Osho

Con ManI have to work on two levels: one is the level where you live, where you are, and one is the level where I am and I want you also to be.From the top of a hill I have to come into the valley where you are, otherwise you won't listen, you won't believe the sunlit top. I have to take your hand in my hand and persuade you - and on the way, tell stories that are not true! But they keep you engaged, and you don't create any trouble in walking; you go on, engaged with the story. And when you have reached the hilltop, you will know why I was telling long stories, and you will feel grateful that I told those stories; otherwise you would not have been able to travel that long, that far uphill.It is something to be remembered: All the masters of the world have been telling stories, parables - why? The truth can be simply said, there is no need to give you short stories. But the night is long, and you have to be kept awake; without stories you are going to fall asleep.Till the morning comes there is an absolute necessity to keep you engaged, and the stories the masters have been telling are the most intriguing things possible.The truth cannot be said, but you can be led to the point from where you can see it.Meditation Meditation in the East is not what is understood by it in the West. In the West, meditation means contemplation: meditating in God, meditating on truth, meditating on love. But if you meditate on something, you are not meditating at all, because you are focusing on something outside yourself. It may be love, it may be truth, it may be God, it makes no difference.Meditation in the East has a totally different meaning, just the opposite of the Western meaning. Mediation in the East means having no object in the mind, no content in the mind, no meditating upon something but dropping everything - neti, neti. neither this or that. Meditation is emptying yourself of all content. When there is no thought moving inside you there is stillness, and that stillness is meditation. Not even a ripple arises in the lake of your consciousness, and that silent lake, absolutely still, is meditation.And in that meditation you will know what truth is, you will know what love is, you will know what godliness is. Not by meditating on God ... See the point: how can you mediate on God? You don't know anything about God. All your meditation is going to be just imagination, an exercise of imagination. You don't know truth - what are you going to meditate upon? Some idea given by others, some belief, some concept? That is not going to help.First become mediation, and then in meditation, truth, godliness, love and all that is transcendental will be revealed to you.Mediation is just being, not doing anything - no action, no thought, no emotion. It is very simple - a totally relaxed state of consciousness where you are not doing anything. The moment doing enters, you become tense, anxious. What to do? How to do it? How to succeed? How not to fail? You have already moved into the future.In meditation you just are. And it is a sheer delight. Meditation is just being delighted in your own presence; meditation is a delight in your own being.Where does this delight come from, when you are not doing anything? It comes from nowhere or it come from everywhere. It is not caused by anything, because existence itself is made of the stuff called joy. It needs no cause, no reason. If you are unhappy you have a reason to be unhappy; if you are happy, you are simply happy - there is no reason for it. Your mind tries to find a reason because it cannot believe in 'the uncaused' because it cannot control the uncaused - with the uncaused the mind simply becomes impotent. So the mind goes on finding some reason or other. But I would like to tell you that whenever you are unhappy, you have a reason to be unhappy, because happiness is just the stuff you are made of. It is your very being, it is your innermost core. Joy is you inner most core.BuddhaGautam Buddha's given name was Siddhartha. Gautama is his family name so his full name was Gautama Siddhartha. Buddha is not his name, it is his awakening. Buddha simply means "one who is awakened." Gautam Buddha is the most famous awakened person. There haven been many buddhas before him and there have been many buddhas after him-- and as long as every human being can become a buddha, new buddhas will go on springing up in the future. Everyone has the potentiality...it is only a matter of waiting for the right time. Some day, tortured by the outside reality, in despair of having seen everything and found nothing, you are bound to turn inward.In Buddhist terminology, 'Buddha' is equivalent to 'truth'. Buddhists don't talk much about truth; they talk much more about the Buddha. When you become a Buddha, you become awakened, so why talk about truth? Just ask what awakening is. Just ask what awareness is, because when you are aware, truth is there; when you are not aware, truth is not there.A Buddha is one who lives from moment to moment, who does not live in the past, who does not live in the future, who lives in the here and now. Buddha-hood is a quality of being present - and it is not a goal, you need not wait, you can become a Buddha just here and now.Buddha says the greatest joy in life is freedom: freedom from all prejudices, freedom from all scriptures, freedom from all concepts and ideologies, freedom from all desires, freedom from all possessiveness and jealousy, freedom from all hatred, anger, rage, lust...In short, freedom from everything, so that you are just a pure consciousness, unbounded, unlimited. That is the greatest joy, and it is possible -- it is within everybody's grasp. You just have to grope for it a little. The groping will be in the dark, but it is not far away. If you try, if you make an effort, you are bound to find it. It is your birthright.TruthTruth is beyond structure. It comes only when you are in an unstructured state of consciousness. It comes only when there is no expectation of it, no preparation for it, because all preparation is expectation. Truth comes unawares, truth comes as a surprise. You cannot manage and manufacture it, it comes when it comes.There is no path to truth. This is one of the most fundamental things to understand. If you are searching for truth, all paths will lead you astray, because following a path means that you have already decided what truth is. You have decided the direction, the dimension, you have decided how to approach it, what discipline to follow, what doctrine to adopt. Your destination will just be a projection of your own mind. It will be just your mind playing a game with itself. There is no way to truth, because the mind is the barrier and it is the mind that creates the way. The mind has to go. The mind has to cease for truth to be.Truth is not a discipline either, because truth is freedom. Truth is a bird on the wing, not a bird in the cage. The cage may be of gold, may be studded with diamonds, but the cage is a cage and cannot contain freedom. Truth can never be a prisoner, its intrinsic quality is freedom, so only those who are capable of being free will reach it.ZenZen goes beyond Buddha and beyond Lao Tzu. It is a culmination, a transcendence, both of the Indian genius and of the Chinese genius. The meeting...the essence of Buddha's teaching and the essence of Lao Tzu's teaching merged into one stream so deeply that no separation is possible now. Out of that meeting Zen was born. Zen is neither Buddhist nor Taoist and yet both.The future of Humanity will go closer to the Zen approach - because the meeting of the East and West is possible only through something like Zen, which is earthly and yet unearthly. The miracle is that Zen is neither interested in the past, nor the future. Zen lives in the present. Its whole teaching is just to be rooted, centered in that which - "is"Zen is Zen. There is nothing comparable to it. It is unique - unique in the sense that is the most ordinary and yet the most extraordinary phenomenon that has ever happened to human consciousness. It is the most ordinary because it does not believe in knowledge, it does not believe in the mind. It is not a philosophy, not a religion either. It is the total acceptance of ordinary existence. It has not interest in any esoteric nonsense, no interest in metaphysics at all. It does not hanker for the other shore; this shore is more than enough. Its acceptance of this shore is so tremendous that through that very acceptance it transforms this shore - and this very shore becomes the other shore.This very body the Buddha.This very Earth the lotus paradise.PhilosophyAristotle says that philosophy begins in wonder, but it's not so in the East. In the East, nobody has ever said philosophy begins in wonder. In the East we say philosophy begins in the awareness of suffering, not in wonder. Philosophy beings in the angst of man, in the meaninglessness of man's life and in the awareness of it.So Western philosophy has remained a kind of entertainment. Eastern philosophy is not entertainment, it is work, it is Sadhana. In fact there is not word in any language to translate this Indian word Sadhana because nothing like it has ever existed anywhere else. Sadhana means that philosophy is not just thinking, but being. You have to become your philosophy, you have to live it! It has to become your blood and bones and marrow. Sadhana has to become your way of life. Whatever you think is right has to be lived - that is the only proof that you think it is right. If you think something is right and you live otherwise, than you are fooling others and you are fooling yourself.You Already Are!If you know your being, there is no question of becoming. All that you could have ever imagined to become you already are.You are gods who have forgotten who they are. You are emperors who have fallen asleep and are dreaming that they have become beggars. Now beggars are trying to become emperors, in dreams they are making great efforts to become emperors, and all that is needed is to wake up!PardiseEverybody is searching for paradise. You can give it different names - nirvana, enlightenment, samadhi, the Kingdom of God, ultimate truth - and you can go on giving it different names, but you will still be missing it - missing not because you have been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but missing because you are in the garden and you have fallen into a deep dreamlike state. The dream consists of your desire to be somewhere else, to reach the peaks.My insistence is that you are already there, in paradise. Just sit silently and look around you, sit silently and look within. You have never been anywhere else! The way you are is the only way you can be. Accept it - and not only accept it but rejoice in it, love it, and suddenly you will find you are awake in the Garden of Eden. It is not a question of going anywhere, just of being here now.