Читать книгу OSHO: The Buddha for the Future - Maneesha James - Страница 9

As far back as one can remember people have gathered around masters just to sit silently. In the East we call it darshan. The West has never understood that seeing—that is the actual meaning of the word ‘darshan’—means being in the energy field of a man who has come to know himself, to drink out of his well, to look into his eyes, to feel his hands, to listen to his silences, to his words. ~ Osho

The following evening is the start of the most creative and exciting period of my life so far. In preparation for recording darshan, we set up a tape recorder and a small mike; Shiva has his camera and I equip myself with book and pen. The substance will of course be Osho’s words. In addition I’d like to include some descriptions of those to whom Osho talks, and of course observations of Osho himself, along with any necessary commentary.

With this slightly new perspective of darshan I feel as if I am attending a play, some existential drama (and sometimes comedy) in which actors are continually changing and the dialogue is spontaneous. The compilation of the diaries becomes my love, almost the sole preoccupation of my every waking hour. Incredibly, the darshan diaries will continue, at the rate of one a month, for over five years, totaling sixty-three books. (This in addition to Osho speaking a book a month in the morning discourses!)

I work fast: by the end of each day, the previous night’s darshan needs to have been transcribed (thanks to “Big Prem”), edited, had descriptions and commentary added, and be ready for its final read-through; otherwise I will never be able to stay abreast of things. Sometimes Osho’s words seem like a gigantic avalanche that constantly pursues me: to pause and glance over my shoulder at it is to waste precious time and risk being obliterated. (Then again: isn’t that exactly why Osho is speaking to us?)

Sometime later a third member joins our tiny team. Savita has been a psychotherapist in London and, like me, adores playing with words. Invariably Big Prem, plugged into her typewriter and earphones all day, bursts into uproarious laughter as she reaches a particularly hilarious exchange in darshan, or stops to exclaim over something that touches her. Savita and I enjoy tossing ideas back and forth; we also begin to interview people who’ve come to darshan and who have interesting stories to tell. All the while I keep playing with new ways of giving expression to these enchanted evenings.

And enchanted they are. I am witness, over these five years, to so many changes—in the ever-increasing number of people arriving to take sannyas; in the faces of people as they take the plunge into meditation and participate in groups; in our daily communal life, my own evolving inner life, and in the format of darshan itself.

I enjoy watching what I privately term Osho’s “wooing” of potential sannyasins. He says he knows “his people,” and if we don’t initially recognize that we are one of them we are, finally, won over by him. It touches and thrills me to see how much of himself he gives to us…to watch unconditional love at work—or “play” as he puts it.

Whenever she is present in darshan, Radha, an Italian sannyasin, is sometimes asked to help with the “energy” aspect—touching third eyes and so on. Later, we two become known as “the sniffers.” Osho is especially sensitive to smells, especially strong perfumes. Stationed either side of the gate that leads into darshan we are responsible for checking that people are clean and completely fragrance-free: no cigarette, onion, or garlic odors, no soap, no shampoo, and absolutely no French perfume. Even many years later people good-naturedly—generally—will remind me that I “turned them away” from darshan at one time or another.

We represent the last barrier to actually being with Osho. The role is certainly a potential “button-pusher.” In fact, the general consensus is that we don’t turn someone away out of consideration for Osho’s well-being but that we randomly reject someone on a whim, as a “device”: that is, to provide them with an opportunity to “look at their stuff”! But I’ve internally writhed my way through too many evenings when some fragrance has clearly caused his discomfort to be lenient.

The two of us must look like a couple of expert wine tasters: positioned either side of the proffered head, simultaneously we bend to smell it. If we both feel it passes muster we nod to each other. But when one of us is unsure we indicate the offending portion of the head, and the other comes to our side to sniff. Maybe there is a slight fragrance? But is the perfume herbal (allowable) rather than artificial (a definite no-no), perhaps? If the smell is mild we suggest a scarf. Some people learn to come prepared with a scarf in case, and, when needed, they hastily wrap it around their head. (You may not look as pretty as you had hoped but hey, if this is the price you must pay for admission…) Perhaps people can be forgiven if they think it is all some extraordinary charade we are performing simply to heighten their pre-darshan excitement.

Osho’s physical proximity to us in these evenings creates a certain intimacy, distinct from when we are several hundred strong in the public discourses. And of course, it’s a chance to have the master focus only on oneself for a precious few moments.

Some attendees want to receive sannyas: Osho gives them a mala and explains the meaning of their names, usually at some length. He might ask how long they will be staying, and then, consulting his list of what is on offer, suggest their participating in some workshops.

Perennial problems, in all sorts of shapes, are brought to him: on meditation, work, health, love, sex, aloneness, and, the universal favorite, relationships. One evening a sannyasin tells Osho that her relationship is beautiful but that her lover is possessive of her. He is aware that he is and is trying to work on it; meanwhile she wonders what her part in this should be.

Osho responds:

Keep him aware, mm? And you remain aware, too.

…A few things have to be understood when you are in a love relationship. One is: never allow possessiveness to settle in it. It tries to. Wherever love happens, possessiveness immediately enters and starts using the possibility of love, starts destroying it. It is the death of love. So the more aware you are, the longer the love can continue—one thing….

The second thing: You should not do something unnecessarily to hurt the feelings of the other. When we love a person we have to be very sensitive about his feelings, too; that which can be avoided should be avoided. Keep alert so that possessiveness does not settle in, but keep alert also that in the name of anti-possessiveness you don’t start destroying the delicacy of it; otherwise that happens immediately, and both are destructive….

Love is such a delicate flower. It is very rarely that it is preserved: it is destroyed, either this way or that. Either possessiveness destroys it—you become an old-fashioned wife and husband—or fooling around destroys it, and you become a modern husband and wife; but both ways it goes down the drain. It has to be protected from both….

Love is always beautiful in the beginning, but that is nothing: it is always so. When love is beautiful in the end, it is really a rare flower, a very rare flower, and then you know exactly what love is… but only in the end you know. Ninety-nine loves die before that ultimate peak is reached.

In the old world there was no love because the marriage was too tight. In the modern world there is no love because in the name of freedom people have become licentious. In the old world love could not grow because the marriage was too much of a legality. In the new world love is not growing because the marriage is almost nil—it is too licentious. License and legality both have to be avoided.

It is a great art to be in love. To fall in love is very easy, to remain in love is very difficult, arduous. Only a few artists of life are capable of remaining in love.

Try it. Give it a try! Mm? be alert and make him alert. Good!

To a sannyasin who is still pining over a relationship that ended two years ago, Osho speaks of the illusoriness of love affairs. The first love is always magical, he points out; then, when frustration inevitably sets in, we change partners in the hope that we can recapture that same magic. But even then the magic, if recaptured, will disappear until we come to the point where we realize that it is simply an illusion, a sweet dream:

This is the way of growth. A day comes—and that day is the most fortunate of days—when you can live without illusions, when you can live without magic, when you can live quietly, silently, with no hankering for any excitement. And then a totally different kind of life starts growing in you. That life has value and truth.

These affairs of love, relationships, are good, but they have to go. I am not against them—when I call them illusions I am not saying that I am against them. I am all for them, because you can grow only by going through those illusions. You can grow only through frustrations; there is no other way to growth. Each success and each failure contributes to growth. Failure contributes more than success, because success can go on nurturing the illusion; failure simply opens your eyes to the reality.

There is a magical dimension to life, Osho continues, but it lies elsewhere than in the biological, chemical, and hormonally induced magic we call love:

[Your love] is not very spiritual or very significant. Search: other magic is there. That’s what I am trying to make available to you here: other magic. And there is a magic that comes through truth. Only that is lasting, only that is eternal…. Now search for it. And I am not saying stop relating with people. Relate, but knowing well that that’s okay—a game is a game. Play it, beautifully and artistically and aesthetically. But it is time to become a little more mature. Search inward now. Let meditation become your love now.

On one occasion in darshan a visitor from America explains that she “gets high” from meditating, but that now and then she slips back into drug taking. Osho comments that although the experience brought about by drugs and that of meditation might appear to be similar, in fact they are completely different and opposite:

The drug experience is a forced, phony experience, but because we don’t know the real, the phony seems to be right…. If you compare your life with an ordinary man who has never taken anything like LSD, marijuana, then you feel very high—if you compare it with an ordinary man, because he has not known any moment, he has not even had a false glimpse; he lives such a mundane life. You have lived the same mundane life—then one day this drug creates a dream, gives you a euphoria, and you are tremendously happy. But once meditation can give you an experience, then you will see that this experience was just a dream experience….

If we go on meddling—sometimes with meditation, sometimes with drugs, Osho adds—drugs can slowly destroy our capacity to meditate.

But if you are really interested in meditation, then drugs are dangerous…. The so-called common people think drugs are dangerous. It is not dangerous for them at all because they have nothing to lose; they have nothing to be destroyed! But if you are really interested in the search and you want to grow, then drugs are dangerous.

Drugs are not dangerous for politicians—drugs are dangerous for the religious people because something delicate arises out of meditation. It is very delicate and it comes out of much effort. Just a small quantity of a drug and it is destroyed and you will have to start again from abc.

The drug experience is so cheap, and the meditation experience is so costly because you have to go through such effort. Then by and by the mind starts choosing the cheaper one. Mm? it is the path of least resistance, so the mind says, “Why bother?” The drug can give you something so easily, then why bother with Vipassana, sitting and meditating and struggling hard? Why not the easier way?

The mind is always for the shortcut, and the shortcut is always false. As far as spiritual growth is concerned, there is no shortcut. You cannot cheat—there is no back door. Each has to follow the arduous way. In fact the real beauty of the peak depends on how hard your struggle has been. When you struggle hard and you lose the track many times—many times even the peak disappears and you are again in the dark valley, again you struggle and again you fall and again you move—this whole effort creates that situation where, when the real experience happens, you are in a tremendous bliss. If you are suddenly dropped on that peak by some helicopter, there will be no joy; there will be no joy at all.

I never have any sense of our being judged by Osho; he does not imply that we are wrong or stupid. He simply, scientifically and lucidly, points out the consequences of what we are doing; it is left to us whether we want to pursue our own course or not. That is always the freedom and the responsibility, and I sense that Osho respects us each for deciding how to use that freedom and take on that responsibility.

*

Shyam, a sannyasin who has just returned from England, tells Osho that while away he could see that he has done a lot of unnecessary worrying when in reality he knows that everything is fine. Yet all the time while away he felt the need to try to do something, to interfere or try to direct the way his life is going.

“Drop that trying and doing,” Osho suggests. “Just be as you are with no judgment.”

“But I don’t know how I am,” Shyam replies.

“I’m not saying that you are x,y,z—whatsoever you are is good. How you are is not the point. That ‘how’ again brings in the same question of wanting to drop certain things. That ‘how’ brings in the question of whether you are right…. What I am saying is that whatsoever you are is right! There is no way to be wrong. How can you be wrong? ”

“I feel wrong,” says Shyam quietly.

“That is possible, but you cannot be wrong; that’s what I’m saying,” counters Osho …. “So the feeling has to be dropped and the fact has to be accepted: you are that which you can be—you will never be anybody else; there is no way. So it is up to you to create misery out of it or bliss out of it. Misery is judgment; bliss is a non-valuating consciousness, no judgment. And meanwhile you remain the same. ”

Then with his typical humor, Osho adds, “The mango remains the mango; it cannot become a banana. But it can become miserable. Looking at a banana, the mango can become miserable, can suffer hell: “Why am I not a banana? What has gone wrong? Why am I not like the banana? Why am I just a mango?” It remains a mango but it will suffer….

This looks very hard, mm? Because ordinarily, spiritual seekers are searching for some way to become something else. People come to me to become somebody else and I go on pulling them back to being themselves. And I am not saying that you will be happy if you become somebody—a great Buddha, a Christ. If you just remain yourself and let things be….

Yes, there will be moments when you will be able to relate and there will be moments when you will not be able to relate; there will be moments when you are open and there will be moments when you will not be open. When you are not open that’s exactly what is needed; when you are open, that is needed. In the night the petals will close and the flower will not be open; in the morning when the sun comes, the flower will open. Now, it makes no problem out of it. So don’t make a problem out of it.

No problem can be solved, but all problems can be dropped. They cannot be solved because they don’t exist really; they are make-believe, constructed. We construct them because we cannot live without problems—problems give us occupation, something to do, but all problems can be dropped. Now be a mango and be happy, or be a banana and be happy; there is nothing else to hanker for. Then suddenly there is joy! Shyam is Shyam, and Shyam is going to remain Shyam. So why waste time? Why go on pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings? All this jumping is foolish! Rest in yourself. For one month drop all judgments. And when I am saying, ‘Drop all judgments,’ this judgment is included in it. ”

With a rueful little laugh Shyam says, “Yes, my mind is already saying, ‘I’ll try’.”

“Yes, you follow me?” Osho responds. “This judgment is included in it. Tomorrow you may be judging something—then don’t say, ‘I have to drop all judgments!’ This too has to be dropped. So you cannot say, ‘This is wrong; Osho has said don’t judge!’ I am not saying don’t judge. I’m simply saying that this judgmental attitude is meaningless; see into it, be clear about it.

By and by you will see within a month that judgment comes less and less and less, and one day suddenly it is not there. That day there is an opening. The clouds are no more there, and the sky is clear and you can see…and what you see has always been there….”

*

This is the alchemy I witness every evening: Osho takes whatever material we present in the form of our problems and, while pointing out their insubstantiality but acknowledging that they mean something to us, he shows us their construction, thread by thread; shows us how we fabricate, by our own doing, each knot, each flaw. And having exposed that fabrication for what it is, he then indicates what we really have and what our real potential is. As he puts it, once we realize that we had been clutching stones when in fact we can claim diamonds, the point is made, the work achieved.

I love how he does this… and the playfulness that is always there, sometimes more to the fore than others. A case in point is that of Big Prem’s mother, who arrives in Pune to visit her daughter. Of even greater proportions than her daughter, Josephine is given a chair to sit on in darshan, rather than joining the rest of us on the floor. Osho is to say the following morning in discourse that he deliberately stimulated Josephine’s defenses. Tonight he certainly doesn’t pussyfoot around, immediately asking Josephine: “What about you? Now become a sannyasin!”

Josephine (the formal smile quickly shocked into extinction): “What?”

Osho: “I’ve been waiting and waiting!”

Josephine: “I only came here to visit Prem.”

Osho: “Mm?”

Josephine: “I really did not come here to be a sannyasin—I only came here to visit my baby.”

Osho: “You did come to visit your baby but you have…Mm?”

Josephine: “Right. No, I’m not interested in being a sannyasin. I’m really not.”

Osho (undaunted): “I will make one of you!”

Josephine: “I’m sorry, I really don’t want to.”

Osho: “What is the fear?”

Josephine: “I’m not interested. I’m just not interested. You don’t mind my being truthful? You want me to say, ‘Yes, I want to be a sannyasin’ when I really don’t want to?”

Osho: “No no, there is no need to become—if you don’t want. But why?”

Josephine: “Because I’m a Roman Catholic and I believe in the Catholic Church and I believe in God, and I cannot give up that belief for anyone…”

Osho invites Josephine to come back, saying she is already not the same person who arrived. But once she leaves she will see that.

Josephine: “I don’t think so. I know Prem has been very happy and I’m grateful for that. She’s very happy. She says she never gets bored; she loves her work. She works typing, ten hours a day, seven days a week. (This elicits smiles from the group behind her.) That’s a lot be grateful for, isn’t it?”

Osho: “Good. Back home you will see that you have changed. Because I can see—I have been watching you since you came.”

Josephine (eyes opening wide, incredulous): “Have you really?”

Osho: “Yes!”

Josephine: “Really? I didn’t see you. Where were you?”

Osho chuckles. Then the conversation moves to the Josephine’s belief, as a Catholic.

Josephine: “Isn’t that something good to believe in though?”

Osho: “Nothing compared to knowing…. Nothing compared to knowing. What I am saying is this: that you are not interested in God at all; otherwise you cannot miss what I am saying, and what I am trying to make clear.”

Josephine: “That’s all I have.”

Osho: “You don’t have anything! If it were anything I would not have taken it away. I have to help you become more and more trusting. How can I take away your faith?”

Josephine: “But I’m just saying that’s all I have, and I don’t feel like I want to give it up.”

Osho switches from cajolery to humor. “Don’t give it up! You don’t have anything to give up, but back home you will realize it—I will go on haunting you!”

“Thank you!” replies Josephine and, assisted by Big Prem, removes herself from the hot seat.

What I see and hear in that exchange and in myriad others over the years is not a “tolerance” of us but a constant, unremitting expression of love. Sometimes watching Osho in conversation is like being witness to an existential chess game, one in which neither he nor we can lose or win because it’s not about that at all. It is all just a play.