As you are now you are just a liquid phenomenon, changing every moment, nothing stable. Really you cannot claim any "I" --- you don't have one. You are many "I"s just in a flow, a riverlike flow. You are a crowd, not an individual yet. But meditation can make you an individual.
This word 'individual' is beautiful; it means indivisible. Right now as you are, you are divided. You are only many fragments clinging together anyhow without any center being there, without any master in the house, with only servants. And for a moment any servant can become the master.
Every moment you are different because you are not--- and unless you are, the divine cannot happen to you. To whom can it happen? You are not there.
From The Book of Secrets
Intelligence
Mind is not your intelligence.
It may sound strange but this is a truth, that mind is not your intelligence. Mind can be intellectual, which is a very poor substitute for intelligence. Intellectuality is mechanical. You can become a great scholar, a great professor, a great philosopher, just playing with words which are all borrowed, arranging and rearranging thoughts, none of which are your own.
The intellect is absolutely bankrupt. It has nothing of its own, all is borrowed. And that´s the difference between intelligence and intellect. Intelligence has an eyesight of its own, a capacity to see into things, into problems.
Watch what you allow into your mind. People are unaware; they go on reading everything and anything, watching any silly thing on the TV, passing on any stupid gossip and pouring rubbish into each other´s heads.
Avoid such situations in which you are unnecessarily burdened with rubbish. You already have too much. You need to be unburdened!
Talk and listen only to the essential and slowly slowly you will see that a cleanliness, a feeling of purity, as if you have just taken a bath, will start arising within you. That becomes the necessary soil for meditation to arise. If you leave a few gaps in your mind unoccupied, those moments of unoccupied consciousness are the first glimpses of meditation, the first penetrations of the beyond, the first flashes of no-mind.
You have to accept the fact that you are living alone -- maybe in a crowd, but you are living alone; maybe with your wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, but they are alone in their aloneness, you are alone in your aloneness, and those alonenesses don´t touch each other, never touch each other.
That you may live with someone for twenty years, thirty years, fifty years -- it makes no difference, you will remain strangers. Always and always you will be strangers. Accept the fact that we are strangers; that we don´t know who you are, that you don´t know who I am. I myself don´t know who I am, so how can you know? But people are presuming that the wife should know the husband, the husband is assuming the wife should know the husband. Everybody is functioning as if everybody is a mind reader, and he should know, before you say it, your needs, your problems. He should know, she should know-- and they should do something. Now this is all nonsense.
Nobody knows you, not even you, so don´t expect that anybody else should know you; it is not possible in the very nature of things. We are strangers. Perhaps by chance we have met and we are together, but our aloneness is there. Don´t forget it, because you have to work upon it. Only from there is your redemption, your salvation. But you are doing just the opposite: how to forget your aloneness? The boyfriend, the girlfriend; go to the movie, the football match; get lost in the crowd, dance in the disco, forget yourself, drink alcohol, take drugs, but somehow don´t let this aloneness come to your conscious mind -- and there lies the whole secret.
You have to accept your aloneness, which in no way you can avoid. And there is no way to change its nature. It is your authentic reality. It is you.
One of the most important things to be understood about man is that man is asleep. Even while he thinks he is awake, he is not. His wakefulness is very fragile; his wakefulness is so tiny it doesn't matter at all. His wakefulness is only a beautiful name but utterly empty.
You sleep in the night, you sleep in the day-- from birth to death you go on changing your patterns of sleep, but you never really awaken. Just by opening the eyes don't befool yourself that you are awake. Unless the inner eyes open-- unless your inside becomes full of light, unless you can see yourself, who you are--don't think that you are awake. That is the greatest illusion man lives in. And once you accept that you are already awake, then there is no question of making any effort to be awake.
From Awareness, The Key to Living in Balance
Authenticity
Know what is the real, your fact, because only a fact can be changed. If you want to transform yourself, you must know your facticity. You cannot change a fiction. You are violent and you think you are nonviolent-- then there is no possibility of any transformation. That non-violence is nowhere, so you cannot change. And the violence is there, but you are not aware of it, so how can you change it?
--------
First know the facts as they are. How to know the facts? Encounter them without your interpretations.
--------
If this consideration is there, by and by you will become authentic. And this authenticity will not be like that of an animal. This authenticity will be like that of a saint, because the more you know how ugly you are, the more you know how violent you are, the more you penetrate inside your facts and become aware of the nonsense that you are doing, the more this awareness will help you. And by and by your ugliness will drop away, will wither away, because if you are aware of your ugliness it cannot continue.
--------
You cannot deceive anyone unless someone is ready to be deceived; that is another thing. By authenticity I mean: remember you facticity. Always sort it out from your interpretations. Throw away your interpretations and look at the fact of what you are. And do not be afraid, then you will never be able to change it. If it is there, accept that it is there; consider it.
This is what consideration means: consider it, look at it in its total nakedness. Move around it, go to its roots, analyze it. See why it is there, how you help it to be there, how you feed it, how you protect it, how it has grown to be such a big tree. See your ugliness, your violence, your hatred, your anger, how you have protected it, how you have helped it to grow up to now. Look at the roots; look at the whole phenomenon.
--------
It is you who have been helping it to become rooted in you. It is your creation. You can drop it immediately-- just now. You can leave it, and then there is no need to look again toward it. But before you can do this, you will have to know it-- what it is, the whole mechanism, the whole complexity of it, how you help it every moment.
"This pain is not to make you sad, remember. That's where
people go on missing.... This pain is just to make you
more alert--because people become alert only when the arrow
goes deep into their heart and wounds them. Otherwise they
don't become alert. When life is easy, comfortable, convenient,
who cares? Who bothers to become alert? When a friend dies,
there is a possibility. When your woman leaves you alone--those
dark nights, you are lonely. You have loved that woman so much
and you have staked all, and then suddenly one day she is gone.
Crying in your loneliness, those are the occasions when,
if you use them, you can become aware.
The arrow is hurting: it can be used. The pain is not to make you miserable, the pain is to make you more aware! And when you are aware, misery disappears."
From Take it Easy, Volume 2 Chapter 12
Peace
"Just this moment, when this silence pervades, who are you?
A nobody, a non-entity.
You don't have a name, you don't have a form.
You are neither man nor woman, Hindu nor Mohammedan.
You don't belong to any country, to any nation, to any race.
You are not the body, not the mind.
Then who are you? In this silence, what is the taste of you?
How does it taste to be?
Just peace.....just a silence......
and out of that peace and silence a great joy starts surfacing, welling up, for no reason at all.
It is your spontaneous nature."
From The Book of Books, discourses on the Dhammapada, June 29, 1979
Osho's epitaph:
Never Born, Never Died--Only visited this planet Earth between December 11, 1931 and January 19,1990.
Fools
The majority consists of fools, utter fools. Beware of the majority.
If so many people are following, that is enough a proof
that they are fast asleep, dreaming. Their problems
are out of their dreams, and they want to solve
them. They cannot be solved because they are not real. How can you solve an unreal problem? If it exists, it can be solved-- but it
is nowhere; it cannot be solved. An unreal problem-- how can it be solved? It can be solved only by an unreal answer. But that unreal answer will create other problems which again will be unreal. And then you fall ad nauseam; there is no end to it.
If you want to come to meet reality.....And to meet reality is to meet God. God is not something hiddden somewhere in the sky, it is the reality around you. God is not hidden; you are hidden in an unreality. God is the nearest immediate presence, but you are hidden in a capsule of your own unreal world and you go on protecting it-- and the center of it is the ego.
----
Nothing real can be dissolved. How can you dissolve it? If something is real, it cannot be destroyed; it will remian. And it will remain whatsoever you do. Only unreal things can be dissolved. They can disappear, they can simply evaporate into nowhere, into nothingness. Your ego can dissolve because it is unreal. It is just a thought, a notion; it has no substance to it.
-From The Book of Secrets pg. 776
Oneness
I am one with all things
- in beauty, in ugliness, for whatsoever is
- there I am.
Not only in virtue but in sin too I am a partner,
and not only heaven but hell too is mine.
Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu - it is easy to be their heir,
When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are
self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don't
know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you
have not come home yet.
-----------------
Whenever you are self-conscious you are simply showing that
you are not conscious of the self at all. You don't know who you
are. If you had known, then there would have been no problem---
then you are not seeking opinions. Then you are not worried what
others say about you--- it is irrelevant! In fact, nobody ever says anything
about you--- whenever people say something about you, they are saying
it about themselves.
----------------
Nobody can say anything about you. Whatsoever people say
is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are
still clinging to a false center. That false center depends on others,
so you are always looking to what people are saying about you.
And you are always following other people, you are always trying
to satisfy them. You are always trying to be respectable, you are
always trying to decorate your ego. This is suicidal.
Rather than being disturbed by what others say, you should
start looking inside yourself. To know the real self is not so cheap.
But people are always hankering for cheap things.
It happened:
When the pain in Mulla Nasruddin's back became un-
bearable, he reluctantly went to a specialist to diagnose his
problem.
"Well," said the doctor, "your problem can be cured
by an operation, two weeks in the hospital and six months
totally horizontal."
"Doctor, I can't afford the cost of all that!" shouted
Nasruddin.
"Well then, for twenty-five dollars I can retouch the
X ray," suggested the doctor.
This is cheap! ---retouch the X ray--- but it is not going to make
you healthy. That's what we are doing, continuously retouching
the X ray and thinking that somehow the miracle will happen.
When you are decorating your ego you are retouching the X ray.
That is not going to help in any way, it is not going to help you
become healthy. It is cheaper ---no operation is needed, no expense
is involved. But what is the point? Your misery remains.
You become respectable and your misery remains. You be-
come highly praised by the society--- your misery remains. You are
decorated with gold medals but your misery remains. These gold
medals are not going to destroy your misery; they are like retouch-
ing the X ray. All decoration on the ego, for the ego, is nothing
but deceiving yourself. And you go on becoming weaker and
weaker and weaker because the ego goes on becoming weaker
every day. Your body will become weaker, your mind will become
weaker, and by and by the ego that you have created out of the
body and mind combination will become weaker. Fear will become
greater and greater; you will be sitting on a volcano that can any
day explode. It will not allow you rest. It will not allow you relax-
ation, it will not allow you any moments of peace.
Once you understand it then the whole energy is put into
another direction. One has to know oneself. One has not to be
worried about what others say about you.
From Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within
Osho on himself:
"If you really want to know who I am, you will have to be absolutely empty as I am. Then two mirrors will be facing each other, and only emptiness will be mirrored.
Infinite emptiness will be mirrored: two mirrors facing each other. But if you have some idea, then you will see your own idea in me."
As you are now you are just a liquid phenomenon, changing every moment, nothing stable. Really you cannot claim any "I" --- you don't have one. You are many "I"s just in a flow, a riverlike flow. You are a crowd, not an individual yet. But meditation can make you an individual.
