[A new sannyasin says: I've been a university student in theoretical physics. I love it very much.
Sometimes you speak against science and sometimes you praise it. What should I do?]
If you want to go inwards you have to leave the scientific attitude completely. If you want to move outwards, the scientific attitude is the only way. That's why sometimes I praise it and sometimes I'm against it. It depends.
If you are going outwards, if your discovery is objective, if you want to know matter, then of course religion is not going to help. That is not the religious way. You will have to follow science. Then I'm all for science. But you have to decide where you are going, what you want to reach, what your goal is.
If your goal is inner peace, silence, love, bliss, self-knowledge, then the scientific approach is meaningless, irrelevant. If you are in the scientific attitude too much, focused, frozen, then it will be very difficult for you to move inwards because the very approach will become a barrier. Religion and science are two diametrically opposite directions. So one has to decide. Even if you want to be a scientist, you can be, but when you want to meditate you have to put away your scientific attitude.
You have to learn how to put away your attitude - just as when you are making love, you put your clothes away. You don't make love with your boots and tie on.
There are a few people maybe making love with their boots and tie on, but they don't seem to be respectful towards love. They cannot go deep in it because they remain concerned too much with the personality.
So nothing is wrong in being a scientist. If you love it, be a scientist, but then become capable by and by of using that scientific attitude as an instrument. You use it when you are in the lab, but when you go into your prayer room, you put it outside. In the prayer room you go as a layman, not as a scientist. You go as an ordinary human being, not as a technician. Then there is no problem. But it is very difficult to put aside a certain attitude once you have invested your life in it.
So you have to decide... nothing is wrong. If you want to become a physicist, become one, but always remember that you will not come to know yourself through that. If that is your goal, you are moving in a totally opposite direction. You are taking a long route unnecessarily. If you want to come home there are other methods. Logic and reason and a laboratory won't help.
It is simple. When you want to see something you use your eyes. If you want to listen to somebody you use your ears, not your eyes, because both move in a different way, both have different capacities. It is exactly like that. If you are going to listen to a song there is no need to even open your eyes. In fact a real listener will close his eyes when he is listening to a song because the eye will be a disturbance. There is no need to see. One has to be totally in the ear.
When you are in the garden and watching a rose flower, if you are really alert you will come totally to the eyes. Your whole body will become eyes and eyes and eyes. You will see the flower from every way, from every pore of your being. Then all other senses are dropped. In a certain moment when you meet the rose, you are no more any ear, taste, noise; everything is gone. You simply see the form.
This goes on continuously. The more flexible you are, the more alive you are. The capacity to move from the eyes to the ears, from the ears to the nose, from the nose to the tongue, from the tongue to the whole skin; the capacity to be available, the capacity to move wherever you like, where you choose to be, not fixated - is flexibility. Your eyes don't resist when you want to close them. You are the master and you can do whatsoever you like.
You can be argumentative; you can discuss deeply. There is nothing wrong in it. The problem arises when you cannot do anything else but argue. Then you are missing something. For argumentation you are missing something which is greater, something which always comes to a non-argumentative mind.
Be rational, but always be capable of putting it away, because there are things in life which cannot be approached through reason. Don't be limited by your approach - whatsoever it is.
The same is also true about religion; don't be limited by that. Don't be unable to live in the world because you are religious and so you have to live in a monastery; you have to escape to the Himalayas, you have to completely die to the world. You cannot relate to a woman because you are religious. You cannot have children because you are religious. You cannot have a beautiful house because you are religious. That too is nonsense. Again you are getting fixed in a certain role and you are missing your flexibility, that fluidity which gives you the enrichment of many dimensions together.
Consciousness is multi-dimensional. Whenever you become fixed in one dimension you are impoverished; your richness is lost.
I would like you to also become a musician. I would like you also to become a meditator. I would like you also to be a scientist. Bigger and greater possibilities are there and you should be able to flow from one to another easily, very easily, with no hangover about anything.
When you go to the lab you become a scientist. You forget all about God. Matter becomes your god.
When you come home and you meditate, God becomes your matter. When you love a woman, love becomes your meditation. When you meditate, meditation becomes your love.
If one can be available this way, it is the best way to be. So think about it!
Anand Abhinatha. Abhinatha literally means the original god, the god of the beginning.
I am talking right now on Mahavira, a jaina teerthankara, a jaina prophet. The jaina tradition has twenty-four prophets and Abhinatha is the first prophet. So sometimes you can find something and read about Abhinatha. He is one of the most beautiful men ever born on the earth.
[The new sannyasin asks if it was necessary for him to go through sex... I want to go but I haven't anybody to go with. I want to know if you feel it is really necessary.]
It is very necessary because if you don't go through it, something will always remain hanging around you. It is better to be finished with it. One has to go beyond it; it is something to be passed beyond.
There is no need to make your abode there; it is just a bridge. But if you don't go through it - and there are other ways; you can go via a boat, you can swim; there are a thousand and one ways to avoid the bridge - then continuously in your mind something will go on thinking about the bridge.
Who knows? Perhaps the bridge was beautiful.
Many never go beyond that bridge, and you will always be aware that many are not only passing on the bridge - they have made their houses there on the bridge and they live there. It is simply human to be curious about what is happening there. Why are so many people interested? Not so many people are interested in God.
If people have to choose between sex and God they will choose sex. They have already chosen it.
There are not so many people who are meditative, so there must be something. The curiosity will continue. Just to avoid that curiosity, I say it is a must. Go through it so you are finished with it. Only experience liberates. When you pass through a thing and you know what it is you are finished with it. So I say go through it but never remain in it. You understand me?
There are many people who say it is not only a must, it is what the whole life is all about. And there are people who say it is not only to be avoided, it is to be completely and absolutely avoided; you should not even think about it. Both are wrong because those who think that sex is all and there is nothing more than it, are missing much. And those that say that sex has to be absolutely avoided become depressive, ill, morbid.
I would like you to become a very very healthy person; so healthy that there is no hangover from the past of any desire seeking to be, haunting you, to be fulfilled. Ghosts are very very dangerous, and whatsoever arises in your mind and you don't fulfill, becomes a ghost. Then it haunts you.
If you enter into monks' heads, they think continuously of sex. They go on repeating Ave Maria, but that doesn't make much sense. Deep down sex continues. In fact they go on repeating mantras, chanting, just to avoid that constant current of sex. They become more and more afraid to move in life, because wherever they go there is provocation - and it becomes more provocative to them.
If you live an ordinary life, a woman is just a woman. If you are a monk, a woman is something tremendously powerful. Ordinarily people don't know what power a woman has; only monks know.
It is just as if you have not eaten food for many days and you have been starved. Then you know what food is. You think only about food. Nothing else comes into your fantasy, your dreams, your imagination; only food floats all around. You imagine the flavour and the aroma and everything hints to you of food, whatsoever you see. Even if a camel passes, you think about food; it has nothing to do with a camel. An elephant passes and you will think about food. You will become food-obsessed - but it is natural because you have been starved.
So never starve. Understand. There are ways to go beyond, and it is better to learn everything that life makes available. Sex is one of the most secret forces of life. We come through sex, we are made of sex. Each cell of the body is a sex cell. The whole of life has a great collaboration with sexual energy. Life exists through sex, in sex.
Of course life is bigger than sex but it is rooted in it, just as a lotus flower is rooted in mud. It comes out of the mud, but it is not mud. It is absolutely different from mud. How can vou say that the lotus is mud? Just by looking at it you will see that the lotus is something of the other world. It is not earthly at all - but it comes out of mud.
Life arises out of sex, but it should not be confined to sex. It should flower and become a lotus. But the lotus cannot avoid the mud. It remains rooted in the mud. It goes on being nourished by the mud; so mud is not an enemy.
Sex is not an enemy. Be friendly. And meditate. Remain available and don't close your doors.
Somebody will come and knock. Don't be shy - open the door. If you feel attracted towards somebody, don't remain closed. Take the initiative.
Initiative is one of the most important values in life. People who cannot take initiative miss many things in life; they always go on missing. Whenever the moment arises, they cannot take the initiative; they wait.
Have you read Samuel Beckett's play 'Waiting for Godot'? Read it. People go on waiting for Godot.
They don't take any initiative. They don't do anything. They simply wait... inert. They don't even know what they are waiting for, because unless you create it, it is hot going to happen. So wait not for Godot. Do something so it happens! Otherwise there are millions of people who don't know exactly what they are waiting for. That is the meaning of Godot.
Somebody asked Samuel Beckett, 'What do you mean by Godot?' He said, 'If I had known I would have said so. I don't know myself.' 'Waiting for Godot'... it simply gives an idea of God. Mm? Just the sound.
But God has to be created, otherwise He becomes a Godot. If you don't create your God you will not find Him.
Now this looks paradoxical when I say create your God and only then vou find Him. Don't wait for Him. Create your love - only then will you find; don't wait for it. People who are creative find millions of ways of love, prayer, gratitude.
Experience is always around you, always ready to sprout flowers, but you have to be creative, receptive, open - and remember initiative. Otherwise the world will pass you by. If you remain closed, hiding yourself somewhere and just waiting for Godot, nobody will come because they are also shy. Somebody has to break the ice.
So meditate, do a few groups and remain available. And there is nothing wrong in chasing. One has to find a lover, and when it is time it is good to chase. Otherwise people start chasing in old age and then it is foolish. Right now when you are ready to chase, don't waste time!
[A group leader says: I want to say a couple of things about myself. Two things are happening. One is that what I used to call love is very emotional, and what I'm getting to feel now is very cool and distant. So I feel as if I'm not feeling.
But the other thing that is happening is that I can see clearly that I am not my feelings, and yet the body responds in a certain way - and it s not me. I don't want something and yet the emotions and the body will react as if they want something. It is not suppression....
Is there anything I can do besides watch?]
It always happens that when you begin to understand love, it starts becoming cool. That disturbs because it seems as if now there is no more love, as if love is disappearing, because we have always associated it with a certain heat, a certain fever, passion.
It has been so much associated with passion, that when it arises above passion, it feels as if it is disappearing. In a way the old love is dying. A new love is going to be born and the new love is going to be cool. It will be more like compassion than love. It will be more like a state than like a relationship. It will not be that you will be in love with somebody in particular. You will simply be in love. It will be just as if you are healthy. You are not healthy towards somebody. It becomes just a healthy thing inside you.
Love becomes your quality. Then it is very cool. It is not an excitement. On the contrary, it is a tranquillity, an equilibrium, a balance. Of course the excitement part will be missing. In the beginning you will think that life is becoming dull, insensitive, unemotional. That's natural because of the old associations.
So simply watch it and allow it. Feel happy about it. It is something tremendously valuable. When love becomes cool the whole life energy changes. The whole work of meditation culminates in that transformation - when love becomes cool - because once love becomes cool, everything becomes cool. It is not only love becoming cool. Your whole being will become cool, because love is the disturbance, the fever.
If you are in love there is fever; a feverish activity, an indulgence. You are disturbed, unbalanced.
You are continuously seeking something - waiting, waivering, trembling.
Passion is an anguish, but people go on being in it because they don't know anything else. If passion disappears they think that now life is gone; what do they exist for now? Even if passion gives misery, people cling to it. At least there is something; something is happening, even if it is misery. One doesn't feel empty.
This I continuously watch in so many people - they go on clinging to their misery. Even if you try to detach them from their misery, impossible. The more you try, the more they will cling. They will think that something valuable is being lost or taken away, or that they are being robbed. And they are simply suffering! The beauty is this - that they are simply suffering. You will feel empty now.
And I was watching you. For three, four months, there was a very very exaggerated phase of passion as if it was the last bout. Before the flame dies it jumps and becomes a big flame. Just as when the night is going to end and it becomes very dark, the last flame of passion was there, very feverish. I was waiting for this day when you would come and say that now love is becoming cool.
Allow it and help it to become cool. You are not losing anything. You are just on the door of gaining many more things - more than you have ever dreamed of. But this passage, this interim period has to be passed, from passion to no-passion, from hot love to cold love. It is going to be hard because in the middle you will almost feel that you have become insensitive, unemotional; in a way, dead.
But a new life will arise out of this death.
So accept it, and accept it with great gratitude because it is something very valuable, very precious.
Protect it, and don't move into the old pattern again. Go on becoming aware, and with this awareness and love becoming cool, you will start feeling separate from your body. When love is a passion you feel too much in the body. That's why you hanker for some other body. It is the hankering of the body for some other body; the passion, the lust of the body. If you are too much in the body you seek other bodies to be loved, to love; it is a bodily affair.
Once love becomes cool a gap will arise between you and your body. That gap will also create a few problems in the interim period. Suddenly you will see many things arising in the body which don't belong to you. They were arising before also, but you were identified so much with the body that you always believed they were yours. Now a gap exists. You can see a certain tension arising in the stomach and it has nothing to do with you. You are completely aloof and it is still arising. You will also feel a little helpless because now it will be very difficult to control it.
[Osho said that because it was possible before to be possessed by things that were happening to the body, it was equally possible to repress things, because one was closely identified with the body.
Now, neither would be possible - to indulge or to repress.
Osho said that all one could do at this stage was to allow these things to happen and to simply watch them. He said that the body would start releasing certain energies which up to now had been accumulating. Mind and body move together in deep synchronicity and as the mind becomes cooler, so will the body also. All the hot sensations of the body will be released and as a result one might experience sensations in the stomach, the heart, the throat, and many other parts of the body.]
For example if you were deep in excitement and love with someone and you used to massage his body, then your hands will release something because in massage they had been releasing something. If you were in love with someone and you used to kiss him too much, your lips will have to release some heat that was there, which was released in your kissing. Now everything is cooling down. Suddenly you will see your lips flickering, there will be a certain tremor. Kissing is nothing but releasing some energy through the lips.
So all over the body, wherever your indulgence was centring, a relaxation will happen. This relaxation is going to be weird because you will see it happening and you will feel helpless. Don't feel helpless. Simply watch; remain an observer and let the body have its way. Within two to three months your body will relax and come to the same cool point as your mind. Then there will be a new meeting of the body and the mind on a new level, with a new quality.
[The Soma group are at darshan. One participant says: I feel very destructive.... I'd like to destroy other peoples egos and to be very dissecting and cold.]
You have somebody in particular in mind? (laughter) No, use that energy to destroy your own ego.
Nobody can ever destroy anybody else's ego, never. There is no way. You can kill the person but you cannot destroy his ego. That is absolutely private. You can throw a person in a prison, you can beat him, crucify him, but you cannot touch his ego because the ego is just his dreams, a private dream. There is no public way to enter it.
You cannot possess anybody's dreams. You cannot say, 'You have to dream this and are not to dream that.' You cannot watch someone's dreams. It is absolutely private.
There was a mad king in Egypt who declared to his country that nobody should ever enter into his dreams, otherwise he would be very hard. The whole country was afraid because nobody can come into another's dreams when he wants to! The king killed a few people - of course his own court people whom he dreamed about.
There are three layers of life. One is dream, which is private. Another is love, which is overlapping between two persons; it is a relationship. Then there is the world, the world of things, which is absolutely public.
That's why two lovers don't want to love where the public is watching. If they do, something is morbid, perverted. Otherwise people want to be private; only two persons' privacies meeting into each other.
Even a third person watching will be a disturbance because he will make them defensive and they will not be open. So there is a private world, then a personal relation world, and then an impersonal marketplace. These are the three ordinary layers.
Then there is one more which we call the ultimate - the world of meditation where even you are not.
In your dreams, you are. In your love, you are and somebody else is. A dream is an 'I, I, I,' world.
Love is an 'I-thou, thou-I' world and the world is an 'I-it' world. Meditation is just empty... not even an 'I'. A no-I world, anatta, no-self.
You are feeling that an energy is arising which wants to kill others' egos. There are two possibilities.
Either you can kill your own ego and you enter the world of meditation, or you try to kill the other's ego - which is impossible. You can overpower the other so much that he starts pretending that now there is no ego. Then you have turned the person into an it; he is no more a person.
If you love a person but you possess and nag him too much, he can simply pretend that he is no more, and only you are. He is just your shadow. Then you have turned the person into a dead thing, a piece of furniture or something like that. If you use this energy to kill the ego of another you will destroy the person and there will only be a thing left. A husband is a thing, a lover is a person. A wife is a thing, a beloved is a person. You can use the energy to destroy your own ego and then suddenly your person disappears.
And when your person disappears, the impersonal, God, arises in you.
When the energy can be used to destroy your persona and you can become a god, why waste it is trying to destroy somebody who cannot really be destroyed and who will be forced to pretend and will become a thing? How can one be happy with a thing?
You will create patterns of unhappiness. If he is not destroyed, you will feel unhappy that he is still carrying his ego. If he is destroyed or pretends that he is destroyed, you will feel unhappy because now he is just a thing and nothing else is left. You will no more be interested. You find somebody else in whom the ego is still there and which is a challenge so that you can destroy it.
The energy is good; it is not bad energy. You can use it in a bad way but that will be your choice.
Use it to destroy your own ego, mm? Try.
[Another group participant says: I enjoyed the group very much. I experienced some really high energy and I love silence. I felt more aware, but when the group was over and I saw myself coming down a little, I felt a sort of blank inside... I started over-eating a lot and I don't want to do that.
Osho has spoken before about the significance of wanting to over-eat when a sensation of emptiness arises.
He said to the sannyasin that when one has made an intensive effort to be aware, an emptiness is created and that can be mistaken for an emptiness in the stomach, and hence one begins to eat more than is needed. If one does over-eat, awareness is lost, because food gives a certain drunkenness. Osho suggested her to eat in fantasy whatsoever she liked, and as much of it as she wanted - but to chew it well.
He went on to elaborate on the connection between eating and dullness, and fasting and awareness.... ]
That's why all religions praise fasting so much. Before a person goes into meditation, he fasts, and after he comes out of meditation he fasts. If he is not fasting there is a danger he may start over- stuffing himself, and whatsoever he has gained through meditation will be lost. Food gives a certain type of sleepiness. It is anti-awareness. That's why when you have eaten too much you feel sleepy.
If you have not eaten well, in the night it is difficult to sleep; sleep is shallow.
But this has been good. Just remain alert and this space will