OSHO: The Buddha for the Future. Maneesha James

There is no need. You can recognize things that you may not have consciously realized, but which must be an undercurrent of realization within you. Except that there is no other way.

      How do you realize when you fall in love that it is love? Certainly somewhere deep inside you there must be a hidden corner that already knows what love is. I am simply saying that there must be a certain realization in your being about beauty, about truth, about the ultimate sound of existence. That’s what makes you recognize. You are much more than you think you are.

      Gautam Buddha continually says to his disciples, "It is not a question of realization, it is only a question of remembering. What you have forgotten you have with you"… just a little search in all your pockets—also in the pockets that you are keeping secret even to yourself.

      This discourse makes so clear to me that reading or listening to Osho from the mind—that is, constantly checking if we agree with one or another point—is so not what he is talking is about or why he is talking to us. He is not trying to impose his truth on us—he will say myriad times it is simply his joy to share his understanding, his vision—but to activate the recognition of our own truth, to create a resonance. And I still experience a palpable response in reading or listening to his words; not an intellectual accord but a physical sensation. (Some years later I will have the same experience sitting just feet away from Krishnamurti as he delivers a lecture. Though he is so different from Osho and his approach too intellectual for me, I recognize a physical response that affirms I’m in the presence of an awakened one. There’s just a knowing… it’s a felt experience.)

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      And yes, it can also be said that Osho speaks to our minds—gives us words as “toys for the mind” as he puts it—because that’s where most of us live and that’s who we think we are. The mind that is constantly thinking and feeling is familiar. So, in listening to words, it is assured; this is known territory. The mind relaxed, the pandemonium of the mental parade begins to fade. The body, too, relaxes, by degrees letting go of its habitual tension.

      Mind-body calmed down, the poetry and humor invite us deeper now, into the welcoming space of the heart, where the sharp edges of ourselves, the ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’ begin to soften. This is a space from where the mind is very peripheral, even obsolete. Then, as I experience it, there is a falling even deeper inside. Here the words sound more like music and the experiencer dissolves into the gaps.

      He is not an orator, Osho insists; he simply talks because we cannot be silent. Talking has never been used this way before—to lead the other into the space of no words, no-mind. “Everything I say is a device. My speaking to you is a device so that you can just be here—your mind is engaged, listening to me, and something invisible can go on transpiring between me and your hearts. That’s the real thing…the real work is from my heart to your heart.”

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      Toward the end of 1975, Osho introduces us to the Sufis and “the way of the heart.” This series is so beautiful, so moving…so juicy! The title, Until You Die, is based on one of the Sufi stories, which concludes that before we die physically we must die metaphysically, and such a death is not possible without help.

      Sufis sing, they don’t give sermons, Osho explains, because life is more like a song and less like a sermon. They dance, and they don’t talk about dogmas because a dance is more alive, more like existence, more like the birds singing in the trees and the wind passing through the pines; more like a waterfall, or clouds raining, or grass growing. The whole life is a dance vibrating, throbbing, with infinite life.

      He spells out to us why society has an investment in cutting the child off from his or her heart: the heart is wild and unpredictable. The heart will inevitably rock the boat! He also talks of why, whenever we move into the vast territory of the heart, we feel both joy and fear:

      Mind is more secure, and with the mind you know where you are. With the heart no one ever knows where one is. With the mind everything is calculated, mapped, measured, and you can feel the crowd always with you. With the heart you are alone; nobody is with you. Fear grips, fear possesses you: where are you going? Now you no longer know, because when you move with a crowd on a highway you know where you are moving, because you think the crowd knows. The moment you start falling toward the heart … and it is a falling, falling like falling in an abyss. That’s why, when somebody is in love, we say he has “fallen in love”. It is a fall—the head sees it as a fall—someone has gone astray, fallen. The heart is unmapped, unmeasured, uncharted. Tremendous fear will be there.

      Osho returns to this theme some months later in his talks on Jesus, Come Follow Me. While many Christians, notably the “experts,” are offended by his interpretation of Jesus, in my view it is only through Osho that Jesus emerges as a real person—a misfit, a lover of the common man, and a mystic:

      Jesus is the culmination of all aspiration. He is in agony as you are, as every human being is born—in agony on the cross. He is in the ecstasy that sometimes a Krishna achieves. He celebrates; he is a song, a dance. And he is also transcendence. There are moments, when you come closer and closer to him, when you will see his innermost being is neither the cross nor his celebration, but his transcendence.

      Christ has something in him that cannot be organized. The very nature of it is rebellion, and rebellion cannot be organized; the moment you organize it, you kill it. Then a dead corpse remains. You can worship it, but you cannot be transformed by it. You can carry the load for centuries and centuries, but it will only burden you, it will not liberate you.

      That’s why, from the beginning, let it be absolutely clear: I am all for Christ, but not even a small part of me is for Christianity. If you cling too much to Christianity, you will not be able to understand Christ.

      In October of the following year, The Discipline of Transcendence, Buddha’s sutras, becomes the focus of the discourses. “Buddha is the most shattering individual in the whole history of humanity,” Osho says by way of introduction. “His whole effort is to drop all props. He does not say to believe in anything. He is an unbeliever, and his religion is that of unbelief. He does not say, ‘Believe!’ He says, ‘Doubt!’”

      The very idea of a God somewhere taking care consoles you, Osho continues. It makes you feel that life must have some meaning, some order. God is not a discovery but an invention, and God is not the truth, but the greatest lie there is:

      Buddha says: You can change your life; beliefs are not needed. In fact, these beliefs are the barriers for real change. Start with no belief, start with no metaphysics, start with no dogma. Start absolutely naked and nude, with no theology, no ideology. Start empty! That is the only way to come to the truth.

      Then Osho recounts the following joke:

      A traveling salesman opens the Gideon Bible in his motel room. On the front page he reads the inscription: “If you are sick, read Psalm 18; if you are troubled about your family, read Psalm 45; if you are lonely, read Psalm 92.”

      He is lonely, so he opens to Psalm 92 and reads it. When he is through, he notices on the bottom of the page the handwritten words: “If you are still lonely call 888-3468 and ask for Myrtle!”

      “If you look at the scriptures you will always find a footnote,” Osho observes; “it may not be written in visible ink, but it is there, and far more real than anything a scripture can offer. Buddha’s message is ‘Be a light unto yourself’: Appa deepo bhava.”

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      Each month Osho talks on the words of a different master, and each month we fall in love with the newcomer. Each month the newest arrival seems to speak more eloquently than the last, hitting the spot more powerfully than anyone else has. When he speaks on Jesus, Osho seems to fill that role perfectly. He becomes Jesus—and an even more plausible, authentic Jesus than I have ever heard portrayed. When he talks on Buddha, Osho is that astute, pragmatic master Buddha surely was. And when he speaks of Kabir, Osho is a god-filled, ecstatic poet. Through the years we hear, too, of Heraclitus and Madame Blavatsky, Pythagoras and Patanjali, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Nanak, Gorakh; Kahlil Gibran and Friedreich Nietzsche, Atisha and the Zen masters,