Tale 66 ~ 100 Tales For 10,000 Buddhas

By and by, people have started to understand us. My office people don’t give me any funny looks. Some have started reading Osho’s books and are coming to listen to His discourses also. The whole atmosphere has changed. My boss is no longer angry at me. On the contrary, he helps in whatever way possible.

Morning discourses are arranged in Patkar Hall for eighteen days from 8:30 to 10:00am. Osho is going to speak on Mahavira. My office starts at 9:00am and I have no leave to my credit. I feel desperate and go to see Osho. I tell Osho about my office timings and ask Him what to do. He is never in favor of resigning my job.

He asks me, “What is the name of your boss and how does he look?”

I tell Him the name and describe his personality. I don’t understand at all what Hi is up to. He closes His eyes for a couple of minutes and then tells me to inform my boss that I will be coming at 10:30 for eighteen days. I am surprised. It looks impossible. I tell Osho, “It won’t work. We have a time card punching system in the office. Only one minute late is allowed.” Listening to this, Osho again repeats the same message and asks me to do what Hi is saying.

I go to the office, working out how to put it to my boss. I know him as a very strict man of discipline in the office. My mind says, “He will think that I have lost my sanity, asking for such a concession.”

Somehow, I gather courage and go to see him. He greets me with a smile on his face, which is very unusual, and asks me what he can do for me. Hesitantly, I ask him if I can come one hour late in the morning and work one hour more in the evening for a few days. To my great astonishment, he says he has seen the advertisement in the paper and knows that Osho speaking from 8:30 to 10:00 every morning for eighteen days. Then he asks me, “How will you manage to reach by 10:00 in the office?” I tell him, “I will leave the discourse a little early and will manage to reach by taxi.”

He laughs and says, “There is no need to leave the discourse early. You can come by 10:30 and don’t punch your time card. I will take care of it and don’t sit late also.”

I can’t believe my ears! What a miracle! I am sure that Osho has done some telepathy with this man which I can’t conceive.

When I tell Osho about this, he laughs and does not comment on it. I think He is not in favor of making any gossip about His miraculous powers.

Osho Stories ~ Trust

Osho Stories ~ Trust

"A man just got married and was returning home with his wife. They were crossing a lake in a boat when suddenly a great storm arose. The man was a warrior, but the woman became very much afraid because it seemed almost hopeless -- THE BOAT WAS SMALL AND THE STORM WAS REALLY HUGE, AND ANY MOMENT THEY WERE GOING TO BE DROWNED. But the man sat silently, calm and quiet, as if nothing was happening.

The woman was trembling and she said, "Are you not afraid? This may be our last moment of life! IT DOESN'T SEEM THAT WE WILL BE ABLE TO REACH THE OTHER SHORE. Only some miracle can save us, otherwise death is certain. Are you not afraid? Are you mad or something? Are you a stone or something?"

THE MAN LAUGHED AND TOOK THE SWORD OUT OF ITS SHEATH. The woman was even more puzzled -- what he is doing? Then he brought the naked sword close to the woman's neck -- so close that just a small gap was there, it was almost touching her neck.

He said, "ARE YOU AFRAID?"

She started to giggle and laugh and said, "WHY SHOULD I BE AFRAID? If the sword is in your hands, why should I be afraid? I know you love me."

He put the sword back and said, "This is my answer. I know God loves me, and the sword is in His hands, and the storm is in His hands -- so WHATSOEVER IS GOING TO HAPPEN IS GOING TO BE GOOD. If we survive, good; if we don't survive, good -- because EVERYTHING IS IN HIS HANDS, AND HE CANNOT DO ANYTHING WRONG."

This is the trust one needs to imbibe. SUCH TREMENDOUS TRUST IS CAPABLE OF TRANSFORMING YOUR WHOLE LIFE! And ONLY such tremendous trust is capable of transforming your life -- less than that won't do."

~ Osho

Who is Osho ???

 
Osho was born in Kuchwada, Madhya Pradesh, India, on December 11, 1931. Rebellious and independent from the very childhood, he insisted on experiencing the truth for himself rather than acquiring borrowed knowledge from others’ belief systems.
He attained Enlightenment at the age of twenty one and went on to complete his education. He taught philosophy at the University of Jabalpur for many years. Meanwhile, he would meet people, address large gatherings and give talks traveling all over India.
Osho revived all the ancient spiritual traditions like Vedanta, Sankhya, Yoga, Tantra, Sufi, Hasid, Tao, Baul and Zen. Not only he revived all these traditions and spoke on great saints and masters like Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, Mahaveera, Shiva he developed his unique dynamic meditation techniques that help the modern man unburden his anxieties, stress through a deep cleansing process in order to achieve a relaxed state of meditation and ultimately – Enlightenment.
Osho spoke on almost every aspect of life not through an intellectual understanding but based on his own existential experience distilling the essence of what is significant to the spiritual growth of modern man. His talks are transcribed and published in over 600 volumes and translated into many languages. The meditation centers owing allegiance to him can be found all over the world.
In early 1970′s a commune started to emerge around him in Pune where many seekers came from around the world to meditate. This beautiful Buddhafield became the spiritual capital of the world. Osho traveled to USA and many other countries finally arriving in Pune commune in 1987 where he left his body on January 19, 1990. The transcription on His Samadhi says:

Osho
Never Born – Never Died
Only visited this planet earth between
December 11, 1931 – January 19, 1990

• “Freedom” means freedom from the mind. Then you are simply in a silence, and in that silence you melt, you merge with the whole. And to melt and merge with the whole is to be holy. Not by fasting, not by torturing, but by becoming one with the whole, one becomes holy.
• Your freedom is a supreme value. Nothing is higher than that. But your freedom is possible only if you are not encaged in your habits, unconscious patterns of living. Change your gestalt from unconsciousness to consciousness

Life is a celebration, not competition ~OSHO~

Don’t invest in misery, invest in celebration”. Man is born with the capacity to celebrate but is he celebrating? Man is missing something terribly; something has gone really wrong; man has moved astray. Even birds are far more in tune with god than man. Even animals, trees and rocks, are more in harmony with existence than man. Celebration is missing, the quality in laughter is missing and even if people celebrate it is false.

Because of a thousand and one barriers created by society and the priests and a thousand reasons not to celebrate and live in misery but none towards making each moment a celebration. Life should be a sweet song but man has made it very bitter, very ugly. It has lost all the qualities of music, rhythm, harmony. It has become an ugly struggle to survive, and survival to no purpose at all, just an ugly struggle which leads nowhere, a cut-throat competition, absolutely unnecessary.

Life is meant to be a celebration, not a competition. Osho says there is no need to go on postponing celebration. “Nothing else is needed. To celebrate, life is needed and life you have. To celebrate, being is needed and being you have. To celebrate, trees and birds and stars are needed, and they are there. What else do you need?”.

Man has that innate capacity to just be a festival from the cradle to the grave, a pure celebration. Very few people have achieved it, but everybody can achieve it. It needs just a little understanding, a little search into one's own misery, a little investigation into the causes of why one goes on missing, just a little effort, just a little intelligence, and one can change the whole gestalt. One can simply get out of all kinds of miseries into a totally different world of bliss and benediction.

“It is really a question of our attitude towards what we do. And with the change of attitude, with work turning into a celebration, the whole milieu of life changes.”
OSHO

Osho – Bliss and awareness are two sides of the same coin

Osho – Bliss and awareness are two sides of the same coin: become blissful and you will be aware, or become aware and you will be blissful. One can do both simultaneously — and that’s the best course because then things happen in a faster way. Then it is not such a long and gradual process; both together can make an opportunity even for sudden enlightenment.
So use them both together, be blissful and be aware. They will enhance each other, they will support each other. They are not things which have to be developed separately, although that’s what has been done in the past. A few people have tried to be blissful — in the East they were known as bhaktas, devotees; and a few people have tried to be aware — they were called gyanis, the knowers.
In India there have been two basic trends; one is of blissfulness, prayer, love, devotion, surrender, the other is of awareness, meditation, watchfulness’, witnessing. Because they both worked separately it took very long. In fact it took so long that India had to think in terms of there being many lives. India is the only country which has thought in terms of there being many lives. Christianity, Judaism, Islam — they think of only one life; they have not really pondered over the matter. One life is not enough, one life is too small to grow in. There are thousand and one things to be done and the mundane takes so much that nothing is left for the sacred.
The Indian seers have been watching this, that this small life is not enough to know god, hence slowly slowly they started exploring ‘Is there any possibility of there being more lives?’ Then they found that there is a possibility; we have been before, we will be afterwards — there are many lives. But the triggering point was that they were all working either on awareness or on blissfulness — and then it takes very long. They developed the whole science of yoga so that you can live long even in this life because the work has to be completed. They started thinking of how to prolong life through physical exercises, through chemicals, through breathing exercises, they have tried many things and certainly they have found ways to prolong life. But the whole point is that if those two things can be put together there is no need to go into the tortures called yoga. You need not bother about the length of life.
These two things together can become a sudden enlightenment because they support each other, enhance each other, enrich each other. So remember it: on one hand be more blissful, cheerful, take life joyously, and on the other hand become more alert and watchful of everything — you are doing, thinking, feeling. Be aware even of your cheerfulness and be cheerful even about your awareness.
Source – Osho Book “Going All The Way”

Osho – Misery is symbolic of Unawareness; bliss is symbolic of Awareness

Osho – The devotee — the real follower — is constantly watching what he is doing, how he is doing, why he is doing. Even in small matters he de-automatizes himself. Walking, he does not just walk; he walks with meditative awareness. He knows that he is walking. Eating, he knows he is eating. You eat and you do a thousand and one other things. You go on swallowing food, you go on throwing food in, you go on stuffing yourself… and the mind goes on planning, goes on remembering, desiring, projecting.
You are not there in the act; you are either in the past or in the future. And the present is the only time, only the present is real. Past is unreal, future is unreal; both are unreal — and you are always living in the unreal. This is sleep: you go on doing things…. You yourself sometimes say, “I did it in spite of myself.” What do you mean when you say “in spite of myself”? It simply means that you were not conscious and you did it — as if you are just an automaton, a robot!
A very fat lady boarded a crowded bus and managed to wedge herself in. She had a long way to go and feeling very uncomfortable reached down and unzipped the zipper in the back of her skirt. A few minutes later, feeling the draft, she reached back and zipped it up again. Feeling more and more uncomfortable, she reached back and unzipped the zipper, but in a few minutes she reached back and zipped herself up again.
This went on for nearly twenty minutes until finally the man standing behind her leaned over and said, “Listen, lady. I don’t know what’s on your mind, but in the last half hour you have unzipped my fly at least ten times!”
People are not conscious of what they are doing! They just go on doing things, half asleep, half awake, in a kind of alcoholic state.
The pretty young thing came slamming into her apartment after a blind date and announced to her roommate, “Boy, what a character! I had to slap his face three times this evening!”
The roommate inquired eagerly, “What did he do?”
“Nothing!” muttered the girl. “I slapped him to see if he was awake!”
People only appear to be awake; they are not. People only appear to be alive; they are not. People only appear to be; they are not — because if they are really there, then there is no difference between them and the buddha. Then they will know all the secrets of life, then they will know the significance of life. Then their life will be a celebration, a constant celebration, a joy, a song, a dance. But people are living in hell, in misery. Misery is symbolic of unawareness; bliss is symbolic of awareness.

Osho – Consciousness and Bliss are two aspects of one phenomenon

Osho – Consciousness and bliss are two aspects of one phenomenon: from one side it is consciousness, from the other side it is bliss. And exactly in the same way unconsciousness and misery are related, they are aspects of one phenomenon – from one side unconsciousness, from another side, misery.

It is impossible to be conscious and miserable, just as it is impossible to be unconscious and blissful. Seek one and the other follows; there is no need to seek both. And to you my suggestion is: seek consciousness, because that will be easier for you. Your involvement is with intelligence. Your involvement is not with feeling; your involvement is with thinking. You think too much.

The thinking person can easily become conscious; the feeling person can easily become blissful.
So for the feeling person the journey starts by being blissful; for the thinking type the journey starts by being conscious. So transform your energy that is involved in thinking into consciousness. Rather than becoming identified with the thoughts that come to you, watch them; don’t become identified. Just see them as a procession… separate from you.

They are separate. You are always a witness. Don’t get lost in the crowd of the thoughts. Remain aloof, standing by the side of the road, let the traffic pass, and slowly slowly become more and more detached, distant. The more detached you are, the more distant you are. Soon you will see that thoughts are still coming but the old rush is no more there.

Thoughts are still coming but their grip over you is lessening. They are still coming but they look pale, ill, not so healthy and strong as they used to be, because their health depends on your identification with them. When you become identified with thought, the thought becomes very strong. It is your energy that the thought lives on. A thought is a parasite: it exploits you, can possess your whole being.

The more detached, the more observing you are, the more you will see that thoughts are far away, distant noises. Slowly slowly they lose all meaning, and the day they lose all meaning they disappear. When you don’t give them any importance they disappear. They come only because they are welcomed guests. When they become unwelcome, ignored, they stop coming. And the day that the no-thought moves in the mind, the whole energy is available to be conscious; and then consciousness rises in a vertical direction.

Thoughts move horizontally: one thought followed by another, followed by another. They move
horizontally. Consciousness moves vertically: it goes higher and higher and higher. Thoughts move like a river… consciousness rises like a tree… but it can rise only if the energy is no more involved in thoughts.

So this is your work: you have to become more alert, conscious, aware of your thinking process,
detached and distant. And as you become distant you will start feeling a great blissfulness arising in you for no reason at all. Just in the same gap that was occupied by thoughts, bliss arises. In the same emptiness in which thoughts were continuously gathering and crowding, bliss arises.

Nature abhors vacuum – it is true for the outer nature, it is also true for the inner nature. When you create an emptiness in your mind, immediately something that has always been there inside you, waiting for some space to spread, starts spreading. And that phenomenon is bliss.

Source : from Osho Book “Hallelujah!”

Osho on Truth – It is a quantum leap, a jump from mind to no-mind

Osho – Man can come to truth only through meditation. Truth is not something that mind can know. Mind can theorise about it, but ‘about’ means around — and mind goes about and about, around and around. It moves in a circle, it never reaches the centre. Its very nature is not to reach to the centre, it exists for the circumference.
Mind is needed only to relate with others. It is a method of communication. Truth is your very being. It is not a question of relating to it. It happens only when you fall into deep silence, when you forget the whole world, when the other is completely forgotten as if the other does not exist at all. In those moments of solitude and aloneness truth is revealed. It is not a conclusion of the mind but a revelation of no-mind.
Meditation simply means turning in. Mind is always turning out, mind is basically extroversion. It has its utility — I am not against utilising it, but I am certainly against being utilised by it. Use it as a servant, use it as a beautiful mechanism, but don’t let it become your master. It is a good slave, take every care of it, but don’t allow it to enslave you.
Remember that the real master is not on the circumference, the real master is at the centre. And at the centre there is only consciousness: no thoughts, no desires, no imagination. All the faculties of the mind stop functioning. You are simply alert, aware, watchful, you simply are. In that state you are truth. That is the meaning of Verity — it is one of the most beautiful names: the state of being true.
And once it is experienced it starts changing your whole life style. If you know your truth you cannot be untrue in any way. It becomes impossible. Even to be untrue to others becomes impossible. The joy of being truthful is such that who would like to fall into the darkness of being untrue? The simplicity of being truthful is such that who would like to create unnecessary complexities, complications, by being untruthful?
One lie brings in its wake a thousand and one other lies, because you have to defend it, you have to support it — and it cannot be defended by truth, it can only be defended by other lies. And every other lie will need in its own turn more lies. A single lie, and your whole life starts becoming untruthful, inauthentic.
Truth needs no defence. It is very simple, it is simply so. And the man who lives in truth need not bother what he has said, what he has done. We need not go on remembering all that he has said and all that he has done. The lying person has to be continuously calculating, watching. he may say something; which goes against something else which he said before, he may do something, that may undo something else. His life becomes more and more complicated, more and more entangled. It becomes a riddle, it becomes a problem; he becomes a problem to himself and to others. And a problematic life cannot know what bliss is.
Bliss is known only by the simple, the innocent. But the way to find it is to put the mind aside and to go in a state of no-mind. Slowly slowly a few glimpses will arise, and then those gaps start becoming bigger, then those beautiful intervals become vaster. And then sooner or later such a state arises that even if you are in the marketplace doing the ordinary things of life which are needed, your silence continues like an undercurrent; it goes on flowing. You can hear its melody, you can feel its beauty, you can taste its sweetness.
Truth brings many gifts, but one has to open the door of meditation. Nobody can give you the truth; truth is already given to you from god himself. It is not something that has to be found anywhere else; it is already the case, it is your suchness, verity! You just have to take a few steps inwards… Sannyas simply means this: a decision to find one’s truth, a commitment that ‘From this moment my life will be devoted to finding mY truth.’
And remember: the truth of Buddha, the truth of Jesus or the truth of Zarathustra cannot be your truth. If you repeat Jesus or Buddha you will be living in the mind. And when you put the mind aside, naturally you put your Christianity, your Hinduism, your Mohammedanism aside because they are all part of the mind. The moment you put the mind aside you have put the whole of history aside, the whole world aside. Then you are moving into your own being with no history, no past, with no society, as if you are alone on the earth, as if you are the first being on the earth, in existence.
Once this decision becomes a commitment… That’s why I insist on sannyas, otherwise people can simply listen to me and they can meditate and they can go on living ordinarily — there is no need to become sannyasins. And many people think ‘What is the need of becoming a sannyasin? We can meditate, we can listen, we can try to understand what is happening, we can go through therapy groups…’
But there is a very fundamental reason; the reason is: it is a deliberate commitment, a conscious decision, so from this moment it becomes your focus of life. You have to put all that is unessential aside, and you have to put more and more energy into the inward journey. The truth is not very far. It needs only one step, hence it is better not to call it a step: it is a quantum leap, a jump from mind to no-mind.
Source – Osho Book “The Golden Wind”

Osho – A miserable person cannot find truth. He can theorise about truth

Osho – Bliss is equivalent to god. ‘God’ is a beautiful word but it has become ugly because of wrong associations. It has fallen into wrong company. The priests have exploited it so much that I appreciate very much Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that god is dead and man is free. In fact he is saying the god of the priests is dead because he only knew about the god of the priests. He had no idea about the god of the buddhas because the god of the Buddhas has nothing to do with any super-human person; it is a state of bliss. One need not believe in god at all.
Buddha himself never believed in any god, he was as atheistic as one can be, and yet there has never been such a holy man on earth as he was: so godless and so godlike. His godlikeness is superb, unique. Nobody even comes close to him.
Jesus is beautiful, Zarathustra is beautiful, Mahavira is beautiful, Lao Tzu is beautiful, Moses is beautiful, but Buddha has some tremendous beauty around him, some inexplicable grace, something very much of the beyond. And it became possible only because he never believed in the stupid idea of god. He went directly into the search, into the enquiry of the existence of bliss. And because he became blissful he became divine. He knew that god is, not as a person but as a quality.
It is as when the sun rises — the same quality. It is as when the cuckoo starts calling from the distance — the same quality. It is there in a rose flower. It is in the eyes of two lovers. It is there when a dancer loses himself in the dance, when the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. Once you have experienced it you will find it everywhere. You will stumble upon god from all sides. Wherever you will go you will encounter him. It is impossible then to avoid him.
Since I have known him I have not been able to avoid him for a single moment. Even if you are alone in your room he is inside you. He does not leave you alone: even if you go to the bathroom he is there’ Even if you are asleep in your bed he is sleeping with you. Once you have known, he is always there, in your very breathing, in your very heartbeat. But seek him through bliss, otherwise there is a danger of becoming just a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. And I want my sannyasins to be aware of all those pitfalls.
There is only one way to find truth and that is through bliss. A miserable person cannot find truth. He can theorise about truth, he can think about truth, he may create great systems of philosopher. But all those are just sandcastles or palaces made of playing cards: just a small breeze and the whole palace collapses. All great systems of philosophy have no foundations because the person who created them had no experience of truth. Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Vico, Feverbalh, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Bertrand Russell — all these people have created beautiful theories, but they are all words; they are not sustained by any experience..
There have existed two rivers of consciousness: One is of the philosophers Aristotle in the West is the father of that, the originator. The other is of the mystics. That is a totally different kind of river. It has nothing to do with philosophising, it is rooted in existential experience. And it has almost always happened that whenever there was a great mystic his followers always became divided between these currents. The real ones, those who have understood the master, those who have really loved the master, became mystics. And those who have understood only the words of the master have become very knowledgeable; they became the philosophers.
Socrates was a mystic. Plato was his disciple but he lost track; he became a philosopher. Aristotle was Plato’s disciple. When Buddha died thirty-six systems of philosophy were born amongst his followers — thirty-six! Almost all kinds of possibilities are exhausted by those thirty-six systems. In fact there cannot be more than thirty-six systems. That is all the possible combinations, the whole world of philosophy exploded.
And the real people… Mahakashyapa, one of Buddha’s most authentic disciples, remained silent, he didn’t say anything. He started a totally different tradition, the tradition of the mystics. He transmitted his experience not through words, not through scriptures, but through a totally different kind of communion: the communion of the master and the disciple.
It is through Mahakashyapa that the tradition of Zen was born. He was the first, and very great mystics followed. But it is a totally different world: there is no argument about god, no argument about truth, no argument at all. mere, argumentation is not the way but meditation, not mind but meditation. These people became more and more silent. And as you become silent your inner source of blissfulness start exploding. It is the words and theories and the philosophies which function like rocks and don’t allow your springs of bliss to flow.
So from this very first moment remember it, that my way is the way of a mystic, not of a philosopher. I believe in bliss, not in theories about bliss. And I want you to taste it, not just to think about it. It is pointless to go on thinking about food — it won’t nourish you. It is stupid to go on thinking about water. Why? — when the river is flowing? You can drink and you can quench your thirst and you can swim in the river and you can become the river and go to the sea.
There are foolish people who are standing or sitting on the bank and thinking about water, theorising about water, finding what water consists of and dying of thirst’ So don’t be a thinker, don’t be a philosopher, be a mystic. My sannyasins have to be mystics, existential experiencers. It is a part of realisation.
Source – Osho Book “The Golden Wind”