The Greatest Crime in the World? To Know The Truth…
Every child is born with an innate search for truth. It is not something learned or adopted later on in life. Truth simply means, “I am, but I do not know who I am.” And the question is natural – “I must know the reality of my being.” It is not a curiosity.
Man is capable by birth to inquire who he is. So it is not a question of learning, cultivation, education; you bring the quest with yourself. You are the quest.
Your society destroys you. It has very sophisticated ways and means to destroy your quest, to remove the question from your being, or at least cover it up. And the method it uses is this; before the child has even asked who he is, the answer is given. And any answer that has been given before the question has been asked is futile; it is going to be just a burden.
He is told that he is a soul, that he is a spirit, that he is not a body, that he is not material. Or, in communist countries, he is told that he is a body, just material, and that only in the old days, out of fear and ignorance, did people believe that they have souls – that that is just a superstition. But in both cases, the child is being given an answer for which he has not asked. And his mind is delicate, pure… and he trusts his mother, his father – there is no reason for him not to trust.
He starts a journey of belief, and belief kills the quest. He becomes more and more knowledgeable. Then education is there, religious education is there, and there is no end to collecting knowledge. But all this knowledge is futile – not only futile, but poisonous, because the first step has gone wrong. The question was not asked, and the answer has been implanted in his mind, and since then he has been collecting more and more answers. He has completely forgotten, that any answer that is not the finding of a question, is meaningless.
So the only quality of a seeker of truth is that he does not believe, that he is not a believer, that he is ready to be ignorant rather than to be knowledgeable, because ignorance is at least natural, simple, innocent. And out of ignorance there is a possibility, almost a certainty, that the question will arise, that the journey will begin. But through knowledge you are lost in a jungle of words, theories, doctrines, dogmas. And there are so many, and they are so contradictory to each other, that soon you will find yourself, more and more knowledgeable, more and more confused.
As far as I am concerned the basic quality of a seeker of truth is to cut himself away from all belief systems, from all borrowed knowledge – in other words, to have the courage to be ignorant rather than to have borrowed knowledge. Ignorance has a beauty; it is at least yours, authentic, sincere.
It has come with you. It is your blood, it is in your bones, it is your marrow.
Knowledgeability is ugly, absolute rubbish. It has been poured upon you by others, and you are carrying the load of it. And the load is such that it will not give you any opportunity to inquire on your own what truth is. Your collection of knowledge will answer immediately that this is truth.
If you are filled with The Holy Bible, then the question will be answered by The Holy Bible. If you are filled with the Vedas, then the question will come out of the Vedas. But it will come from some source outside yourself; it will not be your discovery. And that which is not your discovery is not yours.
Truth brings freedom because it is your discovery. It makes you fully into a man; otherwise you remain on the level of the animals; you are, but you don’t know who you are. The search for truth is really the search for the reality of your being.
Once you have entered your being, you have entered into the being of the whole, because we are different on the periphery but at the center we meet – we are one. You can draw many lines from the periphery of a circle towards the center; those lines on the periphery have a certain distance from each other. But as they come closer to the center, the distance goes on becoming less. And when they reach to the center the distance disappears.
At the center we are one.
At the periphery of existence we appear to be separate.
And to know the truth of your being is to know the truth of the whole.
There is just one quality, one courage – not to be afraid of being ignorant. On that point there can be no compromise, no cheap borrowed knowledge to decorate yourself with as a wise man. That’s enough! Just be pure and natural, and out of that purity, naturalness, ignorance, the quest is bound to born.
Every human being would be a seeker of truth if the society were not interfering with children.
The class of children is the most harmed, oppressed, exploited, distorted class of all classes – and the most helpless. And you are taking advantage of the helplessness of small children. But you are also not responsible. The same has been done to you. It is difficult to find out who was responsible in the beginning. But as long as we can look back, this has been the situation: every generation corrupts the new generation, and anybody who wants to prevent this corruption is condemned as corrupting the youth.
The Death of Socrates
Socrates was condemned for corrupting the youth. and all that he was doing was the simple process of removing borrowed knowledge and helping his disciples to be themselves and then ‘to know thyself’. If anybody has served truth the most sincerely it was Socrates. But he was condemned by the court, by the law, by the people who were in power, for corruption, for corrupting young minds.
Why are they afraid? They know perfectly well that they have no foundation. So if anybody shows the young people that there knowledge is unfounded, that all their answers are bogus because they don’t even have questions, that they are only repeating things parrot – like, but they don’t have any understanding of what they are saying… then anybody who has a little intelligence will be able to understand it immediately.
Is this corruption of the youth?
To bring people to the quest of the the truth – is this corruption?
It seems it is the greatest crime in the world in which – unfortunately – we are living…
Osho: Beyond Psychology
Meditation Is Your Awakening…
One-pointedness, concentration and meditation are not related to each other at all. This is one of the confusions prevalent all over the world.
One-pointedness is another name for concentration, but meditation is just the opposite of concentration. But in most of the books, in most of the dictionaries, and by the so-called teachers, they are used as if they are synonymous.
Concentration simply means one-pointedness. It is something of the mind. Mind can be a chaos, a crowd. Mind can be many voices, many directions. Mind can be a crossroads. Ordinarily, that’s what mind is, a crowd.
But if the mind is a chaos, you cannot think rationally, you cannot think scientifically. To think rationally and scientifically, you have to be concentrated on the object of your study. Whatever the object is, the one thing necessary is that you are pouring your whole mental energy onto that object. Only with this much force is there a possibility to know the objective truth; hence, concentration is the method of all sciences.
But meditation is totally different. First, meditation is not of the mind. It is neither one-pointed mind nor many-pointed mind; it is simply not mind. Meditation is going beyond, beyond mind and its boundaries. They cannot be related; they are opposite to each other.
Concentration is mind and meditation is no-mind.
The West, particularly, has not known meditation. It has remained confined to concentration — hence all scientific progress, technology — but it has not known the inner science of silence, peace, of being a light unto oneself.
One-pointedness can reveal the secrets of the outside world. Meditation reveals the secrets of your own subjectivity. It can be said, concentration is objective and meditation is subjective. Concentration moves outwards; meditation moves inwards. Concentration is going far away from yourself. Meditation is coming home to your innermost center. Mind, reason, logic, all point towards the outer — to them, the inner does not exist at all.
But this is a fundamental law of the inner reality that nothing is ever accomplished in the inner world by a reasonable man. It is an irrational, or better to say suprarational approach — to know oneself you don’t need mind, you need utter silence. Mind is always concerned with some thing or many things. There are thoughts and thoughts, ripples upon ripples — the lake of the mind is never ripple-less.
Your inner being can be reflected only in a mirror without any ripples. No mind — absolute silence of all thoughts, absence of the mind completely — becomes the mirror without any ripples, without even a single fluttering of thought. And suddenly, the explosion: you have become aware for the first time of your own being.
Up to now, you have known things of the world; now you know the knower. That’s exactly what Socrates means when he says: Know thyself. Because without knowing thyself — I want to add to the Socratic advice — you cannot be yourself. Knowing thyself is a step to being thyself, and unless you are yourself, you can never feel at ease. You can never feel contented; you can never feel fulfilled; you can never feel at home in existence.
Some discomfort, some misery… you are not exactly aware what, but a constant feeling that something essential is missing; that you have everything and yet something which can make everything meaningful is absent. Your palace is full of all the treasures of the world but you are empty. Your kingdom is big but you are absent. This is the situation of the modern man; hence, the constant feeling of meaninglessness, anxiety, anguish, angst.
Modern mind is the most troubled mind that has ever existed for the simple reason that man has come of age. A buffalo is not disturbed about the meaning of life — the grass is his meaning of life; more than that all is useless. The trees are not interested in the meaning of life; just a good shower and a rich soil and a beautiful sun and life is a tremendous joy. No tree is an atheist; no tree ever doubts. Except for man, doubt does not exist in existence. Except for man, nobody looks worried. Even donkeys are not worried. They look so relaxed, so philosophically at ease. They have no fear of death, no fear of the unknown, no concern for the tomorrow.
It is only man and his intelligence that has given him a very difficult life, a constant torture. You try to forget it in a thousand and one ways, but it goes on coming back again and again. And this will continue until your last breath unless you know something of meditation, unless you know how to turn inwards, how to have a look at your own interiority.
And suddenly, all meaninglessness disappears.
On a very high level, you are again as at ease as the trees. At a very high consciousness, you are as relaxed as the whole of existence. But your relaxation has a beauty to it — it is conscious, it is alert. It knows that it is. It knows that while the whole of existence is asleep, it is awake.
What is the point of a beautiful sunrise if you are asleep? What is the beauty of a rose if you are asleep? Mind is your sleep, concentrated or not. Meditation is your awakening. The moment you awake, sleep disappears and with it all the dreams, all the projections, all expectations, all desires. Suddenly you are in a state of desirelessness, non-ambition, unfathomable silence. And only in this silence, blossoms flower in your being. Only in this silence the lotuses open their petals.
Remember that any teacher who says to you that concentration is meditation is committing a great crime. Not knowing that he is misleading you, and misleading you on such a fundamental subject, he is far more dangerous than somebody who can kill you. He is killing you far more significantly and deeply. He is destroying your consciousness; he is destroying your very possibility to open the doors of all the mysteries that you are.
Albert Camus has one beautiful statement to remember: “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” Naturally, when mind is not there, no-mind cannot be a rational concept. It is absurd. It cannot say anything reasonably — where it is, what it is, what it signifies. It can only indicate mystically — hence all the parables of the world. The mystics could not say in a logical way what they have experienced. They went around telling stories, parables, which can be understood on two levels: one of the mind and one of the no-mind.
That is the beauty of a parable. You can understand it just like any other story, but it was not meant to be just another story; it was meant to give you some hint, some hidden hint towards that for which mind is absolutely inadequate. I will give you a few examples.
A blind man is brought to Gautam Buddha. The blind man is not an ordinary man, he is a great logician. And his whole village is tired of his logic. They are very annoyed and irritated by the blind man, because he refuses to believe that light exists. And he requires of the whole village that if they say light exists, they have to give him proof: “I can touch things; let me touch your light. I can taste things; let me taste your light. I can smell things; at least let me smell your light. I can hear things; beat the light so I can hear the sound. Do something. These are the only four senses I have.”
Light is neither available to the nose nor to the ears; neither to the mouth, nor to the hands. Unless you have eyes, there is no way to prove that light exists.
Gautam Buddha said to the people, “You have brought him to a wrong man. You have all given all kinds of proofs, and you have not been successful. What can I do? Take him to my personal physician. He is just sitting behind me. He is the greatest physician of our time; perhaps he can cure the blind man’s eyes. He does not need any argument, he needs treatment. He does not need any evidence, logical proof about light; he simply needs eyes. Then there will not be any question or any doubt or any asking for evidence.”
He was given to the physician. It took six months for him to cure that man from his blindness. The day he saw light he cried and went from house to house in the village to offer an apology, “Forgive me. Although I was being rational and logical I had no idea that unless you have eyes, you cannot be given any proof that cannot be rejected by you, argued against.” Although the whole world knows that light exists, the whole world cannot make a single blind man convinced of it.
Your consciousness is not available to the mind. Your mind is not the right vehicle to know yourself. Unless you have a new eye — what in the East we have called the third eye, symbolically…. These two eyes open outwards. Just as a symbol, the third eye opens inwards. The two eyes are for the duality of the world, the one eye is for the singleness of your being.
As you start looking inwards, you are amazed: you were ignoring yourself, and that was the trouble. That was why you were in misery, anxiety, suffering. You were trying everything to remove the misery, but it was caused by your unawareness, by your unconsciousness, by your ignorance of your own being. That was the cause. And unless that cause is removed, you will never have a taste of blissfulness, of ecstasy, of immortality, of the divineness of existence.
Go beyond the mind — and the way beyond the mind is very simple — just become a watcher of the mind, because watching immediately separates you from the thing you watch. You are watching a movie; one thing is certain, you are not an actor in the movie. Watching the road and the crowd passing by, one thing is certain; you are standing by the side, you are not on the road in the crowd.
Whatever you watch, you are not.
The moment you start watching the mind, a tremendous experience happens — a recognition that you are not the mind. Just this small recognition that “I am not the mind” is the beginning of no-mind. You have transcended the crowd, the voices, the chaos of the mind; you have moved into the silences of the heart.
Deva Premal and Miten – Gayatri Mantra
Here is your home, your eternal being.
Here is your deathless, essential existence.
Knowing this has never been transcended by anything more blissful, more ecstatic.
You may have heard about Segal’s Law: A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.
Mind is not only two, it is many. A man with mind is not sure of anything. He is doubtful about everything; he is unsure about everything. And a life of doubt and unsureness is not a life; you don’t have any roots anywhere. And without roots you cannot have flowers, and you cannot become fruitful. Your life will remain barren, a desert where nothing grows…
Osho – The Invitation
An Oceanic Experience…
To be religious is an experience, just like love. It is an encounter with the totality of existence.
It is an oceanic experience, the dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean. You can say either the dewdrop has become the ocean, or you can say the ocean has become the dewdrop.
It is the greatest experience there is.
But to belong to a religion is not an experience, it is just a belief system in which you have been brought up. It is all borrowed.
And remember that truth cannot be borrowed. Either it is yours, or it is not there.
Religion, is not in the holy scriptures but in the holiness of existence.
It is a prayer without words. It is a song without sound. It is pure silence. And in that silence, existence speaks to you.
In that silence, you speak to existence, there is a dialogue, there is a transfer of energy.
But to be a part of an organized religion is to be not really alive, not really in search of truth, not in love with existence. It is a kind of death – although you go on breathing, you go on eating. But all your breathing and all your eating drive you only towards the graveyard. You don’t grow up, you only grow old.
The organized religions are all dead; the churches, the temples, the mosques, the synagogues… they are all graveyards of the past. And the sooner we convert them into museums the better, otherwise they are going to kill the whole of humanity, they have already killed too much in every man. They have crippled everybody, poisoned everybody; their destruction is uncountable.
The rebellious man cannot accept any of this idiocy. His religion is his intelligence.
His religion is his consciousness.
His religion is his awareness.
And out of his awareness, he starts living for the first time, and he knows that life is the only God there is – there is no other God.
The true religion has no name, it cannot have any name. Buddha lived it, Jesus lived it – but remember, Jesus was not a Christian and Buddha was not a Buddhist, he had never heard of the word.
The truly religious people have been simply religious, they have not been dogmatic…
It is strange – so strange that it is almost unbelievable – that there are three hundred religions in the world and there is no peace, no joy, no celebration, no holiness, no divineness anywhere – this is such an absurdity!
If truth is one, how can there be three hundred religions? If science, which is concerned with the objective truth is one, then religion is also one, because it is concerned with the subjective truth, the other side of the truth…
Osho: The Rebel
The Door To Reality Is No-Mind…
There has been a great misunderstanding between life and time. Time is thought to consist of three tenses: past, present, future, which is wrong. Time consists only of past and future.
It is life which consists of the present.
So those who want to live, for them there is no other way than to live this moment. Only the present is existential. The past is simply a collection of memories, and the future is nothing but your imaginations, your dreams.
Reality is herenow.
Those who want just to think about life, about living, about love, for them past and future are perfectly beautiful, because they give them infinite scope. They can decorate their past, make it as beautiful as they like, although they never lived it, when it was present they were not there. These are just shadows, reflections. They were continuously running, and while running they have seen a few things. They think they have lived. In the past only death is the reality, not life.
In the future also, only death is the reality, not life. Those who have missed living in the past, automatically, to substitute for the gap, start dreaming about the future. Their future is only a projection out of the past. Whatever they have missed in the past, they are hoping for in the future; and between the two non-existences, is the small existent moment which is life.
For those who want to live, not to think about it; to love, not to think about it; to be, not to philosophize about it, there is no other alternative. Drink the present moment’s juices, squeeze it totally, because it is not going to come back again; once gone, it is gone forever.
But because of the misunderstanding which has been almost as old as man, and all the cultures have joined in it , they have made the present part of time. And the present has nothing to do with time.
If you are just here in this moment, there is no time. There is immense silence, stillness, no movement; nothing is passing, everything has come to a sudden stop.
The present gives you the opportunity to dive deep into the water of life, or to fly high into the sky of life. But on both sides there are dangers, past and future are the most dangerous words in human language. Between past and future, living in the present is almost like walking on a tight rope, on both sides there is danger.
But once you have tasted the juice of the present, you don’t care about dangers. Once you are in tune with life, then nothing matters.
And to me life is all there is.
You can call it “God”, but that is not a good name because religions have contaminated it. You can call it “existence”, which is beautiful. But what you call it is not of any consequence. The understanding should be clear that you have only one moment in your hands, the real moment. And again and again you will get that real moment. Either you live it or you leave it unlived.
Most of the people simply drag themselves from the cradle to the grave without living at all.
I have heard about a Sufi statement that a man, when he died, suddenly realized, “My God, I was alive.” But only death as a contrast made him aware, that for seventy years he had been alive, but life itself had not enriched him.
It is not the fault of life.
It is our misunderstanding.
My insistence for watchfulness will give you life without even thinking about it, because watchfulness can only be in the present.
You can witness only the present…
Osho: The Transmission of the Lamp
It has happened again and again: Jesus comes, but you don’t recognize him; Buddha comes, but you don’t recognize him.
Why does this happen?… and then for centuries and centuries you think about Jesus and Buddha.
Then religions are created, then great organizations are created for the one whom you never recognized when he was here.
Why do you miss a living Christ?
This has to be understood, because it must be something very deep-rooted in the mind, in the very nature of the mind.
It is not an individual error, it is not a mistake committed by this man or that man.
For millennia it has been committed by the human mind.
The mind has to be penetrated and understood.
One thing: the mind has no present, it has only past and future.
The present is so narrow that the mind cannot catch it.
The moment the mind catches it, it has already become the past.
So the mind can remember the past, can desire the future, but cannot see the present.
The past is vast, the future also is vast; the present is so atomic, so subtle, that by the time you become aware, it is gone.
And you are not so aware!
A very great intensity of awareness is needed, only then will you be able to see the present.
You have to be fully alert; if you are not totally alert, the present cannot be seen.
The mind is drunk.
It cannot see the present, that which is before you.
The mind is filled with dreams, desires.
You don’t have a presence.
That’s why Jesus is missed, Buddha is missed, and then for centuries you weep and cry, then for centuries you feel guilty.
For centuries you think, pray, imagine, and when Jesus is there you miss.
Jesus can be met only if you attain to a presence of mind, such a presence that has no past, that has no future.
Only such a presence can look into the present, and then the present is eternal.
But eternity is in depth, it is not a linear movement, it is not horizontal – it is vertical.
HIS DISCIPLES SAID TO HIM: WHEN WILL THE REPOSE OF THE DEAD COME ABOUT
AND WHEN WILL THE NEW WORLD COME?
HE SAID TO THEM: WHAT YOU EXPECT HAS COME, BUT YOU KNOW IT NOT.
HIS DISCIPLES SAID TO HIM: TWENTY-FOUR PROPHETS SPOKE IN ISRAEL AND
THEY ALL SPOKE ABOUT THEE.
HE SAID TO THEM: YOU HAVE DISMISSED THE LIVING ONE WHO IS BEFORE YOU,
AND YOU HAVE SPOKEN ABOUT THE DEAD.
JESUS SAID: I HAVE CAST FIRE UPON THE WORLD, AND SEE, I GUARD THE
WORLD UNTIL IT IS AFIRE.
A religious man is one who accepts this very moment
Belief is not needed.
What is needed is knowing.
Belief simply hides your ignorance, it does not make any rebellion in your being.
Rebelliousness is the essential quality of a religious man.
It is spirituality in its absolute purity.
The rebel and his rebelliousness are sacred.
A Christ is always rebellious, he is never conformist.
He can create a revolution, he cannot create an establishment…
GateLessGate Magazine 
