The Invitation 17

Osho,
Does psychological therapy help to go beyond the mind?
Psychological therapy can help you to understand the mind, but it cannot lead you beyond the mind.
Only one thing leads you beyond the mind and that is meditation. Meditation has nothing to do with psychotherapy, but psychotherapy can create a ground by giving you a better understanding of your mind to go into meditation. It cannot lead you directly into the transcendental, but it can be a help, just the way you prepare a garden. First, you prepare the soil, but that is not the garden. And just preparing the ground, removing the weeds, the grass, any wild growth, stones, roots, still it is not the garden – this much psychotherapy can do.
Now you will have to put seeds, give nourishment to those seeds, care and love and protection. And slowly, slowly the bare ground will start becoming greener. One day there will be flowers and fruits.
Psychotherapy is only a cleansing process, but it is like all cleansing processes. You have to clean your house every day; it is not as if once you have cleaned it you have cleaned it forever. Within twenty-four hours again dust gathers. You have to take a bath every day, or twice; otherwise you will start getting dirty.
Psychotherapy is good as a cleaning method, but it does not go beyond that. And if you remain addicted to psychotherapies you will have to clean yourself again and again. You will have a better understanding of the mind but just that much is not enough to create the world of the beyond. For that, seeds of meditation, awareness, watchfulness are absolutely necessary.
And once you have gone beyond the mind, psychotherapy becomes meaningless. Going beyond the mind simply means you have realized your own being. Now mind is left far behind. Going beyond the mind also means that now mind is going to function as a servant and you are the master. So whenever you need to, you can use it. Right now the situation is just the reverse. You are not the master, and the mind uses you. The mind is almost blind and it directs your life and sooner or later you are going to fall into a ditch. All minds lead finally to misery, to suffering.
Meditation is the only possibility for creating a space where blessings shower.
I am not against psychotherapies. I am simply telling you they can be used as a foothold to jump into meditation. You can jump into meditation directly too, but you will find it a little difficult because you don’t have a clean mind and a clean understanding. The mind will put every weight on you and drag you backwards. Psychotherapy is instrumental, helpful, but alone it is meaningless. I am using psychotherapy in this commune as a means towards meditation, as a help, as a preparation.
But in the West psychotherapy is used as an end to itself; hence psychotherapy in the West is not of much use. Unless it becomes a stepping-stone for meditation, you are moving in a circle. Every day you will have to clean. Once in a while you will have to go to a psychotherapist. People become addicted because it gives you a clean feeling, but that clean feeling remains only for a few days; again you have gathered all the rubbish.
Psychoanalysts ordinarily give their patients two sessions per week, for years, ten years, fifteen years, and still nobody is beyond the mind. After fifteen years of psychoanalysis one simply becomes addicted to psychoanalysis; now it has become a necessity. If you don’t go twice a week to a psychoanalyst you gather too much tension, too much dust, you feel too dirty, too heavy. Now you have created a new problem. Psychology rather than giving you freedom has given you new chains. It is as addictive as any alcohol or any drug. Nothing is wrong in it; in itself it is helpful and beautiful, but you should use it for something better.
Psychoanalysis is good but the good is the enemy of the best. You should not get addicted to the good. You should use the good as a stepping-stone for the best; otherwise it turns into an enemy.
Even psychoanalysts are very embarrassed by the fact that there is not a single man in the whole world who has been perfectly psychoanalyzed. And I am amazed at their stupidity. Hoping that some day some man will be perfectly psychoanalyzed is exactly like hoping that some day some house will be perfectly clean and there will be no need to clean it again. It is absolutely absurd. The house will need cleaning continually, because as time passes dirt gathers.
Even the cleanest mirror needs cleaning once in a while because dirt gathers on it, vapor gathers on it; it does not reflect clearly, it starts reflecting distortions. There will never be any man perfectly psychoanalyzed, because the process in itself is only of cleaning. Can you get your clothes cleaned forever, perfectly cleaned? They will again become ready to go into the laundry. So the people who are going continuously into psychotherapies are going into a kind of laundry, dry cleaning. It is good, but good is not enough.
Vijen, in a sense it can help if you use it as a means and you don’t forget that it is not all. In another sense it can be a disturbance, a barrier, if you think that this is all and there is nothing else beyond it.
That’s what is happening in the West. Psychotherapists think this is the ultimate, but they have not produced a single buddha. Even their founders, Freud or Jung or Adler are not awakened people. They are living in the same misery, in the same suffering as you are living. They are full of fear. They don’t know anything about death, that it is a fiction. They have not experienced their own being. They are just scratching on the surface. Mind is your surface; your being is in the center. How much you clean your surface does not matter, it is not going to lead you to the center. If you can use psychotherapy as a means it is good. If you think it is the end it is the enemy of your transcendence. It all depends on your intelligence.

A Jew asks his rabbi, “I have two problems. I have asked my boss a dozen times already, but he is determined to fire me at the end of the month.”
“And what is the other problem?” asks the rabbi.
“Ah well, my wife does not get pregnant, although she stays home and prays all day,” answers the Jew.
“You are doing it wrong,” suggests the rabbi. “Next time you stay at home to pray and send your wife to ask the boss.”
Three months later the happy Jew thanks the rabbi: “Your help has worked! The boss has rehired me and my wife is pregnant!”

The rabbi was certainly a great psychoanalyst and did help the poor fellow. If you need this kind of help then psychotherapy is good, but don’t ask for more.

Osho,
I feel I can relax more and more deeply into myself. Yet, at the periphery, there is an unassertiveness, a trembling that can cloud the blissfulness of life.
Beloved master, does my ego need nourishment?
My God! I wonder whether you have been listening to me. Every day, morning and evening, I’m telling you to drop the ego and you are asking me a great question: “Beloved master, does my ego need nourishment?”
And you are also saying, “I feel I can relax more and more deeply into myself. Yet, at the periphery, there is an unassertiveness, a trembling that can cloud the blissfulness of life.…does my ego need nourishment?”
That will destroy whatever relaxation you have, and that will stop your growth going inwards. It will make your trembling more strong and the cloud that is covering the blissfulness of your life will become darker. Nourishment of the ego is against your authentic being; it cannot help you in any way. It can only destroy you – destroy you as you are destined to be by your nature.
Ego is a false mask; it will hide your original face. Don’t ask for its nourishment. In fact, cut off all nourishment to it. Let it die. The death of the ego will be the beginning of your real life. The more the ego becomes strong, the less is the possibility of any realization of yourself.

Little Ernie was taking a walk in the park with his father, when suddenly a bee settled on a rock in front of them. Just for spite, Ernie picked up a piece of wood and smashed the bee, whereupon his father said, “That was very cruel, Ernie, and for being cruel you will get no honey for a year.”
Later, Ernie deliberately stepped on a butterfly. “And for that, young man,” said his father, “you will get no butter for a year.”
When they returned home, Ernie’s mother was fixing the dinner. Just as they entered the kitchen, she saw a cockroach and immediately crushed it. Ernie looked at his father mischievously and said, “Will you tell her, Dad, or shall I?”

Your question really makes me wonder how you have been listening. And perhaps this is the state of many of you. You listen to what you want to listen, not what is being said. You go on continuously interpreting according to your old prejudices. Your mind is continuously interfering; it does not allow what is being said to reach to your heart. What reaches to you is something else, distorted, disfigured, maybe so distorted that it is almost the opposite of what has been said.
One has to learn very earnestly the art of listening. It is a difficult art, and the greatest difficulty is that everybody thinks he knows it. Just because you can hear, you think you can also listen. And these are two differing things, so different that unless you start listening you will never know the difference.
In the dictionaries they mean the same thing, but in actual life hearing is only because you have ears. Listening happens when just behind your ears there is no noisy mind but a silent, receptive alertness. If there is a continuously chattering mind behind the ears you only seem to listen. Then there are going to be misunderstandings.
I myself was very shocked when I came to know that psychologists have discovered that the mind does not allow ninety-eight percent of information to reach you. It only allows two percent; ninety-eight percent is simply rejected in many different ways. Either it gives it a new color, a new meaning, or it misses it deliberately, takes it into a different context where the meaning changes. But the distortion percentage is ninety-eight percent. The two percent it allows without distorting, because it agrees with its old structure.
So it listens only to itself. Those two percent are agreeable to the mind and so it immediately allows them in without creating obstructions, without creating arguments, doubts, misinterpretations. And language is vulnerable; each word can mean many things. The mind has the capacity to choose any meaning it wants, any meaning that fits with it.
The art of listening is based on silence in the mind, so that the mind does not interfere, it simply allows whatever is coming to you. I am not saying you have to agree with it. Listening does not mean that you have to agree with it, neither does it mean that you have to disagree with it. The art of listening is just pure listening, factual, undistorted. And once you have listened then comes the point whether you agree or not, but the first thing is to listen.
If you listen to something which is true there is no question of disagreement. If it is untrue, naturally you have to disagree with it. But your agreement or disagreement should come not from the prejudiced mind, but from the unprejudiced heart. Listening is from the heart, and hearing is from the mind, it is very superficial. And because the heart is deeper, any word that enters you first has to encounter the mind. Before it reaches the heart, the mind has done many things with it.

A man is standing at the bar and another guy walks up to him and says, “Are you Joe Smith?”
The man says, “Yes.”
The guy says, “Were you in Chicago a few weeks ago?”
Joe says, “Just a minute,” and takes out his notebook, turns some pages, and then says, “Yes, I was in Chicago a few weeks ago.”
The guy says, “Were you in room two one three?”
Joe looks in his notebook and says, “Yes.”
The guy says, “Did you meet Mrs. Wentworth in room two one four?”
Joe looks in his notebook and says, “Yes.”
The guy says, “Tell me, did you make love to Mrs. Wentworth?”
Joe scans his notebook again and says, “Yes, I made love to Mrs. Wentworth.”
The guy says, “Well, I’m Mr. Wentworth and I don’t like it.”
Again Joe looks in his notebook and says, “You know, that’s funny. I did not like it either.”

This is what you call hearing. He agrees perfectly, but he hears only what he wants to hear; he understands what he wants to understand.
And this is almost our everyday situation. At least here with me, you have to change this pattern, you have to be utterly silent because things are being said to you which can bring a transformation in your whole life. Here you are not learning geography or history or philosophy; here you are learning the very art, the alchemy of transformation. It is not collecting knowledge and information and becoming more knowledgeable.
The effort here is just the opposite: to make you less knowledgeable and more innocent, to the final point where you can say, “I don’t know anything.” Just like a newly born child, you are pure consciousness, unscratched, unspoiled. This is the state of a sage, of a wise man. His life has a completion. From childhood he began and he moved the whole circle of life. Back he has come again to the same point that he has left in his childhood, the pure consciousness which knows nothing but reflects everything. He is capable of understanding everything exactly as it is without any distortion because he has no prejudices to distort. The state of the sage has no preconceived ideas to mix and to mess and to disfigure.
There is a story in the life of Lao Tzu. I have loved it very much…

He used to go for a morning walk deep in the mountains very early before the sunrise when it was dark and there were still stars in the sky. And he used to go to the peak from where the sunrise was the most beautiful. And he would stand there sometimes for hours, just watching the sunrise, listening to the birds, seeing the trees dancing with joy and life, opening their flowers, releasing their fragrance. And then he would come back.
One of his neighbors used to come with him. And he knew that Lao Tzu did not want to talk at all, because that would be a disturbance in his deep communion with nature. He had told him, “If you don’t use any words not even hello, you can come. Silently you can join me, silently you can follow me, silently we come back; there is no need to say even good-bye. Words have to be completely dropped if you want to come with me.”
The neighbor loved it all. He had never thought that things can be so beautiful because he had never seen the world with such a silent peaceful mind, and with such a beautiful man who must be vibrating his silence and his blissfulness to the neighbor. Because they had been doing it for years now, the neighbor had completely forgotten that it was a strange type of morning walk.
People go, and they talk and they discuss and they argue. They don’t look at the trees, they don’t look at the disappearing stars, they don’t look at the rising sun. They are so much involved with their minds that who is there to look at all the beauty, all the joy of existence, the life again coming back from its sleep as the sun has set the day before. There is everywhere celebration, in the trees, in the flowers, in the birds.
The man was immensely grateful to Lao Tzu that he allowed him to be with him for so many years. Lao Tzu said, “But I had implored you not to use language. Why are you using language today after so many years?”
He said, “A problem has arisen. A guest is staying with me and he also wants to come tomorrow.”
Lao Tzu said, “The condition you have to tell him. He should remember that nothing has to be said on the way, then he can come.”
And the guest thought, It is a strange condition. Not a single word, not even hello, not even a good-bye when departing…!
But his host said, “He is a very different kind of man and he will not relax the condition. So please forget all your etiquette and mannerisms. Simply come with me, remain just like a shadow, and the experience is tremendous.”
The experience was tremendous. When they reached to the highest peak from where they could see the sun rising just underneath, deep down in the valley, he forgot the condition; it was so beautiful. He had never seen such a thing, not even in a dream. He was so overwhelmed that he said to Lao Tzu, “It is so beautiful.”
Lao Tzu looked at the host. Suddenly the guest remembered that words are not to be used. Nothing was said. But as they reached home Lao Tzu told his neighbor, “From tomorrow don’t come.”
He said, “But you are punishing me too much, and I have not spoken a single word. This guest is new; he does not know you. And he has also not said much, just that it is a beautiful sunrise.”
Lao Tzu said, “You say it was just a little? That fellow is very talkative. Although he was not saying I could hear his chattering mind. All the way he was chattering: This is beautiful, that is beautiful, and finally, he asserted. Does he think that we can’t understand beauty, that he has to tell us? I was present; you were present; he was present. We were watching the same sunrise; what was the need to say anything? No, he is too talkative. And because you brought him, and you disturbed my morning, from tomorrow nobody comes with me.”
The neighbor finally persuaded him and he allowed him back after a week, but told him, “Never ask if any guests can come. They don’t know how to be silent; they are too new. I have never felt any difficulty with you, because not only do you not say anything, you don’t think anything.”

Thinking and speaking are not basically different. In front of a silent man, whether you think or speak it is the same. Thinking is talking with yourself inside. People don’t hear it because they are engaged within themselves; they don’t hear even when you talk to them. How can they hear your inner chattering. But a man like Lao Tzu, in the deepest meditativeness, is able to catch your chattering almost like whispering. Even that much is a disturbance and you will not be able to listen to what is being said.
Gautam Buddha used to initiate people, and the first thing was for two years not to use language at all. Naturally, two years is a long period, and if you don’t use language, slowly, slowly your inner chattering also stops because it is getting no more nourishment from outside. How long can you continue playing football on your own? You need a partner. Slowly, slowly you become fed up repeating the same things, because what new information will you be getting? You have repeated the old information many times.
I have heard…

People were waiting in the waiting room of a railway station. The train was late. A man was sitting on an easy chair and everybody was interested in watching the man. Sometimes he will giggle, sometimes he will even laugh loudly, sometimes he will throw something away. Everybody was silently watching and wondering what he is doing. Sometimes he will make a bad face as if something bitter has come into his mouth, and sometimes he will smile so sweetly.
Finally they could not contain themselves. The train was getting later and later and that man was weighing heavier and heavier on their minds. One of them gathered courage and went to the gentleman and asked, “You have to forgive us, but everybody in the waiting room is interested to know what you are doing?”
He said, “Doing? I’m not doing anything. I’m just telling jokes to myself.”
They said, “That makes sense why you sometimes giggle and sometimes laugh. But why do you sometimes throw something and make a bad face?”
He says, “When I hear some old joke I throw it away.”

Now if you are telling jokes to yourself, all are old. From where are you getting new jokes? And how long will you deceive yourself? If for two years you have to sit silently just telling jokes to yourself, by the time two years have passed everything is old. You will be throwing with both the hands, and not a single giggle!
After initiating anybody into sannyas the first thing Gautam Buddha used to say was, “Now for two years be completely silent. Do not use language. If you want water then show the symbol; just be dumb. Act dumb, as if you cannot speak, so you are showing that you need water or you need food. You can point to your stomach when you are feeling hungry. Use symbols as if you cannot speak.”
Two years were a long time, but after two years people were so calm and quiet, so radiant, so full of energy. Your constant chattering is destroying your energy. So Buddha used to remind them, “Now your two years are over, you can use language just if it is necessary. But now you are capable of listening to what I am saying.”
But many of his disciples even after two years did not use any language. The silence of being dumb…and symbols were working perfectly well. They have survived the two years just by making symbols, the very essential. You cannot talk philosophy in symbols; you cannot argue for or against God just by symbols. You can ask for water, you can ask for food, you can ask for shelter; you can say that you are feeling feverish or you are feeling cold or you are feeling too hot – just small day-to-day things which can be counted on your ten fingers.
Only then do you become capable of listening; otherwise you only hear. And if you are capable of listening there is nothing left for you to do. In that silence you will be able to see without any argumentation within you what is right and what is not right. The right immediately makes you so joyful and the wrong immediately makes you sad and aloof. It is a totally different kind of differentiation than mental talk: “This is right; this is wrong.” On what grounds can your mind say, “This is right”? It is your prejudice; it is your preconceived idea.
But the heart has no preconceived ideas. It simply sees clearly. It has eyes but no ideas. It has a clarity but no prejudices. With that clarity it can see where the door is and where the wall is. It does not have to think about it. Only a blind man thinks, Where is the door? Only a blind man starts finding the door with his walking stick. You don’t do that; you don’t even think about the door. If you want to go out, you know, you see. There is no need of thinking, you simply go out of the door.
It is not because you are not thinking that first you will try to go through the wall, and then you think about where the door is. And after a logical syllogism you decide, “This must be the door.” This kind of process does not take place when you have eyes. Silence becomes your eyes. Silence becomes your criterion of what is right and what is not right. And the decision that comes out of silence transforms you. You don’t have to do anything.
Mahavira, another contemporary of Gautam Buddha, a man of the same height of consciousness as Gautam Buddha, has made two divisions of people who attain to truth. One division he used to call the shravaka. It means one who is capable of listening. Shravan means listening, and shravaka means the listener, one who is capable of listening in the sense I have defined listening; one who need not do anything else, just listening will be enough.
If you have a master with you, a man who knows, then listening is enough. If you don’t have a master with you naturally listening will not help. Then you have to be a sadhu. So these are the two categories who travel towards truth. The sadhu means the monk. He has to follow certain disciplines; he has to perform certain austerities, fasting, praying, chanting, the reading of the scriptures. He has to do a thousand and one things which for the listener are not needed.
The art of listening is the simplest method of transformation.

Osho,
You don’t exist as a person and yet you are the being that I love most. You know nothing and yet I put all my questions at your feet. You are just silence and yet I can only sing your song. You have no name and yet I’m helpless in crying your name. You tell us every day the inexpressible cannot be said, and yet I can’t help but try again and again.
You know my gratitude and yet I cannot resist to touch your feet and whisper: Thank you, Osho. Even more today, because you free me from saying no to you.
But now I have a question:
Seeing how painful it is to say no to you, how can I ever dare to ask you anything?
Sarjano, you are asking: “Now I have a question: Seeing how painful it is to say no to you, how can I ever dare to ask you anything?”
It is very natural to say yes when you love, just as it is natural to say no when you don’t love. But there is still a deeper layer where you love so much that you can even say no. Your love gives you that power. Your love does not make you a slave, particularly as far as I am concerned.
You can say yes out of fear. Then your yes has no value. Your yes is valuable only when it comes out of your love. The value is not in your yes; the value is in your love. If you can understand this then you can understand another thing also: if your no comes out of your love, it has the same value as your yes, because the value is neither of yes nor of no; the value is of your love. Love is absolutely capable of saying yes or no, because love knows no fear.
Love trusts so much that it can say no without any difficulty. Saying yes is very natural, but there may be times when you have to say no. But the no is coming from a loving heart without any disrespect, on the contrary, with great respect. You respect so much that you know that your no will not be taken as a disrespectful or negative attitude.
Love gives freedom.
Love is freedom.
So you need not be worried that you cannot ask for anything. Always remember that you are free to say yes or no to me. I am not your enslaver; I am not your jailer. Not in any sense is there a bondage between me and you. All that exists is freedom and the love that freedom brings.
In this freedom and loving atmosphere everything is acceptable: your yes is acceptable; your no is acceptable. And unless this is possible, your love is not deep enough.
What you have said in your whole question is more a statement and very truthful, honest and sincere. There was only one question in the end that I have answered, but I would like to discuss your statement. I am not answering it because there is no question in it. I am discussing it so that it can become clear to all those who are present here. Because one day everybody has to come to this state from where Sarjano is speaking.
He is saying, “You don’t exist as a person, and yet you are the being that I love most.”
It is not only true about me. Anybody who does not exist as a person, but only as a presence, will be loved more than anyone else. Simply because he does not exist as a person, he attracts, provokes, invites your love. His absence is a tremendously powerful magnet. His absence is not emptiness; his absence is overflowingly positive. The person is not there, but the presence is intensely there. And what is the difference between the person and the presence? – the same difference as there is between the flower and its fragrance. The flower is a person, the fragrance is only a presence. You cannot catch hold of it, yet you can be overwhelmed by it.
A person has boundaries, limits. And one who has limits cannot give you unlimited freedom. He himself is not unlimited. Only a person who has died as an ego and has resurrected only as a pure being, a presence, has no boundaries. Obviously he is capable of giving you freedom; in fact, he cannot give you anything else. He has no boundaries. He can also give you a world without boundaries. And naturally, you will love such a presence more than you can love any person.
A person is a very small thing.
A presence is a vast sky full of stars.
“You know nothing and yet I put all my questions at your feet.” I know nothing, it is true. And only a man who knows nothing is innocent. Knowledge corrupts because it gives you prejudices, it makes you mechanical. If you ask a question to a knowledgeable man he will not answer your question directly, he will simply repeat some dead, ready-made formula. He knows; his answer will come from his knowledge.
My answer will come from my innocence; hence, my answer will be a direct response to your question. A learned man cannot respond to you – he appears to answer you, but the answer is ready-made; it is not a fresh, spontaneous response. It is a prerecorded answer; it does not pay any attention to you. The answer would have been the same even if it was asked by somebody other than Sarjano.
But my answer will be different to each person, even though the question is the same, because I am responding each time not only to the question, but more basically to the questioner. The questioner is the context. The question is symbolic only. I have to answer the questioner more. The question is only an excuse, so my answers will be different although your question may be the same. It creates great difficulty to so-called scholars.
One professor of Bhagalpur University has been doing research for his doctorate on my thoughts almost for seven years, and he becomes more and more confused. He has inquired several times, “Which answer is right? Because for the same question you have given so many answers. You have created such trouble for the scholars who will be working on your work when you are gone.”
That’s the way scholars work. They never work on living people, they work on dead people. They will work on Kabir, they will work on Gautam Buddha; they will work on Raidas, Meera, whom they condemned when they were alive. Raidas was a shoemaker and in India a shoemaker is not supposed to be a saint. But what to do if a shoemaker becomes a saint? He was ignored, condemned. No brahmin could go to him to ask a question.
Kabir used to live in Varanasi, which is the Jerusalem of Hindus or the Mecca of Hindus. It is their ancientmost city and perhaps it is the most ancientmost city in the world. All Hindu learned scholars belong to Varanasi. And Kabir lived in Varanasi but he was not a brahmin. In fact, by his profession he was a weaver. And weavers belong to the fourth class of the sudras, untouchables. But only by profession was he a weaver; by his birth nobody knows whether he was Hindu or Mohammedan, because their parents…certainly he was illegitimate, as people call children if they are not out of marriage.
According to me there are no illegitimate children; there are only illegitimate parents. And when I say illegitimate parents I don’t mean those who are not married, but those who give birth to children without any love. Marriage is a formal thing. Love is the reality, the substantial reality. Any child which is born out of a formal marriage without any love, I call those parents illegitimate.
Perhaps Kabir was born out of a pair who were not married. Out of fear of the society they left the child on the banks of the Ganges. A Hindu monk, certainly a great sage, Ramananda, had gone to the Ganges early in the morning in darkness. And the little baby who was to become Kabir was lying down on the steps of the Ganges. And as Ramananda passed by, the little baby just took his feet in his hand. Now Ramananda could not leave the child touching the feet of the master although it was going to be a condemnation for Ramananda, as to where he got the child – most probably it is his own child and illegitimate!
Persons like Ramananda don’t care at all about the crowd and their opinions. The child has caught his feet and he could not leave the child there, knowing perfectly well that some parents have left him. He brought the child to his monastery. He was a famous Hindu monk and had thousands of disciples and they were all against him: “What are you doing unnecessarily taking a condemnation? Give the child to us; we will leave it there or we will leave it in some orphanage.”
Ramananda said, “It is not that there is any question. The child has touched my feet, and I cannot refuse anybody who is ready to surrender himself.”
They said, “You are getting into unnecessary trouble. The child knows nothing; it is just accidental. You must have been passing by and he caught hold of anything. It was not addressed specially to you, ‘I am your disciple.’”
But Ramananda said, “You don’t understand. I know this child, not to whom he belongs in this life, but on his hand is written Kabir.
Kabir is a Mohammedan name which means God; it is one of the names of God. In Mohammedanism there are one hundred names of God. One of those one hundred names is Kabir. So certainly the child seems to be born either out of a father who is Mohammedan or a mother who is Mohammedan or perhaps both are Mohammedan, but it does not matter.
Ramananda said, “I can look into the past life of the child. He has been my child, my disciple before too. It was not accidental that he caught my feet. He simply reminded me, ‘Your poor disciple…’”
People said, “You are getting into unnecessary trouble. Nobody is going to believe these stories. And you will be unnecessarily thought immoral, characterless.”
Ramananda said, “That doesn’t matter.”
He raised the child and his prediction became true. Because he said, “One day this child will be a greater man than me. I will be remembered only because of Kabir.”
And it is true. Ramananda would have been forgotten. There have been many Ramanandas, many Hindu saints whose names have been forgotten. But Kabir proved to be such a great man that obviously while Kabir is remembered you cannot forget Ramananda.
But because Kabir was not a brahmin, and certainly he was illegitimate in the eyes of the society, brahmins, the higher cast people, were not even ready to go to listen to him. They heard him secondhand. They wanted to know everything about him because the people who were going to him were changing so miraculously. He was one of the highest categories of consciousnesses. The same category as Gautam Buddha or Lao Tzu or Mahavira.
You reminded me of him by saying, “You know nothing and yet I put all my questions at your feet.” Knowing that I know nothing, if you still put your questions at my feet, you are sure to find the answer. It won’t come from me, it will arise within your own being, out of your humbleness. Just because you have put your questions at my feet shows immense trust, an innocence. And your trust will not go unfulfilled.
“You are just silence and yet I can only sing your song.” It is true. I am just silence, but I am not a dead silence, I am not the silence of a cemetery. I am the silence of the mountains, the silence of the deep forests. My silence and my song are not different. My silence is a song; it has a music of its own. It has a dance too of its own. So you are right, Sarjano.
“You have no name and yet I’m helpless in crying your name.” Knowing that I have no name, if you cry my name in your helplessness you will be helped, because you are not calling me in ignorance, just believing in my name. You know perfectly well that I don’t have any name. But one has to address some name – it is arbitrary. Namelessness is the reality but you cannot point a finger towards nothingness, towards silence; you cannot pinpoint. Still it is our human weakness, we have to use names.
Silence has no name but we have called it silence. Existence has no name but we have called it existence. Enlightenment has no name but we have given it a name. It is our human weakness and frailty. But if we are aware of the fact that we are calling the nameless, then there is no problem, any name will do.
I told you Mohammedans have one hundred names for God. I must remind you that in fact they have only ninety-nine names. One name they have left as nameless. That is the real name. Unfortunately the language is incapable, but they have done well. They say, “God has one hundred names,” and then they give the list. The list has only ninety-nine. I have asked many Mohammedan scholars, “How do you explain this? Is there some mistake, some error? Either the man counted wrongly or he has forgotten one name.” And not a single Mohammedan scholar could give me the right explanation because learning is very poor.
And when I said to them, “I have my own experience. I am not a Mohammedan, but I can give you the answer: The reality is the man has done it deliberately. Whoever has written these ninety-nine names knows perfectly well that one name is missing. But that is the true name which cannot be pronounced; hence he has left it. The number one hundred is given, but the name is not written. So the man was neither counting wrongly nor has he forgotten it.”
When Jews write God they never use the O in the spelling. They use G-D, because the real essence, the very center is not capable to be pronounced. They have found a beautiful way; they leave out the O. And in a sense the English O is also exactly the same as the English zero. You can take it in both the senses, that God’s real name can only be zero, nothingness, what Gautam Buddha called shunya, zero; he has exactly called it zero.
It is perfectly right if you know that I don’t have any name and still you call my name in your helplessness; you are not committing any wrong.
“And yet I’m helpless in crying your name. You tell us every day the inexpressible cannot be said, and yet I can’t help…” Nobody can help. The inexpressible cannot be said, but yet every effort has to be made to say it, knowing perfectly well every effort is going to fail, but just making the effort is significant. Whether it succeeds or fails, that is secondary. You make the effort knowing that it is inexpressible, yet you tried. You tried and you gave ninety-nine names, but finally you accepted your defeat that no name can be given.
But a number can be given at least: the number one hundred. It is beautiful that the man gave the number at least. Just as the English O in God can also be interpreted, in fact should be interpreted, as zero which is God’s name. And that has been dropped because it is not possible for human lips to utter it. The number one hundred has also tremendous meaning. One meaning is that the inexpressible is perfect; one hundred is a perfect number. There have been different mystical ways but all have failed. But that failure is not something to be taken in sadness. That failure also shows that although we have not been able to express his name, we have caught hold of the nameless. We will not be able to count him but we have counted everything and only he remains uncounted; that is a way of counting.
“And yet I can’t help but try again and again. You know my gratitude and yet I cannot resist to touch your feet and whisper: Thank you, Osho.”
It is true for every seeker past, present, future, that nobody can show gratitude to existence but still one has to say something. Not that that saying expresses the real experience of gratitude, but at least symbolically it gives you a certain satisfaction. You cannot express it in its totality, but you can give it a symbolic name.
In fact what do we know, even about small things? You call a roseflower red, but what do you know about red? If it was called yellow what difference would it make?
One of the great philosophers of the contemporary world, G.E. Moore, has asked the question, “What do you mean by yellow?” And all that you can do is take him to yellow flowers, marigolds, and show him that this is yellow. And he said, “That’s what I am trying to tell you. Even a small and mundane ordinary thing like yellow is inexpressible; it can only be shown. And you ask, ‘What is good? What is beauty? What is God? What is consciousness?’”
You don’t understand that these things also can only be indicated. They can be shown. I can take your hand in my hand and show you the path. I can give you the direction where you will find consciousness. But I cannot express it; I cannot give you any explanation right now without your own experience. And if you have experience you don’t need any explanation.
Lastly you are saying, “Even more today, because you free me from saying no to you. But now I have a question: Seeing how painful it is to say no to you, how can I ever dare to ask you anything?”
There is no question, no problem at all. You can say yes to me, and you can say no to me with the same love, with the same trust, and I will understand your love. I don’t care about your words. I will know your heart and I will know the depths of your being.
Yes and no are just trivia.
You have made people serious, and I hate seriousness; hence this joke…

The psychiatrist had been working with the patient, a sex maniac, for many months. Finally, things had reached a point where the doctor thought that only hypnosis may help the unfortunate patient. The doctor swung a pendulum in front of the man’s face and said, as the hypnotists do, “I want you to imagine that this is a big old clock pendulum, ticking away, and soon you will be asleep. Ding-dong sleep. Ding-dong sleep.”
The patient lay still for a moment and then jumped up, shouting excitedly, “Doctor, it works! It works! My ding-dong is asleep!”