The Perfect Master, Vol 1 Talks on Sufi Stories

The God means the whole. Where are you going to put the God? In the external reality or in the internal? When you love, your beloved becomes part of your internal reality. Is he or she external to you? Are you external to him or her? All those old categories start disappearing -- that's the beauty of love, because it makes you aware of the invisible unity of all.

with no distinctions,

BUT DOES NOT LORD IT OVER THEM.
That is another thing so nice about Tao, about the real God: it is not bossy! The moment your God becomes bossy, your ego has entered in your God, you have falsified God. That's how many Gods have become untrue Gods. Your mind has corrupted them. You have brought all your nonsense to the concept of God. You have poisoned the very concept.
THE TAO LOVES AND NOURISHES ALL THINGS,

BUT DOES NOT LORD IT OVER THEM.

In the moment of awakening to the real, one realizes, not that one SHOULD not rebel against Tao or God, but that one simply CANNOT.

You cannot be otherwise! Notwithstanding what you go on believing. You may think of yourself as an individual -- you are not, because you are not separate. Your thinking is just YOUR thinking. It is a private idea. It corresponds to no reality at all and, hence, it will create misery for you.

This idea of internal and external has created much misery for man, because then people start dropping the external. That's how the idea of renunciation arose: "Renounce the outer and be the inner!" But how can you do it?

There is an apple on the tree. It is external. If you eat it, it becomes internal: it will be your blood, your bones, your marrow. When does it become internal? How does the external become internal? And one day you will die, and all that was inside you will be again outside, back into the earth. It will nourish some apple tree, more apples will grow.

You breathe in and it becomes internal. Then you have to breathe out. WHERE does the breath become internal? Watch. That's what Buddha says: Watch your breathing -- and see where it becomes internal and where it becomes external again. Just watching your breath, all distinctions will disappear. You will see it is the same circle. The internal is the external, and the external is the internal.

The moment you see this in your breath circle, you have solved a great problem, a great dichotomy is dissolved. Then you are no more a body or a soul. Then you don't talk about these words. Then all these words are just childish -- maybe useful, but they have no reality, no truth. Just useful, utilitarian.
You ask me, Anurag: HOW DOES THE INTERNAL WORLD OF EXPERIENCE RELATE TO THE EXTERNAL REALITY?
It does not relate! because they are not two. They are one. It often becomes a great question. But the question is basically false, so all the answers that have been given. are false. Once you start by a wrong question, you will arrive again and again at wrong conclusions.

For at least five thousand years, man has been puzzled by one thing: the body/mind problem. How do they relate? First you divide... division is false. There is no body and no mind separate. It is body mind. It is one entity. The mind is only a way of looking at the body, and the body is also a way of looking at the mind. It is the SAME reality looked at from different angles. It is not two. But once you have thought that body AND mind are two, then the problem arises: How do they relate?

Just watch a small action: you think to raise your hand -- how do you do it? Such a simple phenomenon, raising your hand up -- how do you do it? Philosophers have been puzzled and have not been able to answer it, how it happens, because of this internal and external: they are the mind and the body is being raised -- how can the body follow the order from the mind?

Mind is invisible, immaterial; body is visible, material -- how can matter follow mind? What is the link? How is it translated into body language? How does it correspond? But to me, basically the problem is wrong: there are not two entities in you -- it is all one. Then the problem disappears.

You ask me how the internal relates with the external reality. There are not two realities. There is no question of internal and external. They don't relate. They are one. How do two lovers relate with one another? If they are lovers, they don't relate -- they are simply one. In love they know the unity. If they are not lovers, then they relate. Then relationship is not much. It is more conflict and less relating. It is more fight than being together.

If love has happened, in that moment it becomes absolutely clear that there is no division. Then they start functioning in a harmony. And not that the harmony has to be imposed from the outside. No, it comes of its own accord, with no effort, with no cultivation, with no conditioning. It simply happens. As trees grow upwards... just like that. As birds can fly... just like that. As flowers can bloom... just like that. It is natural.

The internal and the external are in absolute harmony. There is no division. But man has created the division and has created much anxiety about it. Drop the division, and go beyond anxiety.

Dropping dualities one becomes religious. Don't think yourself separate from the world. That's why Zen people say: The world is Nirvana. There is no other enlightenment.

That's why the other day I was talking about Zorba the Buddha. Zorba is extrovert, Buddha is introvert. Zorba has no idea who he is, Buddha has renounced the world, he only thinks about who he is. His whole consciousness moves inward. Zorba is interested in women and wine and dance and song; his whole energy moves outward.

To me, the Perfect Master will be one who has no divisions. He flows in all the directions -- internal, external -- because there is no problem at all. It is all one flow. To be in this one flow is to know God.

I HAVE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH A FRIEND'S WIFE WHO IS IN LOVE WITH MY WIFE -- IS IT NOT STRANGE?

And the partner was trembling: "Now there is going to be danger -- maybe some fight or something." And the man took him into the other room and closed the doors and said, "Tell me one thing: I HAVE to, but why you? What has happened to you? Have you gone crazy or something?"

Finally, out of their frustration, one of the men began walking towards the women to ask them to stop gossiping so much and to play golf, or to please get out of the men's way.

He got within a hundred feet of the women and all of a sudden stopped, turned around and ran back to his friend.

"You'd better go," he said. "One of them is my wife and the other is my mistress."

So the second man started walking towards the women. He got within a hundred and fifty feet of the ladies, and he too turned around and ran the other way. He got back to his friend and said, "Small world!"
The third question:
Question 3

JEWISH RELIGION, LIKE ZEN, IS BASED ONLY ON THE FORMLESS AND DOESN'T PERMIT THE WORSHIP OF FORMS. BUT EVER SINCE RYE BEEN IN INDIA THESE LAST EIGHT YEARS, I'VE MOVED AWAY FROM THIS IDEA AND HAVE FALLEN IN DEEP LOVE NOT ONLY WITH YOUR FORM, BUT ALSO WITH HINDU RELIGION, ITS MULTITUDE OF MYTHOLOGICAL FIGURES AND THE STORIES AROUND THEM -- RAM, KRISHNA, SHIVA, ETC. I LOVE KEEPING MY ROOM DECORATED WITH PICTURES OF YOUR FORM AND OF ALL THESE AS WELL, AND IMMERSING MYSELF IN THE FEELING OF BEING SURROUNDED BY AN INDIAN MYTHOLOGICAL WORLD OF GODS AND GODDESSES, THOUGH INTELLECTUALLY I KNOW THE ILLUSION OF IT.

If you talk about the formless God, what are you saying? What do you mean by 'formless God'? If you contemplate on the formlessness of God you will be surprised: either you have to drop the idea of God like Buddha, like Zen, or you have to create some form. Either the formlessness can remain and God has to go, or God can remain but then the formlessness has to go.

So remember it: Zen has no idea of God. Formlessness cannot be called God. The moment you call it by any name, you have given it a certain form; the formlessness is falsified, is destroyed. It is no more formless. About the formless God you can be only silent. You cannot even say THAT much -- that God is formless. That is profane! that is sacrilegious! You cannot define in any way: Not even are you allowed to say that God is indefinable because that becomes a definition. You have said something, you have ALREADY said something. And you are saying nothing can be said.

Buddha is very logical in that way. Zen is very clear. Judaism is not so clear. It is AGAINST creating forms of God, that is true -- but its being too much against simply shows it is obsessed with the idea of form. That's how Mohammedans are also obsessed, because they are an offshoot of Judaism.

Judaism is obsessed that there should be no statue of God in any temple. And Mohammedans have gone one step further: that if you find any statues, destroy them! free people of the forms of God! As if you can free anybody from the forms of God -- because forms exist in the mind, not in the temples. They are not in the statues but in the intellectual visualization of God.

Why should Judaism not permit the worship of forms? The very effort to deny forms shows that somehow you are still attached to the form. It is not formlessness! It may be an anti form attitude, but not formlessness.

Zen is really formlessness. And because of this, just as Prem says:
JEWISH RELIGION, LIKE ZEN, IS BASED ONLY ON THE FORMLESS AND DOES NOT PERMIT THE WORSHIP OF FORMS.
If God is formless, who are you to permit or not to permit? The very idea of permitting is destructive to freedom. Judaism has not given freedom to people. It is not just an accident that all the revolutionaries have come from the Jews. It is a rebellion. From Jesus to Freud, all the revolutionaries have come from the Jews. Why? No other religion has created so many revolution-aries -- no other religion is so restrictive.

If a religion is free, the revolutionary has nothing to do there. Hinduism has not created any revolutionaries. Buddhism has not created any revolutionaries. Why? Because the freedom is so total! What is the point?

If Jesus had been born in India, nobody would have thought about him that he was a revolutionary. People would have allowed, because there is no question -- who is there to allow or not to allow? It is everybody's own choice.

Because Jews have not been allowing forms, Jesus was born. And Jesus became the form of God for Christians, for millions of people. And then it has been happening again and again.

Marx comes out of Jews, and Albert Einstein, and Sigmund Freud. Why? The religion is very restrictive. It does not have the flavor of Zen.

And when I am talking about Jews, I leave aside the Hassid Masters. They HAVE the flavor of Zen. But Jews don't accept them either. They are thought to be rebellious. And whenever a religion becomes too much interested in permitting and not permitting, it becomes ritualistic, dull, dead. It becomes formal.

Just see the point: Jews talk about the formlessness of God and their whole religion has become absolutely formal! Just ritualistic. Nothing of the interior, nothing of the heart. Just a social formality.

I have heard:

After the couple went upstairs the clerk examined the license more carefully and rushed up after them. He banged on the door shouting, "If you ain't done it, don't do it! This a isn't the license fer it!"

Now, Prem says she has moved away from this idea. You may have moved, but you have moved in the opposite direction. Now she is surrounded by all kinds of gods and goddesses: Ram and Krishna, Shiva.... In India you have millions of gods. They say there are more gods than people in India.

I have known people whose whole day is lost into worship ping. I used to stay with a man. He had at least three hundred statues in his small temple, his own temple. Three hundred statues of all kinds of gods and goddesses. And from four o'clock early in the mowing he would start worship ping -- you have to take care of three hundred gods. Half the day was wasted in it. And he was in such a hurry he could not worship even one, because he knew, "Now there are still two hundred and ninety-nine waiting," and he had to rush to everybody. And he had to be careful, other-wise somebody may have become angry -- those three hundred jealous gods. You have to pay the same attention to each.

He was getting crazy! I said, "You will go mad! Three hundred gods are too much."

Now Prem says she is feeling ecstatic. Yes, you will feel ecstatic because you have moved to the opposite polarity. It gives freedom. But this is not true freedom -- soon you will lose it. Soon you will become tired. And then there is every possibility the mind will start moving to the other extreme agate. And the truth is just exactly in the middle, remember. The truth is just exactly in the middle.

In ancient Greece, on the temple of Delphi, there were two inscriptions. One is very well known, the other is not so well known. There must be some cause why the other never became so well known. One was: Know THYSELF. And the other was: NEVER in EXCESS. But the other is not so well known, and they both are together. They each are as important as the other, of the same plenitude, of the same potential.

One can know oneself only if one lives a life of no excess, if one moves JUST in the middle. Otherwise, one becomes a victim of extremes.

Now, from the idea of formless God you are becoming a victim of thousands of forms. Just exactly in the middle, where gods disappear; neither form nor formlessness, when there is utter silence -- there is the home.

You can go on loving Buddha, but you will never know what Buddha is -- how can you love? Your love will be nothing but a kind of illusion, a hallucination.

You have loved people before, now you project the same illusory energy on Buddha. And if Buddha is alive he won't allow it. He will try to destroy it in every way, because he will think of you in this illusion, in this dream. You may feel good, but this is a dream all the same. Sooner or later you will awake and then you will see that you have been wasting your life.

Yes, there is excitement but there is no ecstasy. And don't think your excitement is ecstasy. They look alike. And the greatest danger in life is from things that look alike. Excitement looks like ecstasy -- it is not. Ecstasy has NO excitement. It is a very tranquil state. Ecstasy is absolute silence, nothingness. It is enlightenment!

You cannot love Buddha unless you become a Buddha! And to become a Buddha is what enlightenment is, and that's what ecstasy is.

Prem, you are not in an ecstasy. You may be in a heart-throbbing excitement, you may be enjoying this trip, but for how long? And these gods that you are surrounded with are all nothing but your projections. You have created them. You can put your energy into Ram, and then he becomes alive, but it is YOUR energy.

Why not become alive COURSES? Why put it in Ram and make him alive? Why go THAT far? And you say:

IF THERE WAS A WAY,

THEN

WHEN THE SUN IS SHINING ON THE POND

WHICH ONE DOES THE TRUE SUN

FOLLOW?

WHICH ONE DOES THE TRUE ONE BORROW?

THERE IS NO TRUE ONE WAY.

AND THE SUN IS A DELUSION

OF A WAY MULTIPLIED BY TWO

AND MULTIPLIED MILLIONFOLD.

SINCE THERE IS NO WAY, NO BUDDHAS,

NO DHARMAS, NO CONCEPTIONS,

ONLY ONE ECSTASY,

AND RIGHT-MINDEDNESS

IS MINDFULNESS

THAT THE WAY IS NO-WAY

ANYHOW SOME WAY.

That one ecstasy is God. The taste of it is God. God is not a person with form or without form. God is the taste on your tongue of that moment -- of that moment of bliss, of that moment of Tao, of that moment when ALL stops, time stops, and the world stops.

I am not a Totapuri at all. He was very much obsessed with the formless, otherwise why should he bother to cut Ramakrishna's forehead? I would not have done that. For what? I am not in any way interested in changing you from one position to another position, from one philosophy to another philosophy. They are all points of view. My effort is to make you free of ALL points of view -- Ramakrishna and Totapuri both.

And what happened? do you know? And that's what I am afraid of, Prem, it can happen to you. Ramakrishna said after those six days, "The last barrier has fallen," and then he lived at least ten more years -- and continued to worship Kali. And the day he died, he died with the name of Kali on his lips: "Jai Kali, Jai Kali!" The day, the moment he died, it was not the formless, it was again the form. What happened? For a few days he remained in that excitement of the formless, then he became tired and moved again.

No excess. No extreme. Be in the middle. Exactly in the middle is the door. If you think of time, then in the past there is no door, in the future there is no door -- but in the present, because that is exactly in the middle. If you think of form and formlessness there is no door, but exactly between the two. Neither this nor that -- NET I, NET I -- just exactly between the two. Neither the soul nor the body. Don't become a spiritualist or a materialist. Don't think of the external reality or the internal. Just exactly in the middle!

Always go on thinking of the middle, and slowly slowly relax in the middle and let the extremes dissolve. And you have wived home.

BELOVED OSHO, KINDLY TELL ME -- HAVE WE MET IN A PAST LIFE?

Ask me why we have not met in this life. How is it going to help whether we met in the past life or not? Now we cannot go back to it; we cannot make anything out of it. It is finished. But this is how mind works. It escapes from the present. It finds ways either in the past or in the future. Those are tricks, strategies of the mind to save itself. Why should you be interested in-'past life'? It is finished, it is gone, it is no more! It has no existence anywhere, no validity. Even if we did meet, it matters nothing.