Osho : Meditation is a state of awareness, watchfulness, witnessing. Ordinarily we live just like a robot: we go through all the gestures of living, but they are only gestures; there is no consciousness behind it. We are functioning like a mechanism. And that’s what the society wants us to do. The society needs machines, not men. Machines are good in a way; they are very obedient. Nobody has ever heard of any machine being rebellious, of any machine saying no.
They are always at your disposals push the button and they start functioning, and whenever you want. They don’t even need a coffee break; day in, day out, they can go on working for you. Hence slowly slowly society bas tried to reduce man to a machine. It has almost succeeded. Fortunately it has only almost succeeded. With a few persons it has failed — and those few are the salt of the earth. Moise is a form of Moses. Moses is one of those few people who can be called the salt of the earth. Existence is beautiful because there have been people like Moses.
They function consciously; they create great rebellions. The whole evolution has depended on these few people. Meditation means undoing what the society has done to you. It has reduced you to a machine; you have to de-automatise yourself, you have to become a man again. You have to come out of this state of unconsciousness, of mechanicalness. You have to come out of this sleep. It is possible only through meditation. There is no other way, there has never been, there will never be.
The only way to reduce a man to a machine is take away his consciousness force him to function unconsciously. And just the opposite is the way of meditation: give him back his consciousness. That’s my work here: to help you to become conscious again so you can be rid of all structures that have been imposed upon you, which are keeping you in slavery, in a mental slavery. The slavery is so subtle that one is not ordinarily even aware of it, that it exists. People take it for granted that they are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Indians, Japanese, French.
They never think, even for a single moment, that each child is born without any religion, without any nation, without any race; he is simply born as a conscious being. But we take away his consciousness, and instead of it we give him poor substitutes. We take away his real identity and give him false ideas; ‘You are this, you are that,’ and then he goes on living according to those ideas. His whole life becomes a falsification. One has to wake up from this sleep. The meaning of Moise is very beautiful.
It has two meanings. Those two meaning are like two sides of the same coin. The first meaning is servant of god. It simply means one who is surrendered to tao, to existence, to nature. God is just a metaphor for the ultimate law of existence. And the second meaning is one who is saved by god. The first has to precede, then the second succeeds of its own accords if you surrender to the ultimate law of existence you are saved; to surrender is to be saved. Sannyas is nothing but a discipline of surrendering, and the outcome is deliverance.
You have to disappear as an ego and then you are suddenly born as the very ocean. You have to disappear as a person, as a separate entity, and then you appear as the whole. And to be the whole is to be holy. The discipline that is imposed from the outside is always ugly because it is destructive, it is paralysing, It cripples you. Rather than cutting the cloth according to you and then making a dress out of it, it does just the opposite: the dress is already there, made by somebody maybe thousands of years before, and you have to fit into it.
If you don’t fit into it then You have to be cut, not the dress. Then something is wrong with you, not with the dress. That is the moralistic attitude, the puritan attitude, that the moral rules are always right. If something is wrong it is always you, so you have to fit with the moral rules. If you don’t fit it creates guilt; if you try to fit, it creates discomfort. If you are stupid you try to fit, but then your whole life becomes a misery. If you are clever, cunning, then you become a hypocrite. You pretend ‘Yes, everything is okay.
I am fitting in perfectly — the dress is beautiful, it is lovely!’ But then you have to live a double life: one life in your drawing room, the other life, which is your real life, from the backdoor. And then there is a split; then you are constantly in a kind of inner struggle, an inner tension, and you can never be at ease. You are pulled apart: if you try to be real you start feeling you are being oral; if you try to be moral you start feeling you are being unnatural. And both prove to be tense states. My approach is totally different; it is not moralistic at all.
And I make a clear-cut distinction between morality and religion. Morality is discipline imposed from the outside, religion is an inner discipline. It arises out of your own consciousness. Morality depends on creating a conscience, and very conscience is bound to create problem for you because it is against you somewhere. It may look right basically, but nature knows no logic. You may have to agree intellectually, but existence is far bigger than the intellect. You cannot manage to force existence into intellectual patterns.
Moreover, the patterns were created long ago. Manu, the Indian law-maker, the Hindu founder, prescribed certain rules. Five thousand years have passed and the Hindu still has to follow them. Now, the whole world has changed, man bas changed; nothing is the same. If Manu comes back he will not even be able to recognise anything. But his rules are still there. If the Hindu follows those rules, in one sense he feels good that he is following the right path.
But then there is repression, and then the whole situation is against him and he looks silly and stupid — to himself, to others too. He does not look contemporary. He becomes a mess. Morality is for man — man is not for morality. And morality has to change with the times. Peoples’ needs change, requirements change; you cannot continue with old rules. Ten commandments were given three thousand years ago; now everything is different — they are absolutely irrelevant. You have to find new ways to live, new ways to be.
The only possibility is that we drop the whole idea of conscience. Instead of conscience we should depend on consciousness. Conscience is always created by others. It is a manipulation, it is a subtle slavery. Consciousness is created by you. It is your own effort to stand on your own two feet, to look at life and to gather enough courage to live according to your light. Of course when you live according to your light you may commit many mistakes, but there is nothing wrong in committing mistakes because that’s the only way to learn.
The more mistakes one commits, the more one learns. He only thing to be remembered is: don’t commit the same mistake again and again, because that is stupid’ Commit new mistakes, find out ways to commit new mistakes. As you grow, as you learn, as you become conscious, as you become more and more alert, a certain inner discipline arises without any imposition, because you can see what is right and what is wrong. And when you see it, there is no split; then you are not of a double mind, then it does not create a kind of schizophrenia.
Otherwise the whole humanity has lived a schizophrenic life up to now, because of the moralistic past. We have to free religion from morality. Once religion is freed from morality, then religion gives you a totally new kind of morality, but it will not be of Manu and it will not be of Moses and it will not be of Jesus, and it will not be of Buddha, it will not be mine — it will be yours. And when it is yours there is a joy in living it, there is great growth through it.
You don’t feel crippled, paralysed, hampered, obstructed, manipulated; you become more and more natural, simple, spontaneous. You become more and more attuned to the universe. That’s the way of sannyas: it is non-moralistic but absolutely religious. I teach an amoral religion: not immoral, not moral, but amoral — a religion that transcends morality. Then it brings freedom to you, and freedom is the ultimate value. There is nothing higher than that. Freedom is the highest truth. It is another name for god.
Bliss is not something philosophical, something intellectual. It is existential, it is an experience — like love, like light, like life. You cannot teach a blind man what light is. You can tell him about the physics of light, you can tell him about the mathematics of light, you can tell him all the theories about light, but even all those theories, physics and mathematics, will not give him a single glimpse of light. He will not know even a single ray of light: he is blind. In fact he does not even know darkness — what to say about light?
People ordinarily think that blind people live in darkness. That is absolutely wrong. That is just our idea, because we close our eyes and there is darkness, so we think blind people must be living in darkness. The blind person cannot see at all, how can he see darkness? To see darkness eyes are needed as much as eyes are needed to see light. You cannot even explain darkness to a blind man, what to say about light? Impossible! The only possible tray is to help him so that his eyes are cured, so that he can also see.
Then he may not know the physics — who knows the physics of light. I don’t know, but I know what light is. Who knows the mathematics of light? Millions of people use light without knowing anything about it. It is said that once it happened that Thomas Alva Edison, who was the inventor of the electric bulb, went to a village, a hill station, for a holiday. The hill station had a small school and the school was celebrating its hundredth anniversary, so they had many functions; many celebrations were going on.
He had nothing to do so he went to see what was going on there. The school children had arranged a small exhibition and they had made a few electrical things. A boy was showing him: ‘Push this button and the light comes on, push this button and the fan starts moving,’ and the villagers were very enchanted, amused. It was so new; they had never seen electricity.
Edison also showed much interest, and nobody knew that he was Edison, the inventor. Humorously he asked the young boy, ‘What is electricity?’ The boy said, ‘What is electricity? Wait. I don’t know — I will call my teacher, my science teacher.’ So the science teacher was called and Edison asked, ‘What is electricity?’ The science teacher was almost at a loss for an answer. He said, ‘Wait. I am not very educated, just a B.Sc., but our principal holds a doctorate in science; I will call him.’
The principal came and Edison asked, ‘What is electricity?’ The principal looked very puzzled and said, ‘You have asked such a great question.’ Seeing the difficulty, Edison laughed and said, ‘Don’t be worried — I am Thomas Alva Edison. I myself don’t know what electricity is. Not that we know is how to use it. So don’t get worried about it. I am the inventor of all these things that you are showing here. I was just joking. I myself don’t know what electricity is exactly — it is indefinable. But we are using it, are using light, we are using air, we are using water.
People were drinking water even before they came to know that water means H2O. It was not needed. Without knowing what water consists of, people have been drinking and surviving perfectly well… The blind man needs eyes and then he will know light. He does not need theories about it. Exactly is the case with bliss: you don’t need theories about it. I am not a theoretician and I don’t encourage my sannyasins to be philosophical. I discourage them as much as I can.
I destroy all their philosophical curiosity in order to emphasise the existential, because once you start moving into the philosophic direction, there is no end to it; you will never come to know what bliss is. You will go on thinking and thinking and thinking; and one thought leads to another thought, ad infinitum. Bliss is an experience. I can teach you how to experience it, I cannot tell you what it is. If you become silent, still, calm and quiet and collected, you will experience it. Bliss is the experience of a silent state of mind, because in a silent state of mind, mind disappears. It is no more mind; it becomes no-mind.
And with the disappearance of the mind all desires disappear, all tensions disappear, all anxieties disappear. And these are the barriers which do not allow the flow of bliss in you, otherwise bliss is your nature. If all the rocks are beloved, suddenly it with great force — your bliss starts flowing like a stream. A sannyasin has to remember it continuously because mind always distracts you towards philosophy. And it is very easy to talk about, to thing about, to read about; the real problem is to experience. That is arduous, because for that you will have to go through, an inner transformation, from mind to no-mind, from thought to no-thought, from desire to no-desire.
