Question 1:

Beloved Osho,

In the West, celebration is associated with the American idea of having a good time which is synonymous with noise, loud music, watching movies, smoking, sex, and release of energy as such, while silence and serenity are automatically associated with boredom and excessive accumulation of energy which results in tension and anxiety. Could you say something about silencde and celebration and life?

 

 

Chidananda, the question you have asked has many implications. It is not a single question; it is one question consisting of many questions of importance. I would like to go into each dimension of the question; only then you may be able to find the answer.

 

The first thing to remember is that man consists of two worlds, one that leads outward and one that leads inward. Man is a duality: he is a body and a soul. And because of this tremendous duality, all the problems of the world have arisen. The duality is not a simple one. It is what I have called a "gestalt duality." In a gestalt duality you can never see both worlds together; if you choose to see one you have to forget about the other. As an example I have told you about a small children's book where they have a picture made of simple lines, but in those lines there are two possibilities: if you fix your eyes on the picture, either you can see an old woman or you can see a beautiful young girl.

 

You can see each separately. If you go on staring at the old woman, suddenly you will find a strange change: the old woman has disappeared and a beautiful young girl is in front of you.

 

If you still persist in staring... because the eyes are not meant to stare; naturally they are continuously moving. Movement is intrinsic to your eyes. They get tired of staring at a thing, they are always in search of something new. Because of this, soon you will find the young woman disappearing and the old woman replaced again. They are both made of the same lines, just different combinations, but you cannot see both together. That is impossible. Because if you see the young woman, where will you find the lines that make the old woman? If you see the old woman, you don't have extra lines to create the young woman. You can see each separately, but you can never see them together. This is gestalt duality, and this is the reality of man.

 

The East has seen man only as a soul, as a consciousness, as an introvert being. But because it has chosen one gestalt, it has to deny the other. That's why in the East for centuries the mystics have consistently been denying the reality of the world. They say it is just a dream, it is maya, it is illusion. It is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. It is not really there, it is only a mirage, only an appearance. The East has denied the outside - has to deny, because of the inner necessity of the gestalt duality.

 

The West has chosen the outside world and has to deny the inner world. Man is only a body. Physiology, biology, chemistry, but not a consciousness, not a soul; the soul is only an epiphenomenon. And because only the outside is considered to be real, it was possible for science to develop in the West. Technology, thousands of gadgets - possibilities to land on the moon, and the vast universe that surrounds you. But knowing all this, there has been a deep emptiness in the Western mind: something is missing.

 

It is difficult for the Western logic to pinpoint what is missing, but it is absolutely certain that something is missing. The house is full of guests but the host is missing. You have all the things of the world, but you are not. A tremendous misery is the outcome. You have all the pleasures, all the money, all that man has ever dreamt of and in the end of centuries of effort, suddenly you find you don't exist. Your inside is hollow, there is nobody.

 

The East has also faced its own misery. Thinking that the outside is unreal, there is no possibility of scientific progress. Science has to be objective - but if objects are only appearances, illusions, there is no point in dissecting illusions and trying to find out the secrets of nature. Hence the East had to remain poor, had to remain hungry, had to remain under all kinds of slaveries for centuries.

 

These two thousand years of slavery are not just an accident. The East was prepared for it. It has accepted it - what does it matter, in a dream, whether you are a master or a slave? What does it matter if in dream you are being served with delicious food or you are hungry? The moment you wake up, both dreams will prove invalid. The East has consented to remain starved, hungry, enslaved, and the reason is that it has chosen a different gestalt: the real is the inner.

 

The East has learned ways to be silent, to be peaceful, to enjoy the bliss that arises as you drown deeper into your interiority. But you cannot share it with anybody else; it is absolutely individual. At the most you can talk about it. So the whole East for thousands of years has been talking about spirituality, consciousness, enlightenment, meditation, and on the outside has remained a beggar, sick, hungry, enslaved.

 

Who is going to listen to these slaves and their great philosophies? The West has simply laughed.

 

But the laughter has not been only on one side. The East has also laughed, seeing that people are accumulating things and losing themselves.

 

We have lived in a very strange, schizophrenic state of mind for thousands of years.

 

Chidananda, you are saying, "In the West, celebration is associated with the American idea of having a good time." That brings me to another implication. Only a miserable man needs a good time. Just as a sick man needs medicine, a miserable man needs a good time; it is a very cunning strategy to avoid your misery.

 

The misery is not avoided; you only forget for the time being that you are miserable. Under the influence of drugs or under the influence of sex or under the influence of your so-called having a good time, what are you actually doing? You are escaping from your inner emptiness. You are getting involved in any kind of thing. One thing you are afraid of is your own self.

 

It has created a certain madness, but because everybody in the West is in the same boat, it becomes very difficult to recognize. Millions of people are watching football - and you call these people intelligent? Then who are you going to call retarded? And not only are these people immensely involved in games like football, they are jumping, they are shouting, they are fighting. And because there are no stadiums big enough to accommodate the whole country, everybody is sitting glued to his chair in front of the television. And they are doing the same stupid acts - sitting in their chairs, shouting....

 

I know one man - because his team was losing, he became so mad he destroyed his television! I was staying with the man and I asked him, "Are you ready to go into an insane asylum? In the first place, football should be for children. You have passed that age long before, but mentally your age is not more than twelve or thirteen years. And what you have done with the television makes me suspect that not only are you retarded, you are insane too."

 

Just last year in California, the University of California made a survey, a whole year's survey about boxing matches. Each time there are boxing matches - which are ugly, inhuman, animalistic - the rate of crime in the whole state of California rises by thirteen or fourteen percent. And that rise remains after the matches are finished; it goes on lingering for at least one week. Slowly, slowly it comes back to normal.

 

People start murdering, people start committing suicide, people start raping; all kinds of crimes suddenly start growing. Still, boxing is not condemned by any country as a criminal game which should be stopped immediately. And if any government tries, the whole country will stand up against the parliament and will protest, because boxing is such a "good time." Two idiots are doing things on your behalf. You also wanted to do the same things, but you kept yourself in control. Now it is "having a good time" because somebody else is doing it and your own repressed energies are expressed.

 

It is something to be understood: why should you be interested in two persons behaving barbariously, harming each other? Certainly you also have the same desires. Perhaps you don't have the guts....

 

But it is something much more complicated: the whole West has become slowly slowly just an observer. Somebody else makes love in the film, somebody else fights in the boxing matches, somebody else plays football, and deep down you get identified with these people. It is good that in movie houses it is kept dark, because I have watched people crying in a movie house, knowing perfectly well that it is an empty screen and a film is being projected. I have seen people laughing, I have seen people standing up, thrilled, and I have always wondered... it seems that man has left everything to the professionals and he has become just a watcher.

 

Obviously the professional can do the thing better than you can. But remember: things are not going to stop here. In one existentialist novel, the writer has a very definite clarity about the future, that soon only servants will be making love. Why should you bother? - you can pay the servant. But why should your wife bother? She can also pay another servant.

 

I am reminded of a very rich man who was bothering and torturing his psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst in the West is one of most the highly paid professionals; hundreds of dollars per hour. Very few people can afford to be mad. But this man used to talk two hours, three hours.... The patient talks on the couch and the psychoanalyst listens, but there is a limit. The man was driving the psychoanalyst mad, every day the same story. And he could not even stop him because he was paying so much; he was his best client.

 

Finally he thought of a plan and he told the man, "Because of you, I cannot see my other patients.

 

A simple device will be very helpful: I will leave my tape recorder. You talk to my tape recorder as long as you want, and in the night I will listen to whatever you have said to the tape recorder more silently, more attentively than I can in the office, because I am worried about other patients who are waiting." The rich man immediately agreed.

 

The psychoanalyst was not thinking that he would agree so easily. The next day when the psychoanalyst was entering the office, the rich man was coming out. He said, "What is the matter?

 

Where are you going? What about your session today?"

 

He said, "The session is over, because I have also worked out a plan: in the dark night, in the silence, without any disturbance of you and your presence, I talk to my tape recorder. Now my tape recorder is on the couch talking to your tape recorder. Why should I waste my time?"

 

People have become so outward that they cannot even for a single moment sit silently; that is the most difficult thing in the world. People are fidgeting. What is the fear? The fear is, you may encounter your emptiness and once you encounter your emptiness, your life will lose all interest, all juice, all meaningfulness, all significance.

 

Everybody is running from himself. And this running from themselves people call "having a good time."

 

Western man's life can be divided in two parts - and I have moved around the earth and watched all kinds of idiots. These are the two parts: first is having a good time and second is having a hangover.

 

By the time the hangover is over the time comes for having a good time. In a vicious circle, they go on between these two, wasting their lives and reaching nowhere.

 

Reaching to the grave cannot be called reaching somewhere. It simply means that now the wheel is so tired and so bored with having a good time and suffering hangovers that it wants to rest inside a grave.

 

People rest only in their graves.

 

Out of the grave, there is no time to rest.

 

In the East, we chose the opposite gestalt. We found treasures and mysteries and secrets, but the difficulty with the inner is that you cannot materialize it. You cannot prove it in a court; you cannot even have a witness. Except you, you cannot allow anybody else into your inner world. Naturally, the East slowly slowly created isolated individuals. These isolated individuals were constantly harassed by the crowd, by the marketplace. They wanted their inner silence, their inner serenity, their calmness, undisturbed. The conclusion was: renounce the world, move to the Himalayas or deep into the forest where you can be absolutely yourself.

 

But both the alternatives are choosing half the man. And the moment you choose half the man, you are going to fall into some kind of misery. The miseries may be different, but misery is absolutely guaranteed. The East is miserable because of its Gautam Buddhas, Mahaviras, Bodhidharmas, Kabirs. It is in misery because of its greatest inner explorers. And the West is in misery because of Galileo, Copernicus, Columbus, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell. These are the great people of the West and the East, and all these great people have chosen man in his half. To choose man in his half has been the root cause of human misery up to now.

 

I teach you the whole man. The inner is real - as real as the outer. And the outer is as significant as the spiritual. You have to attain to a certain balance, a balance in which neither the inner predominates nor the outer but both are equally complementary to each other. This has not happened up to now. But unless this happens, there is no possibility for any humanity to exist in the world.

 

The West is dying of its own success. The East has already died of its success. It is a very strange story that people have died because of their victories - choosing the half is dangerous. But choosing the whole needs courage, insight and overwhelming understanding. And a mobility... just as you come out of your home and go back inside the home, your coming out of your being and going into your being should be as simple as that.

 

Whenever you are needed in the market, you should be in the market with your totality. The market cannot destroy your soul. And anybody who has preached to the world to renounce it, was against humanity. Neither does going inwards, being in a meditative silence, take away anything from the outside world. You don't have to condemn it, and you don't have to declare it illusory. It should have been so simple to see, that I am amazed why thousands of years have passed, and still it is not a recognized fact around the whole world.

 

I am reminded of a great Indian mystic, Adi Shankara. He is one of the proponents of the philosophy that the world is absolutely illusory. One morning he is coming out of the Ganges, after taking his early bath before going into prayer. The sun has not risen yet. It is dark. He is coming up the stone steps in Varanasi and a man touches him. It would not have been much of a trouble, but the man simply said, "Forgive me. I am not supposed even to come close to you. I am a sudra, an untouchable. Even my shadow is evil."

 

Shankara was very angry. He said, "I will have to take another bath to purify myself." But he was not aware who the man was.

 

The man said, "Before you take another bath, you will have to answer a few questions. One is, if the outside is unreal, do you believe me to be a reality? I am certainly outside you. And if the outside is unreal, then what is the reality of the pure River Ganges of the Hindus? It is also outside. And what do you think about your own skin? Is it inside or outside? Unless you explain it to me, I am going to remain here. You can take as many baths as you want; I will touch you again and again."

 

Hindus don't like to talk about the incident. And Shankara does not seem to be an honest man, because after this incident he continued to preach that the outside is illusory. Every day you need the outside food and every day you need the outside water, and still the outside is illusory? It is such pure nonsense that it is time to condemn all these people who have renounced the world and who have been teaching the world that the outside is nothing but a dream.

 

I cannot believe it - if the outside is unreal, whom are you teaching? If the outside world is unreal then what are you renouncing, where are you going? To the Himalayas? The Himalayas are as much outside as M.G. Market!

 

And the same kind of stupidity has been dominating the Western mind. A scientist is perfectly rational when he is working in his lab on objects, but the moment you ask him about himself, he starts saying that there is nobody inside. He cannot see what an irrational statement he is making:

 

if there is nobody inside, who is working in the lab? If there is nobody inside, then who is watching, calculating, coming to conclusions? The science is true and the scientist himself is saying that he is not true.

 

These two idiotic ideologies have destroyed the whole of humanity - its peace, its love, its grandeur, its dignity. It has to be restored. I deny Adi Shankara and I also deny Karl Marx in the same breath; I am against the atheist and I am against the theist because both are trying to divide reality, which is indivisible. The outer cannot exist without the inner.

 

Neither can the inner exist without the outer.

 

They are both two sides of the same coin.

 

But believe it or not, there is not a single statement in the whole history of man declaring that man is one, that the outer and the inner are not contradictory but complementary, that they cannot exist in separation, that they are supported by each other and they should be used together. Only then man can rise to his real heights and blossom into his ultimate flowering.

 

Chidananda, you are asking, "... associated with the American idea of having a good time which is synonymous with noise, loud music, watching movies, smoking, sex, and release of energy as such." This is the half side - the people who have chosen to be extroverts and have forgotten their own inner center. But they are getting fed up with it. Now the greatest philosophers in the West like Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Marcel, Jean Paul Sartre, all are in absolute agreement that life is meaningless, that it is nothing but boredom. And the only conclusion out of all these philosophies is a very simple one: except suicide, there is no way. But there are wonders and wonders: of all these great philosophers I have named, none have committed suicide.

 

It reminds me of a great Greek philosopher, Zeno, who was teaching the same thing two thousand years ago. He lived a long life, he died when he was ninety, but he was such a convincing, impressive personality that thousands of people committed suicide because they could not prove what is the meaning of life. If there is no meaning, then you are simply a coward and you go on dragging yourself - gather courage and commit suicide! When he was dying, one man asked him: "Zeno - following you, thousands of young people have committed suicide. A question arises: why did you not follow your own philosophy?"

 

But philosophers are basically very clever people. Zeno said, "I had to suffer life just to teach people the truth." He has been a martyr, because he lived for ninety years! You should worship him, because he lived so you could commit suicide.

 

All these five great philosophers of the West - and these are the topmost - are not interested in committing suicide, they are only interested in writing about boredom, meaninglessness, anguish, angst. They all come to the conclusion that suicide seems to be the only way out, but nobody gets out of the way.

 

The West has reached, by its own success, to the ultimate failure. And this failure of nerve is very dangerous, because they are in control of enormous destructive power, nuclear weapons. They can destroy the whole planet not only one time, but as many times as you want. Ordinarily every human being dies only once, except Jesus Christ. But the politicians and the scientists of the West have been making arrangements for everybody to die seventy times.

 

I don't think anybody is going to have seventy resurrections. One time will do - perhaps once in a while, somewhere, some Jesus Christ... but even Jesus Christ cannot survive seventy times. There are people who suspect - and I am one of them - whether he even survived one time. I have been to his grave - his grave is in India, in Srinagar in a small village, Pahalgam.

 

In the Kashmiri language pahalgam means the village of the shepherd. Jesus used to call himself the shepherd. He escaped; it was not resurrection. He had never died in the first place.

 

The Jewish cross is a very crude instrument for killing a person. For a healthy young man like Jesus - he was only thirty-three - it will take at least forty-eight hours of being on the cross before he will die. It is because the Jewish cross slowly takes out your blood; it does not kill you immediately.

 

There was a conspiracy between the disciples of Jesus and Pontius Pilate, who was not a Jew. The land of Jesus, Judea, was under the Roman Empire; it was a slave country. Pontius Pilate was the governor, the Roman governor. He had no interest in killing Jesus. In fact, he could not conceive why Jews were so insistent to kill this innocent young man who had not committed any crime at all.

 

He was a politician; he could not arouse the whole of Judea against the Roman Empire just because of a young man. But he managed an agreement with the disciples that Jesus would be crucified on Friday - as late as possible, because as the sun sets on Friday, Jews stop every kind of work.

 

Certainly Jesus would have to be taken down from the cross before sunset. He was only on the cross for six hours, and then he was put in a cave which was guarded by Roman soldiers.

 

The conspiracy worked perfectly well. In the night, Jesus was removed and as he became healed, he was taken out of Judea. Because the Jews would have crucified him again.

 

The only place where he could find people who would understand his language, people who belonged to his race, was Kashmir. Kashmir is basically Jewish, and you will be surprised to know that when Moses had taken the Jews out of Egypt, one of the tribes of the Jews got lost in the desert. It took forty years for Moses to find the promised land, which is nothing but a desert land and Jews have never been able to forgive Moses. He gave them Israel, which is not in any way like the promise he made to them. They were torturing him continuously - "Where have you brought us?" In forty years of wandering in the desert, almost ninety percent of the original people had died - the third generation was now with Moses. And Moses had lost every contact with his own people, because these new people had no idea what Moses had done. They had only complaints against him.

 

Somehow he managed to convince them: "This is the promised land. You remain here and I will go back to find the tribe that has been lost in the desert." That tribe reached Kashmir... and Kashmir seems to be far closer to the promised land Moses was talking about, because there is no place on the earth which is more beautiful than Kashmir. And Kashmir has both the graves of Moses and Jesus, because Moses came in search of the tribe and found it in Kashmir, and after Judea, there was only one place - Kashmir - where Jesus could have been welcome.

 

He remained there - a long life, one hundred and twelve years. And you can see the Kashmiris: you can see Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi... just look at their noses and you will be convinced that these are Jews. Mohammedans converted the Jews, but because they also accepted Moses and Jesus as prophets, they left those two graves without destroying them. They also left a family of caretakers, which is still Jewish.

 

Those are the only two graves in the whole of India on which there is an inscription in Hebrew. The family that has been taking care of those two graves is the only family Mohammedans have left unconverted. They are still Jews, for so long a time. And on the graves the inscription is so clear: it says "Joshua" which is the name of Jesus in Hebrew.

 

Jesus never knew that he would be known to the world as Jesus. His parents, his friends, his followers knew him as Joshua. The inscription says, "Joshua, the Messiah, lived in this place with his followers, a long life of one hundred and twelve years." And because of him, the village is still called Pahalgam.

 

But the politicians are ready to destroy the whole planet seventy times. This is the success of the Western approach of taking the outside man as the whole reality. And nothing better has happened in the East. Almost fifty percent of the people in the East are hungry, starved, undernourished. And by the end of this century at least five hundred million people will die, only in this land; I am not counting people who are going to die in China, in Taiwan, in Korea, in Japan. Just in this country five hundred million people are going to die within ten years. The earth cannot support this huge humanity which goes on growing, unless we also start being scientific, being technological.

 

Science is capable even now to support a humanity seven times bigger than the present one. Right now, there are five billion people in the world. Science has the capacity now for seven times more people to live comfortably - but science cannot do it on its own. It needs scientific minds, it needs people who are technologically expert.

 

My own understanding about the East is that even if people come from the West, well-educated in science and technology, their old stupidities continue inside their being. I have seen D.Sc.'s worshipping before a monkey god, Hanuman. I cannot believe my eyes! Sometimes I think it would have been better to be blind. These people who are worshipping monkey gods, elephant gods - these people don't have scientific minds. They may have had a scientific education, which is a totally different thing.

 

To know about science is one thing and to be creative about science is another thing. To know about meditation is one thing and to meditate is totally different. The West needs a more meditative mind and the East needs a more scientific mind. Then we will be able to create a humanity which can live without poverty, without hunger - a healthier, longer life, which you cannot even think of.

 

The scientific calculation is that the present body that we have is capable of living at least three hundred years - just the right food, right medical care, right ecological environment and these people can live for three hundred years. I cannot conceive what treasures will be revealed if a Gautam Buddha can live three hundred years, if Albert Einstein can live three hundred years, if Bertrand Russell can live three hundred years.

 

Up to now the way we have lived is such a sheer wastage. People who are trained, educated, cultured, become old, die at the age of seventy. And new visitors, absolutely uneducated, barbarious, go on coming from the wombs. This is not a very scientific way of arranging the world.

 

You have to force people to retire, and these are the people who know. And you have to employ people who know nothing.

 

Men's lives should be made longer and birth control should be more strict. A child should be born only when we are ready to allow a Bertrand Russell to leave the world - only a replacement, and unless we can find a better replacement we are not going to allow Bertrand Russell to leave the world. And there is every possibility to find a replacement, because we can read the whole program in the genes, all the possibilities that a person is going to pass through - whether he is going to be a painter of the quality of Picasso or he is going to be a poet of the genius of Rabindranath Tagore; how long he is going to live, whether he will be healthy or sick. And not only can we read the future program of the genes, we can change the program also. The sick person can be made from the very beginning to live a healthier life and the idiots can be avoided, the retarded can be avoided.

 

Existence gives everything with such abundance that if you don't choose, things are going to be a chaos. Every single human being ... a male, if he has not been corrupted by religions, will have at least four thousand times an opportunity to give birth to a child. And each time he releases one million sperm. That means each human male can create a whole India! Such abundance simply means you have to be very choosy. Naturally, in this crowd you cannot find many Rabindranaths.

 

Rabindranath himself was the thirteenth child of his parents; before him, the parents had given birth to twelve children not of any value. They could have been avoided. Rabindranath could have been their first child. And who knows how many other Rabindranaths are not making their way into the world? We need a very scientific approach about the outside and a very meditative approach about the inside.

 

Chidananda, you are saying, "... while silence and serenity are automatically associated with boredom and excessive accumulation of energy which results in tension and anxiety." If things remain the same then this is a truth. If you don't exert your energy... with your food, your continuous breathing, your drinking water, you are generating energy. It has to be used; otherwise it is going to become a tension, and finally it is going to become anxiety. But if my idea is understood... I am saying you are half outside, half inside.

 

Use your energy in the outside world in creative activities, not in football. There is so much to create, so much to discover, such a vast universe is standing there as a challenge to explore. Use your energies to make the world more beautiful, more poetic, more healthy.

 

And when you feel that you are exhausted, tired, move withinwards. Rest. And your rest will become your meditation, because meditation does not need any exertion of energy. On the contrary - it conserves, it preserves; it makes you a pool of great energy. When you feel that your serenity and your silence and your joy inside wants to dance outside, both are yours: then sing, then dance, then create. And if your creativity comes from your silences of heart, it will have a different quality, a different flavor.

 

It is only a question of a little intelligence and balance. Inside is the source of your energies; outside is the world, to let that energy create - be a creator.

 

But you cannot be a creator unless you are a meditator.

 

My sannyasin has a new definition; it is not the definition of the old. In the old definition sannyas meant renouncing the world. My sannyas means rejoicing in the world. But before you can rejoice, you should accumulate energy so much that you start overflowing with love, sensitivity, creativity, poetry, song, dance....

 

And certainly these things will have a very compassionate quality. They will not be violent. I cannot conceive of a meditator playing football. I cannot conceive a Gautam Buddha having a boxing match.

 

But a Gautam Buddha can create a beautiful garden of roses. A Gautam Buddha can paint. And his paintings will be far superior to the paintings of Picasso, because Picasso is almost insane. If you look at the paintings of Picasso, you will feel a kind of sickness to throw out. Just keep a Picasso painting in your bedroom and you will have nightmares, because those paintings have come from nightmares of Picasso - air-conditioned nightmares.

 

There have been meditators who have created. You can see the Taj Mahal... that has been created by the Sufi mystics. Just watching it in the full-moon night, you can suddenly fall into a deep silence which you have never touched within yourself. If you can sit silently by the side in the deep night, the beauty of Taj Mahal starts changing something within you. The Taj Mahal does not remain just there outside, it starts becoming a part of your own being.

 

I used to live in Jabalpur for twenty years. I had a professor, I loved him very much. He was an old man; he had taught me in my post-graduation classes and I had asked him many times to come to Jabalpur, because Jabalpur has something which is unique and is nowhere to be found on this earth.

 

But the old professor was very stubborn in the sense that he had been around the world, he had seen everything... he had been a professor in many countries. And he could just not believe that there was something which he would be surprised to know. But I am also very stubborn. I made that old fellow agree: "You remember, I am going to take you to my place. You think you are stubborn? I am going to prove to you that although you are stubborn, you are number two."

 

And one day while I was driving him to his home, rather than going to his home... he started shouting, "Where are you going?"

 

I said, "I am going to the place I have been telling you about for almost two years."

 

He said, "This is strange. It is my car, you stop it!"

 

I said, "Nobody can stop this car. And you sit silently; otherwise I will take the car up to its full speed."

 

Of speed, he was very much afraid, and when he saw that the car was going a hundred miles per hour, he closed his eyes and remained silent - because the car could go to one hundred and forty miles.

 

I took him to the famous marble rocks in Jabalpur. They are thirteen miles away from Jabalpur, and even when you have reached the point, you don't know that just within two minutes you are entering into another world. A beautiful river, Narmada, flows for two miles continuously between two mountains of white marble. In the full-moon night, if anything defeats Taj Mahal it is the marble rocks of Jabalpur. For two miles continuously, high rocks of white marble, reflected into the river.

 

Absolute silence prevails, not even a bird. I took him in a small boat without an engine, because that engine creates a disturbance. As he entered, he looked at me, he could not believe....

 

He said, "My God! If I had died without knowing this place, I would have lived without meaning. But please take me close to the rocks - I want to touch them, to feel that they really exist, because it is so dreamlike."

 

I had to take the boat close to the rocks. He touched the rocks, he felt the rocks, and he said, "Now I am convinced that you have not created some delusion, that you have not given me some drug, that I am perfectly in my senses." And he pinched himself to see whether he was in his consciousness or not.

 

There are temples in China, in Japan, in India, created by meditators. Just sitting there and you will find that what has been so difficult for you, to stop your thinking, stops itself. The whole atmosphere of the temple, the fragrance, the incense, the statues... they are all creating a certain space within you.

 

Once humanity learns both things together - meditativeness and a scientific approach about the world - we will have entered into a new phase, into a totally new phase discontinuous with the ugly, unhealthy, sick and insane past.

 

I don't want to leave you in this silence....

 

Mendel Kravitz is a fitness freak; he lifts weights and jogs five miles a day. One day, he is admiring his body in the mirror. He notices that he is really suntanned all over, except on his prick, so he decides to do something about it.

 

He goes to the beach, undresses, and buries himself in the sand, except for his prick which he leaves sticking out.

 

Two little old ladies are strolling along the beach, and one looks down and says, "There really is no justice in this world!"

 

"What do you mean?" her friend asks.

 

The first old lady says, "Look at that! When I was ten years old, I was afraid of it. When I was twenty years old, I was curious about it. When I was thirty, I enjoyed it. When I was forty, I asked for it.

 

When I was fifty, I paid for it. When I was sixty, I prayed for it. When I was seventy, I forgot all about it.

 

"And now that I'm eighty, the damn thing is growing all over wild!"

 

-Osho, "Om Mani Padme Hum, #13"