of the most memorable series of all for me is on the words the fifteenth-century Indian mystic, Kabir. Like Jesus, Kabir was of the marketplace—he was a weaver of cloth, illiterate. Osho calls Kabir “the Christ of the East.”
“Kabir is a harbinger, a herald of the future, the first flower that heralds the spring. He is one of the greatest poets of religion. He is not a theologian; he does not belong to any religion. All religions belong to him, but he is vast enough to contain all. He’s a great beauty, a great poetry, a great orchestra.”
Where the Sufis touch my heart, Kabir claims it completely, and his ecstasy infects us all. The musicians set his poetry to music, creating songs that decades later I will not be able to hear without a pricking of tears…. “Just one look at the real man standing there, and we are in love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love!”
It is time to put up a love swing!
Tie the body and then tie the mind so that they swing between the arms of the Secret One you love.
Bring the water that falls from the clouds to your eyes.
And cover yourself over entirely with the shadow of night. Bring your face up close to his ear, and then talk only about what you want deeply to happen.
Kabir says, “Listen to me, brother, bring the face, the shape, and the odor of the Holy One inside you.”
How exquisitely moving it is to hear those words from Osho’s lips—from one who exudes the perfume of that “holy one inside”!
This then, is our daily diet, our “spiritual breakfast”: imbibing the masters of the past. Osho explains that he speaks on such an assortment of paths to make us enriched:
… to make you available to all the joys possible in the spiritual world, to make you capable of all kinds of ecstasies. Yes, Buddha brings one kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through intelligence. And Jesus brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through love. Krishna brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through action. And Lao Tzu brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through inaction. These are very different paths, but they all come into you, and they all meet you in your innermost core.
Be simply a man, a human being, with no Jewish, Christian, Hindu ideologies hanging around you. Drop all that dust and let your mirror be clear, and you will be in continuous celebration, because then the whole existence is yours.
At the conclusion of many of these discourses my heart is so full that it cannot be contained. I am happier than I can ever have imagined possible.
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Seductive though his talking is, as Osho constantly reminds us the words are in themselves are not the message. In not just hearing his words but listening to him, we can receive that which can’t be conveyed by words. Hearing is something anyone with functioning ears could do; it is a passive, mechanical job of the brain. Listening is active, in that you have to consciously participate, to be in a position to receive not only what is being said but what is between the words. He tells us that the art of being a disciple is the art of imbibing, of being like an absolutely porous sponge, and often I feel exactly like that.
It’s an interesting play to watch my thoughts and feelings become engaged in the words, and then to choose to disengage from both and consciously sink into the space of silence, the gap between words… that place that, being other than mind with its thoughts and feelings, cannot be described. If it could, I would choose expanded, weightless, timeless, only awareness, no separation, and complete fulfillment.
Osho is more present than anyone I have ever met and yet also absent in a curious way. When I’m with someone, most of me may be engaged, but occasionally my eyes might dart off to notice someone walking by, or I am scratching myself or shifting from foot to foot. Sometimes perhaps I appear to be present but internally I’m thinking of how to respond to the person or wondering if I should be doing something else, and so on.
I don’t see or sense any of that happening with Osho: he is always one hundred percent here and now. He is present inasmuch as he is completely open and present to each moment, for example, to a person sitting on front of him, explaining what his concern is. And yet inside that so-utterly-present person there isn’t a sense of a “personality”—the usual collection of traits, characteristics and mannerisms, the manifestations of a particular ego that we regard as being intrinsic to each other. Instead, he is filled with space and it’s that which gives me the feeling of his being absent. Even more curiously, both states—the complete presence and the absence—are there at the same time.
Maybe it’s that combination that creates his charisma. I will sit just a few feet from him for many, many years, and—in his sitting with eyes closed, or listening, talking, gently touching someone’s head or laughing with us—witness how this remains a constant.
Speaking of what those around Jesus experienced, Osho explains that the real thing was just to be in the presence of this man:
Have you observed?—very few people have what you call “presence.” Rarely do you come across a person who has a presence—something indefinable about him, something that you suddenly feel but cannot indicate, something that fills you but is ineffable, something very mysterious and unknown. You cannot deny it; you cannot prove it. It is not the body, because anybody can have a body. It is not the mind, because anybody can have a mind. Sometimes a very beautiful body may be there, tremendously beautiful, but the presence is not there; sometimes a genius mind is there, but the presence is not there; and sometimes you pass a beggar and you are filled, touched, stirred—the presence.
Those who were in the presence of Jesus, those who were in his satsang; those who lived close, those who lived in his milieu, breathed him. If you allow me to say it: those who drank him and ate him, who allowed him to enter into their innermost shrine…. That transformed, not the prayer; prayer was just an excuse to be with him. Even without prayer it would have happened, but without prayer they might not have found an excuse to be with him…
Being with a master is so new to most of us that, ironically, it needs a master to explain to us who he is and to provide words to articulate how his presence is affecting us.
“Does being in the presence of the master really change a man?” someone asks in discourse.
“You are changed by everything!” Osho replies:
… the sun rises in the morning, your sleep disappears…. When the sun sets in the evening, you start falling asleep….When you listen to great music, is some chord in your heart touched and moved or not? Listening to great music, do you become music or not? Seeing a dancer, does not a great desire arise in you to dance? Listening to a poet, listening to great poetry, for a few moments you attain to a poetic vision. Some doors open, some mysteries surround you.
Exactly the same happens on a more total level in the presence of a master—because the master is a musician, and the master is a poet, and the master is a painter, and the master is a potter, and the master is a weaver…and the master is all things together….
To be in the presence of the master…to be open, vulnerable, available—available to his touch—then his magic starts flowing into you. And this happens every day to you! Still the mind goes on suspecting. Still the doubt goes on raising its head.
Have you been transported into other worlds being with me? Has it not happened to many of you? Is it not happening right now? Are you the same person when you are far away from me? Have you not felt that something changes, something starts happening to
