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Osho,
Richard Wilhelm, the man who translated the I Ching from Chinese to German, came back to Vienna very disturbed after spending thirty years in China. He consulted his friend, Carl Gustav Jung. Jung’s diagnosis was that Wilhelm was in a dangerous crisis. He had put aside the German culture and adopted the Chinese one, the whole package – religion, education and whatsoever.
Jung said, “The part you sacrificed comes back as the sacrificer, the repressed part comes back as the repressor.”
And Wilhelm loved the Chinese culture, he even worshipped it, but his mind was no help at all. He died from this crisis.
Nietzsche, the man who wrote “Out of chaos it will shine forth – the dancing morning star,” was not a lucky man either. He freaked out.
Nijinsky used his body beyond the boundaries, and freaked out as well.
It seems that mind alone or body alone can’t take you anywhere.
Osho, is the mystical experience the wings that will take mind, body and heart to a non-sleeping condition? Are you the dancing morning star that came out from the East to put fire to the world – or better, to the rebels of the world?
Richard Wilhelm certainly died in a very torturous way. He was a genius, and spending thirty years in China, he became aware of the subtleties and the grace that Chinese culture had developed for thousands of years.
The I Ching is a very strange book.
There are many books like that in the East, which give you a glimpse of your future and also a glimpse of your past.
The crisis was that he was educated, brought up in the Western style, in the German culture, which does not believe in any past lives, which does not believe that the future can be seen. But thirty years is a long period, and to become a real scholar of Chinese language, that is the minimum time needed.
He devoted himself totally. The result was a schizophrenic personality, he became two persons – one that had gone to China, and one that came from China.
The one that had gone to China was absolutely Western, and the idea was only to translate the book; but as he was translating the book, he got more and more involved in it. The whole Western culture started looking pygmy in comparison to the Chinese insight of Tao. So a second personality started growing, and in thirty years the second personality became perfectly mature. But the first personality was not erased.
And Carl Gustav Jung, the great psychoanalyst and his friend, simply did a diagnosis – but a diagnosis is not a cure.
What Wilhelm needed was meditation, which could have bridged the West and the East in him. He was torn apart. His logic was saying one thing; but he has seen in thirty years that there is much more to life than logic, and people have lived it, experienced it. But this was only an intellectual understanding, it was not an insight.
If he had in those thirty years also meditated, the catastrophe would have been avoided, and a genius mind would have been of tremendous help in bringing East and West closer.
But he was too much in learning the language and translating the I Ching. He forgot completely that a book like the I Ching is not an ordinary book, it is a book out of deep meditative insights. It is not intellectual, it is intuitional.
He managed to translate literally, but he missed the point that the book was also totally different from all the other books he had known before. They were produced by the mind, by the intellect.
This book was not produced by the intellect. It created a chaos in his being.
It is unfortunate that he died in that chaos. It made Carl Gustav Jung very much afraid of the East, and he started teaching a certain hypothesis – which is simply stupid – that Eastern methods are suitable only to Eastern people, and Western methods are suitable to Western people, and they should not be mixed.
This seems to be a very superficial analysis of the whole case.
This means that your intellect should remain unbridged with your intuition. This means that your head should never come in contact with your heart. This means that the West will remain half, and the East will remain half.
Richard Wilhelm’s case is very symbolic. It shows that things should be done under proper guidance.
He was learning language from the linguists – they were not masters of intuition. He was translating a book which has nothing to do with intellect, which needed a master to help him, so that the translation is not only literal but essential, that it carries the very fragrance of the original – not just the verbal change of language.
He was never a disciple of a Tao master; otherwise, this catastrophe would have been avoided, and things would have been totally different. Because since his death, nobody has tried that hard to understand the East’s basic contribution.
Intuition cannot be translated into intellect. A certain bridge can certainly be made, but the more intuition takes possession of you, the more intellect has to function as a servant.
And that was the problem. Although for thirty years he worked with an intuitive book, his intellect remained the master.
And intuition can never be a servant. It is your innermost core. It opens up only in deep meditation.
And Richard Wilhelm never bothered about meditation. His whole concern was the translation of the book, without thinking that books can be different. The books written by the mind – of which the West is full – and the books arisen out of intuition are a totally different category.
The I Ching is perhaps five or seven thousand years old. Nobody knows who wrote it – because in the East it is not important that the name of the person should be on the book, particularly the intuitive ones whose egos have been lost, in fact they have become nameless. Some nameless master, a visionary, wrote the book not because he wanted to write it, but because existence wanted it to be written. He was simply a vehicle, a hollow bamboo.
Although Richard Wilhelm remained thirty years in China, he remained with wrong people. He had to. First he had to learn the language, and for that he had to be in contact with linguistic experts. And once he had learned the language, he started translating the book, thinking that every book belongs to the same category – and there is the fallacy.
The Upanishads in India do not belong to the ordinary category of books. The Dhammapada of Gautam Buddha does not belong to the ordinary category of books.
Even in modern times there have been a few intuitive books. The Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore, The Prophet of Kahlil Gibran, The Book of Mirdad by Mikhail Naimy – they do not belong to the ordinary category of books, and if you think they are just as other books are, you are going to have trouble. Your heart will accept them, and your intellect will reject them. So you will be split in two parts, a constant conflict.
That’s what happened and it killed one of the great geniuses of the West, Richard Wilhelm.
And the man he consulted was not the right man – although they were friends. And again he committed another mistake.
The problem could be solved only by an Eastern master of meditation, not by Carl Gustav Jung – who had no idea of meditation.
After Wilhelm’s death, Jung had gone to India – because he was interested in the ancient mythologies. And wherever he went, he was told, “Why are you wasting your time in ancient mythologies, when by chance there is a man alive who represents existentially all the best that has happened in the East. Go to south India, to the hills of Arunachal and meet a simple man, Shri Raman Maharshi.”
He was told so many times the same name everywhere he went, but he was afraid. His friend had died, and he did not want to get into any trouble. He went up to Madras, from where Raman Maharshi’s place was just two hours drive, but he did not go there. On the contrary, to explain his behavior, he said, “Eastern methods are developed only for Eastern people. They are not suitable for Western people.”
This is utter nonsense.
“Western people should remain confined to their own tradition, to their own past; otherwise they will create the same kind of trouble for themselves as Richard Wilhelm.”
It is nonsense, because man in his essential being is neither Eastern or Western. It is only a question of right approach under right guidance, so the split is not created. On the contrary, a bridge is made – and a bridge between the intellect and intuition will give you a tremendous clarity, understanding, a new kind of intelligence of which you are absolutely unaware.
Jung has prevented many people, because in the West he is thought to be an authority. And he knows nothing about the Eastern methods. Just the fear of the death of his friend…. But that fear does not mean what he makes of it, he has not understood the whole situation.
If I was to suggest, I would have told Richard Wilhelm, “You learn language from a linguistic expert. And while you are learning language, also learn meditation under some Taoist master – because the I Ching is a Taoist book – so before you are capable of translating it, you are also capable of understanding it; so it is not only word-to-word translation, but it is translation of a deep understanding.
“And it will not only produce the I Ching in Western languages, it will also produce in you a new man.”
And the same things have been happening with other people. The reason is always a split.
In the case of Nietzsche, he is not a meditator but he has the capacity of flights towards the unknown. Once in a while a window opens, and he sees things. But the window is not under his control, it is circumstantial. If circumstances are right and suitable, if he is feeling a well-being, a certain kind of joy, peace, the window opens, and he can see beyond the ordinary human mind. And he can write about it.
If he was also a meditator, the window would not be accidental; it would be within his own power to open it or to close it.
So he becomes dependent, and that also creates a deep trouble in his being – because ordinarily, in twenty-four hours he lives just like everybody else, and then suddenly one evening looking at a sunset the window opens, and he sees things which are self-evident, they don’t need any proof. They are more real than your reality, they are so authoritatively real that you cannot even question them. But it is only for moments, and then it is gone, and he is back again on the earth.
You can understand the difficulty of the person.
Now all kinds of doubts, all kinds of questions – whether he has been dreaming, whether it has been a hallucination, illusion – and the intellect goes on. But again the window opens, and the scene is the same. You cannot have the same hallucination again and again, and you cannot have the dream either – and fully awake.
This made such an anguish in his being – what is real? The ordinary reality that he sees twenty-four hours, or the reality that once in a while opens its door?
The same was the case with Nijinsky. He was the greatest dancer perhaps of the whole history of man. But it is strange that a man like Nijinsky simply suffered in deep anguish. This is not a reward of being a genius. The trouble was that while dancing, he will become sometimes so deeply one with the dance that there was not the dancer and the dance, but only the dance. In those moments almost a miraculous thing used to happen.
He will take such long jumps, high jumps – which are not possible, physically not possible – and he himself was not capable of doing those high jumps or long jumps in other times. He could not believe it, as if certainly when the dancer disappeared somehow gravitation lost its grip on him. And he jumped so high that nobody could believe that this is possible. And more miraculous was his coming down; anything falling down, gravitation pulls it with great force.
Just the other day Anando was telling me that when asteroids fall towards earth, they come into the sphere of earth’s gravitation, which is two hundred miles around it. They start falling with a great speed of fifty thousand miles per hour, and that’s why the friction burns them. But once in a while, if it is a very big asteroid – miles long – then it may not be burned completely, it may reach to the earth. Sometimes it has killed many people. It is a very strange kind of stone, because it has passed through a strange experience; that fifty thousand miles per hour, and the heat and the friction give it a new quality.
In the Kaaba, the Mohammedan’s holy place, is an asteroid that has reached the earth, and they have been worshipping it, just because there is no other stone like it, it has come from heaven. And certainly it has come from the sky.
But when Nijinsky used to come back, everybody in the audience forgot to breathe. It looked so dangerous from that height – if gravitation works rightly, he is going to have multiple fractures. But he will fall like a leaf, slowly descending towards the earth – with no hurry. And the movement of coming back was so slow that even physicists had no explanation of it. The jump was unexplained, and the coming back was even more mysterious. He himself had no idea.
Only one thing he said, “Whenever I try it does not happen. I would like it to happen every time I am on the stage dancing, but whenever I am consciously, deliberately trying, it simply does not happen. It happens only when I am not trying, when I am not even thinking of it, when in fact I am not there. In my absence, when there is only the dance, and the dancer has completely become one with the dance, it happens. So I cannot give you any explanation, because I was not there.”
He also died badly. First he became mad – because such a thing has never happened to any other man. He was trying hard, and it would not happen, and then when he was not thinking about it, it happened and with no explanation coming from the experts. And he himself had no idea why it was happening. It drove him mad. For one year he was in a madhouse, and he died in the greatest misery.
The same person would have become a Gautam Buddha in the East – because he has found the key – but he could not recognize it. And there was not a single master in the West to show him what was happening.
And this is the whole teaching of the East, that if you forget the ego, if you forget yourself, if you are just nobody, miracles start happening. That is the law of nature. There is nothing in it to be disturbed about. In that moment when you are absent, it means you are so silent, so peaceful, so at ease, that there is no disturbance at all.
The East has known a certain thing against gravitation. They call it levitation. The grip of gravitation loosens; and it has happened even to people who have been meditating that suddenly they have started moving upwards. If it was happening in the West, the man was certainly going to be considered mad. He could not say to anybody that it is happening, because nobody is going to believe, and they will think that he is cuckoo. How can you go on just sitting in a lotus posture? And the man said, “But what can I do? Just when I opened my eyes, I saw my head is touching the ceiling.”
The ego is very heavy. It is like an anchor that keeps you under the control of gravitation.
In meditation you may find, even if your meditation is not very deep, one thing: while you are sitting with closed eyes, you will feel that you are rising up. You open your eyes, you are sitting in your place. And what was happening? Because the moment you close your eyes – again you are attuned, and the feeling arises that you are rising up. But opening the eyes, suddenly you find yourself sitting just as you were sitting before. Your body remains still on the ground, but your soul, your consciousness, starts rising up beyond the body. This is the beginning. Soon a day will come when meditation will be so deep that with the consciousness rising, your body will also follow.
Body is a little slow, in everything.
Man learned to stand up in one million years. Between the monkeys and man, just learning to stand up on two feet, there is a gap of one million years.
The body learns very slowly, very cautiously; but it learns.
If Nijinsky was in the East he would not have been mad, he would have been declared enlightened. His dance was his meditation.
Just like Jalaluddin Rumi’s whirling was his meditation, and he became the most loved Sufi master. No other Sufi has been called mevlana. Mevlana means ‘my beloved master.’ Only Jalaluddin Rumi has become known as Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. People loved the man so much, because he has given such a simple method, that thousands of people in these twelve hundred years since him have become enlightened just by whirling.
It is unfortunate that Nijinsky had to go to a madhouse – because he could not understand what was happening, nobody could explain what was happening. It disturbed him too much.
The thing was the very simple thing I have been telling you every day, that your effort is a barrier. If you really want to go deep in meditation, then make it effortless – it sounds crazy, how to make it effortless? – because that too will be effort. Just drop those words because they give you a wrong connotation. It is better to say, “Be in a let-go, just relaxed.” Sit silently, watching whatever is happening inside you with closed eyes, just watching it – and a moment comes when only the watcher is there, and there is nothing to watch. And for the first time you will be on the threshold of the miraculous.
All these three people would have reached to a state of tremendous benediction.
Something was happening which was immensely valuable, but the West pressured them, “You are mad, you are a split personality” – all condemnatory terms – “you are schizophrenic….”
In the East, the same people with the same talents would have been worshipped, loved, respected.
And I can understand a certain secret principle: when somebody is moving into a new world, into a new realm, he needs an atmosphere where he is respected, loved, appreciated, encouraged. That’s the purpose of a mystery school. Alone you may go mad, but in a mystery school you have people who will support you; that you are on the right path, that you are blessed, that you should just go on. There is no need of explanations, because they will only delay the process, disturb the process.
The West is too much interested in explanations, and the East is interested only in experience – not in explanations.
And you cannot eat explanations, you cannot be nourished on them. It is experience that is going to nourish you, and a supportive milieu.
And I don’t see that there is any problem of bringing Eastern methods to the West.
As far as human consciousness and its evolution is concerned, there is no problem in taking the Western scientific technology to the East. So why there should be any problem in bringing the spiritual technology to the West? Carl Gustav Jung is absolutely wrong, and if such wrong ideas are being spread, then there will be cases like Nijinsky, Richard Wilhelm, Nietzsche and others.
And the time is ripe. The East is taking all objective scientific technologies from the West. The West should try to pick up all methods of maturing consciousness from the East. This way we will be creating a new man who will not be Eastern or Western, who will be simply man.

Osho,
As far as I can remember, I had the feeling that there was somebody somewhere alive on this planet that I had to meet, who was a sage, an alchemist, a master. This was long before I knew what a master really meant. I thought this was just a fantasy, because as a child I loved reading stories about people like Merlin the magician and other alchemists. This feeling was so strong that it kept me from committing myself to anything – marriage, business, politics, countries.
Could this feeling be a vague remembrance of having been with a master like you and missing the opportunity in some past life? If so, why was there such a strong feeling that I had to find him in this lifetime?
I am asking this, because maybe somebody else may have the same feeling, and if they knew this is possible, they would not lose as much time as I did in irrelevant things.
There is every possibility that you have been with a master in your past life. Lives change, but as far as evolution of consciousness is concerned, and its experiences, they go on goading you to start again from the point you stopped at in the last life. Otherwise it will be almost impossible for anyone to become enlightened, because man’s mind is such, he wastes his whole life in irrelevant things.
But after each death, whatever has been your most precious experience follows with you. Anything gained in spiritual evolution remains with you, you don’t lose it. And it certainly creates a goading feeling in you to search for a master, to search for a path, to do something – although you are not clear what exactly has to be done.
But any desire, any longing for truth, any longing to meet someone who can guide you, who can help you, will persist. Unless you meet the person…. There is a simple criterion for whether you have met the right person or not – if the goading disappears, if there is no more persistence of searching, then you have found the person you were looking for.
Because of the Western religions, a very strange situation has been created in people’s minds – that you have only one life. That is creating craziness because…such a small life and so much to do, so many desires to be fulfilled, so many ambitions to be achieved, that everybody is running faster and faster till he falls into his grave.
The Eastern religions agree only on one point – and that is significant. They have different philosophies, different explanations for different things, but on one point all Eastern religions are absolutely in agreement: that reincarnation is a reality, that you have been here since eternity, in many lives, in many forms, developing slowly, slowly towards man. And in man’s form you may have been many lives; and you will remain in man’s form in the future too for many lives unless you attain to the ultimate experience of truth.
And it seems to be right. Giving man just a seventy-year life span and so many desires and so many ambitions and so many troubles – where he is going to get time to meditate? Where he is going to seek the truth or the master?
And science is absolutely certain that in existence nothing can be destroyed, it only changes forms. If nothing in existence can be destroyed – not even a stone – then the most valuable phenomenon, consciousness, cannot be destroyed just by one death.
You have been born many times, you have died many times, but you have continued. And all your experiences, as far as your evolution of consciousness is concerned, are with you. That is the only possibility for man some day to become enlightened, because even if he gets a few steps closer each life towards the truth, one day he is going to reach home.
To me, it is a truth – reincarnation. I am not telling you to believe in it – because I am against believing. I am simply saying, accept it as a hypothesis, so that you can work upon it.
A hypothesis is not a belief, neither is it an experienced truth. It is simply accepted, so that you can work in a certain line.
The master – the real master – cannot give you any belief, because belief is the number one enemy of all search. The real master can only give you a hypothesis – which is for him his truth, but for you he gives it as a hypothesis to work out. Perhaps you may also find truth. When you find the truth, then it is up to you. Once you have found it, there is no question of belief either; you know it.
Your constant yearning, longing, from childhood for a master, an alchemist…because alchemists were also masters. They were hiding behind alchemy, because Christianity was destroying every school of wisdom, and people had to hide even to meditate. So alchemists were not really as it is said in the books and the encyclopedias, that they were trying to change base metal into gold; that is not true, that was only a code language for alchemy. Base metal is the man who is unaware of himself; to change him into gold is to make him aware of himself. That was their code language. And they had to use code language, because the church and the pope did not want anything other than Christianity to have the monopoly of man’s consciousness.
And it is a very strange thing. They had nothing to offer, and they destroyed all those people – the witches were simply wise women who had certain secrets to impart, the alchemists were simply hiding behind the name of alchemy, that they are trying to make gold. In every alchemists’ school, if you entered in the beginning, in their reception room you will find all kinds of fictitious instruments, tubes filled with different color water, and it looked as if it is a great chemical shop, a workshop, a lab; but this was only the frontage. Behind it was their real school, where they were trying to change base humanity into golden humanity.
Your constant longing is certainly a proof that you have carried a seed from your past life.
Now don’t miss this life. Make every effort that the seed starts becoming a sprout, so in the next life you are not unconsciously groping for a master, you are fully conscious – and even without a master you can work.

Osho,
When I become enlightened, who will be the first to know?
Milarepa, as far as you are concerned, I will be the first to know. As far as others are concerned, they may be able to know.
But Milarepa is a special case.