Osho – Whatever you live unconsciously becomes a hangover

Osho – The first thing to remember is how to drop thoughts and become thoughtless — thoughtless but alert, because in deep sleep also you become thoughtless, and that won’t do. It is good for the body, that is why after a deep sleep your body feels rejuvenated. But the mind remains tired even in the morning, because the mind continues its activity. The body relaxes, though it too cannot relax totally because of the mind; but still, it relaxes. So in the morning the body is okay, at least workably okay — but the mind feels tired, even in the morning. You go to bed tired, you get up in the morning more tired because the mind was continuously working, dreaming, thinking, planning, desiring; the mind was continuously working.
In deep sleep for a few moments when you are absolutely unconscious you become one. This same oneness is needed with a conscious and alert mind. As you are in deep sleep — no thought, no distinction of good and bad, heaven and hell, God and the devil, no distinction of any sort, you simply ARE, but unconscious — this has to be attained while you are alert and conscious. Samadhi, the final, the ultimate, the utter meditation, is nothing but deep sleep with full consciousness. Deep sleep you attain, so the only thing to be attained is more and more consciousness. If you can add more consciousness to your deep sleep you will become enlightened. The mountain is transcended and the path opens — one thing.
Second thing: you carry the past within you — that creates multiplicity. You were a child, the child is still hidden in you, and sometimes you can still feel the child kicking; in certain moments you regress and become the child again. You were once young, now you are old; that young man is hidden there, and sometimes even an old man starts being as foolish as a young man.
You carry the whole past, every moment of it, and you have been many things! From the womb up to now you have been millions of persons, and they are all carried within you, layer by layer. You have grown, but the past has not disappeared; it may be hidden, but it is there — and it is not only in the mind, it is even in the body. If, when you were a small child and you were angry and someone said, ‘Stop! Don’t be angry,’ and you stopped, that anger is still being carried by your hand. It has to be so because energy is indestructible, and unless you relax that hand it will persist, unless you do something consciously to complete the circle of that energy which became anger in a certain moment fifty years back or sixty years back, you will carry it within you, and it will color all your actions.
You can touch somebody, but the touch won’t be pure: the whole past is carried by the hand; all repressed anger, all repressed hatred is there. Even if in love you touch a person your touch is not pure, love cannot be — because where will that anger go which is carried by the hand?
Wilhelm Reich worked very much on this somatic repression. The body carries the past, the mind carries the past; because of this loaded state you cannot be here and now. You have to come to terms with your past. So meditation is not only a question of doing something here and now; before that is possible you have to come to terms with your past — you have to dissolve all hangovers, and there are millions of them.
Even when one becomes old he is also a child, a young man, and all that he has ever been is there, because you don’t know how to die every moment. That is the whole art of life — to die moment to moment so that there is no hangover. A relationship has finished — you don’t carry it, you simply die to it! What can you do? Something was happening and now it is not happening. You accept it and you die to it — you simply DROP IT with full awareness, and then you are renewed in a new moment. Now you are not carrying the past.
You are a child no more, but watch yourself and you will feel the child is there — and that child creates trouble! If you were really a child there would be no trouble, but you are young or old….
I have heard: Mulla Nasruddin was hospitalized. He was eighty — and then came his birthday, and he was waiting for his three sons to bring him some present. They came of course, but they had not brought anything — because he was eighty years old! A child feels happy with a present, but an old man? Eighty years old! His eldest son was sixty. So they didn’t think about it at all, but when they came and Mulla looked and they were empty-handed, he felt angry, frustrated, and he said, ‘What! Have you forgotten your old father, your poor old father’s birthday? It is my birthday!’
The child… at that moment you could have looked into his eyes, and this eighty-year-old man was not there, just a child waiting for some toys.
One son said, ‘Forgive us, we forgot completely.’
Mulla Nasruddin said, ‘I reckon I will forgive you, because it seems this forgetfulness runs in our family. Really, I forgot to marry your mother.’ He was really angry.
So they all three shrieked in unison, and they said, ‘What! Do you mean we are…?’
He said, ‘Yes! — and damned cheap ones at that!’
The child continues somewhere in you: when you weep you can find him, when you laugh you can find him, when somebody gives you a present you can find him, when somebody forgets to, you can find him, when somebody appreciates you, you can find him; when somebody condemns you, you can find him — it is very difficult to be really mature. One can never be mature unless the child simply dies within you, is no longer a part of you — otherwise it will go on influencing your actions, your relationships.
And this is not only true for the child, every moment of the past is there and influencing your present — your present is so loaded. And millions of voices from the body and the mind go on manipulating you; how can you reach the path? You are a mountain. This mountain has to be dissolved. What to do? It can be dissolved consciously — one thing is to live your past again, consciously.
This is the mechanism of consciousness: whenever you live something consciously it never becomes a loaded thing on you; try to understand this. It never becomes a burden on you if you live it consciously. If you go to the market to purchase something and you move consciously, walk consciously, purchase the thing consciously, with full remembrance, mindfully come back home, this will never be a part of your memory. I don’t mean that you will forget it — it will not be a load. If you want to remember it, you can remember it, but it will not be constantly forcing your attention towards it, it will not be a loaded thing.
Whatsoever you do consciously is lived through and is no longer a hangover. Whatever you live unconsciously becomes a hangover, because you never live it totally — something remains incomplete. When something is incomplete it has to be carried — it waits to be completed.
You were a child, and somebody had broken your toy, and you were crying; and your mother consoled you, diverted your mind somewhere — gave you some sweets, talked about something else, told you a story, diverted you — and you were going to cry and weep, and you forgot. That has remained incomplete; it is there, and any day whenever somebody snatches a toy from you — it may be any toy, it may be a girlfriend, and somebody snatches her — you start weeping and crying. And you can find the child there, incomplete. It may be a post: you are mayor of the town and somebody snatches the post, a toy, and you are crying and weeping again.
Find out… regress into the past, move through it again, because there is no other way now; the past is there no more, so if something has remained hanging the only way is to relive it in the mind, move backwards. Every night make it a point to go backwards for one hour, fully alert, as if you are living the whole thing again. Many things will bubble up, many things will call your attention — so don’t be in a hurry, and don’t pay half-attention to anything and then move again because that will again create incompleteness. Whatsoever comes, give total attention to it. Live it again. And when I say live it again I mean LIVE it again — not just remember, because when you remember a thing you are a detached observer; that won’t help. RELIVE IT!
You are a child again. Don’t look as if you are standing apart and looking at a child as his toy is being snatched. No! BE the child. Not outside the child, inside the child — be again the child. Relive the moment: somebody snatches the toy, somebody destroys it, and you start crying — and cry! Your mother is trying to console you — go through the whole thing again, but now don’t be diverted by anything. Let the whole process be completed. When it is completed, suddenly you will feel your heart is less heavy; something has dropped.
You wanted to say something to your father; now he is dead, now there is no way to tell him. Or you wanted to ask his forgiveness for a certain thing you did which he didn’t like, but your ego came in and you couldn’t ask his forgiveness; now he is dead, now nothing can be done. What to do? — and it is THERE! It will go on and on and destroy all your relationships.
I am very much aware of that because to be a master is to be in a certain sense a father — it is to be many things but very importantly it is in a certain sense to be a father. When people come to me, if they are loaded with their relationship with their father, then it becomes very difficult to be related to me because I always feel their father comes in. If they have hated their father they will hate me, if they wanted to fight with their father, they will fight, if they love their father they will love me, if they respected their father they will respect me, if they respected him just superficially and deep down they had a disrespect, it will be the same with me — and the whole thing starts working.
If you are conscious, you can watch. Go back. Now your father is no more but for the eyes of the memory he is still there. Close your eyes; again be the child who has committed something, done something against the father, wants to be forgiven but cannot gather courage — now you can gather courage! You can say whatsoever you wanted to say, you can touch his feet again, or you can be angry and hit him — but be finished! Let the whole process be completed. Remember one basic law: anything that is complete drops, because then there is no meaning in carrying it; anything that is incomplete clings, it waits for its completion.
And this existence is really always after completion. The whole existence has a basic tendency to complete everything. It does not like incomplete things — they hang, they wait; and there is no hurry for existence — they can wait for millions of years.
Move backwards. Every night for one hour before you go to sleep, move into the past, relive. Many memories by and by will be unearthed. With many you will be surprised that you were not aware that these things are there — and with such vitality and freshness, as if they had just happened! You will be again a child, again a young man, a lover, many things will come. Move slowly, so everything is completed. Your mountain will become smaller and smaller — the LOAD is the mountain. And the smaller it becomes, the freer you will feel. A certain quality of freedom will come to you, and a freshness, and inside you will feel you have touched a source of life.
You will be always vital — even others will feel that when you walk your step has changed, it has a quality of dance; when you touch, your touch has changed — it is not a dead hand, it has become alive again. Now life is flowing because the blocks have disappeared; now there is no anger in the hand, love can flow easily, unpoisoned, in its purity. You will become more sensitive, vulnerable, open.
If you have come to terms with the past suddenly you will be here and now in the present, because then there is no need to move again and again. Go on moving every night. By and by memories will come up before your eyes and they will be completed. Relive them; completed, suddenly you will feel they drop. Now there is no more to be done, the thing is finished. Less and less memories will come as the time moves. There will be gaps — you would like to live, nothing is coming — and those gaps are beautiful. Then a day will come when you will not be able to move backwards because everything is complete. When you cannot move backwards, only then do you move forwards.
There is no other way. And to move forwards is to reach the path: the whole consciousness moving ahead every moment into the unknown. But your legs are being pulled back continuously by the past, the past is heavy on you; how can you move into the future, and how can you be in the present? The mountain is really big, it is a Himalaya, uncharted, unmapped; nobody knows how to pass through it — and everybody is such a different Himalaya that you can never make a map, because it differs with everybody. You have your Himalayas to carry, others have their Himalayas to carry, and with these mountains, when you meet with people there is only clash and conflict.
The whole life becomes just a struggle, a violent struggle, and everywhere you can see and feel and hear the clash. Whenever somebody comes near, you are tense and the other is also tense — both are carrying their Himalayas of tension and sooner or later they will clash. You may call it love but those who know, they say it is a clash. Now there is going to be misery.
Be finished with the past. As you become more free from the past, the mountain starts disappearing. And then you will attain a unison: you will become, by and by, one.
Source – Osho Book “And the Flowers Showered”

Osho – Religion is living. Living totally, living intensely, without any purpose

Question – Bhagwan, what purpose does your philosophy or religion give for life — for the existence of anything at all?
Osho – First it is not right to make religion and philosophy synonymous. They are two totally different things. Philosophy is thinking about life, its purpose, its goal, but it is only thinking. Religion is living it, not thinking.
The difference is as great as: you are thinking about food, delicious food, and that you are eating it. Thinking cannot quench your hunger — it is only eating that is going to help. Philosophy is a futile exercise of the mind — it leads nowhere.
Secondly, the moment you divide philosophy and religion the question takes a different shape. Now it becomes: what is the purpose of your religion? The very idea of purpose is valid in a philosophical investigation. That idea does not belong to religion at all.
Religion is living. Living totally, living intensely, without any purpose because purpose is always in the future and living is always in the present. If you have a purpose to live your life is divided between present and future — you cannot be total. And without being total you cannot experience what life is.
The only way to be total is to forget all about purpose. It is a meaningless question. It leads only to a logical regress. If it is said that `A’ is the purpose of life then the question will remain `what is the purpose of A?’ The question is not dissolved. If `B’ is the purpose of `A’ then the question will simply shift from A to B.
Finally and ultimately, one has to understand that there is no purpose to life or to existence… and there is no need either.
It is perfectly beautiful to have no purpose and live totally, enjoy totally, relax in the moment totally. It will take you to the peaks of ecstasy — but that is not the purpose of life, it is just a byproduct of total living. It is a little bit difficult. It will lead — I repeat again — to ultimate ecstasy. But that is not the goal. If you make it a goal you will never reach it. It is not a purpose. If you make it a purpose then you are cut off from it forever because purpose and goal all exist in future and you have to live in the present.
And present and future never meet. So you have divided yourself into two halves which are not going to meet. So I will not say that ecstasy is the purpose or the goal. I will say, `when you live intensely, totally in the present, without any purpose and without any goal, ecstasy happens as a byproduct of total living.’
Source – Osho Book “Last Testament Vol 6″

Osho – You cling to life because your life is unfulfilled

Osho – if you want to abide always and always, you have not lived the moment. One who has lived his life truly, authentically, one who has enjoyed it, is always ready to die, is always ready to leave. One who has not enjoyed and celebrated, one who has not lived the moment, the life, is always afraid to leave because “the time has come to leave and I am yet unfulfilled.” The fear of death is not the fear of death, it is a fear of remaining unfulfilled. You are going to die, and nothing, nothing at all could you experience through life — no maturity, no growth, no flowering. Emptyhanded you came, emptyhanded you are going. This is the fear!
One who has lived is always ready to die. His readiness is not a forced attitude. His readiness is just like a flower. When the flower has flowered, has sent its perfume to the infinite corners of existence, enjoyed the moment, lived it, danced through the breeze, risen against the wind, looked at the sky, watched the sunrise, lived it, a fulfillment comes by the evening and the flower is ready to drop to the earth, to go back, to rest. And it is always beautiful — when you have lived, rest is beautiful. It is the thing! The flower simply drops to the earth and goes to sleep. There is no tension, no anguish, no cry, no effort to cling.
You cling to life because your life is unfulfilled. You have not risen against a strong wind. You have not known the morning, and the evening has come. You have never been young, and old age is knocking at the door. You never loved, and death is coming. This unfulfilled state and the coming of death creates the fear. Buddha says that if you have lived you will always be ready to die. And that readiness will not be something forced upon you. It will be the thing, it will be a natural thing! As you are born, you die. As you come, you go. This is the wheel of existence. You lived the being part, now you will live the nonbeing part. You existed, now you will not exist. You rose, you manifested, now you will move into the unmanifested. You were visible, embodied, now you will move without the body to the invisible. You had your day; now you will take rest in the night. What is wrong in it?
The search for the permanent shows that you remain unfulfilled. The search to have a permanent self is a clinging. You know that death is going to be there, so what to do? The body will disintegrate, disappear; now you have your hopes that some permanent self must be there which will go on and on and on. Remember: those who are afraid, they always believe in the eternal soul.
Look in this country: the whole country believes that the soul is eternal, but you cannot find a more cowardly country in the world. It is not accidental. Why are Indians so cowardly? In fact, if they know that the soul is never going to die they should be the bravest — because death doesn’t exist! They go on talking about the deathless, and if you watch their life they are more afraid of death than anybody else. Otherwise, how can you explain the one thousand years of slavery of this country? Very small races — England is no bigger than a small province of India. Three crore people only were able to dominate a country of fifty crore. It seems simply impossible! How did it happen? — because the country is cowardly. They cannot fight, they are afraid of death. They talk about the deathless — and this is not accidental, there is a reasoning behind it.
Whenever somebody talks too much about the deathless it means he is afraid of death, he is a coward. And India has not lived because of the priests. India has not lived life because of the priests. They have been teaching people to renounce, so everybody is ready, before he has lived, to renounce. Then the fear comes in. If you have lived, lived to your total capacity, to the optimum, the fear of death disappears. Only then does the fear of death disappear, never before it. If you renounce life, if you don’t love, if you don’t eat, if you don’t enjoy and dance; if you simply renounce and condemn and you say, “This is all materialistic. I am against it”… who is this “I” who says “I am against it”? This is the ego.
You cannot find greater egoists than so called spiritualists. They are always condemning the materialist. They are always saying: “What! You are wasting your life. Eat, drink, and be merry — this is your religion. You are a burden on the earth. You have to be thrown into hell.” Who is condemning? What is wrong in “Eat, drink, and be merry”? What is wrong in it? That is the first part of life. It should be so. You should eat, drink, and be merry.
You should celebrate. Only then, when you have celebrated to the optimum, are you ready to go, are you ready to leave and with no grudge, with no complaint. You lived the day, now the night has come. And when the day was so beautiful — you rose with the waves in the sky, and you did whatsoever the moment demanded — then the rest, then going back to the earth is beautiful.
India has been renouncing, and a religion that renounces is false. A religion that makes you capable of celebrating to the optimum is the true religion. And this is the beauty of it: if you live life, a renunciation comes automatically. It happens — that is the nature. If you eat well, satiety comes. If you drink well, the thirst disappears. If you lived well, the clinging to life disappears. It has to be so. This is the law, the logos. If you have not lived well, then you always remain clinging, then you always dream about how to live. And if you have renounced this life you have to project another life. You need a permanent self, otherwise what will you do? You missed this life, and there is no other life? You need a permanent self. You have to believe and console yourself: “Okay, the body dies but the self never dies.”
Source – Osho Book “The Hidden Harmony”

Osho – The workaholic is not total in his work. The workaholic is addicted to work

Question – Our Beloved Master, could you talk about the difference between a workaholic and someone who is total in their work?
Osho – Maneesha, the difference is very great. The workaholic is not total in his work. The workaholic is addicted to work, he cannot sit silently. He has to do something; whether it is needed or not, that is not the question.
Now in Japan they are trying more and more for robots to work in the factories, because the robot can work twenty-four hours a day, with no strikes, no trouble with the labor unions, not constantly asking for a raise in the wages, no holidays. Robots are not religious anyway! But the workers are absolutely against it — and the government is only asking them to take one day off in seven.
In Japan, even on Sunday people work — there is no holiday as such — and people are resisting the government, there is great turmoil. They are not ready to take one holiday per week. They will be paid for it, what is the problem? They are addicted. They say, “What will we do at home? No, we don’t want such trouble. At home there will be fighting with the wife, with the children — and we are addicted to work.
“We will open the bonnet of the car, although everything is alright, and we will destroy the car by trying to refine the engine. We will open the television set and destroy it. We have already done it! Sometimes when a national holiday comes, we have done it — destroyed our old grandfather clocks, and they were working perfectly well, but something had to be done!”
These are workaholics — addicted to work just as people are addicted to drugs. Work is their drug. It keeps them engaged. It keeps them away from their worries, it keeps them away from their tensions. It keeps them just like any drug: it drowns your worries, tensions, anxieties, sufferings, Christianity, God, sin, hell — everything is drowned. A miserable person suddenly starts laughing, enjoying.
You just go in a pub and see. A pub is a far more joyous place than a church. Everybody is laughing, enjoying, fighting, punching each other’s noses, and when they get back home … it is late in the night, they are staggering, falling on the road.
One man came home and he was trembling so much, so drunk he could not manage to open the lock, because the key and the lock … The key was in one hand, the lock was in the other hand, and there was no meeting, no dialogue!
Finally, the policeman on the street saw the poor fellow, so he came. He said, “Can I help you?”
The drunk said, “Yes, just hold the house steady. There seems to be such a great earthquake!”
They have forgotten everything … the world and its troubles and the third world war. But you can use anything as a drug — just become addicted.
A few people are just chewing gum. You take their gum and see how miserable they become! Immediately they start thinking, “Life is useless. There is no meaning in life. Where is my chewing gum?”
The chewing gum keeps them engaged, and that’s how cigarettes keep them engaged. That’s how people go on gossiping with each other. That keeps them engaged. Nobody bothers whether it is true or false, that is not the point. The question is: How to keep engaged and away from yourself?
So the workaholics are against meditation. Every addiction is going to prevent you from becoming a meditator. All addictions have to be dropped. But to be total in your work is a totally different thing. To be total in your work is not addiction, it is a kind of meditation. When you are totally in your work, your work has a possibility of perfection, you will have a joy arising out of a perfect work.
If you can be perfect and total in work, you can be total in no-work — just sitting silently, totally silent. You know how to be total. You can close your eyes and you can be totally in. You know the secret of being total. So to be total in work is helpful in meditation. The workaholic cannot meditate, he cannot sit silently even for a few minutes. He will fidget, he will change his position, he will do something or other — look into this pocket or that pocket, and he knows that there is nothing in those pockets. He will take out his glasses, clean them, put them away, and he knows they are clean.
I have been traveling for twenty years around this country, continuously, on the train, on the plane, and I have seen people opening their suitcases, looking into them, closing the suitcase — as if there was something to see. They are just at a loss what to do. They will open the window of the train, close the window, they will lie down, close their eyes, open their eyes.
I used to tell people in trains … In India, if you are going from Bombay to Calcutta it will take forty-eight hours. I would enter into my air-conditioned coupe — mostly I was alone, but once in a while there was somebody else, because the coupe can have two persons — and I would immediately tell my name, my father’s name, my grandfather’s name, from where I come, without being asked. They would be shocked. I would say, “I am finishing my whole autobiography so that you need not ask anything.”
And then I would sit and that man would look very strange …. He would say, “What kind of man …?”
I would tell him, “Now keep quiet, I have told the whole autobiography, there is nothing more!” And I would sit and look at him — forty-eight hours — and whenever he would start opening his mouth I would say … Then he would start doing things. He would read the same newspaper again from the very beginning, the name of the newspaper, to the very end, the publishers, the editors — and once in a while he would look at me.
It happened many times that he would call the conductor and say, “I want to change from this compartment.”
The conductor would say, “Why? You have a very good companion. I know him because he is continuously traveling. He is a nice man. You be here.”
He would say, “It is not a question of a nice or a good man. He is too nice — but please put me into some other compartment where there are people to talk to! This man is dangerous. He goes on staring at me without blinking, and I become afraid. I have taken three showers since the morning just for no reason at all. Just to avoid him I go into the bathroom; then I say, `It is better to take a shower. At least a few minutes will be passed.’”
But forty-eight hours … and he would start seeing his insanity, that he is unnecessarily opening the window, closing the window, unnecessarily lying down, turning this side, that side — and I am watching! Then he would sit down, then he would go on the upper berth. I would keep my hand up, so that he could see my hand, because I could not say it: “I am here! You go on doing all your insanities!”
These are the workaholics.
But a man who is total in his work is not a workaholic. He can be total — in anything, he will be total. He will be total while he is sleeping, he will be total while he is going for a walk. He will be just a walker, nothing else — no other thoughts, no other dreams, no other imaginations. Sleeping, he will simply sleep; eating, he will simply eat. You don’t do that. You are eating and your mind is doing hundreds of trips ….
I have been seeing — in every bed there are never two people, but a great crowd. The husband is making love to his wife but he is thinking of Sophia Loren; the wife is not making love to her husband, she is making love to Muhammad Ali. In every bed you will find such a crowd! Nobody is total in any act, not even in love. So be total in everything that you do or do not do. Be total — then your whole life becomes a meditation.
Source- Osho Book “Christianity: The Deadliest Poison and Zen: The Antidote to All Poisons”

Osho on reaction and action, When you react, it can never be total

Osho – Witnessing is the technique for centering. We discussed centering. A man can live in two ways: he can live from his periphery or he can live from his center. The periphery belongs to the ego and the center belongs to the being. If you live from the ego, you are always related with the other. The periphery is related with the other.
Whatsoever you do is not an action, it is always a reaction. You do it in response to something done to you. From the periphery there is no action – everything is a reaction; nothing comes from your center. In a way, you are just a slave of the circumstances. You are not doing anything; rather, you are being forced to do. From the center the situation changes diametrically: from the center you begin to act. For the first time you begin to exist not as a relata but in your own right.
Buddha is passing a village. Some people are very angry, very much against his teachings. They abuse him, they insult him. The Buddha listens silently and then he says, ”If you are finished then allow me to move. I am to reach to the other village and they will be waiting for me. If something is still remaining in your mind, then when I am passing back by this route you can finish it.” They say, ”We have abused you, insulted you. Are you not going to answer?”
Buddha says, ”I never react now. What you do is up to you – I never react now. You cannot force me to do something. You can abuse me; that is up to you. I am not a slave. I have become a free man. I act from my center, not from my periphery, and your abuse can touch only the periphery, not my center. My center remains untouched.”
You are so much touched, not because your center is touched. but only because you have no center. You are just the periphery, identified with the periphery. The periphery is bound to be touched by everything – everything that happens. It is just your boundary, so whatsoever happens is bound to touch it.
And you don’t have any center. The moment you have a center. then you have a distance from yourself, you have a distance from your periphery. Someone can abuse the periphery, but not you. You can remain aloof, detached. There is a distance between you and yourself. Between you as your periphery and you as the center there is a distance, and that distance cannot be broken by anyone else – because no one can penetrate to the center. The outside world can touch you only as the periphery.
So Buddha says, ”Now I am centered. Ten years before it would have been different. If you had abused me, then I would have reacted – but now I only act.”
Understand clearly the distinction between reaction and action. You love someone because someone loves you. Buddha also loves you – not because you love him; that is irrelevant. Whether you love him or hate him is irrelevant. He loves you because it is an act, not a reaction. The act comes from you, and the reaction is forced upon you. Centering means now you have begun to act.
Another point to be remembered: when you act, the act is always total. When you react, it can never be total. It is always partial, fragmentary, because when I act from my periphery – that is, when I react – it cannot be total because I am not involved in it really. Only my periphery is involved, so it cannot be total.
So if you love from your periphery, your love can never be total – it is always partial. And that means much, because if love is partial then the remaining space will be filled by hate. If your kindness is partial, the remaining space will be filled by cruelty. If your goodness is partial, then who will fill the remaining space? If your God is partial, then you will need a Devil to fill the remaining space.
That means a partial act is bound to be contradictory, in conflict with itself. Modern psychology says you both love and you hate simultaneously. Amphibian is your mind – contradictory. To the same object you are related with love and with hate. And if love and hate are both there, then there is going to be a confusion – and a poisonous confusion. Your kindness is mixed with cruelty. and your charity is theft, and your prayer becomes a violence. And even if you try to be a saint, on the periphery, your sainthood is bound to be tinged with sin. On the periphery, everything is going to be self-contradictory.
Only when you act from the center is your act total. And when that act is total, it has a beauty of its own. When the act is total, it is moment-to-moment. When the act is total, you don’t carry the memory – you need not! When the act is partial, it is a suspended thing. You eat something: if the eating is partial, then when the actual eating is finished you will continue eating in the mind. It will remain suspended. Only a total thing can have an end and can have a beginning. A partial thing is just a continuous series with no beginning and with no end. You are in your home. and you have carried your shop and market with you. You are in your shop, and you have carried your house and household affairs. You are never, you can never be, at any single moment. totally in it. Much is being carried continuously. This is the heaviness, the tense heaviness on the mind, on the heart.
A total act has a beginning and an end. It is atomic; it is not a series. It is there, and then it is not there. You are completely free from it to move into the unknown. Otherwise one goes on in grooves, the mind becomes just groovy. You go on moving in the same circular way, in a vicious circle. You go on continuously in it.
Because the past is never finished, it comes into the present: i t goes on and penetrates into the future. So, really, a partial mind. a peripheral mind, carries its past, and the past is a big thing. Even if you don’t consider past lives, even then the past is a big thing. Fifty years’ experiences, beautiful and ugly, but unfinished, everything unfinished – so you go on carrying a fifty-year-long past which is dead.
This dead past will fall upon a single moment of the present. It is bound to kill it. So you cannot live, it is impossible. With this past on you, upon you, you cannot live. Every single moment is so fresh and so delicate, this whole dead weight will kill it. It is killing! Your past goes on killing your present, and when the present is dead it becomes a part. When it is alive, it is not part of you. When it becomes dead, when it has been killed by your dead past, then it becomes yours, then it is part of you. This is the situation.
The moment you begin to act from the center, every act is total, atomic. It is there and then it is not there. You are completely free from it. Then you can move with no burden, unburdened. And only then can you live in the new moment that is always there – by coming to it fresh.
But you can come to it fresh only when there is no past to be carried. And you will have to carry the past if it is unfinished. The mind has a tendency to finish everything. If it is unfinished, then it has to be carried. If something has remained unfinished during the day, then you will dream about it in the night – because the mind has a tendency to finish everything. The moment it is finished, the mind is unburdened from it. Unless it is finished. the mind is bound to come to it again and again.
Whatsoever you are doing – your love, your sex, your friendship – everything is unfinished. And you cannot make it total if you remain on the periphery. So how to be centered in oneself? How to attain this centering so that you are not on the periphery? Witnessing is the technique.
This word ”witnessing” is a most significant word. There are hundreds of techniques to achieve centering, but witnessing is bound to be a part, a basic part, in every technique. Whatsoever the technique may be, witnessing will be the essential part in it. So it will be better to call it ”the technique of all techniques”. It is not simply a technique. The process of witnessing is the essential part of all the techniques.
Source – Osho Book “The Ultimate Alchemy, Vol 1″

Osho on holistic approach to life – Totality is possible, perfection is not possible

Question – Many see the work that goes on around you as a model for the holistic approach to life. Please talk about this.
Osho – Krishna Prem, the old man is dying. And it is good news that the old man is on his deathbed, because the new can be born only when the old is gone, utterly gone. The old has to cease. The old has existed long, and the old man has been a curse, because he was rooted in very stupid conceptions of life.
The old man was based on superstitions. The most basic flaw in the concept of the old man was perfectionism: he wanted to be perfect, and the very idea of perfectionism drives people crazy. The perfectionist is bound to be a neurotic, he cannot enjoy life till he is perfect. And perfection as such never happens, it is not in the nature of things. Totality is possible, perfection is not possible.
That is the fundamental of the holistic approach. And there is a tremendous difference between perfection and totality. Perfection is a goal somewhere in the future, totality is an experience herenow. Totality is not a goal, it is a style of life. If you can get into any act with your whole heart, you are total. Totality brings wholeness and totality brings health and totality brings sanity.
The perfectionist completely forgets about totality. He has some idea how he should be, and obviously time will be needed to reach that idea. It can’t happen now — tomorrow, day after tomorrow, this life, maybe next life… so life has to be postponed. That’s what the old man has been doing hitherto, postponing, postponing. The man in the past has not really lived; his life was nothing but a sequence of postponements.
I teach you to live herenow with no idea of the future at all. The future will be born out of your lived present. If the present has been lived totally, the future will have even more totality to it. Out of totality more totality is born. But if you have an idea what you want to be in the future, today you will live very partially because your main concern becomes the future. Your eyes become focused on the future, you lose contact with the real and the present — and the tomorrow will be born out of the real with which you are not in contact. The tomorrow will come out of today,
and today was unlived.
The English word devil is very beautiful. If you read it backwards it becomes lived. That which is lived becomes divine, and that which is not lived becomes devil. Only the lived is transformed into godliness; the unlived turns poisonous. Today you postpone, and whatsoever remains unlived in you will hang around you like a weight. If you had lived it you would have been free of it. It would not have haunted you, it would not have tortured you.
But man up to now has been taught not to live but to hope — hope that tomorrow things will be such that you will be able to live, hope that tomorrow you will be worthy to live, hope that tomorrow you will be Jesus Christ or Gautama the Buddha. You are never going to be Jesus the Christ or Gautama the Buddha, you are simply going to be yourself. You are not a carbon copy of anybody else. It would have been ugly to be another Christ or another Buddha; that would have been a great insult to your humanity. Man has dignity because man has originality.
The old concept was to live according to a certain pattern — the Buddhist pattern, the Christian pattern, the Hindu pattern. The old was not in favor of the individual, it was in favor of a certain pattern. That pattern creates slavery. I teach the individual, I teach the unique individual. Respect yourself, love yourself, because there has never been a person like you and there never will be again. God never repeats. You are utterly unique, incomparably unique. You need not be like somebody else, you need not be an imitator, you have to be authentically yourself, your own being. You have to do your own thing.
The moment you start accepting and respecting yourself you start becoming whole. Then there is nothing to divide you, then there is nothing to create the split. Hitherto, man has been schizophrenic. And I am not saying that a few people have been schizophrenic: the whole humanity has been schizophrenic. Leave a few exceptions — a Krishna, a Lao Tzu
here and there — you can count them on your fingers. They don’t constitute humanity, they are exceptions, and the exceptions only prove the rule. But the greater part of humanity has lived a schizophrenic life, a divided life, fragmentary.
And how did man become so split? First thing: you are not acceptable as you are, so reject yourself. Rather than respecting yourself, reject yourself; rather than respecting yourself, respect some idea, some imaginary idea, of how you should be. Don’t live the real, try to live the “should” — and then you are split, you have become two. You are that which you are, but that you reject, repress. And you want to be that which you are not, and that which you are not you love and you respect and you worship. You have become two.
Not only that you have been split in two, you have been made many — because you were taught that the body is your enemy, that you have to get rid of the body. You were taught that many things in you have to be cut off, that you are not as you should be, that great changes have to be done. Naturally you started rejecting your sex, you started rejecting your desires, you started rejecting your anger. And all these rejected parts are energies to be transformed. They are not your enemies, they are friends in disguise.
Anger transformed becomes compassion, sex transformed becomes prayer, greed transformed becomes sharing. But in the past it was told again and again, repeated down the ages, that you had to reject this, reject that. If you listen to the old teachings you will be surprised — you are rejected almost ninety-nine percent. Only one percent, some imaginary soul of which you are not aware at all, is accepted in you. And all that you are aware of is rejected.
These fragments do not allow you to become one piece, and unless you become one piece there is no peace possible. Unless you are a togetherness, integrated, crystallized, you will not know what God is — because God speaks only to those who are real, God speaks only to those who are not a crowd, not noisy.
When there are many in you, you are a crowd, and the crowd is noisy. When you become one, there is silence. Only by becoming one will you attain to silence, and in that silence you can hear the voice of God, in that silence you can start feeling the presence of the divine. And when you are one, you will be able to have a communion with the whole. By being a whole yourself, you become capable of having a communion with the whole.
Man has lived very partially — in fragments, in guilt, in fear. A new man is needed, urgently needed. Enough is enough: say goodbye to the old man. The old has created only wars, violence; it has created sadists, masochists, it has created a very ugly human being. It has made people pathological, it has not allowed a natural, healthy, sane
humanity to be born.
Just the other day, somebody asked, “Who is a masochist and who is a sadist?” A masochist is a person who loves to have a cold shower every morning, but takes instead a warm one. And the sadist is a person who, if asked by a masochist, “Please, please, hit my head hard,” says “No!”
People are torturing themselves and torturing others in every possible way. In the name of religion, in the name of morality, in the name of nationality, people are torturing each other, killing each other. Beautiful names have been found for very pathological, insane things. Insanities are called “nationalities,” insanities are called “moralities” — beautiful labels on very ugly things.
But it is time that we get rid of it all. And if we don’t get rid of it all soon enough, then the cup will be full. Man is going to die if the new does not arrive; the old cannot survive. There is no possibility for the old to survive, it has come to its tether’s end. It has lived more than expected.
I teach you a new man, a new humanity, which will not think of the future and which will not live with shoulds and oughts, which will not deny any natural instinct, which will accept its body, which will accept all that is given by God with deep gratitude. Your body is your temple, it is sacred. Your body is not your enemy. It is not irreligious
to love your body, to take care of your body — it is religious. It is irreligious to torture your body and to destroy it. The religious person will love his body because it is the temple where God lives.
You and your body are not really two, but the manifestation of one. Your soul is your invisible body, and your body is your visible soul. I teach this unity, and with this unity, man becomes whole. I teach you joy, not sadness. I teach you playfulness, not seriousness. I teach you love and laughter, because to me there is nothing more sacred than love and laughter, and there is nothing more prayerful than playfulness.
I don’t teach you renunciation, as it has been taught down the ages. I teach you: Rejoice, rejoice, and rejoice again! Rejoicing should be the essential core of my sannyasins. Yes, Krishna Prem, my approach to life is holistic, because to me, to be whole is to be holy.
Source – Osho Book “The Book of Wisdom”

Osho on Living Totally – Unless you experience it totally, you cannot be finished with it

Osho – Anand means bliss or blissful, and sugatta is a name of buddha. Literally it means well gone, because in india we call those people well-gone who are not going to come back again, who are gone forever. They have gone so well that they will not be returning. It is a beautiful term, very significant.
In the east the world is taken as a place of learning. One has to experience the truth of life. Unless you experience it, you are thrown back again and again into the world. It is just as if somebody studies in the university and goes on failing so he has to come back again and again to the same class. Once you have passed, you don’t return to the university. The world is taken as a school, as a training, as a discipline for something beyond. Once you have learned the art of how to be, there is no need for you to come back. A person who has gone in such a way that he will not be coming back, is called sugatta; well-gone, gone forever.
So become a sugatta. Experience life as deeply, as totally as possible. Never be afraid of any experience, because fear is the only cause which delays. If you don’t experience something, then somewhere deep down inside, you will continue to cling to it. Unless you experience it totally, you cannot be finished with it. So whatsoever it is, go into it as deeply as possible, so if there is something in it, you learn it. If there is nothing in it, you learn that there is nothing in it.
But either way you are benefited. Don’t go into any experience unaware, because if you go unaware, you will go again and again, and you will not learn anything. It is as if somebody goes into the university drunk. Many things will go on happening, but he is drunk and he cannot understand what is happening. He comes back, again misses. He comes back, and again misses. So don’t be drunk. This drunkenness comes by attachment. Drunkenness comes by ego. Drunkenness comes by greed, ambition, but the root cause is always unawareness. So become more aware and experience whatsoever life makes available. Don’t say no. Say yes and go into it.
If it has something, it will deliver. If it has nothing to give you, you will come out of it completely freed – at least from that dimension. Now it will not have any attraction for you; it is finished. By and by, in this way, one goes on finishing in every direction of life. Then one day suddenly, this whole life is simply known as futile, just a vicious circle leading nowhere; one goes on in circles.
In the east we call the world the wheel. It is like a wheel; the spokes go on changing, one goes up, another comes down. If you look at the spokes, you may think that something is changing, but if you look at the whole wheel, you know that nothing is changing. It is the same wheel going round and round and round.
Become aware so that you can see the whole wheel of life going round and round and round – the same anger, the same greed, the same sex, the same conflict. One goes on repeating it. I’m not saying don’t go into it. I’m saying if you have to go, you have to go – but go alert. If there is something, then go strongly into it. If there is nothing, then be still….
Source – Osho Book “Dance Your Way to God”

Osho – People have decided to remain static out of a desire for convenience

[A sannyasin, returned from a visit to the West, says it was so difficult for him to readjust there he was unsure whether to come here again.]
Osho – It happens many times in life. When your consciousness starts changing you cannot remain in the old pattern any more; you have to change it. In fact, if you watch life carefully you will see it happening many times but it happens so silently that you don’t become aware. For example, below the age of fourteen you had a few friends. After fourteen those friendships disappeared. Something happened to you: you became sexually mature. Those friendships started looking childish; they became irrelevant.
If you are doing a certain thing and something happens in your consciousness, now you cannot do it the old way. You have changed so you have to readjust everything. That’s why many people have decided against growth, because growth brings problems. If you grow, then each time you have to change many things. Something looks very very valuable at this moment and you go a little deeper into meditation and it no more looks valuable. So change. That becomes a little inconvenient for people… and inconvenience is very very deep in many dimensions.
For example, you love a woman and your consciousness changes. Suddenly you see that that woman is there, you still like her, you still feel for her but that romance has disappeared. You are in love with a certain kind of work and then you change. That work simply seems no more relevant, no more valid for you.
People have decided to remain at a fixed state of consciousness so that they need not change every day. They have become stagnant. If they remain flowing then every day: new shores and new trees and new people and new towns and new mountains and new valleys. The river will have to come to new things every day.
People have decided to remain static out of a desire for convenience. Psychoanalysts say that usually the mental age of people never goes beyond thirteen, fourteen; that is where they have stopped. They have decided that now this is the last. Now they are going to remain with it. This is their work, this is their hobby, this is their liking, this is their love, these are their friends. Now they have settled their world and they are not going to change it. The only way not to change is to stop your growth.
A growing person has to live in inconvenience, insecurity. And my whole approach is that growth is life. Life is dangerous. Death is very convenient, very comfortable. To be in a grave is the last in luxury. You cannot improve upon it; whatsoever you do will be something less than that. So many people live in the grave.
I will suggest only one thing – to never cling to the past, whatsoever the cost. Always remain open to the future because only the future is going to come. The past is not going to come. You will not meet it again; you will never come across it again. It is finished and finished for good. So loosen your grip on the past, and whatsoever happens, trust life. And if you feel that you are no more enjoying your job then change it! Nothing to be worried about. If you feel that you are no more enjoying the west then come to the east. Nothing is a problem. One should not cling to safeties, and then you will go on growing. To the very last moment of death one can go on growing.
If a person dies at seventy, then his mental age should be seventy – that is my idea – not less than that, because if something is less than that then that man has not lived totally. This is the minimum – the maximum can be more. A person of seventy can have the mental age of two hundred years or three hundred years, because if the man of seventy can have the age of ten years, why not two hundred years? – both are possible.
Live intensely and live dangerously. Live to the very last moment of your life and allow whatsoever happens. Yes, sometimes there will be pain and there will be many times agony, anguish, but those are part of life; they cannot be avoided. If one wants to be ecstatic one has to go through many agonies. If you want to be in an inner state of bliss you will have to go through many pains. They prepare, they cleanse you.
So whatsoever you feel, go with your feeling and always listen to the heart. Whenever you want to decide something, don’t decide only by the mind; decide by the heart. If you still feel that things are going perfectly well, continue; there is no hurry. But if you have started feeling that something is amiss and you are no more in tune with it, then what is the point?
We don’t live for anything else – everything else is for our life. If somebody paints and loves it, good. If one day he finds that it is finished – he cannot paint anymore or no more loves it – he can continue, he can go on dragging, but the love has disappeared. He should drop it! There is no need to carry on in it. He won’t be creating any big painting any more. And it is possible that one day he may come back to the painting. After twenty years he has completely forgotten about it and again it starts coming up. Then again he can go into it and there will be great joy. And after twenty years forgetfulness something more original will come out of it. He will be no more a technician; it will be more original. He has forgotten all that he knew – it will be no more out of his knowledge. It will not be anymore out of his expertise; it will be simply from his heart.
And of course, all that he has known has become part of his bones and blood and marrow so it is there but no more visible; it is an invisible force. But always listen to the heart and go with it. Sacrifice anything that is needed. At the altar of the heart, sacrifice everything. If you feel like coming here, come here. This is your home! And if you want to continue in your work, continue… but listen to your heart. I am not saying to do this or do that. What you do is not the point, but do whatsoever you do with joy and celebration.
Source – Osho Book “Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There”

Osho – Live in the present. That’s what I mean when I say live dangerously

Question – Osho, what do you mean by ”live in danger”? Should man not be careful for the future? Please explain it.
Osho – Brahma Deo Bharti, To live in danger simply means not to cling to the past, because the past gives you a certain kind of security – because it is familiar, well-known. Maybe it is all misery, all anguish, but still, because it is known and you have lived through it for long, you are well-acquainted with it. You know the ups and downs and you have become accustomed to it. In fact, you have become adjusted to it; now there are no more surprises in it. It gives you a certain comfortable, convenient, cozy feeling. It may be dirty, it may be enclosed like a prison, but still it feels like your home because you have lived so long in it. Even prison cells become people’s homes.
I used to visit prisons, one of the governors of one of the states in India was my friend so he allowed me to visit all the prisons in that state. I used to go to the prisons. I was surprised to see that people were perfectly happy. In fact, they started becoming worried when their time for release was coming closer because the outside world looked so alien. Somebody has lived for fifteen years in the prison; now for fifteen years no worry about food, shelter, no problems of any kind. He has been taken care of; now he will have to look again for a job, whether he will get it or not. The unknown is outside the gate. Once he is outside the gate he will be thrown into an unknown world. Fifteen years is a long time.
I asked many prisoners that, ”Why you come back again and again? Have you not learned the lesson that you should not do such things again?”
They said, ”In fact, we have learned the lesson. Inside is so much security and outside so much insecurity – unemployment, poverty, starvation and all kinds of problems. And once you have been in the prison, problems increase because nobody wants a thief to keep as a servant.
People ask, ’Why you have been sent to jail?’ People ask, ’Bring certificates, character certificates.’ From where we can get character certificates? Fifteen years we have been in the jail! We can get a character certificate from the jailer that, ’This man behaved well, did nothing wrong,’ but that will be from the jailer and that is enough proof that nobody is going to give us employment, nobody is going to trust us. A vast unknown faces, outside, so the only thing left for us is to do something again so we are sent back to the jail.”
Our whole system of punishment is stupid; it is utterly anti-psychological. Any person who goes to the prison once is bound to come back again and again and again. He creates friendship there, his friends are there, his room is there, his place is there. Even in prisoners a certain hierarchy arises: there are people who are important and there are people who are not so important and there are people who are just nobodies. And it is a small compact world. There are heroes people talk about that ”This man has murdered seven people, and you have murdered only one, just one? And you brag so much? And somebody has been stealing for years, and you did your first stealing and ere caught? What kind of thief you are?” There are master thieves; and people start learning from the knowledgeable people, and when they come out they use their knowledge…
When I say, Brahma Deo Bharti, live in danger, I mean always remain prepared to move into the unknown. It does not mean that you should not be careful for the future, but the best care that you can take about the future is: first get rid of the past. It is the past that does not allow you to take care of the future. It is the past that goes on repeating itself mechanically and you cannot improve upon your future. If you drop the past completely your future will be totally different and you will start growing. I hat is the first care you should take.
The second care that can be taken is to live in the present as totally as possible, because it is out of the present that future grows. And you never bother about the present; you think only of the future. You constantly think of the future. Either you think of the past or you think of the future, and both are foolish. Live in the present. That’s what I mean when I say live dangerously.
I have come across a story. Somebody like you must have invented it because there is no reference about it anywhere – neither in Christian sources nor in non-Christian sources. Two women are crying and weeping under Jesus’ cross. One says to the other, ”I would give everything to be able to take the nail out of his hand!”
After a few minutes, the other replies, ”Yes, me too! I would give everything to he able to take the nail out of his hand!”
Jesus looks down and mumbles to himself, ”Damn! Those two bitches want me to fall off the cross!”
You become even adjusted to your cross. You don’t want even to fall off your cross. Even cross becomes cozy, comfortable – it is your CROSS. You start worshipping it, you start bragging about it. Just watch people, listen to their stories. They are all bragging about their miseries. They go on magnifying their miseries, exaggerating their miseries, as if they are not satisfied with the small miseries that they are suffering; they want bigger ones. They have become adjusted to their cross.
I am telling you: Leave your cross behind. Jesus says: Carry your cross on your own shoulders. I say drop it, why carry? Forget all about it! And how can you dance if you carry your cross on your own shoulders? No wonder Christians say Jesus never laughed. How can you laugh when you are carrying your cross on your own shoulders? You can only weep, you cannot laugh.
When I say live dangerously, I say don’t become adjusted to that which is dead, because if you become adjusted to that which is dead you will be dead. Remain alive, moving, growing, flowing, going into the unknown every moment, facing the unknown whatsoever it brings. There is no other way to grow, and even if sometimes it is painful – and it is painful sometimes, it is rough sometimes, it is very rough sometimes – but out of this pain is born great ecstasy. That is the price we pay for the ecstasy.
Source – Osho Book “Tao: The Golden Gate, Vol 2″

Osho – Whatever you live unconsciously becomes a hangover

Osho – The first thing to remember is how to drop thoughts and become thoughtless — thoughtless but alert, because in deep sleep also you become thoughtless, and that won’t do. It is good for the body, that is why after a deep sleep your body feels rejuvenated. But the mind remains tired even in the morning, because the mind continues its activity. The body relaxes, though it too cannot relax totally because of the mind; but still, it relaxes. So in the morning the body is okay, at least workably okay — but the mind feels tired, even in the morning. You go to bed tired, you get up in the morning more tired because the mind was continuously working, dreaming, thinking, planning, desiring; the mind was continuously working.
In deep sleep for a few moments when you are absolutely unconscious you become one. This same oneness is needed with a conscious and alert mind. As you are in deep sleep — no thought, no distinction of good and bad, heaven and hell, God and the devil, no distinction of any sort, you simply ARE, but unconscious — this has to be attained while you are alert and conscious. Samadhi, the final, the ultimate, the utter meditation, is nothing but deep sleep with full consciousness. Deep sleep you attain, so the only thing to be attained is more and more consciousness. If you can add more consciousness to your deep sleep you will become enlightened. The mountain is transcended and the path opens — one thing.
Second thing: you carry the past within you — that creates multiplicity. You were a child, the child is still hidden in you, and sometimes you can still feel the child kicking; in certain moments you regress and become the child again. You were once young, now you are old; that young man is hidden there, and sometimes even an old man starts being as foolish as a young man.
You carry the whole past, every moment of it, and you have been many things! From the womb up to now you have been millions of persons, and they are all carried within you, layer by layer. You have grown, but the past has not disappeared; it may be hidden, but it is there — and it is not only in the mind, it is even in the body. If, when you were a small child and you were angry and someone said, ‘Stop! Don’t be angry,’ and you stopped, that anger is still being carried by your hand. It has to be so because energy is indestructible, and unless you relax that hand it will persist, unless you do something consciously to complete the circle of that energy which became anger in a certain moment fifty years back or sixty years back, you will carry it within you, and it will color all your actions.
You can touch somebody, but the touch won’t be pure: the whole past is carried by the hand; all repressed anger, all repressed hatred is there. Even if in love you touch a person your touch is not pure, love cannot be — because where will that anger go which is carried by the hand?
Wilhelm Reich worked very much on this somatic repression. The body carries the past, the mind carries the past; because of this loaded state you cannot be here and now. You have to come to terms with your past. So meditation is not only a question of doing something here and now; before that is possible you have to come to terms with your past — you have to dissolve all hangovers, and there are millions of them.
Even when one becomes old he is also a child, a young man, and all that he has ever been is there, because you don’t know how to die every moment. That is the whole art of life — to die moment to moment so that there is no hangover. A relationship has finished — you don’t carry it, you simply die to it! What can you do? Something was happening and now it is not happening. You accept it and you die to it — you simply DROP IT with full awareness, and then you are renewed in a new moment. Now you are not carrying the past.
You are a child no more, but watch yourself and you will feel the child is there — and that child creates trouble! If you were really a child there would be no trouble, but you are young or old….
I have heard: Mulla Nasruddin was hospitalized. He was eighty — and then came his birthday, and he was waiting for his three sons to bring him some present. They came of course, but they had not brought anything — because he was eighty years old! A child feels happy with a present, but an old man? Eighty years old! His eldest son was sixty. So they didn’t think about it at all, but when they came and Mulla looked and they were empty-handed, he felt angry, frustrated, and he said, ‘What! Have you forgotten your old father, your poor old father’s birthday? It is my birthday!’
The child… at that moment you could have looked into his eyes, and this eighty-year-old man was not there, just a child waiting for some toys.
One son said, ‘Forgive us, we forgot completely.’
Mulla Nasruddin said, ‘I reckon I will forgive you, because it seems this forgetfulness runs in our family. Really, I forgot to marry your mother.’ He was really angry.
So they all three shrieked in unison, and they said, ‘What! Do you mean we are…?’
He said, ‘Yes! — and damned cheap ones at that!’
The child continues somewhere in you: when you weep you can find him, when you laugh you can find him, when somebody gives you a present you can find him, when somebody forgets to, you can find him, when somebody appreciates you, you can find him; when somebody condemns you, you can find him — it is very difficult to be really mature. One can never be mature unless the child simply dies within you, is no longer a part of you — otherwise it will go on influencing your actions, your relationships.
And this is not only true for the child, every moment of the past is there and influencing your present — your present is so loaded. And millions of voices from the body and the mind go on manipulating you; how can you reach the path? You are a mountain. This mountain has to be dissolved. What to do? It can be dissolved consciously — one thing is to live your past again, consciously.
This is the mechanism of consciousness: whenever you live something consciously it never becomes a loaded thing on you; try to understand this. It never becomes a burden on you if you live it consciously. If you go to the market to purchase something and you move consciously, walk consciously, purchase the thing consciously, with full remembrance, mindfully come back home, this will never be a part of your memory. I don’t mean that you will forget it — it will not be a load. If you want to remember it, you can remember it, but it will not be constantly forcing your attention towards it, it will not be a loaded thing.
Whatsoever you do consciously is lived through and is no longer a hangover. Whatever you live unconsciously becomes a hangover, because you never live it totally — something remains incomplete. When something is incomplete it has to be carried — it waits to be completed.
You were a child, and somebody had broken your toy, and you were crying; and your mother consoled you, diverted your mind somewhere — gave you some sweets, talked about something else, told you a story, diverted you — and you were going to cry and weep, and you forgot. That has remained incomplete; it is there, and any day whenever somebody snatches a toy from you — it may be any toy, it may be a girlfriend, and somebody snatches her — you start weeping and crying. And you can find the child there, incomplete. It may be a post: you are mayor of the town and somebody snatches the post, a toy, and you are crying and weeping again.
Find out… regress into the past, move through it again, because there is no other way now; the past is there no more, so if something has remained hanging the only way is to relive it in the mind, move backwards. Every night make it a point to go backwards for one hour, fully alert, as if you are living the whole thing again. Many things will bubble up, many things will call your attention — so don’t be in a hurry, and don’t pay half-attention to anything and then move again because that will again create incompleteness. Whatsoever comes, give total attention to it. Live it again. And when I say live it again I mean LIVE it again — not just remember, because when you remember a thing you are a detached observer; that won’t help. RELIVE IT!
You are a child again. Don’t look as if you are standing apart and looking at a child as his toy is being snatched. No! BE the child. Not outside the child, inside the child — be again the child. Relive the moment: somebody snatches the toy, somebody destroys it, and you start crying — and cry! Your mother is trying to console you — go through the whole thing again, but now don’t be diverted by anything. Let the whole process be completed. When it is completed, suddenly you will feel your heart is less heavy; something has dropped.
You wanted to say something to your father; now he is dead, now there is no way to tell him. Or you wanted to ask his forgiveness for a certain thing you did which he didn’t like, but your ego came in and you couldn’t ask his forgiveness; now he is dead, now nothing can be done. What to do? — and it is THERE! It will go on and on and destroy all your relationships.
I am very much aware of that because to be a master is to be in a certain sense a father — it is to be many things but very importantly it is in a certain sense to be a father. When people come to me, if they are loaded with their relationship with their father, then it becomes very difficult to be related to me because I always feel their father comes in. If they have hated their father they will hate me, if they wanted to fight with their father, they will fight, if they love their father they will love me, if they respected their father they will respect me, if they respected him just superficially and deep down they had a disrespect, it will be the same with me — and the whole thing starts working.
If you are conscious, you can watch. Go back. Now your father is no more but for the eyes of the memory he is still there. Close your eyes; again be the child who has committed something, done something against the father, wants to be forgiven but cannot gather courage — now you can gather courage! You can say whatsoever you wanted to say, you can touch his feet again, or you can be angry and hit him — but be finished! Let the whole process be completed. Remember one basic law: anything that is complete drops, because then there is no meaning in carrying it; anything that is incomplete clings, it waits for its completion.
And this existence is really always after completion. The whole existence has a basic tendency to complete everything. It does not like incomplete things — they hang, they wait; and there is no hurry for existence — they can wait for millions of years.
Move backwards. Every night for one hour before you go to sleep, move into the past, relive. Many memories by and by will be unearthed. With many you will be surprised that you were not aware that these things are there — and with such vitality and freshness, as if they had just happened! You will be again a child, again a young man, a lover, many things will come. Move slowly, so everything is completed. Your mountain will become smaller and smaller — the LOAD is the mountain. And the smaller it becomes, the freer you will feel. A certain quality of freedom will come to you, and a freshness, and inside you will feel you have touched a source of life.
You will be always vital — even others will feel that when you walk your step has changed, it has a quality of dance; when you touch, your touch has changed — it is not a dead hand, it has become alive again. Now life is flowing because the blocks have disappeared; now there is no anger in the hand, love can flow easily, unpoisoned, in its purity. You will become more sensitive, vulnerable, open.
If you have come to terms with the past suddenly you will be here and now in the present, because then there is no need to move again and again. Go on moving every night. By and by memories will come up before your eyes and they will be completed. Relive them; completed, suddenly you will feel they drop. Now there is no more to be done, the thing is finished. Less and less memories will come as the time moves. There will be gaps — you would like to live, nothing is coming — and those gaps are beautiful. Then a day will come when you will not be able to move backwards because everything is complete. When you cannot move backwards, only then do you move forwards.
There is no other way. And to move forwards is to reach the path: the whole consciousness moving ahead every moment into the unknown. But your legs are being pulled back continuously by the past, the past is heavy on you; how can you move into the future, and how can you be in the present? The mountain is really big, it is a Himalaya, uncharted, unmapped; nobody knows how to pass through it — and everybody is such a different Himalaya that you can never make a map, because it differs with everybody. You have your Himalayas to carry, others have their Himalayas to carry, and with these mountains, when you meet with people there is only clash and conflict.
The whole life becomes just a struggle, a violent struggle, and everywhere you can see and feel and hear the clash. Whenever somebody comes near, you are tense and the other is also tense — both are carrying their Himalayas of tension and sooner or later they will clash. You may call it love but those who know, they say it is a clash. Now there is going to be misery.
Be finished with the past. As you become more free from the past, the mountain starts disappearing. And then you will attain a unison: you will become, by and by, one.
Source – Osho Book “And the Flowers Showered”

Osho – Living a holy life means living each moment totally

Osho – The traditional sense of being holy is egoistic. It is a new form of egoism. Somebody is bragging about his money, somebody is bragging out his birth, blood, nobility, aristocracy, somebody is bragging about his political power. And somebody is bragging about his virtues, his prayers, his fasts, his austerities. But it is the same bragging — no difference at all. The ego is the ego. By what it is nourished is of no consequence, it makes no difference. It can be supported by anything.
You can support it with a rock, you can support it with gold, you can support it with diamonds, but it is the same ego. Only the support changes, the ego remains the same.
When I use the word “holy” I use it in the sense of wholeness, in the sense of being total. To be whole is to be holy. And whenever you are whole the ego disappears. It can exist only when you are fragmentary, when you are divided, split. The more you are divided, the better for the ego. It rules you by dividing you. Once you are one, integrated, crystallised, the ego evaporates just like dewdrops in the early morning sun.
Living a holy life means living each moment totally, without holding anything back. If you are dancing then become the dance, and that is the moment of holiness. If you are singing, become the song. If you are loving, become love. Whatsoever you are doing, do it with such joy, with such totality, with such involvement, commitment that you are no more separate from it. And soon you will see that this continuous experience of being totally involved integrates all your fragments into oneness. It moulds you into an individual, into something indivisible. That is being holy.
It has nothing to do with being Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan, but it absolutely has something to do with the ultimate, because when you are total you become available to the ultimate. When you are total you are silent; all those fighting fragments are no more there, no noise is there. There is great stillness, and in that stillness God can descend.
God is whole, and unless we are also whole in our own small way we cannot know anything of God And one thing is beautiful about being whole: even if you are whole in your small way… The bigger whole and the smaller whole are not really different. It is like a small circle and a bigger circle; both are circles. As far as their being circles is concerned, both are perfect circles. Quantitatively they may be different but qualitatively they are not.
And that’s the beauty of being whole. You will be a small circle and God is the infinite circle, but that makes no difference. The moment you are a circle, entire, one, you know the quality of being a god, you become divine.
Source: Osho Book “If You Choose To Be With Me, You Must Risk Finding Yourself”

Osho on Being Total – How to be total? How to give Everything?

Question – How to be total? How to give Everything?
Osho : VIDYA, ONE CAN BE TOTAL ONLY WHEN ONE IS NOT. Only emptiness can be total. If you are, you can’t be total. Your very presence will be a disturbance in your totality, your very presence will continue interfering with your totality.
That’s why Buddha says: Become a nothingness. Just look deep into yourself and Let the cloud of the ego disperse. Let there be empty sky… in that empty sky there is no division. Clouds divide. When there are no clouds, the sky is undivided, one. Thoughts divide.
When there are no thoughts in you, there is totality. And remember, even the thought of totality will be a divisive factor. Now you ask: HOW TO BE TOTAL. This is an idea. Listening to me, again and again seeing the grandeur of totality, a greed arises in you:
HOW TO BE total? But you have missed the whole point. How can you ask such a question?
Totality is not something that you have to be. If you do something, you will remain partial. Doing can never be total, only non-doing can be total. When you are a non-doer, when there is nobody doing anything, there is totality.
Totality is absence of all doings, all thinkings, all that divides. Totality is silence, utter stillness. Don’t ask: How to be total?Just ask: How to see why I am not total? Remember, that’s why Buddha’s path is known as VIA negativa, via the negation. It does not talk
about positive things, it simply talks about the negative.
Don’t ask how to be natural. Just ask how not to be un-natural. Don’t ask how to be total. Just ask how not to be untotal, non-total. Just seeing is the question. Sometimes you ARE total – just see in those moments what happens. Making love, sometimes it happens, you are total. That totality is called the orgasm.
Mind stops for a moment. The frenzy of love, the madness of two energies meeting, merging – the mind is surpassed, transcended. The mind is pushed aside; the mind is no more needed in that space. All thoughts disappear, time StopS, and suddenly you are total.
That’s why people are so much in love with love – in spite of all the saints. They don’t bother about the saints. People go on loving – they pay lip-service to the saints but they go on living and loving; they don’t follow them. They know that they have only one moment of ecstasy, and that is love.
If you have gone to Khajuraho you must have seen the ecstatic expression on the faces of MAITHUNA figures – lovers in deep ecstasy. Even the stone has become ecstatic. Those stone statues, that sculpture, has great poetry, has great softness. Those creators must have been of immense experience; to turn stone into loving ecstasy is great art.
I have seen many things, but nothing compared to Khajuraho. Khajuraho remains the greatest wonder on the earth: transforming stone into ecstasy. The faces show something of the transcendental; time HAS stopped. There are no thoughts in the heads; all division has disappeared. These moments are holy moments, because they come from the whole.
You ask me: HOW TO BE TOTAL?
Just look in some moments when you ARE total, just to see the taste of totality. Listening to music sometimes it happens. Or watching a sunset. Or listening to me. If you are deep in love with me, it happens; it happens again and again every day. I can see on your faces the same expression as is there on Khajuraho statues.
You disappear; something stops deep down in you. There is no movement, everything is utterly quiet – and you are total. I give you th e taste of totality every day. And Vidya, you ask me: HOW TO BE TOTAL? Just allow these moments more and more; don’t miss a single opportunity. Looking at the trees, look so deeply that you disappear in the look.
Listening to the birds, forget yourself completely. And so on and so forth…. Every moment there is a possibility to be total. Whatsoever you are doing, be absorbed in it so utterly that the mind thinks nothing, is just there, is just a presence. And more and more totality will be coming. And the taste of totality will make you more and more capable of being total.
And try to see when you are not total. Those are the moments which have to be dropped slowly slowly. When you are not total, whenever you are in the head – thinking, brooding, calculating, cunning, clever – you are not total. Slowly slowly, slip out of those moments. It is just an old habit; habits die hard. But they die certainly – if one persists, they die.
I have heard about a man whose wife died. And he was sitting late, very late, in the pub. And somebody asked, ”Why do you go on sitting late still? Because you used to tell me that it is because of the wife that you sit in the pub so long. But now the wife is dead!”
The man suddenly stood up. He said, ”Thank you! I had completely forgotten – just old habit!” Just a few months before, it happened: the defence minister of India, Jagjivan Ram, spoke somewhere in the south. For one hour he criticized the Congress party and Indira Gandhi. He himself has been in the Congress his whole life; he was a defence minister in Indira’s government too.
Then he changed the party, became part of Janata party. For one hour he spoke against the Congress party, and in the end he asked the audience: ”Please vote Congress.”
Just old habit – must have been doing this for fifty years: ”Vote Congress!”
Habits die hard. To be untotal is just a habit. And sometimes, in spite of you, totality happens. So just watch those moments – when it happens, how it happens. Learn some secrets from those moments and move in those moments more and more. And see when it is not happening – get out of those moments, slip out. It is not a science, it is ; knack. It is a very very subtle art.
You ask: HOW TO BE TOTAL? HOW TO GIVE EVERYTHING?
It is not a question of giving everything. On the contrary, it is a question of recognizing the fact that you have nothing. This idea of HOW TO GIVE EVERYTHING? is again egoistic. What have you got to give? You are beggars – everybody is. You have nothing to give.
And you ask: HOW TO GIVE EVERYTHING?
The very idea of giving is meaningless. When you have something to give, it gives itself, it shares itself. When you are happy, happiness spreads. When you are blissful, it overflows. One never asks ”How to give?” One simply GIVES! One cannot do otherwise. That state finds its own way of expression and sharing.
When you have a song it sings itself – not that you have to ask ”How to sing it?” It bursts forth in jubilation, in a great shout of joy. The shout may he wordless, may be meaningless, but that is not the point. What is the meaning of ’hallelujah’? There is no meaning in it. It is not a word at all, it is just a shout of joy. You are saying that you have something which cannot be said. You are saying something which has never been said and cannot be said.
But when it is there it happens. When the clouds come and they are full of rain they don’t ask, ”How can I give everything?” They simply start giving – they start showering. When the flower opens it does not ask, ”How can I share my fragrance?” In fact, what can the flower do? There is no question of doing. The fragrance is already on the way, on the wing. It has started moving!
When you have, sharing happens. When you don’t have, only then do these questions arise: ”How to give? How to share?”
Every evening, people come to ask me: ”How to share?” And my problem is that I don’t see anything that they are going to share! There is nothing. When you don’t have anything, this question arises: ”How to share?” This question keeps you happy that you ha
ve something to share but you don’t know how to share. This keeps you unaware of the fact that you don’t have anything to share – because when you have, it happens spontaneously.
You cannot resist it, it has to be given forth. There is no way to avoid, it is inevitable.
So first thing, you ask: HOW TO BE TOTAL?
Not to be is to be total.
Second, you ask: HOW TO GIVE EVERYTHING?
Know that you have nothing. And wait… and wait in silence, in patience. Something will start flowing out of your being. It will take you unawares. It will be a great surprise – that you have started sharing! And the most difficult thing in the world is to see that you don’t have anything – the most difficult, because it feels so bad that you are empty, that you are a beggar. People go on pretending that they have….

Osho on Living dangerously – To live dangerously means to live

Question - What does it mean to live dangerously?
Osho : DANGEROUSLY? To live dangerously means to live. If you don’t live dangerously, you don’t live. Living flowers only in danger. Living never flowers in security; it flowers only in insecurity. If you start getting secure, you become a stagnant pool. Then your energy is no more moving. Then you are afraid, because one never knows how to go into the unknown.
And why take the risk? The known is more secure. Then you get obsessed with the familiar. You go on getting fed up with it, you are bored with it, you feel miserable in it, but still it seems familiar and comfortable. At least it is known. Unknown creates a trembling in you. The very idea of the unknown and you start feeling unsafe.
There are only two types of people in the world. People who want to live comfortably — they are seeking death. They want a comfortable grave. And people who want to live — they choose to live dangerously, because life thrives only when there is risk. Have you ever gone climbing the mountains? The higher the climb, the fresher you feel, the younger you feel.
The greater the danger of falling, the bigger the abyss by the side, the more alive you are… between life and death, when you are just hanging between life and death. Then there is no boredom, then there is no dust of the past, no desire for the future. Then the present moment is very sharp like a flame. It is enough. You live in the here and now.
Or surfing… or skiing… or gliding. Wherever there is a risk of losing life, there is tremendous joy. Because the risk of losing life makes you tremendously alive. Hence people are attracted to dangerous sports. People go climbing the mountains. Somebody asked Hillary, ‘Why did you try to climb Everest? Why?’ And Hillary said, ‘Because it is there — a constant challenge.’
It was risky, many people had died before. For almost sixty, seventy years, groups had been going, and it was almost a certain death. But still people were going. What was the attraction? Reaching higher, going farther away from the settled, the routine life, you again become wild, you again become part of the animal world. You again live like a tiger or a lion or like a river.
You again soar like a bird into the skies, farther and farther away. And each moment the security, the bank balance, the wife, the husband, the family, the society, the church, the respectability… all are fading away and away, distant and distant. You become alone. This is why people are so much interested in sports.
But that too is not real danger because you can become very very skilled. You can learn it, you can be trained for it. It is a very calculated risk — if you allow me the expression, calculated risk. You can train for mountaineering and you can take all precautions. Or driving, speed-driving. You can go a hundred miles per hour. It is dangerous, it is thrilling.
But you can become really skillful about it, and the danger is only for outsiders; for you it is not. And even if it is there, it is very marginal. And then, these risks are only physical risks, only the body is involved. When I say to you, live dangerously, I mean not only bodily risk, but psychological risk, and finally spiritual risk. Religion is spiritual risk.
It is going to such heights from where maybe there is no return. That is the meaning of Buddha’s term, anagamin — one who returns never. It is going to such a height of point of no return; then one is simply lost. One never comes back. When I say live dangerously, I mean don’t live the life of ordinary respectability — that you are a mayor in a town, or a member of the cooperation. This is not life.
Or you are a minister, or you have a good profession and are earning well and money goes on accumulating in the bank and everything is going perfectly well. When everything is going perfectly well, simply see it — you are dying and nothing is happening. People may respect you, and when you die a great procession will follow you. Good, that’s all.
And in the newspapers your pictures will be published and there will be editorials, and then people will forget about you. And you lived your whole life only for these things. Watch — one can miss one’s whole life for ordinary, mundane things. To be spiritual means to understand that these small things should not be given too much importance.
I am not saying that they are meaningless. I am saying that they are meaningful, but not as meaningful as you think. Money is needed. It is a need. But money is not the goal and cannot be the goal. A house is needed, certainly. It is a need. I am not an ascetic and I don’t want you to destroy your houses and escape to the Himalayas. The house is needed — but the house is needed for you. Don’t misunderstand it.
As I see people, the whole thing has gone topsy-turvy. They exist as if they are needed for the house. They go on working for the house. As if they are needed for the bank balance — they simply go on collecting money and then they die. And they had never lived. They had never a single moment of throbbing, streaming life.
They were just imprisoned in security, familiarity, respectability. Then if you feel bored, it is natural. People come to me and they say they feel very bored. They feel fed up, stuck. What to do? They think that just by repeating a mantra they will become again alive. It is not so easy. They will have to change their whole life pattern.
Love, but don’t think that tomorrow the woman will be available to you. Don’t expect. Don’t reduce the woman into a wife. Then you are living dangerously. Don’t reduce the man into a husband, because a husband is an ugly thing. Let your man be your man and your woman your woman. And don’t make your tomorrow predictable. Expect nothing and be ready for everything. That’s what I mean when I say live dangerously.
What do we do? We fall in love with a woman and immediately we start going to the court, or to the registry office, or to the church to get married. I’m not saying don’t get married. It is a formality. Good, satisfy the society. But deep in your mind never possess the woman. Never for a single moment say that ‘you belong to me’.
Because how can a person belong to you? And when you start possessing the woman, she will start possessing you. Then you both are no more in love. You are just crushing and killing each other, paralyzing each other. Love — but don’t let your love degrade into marriage. Work — work is needed — but don’t let work become your only life. Play should remain your life, your center of life.
Work should be as a means towards play. Work in the office and work in the factory and work in the shop, but just to have time, opportunity, to play. Don’t let your life be reduced into just a working routine. Because the goal of life is play. Play means doing something for its own sake. You come to me even to meditate, and you take meditation also as work.
You think something has to be done to achieve god. It is nonsense. Meditation cannot be done that way. You have to play, you have to take it as fun. You have not to be serious about it. You have to enjoy it. When you enjoy it, it develops. When you start taking it as work, as a duty to be done — because you have to do, you have to achieve moksha, nirvana, liberation — then again you have brought your foolish categories into the world of play.
Meditation is play, it is a leela. You enjoy it for its own sake. If you enjoy many more things for their own sake, you will be more alive. Of course, your life will always be in a risk, danger. But that’s how life has to be. Risk is part of it. In fact the better part of it is risk, the best part of it is risk. The most beautiful part of it is risk. It is every moment a risk.
You may not be aware. You breathe in, you breathe out. There is risk. Even breathing out, who knows whether the breath will come back or not? It is not certain, there is no guarantee. But there are a few people whose whole religion is security. Even if they talk about god, they talk about god as the supreme security.
If they think about god, they think only because they are afraid. If they go to pray and meditate, they are going just in order that they remain in the good books — in god’s good books. ‘If there is a god, he will know that I was a regular church-goer, a regular worshipper. I can claim.’ Even their prayer is just a means.
To live dangerously means to live life as if each moment is its own end. Each moment has its own intrinsic value. And you are not afraid. And you know death is there and you accept the fact that death is there, and you are not hiding against death. In fact, you go and encounter death. You enjoy those moments of encountering death — physically, psychologically, spiritually.
Enjoying those moments where you come directly in contact with death, where death becomes almost a reality, is what I mean when I say live dangerously. Love brings you face to face with death. Meditation brings you face to face with death. Coming to a master is coming to your own death. Facing somebody who has disappeared, is entering an abyss in which you can be lost, and you can become an anagamin.
Those who are courageous, they go headlong. They search all opportunities of danger. Their life philosophy is not that of insurance companies. Their life philosophy is that of a mountain climber, a glider, a surfer. And not only in the outside seas they surf; they surf in their innermost seas. And not only on the outside they climb Alps and Himalayas; they seek inner peaks. But remember one thing — never forget the art of risking, never never.
Always remain capable of risking. And wherever you can find an opportunity to risk, never miss it, and you will never be a loser. Risk is the only guarantee for being truly alive.