The drug can give you something so easily, then why bother with Vipassana, sitting and meditating and struggling hard? Why not the easier way?
The mind is always for the shortcut, and the shortcut is always false. As far as spiritual growth is concerned, there is no shortcut. You cannot cheat—there is no back door. Each has to follow the arduous way. In fact the real beauty of the peak depends on how hard your struggle has been. When you struggle hard and you lose the track many times—many times even the peak disappears and you are again in the dark valley, again you struggle and again you fall and again you move—this whole effort creates that situation where, when the real experience happens, you are in a tremendous bliss. If you are suddenly dropped on that peak by some helicopter, there will be no joy; there will be no joy at all.
I never have any sense of our being judged by Osho; he does not imply that we are wrong or stupid. He simply, scientifically and lucidly, points out the consequences of what we are doing; it is left to us whether we want to pursue our own course or not. That is always the freedom and the responsibility, and I sense that Osho respects us each for deciding how to use that freedom and take on that responsibility.
*
Shyam, a sannyasin who has just returned from England, tells Osho that while away he could see that he has done a lot of unnecessary worrying when in reality he knows that everything is fine. Yet all the time while away he felt the need to try to do something, to interfere or try to direct the way his life is going.
“Drop that trying and doing,” Osho suggests. “Just be as you are with no judgment.”
“But I don’t know how I am,” Shyam replies.
“I’m not saying that you are x,y,z—whatsoever you are is good. How you are is not the point. That ‘how’ again brings in the same question of wanting to drop certain things. That ‘how’ brings in the question of whether you are right…. What I am saying is that whatsoever you are is right! There is no way to be wrong. How can you be wrong? ”
“I feel wrong,” says Shyam quietly.
“That is possible, but you cannot be wrong; that’s what I’m saying,” counters Osho …. “So the feeling has to be dropped and the fact has to be accepted: you are that which you can be—you will never be anybody else; there is no way. So it is up to you to create misery out of it or bliss out of it. Misery is judgment; bliss is a non-valuating consciousness, no judgment. And meanwhile you remain the same. ”
Then with his typical humor, Osho adds, “The mango remains the mango; it cannot become a banana. But it can become miserable. Looking at a banana, the mango can become miserable, can suffer hell: “Why am I not a banana? What has gone wrong? Why am I not like the banana? Why am I just a mango?” It remains a mango but it will suffer….
This looks very hard, mm? Because ordinarily, spiritual seekers are searching for some way to become something else. People come to me to become somebody else and I go on pulling them back to being themselves. And I am not saying that you will be happy if you become somebody—a great Buddha, a Christ. If you just remain yourself and let things be….
Yes, there will be moments when you will be able to relate and there will be moments when you will not be able to relate; there will be moments when you are open and there will be moments when you will not be open. When you are not open that’s exactly what is needed; when you are open, that is needed. In the night the petals will close and the flower will not be open; in the morning when the sun comes, the flower will open. Now, it makes no problem out of it. So don’t make a problem out of it.
No problem can be solved, but all problems can be dropped. They cannot be solved because they don’t exist really; they are make-believe, constructed. We construct them because we cannot live without problems—problems give us occupation, something to do, but all problems can be dropped. Now be a mango and be happy, or be a banana and be happy; there is nothing else to hanker for. Then suddenly there is joy! Shyam is Shyam, and Shyam is going to remain Shyam. So why waste time? Why go on pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings? All this jumping is foolish! Rest in yourself. For one month drop all judgments. And when I am saying, ‘Drop all judgments,’ this judgment is included in it. ”
With a rueful little laugh Shyam says, “Yes, my mind is already saying, ‘I’ll try’.”
“Yes, you follow me?” Osho responds. “This judgment is included in it. Tomorrow you may be judging something—then don’t say, ‘I have to drop all judgments!’ This too has to be dropped. So you cannot say, ‘This is wrong; Osho has said don’t judge!’ I am not saying don’t judge. I’m simply saying that this judgmental attitude is meaningless; see into it, be clear about it.
By and by you will see within a month that judgment comes less and less and less, and one day suddenly it is not there. That day there is an opening. The clouds are no more there, and the sky is clear and you can see…and what you see has always been there….”
*
This is the alchemy I witness every evening: Osho takes whatever material we present in the form of our problems and, while pointing out their insubstantiality but acknowledging that they mean something to us, he shows us their construction, thread by thread; shows us how we fabricate, by our own doing, each knot, each flaw. And having exposed that fabrication for what it is, he then indicates what we really have and what our real potential is. As he puts it, once we realize that we had been clutching stones when in fact we can claim diamonds, the point is made, the work achieved.
I love how he does this… and the playfulness that is always there, sometimes more to the fore than others. A case in point is that of Big Prem’s mother, who arrives in Pune to visit her daughter. Of even greater proportions than her daughter, Josephine is given a chair to sit on in darshan, rather than joining the rest of us on the floor. Osho is to say the following morning in discourse that he deliberately stimulated Josephine’s defenses. Tonight he certainly doesn’t pussyfoot around, immediately asking Josephine: “What about you? Now become a sannyasin!”
Josephine (the formal smile quickly shocked into extinction): “What?”
Osho: “I’ve been waiting and waiting!”
Josephine: “I only came here to visit Prem.”
Osho: “Mm?”
Josephine: “I really did not come here to be a sannyasin—I only came here to visit my baby.”
Osho: “You did come to visit your baby but you have…Mm?”
Josephine: “Right. No, I’m not interested in being a sannyasin. I’m really not.”
Osho (undaunted): “I will make one of you!”
Josephine: “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to.”
Osho: “What is the fear?”
Josephine: “I’m not interested. I’m just not interested. You don’t mind my being truthful? You want me to say, ‘Yes, I want to be a sannyasin’ when I really don’t want to?”
Osho: “No no, there is no need to become—if you don’t want. But why?”
Josephine: “Because I’m a Roman Catholic and I believe in the Catholic Church and I believe in God, and I cannot give
