---
section: Library
booktitle: "The Old Pond ... Plop"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "POND"
dategiven: "20 January 1981 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #20"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "8101205"
shorttitle: "POND20"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "The Old Pond ... Plop: Chapter #20"
---

```style
.sutra {
  font-style: italic;
  white-space: pre-wrap !important;
}
```
<!--This file is automatically generated. Do not edit!-->
> [!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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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.]


Man is born with the absolute potential to be blissful but the society in which he is born is miserable. The parents, the family, the teachers, the priests, the politicians, the whole structure around the child is living in misery, and it needs tremendous courage not to follow the crowd, otherwise you will also be miserable. It needs not only courage but a tremendous trust in one's own being.


The person who follows others has no trust in himself; that's why he follows others. The man who has trust in himself learns from others but does not follow. He follows his own insight. Whatsoever the risk he never compromises.


Courage is needed to be oneself and immense loyalty is needed towards one's being. Initiation into sannyas is not initiation into a certain kind of following: I am against all following. Initiation into sannyas is just to prepare you to be yourself, to prepare you to be courageous, to revolt against all misery and all the programmes which make people miserable.


Sannyas means individuality. You have to imbibe my spirit, partake of my being but not to be a follower, not to be an imitator. That's what all the religions have done up to nows they create imitators, pseudo, phony, hypocrites. My whole effort here is to help you to be courageous, trusting in your own being, trusting your own voice. I don't teach you loyalty to me; I teach you loyalty towards your own potential.


The real master always throws the disciple towards his own inner depths. He does not allow the disciple to cling to him. The disciple would like to cling the disciple would like to be dependent, the disciple would like to be directed, guided, given a programme, but the true master has to fight the disciple. He has to do something which the disciple is not inclined to do. And that's the distinction between a true master and a false master: the false master fulfils your expectations, he never disappoints you; the true master disappoints you at each and every step, he never fulfils your expectations. He really frustrates you, because that is the only way to undo what the society has done to you, that is the only way to bring you to total freedom.
Sannyas is a way towards absolute freedom.


Atta is a dangerous name -- at least in German! It means the father.
The father is an invented institution, it is not natural. There was a time when there was no institution like the father and there will come a time -- and it is coming very fast (laughter) -- when the father is going to disappear. The father came into existence with private property, it symbolises private property. Once private property disappears, once property becomes communal, the father is no more needed. Once the family is replaced by the commune, the father becomes irrelevant.


Uncles will be there but not fathers. And the word 'uncle' is sweet and beautiful. With the disappearance of the father, the idea of god the father will also disappear. Just think of god the uncle, and it changes the whole colour (laughter), the whole flavour. If god is the uncle there cannot be any hell, and if god is the father there cannot be any heaven. The father represents the authoritative.


Veet means transcendence. Go beyond the idea of the father, of private property, of invented institutions, of authorities. In Pali, the language that Buddha used, the same word has a far more significant meaning. There is just a little different pronunciation; not 'ah-ta', but 'uh-tah'. The spelling is the same.


Atta means the ego, and in a way, the father represents the ego. Go beyond the ego and the egoistic approach of the father. The father dominates the family -- he is the head, the chief, he dictates, he possesses the woman, the children, he is the ruler. In fact the father represents, in a very gross way, the whole phenomenon of the ego.


One has to go beyond the ego too. The father is a gross manifestation, but deep down is the ego. It is perfectly beautiful to be a lover but ugly to be a husband, beautiful to be a beloved, a friend, but ugly to be a wife. These beautiful experiences should not be made into legal relationships. Law is very destructive. Love can never be reduced to law, and the moment it is reduced to law it is no more love. It is perfectly beautiful to be a vehicle for children to come into existence; and the father and the mother are nothing but vehicles. The children are not their possessions; they are not produced by them, they are not manufactured by them -- they are just vehicles.


The children come through them -- that is true but they are not created by them. They come from some unknown source, from the same unknown source, from the same unknown source from where we come, from where everything comes -- the flowers and the stars and the birds.


The idea of the father creates possessiveness. Once the idea of father disappears, you will be friendly to your children. You will be immensely respectful to them because they are closer to the source than you are, they come freshly from it. They are as fresh as dewdrops in the early morning;, they are still carrying some fragrance of the unknown source: they should be respected, loved, but not possessed.


And this is my approach; hence I am against the family and for the commune and communal living. The family is an ugly unit and it is the basic brick upon which all other ugly institutions have arisen -- the church, the state, the nation. I want to hit hard at the very root. I am not interested in pruning leaves and branches. I want to hit at the very root, and the family is the root. If the family can be destroyed then the state, the church, the nation, will automatically disappear from the earth. And that will be the greatest day in the history of humanity; for the first time the whole earth will be one.


Transcendence precisely defines meditation. One has to transcend three things and then the fourth is achieved. The fourth is our true nature. Gurdjieff used to call his way the fourth way and in the East we have called the ultimate state of being, turiya, the fourth.


We have to transcend the body -- that is our outermost circumference. We have to become aware that we are  in the body, but we are not it. The body is beautiful, one has to take care of it, one has to be very loving to the body. It is serving you beautifully. One has not to be antagonistic to it.


The religions have been teaching people to be antagonistic to their body, to torture it -- they call it asceticism. That is sheer stupidity! And they think that by torturing the body they will be able to transcend it. They are utterly wrong.


The only way to transcend is awareness, not torture. There is no question of torturing. You don't torture your house; you know that you are not it, it is your house. Just awareness is needed. There is no need to go on a fast, there is no need to stand on your head, there is no need to contort your body in a thousand and one postures. Just watching; becoming aware, is enough. And the same is the key for the other two transcendences.


The second is, you have to transcend the mind -- that is a second concentric circle, closer to your being than the body. The body is the gross, the mind is the subtle, and then there is a third, the subtlest: your heart -- the world of your feelings, emotions, moods. But the key is the same.


Start with the body because the body is the most easily observable thing. It is an object. Thoughts ere also objects but they are more invisible. Once you have become aware of the body you will be able to watch your thoughts too. Once you have become aware of your thoughts you will be able to watch your moods too but they are the subtlest; so only at the third state that awareness has to be tried. Once one becomes aware of all these three concentric circles around your centre the fourth happening of its own accord. Suddenly you know who you are -- not verbally; you don't get an answer, you cannot tell anybody -- but you know. You know in the same way you know when you have a headache. You know in the same way as you know when you are hungry or thirsty. You know in the same way you know that you have fallen in love.


You cannot prove it, there is no way to prove it, but you know. And that knowing is self-evident; you cannot suspect it, it is indubitable. When one has come to the fourth, one has transcended the world.


I don't teach renunciation of the world. I teach transcendence of the world -- and this is the way.


Pleasure is very limited. Bliss is unlimited, and between the two is what we call happiness. It is exactly in the middle; a part of it seems to be infinite and a part of it seems to be very finite. Hence in happiness there is a dichotomy, a conflict, a tension.


Pleasure has no tension. In fact pleasure helps you to become relaxed. For example; sex is pleasure. Now the medical sciences agree that sex helps people to relieve tension in many ways. It helps people to protect their hearts from heart failure. At least, not a single man has ever died from heart failure while making love. In every kind of activity people have suffered from heart failure, but not while making love. It should be otherwise, because the heart is beating faster and your blood is pulsating faster and you are getting crazy! (laughter) But the heart does not fail. In fact it is a good exercise for the heart.


Now heart experts suggest to people that it is a good exercise for the heart. Pleasure relieves you of tension; that's why tense people tend to eat more -- it relaxes tension. When their bellies are full their heads become empty (laughter), because the whole energy goes into digestion. So there is no more energy left to think or worry. That's why after eating people start feeling sleepy.


Pleasure is animal, but happiness is human. And with happiness there comes a dichotomy, a tension. The happy person is always worried about how long it is going to last. He is also worried that if it is repeated too often it will become boring. He is also worried that if he does not repeat it he way lose track of it (laughter). His problems are millions! (laughter) That's why you will find poor people more satisfied; they are living at the lowest, very close to the animals. The richer one gets, the more problems arise. The affluent society has a thousand and one psychological problems, for the simple reason that happiness brings a duality. A part of it is momentary and a part of it is very eternal, and they don 't get together. They are moving; in different directions.


The animal lives with pleasure, human beings live in a divided insane world of happiness, and only Buddhas have lived in the world of bliss. Bliss is eternal. It is again, in a way, the same as pleasure, but only in one way is it the same: there is no dichotomy, no fear, no anxiety. But in another way it is absolutely different. Pleasure is unconscious and bliss is absolutely conscious. Pleasure is momentary -- you can enjoy food today but tomorrow again you will be hungry. So it is repetitive, circular; you go on in circles, a mechanical routine.


Bliss is every moment new, every moment fresh, every moment young. It never grows old, never grows stale, never becomes stagnant. And it is infinite.


Once you have entered into the world of bliss you have entered into the unbounded, uncharted. Suddenly there are no walls anywhere. For the first time you are no more in a prison. And the taste of freedom is what ecstasy is all about -- just like the bird on the wing.


A sannyasins is a bird on the wing; in the sky of bliss which knows no boundaries. You can go on and on and you will never come to the end of it.


Buddha has said 'Misery has no beginning but an end and bliss has a beginning but no end.' And he is absolutely right. You don't know how you became miserable or when you became miserable. You have always been miserable. You can go on remembering and you will find you have always been miserable. It has no beginning, but it has an end. You can put a full point to it.


Bliss begins where misery ends, but then there is no end to it. You cannot put a full point to it. It is a river that is always moving towards the ocean but never reaches the ocean; and that's its beauty -- the ecstasy, the excitement, the joy, the adventure, of always reaching. And the ocean is just ahead of you. By the very effort to reach to the ocean you start becoming an ocean, but you never reach it.


You go on growing, you go on evolving, but there comes no full point. This eternal pilgrimage is the essential core of religion.


Character can be cultivated from the outside -- then it is pseudo and phony. That's what our so-called morality does. That's the way of the puritan: it creates hypocrisy in people, it only paints their faces, it does not change their being. Behind the beautiful facade they remain the same people. They nay be able to deceive others but they cannot deceive existence. Before existence one has to stand naked. Not only do the clothes fall away but your whole cultivated character also falls.


Hence it is a sheer wastage of energy, time, opportunity. The other way, the true way to create an authentic character is through meditation. You don't cultivate any quality, any virtue. You simply become silent, aware. You start divine deeper and deeper into your being.


The moment you come to your very centre an explosion happens, and in that explosion the old character is finished. A totally new style of life arises, and that is real virtue. Then whatsoever you do is right. Then there is no question of following any commandment; your very being is aware of its responsibility. Then it is no more Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, it is not derived from the Old Testament or the Vedas or the Koran. You live according to your own light.


And when a person starts living according to his own light there is great joy. And each act becomes such a fulfilment, and each act brings so much contentment, because never does anything go wrong, never does one feel guilty or repentant, never does one feel 'I should have done otherwise.' Even a so-called great saint like Saint Augustine says in his CONFESSIONS, 'I always do what should not be done, and I never do what should be done -- god forgive me!' (laughter) But that's the whole story of all your saints.


A man like Buddha cannot say that. It is not a question at all of shoulds and should nots; you simply do out of your total awareness whatsoever is the need of the moment. You respond accordingly, and your action is total. It is not a choice of 'Whether I should do this or that.' You have clarity, light, eyes; hence whatsoever you do is total.


And every total act brings freedom, joy, benediction. Then character is not something, that you have cultivated; it is a consequence.


True character is a by-product of meditation and false character is manufactured by cultivation. Beware of the false, because it is cheap, and the mind tends to buy the cheap. Beware of the false because it seems to be a shortcut, and the mind is always ready to follows the shortcut. It is very lazy.


Mind lives in time, mind is time. It consists of past and future. Remember, I divide time into only two tenses, past and future. Present is not part of time, present is part of eternity. Present is that moment where eternity crosses time. Time is horizontal, eternity is vertical; where the vertical line crosses the horizontal line, that point -- it is just a point -- is the present. And the whole art of meditation is to live in the present, to be herenow, dropping the past, dropping the future.


Once you are capable of dropping all the past and all the future, all that is left is the present moment, the now. And that is the time, the moment, the space in which the revolution happens. Suddenly your horizontal line becomes vertical, you enter into eternity, into timelessness. That is the world of truth, the world of the real. Time is the world of dreams, fantasies, and nobody can be blissful in the world of time. It is nightmarish.


Once you enter into eternity, all turmoil ceases, immense peace descends on you; and then you can go on living in the world of time but you carry that peace within you, untouched by time and its noise. Time is mind, meditation is no-mind. And this is a whole change of world: from mind to no-mind, from time to eternity.


It is possible; everybody is born with the capacity, one just has to know the knack of it. And the knack is simple: try to be herenow, don't go on enjoying the past and its memories. All those so-called nostalgias -- don't waste yourself in them; and don't go into the future trips of becoming this, of having that.


The past is no more and the future is not yet, and between the two is that which always is. To enter that 'isness' is to enter into godliness, into bliss, into truth, into immortality. Then there is no death. In Sanskrit we have only one word for time and death -- the same word, kal -- because death happens in time, it never happens in eternity. Eternity is deathless.


Mind is one-dimensional; it moves from the past to the future. It is linear, one line. Meditation is multi-dimensional. It opens as many doors as you can imagine. It opens the door of love, it opens the door of truth, it opens the door of freedom, it opens the door of awareness, it opens the door of bliss, and so on and so forth. It simply goes on opening doors upon doors. Reality is multi-dimensional and meditation makes you one with reality.


Time is only a small part, a fragment of reality. But we are all living in that small fragment; hence we all feel suffocated, cramped, overcrowded. It is not just the crowd around you that makes you feel like that, it is far deeper. Mind is overcrowded because it is a single line and on that single line so many trains are running. And naturally, so many accidents are happening. Thoughts are running, millions of thoughts, desires are running, imagination, memories, dreams, fantasies, what not. Just a single track and so many trains are running.


Every moment there is an accident, something clashes with something else. You are continuously being thrown from one accident to another accident.


No wonder people look so miserable, so drained, so utterly exhausted. But once you have learned how to be silent, how to slip out of the mind, then thousands of doors open and suddenly your world becomes so vast that you don't feel crowded at all. There is so much space to create, to enjoy, to dance, so much space that you can expand to infinity. That expansion of consciousness is the ultimate goal of sannyas.


Meditation has not to be taken seriously. That's how people take it; and to take it seriously is to miss it totally. It is a song, a dance, a celebration -- enjoy it, love it, but don't take it seriously, don't be sombre about it. Be sincere, but not serious.


For thousands of years the saint has looked so serious, so deadly serious, that he has created a certain idea that religion means seriousness, that religion means dropping all playfulness, dropping all cheerfulness, that one has to become really gravelike. Exactly that is the word we use for the serious person: very grave. He has become a grave, he is no more alive. He is living only in a very minimal way, just existing, or vegetating, not living.


My approach to religion is absolutely non-serious, playful. So let your meditation be a song, let your sannyas be a song. Let it be a love, a laughter. As I see it, a sense of humour is one of the most essential qualities for a religious person. If it is not there then the person may be ANything else but he is not religious. Something of humour must be there, a capacity to laugh at so many of the ridiculous things life abounds with. Everybody is slipping on a banana peel (much laughter). People arc carrying their own banana peels (laughter), spreading them on the roads, slipping on them -- how can one be serious? (laughter)


People are doing all kinds of absurdities. If you just watch people it is such a comedy! (more laughter) That has to be the message for you! (more laughter) Love, laugh, and live!
			

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