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Notes on some views of Osho (BHAGWAN SHREE RAJNEESH)

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Reading Time: 9 minutes

Based on the Book ZEN: ZEST, ZIP, ZAP AND ZING by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

The book is in the form of Question and Answer Riddles and Jokes.

ZEN – THE KOAN OF LIFE

KOAN – A paradoxical anecdote or middle without a solution, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and provide enlightenment. Zen is not a religion, it is pure religion-ness. To call Zen, Zen Buddhism is wrong. Zen is not an ideology, it is not philosophy, it is living life in its totality in an existential way.

Zen is another word for Zest, for Zip, Zap and Zing.

Pure Zen is getting rid of one’s Mind. Zen is the transcendence of the mind. The only way to go beyond the mind is to enter into Life here and now. You have to be ordinary, utterly ordinary, in tune with Life, harmonious with life, living life passionately, making life a joy – a festival, a feasting, a love, laughter.

Life needs to be balanced, it needs a rhythm. Zen is not for unintelligent people.

The words Dhyana or Zen, simply mean emptying yourself of all thinking. It is a state of absolute silence, of profound peace of not thinking at all but just being aware. Only in that awareness you will be able to see the truth. Mind consists of the past, the familiar and the unknown. The mind has no experience of the present and no opening towards the future. It is utterly closed, un-conditioning, helping to get rid of all that is past and dead and heavy is the job.

OSHO IS NOT A MORALIST, NOR A PURITAN, BUT HAVE GOT ESTHETIC SENSE. HE IS NOT A THEIST OR AN ATHEIST. HE IS THERE TO FREE YOU FROM YOUR MIND.

The body is a temple. It has to be loved, respected. When you lose respect for yourself, you are losing your trust in life. You will be living a minimum. It will be dragging, to compromise with the foolish, to compromise with the repressed is to lose self-respect. Whatsoever is ugly has to be destroyed, and whatsoever repressive is ugly. Imitation is a way of crippling people, paralyzing people, cutting their roots. Culture is advised of repression. A man may be happy even in hell, if he has chosen it on his own.

The innocence of children is ignorance, it is not true innocence. Well behaved children, the obedient children are not really alive people. Out of disobedience, intelligence becomes sharper. One has to learn to say no only then saying yes have any meaning. Having compassion is not possible. Either you are compassionate or not. Know the difference between having and being. seeing is knowing and knowing is not approximate. Feeling sorry for others – it is so ego fulfilling. Duty, service, sympathy – these are ugly words. Service is not done, it happens. A man who is doing service know-nothing of love. When passion is transformed it is called compassion. Sex is animal, love is human and compassion is divine. Sex is physical, love is psychological, compassion is spiritual. Unless you stop the whole stupidity of serving the poor and start destroying poverty, it is not going to disappear. Compassion is a fragrance, it has nothing to do with serving the poor or feeding the beggars. A real man of compassion is not a man of service, he is a man who destroys the very causes, the very roots of an ugly society.

Teaching simply means conditioning of your mind, programming you in a certain way. Nothing is impossible for the person who does not have to do it himself. If everything seems to be going well, you obviously do not know what is going on. Scholarliness and stupidity go hand in hand. Both things go in deep synchronicity. Scholars are never known to be intelligent. They are well informed but immensely stupid at the same time. Hearing and listening are tremendously different.

Education means drawing something at, that is inside the person, bringing his center to the surface, to the circumference, bringing his being into a form of manifestation. It is latent, unmanifest, it is dormant, making it active, dynamic. That is what education is.

The function of the master is just the opposite of that of the teacher. The master is basically a rebel. His whole effort is to help you to discover your individuality. Truth is untransferable. The truth is always your own authenticity, your own being. In a better world no parent will give you any belief. The master will give you courage to you to enquire, to adventure, and will sharpen your intelligence. Beliefs are poisonous.

They destroy your intelligence, courage, and create prejudices. Mind and senses prevent reality from reaching you. Some times logic can be very absurd and learned men the most stupid people possible.

Love is, in the ordinary way, something crazy, it is biological, instructive, unconsciousness. It is a hormone. It is more chemistry than spirituality. Love, the moment it becomes a relationship, becomes a bondage. It is a commitment that has made love false. Love is not something that you do it is something that happens. Under bondage it is impossible to be festive, to be joyous. Love is an animal. Love plus meditation change from relationship to relatedness, then it gives freedom. Love is religion- God simply means the loving energy of existence. It is love that gives you the first taste of humanity. Love need not forgive because in the first place it is not angered. Love is simply love, it cannot be great, it cannot be small. Love is a quality and it is immeasurable. Love is just love. Love at its ultimate expression is not even a quality, you become love itself. It is love that gives you the first taste of humanity.

Commitment is towards existence. It can be only towards the whole, not to each other. Existence knows no past, no future, the only time existence knows is now. One is never born and never dies both are illusions. Tomorrow is unpredictable. Commitment is stupid. One lives moment to moment intensely, passionately, totally that is commitment. Existence is so creative it never repeats itself.

The Indian mind believes in the collectivity. It is not an individual. It has no respect for the individual. The Indians understand only one language that of enforcement. Then only they will become law-abiding. The root cause is that freedom is absolutely strange to Indian programming. India needs a totally different kind of government. Democracy is an imported idea. The people who fought for Indian freedom were all educated in England. They saw democracy functioning there beautifully. It will be better India shifts to a presidential form of government which will be something between democracy and dictatorship. Freedom came to India suddenly without preparation. Indians have double faces. One face to wear in private. Beware of the person who has been forcing himself to be a celibate. He can be a rapist at any moment.

In India everybody is ready to encroach on everybody’s space, nobody respects anybody else’s territorial imperative. The fatalistic philosophy has made India utterly lazy, uncreative, lousy. You create yourself by your action. People who are obsessed with the past are people who have forgotten how to live in the present Indians have to be educated for democracy. Respect each other’s views, visions, style of life, to respect the difference in people’ lives, thoughts, attitudes, approaches. Creativity has never been taught, has never been respected. Dictatorship has to be used as a means the end remains a democracy.

Parental conditioning is the greatest slavery of the child. A slave to his own parents, who loves him, who sacrifices themselves, for the child. What you think you have is not individuality, it is only personality. It is something cultivated in you. The obedient child is almost always the most stupid child. The strange thing is that the children are always more intelligent than the parents. The parents belong to the past and the children belong to the future. Everything that needs growth needs privacy, but a child needs much more privacy. But he is not left alone at all. Spaciousness is needed for their growth. Unless you know yourself, your knowledge is of no use. It is dangerous. a knowledge that is borrowed is a hindrance. Everybody has his own uniqueness. Imitation is to destroy yourself., it is suicidal. Unless a person loves himself, he cannot love anybody else in this world. Unless a child respects himself, he cannot respect anybody else.

Misery is always negative. It is one of the most fundamental laws of life. Misery is an indication of a negative mind. Negativity creates misery. you can see misery but not negativity. Nostalgia is suffering. it is a disease. Neither the past exists nor the future.  Now is the only real-time and here the only real space. You can live in memories, living in memories is an empty gesture. Future and past both are escapes. Eternity is vertical, time is horizontal. This happens to many people. In one part they are grown up. In another part very childish. Nobody’s childhood can be happy. Everybody, later on, think that childhood was the most beautiful thing that happened to them.

Man is more than the body and the brain. Trying to live in your own, unbridged with others, is the most dangerous idea that can possess anybody ever. Life means togetherness with existence. To be a man is such a great opportunity, one should not waste it. Never trust the next moment. The tomorrow never comes. Now or never. The way to Hell is full of good intentions. The results don’t depend on your intentions.

Man is not a being, he is a becoming. Man is only an opportunity, multidimensional. He brings with him only a clean slate, he has to write his own fate, he has to decide what he wants to be. Man is the only entity in existence that is closer to becoming than to being. Man is born without a soul, no man is born with a destiny, with fate. Man is born as an opening, he can be anything he decides to be. Man is a pilgrimage from animal to god.

Life is not logic, life is not philosophy. Life is a dance, a song celebration. The religious person is one who lives without fear and without greed. Life is creativity. Life is purposeless, life is its own end, it has no other end. That is the beauty of life.

Bhagwan does not mean god at all, that is a strange misunderstanding. Fools have the same quality all over the world. Bhagwan simply means the blessed one. Wise men may differ, but fools are in absolute agreement with each other. Jains are atheists. God means creator, one who has made the world. They don’t believe in any god, they don’t believe in any creator. We are calling Mahavira and all the twenty-four Tirthankaras of the Jains Bhagwan. The world is a self-creative process. No creator is needed. The world is creativity. There is no division between the creator and the created. There is no need for a God at all.

Truth is a higher value than life itself. A life without truth is not life. Truth has to be discovered by oneself, it cannot be given by anybody else. It is not transferable. Intellect is of the mind, intelligence comes only through meditation. Intellectuals are parrots, they are mechanical, don’t have their own understanding. The intelligent person lives moment-to-moment. He is a mirror. The intelligent person is spontaneous. IQ the intelligence quotient has nothing to do with intelligence. It is memory quotient, it is MQ. It needs tremendous intelligence to learn from others mistakes. It is very rare. Even if you can learn from your own mistakes, that is something very great. People are so foolish that they go on making the same mistakes again and again. Too much courage can be dangerous.

Tradition belongs to the crowd and truth belongs to individual queries. Intellect belongs to the head, intelligence belongs to the heart. Intellect is a cultivated phenomenon. Intelligence is a discovery of your innermost nature. Intellect can be given by others. Intelligence is a discovery through meditation and meditation is just a method of discovering your self-nature then intelligence blossom. man needs a new kind of understanding which accepts both birth and death as part of life with no fear. The moment you accept both, the moment you celebrate both, you go beyond both. Character is imposed by outside agencies, the society, the state, the religion. Consciousness is individual it comes through meditation.

Beauty is higher than virtue, any virtue. It is higher than good than the truth. The master is music is poetry. The teacher is mathematics, calculation. The master shatters your illusions, he gives a shock to your preconceived ideas, to your prejudices. He destroys your consolations, your rationalizations. It needs guts to be with master, guts to renounce your ego, past, all your investments, and to live dangerously against the society, culture, and the whole past. A true disciple is a rebel just as a true master is the ultimate in rebellion.

The highest is prayer that makes you divine. One has to learn the art of living that is A of meditation. Then one has to learn the art of loving that is the B of meditation. Then one has to learn the art of laughing that is the C of meditation. And meditation has only three-letter A, B, C. Once you have achieved Meditation all ends disappear. You become part of the universal festival of existence. To be meditative simply means dropping of all ego trips. The greatest desire of man is freedom not love. Meditation will bring freedom.

The Upanishads were born out of self-realization. Upanishads are nothing but pure meditation. Meditation does not need any effort. It needs relaxation. It needs a restful consciousness. If one learns by meditation, then he will have some riches that cannot be destroyed by death.

Compiled by Vathukkat Krishnan Kutty.

P.s The article does not contain the following views of OSHO on subjects mentioned in the book.

  • Religion
  • Renunciation
  • Conversion
  • Alfred Nobel and Nobel prize
  • Mother Theresa

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vkkutty

Vathukkat Krishnan KuttyAn Avid reader and knowledge seeker with a curious mind and descriptive skills.

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