The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty Talks on Kabir

And now he started to understand why: "This is his teaching. This is how he is teaching meditation!" Now it dawned in his consciousness. He was immensely grateful.

The day the Master came from the back and, just before he was going to hit him, the young man jumped, dodged, and the stick of the Master fell on the ground, the young man was immensely happy. Something new had happened in his being. And the Master blessed him.

But from that day, things became even more difficult... the Master started hitting him while he was asleep. Now, this was too much. In the night, any time...! And the Master was very old; naturally, he could not sleep much, so whenever he felt awake he would go and hit the young man. But now the young man knew: "I may not understand the process of it, but the Master's hitting in the day has been of such immense benediction, has been such a transformation, that I accept this too -- without any question." He didn't ask, "This is absurd, this is ridiculous. It is okay that you hit me in the day -- I can at least protect myself, run away, escape, dodge -- but what can I do when I am asleep?" He didn't say it.

And the Master said, "This is a good sign. For the first time you are learning trust -- you have not asked the question."

And after two, three months of being hit in the night, the whole day the body would ache. In the day he was able now to protect himself... but one day in the night it happened!

The Master entered the room and he opened his eyes. He said, "Wait! I am awake."
And it happened more and more. It became impossible to hit him. Immediately the Master entered into the room he would open his eyes -- as if he was not asleep at all. That was not so: he was fast asleep, but a part of his being was released from the metaphysical sleep, the tip of the iceberg, just a small part, but it went on like a lit candle inside -- watching, waiting.

The Master was very happy. The next day in the morning, the Master was sitting underneath a tree reading some old sutras, some old scripture. Suddenly -- the young man was sweeping the garden -- an idea arose in him: "This old man has been hitting me for almost one year, day in, day out -- how will it be if I try once to hit him? It will be worth seeing how HE reacts."

And the Master closed his sutras and said, "You stupid! I am an old man! Don't have such ideas."
Yes, the ultimate state of awareness where even the footprints, the step sounds of the thoughts are heard.

Mrs. Ward, you are in such a hurry you cannot relax. Meditation is not a hit or miss affair. It needs tremendous waiting; it needs love, trust. It needs a very unhurried approach. In fact, it needs a mind which is not goal-oriented at all. But if you are in a hurry, it will be impossible.

That's what sannyas is all about. Falling in love with a Master, for NO reason at all just for the sheer joy of falling in love with someone who has disappeared, who is no more, who has become a great nothing. Who has become a silence... of course, that silence is full of songs, and that silence is music, celestial music. That silence is not negatively empty. It is empty of noise but full of melodies. It is empty of thoughts but full of awareness. It is empty of darkness and death but full of light and life.

Unless one falls in love, the process of understanding cannot be triggered. You CAN be here, you can listen to me -- only words will reach you. Those words will become part of your memory; they will make you more knowledgeable. But to be knowledgeable is utterly futile; it doesn't help. To know about God is not to know God, because the word 'God' is not God. To know about love is not to know love, because the word 'love' is not love.

You will have to move into an experiential space. For that, waiting is needed, a relaxed, non-goal-oriented attitude is needed -- otherwise you will not understand a thing. You will only MISunderstand. The head only knows how to misunderstand. It is only the heart which knows how to understand. Love is the only way to know. Logic is a pretend: it only pretends that it knows; it befools you, it deceives you. It is only love that opens the eyes of knowing.

But see: the head goes on condemning love. The head says, "Love is blind." Only love has eyes! Without love, everything is blind. But the head condemns the heart, and the head is really very skillful in creating counterfeit phenomena. Instead of understanding, it spins and weaves knowledgeability. And knowledgeability is a false coin -- it is not understanding. Understanding means you have tasted, lived, loved, been, in a totally different space; you have visited the innermost core of your being.

Knowledge simply means you have heard somebody talk about it. Knowledge only goes on adding to your memory but not to your being. Understanding helps your being to grow, to mature.

If you are here to understand, then forget about going so quickly. Just see: so many people here had come only for a few days... then a few years have passed! And I am happy about my people -- they don't even count, and they don't go on asking me "How long is it going to take?" Now they know that it is not a question of 'how long?' It can happen any moment... it is only a question of your own openness, your own intensity, your own passionate desire to know, your own love.

It is unpredictable. It is not a commodity. Had it been a thing, Mrs. Ward, I would have given it to you very joyously. I am helpless -- I cannot give it to you. I am creating the space in which it can happen, but it happens indirectly. Understanding is not direct; it is very indirect. If you approach understanding directly, it is very shy, it escapes, it is very elusive.

You have to be very very alert, watchful, when you start moving towards understanding -- in indirect ways. ALL that is great in life happens only indirectly -- it may be understanding, or happiness, poetry, painting, sculpture; it may be art, it may even be a discovery of science -- all that is great happens indirectly.

Now it is a well-known fact that scientists go on struggling to understand something, and they fail again and again and again, and one day suddenly, when they are not struggling at all -- maybe smoking a cigar, or just resting in their bathtub. or digging in the garden -- suddenly it pops up! And they have been struggling so long and it was not coming.

There is a certain secret in it.

When you are too intent, too direct, you are aggressive, and life reveals its secrets only to people who are non-aggressive. When you are too intent, too aggressive, too violent, and you are trying to conquer some secret of life, you become very narrow. Your consciousness closes; you are no longer wide, open. And truth is so big that it cannot enter into a narrow consciousness.

When you are relaxed, the narrowness disappears, you are open from all sides -- maybe just playing with soap-bubbles in your bathtub.... That's exactly what Albert Einstein used to do: all his great discoveries happened while he was playing with soap-bubbles in his bathtub. You will be surprised to know that for hours together he would remain in his bathtub playing with soap-bubbles. His wife was very embarrassed to tell it to other people.

One of my friends went to see him and he had to wait for six hours -- because he wouldn't come out of the bathroom. And finally the wife had to tell him the truth: "He cannot be disturbed -- never when he is in the bathroom. He can be disturbed when he is in his lab, but not when he is in his bathroom -- because he becomes so utterly relaxed that all the great insights happen to him there. So nothing can be done. He may be playing with soap-bubbles, but playing with soap-bubbles he has come to know about stars, faraway, faraway stars." Playing with soap-bubbles, even stars, which are so far away that their light has not reached yet since the earth came into existence...! For millions of years the earth has been in existence; their light has not reached the earth yet. And light travels with terrific speed; greater speed is inconceivable.

Light travels one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second.... When the earth came into existence, since that day the light has been travelling from those stars; it has not reached yet. Einstein became aware of THOSE stars. Playing with soap-bubbles?! Became aware of the greatest discovery of this age, the theory of relativity, in his bath-tub.

This is simply to say that life is ready to reveal itself when you are non-aggressive, when you are like a child playing with reality. All that is great happens in fun, in playfulness.

Mrs. Ward, you are too much intent. You say:
I AM ONLY HERE ON A VERY SHORT VISIT. I HAVE COME TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU HAVE HERE THAT THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES NOT.

WHAT I HAVE HERE IS EVERYWHERE, but maybe you cannot see it somewhere else. You need a certain space in which you can relax -- that space is nowhere else. Religion is very serious all over the world; religion here with me is a non-serious phenomenon. Elsewhere life is taken as a great problem, a theological problem. HERE it is thought to be a beautiful joke! Prayer is thought to be very sacred in other places. Here, just to be celebrating, ANYTHING... the whole question is just to be celebrating. If you are eating your food with celebration, it is prayer; if you are taking your bath with celebration, it is prayer. If you have joy in the heart, it is prayer. Prayer is not a ritual here; you need not repeat certain words, you need not move through certain gestures. Prayer is a quality here, not an activity -- a flavour, a subtle dance of your inner energy.

Listening to the birds... and it is prayer! Seeing the trees, all their green and all their red and all their gold, is prayer. A bird on the wing, and you simply watching with great joy, with a certain relatedness to the bird, a certain affinity, empathy -- as if you are on the wing -- it is prayer.

Prayer is not something special here: it is the day-to-day ordinary life, with a new quality -- the quality of joy added to it, the quality of surrender and offering added to it. Any act offered to God is sacred. And if you can offer all your acts to God, everything is sacred.

There are thousands of churches and temples in the world; there are thousands of teachers, great teachers, very learned teachers.... I am not a learned man and I am not a teacher, because I have no teaching to impart. I am just a silent stillness; I am just love in my heart, a playfulness. If you can be here, without any idea of when you are leaving, if you can just be here, and you can imbibe the spirit of this Buddhafield, this energy-field, something is possible -- something impossible is possible, which may not be possible anywhere else. Because as far as I know, there exists no Buddhafield in the world right now except this.

Christians are there and Hindus are there and Mohammedans are there and Jainas and Buddhists -- there are three hundred religious on the earth, but all are hangovers of the past. Their Masters are long dead; they are traditions not religions, conventions not religions, conformities not revolutions.

Here it is not a tradition that I am making available to you. It has nothing to do with the past. It is a new beginning, and it is very fortunate to be at the beginning of something, to be at the very source of something.

The people who walked with Jesus were immensely fortunate -- they were at the very source, at the purest source. The people who walked with Buddha and lived with Buddha were immensely blessed, but now to be Buddhist is just meaningless. Twenty-five centuries have passed, and in these twenty-five centuries Buddhism has been corrupted so much that now it is almost impossible to sort out what Buddha said and what has been added to it and what has been deleted from it. It is almost impossible to say what has come from Buddha and what these twenty-five centuries have gathered around it.

It is like a snow-ball rolling: more and more snow goes on collecting around it; the original face is lost. You will even be surprised that the Buddhist statues have nothing to do with the real face of Buddha. The Buddhist statues have something more to do with the face of Alexander the Great -- because with Alexander the Great Indians became aware for the first time of the Greek beauty, and particularly of the Greek male beauty.

Greeks were not interested in female beauty at all, remember, their whole idea was of male beauty. If you look at ancient statues that the Greek culture left, you will not find statues of women -- you will find statues of men, statues of nude men. They were tremendously in love with male beauty, the male body. The female body was not thought to be beautiful in Greece.

They created beautiful statues of nude male bodies. Those statues and those Greeks who came to India with Alexander the Great, they gave the idea of how the Buddha's face should be made. Buddha's statues are not in ANY correspondence with his real face -- they are Greek in origin. And everything like that has been changed.

The day Buddha died, the monks started quarrelling -- about each and everything. Thirty-six schools immediately arose, thirty-six sects. One man they all have loved, one man they all have heard -- but they have heard according to their minds. And when a man like Buddha is there, he releases great power; and there are power-hungry people who immediately jump on it, exploit it. These power-hungry people are really politicians.

St. Paul who created Christianity is a politician. Christianity has nothing to do with Christ, and Buddhism has nothing to do with Buddha. Buddhism was created by King Ashoka, the great Emperor. He spread Buddhism all over Asia. It was he... and I don't think that he was a man of any great understanding or enlightenment; politicians never are. It became a new power trip. Somebody can spread his worldly riches more and more and more, somebody can spread his empire of political domination, somebody else can spread his religious empire -- but it is all the same! The desire is to dominate more and more people. Politicians are not very intelligent people.

Those thirty-six people who started quarrelling must have been politicians.

And this is something that is always going to happen; it is something in the nature of things -- it cannot be avoided. Those who were really in tune with Buddha remained silent. The shock was such -- Buddha's leaving the body -- that they were shattered, they were crying and weeping. They were missing their Master; their hearts were no more in their right places. They were not interested at all in creating schisms, sects, divisions, politics. But there were idiots, and they are always around -- seek one and you will find a thousand and one; they are always around. And when one idiot goes, another idiot takes his place, immediately.

Just now... the other day I was reading: in Uganda, Idi Amin is gone; he was known as 'Idiot Amin'. Now do you know who has succeeded him? -- a man called Lulu. One idiot goes, another lulu comes! It is a very strange world. You cannot get rid of idiots and lulus.

Once the Master is gone, the politicians are there immediately ready to grab the power. And politics remains as long as ego remains; politics is the shadow of the ego.

So you can go to a Christian church or a Hindu temple, and you will go empty-handed and you will come back empty-handed. Unless you can find an alive Buddhafield, pulsating, streaming with life... and this is what is happening here.

Something is possible. I cannot promise you that I can give it to you; I can only say that the space is here, and the space is becoming richer and richer every day, more and more dimensional every day. If you are ready to dive deep into the world that we are creating here -- it is an invisible world -- something of great value is possible.
You ask me: CAN YOU HELP ME?

That's what I am here for. That is not the real question.... Can you take my help? -- that is the real question. Are you ready to take my help? Will you ALLOW me to help you? Won't you resist? Will you open your heart for me to come in? And my coming in your heart is a great surgery. It is pain in the beginning, agony on the way, ecstasy only in the end.

OSHO, WHY DO ALL THE BUDDHAS SAY THE SAME THING?

TRUTH IS ONE. Even if it is said differently, it is the same truth. Languages may differ, metaphors may differ parables may differ, but if you really look a little deep, then al parables, all languages, all metaphors, culminate in one truth. TRUTH is one -- what can Buddhas do? Although each Buddha speaks in his own way, and his expression has HIS signature on it. His expression is just his and nobody else's. But still those who can see will always find that it is the same diamond -- maybe we have been shown only one aspect of it by Krishna, another aspect by Christ, still another by Mohammed, but those are aspects of the same diamond.

The diamond is one, this universe is one -- and all the Buddhas have been saying the same thing, in different languages, in different ways. Those differences come from their individualities, not from their experience. The moment of experience is wordless, the moment of experience is thoughtless. So when Buddha experienced it, it was the same purity of consciousness as when Jesus experienced it.

Two purities cannot be different; two impurities can be different. Two healths cannot be different; two diseases can be different. Two silences cannot be different; two noises can be different. The truth is known in silence, but you cannot utter It in silence -- you have to use words, language, noise. And immediately... when Buddha speaks, he speaks in Pali; that is the language that he knows, that is his mother tongue.

And Jesus speaks in Aramaic; that is his mother tongue. If Jesus and Buddha had met, they would not have understood each other's language at all, but they would have looked into each other's eyes and would have understood each other TOTALLY!

A Sufi story:

"Those donkeys," retorts the Mulla, "they are searching for the note, but I have found it!"

If you go to a Sufi saint, he will be very polite to you, he may even touch your feet -- because the Sufis respect God in all forms. That is their device. When a Sufi Master touches your feet... just think of that moment, contemplate over the moment -- a Bahauddin, or a Jalaluddin, or a Farid -- great Masters! diamonds of the purest water. A Bahauddin touching your feet, it is a device. In that moment when Bahauddin touches your feet, you are BOUND to fall silent, howsoever noisy your mind. Bahauddin touching your feet!? A great silence will descend on you. Bahauddin is giving you a taste of his meditation in this way; this is his device.

And a Zen Master is just the opposite: you go to him, you have to bow down seven times. And you ask some innocent question... and he jumps on you, hits you on the head -- so unexpectedly. A very different device, but just think: a Bodhidharma, a Rinzai, a Bokoju, jumping on you, hitting on your head! For a moment all thinking stops... so unexpected. And you had asked a simple question: "Is there a God?" and he became furious. And you cannot figure it out -- why? And he gives you no time to figure it out; he gives you no time to escape either.
It happened once that when Bokoju met his Master and asked something about Buddha, the Master took him physically and threw him out of the window... from a three-storey building. The poor fellow fell down on a rock, smashed, and the Master was looking from the window and he asked, "Do you understand now?" And the whole ridiculousness of it! And the silence of the garden. And the silence of the accident. The shock. And the Master's smiling face, and those compassionate eyes, and his asking, "Now do you understand?"

And in that moment, Bokoju became enlightened. He said, "Yes, yes, Master. Can I come in and touch your feet in gratitude?"

"You are welcome," the Master said, "to have a cup of tea with me."

And they are sipping tea together.

Gurdjieff used to say that mind is very slow in action, and he is right. The body is far quicker. Mind is very lethargic; it goes on round and round in circles. So whenever there is some urgency, then your existence does not allow your mind to go round and round through logical processes to come to a conclusion, because then it will be too late. By the time you have decided.... For example, if a snake is passing by and you give it to the mind, then there is trouble. First the mind will say, "Ninety-seven percent of snakes are non-poisonous, so there are only three chances out of a hundred that this snake is poisonous. A hundred persons who are bitten by snakes, they don't all die; only five percent die, ninety-five percent are saved. And those five persons who die, maybe they were going to die anyway. So what is the hurry? Why bother? And one has to die one day."

And great philosophical ideas about death and the immortality of the soul.... And snakes don't care about these things! They are absolutely non-philosophical; they won't give you that much time. The snake may strike you before you have come to any conclusion.

Gurdjieff is right: he says whenever there is any urgency, the body immediately takes over from the mind; it does not give mind any chance to do -- it does it on its own. The body has its own wisdom: it jumps out of the way. It is almost an in-built response, so no thinking is needed.

That's what Zen people have been doing with their disciples.
One Zen Master had this habit that whenever he would talk of God, of Buddha, of the higher dimensions of life, he would raise one of his fingers towards the sky. It became so characteristic of him that one of his small sannyasins, a young boy -- must have been of the age of Siddhartha -- became very much interested in this one finger pointing upwards. And he was always in attendance just to do something for the Master -- if he needs some tea, to run and bring the tea, or just to be by his side and to help him to get rid of the mosquitoes.

He learnt the trick, and playfully, whenever the Master was not looking at him, he would show one finger to the audience. The Master knew -- people would laugh, or smile and he would know who was doing the whole trick.

One day -- and this can be done only by a Zen Master -- he simply caught hold of the child when he was making the gesture of one finger pointing to heaven, and cut the finger with a sharp knife. Now, just think of doing such a thing to poor Siddhartha....