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♥

Sudhindra means god of remembrance, god of awareness, god of mindfulness. The most important thing in your life will be awareness. Pour your whole energy into that dimension: become more alert, more attentive, more mindful. Whatsoever you are doing, make it a point that you should do it with awareness… small things: washing your clothes, do it with full awareness. You can do it mechanically, you can think of a thousand other things and you can go on washing the clothes. That does not need awareness: you know how to do it, your body has learned the trick of it, it goes on doing it. You are not needed; you can think, you can fantasise, you can dream and the body will do the work. The body is functioning like a robot: it is programmed, so it will do its acts.

Bringing awareness in means dissolving the body robot, its mechanicalness, creating awareness deep in the body. And when awareness penetrates the body it becomes luminous. When awareness penetrates the body there is no separation between the soul and the body; they are one unity, functioning in unison. And that’s a great blessing. It is what blissfulness is all about: when the body and the soul are functioning as one, when they are coupled together in deep loving embrace, when all boundaries dissolve.

But from our very childhood we have been taught one thing, that we are separate from the body. Control the body; we are the master and the body is the slave – manipulate the body. Because of these teachings, every human being on the earth is a victim; no human being finds a harmony between his body and soul. With that harmony missing you can’t feel god; god can be felt only in a harmonious being.

Each child has been forced to become a kind of schizophrenic, a duality, a division: the mind and the body. And between the two a gap has been created; that gap is ugly, that gap is a calamity. Man has lost all joy because of that gap and man has lost contact with nature because of that gap. We are connected to nature through the body but we are disconnected from the body so we have become ghosts in a machine. the body is being used as a machine, as a robot.

Awareness means dissolving the robot, awareness means unlearning the nonsense that has been taught by the society, bringing the mind closer and closer to the body, penetrating the body with awareness. and when it happens, a great thrill passes through the whole body mechanism, and then it is no more a mechanism at all: it becomes an organic unity with the soul. Then the body vibrates in unison. You don’t have the division, you don’t possess the body; you are the body – there is no possessor, no possessed. That’s where sanity and health and wholeness arise; otherwise everybody remains schizophrenic.

So that is going to be your work here: become more and more alert in small things. In drinking water, drink it with absolute alertness, as if everything depends on it. In that moment don’t do anything else. Taste the water, feel its coolness going down your throat. Feel the quenching of the thirst, feel the entry of the water in the body. In that moment only be that. Eating, do the same. In walking, sleeping, loving, remember one thing: the body has not to be used as a robot. It is not a machine, you are not the manipulator. It is you; it is your visible being, you are its invisible source. But you are not two, you are two aspects of one energy. Matter and mind are not two but two states of the same energy; matter is more condensed, the mind is more abstract.

OSHO♥

CRIPPLED

[At a previous darshan a sannyasin, who was crippled by polio four years ago, said he disliked the constant attention his disability received. Osho suggested he wear a sign ’I am crippled. Please don’t ask me about my leg. Thank you!’ Tonight he said it helped him to accept his situation, but he still feels frustrated; he wants to dance totally.]

Be a total cripple! – that’s what totality should mean to you. Just accept it and enjoy it.

[The sannyasin asks: Will it become better?]

Yes, it will. If you can accept it and enjoy it, it will start changing. The rejection of anything is always a barrier to change; you create a division between you and your leg. Somehow you are ashamed of it, somehow you don’t like it the way it is, you don’t respect it, and it is only respect that will change the situation.

Feel grateful: at least you have the leg; there are people who don’t have legs! Nothing is wrong in it, there is nothing to be worried about; it is just comparison. Just think of a world where all are crippled and one man is born who is not crippled. He will be in the same position as you are, because then dancing with all the crippled people, he will think, ’I am not dancing as totally as they are. I am not totally in my crippledness because I am not crippled.’ It is just comparison.

One can transform any situation by looking at it positively. So simply accept it; this is the way god wants you to be. Now why not be a perfect cripple? Do you think that if you were not crippled problems wouldn’t be there? Then why are there so many people here not crippled but still having problems?

It is good that you only have a crippled leg; people have crippled minds, crippled hearts. You have a very small problem. Don’t fuss about it too much, mm? – just forget about it; accept and forget. Do whatsoever you can do, and within your limits be total. You can’t have somebody else as your criterion. Somebody is a fast runner and you cannot run; even if you are not crippled, you are not an Olympic runner. But nobody bothers about it; why should one bother? Whatsoever the given situation, make the most out of it, and you will be surprised that if you can make the most out of it, everything that can happen to a man, will happen.

Simply forget about it. But respectfully forget about it, mm? – not that you keep it at the back just to avoid it, you keep yourself occupied with something else. That is not respect. Respectfully, mm? – be loving to the leg: massage it, play with it. Just give some enthusiasm to the leg and say to it, ’Don’t be worried. I am not worried – why are you worried? Everything is perfectly okay!’ Things will start changing, energy will start moving more.

OSHO♥

NON - GRAVITATIONAL FOOD

Now, we have to go into an enquiry about the bodies. Man is not one body, man has many bodies – layers of bodies. The body we know is only the outermost; inside it there is another, and inside that, another. Rishis have divided these layers into five.

The first is known as the food body, the physical body. Ordinarily, we remain attached to this body. We are in a deep illusion and are identified with the physical one. This attachment to the physical body will not allow you to move inside. But why this attachment? – because we don’t know that there is another; we have never become aware that inside this body there is another. This body is so solid, so non-transparent, you cannot have any glimpse within. This solidity of the body means that we have been using foods which make it solid. This body can be made transparent also – just like a glass body in which you can have a glimpse inside.

The change of food is bound to change the qualities of your physical body. Food is not just energy, it is also a qualitative thing. Food is not just a fuel, it contributes more than fuel – it gives you either transparency, or non-transparency. The insight into this phenomenon can mutate, and you can have altogether a different type of body. And it is not so difficult to change this body, because the body is a flux, every moment changing itself; it is a process, it is not a static thing. The moment you came here, you had another body; now the body has changed. It is changing constantly, every moment; it is riverlike, moving and changing – it is not a static thing.

If you change direction, the body takes a jump; only the direction has to be changed. One should become aware, that whatsoever one is eating must be such that it doesn’t make one’s body heavy. This heaviness is not concerned with weight: sometimes you feel that you are weightless, as if you can fly. So the food that can give you the feeling of weightlessness is the right food. The food that gives you the feeling of being burdened is not the right food. All non-vegetarian foods make you more rooted in the earth; you cannot fly. Vegetarian foods give you wings; you have an inner feeling that you can just levitate, you can just go out of gravitation.

Food is right if it is non-gravitational. If you can feel non-physical in it, it is good. Really, the body is felt only when it is heavy; when you have the feeling of heaviness inside, only then you feel the body. When the body is not heavy with wrong foods, you are bodiless. That’s why when the body is diseased, when the body is ill, you feel it; when it is healthy, you don’t feel it. You feel your head only when there is a headache; when there is no headache, there is no head.

So to define health positively, there is only one way: A person who is not feeling his body, is healthy. The more you feel your body, the more ill you are, because when the body is really healthy, there is no need to feel it. Only pain is felt. And if you even feel pleasure, it must be a sort of pain. Pleasure is never felt, because only a disturbance is felt. Silence is never felt really, only noise is felt. And if you begin to feel silence….

Real, authentic silence is not felt. Really, when you are not feeling any noise, it is silence. When you are not feeling your body, it means you are not feeling any disturbances; you are healthy. So the feeling of bodilessness is healthy. Any food that gives you a feeling of bodilessness is good, is right food. So be discriminative; be consciously discriminative. Don’t eat anything which makes you more embodied, which makes you more of a body. Go on eliminating all that gives you a bodiness, and then you will begin to transform your body towards a transparency.

This may look paradoxical, but this is true. When you are really healthy, you are desireless – illness and unhealthiness create desires. This is one of the basic distinctions between Eastern and Western thinking. They say, in the West, that to be filled with desire means you are healthy. But their understanding is very superficial, because desire is a disturbance. Something is still incomplete, that’s why the desire. Something is incomplete, so there is the urge to fulfill it. But when you are really healthy you are so fulfilled, you are so complete – the circle is so complete – that there is no desire.

Desire means you are incomplete. Somewhere, something is still lacking; somewhere, something is absent; somewhere, you are feeling a vacuum. This is what illness means: a vacuum. Health means: so much fulfilled, so much filled there is no more space. When there is no inner space, there is no desire; so a really healthy person is desireless, and a really healthy person is bodiless. These both are associated: To be a body is to
be in desire; to be in desire is to be heavy with the body.

Make the body as if it is not. The more absent, the better; the more present, the more you are falling downwards. You can just become a stone, and many are that – just stones. They only feel awake when the body demands something; otherwise, they are asleep. When the body demands, they feel awake; then the demand is fulfilled – they again fall deep into sleep.

One should create a body which has needs but not demands. Needs are natural; demands become crazy and obsessions. Demands mean you are addicted; the body is the master. All the austerities were not meant as suicidal methods, they were not masochist – they were really an inner transformation, they were really a change of power.

When a buddha is fasting, it is not to destroy the body; it is to destroy the demands. Understand it very clearly: when a buddha is fasting, he is not destroying his body, but he is changing the seat of power, who the master is. The body must not be the master; otherwise, you cannot go inwards. The master is outside. How can you go inwards? You are just a slave, and you have to be around the master. The power seat must be transformed; the body must become a slave. A slave has needs, but no demands; a slave has needs, but no commandments. The commanding must remain with the master, and the master must be inside, not outside. The deeper the master, the more is your freedom.

So when a buddha is on a fast, it is to change the seat of power. He is saying to his body, ”Now I will fulfill your needs, but not your demands.” The body will struggle – no one can lose the power, the master, the sovereignty, so easily. And you have lived with the body as the master for millennia. The body was never challenged, so the mastery has become natural; it has become such an old habit that the body even cannot conceive it, ”What nonsense are you talking? You are the master? You have always been the slave. Always! Have you gone crazy? The orders have already been issued by ME! – you have always followed.”

Austerity means, TAPASCHARYA means, TAPAS means, that now you are not ready to continue this status quo, this state of affairs. The body will struggle: the fight is really not from the inside, the fight is from the outside. But the body is a very subtle and miraculous mechanism; it adjusts to anything if you have the will – the greater the will, the sooner the body is adjusted again. it begins to feel, ”Now the mastery is lost.” And really, when the mastery is lost, the body becomes more healthy, because now it is natural.

The mastery of the body is really unnatural; it is not healthful – even to the body – because the body has no consciousness, and goes on demanding; the body has no discrimination and goes on demanding.It goes on doing things which are not even good for it. Consciousness becomes the slave; and the material desires, the mechanical ones, becomes the master.

This is the deepest accident, the deepest misery that has happened to humankind. But in a way, it had to, because we have developed from an animal existence. We have developed from animal existence. There is no need for a Darwin to prove this – we have know it always. Because an animal has no consciousness, the body has to be the master. There is no one other to claim the mastery – the body has to be the master. But when consciousness grows inside, the body goes on, mm? – Just as a old habit.

You have to change it. Now you are not in the animal world; now you are not animals. Austerity means that now we declare we have passed the state of animalhood. The suffering that one goes through in austerity is just a birth pain – nothing else. And that suffering is good and healthy, because out of that suffering is transformation.

But it should not be done as a masochist – that’s altogether a different matter, a very diseased thing. You can make your body suffer and enjoy it. If you are enjoying it, then you are suicidal: then it is not austerity. Then it is not austerity; then you are really a very impotent, violent mind. You cannot do violence to others, so you are doing violence to yourself. So you can fast as a masochist, as a person who enjoys suffering. This is not austerity; this is very abnormal, this is really a mental case.

Out of one hundred, ninety-nine percent of the people who go on austerities are masochists, but they can deceive; they can deceive others and themselves also. To deceive others is irrelevant, but to deceive oneself is very dangerous. You can deceive yourself. The point to understand is that one must not enjoy suffering; one must take it as a necessary measure – that’s another thing. One must go through it as a cleansing; one must go through it as a purity, as a catharsis, as a change, as a mutation. One must accept it, but not ENJOY it! That is the thing: If you are enjoying it, then this is not austerity at all; this is madness.

This is the point to be remembered: never enjoy suffering because that is abnormal. To suffer suffering is normal, but to accept it as a necessity, as an inevitability, is another thing. Accept it, go through it; don’t enjoy it. You have to do it, because as you have an animal heritage, one day you have to assert your humanity. Against the animal heritage you have to assert yourself. You have to make your body know exactly, NOW, that the body is not the master. And once the body has know it, the body is adjusted. And really the body is freed from a responsibility it cannot carry. It CANNOT be the master because it has no consciousness; it has no awareness. It is an automata, it is a mechanical device.

The body is an automatic device, so it goes on working. If you make it the master it goes on demanding without any consciousness, without any discrimination, without any intelligence. It has a mechanical intelligence just like a computer: it goes on demanding… it goes on demanding. It has a built-in process of how to demand, but without any consciousness: without any consciousness it tells you when you are hungry, it tells you what to eat, it tells you what to do. But this whole arrangement is just mechanical – it goes on repeating.

That’s why a person who lives with the body feels life as a boredom, because the body can only repeat; it can only repeat continuously. So we are just repeating every day the same thing. It is a circle, a closed circle: the same things, the same demands, the same desires, the same lusts – the body goes on repeating and repeating, and in the end one feels just bored, but still one cannot do anything. Even if you feel bored, again the second day, the body will demand the same thing; and you will have to supply, because you have never been in command.

This physical layer is the first, is the primary layer – the outermost. If you can be aware that you are unnecessarily the slave and need not be, then change your body habits consciously. By and by, change. Change the seat of power; be more in control. And give to the body all that is needed by it, but never fulfill any addictions. It will be painful in the beginning, but it is a bliss when you have reached beyond the body and have become the master. And when you are on the throne, it is one of the deepest blisses possible. Matter and energy are not two things. Matter is just energy, energy is just matter – Two states of one thing.

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♥