Work in the world but don't get lost in it

Sadhana

My friend Sundari from Portugal has asked for some words of wisdom from Osho about working in the world. I understand her for she has just been here. When you come to Pune in the Osho Meditation Resort life is so serene and blissful, you wish it stays like this forever. And then you go back and face reality. The dream has disappeared! Here is an Osho insight for all those who want to change the quality of their working life.
Osho says: " It is good to continue the work and to continue working on yourself side by side. Never be an escapist because escape is not going to help. The best arrangement is to work in the world but don't be lost in it. Work for five or six hours and then forget all about it. Give at least two hours for your inner growth, a few hours for your relationship, love, children, friends, society.
Your profession should only be a part of life. It should not overlap into every dimension of your life, as ordinarily it does. A doctor becomes almost a twenty-four-hour doctor. He thinks about it, he talks about it. Even when he is eating he is a doctor. While he is making love to his woman, he is a doctor.
My whole effort is to help you to be in the world and yet to be a meditator. Of course it is more difficult because there will be more challenge and situations. It is easier to be either a doctor or a meditator. It will be difficult to be both because that will give you many contradictory situations. But a person grows when there are contradictory situations. In the turmoil, in that clash of the contradictions, integrity is born. You become more centred.
A wise man has to be so wise that he can allow himself a little foolishness also. That is the greatest wisdom: to use foolish-ness also as a part of life so that you can laugh -- not only at others but at yourself also; so that you can play for no profit, no motive; so that you can simply relate to people for no reason whatsoever. "
Cypress In The Courtyard

OSHO : a protected trademark in more than 40 countries

Amrit Sadhana

For more than 40 years both during his life and afterwards the Osho Foundations have always acted on Osho’s request to protect his name, his copyright and his work and will continue to do so. As part of this work Osho is now a protected trademark in more than 40 other countries around the world.

Recently the Patent and Trademark office in the US decided, in a trademark dispute brought against the Osho Foundation by a group of so called “Friends of Osho,” that the name Osho is generic and cannot be registered as a trademark in the United States.
Generic means that Osho is now in the same category as computers and tissues. This decision is appealable in the American courts. It is interesting to note that the same group, Friends of Osho, that brought the US action, and who today claims victory in the US action, is the same group applying to register “Osho” as a trademark in India for their personal business.

Osho Foundation’s main reason for applying for the Osho trademark is to ensure that Osho’s name would be used as a way of identifying his work. If this decision stands this will no longer be the case.

As the decision now stands anyone in the United States can use the name Osho in any manner they may choose. They may create their own meditations and call them Osho Meditations or even change any of Osho’s meditations as they wish. They may create and sell “Osho paintings” even if they are painted by someone else, or any manner of such things.

It is strange that the Foundation’s success in making Osho’s proposal available, including in the United States, was the source of the board’s view that Osho, in the United States, is considered generic.

This decision has no effect on Osho’s copyright which is protected by international treaties around the world. So, Osho Foundation’s efforts to make Osho available around the world will continue to expand exactly as is currently the case.

How much land does a man need?

Amrit Sadhana

Reading about the recent fraud worth Rs 50 billion by Ramalingam Raju, the CEO of Satyam Computers, the first thought that came to my mind was, “How much is 50 billion? What must have he done with all the money that I can’t even calculate? Why do people require so much money?”
And then it came to light that Mr Raju had purchased more than six thousand acres of land near Hyderabad and Karnataka, the southern part of India. Again my mind did a somersault -- how much is six thousand acres and what would he do with it?
But I was looking from the space of need, and people like Raju are driven by greed . For greed even the whole earth is not enough, whereas the need is satisfied with a small shelter.
This case of abnormal lust for land reminded me of a famous story by Leo Tolstoy: How much land does a man need? Osho often tells this story to highlight the greed of the human mind. What is the source this insatiable greed?
Says Osho: “Greed simply means you are feeling a deep emptiness and you want to fill it with anything possible -- it doesn't matter what it is. And once you understand it, then you have nothing to do with greed. You have something to do with your coming into communion with the whole, so the inner emptiness disappears. And with it, all greed disappears. But there are mad people all over the world, and they are collecting... Somebody is collecting money although he never uses it.
So there can be many directions and many ways to fill emptiness, although it is never full -- it remains empty, and you remain miserable because it is never enough.” Beyond Psychology

Now the story -- you must have read the story but it will be interesting to refresh your memory in view of the current Satyam scenario.
There is a poor peasant in the village of Russia named Pakhom, who at the beginning can be heard complaining that he does not own enough land to satisfy him. He goes on buying land but is not satisfied.
Finally, he is introduced to the Bashkirs, and is told they are simple-minded people who own a huge amount of land. Thus, he goes to them to take as much of their land for as low a price as he can negotiate.
But their offer is very unusual: for a sum of one thousand rubles, Pakhom can walk around as large an area as he wants, starting at daybreak, marking his route with a spade along the way. If he reaches his starting point by sunset that day, the entire area of land his route encloses will be his.
Again his greediness has the better of him. He tries to cover as much land as possible, not content with what he already has. As the sun nearly sets, he realizes his error and runs back as fast as he can to the waiting Bashkirs. He finally arrives at the starting point just as the sun sets.
But exhausted from the run, he drops dead as he reaches the starting point. They bury him in an ordinary grave only six feet long. Actually the land that he needed, and everybody needs, was only six feet long!

I wish Mr Raju asks himself sitting in the prison cell: how much land do I really need – as big as the cell?

Osho loves science and technology

Amrit Sadhana

There can't be more contemporary a mystic than Osho. He is a perfect guy for these times, because he is not against technology, on the contrary he wants to use all the modern electronic gadgets to spread the message to millions. But what's the message, one would ask. The message of meditation. The message of awakening consciousness. And he does that so playfully. Not the traditional boring way of preaching.

Mark Osho's words : "My word can go to the farthest corner of the earth -- it is reaching already. New methods have been evolved. A videotape is a far better way to reach people because they can hear me the same way as you are hearing me. And just hearing the word without seeing the person is one thing; seeing the person also makes a lot of difference. It is totally different because when you are listening to me on a tape recording or on records you will not be able to see my hand, which says more than I can say with my words. You will not be looking at my eyes, which have much more to say than words can convey. Something will be missing, something of immense value -- the person will he missing. You will be hearing only a ghostly voice.
I will use films, television, videotapes, tapes, every modern technique to spread the message. I belong to the twentieth century totally, wholeheartedly.
And I love this century; I am not against it. I love science and its technology. It is in the wrong hands, but that always happens. Whenever something significant is discovered it always falls into the wrong hands first for the simple reason that they are very quick people, cunning people.
Even the discovery of atomic energy can be a blessing to the world. But it has fallen into the hands of the politicians. It should be in the hands of mystics; then there would be no need to be afraid of a Third World War. Then we could fill the whole earth with affluence; then poverty could disappear for the first time from the whole earth. Much illness could disappear."
Excerpted from Tao: The Golden Gate, Vol 1

Is your illness authentic?

Amrit Sadhana

I wonder why there are so many medicines and doctors and hospitals. Isn't it a sign of a sick humanity? Can't we live a healthy life like birds and animals? Osho points out that we not only create our illness, we cling to it because we enjoy being sick. Startled? Of course, who would agree with it? But go deeper, and you will agree with the Osho insight--
"If medicine fails to cure you, know well your illness is not curable through medication -- the cause of the illness lies somewhere else; it has nothing to do with medication. You may curse the medicine and call the doctors stupid for not finding the right treatment for you; you may try ayurvedic medicine or naturopathic treatment; you may turn to allopathy or homeopathy -- nothing will work. No doctor can be of any use to you, simply because a doctor can only treat an authentic illness -- he has no control over something pseudo. And the interesting thing is that you keep busy creating illnesses like that, and you want them to remain. "

So what's the cure? Meditation. Meditate and clean your mind every day the way you clean your clothes, the pots and pans and the body. A clean mind will have a healthy body.

Excerpted from And Now And Here, vol1

Gibberish : The Language of 2009

Amrit Sadhana

Language is no doubt one of the greatest means of communication. If it is used unconsciously, which is more often than not , it creates lots of problems and misunderstanding. Have you noticed, our 99% problems are created because of our words. Often we say things we don’t mean and later we have to clarify ourselves or apologize. It depends where the words are coming from. If they are coming from emotions they carry lot of charge which hurts others. If they come from the intellect they trigger an argument.
NLP Psychologists have found that 98% of human communication is non verbal and only 2% is verbal. In that case won’t it be good if we use a language that will express ourselves and not create fire wherever it reaches?
There is such a language called Gibberish. The word gibberish is Arabic; and it comes from an enlightened Sufi mystic, Jabbar. Jabbar spoke so fast that his words would run over each other. It was impossible to make any sense out of what he said because there were no full stops, commas, no indication of where the sentence began and where it ended. It was such an outburst of energy that the listeners found it mind blowing. This is exactly what he intended: to bring the mind to a stand still. It gave a taste of silence and relaxation to the listener.
Osho has revived Gibberish which is immensely cleansing and an excellent device for venting out tensions, or releasing bottled up emotions without hurting anybody. It is actually speaking in the language you don’t know. Osho uses gibberish as a meditative therapy and a door to meditation. Highly effective!
It is a wonderful potion for the modern mind which is trained to think logically, rationalize every act , or accumulate thoughts like a heap of garbage. Yes, garbage it sure is. The modern man is bombarded with much information from the electronic gadgets and media . This unprocessed information creates stress and he feels bogged down by it. This leads to many illnesses like migraine, headache, and other psychosomatic diseases.
Usually when two people are angry with each other they start hurling abuses and poisonous words at each other, or they suppress it and torture themselves. There is no need to go the conventional “fight or flight” way, express your thoughts in gibberish instead. Make meaningless sounds, tell the other person what you think about him/her without words. Use your body and face. Chirp like birds or small kids who cannot speak yet. It is so hilarious, and liberating. It cleanses the toxins in the body, relaxes strained nerves, activates positive energy.
It also holds good if you want to express your soft feelings for someone. It is embarrassing for many people to express their love or appreciation for somebody. You can use a gentle singing like gibberish sounds, let your body speak and transmit your energy to the other person.
I wish more and more people use gibberish as a means of communication in 2009. It will save so much trouble and fill our lives with joy.
For more informtaion on gibberish see The Osho book: Live Zen, # 17/www.osho.com/library

Terrorism is not in weapons, it is in your hands

The world is shaken by the growing menace of terrorism and no one seems to have any solution. Here is the Osho insight -- the analysis and the remedy : 'clean the basement of human mind, the unconscious which harbors violence and ugly emotions. '

OSHO Dynamic Meditation is the most effective tool that can be useful.

Osho says, " The event of terrorism is certainly related with what is happening in the society. The society is falling apart. Its old order, discipline, morality, religion, everything has been found to be wrongly based. It has lost its power over people's conscience.
Terrorism simply symbolizes that to destroy human beings does not matter, that there is nothing in human beings which is indestructible, that it is all matter. Once man is taken to be only a combination of matter, and no place is given for a spiritual being inside him, then to kill becomes just play.
Terrorism has many undercurrents. One is that because of nuclear weapons, the nations are pouring their energy into that field, thinking that the old weapons are out of date. They are out of date, but individuals can start using them. And you cannot use nuclear weapons against individuals -- that would be simply stupid. One individual terrorist throws a bomb.
What I want to emphasize is that the nuclear weapon has given individual people a certain freedom to use old weapons, a freedom which was not possible in the old days because the governments were also using the same weapons.
Now the governments are concentrated on destroying the old weapons, throwing them in the ocean, selling them to countries which are poor and cannot afford nuclear weapons. And all those terrorists are coming from these poor countries, with the same weapons that have been sold to their countries. And they have a strange protection: you cannot use nuclear weapons against them, you cannot throw atom bombs at them.

Terrorism is going to become bigger and bigger, because the third world war is almost impossible. Terrorism simply means that what was being done on a social scale now has to be done individually. It will grow. It can only be prevented if we change the very base of human understanding -- which is a Himalayan task; more so because these same people whom you want to change will fight you; they won't allow you to change them easily.
My understanding is that the way he has lived, man needs every ten to twelve years -- a war. He accumulates so much anger, so much rage, so much violence, that nothing short of a war will give him release. So, war after war, there is a gap of only ten to fifteen years. That gap is a kind of relaxation. But again you start accumulating, because the same psychology is working -- the same jealousy, the same violence.
And man is basically a hunter; he is not by nature vegetarian. First he became a hunter, and for thousands of years he was just a meat-eater, and cannibalism was prevalent everywhere. To eat human beings caught from the opposing tribe you were fighting with was perfectly ethical. All that is carried in the unconscious of humanity.
Things are interconnected. The first thing that has to be changed is that man should be made more rejoicing -- which all the religions have killed. The real criminals are not caught. The terrorists and other criminals are the victims.
It is all the religions who have destroyed all possibilities of rejoicing. They have destroyed the possibility of enjoying small things of life; they have condemned everything that nature provides you to make you happy.
A man who is living in comfort and luxury cannot become a terrorist. Religions have condemned riches, praised poverty; now, a man who is rich cannot be a terrorist. Only the poor can be terrorists -- because they have nothing to lose, and they are boiling up against the whole of society because others have things they don't have.
You live in fear, not in joy. If we can clean the basement of the human mind's unconscious... it can be cleaned away.
The terrorism is not in the bombs, it is in your hands; the terrorism is in your unconscious.
Otherwise, this state of affairs is going to grow more bitter. And it seems all kinds of blind people have bombs in their hands and are throwing them at random.
So individual violence will increase -- it is increasing. And all your governments and all your religions will go on perpetuating the old strategies without understanding the new situation.
The new situation is that every human being needs to go through therapies, needs to understand his unconscious intentions, needs to go through meditations so that he can calm down, become cool -- and look towards the world with a new perspective of silence."

Excerpted from Beyond Psychology