Belief !!!

You may have heard a story like this: once a brahmin bought a goat and was taking it home. Three or four thieves saw him and thought the goat could be snatched away from him. But the brahmin was strong and to steal from him would be no easy job, so they decided to try diplomacy, a little trickery.

One came up to him on the road saying, ”Well done! How much did you pay for the dog?” That man, that brahmin said, ”Dog! Are you blind? Or only mad? It is a goat! I am bringing her from the market. I paid fifty rupees for her.”

The thief said, ”It’s up to you, but you know... seeing a brahmin carrying a dog on his shoulders.... Dear brother, to me it looks like a dog. Could there be some mistake?”

The brahmin went on his way, wondering what kind of man was that! But he fingered the feet of the goat just to check, saying to himself, ”It is a goat.” Another of the gang was waiting across the road.

He called over to the brahmin, ”What a fine dog you bought!”

Now the brahmin hadn’t the courage to insist it was not a dog: who knows maybe it was a dog – two men could not be wrong. Still he said, ”No no, it’s not a dog.” But it was weaker now. He said it, but the foundations inside were shaken. He said, ”No, no it’s a goat.”

The man said, ”It’s a goat? You call this a goat? Then, respected brahmin, the definition of goat needs to be changed! If you call this a goat then what will you call a dog? But it’s up to you. You are a scholarly man; you can change it if you want. It’s just a name. Perhaps you say dog, perhaps you say goat – a dog it remains. Nothing changes just by calling it a goat.”

The man went away. The brahmin put the goat down and looked: it was definitely a goat... a goat like any other goat. He rubbed his eyes and splashed them with water from a roadside tap. He was nearing his own neighborhood: if people saw a brahmin carrying a dog on his shoulders it would be a blow against worship in the temple and against scholarship. People paid for his worship – they would stop paying, they would think him mad.... Again he thoroughly inspected the animal, making sure it was a goat. But what was with those two guys?

Again he shouldered the goat and started off, but now he moved a little nervously. What if anyone else saw him? Then he came across the third fellow. He exclaimed, ”What a fine dog! Where did you get it? I too have wanted to have a dog for a long time.”

The brahmin said, ”Friend, you just take it! If you want a dog, take it. It is really a dog. A friend gave it to me, you please relieve me of it.” And he ran home before anyone could find out that he had bought a dog.

This is how man lives. You have become what you believe. And there are many cheats and scoundrels all around – you have been led to believe all kinds of things. They have their own motives. The priest wants to convince you that you are a sinner, because if you are not a sinner how will he continue to pray for you? It is in his interest that a goat be taken for a dog.

A pundit... if you are not ignorant what will become of his scholarship? How will he run his business? A religious teacher... if he explains to you that you are inactive, free of doing, that you have never committed sin – then what need is there of him?

It is as if you go to a doctor and he explains that you are not sick, that you have never been sick, you cannot be sick, health is your nature – then the doctor is committing suicide. What will happen to his business? In robust health go to a doctor, go when you are not at all sick; then too you will find that he discovers some problem. Go and try it. Go in absolutely top form, when you are not sick at all; just go and do it, tell the doctor that you just want him to do a check-up. It is not easy to find a doctor who will say you are not ill. 

Source: “The Mahageeta, Volume 1” - Osho

Osho On God ! ! !

I have never spoken against God for the simple reason that God does not exist. How can you speak against someone who does not exist in the first place? I have never spoken against Christianity either, because there is no such thing in the world as Christianity.

What exists in the name of Christianity I have always called Crossianity. It is the worship of the cross, not of Christ. It is fear of death, not love of life. Just take a few things out of the life of Jesus and Christianity disappears. If he is not crucified can there be a Christianity? Jesus is not important; what is important is crucifixion. Even more important is the fiction of resurrection, but that is possible only if first Jesus is crucified. It is a corollary.

These so-called Christians worship Jesus because of resurrection. That is a great consolation against death. That's why I say they are worshiping the cross, the crucifixion, the resurrection -- not for any love for Jesus and his teachings but because of a deep fear of death. This fear of death makes them believe in things which they know are impossible. But when you are in a psychological turmoil of fear you can believe anything, just as a temporary consolation.

They believe Jesus walks on water, turns stones into bread, makes wine out of water, raises the dead back to life. Just remove these things which don't have anything to do with Jesus' teachings -- or do you think these things are necessary for there to be a religion? Then there cannot be any Buddhism, there cannot be any Jainism, there cannot be any religion other than Christianity. But all these religions are there.

Buddha never made wine out of water. In fact if he had come to know that, "Jesus is going to make wine out of water when I'm gone" -- because Jesus came five hundred years afterwards -- he would have condemned this man as a sinner. This is criminal -- making wine out of water? This is against the law of every country. Just try to make marijuana and you will know whether you are worshiped or imprisoned.

A very intelligent man, Timothy Leary, served seven years in jail because he was teaching that LSD can make man in every way superior to what he is now: his consciousness can be wider, his love can be deeper, his sensitivity can touch unknown peaks which have never been touched before. In every dimension LSD can be a tremendous boost for human growth. Just because of teaching these things he was put in jail.

He was a professor, perfectly acquainted with the chemistry of LSD and the chemistry of the mind. He was not an illiterate person; what he was saying was based on scientific discoveries. But still, because he was teaching a philosophy supporting drugs, he was imprisoned for seven years. He is not a man of great guts; professors rarely are. He may have never thought that just by teaching a philosophical attitude you can get into so much trouble.

Since he has been out of jail he has forgotten all about his philosophy. Now he is teaching something else -- he has to teach, he has become a world-famous man. He can't remain silent, he can't keep quiet. The old thing he cannot teach again; otherwise he will be back in jail. Now he is teaching something absolutely absurd. Now is the time that he should be in a madhouse.

Those seven years in jail were absolutely unjustified. On the one side these politicians go on talking about the freedom of speech, and on the other hand a man cannot say something which he feels is a scientific fact. It may not be -- then prove it!

A cultured society need not throw a man like Timothy Leary in jail. You have so many scientists, let them prove what he is saying is wrong. There is no need for any court, for any law to come into it. And if he is right then he should be accepted, then he should be received as a messiah because he is bringing a new way of transformation. If he is right, welcome him. If he is wrong, prove him wrong; that's enough.

This is very primitive, ugly, to throw him into jail because he is saying something which goes against the law. But who told you that the law is anything ultimate? You have made the law. Science goes on progressing. You will have to change your laws if they go against science; science is not to be prevented.

I am not saying that Timothy Leary is right, no, don't misunderstand me. What I am saying is, he has been mistreated without any justification. I also say he is wrong, but he is not a criminal. To be philosophically wrong does not make a person criminal.

But when I say he is wrong, I also say that there is some truth, maybe just a little bit, in what he is saying. His idea of changing men's mind chemically has a truth about it because mind is chemistry. And there has never been any method which was not chemical which has ever been used to change mind.

Just look -- yoga is the ancientmost methodology of changing mind. What do they do? Body postures are physical, but in certain postures your body chemistry changes. So simple: if you stand on your head the whole normal functioning of your body, its mechanism, is turned upside down. More blood is going into your head, less blood is going into your feet. More blood in the head is going to change the chemistry of your mind, more oxygen is going to change the chemistry of the mind.

Yoga has been teaching you breathing exercises. Breath is chemistry. With more oxygen in your lungs you are a certain man; more carbon dioxide, and you are a different man. If your lungs are full of carbon dioxide you are dead; if they are full of oxygen .... There are millions of small, very small rooms; with your breathing, only one third of those small sacs receive oxygen, two thirds remain filled with carbon dioxide. This is your normal state.

With yoga-breathing those sacs, those small rooms, start removing their carbon dioxide, throwing it out and filling themselves with oxygen. When all the sacs are full of oxygen your vitality is different, is bound to be different -- normally you are only one-third alive. And that much oxygen in your body is going to change everything -- but it is all chemistry.

So I say there is a certain truth in what Timothy Leary was saying, yet I am against his supporting drugs to transform man. That is dangerous.

In fact, politicians are idiots; otherwise they would have used this man; he would have proved of immense help to them. He would have shown them how to enslave people forever. Drugs can be created -- and people can be made addicted to those drugs -- which will cancel all revolutions, all rebellions. Anything that goes against the status quo, the drug will prevent it.

I am against him for other reasons too -- because drugs can only change mind, and man is not only mind. He is something more. The real transformation has to happen in that something more -- in consciousness. And no drug can even touch consciousness. It can change the mechanism of the mind, the chemistry of the mind. It can give you hallucinations of samadhi, of nirvana, enlightenment; but those are only hallucinations, they are not true.

One day you miss your injection and they are gone and you are back in the dumps. And when somebody falls from nirvana, he is going to have multiple fractures -- everything destroyed. If you are going to fall, it is better never to try climbing so high. It is better to crawl on the earth if you are going to fall; at least you won't have any fractures. Drugs can take you very high but you will have to come back down; it was the drug, not you.

Meditation changes not your mind, but you, your consciousness.

And the change comes by your own awareness.

Happiness And Suffering

Bertrand Russell has said he would not like to go to heaven, where only happiness abounds. How can you know happiness without knowing suffering? How can you know health without knowing sickness? Where you have everything just by wishing for it, there cannot be any joy in having it.

The joy of having something comes from the length of time you have been wanting it, expecting it. Happiness really lies in the expectation. So once you achieve it, it loses its charm for you. Every happiness is imaginary: so long as you don't possess it, it seems to be abounding happiness. But as soon as it is actualized, it ceases to be happiness; our hands are as empty as before. And then we seek some other object for our desire, and we begin to expect it again. We feel so unhappy without it and imagine that happiness will come with it.

Rothschild was one of America's multi-millionaires. There is a story about him, and I don't know if it is true or not. He was on his deathbed, and he said to his son, "You have seen from my life that I made millions and they didn't make me really happy, they didn't bring happiness with them. Do you see that wealth is not happiness?"

His son said, "It is true, as I learned from your life, that wealth is not happiness, but I also learned from your life that if one has wealth, one can have the suffering of his choice; one can choose between one suffering and another. And this freedom of choice is beautiful. I know that you were never happy, but you always chose your own kind of suffering. A poor man does not have this freedom, this choice; his suffering is determined by circumstances. Except this, there is no difference between a rich man and a poor man in the matter of suffering. A poor man has to suffer with a woman who comes his way as his wife, but the rich man can afford women with whom he wants to suffer. And this choice is not an insignificant happiness."

If you examine it deeply, you will find that happiness and suffering are two aspects of the same thing, two sides of the same coin, or, perhaps, they are different densities of the same phenomenon.

Besides, what is happiness for me may be a matter of suffering for you. If I own ten million and I lose five, I will be miserable in spite of the fact that I still own five million. But if you have nothing and you come across five million, you will be mad with joy and happiness. Although both of us will be in the same situation financially -- we have five million each -- I will be beating my head against the wall and you will be dancing and celebrating. But also remember, your celebration will not last long, because someone who comes to own five million will also be faced with the fear of losing it. In the same way, my sufferings will soon wither away, because one who loses five million soon becomes engaged in recovering that loss -- which is quite possible for him.

Strange are the ways of life. My happiness cannot be your happiness, nor can my suffering become your suffering. Even my happiness of today can not be my happiness for tomorrow. I cannot say if my happiness in this moment will continue to be my happiness in the next. Happiness and suffering are like clouds passing through the sky. They come and go.

Both happiness and suffering are there, and they are facts of life. In fact, it is wrong to call them two, but we have to, because all our languages divide things into two. Really it is one truth, sometimes seen as happiness and other times as suffering. In reality, pleasure and pain are just our interpretations, psychological interpretations. They are not real situations, they are largely interpretations of them. And it depends on us how we interpret something. And there may be a thousand interpretations of the same thing. It all depends on us.

The New Man

The new man will not be like me in the sense that he will not be my carbon copy. But in a way, in a very different way, he will be like me. I am independent; he will be independent. I am my own self; he will be his own self. I have never accepted anything just as a belief unless I have experienced it. Then there is no question of belief—I know it. So either I know something or I don't know, there is nothing in between….

I have doubted everything. I have never accepted anything because it is written in the holy scriptures, because the great founders of religions have said it, because great saints verify it. I have insisted my whole life that nothing else can prove it to me except my own experience. And when it comes as your own experience, it brings tremendous rejoicing, great blessings, flowering. Your being finds its home. The wandering is finished, you have arrived.

Now my wandering and your wandering will be different. The point where I started and the point where you will start will be different. I will arrive to my own innermost core; you will arrive to your innermost core. The ultimate experience of blossoming will be the same, but the path will be totally different. Everybody has to search and seek in his own way….

Yes, I am the new man and I am preparing the way for you to become the new man. That's why I go on insisting that you keep yourself intelligent, meditative, silent. Keep yourself alert, aware. Change every stone on the path into a stepping-stone. Don't think, "Now the stone is blocking the way." No stone blocks the way. You just have to know that every stone can be turned into a stepping-stone….

The new man will have communes, but the agreement will be freedom. You can look into my eyes and you can see my silence, my depth. You can feel my presence, my joy, my song. But you are not to repeat anything. I am simply indicating to you that what has happened to me can happen to you. There will be differences, there will be uniquenesses. I may be just a marigold flower and you may be a lotus—so don't imitate me. You may be a rose and I am just a marigold, a very poor flower who has nothing. But whoever named it marigold must have had great insight; it is the poorest flower, but there is great merriness, great joy in it—and it is pure gold, twenty-four carat….

I am the new man. You have to be the new man. I am not ordering you, I am simply saying so loudly so you can hear. And we have to create more opportunities for the new man for more people around the world.

Osho On Changing Moods

By and by, one comes to realise that it is something inside you that goes on changing, and that it has nothing to do with outside circumstances. It is something inside you, a wheel inside you, that goes on moving.

Just watch it – and it is very beautiful, because in being aware of it, something has been attained.Now you understand that you are free from outside excuses, because nothing has happened on the outside and yet your mood has changed within a few minutes from happiness to unhappiness.This means that happiness and unhappiness are your moods and don’t depend on the outside.

This is one of the most basic things to be realised, because then much can be done. So the first thing to do is to realise that moods are not dependent on outside circumstances. The second thing to understand is that they depend on your unawareness. So just watch and become aware. If happiness is there, just watch it and don’t become identified with it. When unhappiness is there, again just watch.

It is just like morning and evening. In the morning you watch and enjoy the rising sun. When the sun sets and darkness descends, that too you watch and enjoy.
Don’t use these words ’happiness’ and ’unhappiness’, because they carry judgements. Simply watch without judging – this mood ’A’, and this mood ’B’, mm? do you follow? ’A’ mood has gone,now ’B’ mood is here, and you are simply a watcher. Suddenly you will realise that when you call happiness ’A’, it is not so happy, and when you call unhappiness ’B’, it is not so unhappy. Just by calling the moods A and B, a distance is created.

When you say ’happiness’, much is implied in the word. You are saying you want to cling to it, that you don’t want it to go. When you say ’unhappy’, you are not just using a word; much is implied in it. You are saying that you don’t want it, that it should not be there. All these things are said unconsciously.

So use these terms for the moods for seven days, and then tell me. Just be a watcher – as if you
are sitting on top of the hill, and in the valley clouds and sunrises and sunsets come... sometimes it is day and sometimes night, mm? Just be a watcher on the hill far away.

Osho On Films,Media.

Books are very old media. The days for books are gone. People don't have that much time to read, because reading is active; you have to do something. Television is perfectly okay. You have nothing to do; you simply sit and see.

So something that is active is not going to spread very fast -- rather, something that people can simply sit and see. And eyes are more powerful than ears. When you listen to something you tend to forget it, but when you see something, you remember. Seeing is the most primitive language, so through TV the most primitive has become the most modern.

Children see... their language is pictorial. If you talk about mangoes, you have to show them the picture; the picture comes first. Through the picture they learn the word cat. By and by the picture is forgotten; superimposed by the word. Then we talk about a cat, never realising that there is no corresponding picture inside.

Mind has become more verbal on the superficial level, but deep down it remains pictorial. If you think of love, you start visualising... imagination starts working. Hence the appeal of pornography -- because you can see something. And it has been realised for centuries that the eyes are very potential. That's why we say, 'Never believe a word that you have heard. But if you have seen it, then it is true.' But why? Why so much preference for the eyes and not for the ears?

Whatsoever is seen, people think is true, so TV is used by all sorts of people; because when people see, they believe. Seeing is believing. The moment you see, you cannot doubt -- hence all the advertising that goes on. In fact TV shows are not meant for shows; they are just in between two advertisements. The real thing is the advertisement.

When you are relaxed and in a passive mood, anything that is said to you or you see, impresses deeply. You are vulnerable, almost in a hypno-sleep. And when you are watching for hours together, the eyes become focused, hypnotised. TV is the latest hypnosis. People become almost glued to their chairs; they cannot move -- and then the advertisement.

In the past also, we have always talked about seers. Those who have realised the truth, we call seers. In India, philosophy is called vision -- darshan. The truth has been seen. But why seen? Why not heard? Why not touched? Why not smelled? Why not tasted? Because eyes are just a member of this whole operation of senses, but they are very dominating.

Almost eighty percent of your personality is dominated by the eyes, so the book is almost out of date. Now people would like to see, and soon people will be seeing books also; they will not be reading. Sooner or later books are going to disappear. There will be microfilms of books so you can just put them on the projector and see the books moving on the screen; you can simply sit.

Film is one of the most potential things that man has yet invented. It has given people their childhood again... again they can think in pictorial language.

So go back home and think about it, mm? And continue meditating....