Question 3:

Last night i heard you say that our energy is based in the 'hara', and that it is expressed through the different chakras in the body.

Traditional zen seems to emphasize zazen as the way to come in touch with that energy, whereas you have allowed, even encouraged, your disciples to have more freedom to explore the various avenues of expression.

Osho, would you like to comment?
 

 

I am not a traditional man at all. I am untraditional in every possible way. I am not confined to any technique.

 

Zen is confined, in a way, to Zazen. Zazen means just sitting and doing nothing. It is perfectly right, but my experience of the modern man is that the most difficult thing for him is just sitting and doing nothing. If you ask him to go to the moon, he can go. If you ask him to go to Everest, he can go. But just sitting? That is the most difficult thing. Finally, you will have to come to the point.

 

I have nothing to do with tradition. My Zen is absolutely untraditional. First, I make you jump and shout and scream, and do all kinds of gibberish. Then finally, tired, you can sit for a few moments.

 

I was staying in a home, and the host, my friend, was introducing me to his wife and his child. And he said, "This child is a trouble. He can't sit silently even for a single moment. He is always doing something - running..."

 

I said, "You can sit? Your wife can just sit and do nothing?"

 

The wife said, "We never thought about it, but it is true. Even my husband on holiday unnecessarily opens the car. It is doing perfectly well, but he tries to improve it. And finally it has to be sent to the garage. He cannot sit, nor can I sit. And that is the same with our child. We were not aware. You made us aware that it is not right to ask him to just sit."

 

I said, "First, let him go around the house seven times, and he will sit silently." And I told the boy, "Go around the house seven times."

 

He said, "Why?"

 

I said, "You just do it seven times. Just show your energy."

 

So he went around the house seven times, then he sat in the garden very silently.

 

I told his parents, "You can do the same. Go around the house whenever you feel like sitting. First, jump, scream, throw out all the garbage that is inside your head."

 

I am dealing with the contemporary man, who is the most restless being that has ever evolved on the earth. But people do become silent; you just have to allow them to throw out their madness, insanity, then they themselves become silent. They start waiting for the moment when I will say, "Be silent." They become tired of their gibberish. They also become aware that this gibberish is there.

 

I used to have camps in Mount Abu, and I used gibberish - not for two minutes, but for a complete hour. And it was such a great joy when I said to people, "Now you can be silent."

 

And they did such things...

 

One man, every day, whenever it was allowed... We used to do the gibberish in the afternoon, and as everybody was going insane, he would start phoning - that was his speciality.

 

"Hello...!" - and there was nobody. And he would look at me, and I would close my eyes because he felt embarrassed. There was nobody, no phone. But he was some kind of broker, so - "Hello..." And he would answer from the other end, and from both the ends for one hour... He would become tired and he would start throwing his nonexistent telephone towards me, because he was getting tired.

 

One hour - and then I would say, "Be silent." He would put the phone back, and he would look so joyous. And I wondered how long he would be able to do it. In the seven-day camp, after the fifth day he stopped phoning. He would take up the phone and then put it down, seeing the futility of it.

 

But it took five days.

 

You have to be total, otherwise things remain inside you. You have to empty your continuous gibberish that goes on inside, "Yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak..." Don't do it partially. Don't be bothered about being seen, because nobody is looking at you; everybody is in his own insanity. This is a good time for you to say and do anything which ordinarily you will not say.

 

In Mount Abu one day, one of my sannyasins who used to arrange the car for me from Ahmedabad to Mount Abu - his friend, in the gibberish meditation, suddenly jumped up, threw away all his clothes, and started pulling the car towards the valley. Four persons had to prevent him, otherwise he would have thrown the car into a deep valley. When he was prevented, he jumped up on a tree, naked, and started waving the branches of the tree, and the branches started cracking! Everybody was worried - "We never expected... this man has always been sane." Somehow he had to be brought down.

 

When the meditation was over, he came to me saying, "Please forgive me, but perhaps these ideas must have been in me, otherwise why? I never have done such a thing before, and I cannot conceive... But in that moment I wanted to throw that car into the valley and destroy it."

 

I said, "You should think about it. Perhaps you have always been jealous of your friend's car."

 

He became silent, and he said, "Perhaps. Deep down it must have been."

 

"And because you were prevented from throwing the car into the valley, in your anger you forgot completely that you were naked, and you jumped on the tree. And out of anger you started shaking the whole tree. All this violence you must have carried inside you. With this much violence inside, how can you sit down silently?"

 

The contemporary man is the most restless man. And I am dealing with the contemporary man, not the dead of the past. I have to devise ways and methods so that you can become silent. Finally, that is the goal - Zazen. But before that you have to throw out many things. Perhaps in the past when man was much more natural, unrepressed...

 

In Burma there is still a small tribe in the mountains, which has never fought with anybody, which has never killed anybody. Nobody in its history has committed suicide or murder. They know nothing of Sigmund Freud, but they know a far deeper psychoanalysis than Sigmund Freud knows.

 

Anybody in that tribe, if he dreams, and in his dream he hits somebody, in the morning he has to confess to the elders that he has hit somebody in the dream. He has to describe the person so they can find out who the person is whom he has hit. Then he has to go to that person with fruits, sweets, to be forgiven - although it happened in the dream. But it must have been in the mind, otherwise it cannot happen even in the dream.

 

In that small tribe, no violence, no war, no battle... they don't have any arms. If it is possible in a small tribe, it is possible on the whole globe. If it is possible for a single man, it is possible for the whole of humanity. We have just to throw out all the garbage that comes up in our minds, in our dreams. And it affects our actions, our attitudes, our miseries, our angers, our despair. It is better to throw it before it affects your actions.

 

And that is the whole psychology behind meditation: emptying you, creating a nothingness in you.

 

Out of that nothingness blossoms the ultimate joy, the ultimate bliss.

 

-Osho, "The Zen Manifesto Freedom From Oneself, #8, Q3"