the-guest-08

The first question:
Osho,
Five years ago I had a dream in which you looked at me and said very sternly, “Why don’t you go away?”
Now whenever I am in front of you, and at other times also, I feel me so strongly – I wish I would go away.
You are just holding on to something which is no longer there. You are clinging to a shadow. You are just clinging to a memory. And that is the case with many of my sannyasins – their egos are gone, there are just traces, footprints, past memories. They go on clinging to these past memories, thinking they are their egos.
It takes time to recognize the fact that you are no more. Sometimes it can take years to understand that the ego has been left somewhere on the path long before. And about you I can say it absolutely: it is only a shadow that is torturing you. The ego has disappeared, but you have not yet been able, alert… The ego has disappeared in deep love with me.
The ego disappears in two ways. When it disappears because of meditation one immediately becomes aware that it is gone because meditation means awareness and nothing else, so there is no gap. On the path of awareness the disappearance of the ego and the recognition is instantaneous, simultaneous.
But on the path of love, the ego disappears and recognition only comes later on. The path of love is the path of the drunkard. He is utterly drunk, so how can he recognize what has happened or what is happening? And when you are in love, so much goes on happening that even to take note of it all becomes more and more difficult. And when deeper things happen, it really takes time for them to be recognized.
Meditation is the way of the head. Recognition also, is a function of the head, so when meditation happens, immediately recognition happens. But love happens in the heart, and there is a great distance between love and logic, the heart and the head. In the heart you are no more, but the head is still clinging to an old idea. The bird has left the cage long ago. You are drowning in me more and more every day.

Dad was pretending to be asleep. “If I play possum,” he thought, “maybe the kids will go away.”
But they persisted in their efforts to try and rouse him from his delicious sleep. Finally his little daughter tried to open one of his eyelids, looked intently in, and reported to her brothers, “He is still in there!”

I have looked into you and I say you are not there. It will be difficult to believe what I am saying: how can you believe it unless it becomes your own recognition? But my saying it will help, it will help the recognition to happen sooner than otherwise. The news has started traveling from the heart.
Physiologically the heart and the head are very close – the distance is maybe not more than eighteen inches – but spiritually the head and the heart, these two points, are the furthest apart. Even stars are closer to you than your own heart. The greatest distance in existence is between the heart and the head, between love and logic, between intuition and intellect. Recognition happens in the intellect and love happens in the world of intuition.
And you are in love. Your path is that of love. Don’t be at all worried – you are gone, and gone forever. You cannot return even if you want to. And this is so with many of my sannyasins who are in deep love with me, who are following on the path with tremendous drunkenness, who have abandoned themselves, whose trust is total – they also will need time. But who cares about the recognition? The real thing is the realization, not the recognition.
On the path of love it is always the master who makes the disciple aware: “It has happened! Now don’t worry about it. It is already dawn and the night is gone.” It is always the master who reminds, who helps, the disciple to recognize. On the path of awareness, there is no need. The disciple himself becomes alert; alertness is his whole work.

The second question:
Osho,
Listening to you speak this morning on the different paths for different people, it struck me as strange that over the years the entire collection of my personal tapes has been of your talks on meditation, such as the Dhammapada, the Heart sutra, Yoga sutras, Shiva sutras, Hakim Sanai, and the latest, on Atisha. Also, even during the three great celebrations at the ashram, I have preferred to sit silently rather than sing and dance. Neither of these things are done deliberately though, it has just happened that way. I sometimes wonder if I am caught in the attraction of the opposite. Would you please comment?
Ajit Saraswati, you are not caught in the opposite: meditation is your path, awareness is going to be your key, the master key. Go totally with it and don’t be worried about the lovers. Many times, many things will make you jealous because those who follow the path of love will dance, they will sing, they will laugh, they will celebrate. A thousand and one flowers will bloom on their path; their eyes will sparkle, will become candles; their lives will become more and more juicy.
On the path of awareness these things don’t happen at all. Yes, a totally different kind of beauty happens – the beauty of the desert, the silence of the desert. And remember, the desert has its own beauty; all that is needed is one who can understand that beauty. There are no trees, no greenery, just an infinite expanse of sand and sand, and the patterns that the wind makes on the sand, and the starry night in the desert, and silence, utter silence.
You cannot find that silence in a garden. The birds will go on chirping, and the wind will go on blowing through the pine trees, and the fountains and the streams… And much goes on because it is a dance. In the desert it is all stillness. Those who can appreciate the beauty of a garden may not be able to appreciate the beauty of the desert; those who can feel the beauty of the desert may sometimes feel jealous of those who are living in the garden.
It is an ancient phenomenon: the follower on the path of awareness has always felt suspicious; doubts arise in him many times. That’s what is happening to Ajit. The doubt is natural because the lover displays so many things that prove that something is happening, and the meditator simply starts disappearing into his own being, into his own interiority. No flower manifests, no song bursts forth; he becomes more and more aloof, distant. Others may even start thinking that he has become sad or serious.
Vivek always asks me, “What is happening to Ajit Saraswati? Why does he look so serious? He does not even laugh at the jokes, or very rarely, and that with an effort, just as if not to feel left out.” Vivek reminds me because her path is of love; she cannot understand. It is impossible for the lover to understand that there can be any beauty in the desert, in being simply, utterly alone. But both have their beauties.
Ajit Saraswati, you need not worry, you are not attracted by the opposite. Meditation is your path. On the path of the lover you would feel strange, it wouldn’t suit you. And it is not only in this life that you are following the path of meditation: for many lives you have been following it, on and off. But this time I think it is going to remain on. There is every possibility that this may be your last life. Enjoy it deeply. Enjoy this stillness, silence – which may appear to others as seriousness, even as sadness. Don’t be confused by it, don’t be shaken by it.

The third question:
Osho,
Why am I still so scared of exposing myself?
Gita, who is not? To expose oneself creates great fear. It is natural because to expose oneself means to expose all the rubbish that you carry in your mind, the garbage which has been piling up for centuries, for many, many lives. To expose oneself means to expose all one’s weaknesses, limitations, faults. To expose oneself ultimately means to expose one’s vulnerability, death. To expose oneself means to expose one’s emptiness.
Behind all the garbage of the mind and the noise of the mind there is a dimension of utter emptiness. One is hollow without godliness, one is just empty and nothing without godliness. One wants to hide this nakedness, this emptiness, this ugliness, cover it with beautiful flowers, decorate those covers. One can at least pretend that one is something, somebody.
And this is not something personal to you; this is universal, this is the case with everybody. No one can open themselves up like a book. Fear grips you: “What will people think of me?” From your very childhood you have been taught to wear masks, beautiful masks. There is no need to have a beautiful face, just a beautiful mask will do; and the masks are cheap. To transform your face is arduous, to paint your face is very simple.
Now to suddenly expose your real face makes you shiver in the deepest core of your being; a trembling arises. Will people like it? Will people accept you? Will people still love you, respect you? Who knows? They loved your mask, they respected your character, they glorified your garments; but now fear arises: “If I suddenly become naked are they still going to love me, respect me, appreciate me, or will they all escape, run away from me? They may turn their backs on me, I may be left alone.” Hence, people go on pretending. This pretension is out of fear, and out of fear arises all pseudoness. One needs to be fearless to be authentic.
One of the fundamental laws of life is this: whatsoever you hide goes on growing, and whatsoever you expose, if it is wrong it disappears, evaporates in the sun, and if it is right it is nourished. Just the opposite happens when you hide something: the right starts dying because it is not nourished. It needs the wind and the rain and the sun; it needs the whole of nature available to it. It can grow only with truth, it feeds on truth. Stop giving it its nourishment and it starts getting thinner and thinner.
People are starving their reality and fattening their unreality. Your unreal faces feed upon lies, so you have to go on inventing more and more lies. To support one lie you will have to lie a hundred times more because a lie can only be supported by bigger lies. So when you hide behind facades the real starts dying and the unreal thrives, becomes fatter and fatter. If you expose yourself the unreal will die, is bound to die because the unreal cannot remain in the open. It can remain only in secrecy, it can remain only in darkness, it can remain only in the tunnels of your unconscious. If you bring the unreal to consciousness it starts evaporating.
That’s the whole secret of the success of psychoanalysis. It is a simple secret, but the whole secret: the psychoanalyst helps to bring up all that is inside your unconscious, in the darker realms of your being, to the level of the conscious. He brings it to the surface where you can see it, others can see it, and a miracle happens: just your seeing it is the beginning of its death. And if you can tell it to somebody else, just exposing it to a single person is enough to bring about great changes in your being. That’s what you do in psychoanalysis, you expose yourself to your psychoanalyst.
But to expose yourself to a psychoanalyst is limiting: you have exposed your secrets to only one person, in deep privacy, with the condition that he is not going to make them public. That is part of the profession of the physician, psychoanalyst, therapist, that is part of his oath: he will keep your secrets, he will not tell them to anybody. So it is a very limited exposure, but it still helps. And it is exposure to a professional, that’s why it takes years. It still helps, but what could be done within days takes years in psychoanalysis – four years, five years – and even then it is never complete. The world has not yet known a single case of total psychoanalysis, of the process completed, terminated, finished, no, not yet. Not even your psychoanalysts are completely psychoanalyzed because the exposure itself is very limited and with conditions. The psychoanalyst listens to you as if he is not listening because he is not to tell your secrets to anybody. But even then, it helps tremendously to unburden you.
If you can expose yourself religiously – not in privacy, not to the professional, but simply in all your relationships – that’s what sannyas is all about. It is self-psychoanalysis. It is twenty-four-hour psychoanalysis, day in, day out. It is psychoanalysis in all kinds of situations: with the wife, with the friend, with the relative, with the enemy, with the stranger, with the boss, with the servant. For twenty-four hours you are relating.
In the beginning it is going to be really very scary, but if you go on exposing yourself soon you will start gaining strength because once the truth is exposed it becomes stronger and the untruth dies. And with the truth becoming stronger you become rooted, you become centered. You start becoming an individual; the personality disappears and individuality appears.
Personality is bogus, individuality is substantial. Personality is just a facade, individuality is your truth. Personality is imposed from the outside; it is a persona, a mask. Individuality is your reality; it is as existence has made you. Personality is social sophistication, social polishing. Individuality is raw, wild, strong, with tremendous power.
The fear will be there only in the beginning. Hence the need for a master, so that in the beginning he can hold your hand, so that in the beginning he can support you, so that in the beginning he can take you a few steps with him. The master is not a psychoanalyst – he is that and far more. The psychoanalyst is a professional; the master is not a professional – it is not his profession to help people, it is his vocation, it is his love, it is his compassion. And because it is his compassion he takes you only as far as you need him. The moment he starts feeling that you can go on your own he starts slipping his hand out of yours. Although you would like to cling on, he cannot allow that. Once you are ready, courageous, daring, once you have tasted the freedom of truth, the freedom of exposing your reality, you can go on your own. You can be a light unto yourself.
Fear arises because of a great identity crisis. This fear is natural because from your very childhood what you have been taught is false, and you have become so identified with the false that to drop it looks almost like committing suicide. For fifty years, sixty years, you have been a certain kind of person.
Gita must be reaching sixty now. For sixty years you have been a certain kind of person. Dropping that identity now, in this last phase of your life, and starting to learn about yourself from ABC is frightening. Death is coming closer and closer every day – is this the time to start a new lesson? Who knows if you will be able to complete it or not? Who knows? You may lose your old identity and you may not have enough time, enough energy, enough courage, to attain a new identity. So are you going to die without an identity? Are you going to live in the last phase of your life without an identity? To live without an identity would be a kind of madness; the heart sinks, the heart shrinks. One thinks, “Now it is okay to go on for a few days more. It is better to live with the old, the familiar, the secure, the convenient.” You have become skilled at it. And it has been a great investment: you have put sixty years of your life into it. Somehow you have managed, somehow you have created an idea of who you are – and now I tell you to drop that idea because you are not that?
No idea is needed to know yourself. In fact, all ideas have to be dropped, only then can you know who you are. Fear is natural. Don’t condemn it, and don’t feel that it is something wrong. It is just part of your whole social upbringing. You have to accept it and go beyond it; without condemning it you have to go beyond it.
Expose slowly, slowly. There is no need to take jumps that you cannot manage; go by steps, gradually. Soon you will learn the taste of the truth, and you will be surprised that all those sixty years have been a sheer waste. Your old identity will be lost, and you will have a totally new conception. It will not really be an identity, but a new vision, a new way of seeing things, a new perspective. You will not be able to say “I” again with something behind it. You will use the word because it is useful, but you will know all the time that the word carries no meaning, no substance, no existential substance at all; that behind this “I” is hidden an ocean, infinite, vast, divine.
You will never attain another identity. Your old identity will be gone, and for the first time you will start feeling yourself as a wave in the ocean of existence. That is not an identity because you are not in it. You have disappeared, godliness has overwhelmed you. If you can risk the false, the truth can be yours. And it is worth it because you risk only the false and you gain the truth. You risk nothing and you gain all.
My work here is to somehow persuade you, seduce you this way or that, to drop the old identity. You have succeeded in being able to hide many things you have done in the past. Now opening again those closed chapters, closed chambers for no reason at all, and releasing the ghosts of the past, many, many fears will come.
You may not have been faithful to your husband once in a while, but you have been able to manage a certain face of sincerity, faithfulness. Unnecessarily exposing yourself now is bound to create fear. You may not have been faithful, but what is the point of exposing it now? Or you may have been faithful in deed, but not in thought, what is the point of exposing it? The mind will say, “There is no need. There are so many problems already, why create new ones?”
You may have succeeded in telling many lies and circulating those lies as true. You may have succeeded, and now those lies are almost truths for others, and even for you. Now going back and looking again, it is very, very natural to be afraid, to not want to look back, to not go into all those nightmares.

Harry constantly irritated his friends with his eternal optimism. No matter how bad the situation was he would always say, “It could have been worse.”
To cure him of this annoying habit his friends decided to invent a situation so completely black, so dreadful, that even Harry wouldn’t be able to find any hope in it.
Approaching him at the club bar one day, one of them said, “Harry, did you hear what happened to George? He came home last night, found his wife in bed with another man, shot them both, then turned the gun on himself.”
“Terrible!” said Harry, “but it could have been worse.”
“How in hell,” asked the dumbfounded friend, “could it possibly have been worse?”
“Well,” said Harry, “if it had happened the night before, I would be dead now.”

It is better to keep quiet, the mind says. It is better not to bring out all the old ghosts, not to release them; it is better to go on sitting on them. For sixty years you have been able to manage a certain demeanor, a certain gracefulness, a certain personality – polished, civilized, respectable. And now to suddenly expose it for no reason at all? The mind will say, “Have you gone mad? If you have waited so long, you can wait a little more.”
Little Siddhartha writes to me again and again, “Osho, I want to become part of the ashram now.” I have been telling him to wait just a little more, a little more, a little more, but he is persistent. Every month or two he asks for a darshan, and the only question he asks is, “When can I come into the ashram?”
Three or four days ago, he again wrote a letter saying, “It is time now. When am I going to be in the ashram?” So I said to Laxmi, “Tell him, within four or five days. Make any arrangements and let him come in.”
Laxmi told him, “Just wait four or five days.”
He said, “Why four or five days? Osho always says ‘Do it now!’ Why four or five days? Why wait? Why can’t I come right now? Osho’s insistence is always on the right now, here.”
Laxmi told him, “You would find it very difficult right now.” The room had to be prepared, the room had to be painted.
So he said, “Okay. If I have waited for so long, I can wait for four or five days more. If it is only a question of four or five days more, I can wait. And I have waited so long already. Okay, I will wait.”
After sixty years of life the idea simply arises in your mind that you have waited for so long, why can’t you wait for a few days more? Why create any disturbance? Why create any unnecessary ripples? Things have settled, everybody respects you: your children respect you, your husband respects you, your society respects you. It has been a hard struggle, it has been a struggle with the outside, it has been a struggle with the inside. Somehow you have repressed all that is wild in you: you have repressed sex, anger, greed, jealousy; you have repressed all that society condemns. You have somehow managed to create a beautiful character; why expose it now, in the last phase of your life? For what? What are you going to gain from it? The mind will give you all these cunning reasons – they are rationalizations.
If you have lived in a false way for sixty years, enough is enough! It is now time to drop that whole falsity. What can people take away from you now? Sooner or later you will be dead, and all respect, and all character, and everything, will be gone; soon you will be forgotten. A few people will remember you for a few days, then they will die and even the memory of you will be gone from the earth.
How many millions of people have lived on the earth? Nobody even knows their names now. In their own time they must have bragged about their character, personality, strength, truth, courage, religiousness, saintliness, this and that. Now nobody even knows their names. When a person dies, almost ninety-nine percent of their life disappears; one percent lingers a little bit as memories in the minds of the few people who knew them. Yes, they will remember that person once in a while, but that is all that is left. And then those people will die and even those memories will disappear. Within a few years a person disappears so totally, it is as if he had never been there in the first place.
What have you got to lose now? You have nothing to lose and you have everything to gain. You are fortunate that in the last phase of your life you have come into contact with this energy field. You are fortunate that in the evening of your life a door is opening – and the person who comes back home, even in the evening, should not be thought lost. That is a proverb in India: even in the evening when the sun is setting, if somebody comes back home he is not thought to be lost. He has arrived, finally, he has arrived.
Your life has gone down the drain – now don’t miss this last phase. And the last phase is the most important because it will bring death. If you can die as truth you will not be born again. If you can die with all the falsities dropped, with all false identities renounced, disconnected from you; if you can die utterly naked before God, absolutely naked before God, like a small child before his parents – your death will be the most beautiful experience that you have ever had.
Those who have known death say that life is nothing compared to death. Life has extension, it is spread out over seventy, eighty years. Hence, it cannot have the intensity which death can have, and only death can have because it happens in a split second. You live over eighty years and in a split second you die. Death has intensity, not extension but intensity. It has depth.
Life gives you a long time in which to live; you can postpone things to tomorrow and you can live in a lukewarm way. But death is so total – if you can die consciously. And you can die consciously only if you expose yourself totally, so all that the unconscious is carrying is poured out, all that the unconscious is repressing is released, so the unconscious becomes empty and there is nothing to hide. Then you can totally expose yourself in the moment of death and you can die consciously.
Remember, a person who has any repression cannot die consciously; repression creates the unconscious. The more repressed you are, the bigger an unconscious you have. What actually is the unconscious? – it is that part of your mind that you don’t want to see, it is that part of your mind that you bypass, it is that part of your house where you never go, the basement. You go on throwing all kinds of things into it and you never go in.
The unconscious is not a natural phenomenon. The more civilized man becomes, the bigger the unconscious becomes. Uncivilized people have very small unconscious minds. You will be surprised to know about aboriginals, the very primitive people who still exist in some parts of the world. In India, in some deep forests, in the hills, there are still people who are as primitive as you can find anywhere, they are at least five thousand years behind. One of the most important things about these people – I have lived with them – is that they don’t dream. It is tremendously important. It is very rare that a primitive dreams because he has no unconscious. He lives his life so naturally, so truthfully, he represses nothing. When you don’t repress anything you cannot create dreams.
A dream is the boiling unconscious. The whole day you go on repressing and in the night, when you fall asleep – when the repressor falls asleep – all that is repressed starts surfacing. That’s what your dreaming is. And if your dreams are nightmares that simply means you are really repressing. Your repression is dangerous. You are repressing neurotic things inside your unconscious and the deeper they go, the more damage they do.
I have lived with the primitives. I have noted many things in them, but the most important is that they don’t dream. If you ask them, “What did you dream last night?” they say, “What dream? We slept well.” Yes, once in a while somebody dreams, but only once in a while, and the person who dreams has a totally different kind of dream from you. His dream is not the sort of dream that Freud, Jung and Adler study. His dream is intuitive, his dream is a prediction of the future, his dream is a foreshadowing of something that is going to happen.
So in a primitive society the dreamer becomes the seer; he becomes the shaman. Because he can dream he becomes a tremendously important person. In a civilized society the psychoanalyst becomes very important because he can analyze dreams, he can interpret dreams. In a primitive society the dreamer becomes the most important person. He becomes the religious head of the commune because his dreams become predictions, his dreams always prove to be true. He does not dream about the past because he never represses it. If he dreams at all, he dreams about the future, that which has not yet happened and is going to happen – his dreams are almost always true. And his dreams have to be understood in a totally different way. Modern psychoanalysis is not able to understand his dreams; it is too obsessed with the civilized man, his unconscious. The primitive man has no unconscious.
And the same happens to a buddha: his unconscious disappears because he goes on exposing, pouring out whatsoever is in his being. He never represses it, he never creates an unconscious. The unconscious is a creation of civilization: the more civilized you are, the more unconscious you are. If you become absolutely civilized you will be robots, you will be absolutely unconscious. That’s what is happening. That calamity is happening all over the world – it has to be stopped. And the only way to stop it is to help people to pour out their unconscious in meditations.
Gita, expose yourself. That will unburden you. And I am here. Don’t be worried and don’t be afraid. I am coming with you. I will keep company with you to the point where you don’t need me. I will only leave you in the unknown when I see that you can now walk on your own – and then there will be no fear.
But don’t miss this opportunity. This time, die consciously. You have to start right now to live consciously, only then can you die consciously. If you can live consciously for even a few years, that will be enough. A few months, a few days, or – if the intensity is great – even a few minutes, are enough to live consciously. Then one becomes capable of dying consciously. And to die consciously is to be resurrected into a totally different dimension, the dimension of the divine.
I would like all of my sannyasins to die so deeply that they are never born again, so they can disappear into the cosmos, become part of the whole.

The fourth question:
Osho,
Each morning at discourse I feel you are beckoning me with your eyes to walk across the water to you. Courage arises and I step from my boat. Exhilarated, I take a few steps, but I become afraid and begin to sink. What is this?
I am continuously beckoning you to come across, certainly, but who has told you to walk on the water? Why should you step out of your boat? Use the boat and just come across.

Once, a man went to Ramakrishna, who was sitting on the bank of the Ganges. The man was a very famous yogi of those days. He had gone there to brag about himself – that’s what these so-called yogis go on doing. He said, “Ramakrishna, what are you doing sitting here? Let us go for a walk on the Ganges.”
Ramakrishna asked him, “How many years did it take for you to learn to walk on water?”
The man said, “Eighteen years, practicing in the Himalayas: hard work, fasting, yoga postures. It was difficult, very difficult, almost impossible. Many times I wanted to drop the whole project, but somehow I persisted. Now I have the siddhi, the power – I can walk on water. Can’t you?”
Ramakrishna said, “I am not so foolish. When I want to go to the other bank I give the ferryman only two paise, and that’s enough! Your eighteen years are worth just two paise. Get lost! I am not interested.”

Only fools are interested in miracles.
Another story…

One day Hassan, a Sufi mystic, went to Rabiya, the great Sufi woman. He had just learned how to walk on water, so he told Rabiya, “Let us go and walk on the water and have a little spiritual discourse, a discussion.”
That spiritual discussion was just an excuse; he wanted to show Rabiya that he could walk on water.
Rabiya said, “On the water? That does not appeal to me. Let us go up to the clouds. We will sit on the clouds and have a spiritual discourse.”
Hassan said, “But I don’t know how to go up and sit on the clouds.”
Rabiya said, “Neither do I. But what is the point? Why can’t we have a religious discourse here? Why go to the water, or to the clouds?”

All great mystics have been against miracles, and all fools are interested in miracles.
Use your boat. You have to come to the other shore, certainly, but there is no need to get out of your boat. You have misunderstood my calling you.

A group of tourists were standing at a vantage point overlooking an awesome panorama of the Grand Canyon, when someone could be heard saying, “You know, every afternoon there is a tremendous updraft here caused by warm air rushing up the canyon. A person can actually float on it.”
“You don’t say!” replied his friend.
“Why yes, watch this,” the man said. And he stepped off the edge of the cliff, floated away, and then came back easily.
“Wow!” said someone standing nearby, “I’ll try that!” And he stepped off and went plummeting out of sight down to the bottom of the canyon.
Said the friend, “You can be really mean sometimes, Superman.”

But I cannot be mean to you – please, don’t get out of your boat! Of course you will sink, it is not your fault; that’s how it should be. But use the boat – that’s what is it made for! I am not for any stupid miracles, I am totally for the natural. Use the boat, use all natural means. Godliness is only available through nature, not through the cunning devices of man.
You say, “Osho, each morning at discourse I feel you are beckoning me with your eyes to walk across the water to you. Courage arises and I step from my boat. Exhilarated, I take a few steps, but I become afraid and begin to sink. What is this?”
Stupidity, just pure stupidity. Next time courage arises, don’t do it. Don’t you have oars? Use them, use the boat. There are two kinds of foolish people in the world: one who does not like to use the boat, who would like to walk on the water; and the other who will use the boat, but when they have reached the other shore they will not leave it. Just out of gratitude, they carry the boat on their head all their life.
I go on beckoning you, but you have to understand it rightly. Just a little misunderstanding, just a little misinterpretation, and you will go astray. That’s where I am totally different, and you will see the difference. The same story is there with Jesus: Jesus calls; he is walking on water.
I don’t know that stories like this are true; they must have been invented by priests. Priests are the most cunning, inventive people in the world. I cannot think that a man like Jesus could be so mean as to walk on water. Why would he? These stories have been invented to convert foolish people because only they are interested in such things.
But the story is…

Jesus is walking on the water. Thomas is sitting in the boat and sees him coming. Great enthusiasm arises in him – just like you, great courage – and he thinks, “If the master can do it, why can’t I?” So he asks Jesus, “Can I come and follow you?”
Jesus says, “Certainly, come and follow me.” But Thomas walks only two, three steps before great doubt arises in him and he starts sinking.
Jesus somehow has to save him, and tells him, “Don’t be a doubting Thomas.” Since then there has been the phrase “doubting Thomas.”

If I had been in Jesus’ place, I would not have walked on the water in the first place, and secondly, if by some chance I had walked, I would have stopped Thomas: “Stay in the boat, don’t be too courageous.”
Intelligent people are always courageous, but not vice versa: courageous people are not necessarily intelligent. I would have told Thomas, “Wait! There is no need to walk on the water. Follow me into the dimension of the unknown, but there is no need to walk on the water; that is not a prerequisite for it.” I would have stopped him there and then, rather than allowing him to walk a few steps and sink, and then saving him. I would not have liked all that trouble at all.
So, next time this courage hits you, wait; close your eyes, take your oars, use the boat. Don’t misunderstand me: I would like you to trust, but very intelligently. Trust is the ultimate essence of intelligence; it is not blind faith. I am not against your doubt. You have to use your doubt in purifying your intelligence. You have to use your doubt in sharpening your intelligence. That is the function of doubt – to sharpen intelligence. Once intelligence is sharpened doubt disappears, trust arises. Doubt is not against trust. In fact, doubt is a servant, it serves trust.
So I am not here to tell you to faithfully believe in me – trust intelligently. But people have their own understanding. I say one thing, they understand something else.

Charlie was taking his out-of-town pal for a stroll through the city. The friend saw a good-looking girl and asked Charlie if he knew her.
“Yes, that’s Betty – twenty dollars.”
“How about that one?”
“That’s Dolores – forty dollars.”
“Here comes one that is really first class. Do you know her?”
“That’s Gloria – eighty dollars.”
“My God! Aren’t there any nice, respectable girls in this town?”
“Of course there are, but you couldn’t afford them.”

People have their own way of understanding. It is not much of an understanding, but that’s what they have got, and they go on interpreting through it: “Of course there are, but you could not afford their rates,” he says.

A man was discussing his problems with his next-door neighbor. “That selfish wife of mine,” he was saying, “you know what she has done? She has rationed me, cut me down to a miserable once-a-week!”
“Don’t feel too sorry for yourself,” said the next-door neighbor. “I know at least ten fellows living in our block who she has cut off completely.”

I am saying things which have to be meditated upon. Don’t come to conclusions in a hasty, hurried way, because I am saying things which are really paradoxical. This doubt is a paradox. You have been told down the ages, “Believe, don’t doubt.” I am saying something totally different – doubt, and doubt totally, so that your intelligence is sharpened. And then trust arises of its own accord.
Nobody has ever said this to you, hence the world has remained blind, hence the people have remained just sheep. It has been good: good business for the priests, good business for the politicians, good business for the so-called leaders – because people are at a loss, they need leaders. In worldly matters, in other-worldly matters, they need leaders. In worldly matters the politician becomes their leader, and in other-worldly matters, the priest. And the priest and the politician have been in a conspiracy: “Don’t allow people to become intelligent.” Once they become intelligent they will not need any leader and they will not need any priest. They will learn how to walk on their own.
My approach is totally new: use doubt as a sharpener. I am not against doubt, I am all for it. Doubt very scientifically. And why am I not against doubt? – because I know if you really doubt, it is bound to make your intelligence clearer and clearer. It is bound to give you more and more clarity. Belief confuses, doubt clarifies. And there comes a point when doubt cannot doubt anymore. I trust in truth so much that I can tell you to doubt because I know, if you go on doubting, a moment is bound to come when doubt dies of its own accord. When you see the truth, how can doubt exist? Then trust arises.
Trust is through knowing, not through believing. Don’t believe me. Trust me certainly, but don’t believe me. And if you want to trust me you will have to go on a long pilgrimage of doubt, of sharpening your intelligence. That’s why I go on talking to you, creating a thousand and one doubts in you. I don’t allow you to settle anywhere. You would like to settle very soon because who wants to travel forever and ever? One wants to make a home and settle. I say one thing one day, and just the opposite another day. I create doubt continuously because my trust in truth is so tremendous that I know no doubt can disturb it. If you go on doubting, even doubt will bring you to truth.
All doors bring you to godliness, even the door of doubt. Sincerity is needed and intensity is needed and totality is needed.

The fifth question:
Osho,
In the old days you used to hammer us fiercely. I remember clutching at the tiles of the floor in despair after a lecture when you had once again shouted at us, “You stupid disciples!” Now you come into lectures looking around happily, like a farmer looking at his golden cornfields. Are you happy with us?
I am absolutely happy with you. I am one of the most fortunate masters in the world because a great many intelligent, alive, loving people have gathered around me. The very cream of the modern mind has gathered around me. I am tremendously happy, yes, just like a farmer when he looks out on his golden cornfields.
You are my golden cornfield. The crop is becoming riper and riper every day. Many are blossoming, many are coming to fruit. Many are growing – in love, in awareness, in trust, in every possible way. I am tremendously happy that you are here with me.
It happens very rarely. Jesus was not so fortunate: he had only a few disciples, and they were not very intelligent people either. They were asking really stupid questions, even to the very end.
The night Jesus invited them to say good-bye, to dine and drink with him, and dance with him – because this was the last night, when he would be caught, and the next day he might be killed – do you know what the disciples were asking? One disciple asked, “Lord, now that you are leaving us, please tell us one thing. We know perfectly well that in the Kingdom of God you will be by the right side of God, you will be his right hand. But who among us will be by your side? And what will be our numbers and positions?”
The master is going to die and the disciples are talking politics! “Who will be the first after you, and the second, and the third?” The master is going to die and the disciples are feeling jealous of each other, competitive. They are thinking of the other world in terms of this world. Jesus must have cried deep down in his heart. These are the people on whom he has wasted his life, for whom he was ready to die. Then he was caught, and only one disciple, Peter, stayed and followed him; the others fled. And out of the twelve one, Judas, deceived him; he sold him for thirty silver coins.
When I read that the man who hanged Z. A. Bhutto of Pakistan got twenty-five rupees for hanging him, suddenly I remembered Jesus – he was sold for thirty rupees. The price has fallen; now you get five rupees less. In fact, the price has fallen too much because thirty rupees of pure silver in those days and twenty-five paper notes of today – the difference is not just five rupees, it is much more. Thirty rupees from those days would be equivalent to almost one thousand rupees today.
But what kind of humanity is this? What kind of civilization and what kind of progress are we talking about? Jesus was killed by Jews. The man who hanged Bhutto was a Christian – in a Mohammedan country, they could not find anybody else to hang him. A Christian! How could a Christian do such a thing? And how could he still remain a Christian? He was a professional; that is what his family had been doing for many generations. By a very strange coincidence, this man’s father hanged one of the great Indian martyrs, Sardar Bhagat Singh, a revolutionary – one of the greatest revolutionaries that India has produced in these hundred years.
And in the exact same place where Bhagat Singh was hanged – although now the jail has been demolished – Z. A. Bhutto shot one of his political opponents. That man was the magistrate who ordered the hanging of Bhagat Singh. And now Bhutto is hanged by the son of the man who hanged Bhagat Singh. History goes on spinning, weaving strange patterns in a very mysterious way.
The night Jesus was taken away, a disciple betrayed him for only thirty rupees. For just thirty rupees, one can sell a man like Jesus? And seeing the danger, the remaining ten fled immediately. What kind of disciples were they? Only one remained, and he was not following Jesus but hiding in the crowd; he had only remained out of curiosity. Jesus said, “Escape, because before sunrise, before the cock crows, you will have thrice betrayed me.”
But the man thought in his heart, “No, Judas has betrayed you, the others have fled, but I am made of better stuff. I cannot deny you, I cannot renounce you. I will be true to you to the very last.”
But it happened exactly the way Jesus had said. Before sunrise, this man, Peter, had thrice denied him because the crowd taking Jesus, making him a prisoner, became more and more suspicious of Peter. They were carrying torches, and he looked like a stranger. They asked, “Who are you? Are you a follower of Jesus?”
And he said, “No.”
And when he had said no three times, Jesus looked back and said, “Remember now.” At the time of the crucifixion not a single disciple was there, they had all escaped.
Jesus was not very fortunate. Buddha was far more fortunate. But I am even more fortunate than Buddha because Buddha had only one kind of people around him. My disciples are multidimensional; they come from every nook and corner of the world. This is a universal brotherhood. This is the first time that religion is taking off, becoming airborne, losing local limitations. This is the first time that religion is losing racial associations, national associations – Indian, Chinese, Japanese, German, Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Buddhist. We are creating a kind of religiousness without any name; a nameless religion can only be true to a nameless God.
Yes, I am tremendously happy. The moment I look at you my heart dances with immense joy. And this is only the beginning. Many, many more people are going to come, they are on their way. You are just heralding the coming of millions more. Hence, your responsibility is great because you will be preparing the way; the others who will come will learn from you. The others will learn love, awareness, discipline, spontaneity, individuality, freedom – all of these dimensions – from you.
The new commune will have at least ten thousand sannyasins resident, and thousands and thousands will come and go. You are also fortunate because you will be the first bricks: out of you this great temple is going to be created, you will be the foundation. Remember that responsibility, and remember that such a responsibility comes only as a benediction.

The last question:
Osho,
I am suspicious about my father. I don’t think that he is my father. Can you help me get rid of this doubt?
Christopher, this is a really difficult question. In the first place, it matters not. It is irrelevant whether A is your father or B is your father. How can it matter? Christopher is Christopher; you are that which you are. From where your first cell came; from where, from what source, makes no difference now.
Sooner or later it will be impossible to decide who is whose father because there are going to be semen banks, just like there are blood banks. People will donate their semen to the banks, and the doctors will decide the right type for a particular woman.
Why are you so worried about it? Such things sometimes become obsessions. Even if you come to know, even if I say that “This man is your father,” then what? For example, if I say Paritosh, old Paritosh, is your father – are you going to believe me? You will start doubting me, so it is better that you doubt your father. Or you may start doubting poor Paritosh, who has nothing to do with it.
Only your mother can answer. Even your father cannot answer because even your father may not be right. Ask your mother.

A youngster went to his father and said, “Dad, I would like to marry Suzy.”
“Don’t marry her, son,” said the old man. “When I was a kid I sowed my wild oats, and well, you know how it is.”
About a week later the boy came to his father again and said, “Dad, I am in love with Mildred and I want to marry her.”
The old salesman said, “She is your half sister, son. You can’t marry her.”
“How about Mabel?” the kid asked a couple of weeks later.
“She’s your half sister too,” said Dad.
The youngster, who was anxious to get married, went to his mom and complained, “Pop says I shouldn’t marry Suzy, Mildred or Mabel because they’re my half sisters. What can I do?”
Mom put her arms around her boy and consoled him: “You can marry any one of them if you like – he’s not your father.”

So it is a very difficult thing. Unless your mother is truthful about it, nobody can give you a guarantee. But I have heard about a machine that IBM has produced. I don’t know whether it is true or not, you can inquire.

A woman, having heard how fantastic IBM machines are, enters the IBM salesroom to look around.
“You can ask the machine any question you like and it will give you the correct answer,” explains the salesman.
The woman writes the question, “Where is my father?” and puts it into the machine. The answer comes back, “Your father is fishing off the west coast of Florida.”
“Ridiculous!” exclaims the woman. “My father has been dead twenty years.”
“The machine never makes a mistake,” the salesman proclaims. “There is simply a misunderstanding. Rephrase your question and ask it again.”
The woman writes down for the machine, “Where is my mother’s husband?”
The IBM machine answers, “He has been dead twenty years, but your father is fishing off the west coast of Florida.”

But please don’t ask such questions of me, I am not an IBM machine – neither am I your mother.
Enough for today.