Question 1:
Chaitanya Kirti, I do not agree with RIGVEDA and its statement. It appears only to the intellectuals as true.
But those who know, know perfectly well that thoughts are simply thoughts. They are neither noble nor ignoble. They are all chains, prisons; how can they be noble? Mind itself is your slavery, how it can be noble? And the ugliest thing in the statement of RIGVEDA is that it is asking, "Let noble thoughts come to us from every side." You are already too full of all kinds of crap and you are inviting more crap to come to you from every side?
How can I agree with this statement? It may have been made by a great Hindu seer and saint, but because of this statement, this very statement, whoever has made it has shown his ignorance about human consciousness. He does not know the state beyond the mind.
Unless you know the state beyond the mind you are as blind as anyone else, as ignorant as anyone else, with only one difference: you are a hypocrite, you are a pretender, you are showing the world a false face and hiding your reality. Any man who has made this statement is utterly ignorant about spiritual reality. It does not matter that the statement is contained in the ancientmost holy book of the Hindus. To me, each statement has to stand on its own authority. It doesn't matter from where it comes, who utters it, the statement itself intrinsically is wrong. It shows only one thing: that whoever uttered it was also wrong.
The whole process of religious consciousness is getting rid of thoughts. Yes, noble thoughts are included in it. It doesn't matter whether your chains are made of gold or just steel; in fact, the chains that are made of gold are more dangerous than the chains made of steel. Because the chains made of gold can be misunderstood as ornaments, you can start being attached to them, and then there is no possibility of freedom at all.
To call any thoughts "noble" is one of the most dangerous statements to make. It goes against all mystical experience. No thought is noble, and therefore no thought is ignoble either. Thoughts are just thoughts. Their function is to keep you clouded so that you cannot see the sun. Their function is to keep you in darkness so you cannot see the light of the day. They surround you in thick layers and keep you disconnected with existence. This separation is our misery. This is our anguish, this is our hell.
All thoughts have to be removed, irrespective of whether they are made of gold or of steel. Whether they appear to be good or bad, whether they come in moral packages or immoral packages, does not matter. In fact, again I would like to repeat: Thoughts that appear to be noble are more dangerous than those that are apparently ignoble, because there is a tendency within you to get attached to anything that is noble, moral, puritan.
Once you get attached to your chains, how are you going to be free? Once you become attached to your cage, how are you going to open your wings in the sky?
Chaitanya Kirti, RIGVEDA is certainly the ancientmost scripture in the world. That does not make it in any way significant, it simply makes it more primitive than any other scripture. It was written by more barbarous and more primitive people, less civilized, less cultured, and you can see it in the lifestyles of the Vedic seers.
You can see the difference between a Gautam Buddha and any seer, any sage of the VEDAS. They had many wives - and not only that, they had many other women purchased in the slave markets.
Can you conceive of Gautam Buddha purchasing a woman auctioned in the marketplace? It is simply inconceivable to reduce a woman to a commodity, just a sexual object to be used. And all the vedic seers without any exception had many wives and had many women purchased from the auctions in the marketplace.
You will be surprised to know, sometimes words go through such a transformation that one becomes absolutely unaware of their meaning. Now the word vadhu has lost all its original meaning. Now it means the newly-wed wife; but in the times of the VEDAS, ?vadhu' meant a woman who had been purchased from the marketplace. You can treat her as a wife, you can use her as a sexual object, but her children will not be legitimate. They will be orphans, illegitimate and condemned by the society.
Strange... the people who are producing them are praised as seers and sages. Their very act of purchasing women is so ugly that to call them sages is simply stupid; they are not even worthy to be called human. And then to produce from those women children who will be condemned for their whole lives as illegitimate...
I say unto you, there is not a single child in the whole world who is illegitimate. Parents may be illegitimate, but not children. How can a child be illegitimate? Every child comes into existence from the same source of life, with the same purity and dignity. No child brings a certificate that "I am legitimate;" and no child comes with a seal on his forehead that he is illegitimate.
But these so-called seers were accumulating immense money. They were in favor of the ugly caste system of India - in fact they created it. One fourth of the country is condemned to live like cattle, and the responsibility goes to the VEDAS. They were very ordinary people; if you look at the prayers that they have written in the VEDAS, you can see their utter ordinariness.
And that has continued to be the inner unconscious of the Indian mind. They were greedy people, purchased lands, slaves, and they were very jealous, jealous of each other. They were not humble people, and they were jealous even of their own wives. They had many wives, and they had many purchased women who were almost like prostitutes. But they wanted their wives to be absolutely dedicated only to them. They were very angry people, ready to curse anybody - not only for this life but even for future lives - on any slight provocation. And they have still a certain existence in the Indian mind.
Just a few days ago, Jayesh was telling me - because he is looking after all the problems that the Indian government and the Indian bureaucracy have created for the ashram. One ex-attorney general of Maharashtra appeared to be very much interested in me.
Jayesh asked him, "Have you ever heard Osho, have you ever read anything?"
He said, "I have not read anything, I have never heard him."
Jayesh said, "Then in what ways are you interested in him? And why do you want to help me in solving the legal problems against the ashram which are absolutely invalid?"
He said, "I simply want to help, because it is a blessing to work for Osho." Jayesh was very much influenced, but in the next sentence the man said, "I will work just for the sheer joy and the blessings that will come to me from working for Osho. But money also is needed...."
Jayesh asked me what to do with such people. "He knows you not, he has never read you, he has never heard you. He talks about blessings, looks very spiritual - and ends up with the sentence that money is also needed."
I said to him, "Ask him to choose between the two: either the blessings or the money."
He said, "Osho, you will destroy my whole work. He is the man I am depending on."
I said, "But make it clear... because he cannot have both."
He said, "It was better I should not have told you. Now I am in a fix. I know he needs money, I know he is working for money. And if I ask this question, he will certainly be very much annoyed."
This greed, this money infatuation, this materialism comes exactly down from the seers of the RIGVEDA. It still constitutes the unconscious of the Hindu mind. On the surface, everything is spiritual; underneath, everything is so ugly, so obscene. And the beauty of it is that the Indians go on condemning the whole world as materialist; they are the only spiritual people.
But my own experience is that I have not come across more materialist people in the whole world than the Indians. Yes, they have a spiritual mask which the others don't have, so the others appear to be materialist. And Indians are very much conditioned to talk about spirituality, the ultimate reality; it is just common heritage to talk about great things. But when you scratch a little bit, you will find the most ugly human beings in the world. And the responsibility goes to such people.
The man who said, "Let noble thoughts come to us from every side," has been praised by Hindu scholars down the ages. I am the first in the whole history of mankind who is condemning this man and his statement. His statement shows absolutely clearly that he knows nothing of meditation.
Noble thoughts are simply noble chains, noble prisons, noble poisons. Every thought has to be dropped; whether it is good or bad, that is immaterial. You have to rise into a state of thoughtlessness. That state is the only nobility in the world.
That is the only authentic spirituality.
But the moment you go beyond thought, you are no more a Christian, no more a Hindu, no more a Jew, no more a Buddhist. All these are thoughts. To be a Hindu means you have certain kinds of thoughts; to be a Mohammedan means you have chosen a different collection of thoughts. What is the difference between a Hindu and a Christian? - just the thoughts. Once they both go beyond thoughts, what will be the difference? In the silences of the heart, everybody is exactly the same open sky without any clouds.
Chaitanya Kirti, a few sutras for your meditation. You need them urgently, because you are reading the wrong kind of literature. The first sutra:
"Not all saints are playing a practical joke on the public. Some are genuinely mad."
Second: "If everyone does what they believe to be right, there will be assuredly utter chaos in the world."
Third: "If you see the good in everybody, you are an optimist or you may be simply nuts."
Fourth: "Just when I nearly had the answer, I forgot the question."
Question 2:
Anand Shantideva, the question you have asked is very complex. You will have to understand a few other things before you can understand what real authentic friendliness is.
The first is friendship. Friendship is love without any biological tones to it. It is not the friendship that you understand ordinarily - the boyfriend, the girlfriend. To use the word friend in any way associated with biology is sheer stupidity. It is infatuation and madness. You are being used by biology for reproduction purposes. If you think you are in love, you are wrong; it is just hormonal attraction.
Your chemistry can be changed and your love will disappear. Just an injection of hormones and a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man.
Friendship is love without any biological tones. It has become a rare phenomenon. It used to be a great thing in the past, but a few great things in the past have completely disappeared. It is a very strange thing that ugly things are stubborn, they don't die easily; and beautiful things are very fragile, they die and disappear very easily.
Today friendship is understood either in biological terms or in economic terms, or in sociological terms - in terms of acquaintance, a kind of acquaintance.
But friendship means that if the need arises you will be ready even to sacrifice yourself. Friendship means that you have made somebody else more important than yourself; somebody else has become more precious than you yourself.
It is not a business.
It is love in its purity.
This friendship is possible even the way you are now. Even unconscious people can have such a friendship. But if you start becoming more conscious of your being, then friendship starts turning into friendliness. Friendliness has a wider connotation, a far bigger sky.
Friendship is a small thing compared to friendliness. Friendship can be broken, the friend can turn into an enemy. That possibility remains intrinsic in the very fact of friendship.
I am reminded of Machiavelli giving guidance to the princes of the world in his great work, THE PRINCE. One of his guidelines is, Never tell anything to your friend which you would not be able to say to your enemy, because the person who is a friend today may turn into an enemy tomorrow.
And the suggestion following that is, Never say anything against the enemy, because the enemy can turn into a friend tomorrow. Then you will be very embarrassed. Machiavelli is giving a very clear insight: that our ordinary love can change into hate, our friendship can become enmity any moment.
This is the unconscious state of man - where love is hiding hate just behind it, where you hate the same person you love but you are not aware of it.
Friendliness becomes possible only when you are real, you are authentic, and you are absolutely aware of your being.
And out of this awareness, if love arises it will be friendliness. Friendliness can never change into its opposite. Remember this as a criterion, that the greatest values of life are only those which cannot change into their opposite; in fact there is no opposite.
You are asking, "What is real authentic friendliness?"
It will need a great transformation in you, Anand Shantideva, to have a taste of friendliness. As you are, friendliness is a faraway star. You can have a look at the faraway star, you can have a certain intellectual understanding, but it will remain only an intellectual understanding, not an existential taste.
Unless you have an existential taste of friendliness, it will be very difficult, almost impossible to make a distinction between friendship and friendliness.
Friendliness is the purest thing you can conceive about love. It is so pure that you cannot even call it a flower, you can only call it a fragrance which you can feel and experience, but you cannot catch hold of. It is there, your nostrils are full of it, your being is surrounded by it. You feel the vibe, but there is no way to catch hold of it; the experience is so big and so vast and our hands are too small.
I said to you that your question is very complex, not because of the question, but because of you.
You are not yet at the point from where friendliness can become an experience.
Be real, be authentic and you will know the purest quality of love - just a fragrance of love surrounding you always. And that quality of the purest love is friendliness. Friendship is addressed to someone, somebody is your friend.
Once Gautam Buddha was asked, "Does the enlightened man have friends?" and he said, "No." The questioner was shocked because he was thinking the man who is enlightened must have the whole world as his friend.
But Gautam Buddha is right, whether you are shocked or not. When he says, "The enlightened man has no friends," he is saying he cannot have friends because he cannot have enemies. They both come together. Friendliness he can have, but not friendship.
Friendliness is unfocused, unaddressed love. It is not any contract, spoken or unspoken. It is not from one individual to another individual; it is from one individual to the whole existence, of which man is only a small part, because trees are included, animals are included, rivers are included, mountains are included, stars are included. Everything is included in friendliness.
Friendliness is just the way of your being real and authentic; you start radiating it. It comes on its own accord, you don't have to bring it. Whoever comes close to you will feel the friendliness.
That does not mean that nobody will be your enemy. As far as you are concerned, you will not be an enemy of anyone, because you are no more a friend to anyone. But your height, your consciousness, your blissfulness, your silence, your peace will annoy many, will irritate many, will make many, without understanding you, your enemies.
In fact the enlightened men have more enemies than the unenlightened. The unenlightened may have a few enemies, a few friends. The enlightened men have almost the whole world antagonistic towards them, because the blind people cannot forgive the man who has eyes, and the ignorant cannot forgive one who knows. They cannot feel love towards a man who has attained to his fulfillment, because their egos are hurt.
Just the other day I received four letters from four different American prisons. All the four prisoners are asking for sannyas. One American prisoner has been reading my books. Since I was in that prison for one day, the authorities became interested, the prisoners became interested, so they must have ordered my books. The prisoner has been reading those books.
Although he is an American, he writes that "Osho, reading your books, listening to you on the television, and when you were in the prison for one day, I was also here" - he has been there for almost five years. "It was a blissful experience for me and I will never forget the day we were together in the same cell; it has been the most important day of my life. And I have been carrying something in me which I want to express to you.
"You have not committed any sin - of that I was absolutely certain the moment I saw you - but to be innocent seems to be a greater crime than any other. And because you were talked about on the radio, on the television, your books were read all over the country, there came a moment when you were more important a figure than the president of America. That's what triggered the whole process of destroying your commune, imprisoning you - just to humiliate you."
I was surprised that a prisoner would have such a deep insight. He is saying that "people like you are bound to be condemned, because even the greatest, most powerful people look like pygmies before your consciousness and your height. It is your fault," he is saying to me. "If you were not so successful, you would have been ignored. If your commune was not so successful, nobody would have bothered about you."
The enlightened man has no friends, no enemies, but only a pure love, unaddressed. He is ready to pour into anybody's heart who is available.
That is, Shantideva, real authentic friendliness.
But such a man will provoke many egos, will hurt those who think they are very important and powerful people. The presidents and the queens and the prime ministers and the kings will become immediately worried, concerned. A man who has no power has suddenly become the focus of attention of the people, attracts more people than the people who have power and money and prestige. Such a man cannot be forgiven. He has to be punished whether he has committed any crime or not. And a man of enlightenment cannot commit a crime; that is just a sheer impossibility.
But to be innocent, to be friendly, to be loving for no reason at all, just to be yourself is enough to trigger many egos against you.
So when I say, "The enlightened man has no enemies," I mean that from his side he has no enemies.
But from others' side, the greater his height, the more will be their antagonism against him, the more will be the enmity, hatred, condemnation. This is how it has been happening for centuries.
Nirvano was just telling me the other day that the day I was fined four hundred thousand dollars - more than half a crore rupees - knowing perfectly well that I don't possess a single paisa, a single cent, the attorney who was working for Nirvano told her, "They have done it again."
She asked him, "What are you saying?"
And he said, "Yes, they have done it again. They have again crucified Jesus, they have again punished a man who is utterly innocent - but his innocence hurts their egos."
Shantideva, just an intellectual understanding will not be enough - although it is good to have some intellectual understanding, because that may help you move towards existential experience. But only the experience will give you the full taste of the tremendous sweetness, the beauty, the godliness and the truth of love.
Question 3:
Dhyan Satyama, the place you are in and the space you are in... four and a half years is really too long. You can understand by the laughter of the people. They are in the same boat.
If you meditate, sex is going to drop by itself.
Sex is part of your unconsciousness, and it is a blissful experience if it drops by itself. If you force it to drop, it never drops. On the contrary, it becomes perverted; it starts finding ways from the back door. Unless it drops by itself, it never drops.
Meditation is the secretmost method of going beyond the body and all that the body contains. Sex is part of your body, your biology, it is not part of your consciousness. The moment you start rising up in your consciousness, sex is left far behind. Naturally, at the age of thirty-one one starts wondering, "Something seems to have gone wrong.... Nothing has gone wrong, everything has gone right. You should feel blessed that you are free from the greatest imprisonment of your being.
Adam and Eve were standing underneath the tree of knowledge, looking at the apple in Eve's hand.
Eve turned to Adam and said, "After we have eaten the apple, we are going to do WHAT?" Naturally the poor woman was not yet aware about what. And they had eaten only one apple... It seems you have been eating too many apples; then one becomes a quicky.
Little Ernie's mother was worried about his progress at school, so she took him to see the psychiatrist. The shrink decided to give him an aptitude test and asked the nurse to put a hammer, a wrench and a screwdriver on the table. "If he grabs the hammer," said the shrink, "he will be a carpenter. If he grabs the wrench, he will be a mechanic. If he grabs the screwdriver, he will be an electrician."
Ernie fooled them all. He grabbed the nurse.
It does not matter what your age is; sex has nothing to do with age. It can disappear at any moment or it may not disappear even when one leg is in the grave. It all depends whether your life is just a horizontal phenomenon or something vertical also.
That verticalness can happen any moment, particularly for those who are in meditation. You can start moving differently than any other animal is capable of - except a few men. It is unfortunate that I have to say "except a few men"; intrinsically, every man is capable of going beyond sex.
But people think sex is life; the moment sex disappears, they think, now there is no point in going on living. Sex was their meaning, their very salt. These are the poorest people in the world who have not known anything beyond the lowest; they have never raised their eyes towards the stars.
"A man has reached old age when he can't take yes for an answer."
So it doesn't matter... at the age of thirty-one you have become a wise old man. And the beauty of a wise old man is tremendously valuable in comparison to the foolishness of all those who are just young. The young people are bound to fool around; it is rare at this age, to be able to get out of this stupidity that we call youth.
Dhyan Satyama, you are exactly what I would like every sannyasin to be. This place is a place for transformation, and the only energy you have got to be transformed is sex.
Sex is your basic life force.
If you transform it into higher forms, it is going to disappear from its lower manifestations. But you are not going to miss anything; at each higher state the energy will give you more and more blissfulness.
The higher it rises... it becomes a tidal wave of blissfulness. You start feeling orgasmic in every fiber of your being. Sexual orgasm seems to be a faraway echo, almost as if you have seen it in a dream - just a faint memory.
Because what you are now experiencing is so authentic and so real, so solid, you will not need a companion. That too is one of the basic dependencies, and that's why all couples are in constant fight. The reason is that nobody wants to be dependent on anyone. It takes away your dignity, your individuality, your freedom. It makes you in a subtle sense a slave.
The man who loves a woman will hate the woman, because that woman has become a necessity, and one hates to be dependent on anyone. And the same is the case for the woman. Every woman hates the husband, has to hate him, because she has become dependent on him for momentary pleasures which don't last long.
A meditator finally comes into a space where he does not need anyone to give him pleasure. He is full of blissfulness, overflowing, he can share, he can fill the whole world with his blissfulness. His very being has become orgasmic.
Now that is something tremendously significant to be remembered: you are both, man and woman together. Because you are born of a father and a mother - half of your being has been contributed by your father and the other half by your mother - naturally you cannot be just man or just woman. It is a fallacy perpetuated for centuries that man is man and woman is woman. It is absolutely wrong.
Every man has his woman within him and every woman has her man within her. Only the meditator comes to know his whole being. Suddenly his inner woman and the inner man melt and merge into each other. That creates an orgasmic state in him. Now it is no more a momentary experience that comes and goes; it is something that continues, day in, day out, like heartbeat or breathing. Every moment he is in an orgasmic state.
Naturally, sex disappears. A greater experience has come in. The sun has risen; what is the use of having a candle unnecessarily burning? You are bound to blow it out. If somebody keeps his candle burning in the sun, it only shows one thing: that man is blind.
A meditator comes to know such a vast experience of joy that all other pleasures simply fade away.
You are asking, "Can it be true that sex is already over?"
Yes, it is true, and you need not repent for it. Don't look back, look ahead. Something greater is going to open in your being, something like a lotus, which will give you absolute fulfillment and contentment, and freedom, independence, individuality. For the first time you will feel you are able to fly alone into the vast sky of existence. Your need for the other has disappeared - that is what sex is, the need for the other - and in this state of orgasmic experience within yourself, without the help of anyone else you become capable of sharing your love, not bargaining, not even hoping for something in return.
In other words, this is what I was just talking about: friendliness - friendliness towards the whole existence. Nothing is greater, more glorious. Nothing is more of a splendor and a miracle.
You are saying, Satyama, "I have been your sannyasin for four and a half years and my body is thirty-one years of age." The body can be of any age....
There are two things which are not necessarily of the same age as the body. The lowest of these two is well understood by the psychoanalyst; the higher is still beyond them. Psychology is still struggling to stand up. It is crawling on the ground at the lowest level of human energies; hence, about the lower it has found a few fundamental truths.
One is the mental age: a man may be seventy years old, yet his mental age may be only fourteen - or vice versa. In cases like Mozart... when he was only four years of age he was able to play on musical instruments like a great master; at the age of five he was already becoming famous. Even great masters of music could not believe the phenomenal energy of Mozart. At the age of five, he was almost as mature mentally as very few people become at the age of seventy.
Psychology has accepted that body and mind don't grow together. Sometimes, most of the time, the mind is lagging behind and the body goes on growing. A few times, in rare cases, the mind grows ahead and the body lags behind.
When Emerson, a great creative and sensitive man, was asked about his age, he said, "Three hundred and sixty years." The people who were present could not believe it; they could not believe that Emerson, a man of truth, a very innocent man, a man loved and respected by all those who could understand the heights of consciousness... why should he lie about such a thing? Three hundred and sixty years old? - he does not look more than sixty. What to make of it?
Finally, one man asked, "Perhaps I could not rightly hear what you said. Will you please repeat it?"
Emerson laughed and said, "Why are you going in a roundabout way? Why don't you say directly that you cannot believe that my age is three hundred and sixty years?"
Then another man said, "Now we have to ask you. You look only sixty at the most; you will have to give us evidence that you are three hundred and sixty years of age. And a man of your integrity is expected not to lie."
Emerson said, "I am not lying. I have lived so much in sixty years that you will be able to live only in three hundred and sixty years. According to my intensity and totality of life, I have lived in sixty years as much as an ordinary man will live in three hundred and sixty years. I am not lying; it all depends how you live."
Meditation changes your life pattern completely.
This has still to be recognized by psychology. But the psychology of the enlightened ones knows perfectly well that consciousness can go on growing. It need not grow simultaneously with the body.
Adi Shankara, the founder of a systematic, philosophical system for the Hindus, died at the age of thirty three. He became enlightened somewhere about the age of seven. When he was seven his father had died. He was the son of a poor father, a poor brahmin; the mother was only living for him, the only son. At the age of seven, Adi Shankara asked his mother that he wanted to renounce the world. Can you conceive of a child of seven years old thinking of renouncing the world? - must be another Mozart, a Mozart of spirituality.
The mother said, "Your father has died and you want to renounce the world. Don't you think of me?"
Adi Shankara said, "I can only promise you one thing: before you die I will be present, so in your last moments you can die peacefully. But right now, allow me to renounce the world. I want to become a sannyasin and to go in search." The mother refused.
Not to hurt her, Shankara remained for a few days more. One day he went to the river. He used to go for his bath every day, but that day he insisted that his mother should also come with him. The mother was a little concerned: why he was so insistent? But when he became absolutely adamant that "if you don't come, I will not go for the bath. Then I cannot worship and then I cannot eat either,"
so the mother had to go.
The mother was standing on the river bank and the little child, seven years old, was caught by a crocodile. A crowd gathered, but there was nothing that could be done. Both the feet of the boy were inside the mouth of the crocodile, and Shankara shouted to the mother, "Now there are only two possibilities: either you give me permission to renounce the world and become a sannyasin or the crocodile is going to eat me. It is up to you to decide. Be quick!"
It is a strange story. How did the crocodile conspire in this? And the mother of course immediately shouted, "I allow you, you can become a sannyasin. Even this much will be a solace to me, that you are still alive."
And the story goes that the crocodile immediately left him and disappeared. Must have been a very saintly crocodile... Whatever the case - perhaps it is only a parable - one thing is certain: that Adi Shankara at the age of seven must have convinced his mother that either she had to allow him to be a sannyasin or she had to be ready for his death. How he managed it, that is a different matter. But one thing is certain: he gave her the clear-cut choice, either death or sannyas. Obviously the poor mother had no choice; she allowed him.
At the age of seven, Adi Shankara became a sannyasin. In the whole history of the world there is no other case parallel to Shankara. Somewhere between the age of seven and eleven - there is no historical record of it, but it seems just between seven and eleven - he must have become enlightened. At the age of eleven he started writing his great commentaries on the UPANISHADS, and on one of the greatest and most complicated scriptures that exists in India, Badrayana's BRAHMASUTRAS.
At the age of eleven it is almost impossible even to understand it - and Shankara wrote the greatest commentary. It has defeated all the great commentators of the past and all the great commentators that came after him. Nobody has been able to go beyond these flights of consciousness and bring such tremendous meaning to the almost dead scripture of Badrayana, BRAHMASUTRAS. The way he interprets is possible only after enlightenment. Each small word... the way he gives a turn to its meaning. Something which was looking very ordinary immediately becomes extraordinary. He has the touch that transforms everything into gold.
By the time he was thirty-three, he had written all the great commentaries on all the great scriptures, and he had traveled all over the country and defeated all the so-called great philosophers, theologians, priests. At the age of thirty-three he died.
Consciousness is not limited to your physical age.
Consciousness can go far ahead of you, your body.
So don't be worried, Satyama. You are saying, "I never planned to drop sex, but now it feels like it has dropped me." That's the right way. You should never drop sex with conscious effort, because that is only repression. You should not pay any attention to sex. Your whole focus should be towards meditation, and one day sex is going to drop just like an old leaf dropping from the tree, not making even any noise, silently falling into the earth and disappearing.
I have given you the name Satyama. I would like to explain to you that that name belonged to an ancient seeker. He was also in the same category as Adi Shankara. When he was just nine years old, he asked his mother, "I would like to go to a forest monastery and learn all about myself, before it is too late."
The mother said, "My son, you are creating a difficulty for me. But if you have decided, then I will not stand in your way. Just one thing you have to remember: in that forest monastery the first question that will be asked will be, ?What is the name of your father?' - and I don't know the name of your father. When I was young, being poor I used to serve in many houses, and I have been sexually abused by so many rich people. I was so poor I could not fight back, neither was anybody ready to believe me. Those people were powerful, and my whole concern was you. I don't know who your father was out of so many people who have forced me to make love against my will.
"So when you are asked in the university, you have to say the simple truth. Your name is Satyakama, and your mother's name is Jawali. As far as your father is concerned, your mother has said that while young she has been abused, exploited by so many rich people, so she does not know who exactly your father is. ... So please call me not by my father's name, call me by my mother's name. My name is Satyakama, my mother's name is Jawali. You can call me Satyakama Jawali."
He went to the forest university. And the first thing the calpati of the university, the head of the university asked him was, "What is your caste?"
He said, "I don't know."
"Who is your father?"
He said, "I don't know. I asked my mother, and this is the story she has told me.... You can call me Satyakama Jawali."
The old man could not believe that a mother could be so truthful as to say this to her own son, and the son also could be so truthful as to repeat it to a stranger without feeling any guilt or any humiliation - with utter dignity, with absolute acceptance, whatever is the case. The old man must have been a man of immense understanding. He said, "You are accepted, Satyakama Jawali, because at the age of nine you are so truthful. And your mother is also great. Her respect for truth is immense. You don't know your caste... I know your caste. You are a born brahmin" - the highest caste in India - "because of your truth. I can deduce logically that you must belong to the highest caste. You are accepted." This Satyakama one day became enlightened.
I have given you the name Dhyan Satyama - just another form of Satyakama. Remain truthful to yourself and to the world and the day of your illumination is not far away.
Okay, Maneesha?
Yes, Osho.