Osho on Magga Baba
The man who forced me to speak - for one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days I had remained silent - was also a very strange man. He himself had remained silent his whole life. Nobody heard about him; nobody knew about him. And he was the most precious man I have come across in this, or any of my lives in the past. His name was Magga Baba. It is not much of a name; magga simply means a jug. He used to carry a jug - that was his only possession, a plastic jug. From the same jug he would drink, he would ask for food with it. People would drop anything in the jug: money, food, water. And that was all he had. Anybody who wanted to take from his jug was also allowed. So people would take out money, or food - children particularly, beggars. He neither prevented anybody from dropping, nor did he prevent anybody from taking. And he was absolutely silent, so nobody had any idea even of his name, because he had never said what his name was. They simply started calling him Magga Baba because of the jug.
But deep in the night, once in a while when there was nobody, I used to visit him. It was very difficult to find a time when nobody was there, because he attracted strange types of people. He was not speaking, so of course intellectuals were not going to him - just simple people. And what can you do with him? In India, to go to a man who has realized is called seva. Literally it means service, but it will not be justified because that word seva has a sacredness about it which service has not.
When you go to a realized man what else can you do than serve him? So people would come and massage his feet and somebody would massage his head, and he would not say anything to anybody. He would neither say yes, nor would he say no. Sometimes they wouldn't allow him even to sleep, because four or five people were massaging him; they were doing seva. Many times I had to throw people out. He was just living on a porch of a bungalow, open from all sides. Once in a while, particularly on cold winter nights, I used to find him alone; then he would say something to me.
He forced me to speak. He said, "Look, I have remained silent my whole life, but they do not hear, they do not listen. They cannot understand it; it is beyond them. I have failed. I have not been able to convey what I have been carrying within me, and now there is not much time left for me. You are so young, you have a long life before you: please don't stop speaking. START!" It is a difficult, almost impossible job to convey things in words, because they are experienced in a wordless state of consciousness. How to convert that silence into sound? There seems to be no way. And there is none.
But I understood Magga Baba's point. He was very old, and he was saying to me, "You will be in the same position. If you don't start soon, the inner silence, the vacuum, the innermost zero, will go on pulling you inwards. And then there comes a time when you cannot come out. You are drowned in it. You are utterly blissful, but the whole world is full of misery. You could have shown the way.
Perhaps somebody may have heard, perhaps somebody may have walked on the path. At least you would not feel that you have not done what was expected of you by existence itself. Yes, it is a responsibility."
I promised him, "I will do my best." And for thirty years continually I went on and on talking on every subject under the stars. But I came to a point which Magga Baba had not come to. He saved me from his disappointment; but I came to a new realization, a new point. I had thrown my net far and wide to catch as many people as have the potential to blossom. But then I felt that words are not enough.
Now I have found my people and I have to arrange a silent communion, which will help in two ways:
those who cannot understand silence will drop out. That will be good. That will be a good weeding; otherwise they will go on clinging around me because of the words, because their intellect feels satisfied. And I am not here to satisfy their intellect. My purpose is far, far deeper, of a different dimension.
So these days of silence have helped those who were just intellectually curious, rationally interested in me, to turn their back. And secondly, it has helped me to find my real, authentic people who are not in need of words to be with me. They can be with me without words. That's the difference between communication and communion.
Communication is through words, and communion is through silence.
-Osho, “From Unconciousness to Consciousness, #1”