OshoSpeak – 2009: #5

From ‘Be Still and Know’ – Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh responding to disciples’ and visitors’ questions.


The East has lived religiously – that is one pole – and because it has lived religiously it has not been able to produce science. The West has lived scientifically, and because of its science it has lost track of religion. Now for the first time, the East is no more East and the West is no more West. The earth is becoming one:….becoming one global village.
Man is entering a new phase……




Zen painting is not done in the Western way. In Western painting you will find that the painter goes on improving…..Zen painters cannot do that…….they use a certain kind of paper, rice-paper, on which you can make only one stroke. You cannot correct it, you have to leave it as it is…………It has to be from the heart, a single stroke. If your heart is full of it, it will come right. But you cannot correct it, correction comes from the mind…………It has to come out of your meditativeness, your silence. Your feeling of the moment is spread on the rice-paper.




The whole art of meditation consists in witnessing…what does it bring? At the most we can stay it brings total peace; it simply brings eternal silence………..
The state of witnessing remains indefinable. That’s why Buddha has not used the word ‘bliss’ at all, because it can give you a wrong idea – because in your mind bliss will mean happiness……..Buddha has not……used the word ‘God’.
The word that he has used is ‘absolute void’ – shunyam




Just the other night I was looking at a book: Jesus, The Only Way. Why the only way? Is Buddha not a way? Is Lao Tzu…..Zarathustra…..Moses……Mohammed not a way? Thre are infinite ways to reach God. Why make God so poor? – only one way?
But the Christian priest is not interested in god: he is interested in creating a business. He has to claim that Jesus is the only way, that all other ways are wrong. He is in search of customers.
That’s why every religion creates fascists and fanatics………the world has suffered very much from this fanatical approach. It is time, ripe time now, to drop all kinds of fascist and fanatical attitudes




It is almost impossible to understand Jesus through the priests. The only pure way…..return inside. There you will meet Christ-consciousness………Never be a Christian – be a Christ! Never be a Buddhist – be a Buddha! Never be a Hindu – be a Krishna!..........u need not go into the scriptures and you need not ask the scholars: you will have to ask the mystics how to go in.




Each religion creates Adolf Hitlers because of this idea that “My way is the only right way.”




Ego is a state of no-prayer: egolessness is a state of prayer………..it is wordless silence………In prayer you are not Hindu or Christian………….In prayer you are not: in prayer God is.




…….religion is possible only in a civilized, cultured, sophisticated society………….primitive people also have religion, but their religion………..it is magic, it is ritual. Hence they have not produced Buddhas. They are good people, simple, beautiful, innocent………..
…….at the most they create magicians……..Their religion………..never reaches the heights of a Patanjali or a Lao Tzu or a Mohammed. They have not produced any Koran, Upanishads, Bible; they cannot. They are people who have not yet said no………who have not yet disobeyed. They have not eaten the fruit of knowledge yet………….
………Eat the fruit of knowledge! Become knowledgeable and one day renounce your knowledge. Then wisdom is born………..
Before you can become a Christ you will have to become a disobedient Adam and Eve……..Christ is the higher stage of Adam. Adam says no, creates a personality; Christ says yes, drops the old personality and attains to a new individuality which is eternal.




Tomorrow when you go for a morning walk, enjoy the walk – the birds in the trees and the sunrays and the clouds and the wind……remember you are a mirror; you are reflecting the clouds and the trees and the birds and the people.
This self-remembering Buddha calls ‘sammasati’ – right mindfulness. Krishnamurthi calls it ‘choiceless awareness’, the Upanishads call it ‘witnessing’, Gurdjieff calls it ‘self-remembering’




……..when Buddha became enlightened somebody asked him, “What have you gained?”
He said, “I have not gained anything, but I have lost so many things. I have lost my desires…..dreams….sleep….anger….greed….ambition…..ego……But by losing all those things I have come home. I have become just myself – a purity, a clarity, a cloudless sky.”




The Devil is nothing but the other side of God……….’Divine’ and ’devil’ both come from the same root, ‘dev’ in Sanskrit…………if you repress one part of God, one aspect of his being, sooner of later it is going to assert itself…………
In the East, particularly in India, there is no Devil worship at all……….The Indian trinity……..Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh: these are the three faces of God. Brahma is the creator…..the aspect that creates, Vishnu, the aspect that maintains the world…keeps it running….Mahesh, the destroyer who destroys the world………..
…..The Christian concept of God as creator makes it a very limited one. Then whose responsibility is it to destroy things?......no creation is possible without destruction



Reference

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiddu_Krishnamurti
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurdjieff