Question 4
Osho,
Although you were born almost enlightened, when i listen to your stories of your early life, i never get the impression that you saw yourself as a spiritual seeker. were you looking for enlightenment, or was enlightenment a by-product of an impeccable resolve to never compromise what you felt to be true?
There are things which cannot be sought directly. The more valuable a thing is, the more indirectly you have to go into it. In fact you have to do something else that simply prepares the situation around you -- in which things like enlightenment, truth, can happen.
You cannot go seeking and searching for truth. Where will you go? Kabul? Kulu-Manali? Kathmandu? Goa?... and then back home. All seekers of truth go this route and come back home looking more foolish than before. They have not found anything.
Where will you go to seek the truth? You don't know the way, there is no map, there is no direction available. Nobody knows what, where, when it is possible to realize truth.
The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, unauthentic, insincere -- and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.
I have never been spiritual in the sense that you understand the word. I have never gone to the temples or the churches, or read scriptures, or followed certain practices to find truth, or worshipped God or prayed to God. That has not been my way at all. So certainly you can say that I was not doing anything spiritual. But to me spirituality has a totally different connotation. It needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people's aloneness.
So my spirituality has a different meaning from your idea of spirituality. My childhood stories -- if you can understand them -- will point to all these qualities in some way or other. Nobody can call them spiritual. I call them spiritual, because to me they have given all that man can aspire to.
While listening to my childhood stories you should try to look for some quality in it -- not just the story but some intrinsic quality that runs like a thin thread through all of my memoirs. And that thin thread is spiritual.
Spiritual, to me, simply means finding oneself. I never allowed anybody to do this work on my behalf -- because nobody can do this work on your behalf; you have to do it yourself. And you cannot do it directly either, you have to create a certain milieu in which it happens. It is a happening; enlightenment, liberation, awakening, realization -- all these words point towards absolutely one thing and that is a happening.
That creates a kind of fear in many people: "If it is happening, then what are we supposed to do? Whenever it will happen, it will happen." That is not so. It is a happening, but you can do much to prepare the ground for it to happen.
Preparing the ground may not look spiritual to those who do not understand. But it must be spiritual because the enlightenment has happened.
The end proves that whatever means were used were substantially right. It is the goal that proves that the way that was followed was right.
- Osho, “The Transmission of the Lamp, #10, Q4”