The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty Talks on Kabir

Any schoolchild can say, "This is nonsense! Stars are not so small, and trees -- who has seen such big trees? reaching above the stars?" But Vincent van Gogh used to say, "Whenever I see a tree, this is my feeling: that the earth is trying to reach the stars, to transcend the stars, through the trees. These are the hands of the earth reaching for the unknown, for the transcendental. And I love my earth, hence my stars are small and my trees are big. I am PART of this earth, I am also a hand of my earth. To me stars are small."

This is not a question of astronomy, physics, mathematics: it is a totally different vision. Trees are seen as ambitions of the earth, love affairs of the earth with the sky. But who is going to appreciate him?

In one of his paintings the sun is painted black. Now who has ever seen a black sun? But he used to say that the sun that shines outside IS black compared to the sun that is inside. It is a comparison. Kabir will agree; Kabir says, "When I saw the inner sun, then I knew that the outer sun is just a black hole. When I saw my inner life, then I knew that the outer life is nothing but another name for death."

The moment the inner is known, suddenly the outer starts fading away. Now, van Gogh is talking in d mystic way -- he is a mystic -- but who will understand? It will take years for people to understand. Van Gogh lived and died unappreciated, unknown. He remained absolutely unknown.

You will be surprised to know: now each of his paintings is so valuable that no other painting can compete. Even Picasso's paintings are not so valuable -- millions of dollars for a single painting. In his own day, in his whole life, he could not sell a single painting. He had to distribute his paintings to friends or to the man who used to give him a cup of tea in the morning free of charge. Those same paintings now cost millions of dollars. People had discarded them; people accepted them out of politeness, because as far as they were concerned it was all junk -- so why collect it?

Vincent van Gogh committed suicide when he was only thirty-three. It was impossible to live; he could not earn a single pie. His brother used to give him enough money, just enough, to exist, to survive. But he needed money to paint -- for the canvas and the colours and the brushes. So this was his arrangement: out of seven days... he used to get money every Sunday for one week. Every week, for three days he would eat and for four days he would fast, so that money could be saved to purchase canvases, colours, and other things that he needed.

To me, van Gogh's fasting is far more significant than all the fasts that have been done by your so-called saints. THIS fasting has something beautiful in it, something spiritual in it. When your so-called saints go on a fast, it is a means; they are fasting so that they can reach heaven and enjoy all the heavenly joys. But van Gogh's fasting has a totally different quality to it: his love to create.

And why did he commit suicide? He committed suicide... that too has a tremendous significance. It is no ordinary suicide. In fact, a man like van Gogh cannot do anything in an ordinary way. He committed suicide because he said, "Whatsoever I wanted to paint, I have painted. Now, just to exist is pointless. I have given that which I came to give; now I can go back to the original source. There is no need to live in the body any more. I have contributed."

Years and years passed, then slowly slowly he was appreciated. Now he is thought to be one of the greatest painters in the world.

And this has been so with all the geniuses: in their own time they are condemned -- condemned by the masses, condemned by the crowd, condemned by the priests, condemned by the politicians. They are appreciated by only very few people -- sensitive, receptive, intelligent -- only by very few people who have the capacity to see something that is new, unknown, that has never happened before; only by very few people who can put their minds aside and look.

I would like you to be creative, but don't be bothered about appreciation, don't be bothered that you will be gaining fame, name through it. Whenever the motive is to gain something out of creativity, you are no more interested in it. You become a technician; you are no more an artist. You may do the painting, and you may do it perfectly, technically perfectly, but it will not have the soul, it will not be alive, because you will not be there. You will be looking all around for the appreciators to come. And you will always paint accordingly, so that they can appreciate.

There are people who say only that which people want to hear. These people will be very famous, known, appreciated, respected, but they are mediocre people. The genius speaks that which arises in his heart; he does not care a bit whether anybody is going to like it or not. He says it straight, he says it direct -- he never thinks of the results and the consequences.

Be creative in that sense and your creativity will become an offering to God. God has given you so many gifts, Garima; something HAS to be done just in deep thankfulness. But remember: with no motive, not as a means but as an end unto itself. Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake, and prayer for prayer's sake.

And that's how one, slowly slowly, becomes religious. The religious person lives in the moment; he has no worry about the future, not even about the next moment. When it comes, it will come. He does not prepare for it. He lives this moment, and out of this moment the next will be born. And if this moment has been beautiful, if this moment has been a benediction, the next is going to be, of course, a deeper benediction, a greater blessing.
Garima, you say: I HAVE THIS FEELING THAT I NEED TO DO TO BE WORTHY...

THE NEED TO DO CAN BE A GUT-FEELING, because we have too much energy and the energy wants to dance, the energy wants to paint, the energy wants to sing, the energy wants to DO something. But this can't be a gut-feeling: I NEED TO DO TO BE WORTHY. That is a feeling that has been put inside you -- like scientists put electrodes in the brain and then a person can be manipulated.

Just like that the society has been going on down the ages -- it creates a conscience in you: "Do this, this is right, approved, respected. Don't do that; that is unworthy of you. You will be condemned if you do it." And a kind of division is created within you between right and wrong, between the 'should' and the 'should-not'.

And the problem is that no 'should' can ever be a fixed phenomenon; it changes with life. No right is always right, and no wrong is always wrong, so to decide beforehand is dangerous. I don't teach you conscience; conscience means right and wrong are like things, decided: this is a rose and that is a lotus, and this is a stone and that is a diamond -- decided. Decided for ever! Right and wrong are not things. They change. Life is a riverlike phenomenon. What is right today may not be right tomorrow.

The disciple bowed down, remained silent. The Master blessed him and said, "This is good. I am happy."

Next day, again, the Master asked the disciple, "What is God?"

And of course now he had learnt, so he bowed down, an even deeper bow, remained quiet, even closed his eyes, and the Master hit him hard on the head and said, "You stupid!" The disciple was puzzled. He said, "But what has happened? Yesterday you were so happy, and the answer is the same -- even better than yesterday!"

And the Master said, "That is where you went wrong: yesterday was yesterday, today is today. Now you are simply repeating a ready-made formula. Now you are not being true, not being spontaneous, not being responsible. Now you have learnt a trick. How can the same answer be right today? Twenty-four hours have passed, so much water has gone down the Ganges!"

Existence is dynamic, it is not static -- it is not a stagnant pool. It is a constant continuum, flow. No answer can ever be fixed -- and that's where the society deceives you: it gives you fixed answers. with fixed answers one thing is good -- that's why we cling to them -- they give you a sort of certainty, security, safety. You can remain certain that you are right.

But life goes on changing, And your 'right' remains fixed. And then your whole life becomes a misery, because your answers never fit the questions. Then your whole life is an effort to put square plugs into round holes -- your whole life you go on trying. And it is very frustrating. And the reason is: you never see that life is changing.

And the really conscious person changes with life. The really conscious person cannot afford to be consistent. Consistency is part of a mediocre mind. I am not saying be deliberately inconsistent; I am simply stating a fact, that to be consistent means to be stupid, to be consistent means to remain with the past, blind to the present. If you look at the present you have to change with life.

Hence you will find a thousand and one contradictions in Jesus' statements, and so is the case with Gautam Buddha. And that has always been the case with the enlightened people, because they don't have any ready-made answer. You hanker for the ready-made answer so you can jump upon it, you can hold it tight in your hand and you can be certain.

You suffer from uncertainty -- and uncertainty is the nature of life. Certainty is part of death. Be certain and you will be dead. Remain flowing, remain uncertain, remain available to the changing circumstances, and you will remain more and more alive.

To be totally alive means to live in the moment with no past interfering at all -- then you respond to the moment and the response comes from your consciousness not from your conscience. Conscience is a deception; conscience is a social trick. The society has created the conscience. And the function of the Master is to destroy your conscience so that your consciousness can be freed.

Your gut-feeling is not a gut-feeling. You have been deceived. There is no need to do anything to be worthy -- you are already worthy. If you were not worthy, you would not be here at all. God has given you birth, has created you -- must have seen some worth in you. If you are unworthy, then God is not a very original creator, then he is not much of a creator either. How can he create an unworthy person?

Society makes you unworthy, because that is the only way to exploit you -- to make you feel unworthy. Then you will try hard to become worthy because that is the only way to gain self-respect. And to become worthy you will follow the dictates of the society.

Society creates fear in you -- fear of being unworthy, fear of being condemned, fear of being left alone, fear of being nobody, fear of being anonymous. And then you are ready to yield, to bow down, to any kind of nonsense.

"What happened?" they asked him.

"Well," he replied. "When I saw that poor guy nailed to the cross everywhere I looked, I knew they meant business!"
Create fear... create as much fear as you can. That has been the policy of the society. Hells have been created just to catch hold of you; heavens have been created just to reward those who will follow the dictates. All are imaginary: there is no hell, no heaven. But these rewards and punishments are subtle strategies, and they have worked up to now, and they have destroyed all human dignity.

This is not a gut-feeling in you. Your gut-feeling and the conscience created by the society have got mixed up. The gut-feeling is to DO something -- yes, that is a gut-feeling. When energy is there, one wants to do something; that is natural. Energy wants to be expressed. But WITH the motive to be worthy, that is a conscience part which is getting mixed with your gut-feeling. Be clear about it!

You have been messed around by the society in every possible way. You have been confused so much that you have to depend on somebody. Either you go to the priest -- in the old days you used to go to the priest. In India they still go to the priest. In the West the new priest has arisen: the psychotherapist, the psychiatrist, the psychologist -- go to him.

And the miracle is that the priest is just like you, maybe even more in a mess than you are, but still you go to him to find good advice. Yes, he repeats good advice like a parrot. Your psychotherapist, your psychiatrist, your psychoanalyst, may be in deeper anxiety, in more tensions than you are.

Just the other night one of my sannyasins was asking me, "Osho, you had told me last time when I came here, 'Look for the lighter side of life, count the roses, ignore the thorns. They are there, take note of them, but don't pay too much attention to them.' But my psychoanalyst has said, 'This is dangerous, this is going to repress your emotions.' So I am puzzled -- what to do?"

I told him, "You just wait a few days, your psychoanalyst will be here...!" But I was not aware that this sannyasin himself is a psychoanalyst. Just later on Vivek told me that he himself is a psychoanalyst. Now, one psychoanalyst going to another psychoanalyst -- for what? And that one may be going to somebody else.

One of his friends gave him the idea that just as each woman has a twenty-eight-day period when her menstruation comes, exactly like that each man has a twenty-three-day period. There is some truth in it -- not twenty-three days, exactly twenty-eight days. Now much more research has been done on it.

Those four, five days when a woman goes through the period are sad, depressive, dull, negative -- exactly like that man also goes into a negative state each month for four, five days. Of course, his period is not very visible, but it is there; it is a psychological fact. It should be there, because men and women are not very different.

So the friend's idea was on the right track. Sigmund Freud suddenly got one idea -- lying down in his bed, he was thinking about twenty-eight and twenty-three -- suddenly an idea flashed in his mind: twenty-eight plus twenty-three means fifty-one, and he could not sleep the whole night. He became certain by the morning that he was going to live fifty-one years -- a very great gut-feeling. And he started talking about it twenty-eight plus twenty-three -- fifty-one years and he will die.

And the fifty-first year came and passed... and he did not die. Then something else had to be found. The day he was expecting to die, his phone number was changed and the end of the phone number was sixty-two. So he said, "Look, another indication: so now I am going to die at sixty-two." But that day also came and was passing.

But the people like Sigmund Freud are not easy... they will find something or other. He was staying in a hotel and the number of the room was eighty-two, so he said, "Look, another indication from above -- at eighty-two I am going to die -- that is absolutely certain."

And that day also passed. He died when he was eighty-three.

Such superstitious people... he was so afraid of death, that's why he was so much concerned about it. He was so afraid of death that five times in his life he fainted publicly because somebody started talking about death. He used to faint flat on the ground. Just the IDEA of death! And such a pathological, neurotic person became the founder of psychoanalysis.

And he used to project himself: whatsoever was true for him he thought was true for every human being. That is the very limit of nonsense. All that he has said about man is not about man -- it is about Sigmund Freud. And Sigmund Freud is a single individual; he does not represent man. Nobody represents man! Nobody can ever represent man.

So maybe a few people are helped by psychoanalysis, very few people -- rarely have I seen a person who has been helped by psychoanalysis -- but those are the people who are of the same type as Sigmund Freud.

And now much research has happened and it has been found that even those people who are helped are not helped by psychoanalysis but by something else. In one experiment, twenty-five persons were given psychoanalysis for six months, and twenty-five persons were just kept waiting and were told, "Soon your psychoanalysis will start." They were all suffering from the same kind of illness, and the result was very surprising.

The twenty-five who were given psychoanalysis were helped a little bit, but the twenty-five who were kept waiting were helped far more. Just waiting helped them far more. In fact, this secret has been known in the East, it has been practised for centuries. If you take a mental case into a Zen monastery, they put him in isolation for three weeks; nobody talks to him -- just the opposite of psychoanalysis -- nobody talks to him, nobody listens to him. They just keep him isolated; somebody goes, absolutely silently, and puts the food there, comes back. He has to live with himself for three weeks... and miracles have been happening down the ages.

Just putting him there for three weeks in isolation, slowly slowly he cools down -- no psychoanalysis, no therapy, just isolation. In fact, he was suffering too much from people -- the stress of being in a crowd continuously.

Psychoanalysis may not be the real cause of help, but the length of time -- two years, three years, four years, the psychoanalysis continues. It continues as long as you can afford it; it depends on you. If you have enough money, it can continue your whole life. In fact, psychoanalysis never comes to a termination. It cannot come, because the mind is very inventive. It goes on inventing more and more rubbish. It starts enjoying, slowly slowly, because the more rubbish it brings up, the more happy the psychotherapist feels. Seeing him happy, it obliges more.

Whatsoever the expectations of the psychotherapist are, the patient fulfills them. Patients are really patient people, very obliging, courteous. Good people they are! That's why they are suffering; they are not hard people -- not hardware but software. Because they are soft they are suffering. The hard guys are not suffering; the hard guys make others suffer. The soft guys become victims. Three, four years Lying down on the couch, talking nonsense, waiting, waiting, waiting -- it helps one to unwind, one becomes a little more relaxed. And somebody is listening to you very attentively, at least pretending that he is listening very attentively.

My own observation is that the attention of the psychotherapist is of immense value. This is a world where nobody gives you any attention. If the husband wants to talk to the wife she says, "There is so much work to be done in the kitchen -- and the dishes have to be washed and I have no time." If the wife wants to talk to the husband, he is tired from the whole day at the office and the work and the traffic, and he wants to watch the TV.

A survey says that the average husband/wife communication in America is only thirty-three minutes per day -- and that is the average. And in that thirty-three minutes you can count fighting, nagging, pillow-throwing, and every kind of thing. Thirty-three minutes only between husband and wife -- out of twenty-four hours?

A great need has arisen that somebody should listen to you. Hence the psychotherapist helps -- he is a professional listener. That is the only quality that he has, the only qualification really. You can start the business -- no other qualification is needed -- if you know only one thing: how to be attentively sitting there by the side and listening. Just listening attentively will help. The person starts feeling, "I have some worth. Somebody..." And the more he has paid, the more it helps because the person who is listening is no ordinary psychotherapist, not run-of-the-mill."... Somebody special, very famous, world-known -- and listening so attentively to me?" The very idea gives worth, "Then I must be saying something immensely beautiful."

Gibberish he may be bringing up. That's what in psycho-babble is called 'free association' -- anything that comes to your mind, bring it up. If such gibberish is being listened to so attentively, a great need is fulfilled -- he feels worthy, he feels important, he feels somebody.

Remember, this society has messed you up so much that man as such is almost on the verge of going insane. All love has disappeared, all communication has disappeared, all friendship has disappeared, all aesthetic sensitivity has disappeared. People have become like zombies. They talk to each other yet they don't talk, they don't meet.

This society is an ill society, and when I say 'this society' I mean all the societies that exist in the world, more or less, in this way or that, they are ill -- because in the past, for centuries, we have been creating a model of man which is wrong. We are giving people ideals and saying "Unless you fulfill THESE ideals you will never be worthy." And those ideals are impossible. We are giving people ideas of being perfect. and once the idea of being perfect enters in one's being, it turns one into a neurotic.

Accept your limitations, accept your imperfections. That's what it means to be a human being! And accept yourself as you are -- with joy, not in helplessness. Because GOD accepts you -- this is my basic teaching -- God accepts you, accept yourself; love yourself. Let there be a great upsurge of self-love. And out of that love you will start becoming creative; a person who loves himself is bound to become creative. I am not saying he will become famous; I am not saying that he will be a Picasso or an Ezra Pound or a Pablo Neruda, no -- he may be, he may not be. But that is irrelevant! The real thing is to enjoy creativity. Whatsoever you do, do it with joy, bring your total intelligence to it, be meditative in it.

THAT KIND OF GOD YOU WILL NEVER FIND WITHIN YOU. You will have to drop all the concepts that have been given to you from the outside, because God is not a person. No picture of God exists, no statue is possible. God is an experience! If you have the idea of a God which your parents and your society have given to you, you will go inside with that idea and that idea will be the hindrance -- it will not allow you to see that which is. And God IS that which is. It needs no concepts to see; concepts blind you. Drop all concepts.

If you really want to go in, go as an agnostic. This word is beautiful. You must have heard the word 'gnostic'; 'gnostic' means one who knows -- gnosis means knowledge. 'Agnostic' means one who knows not; 'agnostic' means one who knows only one thing, that he knows not. Be an agnostic -- that is the beginning of real religion.

Don't believe, don't disbelieve. Don't be a Hindu, and don't be a Jaina and don't be a Christian, otherwise you will go on groping in darkness for ever and for ever. Unless you drop all ideologies, all philosophies, all religions, all systems of thought, and go inside empty, with nothing in your hand, with no idea.... How can you have an idea of God? You have not known him. Just go... with a great desire to know, but with no idea of knowledge with intensity to know, with a passionate love to know what is there, but don't carry any ideas given to you by others. Drop them outside. That is the greatest barrier for the seeker on the path of truth.