BECOME AN EAGLE

Anand means bliss, ramraj means the kingdom of god: bliss, the kingdom of god. It is within you. The sky that I was talking about just now is within you. And the eagle I was telling you to become is your very soul. The soul is really confined, very much confined because the body is very earthbound.

The soul is a bird of the sky; the body is like a burden around it. It goes on gravitating it towards the earth, it does not allow it wings. The body functions like a cage… but the soul can be free of it. Just a little more awareness and you can spread your wings. Then the body is no more like a prison. It becomes like a resting place when you are tired of the sky. And naturally, one tires. The excitement of it is exhausting. One cannot bear the ecstasy of it for long; even for moments it is too much. Then you can come back to the earth, rest in your body. It becomes a shrine, a nest.

But right now, the way people live, the body has become a cage, an imprisonment, a kind of bondage. It should not be so. And remember, the body is not at fault; it is our consciousness that is at fault. It is we who have not understood the whole situation, who have not faced the whole situation, who have not looked into all the possibilities and potentialities of our being. The responsibility is not of the body. I am not anti-body I am all for the body – it is a beautiful nest – but if you are unconscious it becomes a prison. Because of your unconsciousness it becomes a prison. Then you don’t know where to go, how to go, how to fly.

Have you not observed it? – that many times in dreams you start flying ? It is very rare to find a person who has not been flying in his dream some time or other. If you ask the freudians they will attach some sexual meaning to it; they will say that flying is phallic. That is nonsense! Flying is a very very natural desire in the innermost core of humanity… because we don’t belong to this earth. We are strangers here, outsiders. We have made our nest here but it is only an overnight’s stay; in the morning we go.

So the dream of flying is not phallic: it is not a kind of thirst to enter the woman. The sky is the woman, the vagina, for the freudian, and flying and entering the sky is nothing but a sexual penetration. This is nonsense, just absurdity! Yes, sometimes it can have that meaning but it is not necessarily always so. A very very sexually perverted person, a very very sexually repressed person may use this symbol in a sexual way, but the symbol itself is absolutely spiritual; it has nothing to do with sex. It can be used…. For example, anything can be used for anything else. I can hit you on your head with this mike and I can kill you, but the purpose of the mike was not that. It was not meant for that purpose; it was not made for that purpose. The people who manufactured it had not even thought that a man can be killed by it.

The symbol is purely spiritual. It simply says again and again through the unconscious to learn flying. Become an astronaut, become a soul-traveller. In the interpretation of this dream it is not only freudians who are in the wrong, many other people are too. For example, this reaching to the moon or to mars and other planets in the future, that too is a misinterpretation of the human desire to go there, above the clouds. Even a small child starts asking for the moon, wants to reach the moon. Those small hands reaching for the moon are really a symbolic desire inside to go beyond, to go on to the transcendental.

So become an eagle, a seagull… and you can do it. Let this be your meditation, your special meditation. Do other meditations but make this your special meditation, especially for you. Whenever you are sitting, become a seagull or an eagle or whatsoever you want to become, and start flying. Soon you will see that you are really passing the clouds. You will feel the wetness… you will see the sun, you will feel the rays falling on you. You can go on and on… and get absorbed in it as much as possible. This is going to open the door of your inner being!

OSHO♥

Asanas, pranayama — there are so many methods through which energies can be made to flow inward. When they flow inward they become one, because at the center there cannot be more than one. So the more energy goes inward, the more harmony there is. Conflicts drop. In the center there is no conflict. There is an organic unity of the whole. That is why bliss is felt.

Another thing: asanas and pranayama are bodily helps. They are important, but they are only physical helps. If your mind is in conflict then they will not be of much help, because body and mind are not two things really. They are two parts of one thing. You are not body and mind; you are body/mind. You are psycho/somatic or somato/psychic. We talk about the body as one thing and the mind as something different, but body and mind are two poles of one energy. The body is gross and the mind is subtle, but the energy is the same.

One has to work from both polarities. For the body there is hatha yoga: asanas, pranayama, etcetera; and for the mind there is raga yoga and other yogas that are basically concerned with your mental attitudes.

Body and mind are one energy. For example, if you can control your breath when you are angry, the anger will die. If you can go on breathing rhythmically, anger cannot overpower you. In the same way, if you go on breathing rhythmically, sexual passion cannot overpower you. It will be there, but it will not become manifest. No one will know it is there. Not even you will be able to know it. So sex can be suppressed; anger can be suppressed. Through rhythmic breathing you can suppress them so much that you yourself will not even be aware of it. But the anger or sex will still be there. The body has suppressed it, but it remains inside, untouched.

One has to work with both the body and the mind. The body should be trained through yogic methodology, and the mind through awareness. You will require more awareness if you practice yoga because things will become more subtle. If you are angry, you can ordinarily become aware of it because it is so gross. But if you practice pranayama, you will need more awareness, more acute sensitivity to be aware of anger, because now the anger will become more subtle. The body is not cooperating with it so there will be no physical expression of it at all.

If people practice awareness techniques and simultaneously practice yogic methods, they will know deeper realms of awareness. Otherwise they will be aware only of the gross. If you change the gross but do not change the subtle, you will be in a dilemma. Now conflict will assert itself in a new way.

Yoga is helpful, but it is only one part. The other part is what Buddha calls mindfulness. Practice yoga so that the body becomes rhythmic and cooperative with your inner movements, and simultaneously practice mindfulness.

Be mindful of breathing. In yoga, you have to change the breathing process. In mindfulness, you have to be aware of the breathing as it is. Just be aware of it. If you can become aware of your breathing, then you can become aware of your thought process; otherwise not.

Those who try to become aware of their thought process directly, will not be able to do it. It will be very arduous, tedious. Breathing is the door to the mind. If you stop your breathing for a single moment, your thoughts will also stop. When breathing stops, the thought process stops. If your thinking is chaotic, your breathing will be chaotic. Breathing will simultaneously reflect your thought process.

Buddha talks about anapanasati: the yoga of awareness of the incoming and outgoing breath. He says, “Begin from here.” And that is the correct beginning. One should begin from breathing and never from the thought process itself. When you can feel the subtle movements of breath, only then will you be able to feel the subtle movements of thought.

Awareness of the thought process will change the quality of the mind; asanas and pranayama will change the quality of the body. Then the moment comes when your body and mind are one, without any conflict at all. When they are synchronized, you are neither body nor mind. For the first time, you know yourself as the Self. You transcend.

You can transcend only when there is no conflict. In this harmonious moment when body and mind are one, with no conflict, you transcend both. You are neither. Now you are nothing in a sense: no-thing. You are simple consciousness. Not conscious of something, but just awareness itself.

This awareness without being aware of anything, this consciousness without being conscious of anything, is the moment of explosion. Your potential becomes actual. You explode into a new realm: the ultimate. This ultimate is the concern of all religions.

OSHO♥

DON'T WASTE TIME DECORATING THE BODY

Don’t depend on the body and don’t remain confined to the body. Use it, respect it, love it, care for it, but remember: you have to leave it one day. It is only a cage, it will be left behind, and the bird will be gone. Before that happens, take care of the bird too. Cleanse your consciousness, because that will be going with you. Your understanding will go with you, not your body.

So don’t waste too much time in decorating it with cosmetics, with clothes, with ornaments — don’t waste too much time with the body, because the body belongs to the earth and the earth will claim it back. Dust unto dust. You don’t belong to the earth, you belong to some beyond, to some unknown. Your home is in the unknown, here you are only a visitor. Enjoy the visit and use it as much as possible to grow in understanding and maturity, so that you can take home your maturity, your understanding, your wisdom

OSHO♥

SLAVERY

Sex is really an internal process of intoxicating you. It is chemical. You have nothing to do with it. It is your body chemistry, it is your physiology that releases certain chemicals in your body and then in a sexual state you can do something for which you will repent. Later on you will say, “I cannot believe how it happened. It happened in spite of me.” And it is not only sex; so many things are happening in you through your physiology.

When you are angry, it is not you. Again certain poisons are released in your blood and you are under the impact of those poisons. Buddha says: If you start watching the processes of sexuality, anger, greed, you will be able to see that it is not out of you that these things are born. You are only a witness. These things are born in your body, in your mind; and body and mind are not two things, they are one. You are psychosomatic. The mind is your inner body, and the body is your outer mind. Hence the body affects the mind and the mind affects the body. You are a third force.

That third force is known only through meditation; there is no other way to know it, because it is through meditation that you become disidentified with the body mind mechanism. Otherwise you can be very mighty, very knowledgeable, even sometimes in some moments very wise, but all that can go in a second. Your body can possess you, your physiology can become so powerful over you that you become a slave. You lose your mastery. Whenever you are angry, whenever you are in a sexual arousal, you are no more a master, you are simply a slave.

Buddha is not against sex, remember. Buddha is not against anger or greed, he is against slavery. And anything that creates slavery in you, he would like you to transcend it. Remember the difference. There are people who are against sex — they are against sex because sex is hedonistic, they say; they are against sex because sex makes you happy. They are against happiness. They can’t tolerate any happiness anywhere. They are sadists, they would like the whole world to be in suffering; they enjoy suffering.

They not only want others to suffer, they make themselves suffer too. Suffering is their joy. That is a perverted state, a pathological state. Buddha is not against sex because it gives you pleasure; he is simply trying to make you aware of the fact that these are the things that keep you tethered into a kind of inner slavery. You are a slave of your own chemistry, you are a slave of your own physiology — and this slavery has to be transcended.

OSHO♥

LIMITS OF BIOLOGY

Man and woman are intimate enemies – enemies and yet intimate. If your woman is with you then you start feeling: how to be alone? When you are alone, after a few days you start a great thirst and hunger for your woman – how to be with her? If you are alone, appetite arises for love; if you are with somebody, the appetite disappears and you start thinking,

’Why not go to the Himalayas and sit silently in a cave? Why go on bothering with this nonsense?’ Just a few days ago Ramananda wrote a letter to me. First he used to live alone, then he got tired of aloneness – naturally. Everybody gets tired of aloneness, gets fed up with oneself. Nothing else to do, nowhere to go, nobody to look at, nobody to be with, nobody to hug, nobody to care for you or to care about.

He got tired and started looking for a woman – and when you look for trouble it comes! So then came Vani from faraway Germany, and they were both happy – as stories go. They were both happy. Then things started getting entangled, and there was conflict and fight and nagging – all natural things. Then for two days Vani was ill and Ramananda was alone again.

He enjoyed those two days like anything! He wrote me a letter: ’Osho, to be alone is so incredible, so beautiful, I have never known that aloneness is so beautiful.’ I told him, ’Wait, Ramananda! Just a few more days and you will start hankering.’

And this goes on and on, again and again. One has to understand. One has to understand how one functions, man or woman, and how the other functions. And don’t be too personal about it. It has nothing to do with you. It is just the man’s mind and the woman’s mind, it has nothing to do with Ramananda and Vani. It is basically biological. You have to understand it very impersonally, only then can you go beyond it, only then can you transcend it.

Watch every move that you make and watch every move that the woman makes. Listen to the deepest instinct, to what is happening. Don’t throw the responsibility on the other and don’t start feeling guilty that you are doing something wrong. Nobody is doing wrong. It is simply natural. But one can go beyond nature because there is a super-nature too. I am not saying that you are condemned to be natural, that you will remain always natural, no.

With understanding one becomes wiser, wiser than nature. One becomes more meditative than nature allows. And through that understanding there comes a liberation. But that liberation is so alchemical that it transforms you totally, radically. Then you are no more a man and your woman is no more a woman. Then you both become more like two spirits – man, woman, seem irrelevant.

And when a man is no more a man and a woman is no more a woman that means they are no more confined to their biologies, no more confined to their bodies – because the difference is only in the body. Beyond the body there is no difference. Hidden behind, you are the same. It is just the body, the medium, that makes the difference.

Once you have started learning how to go beyond the medium, how to transcend biology, physiology, then you have become only two spirits. And only two spirits can live in communion forever. Then there arises a new kind of love which I call friendship. Friendship is higher than your so-called love. Your so-called love is full of hate; friendship is pure love. All hate has disappeared. All conflict, nagging, fighting has disappeared.

All desire to dominate, possess, be jealous, has disappeared. Friendship is pure love. All that was not needed is no more there. All that was non-essential has, been left behind. Only the essential fragrance. Friendship is the fragrance of love. And remember that unless you and your wife become friends, you will never be at peace.

OSHO♥