Osho

Happiness is when mind is not.

And when mind comes in, happiness is no more there. Now there is only a memory, a dead memory. Your lover is gone; you are just carrying a letter written by your lover. The flower has faded; just an image in your mind. This image will not allow happiness to enter again in your being -- this image will be the barrier, will be the rock.

Buddha says: Don't carry the past and don't ask for the future -- just be herenow. And then there is no-mind. And the body simply follows that no-mindness.

Right now the body follows the mind, and the mind is the culprit -- and you go on punishing the body. It is almost like a small child: he comes running into the room, gets hit by the door, becomes angry at the door, starts beating the door -- as if the door is the culprit.

When the mind is calm it becomes no-mind. No-mind and a calm mind mean exactly the same thing; they don't mean two different things. A calm mind, a cool mind, is a no-mind -- because mind is the fever. Mind is the continuous anxiety, tension, the disease -- yes, the disease is the mind. When the disease has disappeared, you function from a state which is of no mind, and then the body follows it.

The body is a follower. If you have mind, the body follows the mind; if you have no-mind, the body follows the no-mind. But don't start fighting with the body. Don't be stupid.

The will grows from thought and imagination.... Thought comes from the past; imagination means movement in the future.

Whatsoever you have experienced, thought, learnt, that is your ego. And whatsoever you want to experience in your future, would like to have in your future, is your will. These are two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Osho quotes the Buddha, "Passions grow from the will...desires grow from the will. The will grows from thought and imagination.... When both are calmed, there is neither sensualism nor transmigration." Buddha says then all sensualism disappears; then one is no more greedy for senses and the experience of the senses.

A sensual person is not a sensitive person; a sensual person is very gross, very rough, very primitive. A sensitive person is very developed, highly developed; he is very receptive. A sensual person is after pleasure, and the sensitive person is one who knows bliss is here and he is open to it, and he goes on being showered by the divine bliss. He soaks it up like a sponge. He is sensitive.

The sensual person is always after something, trying to achieve -- money, power, prestige. The sensitive person is simply alive herenow, enjoying the beauty that is available. When tomorrow comes then tomorrow will take care of itself.

Your mind is unnecessary luggage. It makes no difference to this existence that is carrying you; you are unnecessarily burdened. I say: Drop it. The trees exist without the mind and exist more beautifully than any human being; the birds exist without the mind and exist in a more ecstatic state than any human being. Look at children who are still not civilized, who are still wild. They exist without the mind, and even a Jesus or a Buddha will feel jealous of their innocence. There is no need for this mind. The whole world is going on and on without it. Why are you carrying it? Are you just thinking that it will be too much for God, too much for existence? Once you can put it down, even for a single minute, your whole existence will be transformed. You will enter into a new dimension, the dimension of weightlessness.

A Buddha is a person who lives without the mind; It is simple: whatsoever Buddha is doing, he is doing without any mind in it. He is spontaneous, it is not activity. He is not thinking about it, it happens. He is not the doer. He moves like an emptiness. He has no mind for it, he was not thinking to do it. But if the existence allows it to happen, he allows it to happen. He has no more the ego to resist; no more the ego to do.

That is the meaning of being empty and a no-self: just being a non-being, anatta, no-selfness. Then you accumulate nothing; then you are not responsible for anything that goes on around you; then you transcend.

No, there is a totally different quality of being which comes by not thinking: not good, not bad, simply a state of no-thinking. You simply watch, you simply remain conscious, but you don't think. And if some thought enters...it will enter, because thoughts are not yours; they are just floating in the air.

All around there is a noosphere, a thoughtsphere, all around. Just as there is air, there is thought all around you, and it goes on entering on its own accord. It stops only when you become more and more aware. There is something in it: if you become more aware, a thought simply disappears, it melts, because awareness is a greater energy than thought.

It is just like you burn a lamp in the house and the darkness cannot enter; you put the light off -- from everywhere darkness has entered; without taking a single minute, a single moment, it is there. When the light burns in the house, the darkness cannot enter. Thoughts are like darkness: they enter only if there is no light within. Awareness is fire: you become more aware, less and less thoughts enter.

If you become really integrated in your awareness, thoughts don't enter you; you have become an impenetrable citadel, nothing can penetrate you. Not that you are closed, remember -- you are absolutely open; but just the very energy of awareness becomes your citadel. And when no thoughts can enter you, they will come and they will bypass you. You will see them coming, and simply, by the time they reach near you they turn. Then you can move anywhere, then you go to the very hell -- nothing can affect you. This is what we mean by enlightenment.

If one sees naught when staring into space.... This is a method, a tantra method: to look into space, into the sky, without seeing; to look with an empty eye. Looking, yet not looking for something: just an empty look.

Sometimes you see in a madman's eyes an empty look -- and madmen and sages are alike in certain things. A madman looks at your face, but you can see he is not looking at you. He just looks through you as if you are a glass thing, transparent; you are just in the way, he is not looking at you. And you are transparent for him: he looks beyond you, through you. He looks without looking at you; the "at" is not present, he simply looks.

Look in the sky without looking for something, because if you look for something a cloud is bound to come: "something" means a cloud, "nothing" means the vast expanse of the blue sky. Don't look for any object. If you look for an object, the very look creates the object: a cloud comes, and then you are looking at a cloud. Don't look at the clouds. Even if there are clouds, you don't lookat them -- simply look, let them float, they are there. Suddenly a moment comes when you are attuned to this look of not-looking -- clouds disappear for you, only the vast sky remains. It is difficult because eyes are focused and your eyes are tuned to look at things.

Look at a small child the first day born. He has the same eyes as a sage -- or like a madman: his eyes are loose and floating. He can bring both his eyes to meet at the center; he can allow them to float to the far corners -- they are not yet fixed. His system is liquid, his nervous system is not yet a structure, everything is floating. So a child looks without looking at things; it is a mad look. Watch a child: the same look is needed from you, because again you have to attain a second childhood.

Don't see, just look. For the beginning few days, again and again you will see something, just because of the old habit. We hear things because of old habit. We see things because of old habit. We understand things because of old habit.

To know existence, all fixed attitudes have to be dropped. Your eyes should be just windows, not projectors. Your ears should be just doors, not projectors.

Nobody is listening to anybody. You hear whatsoever you expect. Expectation is your specs -- that is the glasses. Your eyes should be windows -- this is the technique.

Nothing should go out of the eyes, because if something goes a cloud is created. Then you see things which are not there, then a subtle hallucination.... Let pure clarity be in the eyes, in the ears; all your senses should be clear, perception pure -- only then the existence can be revealed to you. And when you know existence, then you know that you are a Buddha, a God, because in existence everything is divine.

First stare into the sky; lie down on the ground and just stare at the sky. Only one thing has to be tried: don't look at anything. In the beginning you will fall again and again, you will forget again and again. You will not be able to remember continuously. Don't be frustrated, it is natural because of so long a habit.

Whenever you remember again, unfocus your eyes, make them loose, just look at the sky -- not doing anything, just looking. Soon a time comes when you can see into the sky without trying to see anything there.

Then try it with your inner sky: Then close your eyes and look inside, not looking for anything, just the same absent look. Thoughts floating but you are not looking for them, or at them -- you are simply looking. If they come it is good, if they don't come it is good also. Then you will be able to see the gaps: one thought passes, another comes -- and the gap. And then, by and by, you will be able to see that the thought becomes transparent, even when the thought is passing you continue to see the gap, you continue to see the hidden sky behind the cloud.

And the more you get attuned to this vision, thoughts will drop by and by, they will come less and less, less and less. The gaps will become wider. For minutes together no thought coming, everything is so quiet and silent inside -- you are for the first time together. Everything feels absolutely blissful, no disturbance. And if this look becomes natural to you -- it becomes, it is one of the most natural things; one just has to unfocus, precondition: ...one destroys distinctions... Then there is nothing good, nothing bad; nothing ugly, nothing beautiful.

And this happens, that the more you look, the less you find; the deeper you look, the thoughts disappear, disperse. Once you know this then the key is in your hand. And this key unlocks the most secret phenomenon: the phenomenon of Buddhahood.

And once you can see that thoughts are floating -- you are not the thoughts but the space in which thoughts are floating -- you have attained to your self-mind, you have understood the phenomenon of your consciousness. Then discrimination stops: then nothing is good, nothing is bad; then all desire simply disappears, because if there is nothing good, nothing bad, there is nothing to be desired, nothing to be avoided. You accept, you become loose and natural. You simply start floating with existence, not going anywhere, because there is no goal; not moving to any target, because there is no target. Then you start enjoying every moment, whatsoever it brings -- whatsoever, remember. And you can enjoy it, because now you have no desires and no expectations. And you don't ask for anything, so whatsoever is given you feel grateful. Just sitting and breathing is so beautiful, just being here is so wonderful that every moment of life becomes a magical thing, a miracle in itself.

The first side is freedom from: from nationality, from a certain church, from a certain race, from a certain political ideology. This is the first part of freedom, the foundation of freedom. It is always from something. Once you have attained this freedom, you will feel very light and very good and very happy. And for the first time you will start rejoicing in your own individuality, because your individuality was covered with all those things that you have become free of.

Osho taught that freedom from was only first side of freedom: “But this is only one half and then there will come sadness, because the other half is missing. Freedom from is fulfilled, but freedom for what? Freedom in itself has no meaning, unless it is freedom for something, something creative – freedom to sculpt, freedom to dance, freedom to create music, poetry, painting. Unless your freedom turns into a creative realization, you will feel sad. Because you will see that you are free: your chains are broken, you no longer have any handcuffs, you no longer have any chains, you don’t have any prison, you are standing under the starry night, completely free, but where to go? Then comes a sudden sadness. What path to choose? Up to now there was no question of going anywhere – you were imprisoned. Your whole consciousness was concentrated on how to get free, your only anxiety was how to get free. Now that you are free, a new kind of problem has to be encountered. What to do now that you are free?"

Just freedom in itself does not mean anything, unless you choose a creative path. Either you go deeper into meditation for self-realization – that’s what I was talking about: unless you become like Premda, pregnant – or if you have a certain kind of talent that has not been allowed to develop because of your fetters – you could not compose music because your hands were in chains, you could not dance because your feet were in chains. If you have a talent to be a dancer, then be a dancer. Then your freedom is complete, then the circle is complete.

Freedom from and freedom for – this is not something new that you are facing. It is being faced by every person who struggles first for freedom and then suddenly finds, ‘Now that I am free, what am I going to do?’ Up to now, he was so occupied, so engaged, so very busy. Even in his dreams he was thinking only of freedom. And he has never thought about what he is going to do when he will get freedom.

What has happened is beautiful. But something more is needed. You have to become a creator. You have to find some creativity that fulfills your freedom, otherwise the freedom is empty. You need either to create something or to discover something. Either bring your potential to actuality or go inwards to find yourself, but do something with your freedom.

A really spiritual man is absolutely at ease herenow. He has no other time; his only time is now, and his only place is here. He does not hanker for anything.

Osho talks about trying to speak the unspeakable. After one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days of silence, it feels as if I am coming to you from a totally different world. In fact it is so. The world of words, language, concepts, and the world of silence are so diametrically opposite to each other, they don’t meet anywhere. They can’t meet by their very nature. Silence means a state of wordlessness; and to speak now, it is as if to learn language again from ABC. But this is not a new experience for me; it has happened before too.

You have to understand also that each individual is so unique that if you start following somebody you will be automatically imitating. You will lose your identity. You will start becoming phony, a hypocrite. You will not be yourself, but somebody else. You will become split.

You will have a mask: Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist. That will be just the mask that you and the person you have been following have created – it is not your authentic face. You are going against yourself, and you will be in suffering... and the whole of humanity is in suffering.

Every child is trying to imitate his parents, his neighbours, his school-friends, his teachers... and they are all trying to enforce it.

I have never followed anybody and it has paid me tremendously. It has been the greatest benediction to me that can be possible for a human being: not following. I have tried to remain just myself.

You will need courage. You will need intelligence. You will need a true search and seeking; then only can you risk. Otherwise there are people all around you, they are all salesmen....

The very idea of following makes me sick. It is sickening. You have to be yourself, and when you blossom, you are not going to be like me or like Jesus or like Buddha. You are going to be just like you: **you have never happened before**, and you are not going to happen again. It is only possible with you. You are unrepeatable. If you start following somebody you are missing a great opportunity that existence has provided for you, and you will never be happy. No Christian is happy, no Hindu is happy, no Buddhist is happy; they cannot be. How can you be happy?

If the roseflower tries to become a lotus, the lotus tries to become a rose, both will be in tremendous suffering because neither can the rose become the lotus nor can the lotus become the rose. At the most they can pretend, and pretensions are not fulfilling. The roseflower can only be a roseflower. And the unfortunate thing is, when the roseflower starts trying to be a lotus, its energy goes into that effort of becoming a lotus. A lotus it can never become, it has no potential for it. It is not a lotus, and there is no need for it to be a lotus. If existence wanted a lotus there would have been a lotus. The existence needs a rose. Trying to be a lotus, the rose will be losing its energy in a fruitless, hopeless effort, and perhaps may not be able to even become a rose. From where will it find the energy to become a rose, the vitality to become a rose?

If you follow somebody you are betraying existence because you are betraying your own innermost being. You are betraying your flowering. And why do people so easily become followers? Why is the whole world following somebody or other? And if sometimes one becomes fed up with Christianity, he becomes Hindu; the Hindu becomes fed up with Hinduism, he becomes a Buddhist... but the following continues. The whole pattern remains the same. The book changes, the leader changes, but the following, the follower... and the whole process remains the same, the same destructive suicidal process. I am against following because it is against the basic psychological principle of the uniqueness of the individual.

You should pay a little more attention to the word individual. It means indivisible – it cannot be divided.

The moment you follow, you are dividing. You are something, you are trying to become something else; you are somewhere, you are trying to reach somewhere else. Now you are creating a tension in your being. Hence the anguish all over the world.

My religion is not the religion of following. I can only share with you whatever has happened to me. And I am not saying that the same will happen to you. I am simply saying that if I can see, you can also see. If I can feel, you can also feel. Certainly, you will feel in your own way and you will see in your own way. The poetry that will be born to you will be your poetry, it will not be mine.

A lioness gives birth to a child in a crowd of sheep. The child grows amongst the sheep and naturally believes that he is a sheep – what else can the young lion do? One day an old lion, just passing by the crowd of sheep, looks at this miracle: a young, beautiful lion just walking in the middle of a crowd of sheep. Neither the sheep are afraid of him, nor is he in any way behaving differently.

The old lion becomes interested. He runs after the young lion. It is with great difficulty that he catches hold of him because the young lion escapes, just like every other sheep escapes. But finally he catches hold of him. The young lion starts crying and weeping, like a sheep. And the old lion says, ”Stop all this nonsense!” He takes him to a nearby pond, drags him by his side to the pond, forces him to look into the water... and suddenly the young lion roars like a lion.

The old lion has not done anything. He has just shown him his face, his real face, and he has recognized that he is a lion – he is not a sheep. And just that recognition is enough. It is transforming.

The old lion has not done anything at all. He has not told the young lion to ”follow me,” to ”imitate me,” and ”These are the commandments for you, and this is the character you have to attain, and these are the principles, and these are the things you have not to do.” He has not done anything of that sort. That is the function of the master: just to bring you so close to his own experience that something transpires in you.

A sudden lion’s roar... and the transformation, and you are yourself – neither a Hindu, nor a Mohammedan, nor a Christian. But the world wants a mob, a crowd. It is afraid of the individual because every authentic individual is bound to be a rebel, because he will insist on being himself.

I do not believe in believing. That has to be understood first.

Nobody asks me, ”Do you believe in the sun? Do you believe in the moon?” Nobody asks me that question. Millions of people I have met, and for thirty years continuously I have answered thousands of questions. Nobody asks me, ”Do you believe in the roseflower?” There is no need. You can see: the roseflower is there or it is not there. Only fictions, not facts, have to be believed.

God is the greatest fiction that man has created. Hence you have to believe in him. And why does man have to create this fiction of God? There must be some inner necessity. I don’t have that necessity so there is no question. But let me explain to you why people have believed in God.

One of the significant things to understand about man’s mind is that the mind is always seeking and searching some meaning in life. If there is no meaning, suddenly you feel then what are you doing here? Then why go on living? Then why go on breathing? Then why tomorrow morning have you to get up again and go through the same routine – the tea, the breakfast, the same wife, the same children, the same phony kiss to the wife, and the same office, and the same work, and comes the evening, and bored, utterly bored, you are back home – why go on doing all this? The mind has a question: Is there any meaning in all this, or are you just vegetating?

Buddhists and Jainas don’t believe in God, don’t believe that anybody created the world, but they use ’bhagwan’. They have a different origination for their word. In Jaina and Buddhist reference bhag means fortune, and bhagwan means the fortunate one, the blessed one; one who has attained to his destiny, who has matured.

So man has been searching for meaning. He created God as a fiction to fulfill his need for meaning. Without God, the world becomes accidental. It is no more a creation of a wise God who creates it for your growth, for your development, or for something. Without God – remove God and the world is accidental, meaningless. And the mind has an intrinsic incapacity to live with meaninglessness, so it creates all kinds of fictions – God, nirvana, heaven, paradise, other life beyond death – and makes a whole system. But it is a fiction, to fulfill a certain psychological need.

My work is to make your mind so mature that you can live with meaningless life, and yet beautifully.

What is the meaning of a rose, or a cloud floating in the sky? There is no meaning but there is such tremendous beauty. There is no meaning. The river goes on flowing but there is so much joy, meaning is not needed. And unless a man is able to live without asking for meaning, moment to moment, beautifully, blissfully, for no reason at all.... Just to breathe is enough. Why should you ask for what? Why do you make life a business?

Is not love enough? Have you to ask what is the meaning of love? And if there is no meaning in love, then of course your life becomes loveless. You ask a wrong question. Love is in itself enough; it needs no other meaning to make it beautiful, a joy. The birds singing in the morning... what is the meaning? The whole existence, to me, is meaningless. And the more I became silent and became attuned with the existence, the more it became clear that there is no need for meaning. It is enough as it is.

Don’t create fictions. Once you create a fiction then you have to create a thousand and one other fictions to support it, because it has no support in reality.

So when I say God is a fiction, please do not misunderstand me. God is a fiction but godliness is not a fiction; that is a quality. ’God’ is a person... as a person it is a fiction. There is no God sitting in heaven creating the world. And do you think a God will create such a mess that you call the world? Then what is left for the devil? If anybody has created this world it must be the devil, it cannot be God.

I say existence itself is enough, it needs no creator. It is creativity itself.

And to me, to be creative is the most important religious quality.

If you create a song, if you create music, if you create a garden, you are being religious. Going to the church is foolish, but creating a garden is tremendously religious. That’s why here in my commune, work is called worship. We don’t pray in any other way, we pray only through creating something. To me, creativity is God. But it will be better if you allow me to change the word god into godliness, because I don’t want to be misunderstood. There is no person like God, but there is tremendous energy – exploding, unending, expanding. This expanding, unending, exploding energy, this creativity, is divine.

'Meditation' means for one minute no thought moves on the screen of awareness. It is not easy. It is one of the most difficult things in the world. But it can happen if you continue to try.

And if it happens for one minute, that’s enough. If for one minute you can be in a state where no thought moves.... This has been my whole life’s work, teaching people how to be silent.

If you can be silent for one minute, you have learned the art. Then you can be silent for two minutes, because it is the same; the second minute is not different from the first. You can be silent for three minutes; all the minutes are the same.

Once you know the way... and the way is not something which can be told to you; you have to just sit with closed eyes and start watching your thoughts. In the beginning there will be a great rush hour, but slowly you will find the street is less and less crowded; less cars are passing, less thoughts are passing, less people are passing, gaps are becoming bigger. If one continues patiently, in three months’ time he will certainly be able to attain one minute’s silence.

Meditation does not require faith in God as a necessary step – in fact it is a hindrance. Meditation simply wants you not to begin with any belief, because any belief can become a hypnotizing factor. If you believe too much, and if you go on believing in a certain thing, you will start hallucinating about it.

Meditation is without any faith, without any belief, entering into silence to see what is there.

Meditation is the most scientific method. It needs no belief, no faith – just inquiry. And the inquiry, to be scientific, has to be without belief.

Start fresh: a clean slate with no belief, with no dogma, with no faith. Then there is a possibility that you may find what is the truth. And the truth is neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian. And the truth is not in The Bible, nor in the Koran, nor in the Gita.

The truth that you will find – you will be surprised – is nowhere written, cannot be written. It is impossible to write it. It has never been uttered by anybody and it is not going to be uttered by anybody. Only fingers have been pointing to the moon, saying nothing. And you should not get attached to the finger, because the finger is not the moon. You have to forget the finger completely and look at the moon. And the moon has nothing to do with the finger.

Meditation is a total transformation of your being. And a great understanding is needed and a great intelligence. It is only for those who are really fed up with misery and are ready to get out of the trap.

You have to understand one thing which is very fundamental. The world consists of verbs, not of nouns. Nouns are a human invention – necessary, but after all, a human invention. But existence consists of verbs, only of verbs, not nouns and pronouns.

Look at this. You are seeing a flower, a rose. To call it a flower is not right, because it has not stopped flowering, it is still flowering; it is a verb, it is a flow. To call it a flower you have made it a noun. You see the river. You calI it a river – you have made it a noun. It is rivering. It will be more accurate to the existential to say that it is rivering, flowing. And everything is changing, flowing.

The child is becoming a young man; the young man is becoming old; life is turning into death; death is turning into life. Everything is in continuity, continuous change; it is a continuum. There never comes a stop, a full stop. It comes only in language. In existence there is no full stop.

Do you remember when you stopped being a child? – when, at what point came the stop and you became a young man? There is no place, no demarcation, no full stop. The child is still flowing in you. If you just close your eyes and look within, you will find everything that has been is still there, flowing. You have been absorbing more and more, but all that has been is still there. The river is becoming big, new rivulets are joining it, but the original is still there.

Have you ever thought about it? Do you love yourself? Have you any respect for yourself? Forget about love, forget about respect; do you even accept yourself as you are? There is condemnation; you would like to be somebody else, you don’t want to be yourself – not at all.

But to love yourself... you don’t become superior. You don’t even look at yourself. You have not even looked within you at what you have been carrying from your very birth. What is it that you are? Have you ever tried to face it?

And secondly, anybody who is really original and thinking about love will have to know one thing: you can love only if you are capable of hate. You cannot love if you become incapable of hate. You can love somebody because you are capable of hating somebody else. You have a friend, that is why you can have an enemy. You cannot destroy hate completely and just save love; they are two sides of the same coin. When hate disappears, love also disappears. That is my experience.

Buddha also says love, and don’t hate. Jesus also says love, don’t hate; Mahavira also says love, don’t hate. But I say to you: if you don’t hate you cannot love. All these people are just talking intellectually. They have not looked into the energy of love and hate, that they are one energy. Love standing upside down becomes hate; it is just standing on its head, that’s all. It is not a different thing. So when hate disappears – I am saying it to you from my own experience – when hate disappears, love disappears too. And what is left is just compassion.

You cannot call it love – love is too passionate a word, too hot a word. What is left when love and hate are gone – for love and hate it would be better if I say love-hate and drop the ’and’ because they are not two things – when love-hate disappears, then the energy that is left is compassion. It has no attachment; it is neither love nor hate. It has no friends, and no enemies. Neither Buddha has understood it, nor Mahavira, nor Jesus.

You love your chains and you want me to redeem you. You are asking an absurdity. You are the cause of your miseries, sufferings, and you want me to redeem you from your sufferings and miseries. And you will go on sowing the same seeds, continuing, being the same old person, watering the same causes. Who can redeem you? And why should anybody redeem you? It is not my responsibility to redeem you. I have not made you what you are; you have made yourself what you are.

You cannot avoid doubt; wherever belief exists, doubt is simply suppressed. If there is no doubt you don’t need any belief.

It is because of the doubt that you need belief, to suppress it, to cover it. And the condition is that there should be no doubt; you should believe in me without any doubt and I will redeem you. Neither can you fulfill the condition, nor can you ask me, ”Why am I not redeemed?”

The condition is such that it cannot be fulfilled. And I am free to say that you have not fulfilled the basic condition; the contract has not been fulfilled from your side, what can I do? You agreed to believe in me indubitably, which is absolutely impossible. Nobody can do it, it is not in the nature of things.

You go on pouring belief, more belief; but you are simply suppressing doubt deeper and deeper into your unconscious. And the deeper it goes, the more dangerous it is because you will become unaware of it. One day you will think that you believe, that you are a believer, that you have attained to faith – because your doubt has gone so deep in your dark unconscious that you cannot see it anymore.

I would like you to see your doubt clearly. Rather than repressing it by any belief system, bring it out into the conscious mind, face it. And just by facing your doubt, it dissolves. No belief is needed, it simply evaporates.

Doubt is not to be substituted with a belief. If you substitute it with a belief, then you are in a very strange dilemma: just scratch your belief a little bit – and there is doubt flowing, fully alive. The belief is skin deep and underneath your blood is flowing.

So basically my standpoint is: you are responsible for whatsoever you are. If you are miserable, you are responsible. Don’t throw the responsibility on anybody else; otherwise you will never be free of it... because how can you be free if I am responsible for your misery? Then, unless I free you, you cannot be free; it is in my hands. And if it is in my hands, it can be in somebody else’ hands.

Those who are with me have to understand, howsoever hard and painful it is, that you and you alone are responsible for everything that is happening to you, has happened to you, will happen to you. Once you accept all your responsibility in its totality, you become mature. You stop throwing tantrums, and you stop seeking for messiahs. Then there is no need for any Jesus to save you. Nor can any Jesus save you – he was exploiting your situation.

Every religion is afraid of women, because every religion is afraid of sex. Every religion is repressive of sex, against sex. Naturally, it is a byproduct that every religion has to be against the woman, the woman has to be condemned. If you condemn sex you are bound to condemn the woman. If you respect the woman – it is a corollary – you will respect sex also, as a natural thing.

And why were these people against sex? They are different in their attitudes about everything except sex. About sex all religions agree; that seems to be the only agreement amongst religions. So it seems to be tremendously important that we should go deep into the whole phenomenon: why they are afraid of it. They are afraid of sex because it is the greatest energy in man, the most powerful pull of nature and biology.

There is no way to destroy it. Either you can condemn and repress it, or you can understand and transform it. But the second is a long and arduous path and needs tremendous intelligence, awareness – because sex is an unconscious force in you. Each cell in your body is made of it, is vibrant with it. Your conscious mind is nothing compared to your unconscious sexual energy; hence the fear that the unconscious can take possession of you any moment.

But to repress seems to be easier. Repression needs no intelligence in the first place; any idiot can do it. In fact, only idiots do it. I have been surprised, seeing hundreds of monks in India belonging to different religions – they are all repressing their sexuality. My surprise was that the more they repress their sexuality, the more stupid they become, exactly in the same proportion. Repressing nature is such an idiotic effort that it is bound to destroy your intelligence.

When you repress life energy you will become dull. And the methods you are going to use to repress life energy are bound to make you more and more stupid. When all the needs of your body are fulfilled, only then intellect gets energy, because it is at the highest level of your being. If on the lower levels your energy is starving, then it cannot rise to reach to the higher levels.

The people who call me ‘sex guru’ are obsessed with sex. I have not talked about sex more than I have talked about meditation, love, God, prayer, but nobody seems to be interested in God, love, meditation, prayer. If I say anything about sex, immediately they jump upon it.

Out of my three hundred books only one book concerns sex, and that, too, not in its totality. The name of the book is From Sex to Superconsciousness. Just the beginning of it is concerned with sex; as you go deeper in understanding it moves towards superconsciousness, towards samadhi. Now that is the book which has reached to millions of people. It is a strange phenomenon: my other books have not reached to so many people. There is not a single Hindu, Jaina saint, mahatma in India who has not read it. It has been discussed criticized, analyzed, commented upon in every possible way. Many books have been written against it – as if that is the only book I have written!

Why so much emphasis? People are obsessed particularly the religious people are obsessed. This label of ‘sex guru’ comes from religious people.

I am against the will-to-power, because the will-to-power is nothing but ego projection, and that is the greatest barrier between you and existence. The bigger ego you have, the farther away you are from existence. If it is not there... the meeting, the merger.

But I will not tell you to drop the ego. I am fully aware how cunning the ego is. It can even play the game of dropping itself, and you can say, ”Look, I am the humblest person in the world, the most egoless.” It has come in from the back door again; now you are the humblest, the most egoless – but you have to be somebody special and extraordinary.

I only say to you: if you try to drop it, it will come in from the back door. Just try to understand its games, that’s enough. Just try to see how many games it can play, in how many ways it can deceive you. Just be alert.

And if you are aware of all the possible ways of the ego, it disappears just like darkness disappears when you bring a lighted candle in. And you start looking with the candle where the darkness is. And you go on looking... and wherever you go it is not... wherever you go it is not.

When the light is there, the darkness disappears. It is not that darkness escapes; darkness does not exist at all. It is only an absence of light. Ego is just like darkness; it has no existence of its own. It is only the absence of awareness. So I don’t say drop the ego, I say watch it. Be watchful, observe it – and you will find it in so many layers that you will be surprised.

My whole life’s work is to find out the basic problem of humanity. And once we know the basic problem of humanity, it is not difficult at all to dissolve it. In fact, in the very finding it dissolves, because your awareness becomes a light unto itself.

I cannot say I am a messiah, I cannot say I am the avatara, because I know those are subtle ego games. All that I can say is: I am just as ordinary as anybody, or as extraordinary as everybody.

In existence, the smallest blade of grass has the same significance and the same beauty as the greatest star. There is no hierarchy. There is nobody higher, nobody lower.

I am not against anybody. But my basic work is to expose before you all the diseases, the bondages, so that you are not caught in them, so you can remain free, so you can have a merger with existence, without any barrier. And ego is the only barrier. It can come in so many ways that unless you are really alert it will deceive you. It can become so subtle – almost like a shadow – that it will follow you, and you will not be aware of it.

If you start fighting with anything – it may be sex, it may be ego, it may be greed, it may be fear, it may be anger, whatsoever – if you start fighting with it. And how will you drop it?

Other than fight, how are you going to drop it? You will push hard but where will you push it? Anything pushed goes deep down into your own unconscious. And anything in the unconscious is far more powerful than in the conscious, because conscious is only one part; the unconscious is nine times bigger than that. And in the conscious mind at least you are aware what is there.

In the unconscious mind it is so dark, you don’t know what is there; and it is nine times bigger, more powerful. It can take over your conscious effort any moment.

Awareness is my teaching. Never fight with greed, ego, anger, jealousy, hatred – all those enemies that the religions have been telling you, ”Fight with them, crush them, kill them. You cannot kill them, you cannot crush them, you cannot fight with them; all that you can do is just be aware of them. And the moment you are aware, they are gone. In the light, the darkness simply disappears.

The distinction between the subjective and the objective art is basically based on meditation. Anything that comes out of the mind will remain subjective art, and anything that comes out of no-mind, out of silence, out of meditation, will be objective art.

This definition is simple and will destroy your confusion. Whether you are creating something -- you may be a sculptor, you may be a carpenter, you may be a painter, a poet, a singer, a musician -- all that has to be remembered is that it is coming out of a silence within you, that it has a spontaneity. It is not prearranged, preprogrammed, pre-thought. As you are creating something you go on being surprised yourself -- you have left yourself in the hands of existence.

Now your hands are not your own hands. They are simply following what the existence longs for. You are not to interfere, you have just to be a watcher -- a watcher of your own creative activity. From the doer you have to shift to being just a watcher.

Mind is a doer, so when you are doing something according to your mind, it will be subjective art -- subjective in the sense that you are pouring your own thoughts onto the canvas in colors, singing your own thoughts on the flute, but it cannot be sacred. Your mind is so full of trivia, your mind is concerned with absolutely nonessential things. It is a mess.

That's why even a great painter, a genius like Picasso, has never attained to what I am calling objective art. All his paintings are subjective.

And if you watch his paintings, sitting silently, looking at them, the paintings will create not silence in you, not beauty in you, not grace in you, not a feeling of the divine in you, but you will start feeling a little crazy. Those paintings are crazy. They have come out of a mad mind. It does not matter that the mad mind was a genius.

On the other hand, if you sit silently on a full moon night near the Taj Mahal and watch it, you will be surprised how your mind becomes calm and quiet. The Taj Mahal has a totally different effect, because it was created by Sufi mystics. It is an example of objective art.

The subjective art is a kind of vomiting. You are filled with so much rubbish; you want to get rid of it, and the only way to get rid of it is to throw it on the canvas, on the musical instruments. Objective art is coming out of a silence so deep...it is almost an expression, to convey to you that this silence is possible in everybody. Objective art has a message. Subjective art has a madness.

If doing comes out of your mind, full of thoughts, then it is subjective. If your doing pours out of silence, blissfulness, serenity, ecstasy, then the same doing has a different flavor, a different significance; it becomes objective.

You must have heard about the haikus of the Zen masters of Japan. They are examples of objective art. One of the famous haikus of Basho...and Basho is a genius, but he is not writing through the mind. Whatever he is writing is growing within him in his silence like a flower, and he gives it as a gift to the world.

Listen deeply to this haiku. You have to visualize it; then only will you be able to feel its freshness, its beauty, and its penetration into your own being. Just visualize:

An ancient pond.
A frog jumps in.
This sound.

Just these three lines...not even lines.

An ancient pond.
A frog jumps in.

Naturally, he creates a certain sound.

This sound.

If you visualize it, you will find yourself sitting by the side of an ancient pond...a frog jumps in. You will hear the sound of the frog jumping in, and after the sound, an immense silence. That silence is the message. Basho is trying to give you the message which he has lived, felt, and he feels a responsibility that it should reach to anybody who is in search of it.

In comparison to Basho, Picasso is not concerned with you. He is burdened in his head and he wants to unburden it. And when you look at Picasso's paintings you will feel a certain burden, a tension arising in you. If you keep Picasso's paintings in your bedroom you will have nightmares. Each of his paintings is a nightmare. He has relieved himself of his nightmare, given it to the painting. The distinction is very significant.

Before you do anything, let your doing come out of your silence. Before you sing, let your song come out of your silence. Before you paint you should meditate. Unless you come to the point where you feel you are no more, and now existence can use you as its instrument....

First cleanse yourself; let fresh breezes pass through you, let new flowers of silence blossom in you. Then you know the spring has come, and now you are in the hands of the unknown. Just leave your hands in the unknown, allow them to move not according to your wishes, but according to something bigger than you, something vaster than you. You will be surprised that they move, and you will be surprised that that movement is not coming from you -- it is coming from the beyond.

Just a little change -- let your meditation be your art...but meditation has the priority; art is only a by-product. Meditation cannot be a by-product of anything.

You are asking, "I have always felt my art to be my meditation, but is it still not a doing?"

It is. If art has the priority then it is a doing. If meditation has the priority then it is a non-doing. Just a small change makes such a tremendous change -- so mysterious, so beautiful, so delicious. You have given yourself into the hands of eternity. It is a deep offering.

This is the only prayer I know of. All your other prayers are just rubbish coming from the mind.

First, let me explain to you the pseudo ways, then it will be easier to understand the right way. These are the two pseudo ways most people have lived and are living: the first is in the yesterday, the past; the second is in the tomorrow, the future. Both are really ways of deceiving yourself. The yesterday is no more, and the tomorrow has not come yet.

The yesterday cannot be lived. Yes, only in imagination, but not truly. It is dead. There is no way to make it alive again. You cannot move backwards in time. That which is gone is gone forever. But millions of people, ninety-nine point nine percent of people, have chosen to live either in the yesterday or in the tomorrow.

The tomorrow is not there and is not going to be there ever. It never comes, by its very nature. It is always coming, coming, coming... but it never comes. It is only a hope which is not going to be fulfilled. But hope is the most ancient psychological drug.

If you know the art of living... and it consists of small things, not of big, great commandments... very small things... just sipping your tea joyfully, meditatively, tasting each sip as if this is the last sip. Perhaps you may not be able again to hold the cup in your hands – there is no guarantee.

But if you are living fully, joyously, there is no reason at all to think of the future. It does not arise at all in your being. And your contentment, moment to moment, goes on making you more and more fulfilled, so fulfilled that you could not have imagined, dreamed of it.

Words get in the way and stop that revolution from taking place. The birth of thoughts becomes a barrier to that revolution.

Thoughts and thoughts alone are in front of us; our entire seeing is veiled by them. We have to turn from thoughts toward thoughtlessness. This change of direction is the revolution! 

First we must know how thoughts are born and only then can they be stopped from being born….

Thoughts are very short-lived; no thought endures for long. A particular thought does not endure, but the thought process does. Thoughts die on their own one after another, but the flow of thoughts does not….

As soon as an experience is given words, thought has taken birth. This reaction, this habit of giving words to experience covers up the experience, the seeing, with thoughts. The experience is suppressed, the seeing is suppressed and only words are left floating in the mind. These words themselves are our thoughts.

These thoughts are very short-lived so before one thought dies away, we transform another experience into thoughts. This process continues throughout our lifetimes, and we become so filled with words and so burdened under them that we lose ourselves in them. 

To drop the habit of giving words to our experiences is to eliminate the birth of thoughts…

There will be such a great revolution in your life that it has no parallel.

The head runs the show in the society; otherwise, we would have lived in a totally different world -- more loving, less hate, less war, no possibility of nuclear weapons. The heart will never give support for any destructive methods to be evolved. The heart will never be in the service of death. It is life -- it throbs for life, it beats for life.

And truth is every day expanding, opening new dimensions. And of course the old books and old messiahs are bound to become outdated – but they don’t. The dead go on ruling over the living.

There is an old definition of a philosopher: a philosopher is a blind man in a dark house with no light, on a dark night, looking for a black cat which is not there. This is an old definition of a philosopher. Let me add something more to it. The journalist is the man who finds it. Then it is news.

And truth is every day expanding, opening new dimensions. And of course the old books and old messiahs are bound to become outdated – but they don’t. The dead go on ruling over the living.

Mysticism means looking at existence without any prejudice.

If you can rejoice in this life totally, you will not be bothered at all what happens after death – because so much will be happening now that you cannot imagine that more is possible.

Meditation is not a state of concentration; it is not a state of mind at all. It is a state of total mindlessness -- and not a state of sleep either. No mind, no sleep; no mind, but total awareness. Out of that awareness you bring a different quality to music, to painting, to poetry. And out of that meditativeness you can bring a totally different quality to science too. But before that can happen we will need large numbers of meditative people around the earth.

The path of awareness is the path that passes through a desert. It is only for those who cannot manage to get back into their hearts. If you can easily be heartful, forget all about awareness; it will come on its own accord. Each step of love will bring its own awareness. This love will not be falling in love; I call it rising in love.

Albert Einstein, at the time of death, said his last words -- and remember, the last words are the most important a person has ever spoken in his life, because they are a conclusion, the essential experience. His last words were, "If there is another life, I would like to be a plumber. I don't want to be a physicist. I want to be something very simple -- a plumber.

When tomorrow comes then tomorrow will take care of itself.

People have only passions in their lives, that's why they have only worries and fear and nothing else. They come to me -- so many people -- and they want to get some peace of mind, they want a way to get out of their worries. But if you tell them: "Get out of your passions," then they are not ready to follow you. They want some mantra, some cheap thing, so they can go on desiring, they can go on chasing their passions -- and still remain unworried.

It is up to you, it depends on you. You have created it! Once you understand how you have created it, it will disappear -- because then you will not be able to create it any more.

If you have something, something that gives you joy, peace, ecstasy, share it. And remember that when you share there is no motive. I am not saying that by sharing it you will reach to heaven. I am not giving you any goal. I am saying to you, just by sharing it you will be tremendously fulfilled. In the very sharing is the fulfillment, there is no goal beyond it. It is not end-oriented, it is an end unto itself.

I know one thing for certain, that when you have blossomed, you will be sharing. There is no way to avoid it. When the flower opens up there is no way for it to withhold its fragrance and keep it imprisoned. The fragrance escapes. It reaches in all directions. So first, be fulfilled, be content. First, be. Then out of your being there will be a fragrance reaching to many. And it will not be a service, it will be a sheer joyous sharing. And there is nothing more joyful than sharing your joy.

Wild Wild Country is a Netflix documentary series about the controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho).

Sex, spirituality and lies - what I learnt about Rajneesh inside Osho ashram

Rajneesh (born Chandra Mohan Jain, 11 December 1931 – 19 January 1990), also known as Acharya Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, and later as Osho (/ˈoʊʃoʊ/), was an Indian godman and founder of the Rajneesh movement.

The Rajneesh movement comprises persons inspired by the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931–1990), also known as Osho, particularly initiated disciples who are referred to as "neo-sannyasins" or simply "sannyasins".

The movement was controversial in the 1970s and 1980s, due to the founder's hostility to traditional moral values, first in India and later in the United States. In the Soviet Union, the movement was banned as being contrary to "positive aspects of Indian culture and to the aims of the youth protest movement in Western countries". The positive aspects were seen as being subverted by Rajneesh, who was seen as a reactionary ideologist of the monopolistic bourgeoisie of India, promoting the ideas of the consumer society in a traditional Hindu guise.

In Oregon, the movement's large intentional community of the early 1980s, called Rajneeshpuram, caused immediate tensions in the local community for its attempts to take over the nearby town of Antelope and later the county seat of The Dalles.

At the peak of these tensions, a circle of leading members of the Rajneeshpuram Oregon commune was arrested for crimes including attempted murder as part of the United States's first recorded bio-terror attack calculated to influence the outcome of a local election in their favour, which ultimately failed.

Salmonella was deployed to infect salad products in local restaurants and shops, which poisoned several hundred people. The Bhagwan, as Rajneesh was then called, was deported from the United States in 1985 as part of his Alford plea deal following the convictions of his staff and right hand Ma Anand Sheela, who were found guilty of the attack. The movement's headquarters eventually returned to Poona (present-day Pune), India. The Oregon commune was destroyed in September 1985