---
section: Library
booktitle: "The Imprisoned Splendor"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "IMPRIS"
dategiven: "13 June 1980 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #13"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "8006135"
shorttitle: "IMPRIS13"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "The Imprisoned Splendor: Chapter #13"
---

```style
.sutra {
  font-style: italic;
  white-space: pre-wrap !important;
}
```
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> [!info]
> Note
>
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]


The only way to help others is first to become awakened. If those who are not awakened yet try to help ... their intentions are good but the results are going to be just the opposite. Their wishes are good but they cannot be fulfilled; they are not capable of fulfilling them. They have not even been able to help themselves.


That's where all the religions have failed. They create missionaries; they create the idea in peoples' mind that service is the way to god. It is true: service is the way to god. But the sleepy person cannot serve, cannot love. It is impossible. We can try, but he will only create more mess.


The so-called servants of humanity have proved more mischievous than anybody else. They have been the cause of much misery, for the simple reason that nobody told them you cannot give to others what you yourself have not got in the first place. If you want to share love you have to be full of love. If you want to share bliss you have to be overflowing with bliss. If you want people to move towards god you have to be radiating god. Just words won't help, even acts won't help, because they will be just superficial.


Hence my approach is totally different, I say religion is basically selfish. First it teaches you to become blissful. That is utter selfishness, there cannot be anything more selfish than that. But out of that selfishness altruism is born. Out of that selfishness service is born. Out of that selfishness you can become a great help. And people are in need of help, in need of light, in need of guidance; they are groping in the dark. But a person who himself is asleep cannot wake others; first he has to wake up himself -- that is my fundamental  --  and then everything follows of its own accord. Hence I never talk about service; there is no need.


I talk only about the rosebush, how to take care of the rosebush. The flowers will come of their own accord, you will be full of roses. If the right care is being taken care of the rosebush, roses are bound to come  --  it is just a natural law. Hence I never talk about the consequences. And consequences cannot be put before the causes, the effects cannot precede the causes.


The first thing a sannyasin has to do is to help himself. For the time being forget the whole worlds all its misery, oppression, the darkness that is becoming darker and darker every day, the impending third world war which can happen any day. Forget all about that because you cannot do anything about it right now. But you can do something about yourself right now and that will trigger a process in you which may prove of immense help to the whole humanity, to the whole future of humanity.


Meditation is a kind of farming  --  inner farming. We have the seeds but we have never bothered to do anything about them . We have the soil but we have never prepared it. Seasons come and go and our inner landscape remains barren for the simple reason that we never look inwards we are focussed on the outside.


Sannyas means a turning in, and then all that you need is already provided for, you have brought it with you. It is intrinsic, it is born with you. It cannot be taken away from you. It is part of your nature, it is inseparably part of your being. But something has to be done about it -- it is only potential. It has to be transformed into the actual. It is only seeds. Those seeds contain millions of flowers.


The soil is there, the seeds are there, the sun rises, the seasons come, the clouds come. God goes on providing a thousand and one opportunities, but the farmer is obsessed with his own being. He never looks within his own being.


All that is needed is a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn and you are immediately transported into another world  --  Jesus calls it the kingdom of god. Gautam the Buddha has actually called himself a farmer for a simple reason that it is a kind of farming. It transforms you, it brings you to the peak of your possibilities. And when all your possibilities are actualised there is tremendous joy, there is contentment, fulfillment, there is celebration.


Love is the greatest gift of God, but it is given only as a potential; you have to actualize it. It is given only as a possibility; if one does not pay attention to it one may ever known one's own treasures. It is there waiting for you, but you are never at the center  of your being, you are running on the circumference. That's what everybody is doing.


Our mind is the circumference of our being, and to go on thinking is what I call running around the circumference. One thought leads to another thought, and so on, so forth; it is an unending process. You have to jump out of it to find the center of your being. You cannot find the center by running faster around the circumference, because it does not exist there. So it is not a question of speed: one has to jump out of the circumference. It is a quantum leap. That's what I call meditation. It is a jump from mind to no-mind, from thought to no-thought, from desire to no-desire. And immediately you are standing at the Golden Gate. That's what we have been searching, for lives. And it has never been far away; it has always been within us, it has never left us even for a single moment. But one can go on missing the opportunity.


In fact missing the opportunity has become our habit. We have become so accustomed to thinking that it seems the hardest thing in the world not to think - even for a single moment. But it is not as difficult as we think. One just has to try and one has to be a little patient, because habits die hard.


If one can be patient and go on watching the mind without doing anything about it, slowly slowly one slips out of the mind. Suddenly one day the mind is no more there. And the first glimpse of no-mind is such a revelation that one is never the same again. One is reborn.


Jesus said to Nicodemus, "Unless you are born again, you shall not enter into my kingdom of god." He is talking about this rebirth.


My path is the path of bliss. It is not of sadness, it is not of seriousness. Sadness and seriousness are pathological. The so-called saints who appear very serious, are really ill people. They are not whole. They have become incapable of laughter, they have become incapable of cheerfulness  --  and to be incapable of cheerfulness and laughter is really to commit suicide. They have committed suicide. But we have worshipped these people for centuries because we are worshippers of death, not of life. And we worship a person who becomes dead even while he is alive, who starts living a kind of post-humous existence. He becomes a mahatma, a sage, a saint.


As far as I am concerned, what he needs is just psychological treatment. Maybe ordinary psychoanalysis will not help him, he may need electroshocks. Nothing will bring him to his senses unless he is given really great shocks of electricity. That may revive him.


Sometimes it happens... Just the other day I was reading in the newspapers, one man had gone blind for ten years and the doctors had declared that his blindness was incurable, nothing could be done about it.


He was sitting outside his home in the garden and there was great thunder and lightning. The lightning struck his home, it destroyed his home, but the shock was such that he started seeing. Something inside his brain changed its tracks. Some nuts and bolts may have gone loose became tight, or maybe they had become tight and now they became loose ... and he started seeing!
Doctors are puzzled  --  how did it happen? The shock did something.


Sometimes it happens that a shock can cure a person Or a certain illness. And to me, the serious and sad kind of religion is one of the most serious sicknesses. It is far more dangerous than cancer. One can survive cancer but one cannot survive this so-called spirituality. The cancer can destroy only your body but this so-called spirituality destroys even your soul.


My vision of religion is totally different, diametrically opposite to what has been taught to people for centuries. I believe in life and I don't believe in anything else. To me life is god and to me to live totally is the only religion and to live blissfully is the only prayer.


That has to be the path of my sannyasins. Rejoice, be cheerful. Drop all kinds of seriousness lurking anywhere in your mind. Simply throw them out, cleanse yourself completely. And once you start living cheerfully, joyfully, once you know the taste of a dancing life, of a singing life, no other proof of god is needed - that is the only proof that god is, Only bliss gives you the proof. It is not a question of arguments, it is a question of experiencing.
			

> [!info]
> Copyright 1964-1990 Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh)
>