Osho – Eastern mystics have defined god as satyam, shivam, sunderam

Osho – The Eastern mystics have defined god as satyam, shivam, sunderam. Satyam means the truth, shivam means the good, sunderam means the beautiful. The Christian trinity looks very poor — this is the true trinity. These are the three approaches towards god, three doors to enter into the ultimate.
Either you enter as a seeker of truth… That is the approach of the philosopher. And by philosophy I do not mean that which is taught in the universities. That is not philosophy at all. By philosophy I mean the original meaning of philosophy: love of wisdom. Lovers of wisdom enter from the door of truth. It is a different path but they reach the same peak, the peak is the same.
And the person who enters through the door called good is the person who tries to live a life of simplicity, innocence, purity — the virtuous one. And by the virtuous I don’t mean the moralist. The moralist is an egoist. He is cunning, calculative. His morality is not much, his morality is just a policy; hence he says ‘Honesty is the best policy.’ It is politics. He is playing a game. He is trying to deceive even god. He is only pretending to be good, he is not good.
To be virtuous is totally different. It is not a question of having a good character. It is a question of having more consciousness in your being, not conscience but consciousness. Conscience makes character, consciousness creates virtue. When you are alert, more alert than people ordinarily are, you have the capacity to see what is right and what is wrong. And each moment you decide; you don’t carry ready-made answers.
The man of so-called character lives out of ready-made answers; hence he is never in tune with life, never in step with life. His answers are old and life always raises new questions. But the virtuous man is spontaneous. He enters from the door of good.
And the poet and the painter and the sculptor and all those who love beauty enter from the third door. If one can enter from the third door, my preference is for the third. If it si impossible then my next preference is fo the second door, the door of spontaneous virtue. If that too is difficult, then only should one choose the path of wisdom, because that is the hardest path, the most arduous. And there is no need to be a martyr unnecessarily. When one can go easily, when one can go dancing and singing, why carry a cross?
Let that be your path — creativity. Create something beautiful, out of your being create something beautiful. And whatsoever you do be creative — that will be your religion, that will be your meditation. In the past religion has not been creative. That’s why religion has existed for thousands of years but has failed, utterly failed. It has not been able to transform human consciousness, not at all. Just a Jesus, a Buddha, a Lao Tzu, here and there — this is not success. Out of millions of people one person, Jesus… it does not prove anything. The exception simply proves the rule. And what did we do to these people? — we poisoned them, we killed them, we crucified them. We are closer to Judas than to Jesus. The whole humanity is closer to Judas than to Jesus. If Jesus comes back we will kill him again.
Religion has failed for the simple reason that it was uncreative. Anything uncreative cannot succeed. God is a creator. The only way to succeed in god’s existence — and there is no other existence — is to be creative. Create beauty, appreciate beauty, love beauty. Let beauty be your god. Worship beauty.
Source – Osho Book “Fingers Pointing to the Moon”

Osho on Crazy Ideas – God is crazy, Truth is crazy

Question : Beloved Master, Your ideas seem to be crazy!
Osho : Thank you for the compliment. They don’t SEEM to be crazy, they ARE. But that is the only way God expresses himself. God’s ways are crazy. If the word `crazy’ does not look proper, you can say, “God’s ways are miraculous” — but it means the same. Translated rightly, miraculous means crazy. God is not a logician — he may be a singer, a poet. His ways are crazy. They are not like superhighways, they are more like footpaths in a forest — zigzag. On the footpaths you can go astray very easily: freedom is intact. On a superhighway you cannot go astray: freedom is not allowed — those milestones everywhere, they will hinder you.
God is crazy, truth is crazy, because truth is so vast, it cannot be reduced into a syllogism. You can sing about it, but you cannot argue about it — the moment you argue about it, you have falsified it. You can dance it, but you cannot make a dogma out of it. Yes, you are right. My ideas ARE crazy, because they are not MY ideas. I simply allow myself to be a hollow bamboo and whatsoever song God wants to sing on it, I allow him total freedom. I don’t stand in judgment. I don’t say: Don’t sing this sing, this will look crazy. I say: Okay, if you want to sing it, sing it. If it is crazy, it s crazy.
I have heard a true story, as told by Freeman Dyron… A few months ago, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli believed that they had made an essential step forward in the direction of a theory of elementary particles.
Both the names are world-famous: Heisenberg and Pauli — two of the greatest scientists of any time, and they were thinking that they had come across the basic theory to explain the structure of the elements.
Pauli happened to be passing through New York, and he was prevailed upon to give a lecture explaining the new ideas to an audience which included Niels Bohr — another famous name, another great name in science.
Pauli spoke for an hour, and then there was a general discussion during which he was criticized rather sharply by the younger generation of scientists. Finally, Niels Bohr was called on to make a speech summing up the argument. “We are all agreed,” he said, “that your theory is crazy, Pauli. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”
And that’s how things really are. A very sane theory cannot be right, because a sane theory will be human. It will be very limited. Only a crazy theory has any possibility of being right, because crazy means that which transcends human limitations. Crazy means that which cannot be reduced to human logic, crazy means that which is beyond your understanding. Yes, right is Niels Bohr. Let me repeat: “We are all agreed, Pauli,” he said, “that your theory is crazy.” This much agreement is there. “The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”
If you look into the modern world of physics, you will be surprised. Those old days of clear-cut theories are all gone; the days of Darwin, Newton, Edison, are gone. Truth has erupted, exploded — in Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, Niels Bohr, Planck — and physics looks more and more like metaphysics; more and more like poetry and less and less like prose. The deeper scientists have penetrated into the world of physics, the more they are surprised to find that our logic is just irrelevant. Reality is more than our logic. It’s FAR more than our logic. Our logic is just a small piece of ground that we have cleared and cleaned, and reality is this great jungle of infinity.
Yes, you are right: my ideas ARE crazy because they are not MY ideas. If they were mine then there was a possibility I would have made them logical — it is not very difficult. I can deny those parts which look illogical, and insist on the logical. I can remain consistent; I can make a very clean-cut philosophy.
That is not difficult — in fact, that will be very easy. But I am not interested in consistency. I am not interested at all in logic, I am interested in truth. And if truth is crazy, I am crazy. If truth is mad, I am mad. And let that point be remembered by you all, because my whole effort here is to relax you so you can also become a little crazy; to help you relax, to help you loose the grip of the mind so the no-mind can penetrate in you; to put the human aside so the divine can have a chance in your being.
Don’t cling to the clear-cut. Truth is not so clear-cut, and cannot be. Truth is so vast, it contains contradictions. It is crazy.
It is said that Aristotle used to say that God is a mathematician. I cannot conceive how God can be a mathematician. On the door of his academy it was written: “Those who don’t know mathematics should not enter here, should not dare to enter here.” I cannot conceive what mathematics has to do with God, what mathematics has to do with reality. If I have to put a sign on Rajneesh Ashram’s door, then I will put: “Those who are not crazy enough should not enter here.”
God is mad. If you are ready to be a little mad, only then is there any possibility of any contact between you and the infinite. It has to be so. When the whole ocean drops into a drop, the drop is going to get crazy. When the infinite descends into the finite, how can the finite remain sane? It has to go mad. The old mystics have always called it “the divine madness.”
All meditation is an approach towards divine madness. Stake all human sanity. It is better to be mad in a divine way than to be sane in a human way. I am crazy.
Source – Osho Book “The Divine Melody”

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”

Osho – Don’t think of God as truth, rather, think of God as beauty

Osho – Don’t think of God as truth, rather, think of God as beauty. Religion would have been totally different if God were thought of as beauty rather than as truth. I am not saying that He is not true – He is, but it makes a lot of difference for people in how they conceive of Him.
Because God has been conceived of as truth, people started thinking logically about Him. Truth creates logic in consciousness, it stirs logic. Truth seems like the conclusion of a syllogism. People started arguing about God, started proving, disproving. Because God was conceived of as truth, religion automatically became reduced to theology. Rather than becoming poetry, it became theology. Rather than becoming an aesthetic experience, it became logic-chopping.
Rather than enhancing the earth, making it more beautiful, it went against life. Logic is always against life; it is murderous because it depends on analysis; analysis kills. Because God was thought of as truth, religious people became thinkers, not creative artists. Just that simple phenom-enon dominated the whole past of ten thousand years.
Sufis say that God is beautiful, ’jamil.’ Think of Him as beauty, then it stirs creativity in you. Because beauty has to be created – in poetry, in sculpture, in painting; one has to give birth to it. If you think of God as beauty then you can do something about it. If God is truth then you can’t do anything about it, you have to discover it. Truth is there – you have just to uncover it.
But if God is beauty then you are not only to discover it, you have to create. Then the whole perspective changes and religion becomes life-affirmative. Then it enhances and affirms. It is not life-negative, it is not in the service of death. Then religion is not against love, because how can beauty be against love? Then religion is not against dance, it is not against celebration. How can beauty be against celebration? Then the earth is not a punishment but a holiday resort. We are here just to enjoy – it is a gift.