you are going slowly to be a Genghis Khan it is perfectly right. You are not
doing something new, man has always been doing this.
We have to sort out history, cut
out all those wrong people and protect our children
from being conditioned that man
has been involved in nothing but war, fighting, competition, greed. We should
teach our children not what has been but what can be -- not the past, but the
future. Why waste so much time on teaching subjects which are of no
significance in actual existential life and not give them a single direction
about the art of love, the art of life, the meaning of existence, preparation
for death with joy, silence and meditativeness. All that is essential is
missing, and that which is non-essential and absolutely stupid is being
forced.
They say history repeats. History
does not repeat. It is our stupidity that we go on and on teaching the same
thing to each generation. The poor children are conditioned to imitate the
same great heroes who were really criminals, not heroes. Just a single man,
Genghis Khan, killed forty million people. It is better to drop all
information about these people from education. Give an education about the
dance of a Shiva, the flute of Krishna. Teach them all that has been
beautiful and good so that they become accustomed that all that is good is
natural, and the bad is accidental -- that the bad does not happen, has never
happened, and the good is absolutely normal.
To be a buddha is not something
abnormal. It should be taught to every child that to be a buddha is a normal
phenomenon. Anybody who is wise enough is going to become a buddha. You are
going to become a buddha.
The greatest revolution has to
happen in education and its systems; otherwise, man will go on repeating
history.
Now time for silence and time for
laughter....
Hymie Goldberg comes home from
work one evening and Becky says, "Did you go to the store and pick up
the snapshots, like I asked you? You probably did not! You never listen to
me! You never remember anything! Oh! You did get them. Well, thank goodness
for miracles. Let me see them! This shot is terrible and this one is even
worse. My God! This one is horrible and this one is a disaster. In fact, this
is the worst lot of photographs I have ever seen in my life.
"You can't do anything right! You can't drive a car properly! You can't even change a fuse. You can't sing in tune, and as a photographer, you are the worst! "Just take a look at these pictures: in every one you took of me, I have my mouth open!"
A reformed prostitute is giving
testimony on a street corner with the Salvation Army. She punctuates her talk
by beating on a big drum.
"I used to be a sinner!" she shouts. BOOM! goes the drum. "I used to be a bad woman!" she cries. BOOM! "I used to drink!" BOOM! "Gamble!" BOOM! "Chase men!" BOOM! BOOM! "I used to go wild on Saturday nights and raise hell!" BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! "And now what do I do on Saturday nights?" she cries. "I stand on the street corner beating this fucking drum!" |
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