---
section: Library
booktitle: "The Old Pond ... Plop"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "POND"
dategiven: "30 January 1981 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #30"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "8101305"
shorttitle: "POND30"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "The Old Pond ... Plop: Chapter #30"
---

```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[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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.]


Man can live on two planes: either in time or in eternity. Time is constantly changing it is movement, it is flux. Heraclitus is right about time when he says you cannot step in the same river twice. No moment in time cones back -- it is gone and gone forever. Everything that lives in time is temporary, everything that is born in time is bound to die. Our body belongs to time; one day it was not there, one day again it will not be there. Our mind also belongs to time.


Mind is created by experiences, knowledge and all that is given by the society, the older generation -- the parents, the teachers, the priests. Mind is also going to die. We come into the world without mind, we come only as a clean slate, a tabula rasa, with no writing on it, then time does the writing. As the child grows the writing goes on becoming bigger and bigger.


The grown-up person loses all inner space, he is full af junk from the past. The older a man is, the less innocent he is, because innocence needs clarity, spaciousness. And the old man is so burdened with memories that there is no space inside his being, it is full of furnitures thoughts, desires, dreams fulfilled, unfulfilled, frustrations, expectations -- the whole life that he has lived and the whole life that he has missed living -- all that is there. He is crowded.


And the moment he dies he will have to leave his bodymind here; he will not be able to take it with him. Our whole education goes down the drain.


If we remain identified with the bodymind complex then we live in the dimension of time. If we become disidentified from the body and the mind we enter into a totally different world, the world of eternity. That is our real nature. We are in time but we don't belong to it. We are like a ray of light penetrating a dark tunnel. It comes from the outside, it comes from somewhere else, from o source of light. It passes through the dark tunnel but it is not part of it. It is alien, it is an outsider.


The body belongs to the world, the mind belongs to the world, but we don't belong to the world. Experiencing this is meditation. Getting disidentified from all that is part of time is meditation.


George Gurdjieff, one of the greatest masters of this age, used to define meditation simply in this way: identification is a state of no meditation, non-identification is a state of meditation. And the moment you are not identified with the body and the mind and you can watch them as entities separate from you, suddenly, instantly, you are transported, time disappears death disappears with it, change disappears with it. Then you are in the world of that which always is, that which knows no past, no future, that which only knows the present, now. The taste of now is the taste of nectar.


Time consists of past and future. Now is penetration of a ray from the beyond, hence the whole art of sannyas is to live more and more in the here, in the now, in the present, in the immediate. This moment is all, end if one can be absolutely absorbed in this moment, caring nothing about that which is gone, thinking not at all about that which is going to come, one realises the beauty of transcendence. I call it the experience of immortality, deathlessness. This has been the search for centuries of all the alchemy schools of the world.


Science functions in time. It thinks in time and space, its whole world is confined in spacio-time. It knows nothing of the beyond, and the beyond is our true being. The very beyondness is our freedom -- freedom, from all bondage, from all limitations, from all misery. And the freedom is not only negative -- it is not only freedom from bondage, it is not only freedom from misery. It is freedom for bliss, it is freedom for the whole sky and the stars. It is not only removal of something: at the same time it is a realisation of our true potential hence it is ecstasy.


To live without knowing it is to live in vain. And once you know it then whatsoever you do has a grace. Then each action that comes out of your being has a beauty, a creativity about it. Then your whole life has a quality of dance, song, music, celebration -- the very colour of spring. Hence I have chosen orange and all the shades of red for my sannyasins; in the East that is the colour of spring, because then all the flowers open up. They belong more or less to the spectrum of different shades of red.


Life without flowering is a kind of slow death. It is not worth anything. It is meaningless, it is absurd, sannyas gives you significance, an understanding into the deepest mystery of existence. The name of the door that leads to this experience is meditation.


So your name consists of two words. The first is the door, meditation, dhyan, and the second is when you have entered the door, when you have entered the innermost shrine -- that is smrit, that is nectar, that is deathlessness, eternity.

Meditation bring many flowers to your life. It is multi-dimensional.


Mind is one-dimensional. It is linear, like a straight line, horizontal. It moves from A to B, from B to C, from C to D; it runs like a railway train, on tracks. Its approach is mechanical, conditioned. It has no freedom. It is confined to a single line. And millions of people are living like that. In fact all the societies up to now have lived like that.


You must have seen ants moving in a line -- that's how human beings have behaved. And ants and human beings have many things in common. Ants are one of the most primitive societies, perhaps far more ancient than human societies, and they are very highly developed. There is a certain hierarchy, there is a definite demarcation of classes. There are labourers -- hands and heads -- and they all follow the line very obediently, very religiously. You will not find even a single ant moving astray, rebels don't exist. That's how human beings have also done in the past; they have lived in the crowd, according to the crowd, losing their individuality. And the society wants you never to be rebellious; that is against its investments, it is against the establishment, it is against all the vested interests, it is against the status quo.


Hence society emphasises the mind because mind is a crowd phenomenon, it is part of mob psychology. Society manufactures the mind. From the kindergarten to the university it is nothing but a process of manufacturing the minds. What is called education is not education at all; it is a very destructive process. It is an effort to make you part of a crowd, to cut you to size, to fix you into a certain pattern and structure so that you can become efficient, a cog in the wheel. It does not want you to have any individuality. And that is the miracle of meditation; it takes you out of the mind and imparts individuality to you for the first time.


Meditation means putting the mind aside. By putting the mind aside you have undone all that the society has done to you, you are free from the society. Free from the mind means free from the society. The society may be Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Indian, German, Chinese -- it makes no difference. It may be capitalist, communist, socialist, fascist -- it is all the same game in different names. Maybe there are little differences here and there but they don't make a difference that really makes a difference. Those are just superficial differences. Otherwise every society insists that you be in the mind, that you be the mind and never slip out of it, because slipping out of it makes you a rebel. You start seeing on your own, you start becoming independent, you start enjoying the freshness of freedom. You are no more part of the prison.


And once you have tasted freedom, you can never be a part of the prison. You would rather die than compromise.


Meditation is real rebellion, but it is individual rebellion. It is not political, it is not social, it is spiritual. And rebellion can only be spiritual. All political revolutions have failed, without exception, because the people who possess power after the revolution have the same kind of mind. They start creating again the same mob psychology, they start manipulating people, fixing them in a line, forcing them to follow the line. The flags change, the slogans change, but the basic poisoning remains the same hence I say that only spiritual revolution is real. All other revolutions are pseudo. And spiritual revolution begins with meditation. Meditation is like a snake slipping not of the old skin.


Our mind is an old skin, rotten. Because it is given by others it is ugly, because it has been forced upon us it is against us, it is against our nature. It is the enemy of our well-being. Living in it is cowardly. Getting out of it is being again full of adventure and thrill. Then life goes on opening new visions, new pastures, new peaks to be attained, new targets to be fulfilled, again life becomes a tremendous aspiration. And I call it aspiration knowingly, not inspiration, because inspiration comes from others -- leaders inspire you, priests inspire you. Aspiration comes from your own being, and only that which comes from your own being can have any authentic value.


Getting out of the mind is getting into life, into the very stream of life. It is becoming alive. And the person who is alive becomes a beloved of existence. The whole Existence loves that person. Human beings may hate him, but they don't constitute the whole of existence; they are such a small speck of dust -- there is no need to worry about that. Stars will love you, trees love you, animals will love you, mountains and rivers -- the whole existence!


Compared to the whole existence and its love, the stupid respectability given by human beings is of no worth at all. Hence it is better to be crucified like a Jesus. The human beings are crucifying him, but the whole existence is showering love! And that is the meaning of your name: become a meditator so that you can become a beloved of existence itself. I cannot say that you will become a beloved of human beings too. Of course a few human beings, those who are as rebellious as you are... But ninety-nine per cent, the people who have lived like sheep are bound to hate you. They hate you because it is a deep-felt insult to them, it is humiliating. When they see a rebel like Socrates, Buddha, Lao TZu, they feel humiliated, because they can see for the first time, in comparison to these people, what they could have been but are not, and they don't have guts enough to risk and to grow. So the best way is to kill Socrates, to remove Jesus, to murder Mansoor, so that no comparison is left and they can again feel at ease -- at ease in their prison, at ease with their chains, at ease with all their superstitions and stupidities.


My sannyasin have to be aware, that whenever there is a choice between the whole existence and a few human beings... and there are really fewer than we think. Our perspective is not clear, that's why they seem to be so many. Because we only think of this earth there seem to be so many human beings; but scientists say that there are at least fifty thousand planets -- that is the least, the minimum, according to scientific calculations -- fifty thousand planets which must have grown people at least to the level of human beings. There may be more because we have not been able to explore the whole -- and I don't think that we are ever going to be able to explore the whole. The more we will explore, the more there will be to be explored.


If you think of the whole existence, then human beings simply disappear; they don't count! Then things seem to be very small.


One scientific association publishes a magazine, once in a while, to inform the whole world about atomic danger. Once its first issue it has kept the same cover; from 1960 up to now -- twenty-one years -- the cover has not changed. Only one thing changes on it, just one thing: the cover carries a picture of a clock. They divide the whole history of humanity into one hour. Compared to eternity it is not more than that, perhaps less but not more. Tentatively they divide it into one hour.


In 1960 when they published their first issue they declared that the atomic war, the Third World War was only seven minutes away. So the clock was showing just seven minutes more before twenty-four hours would be complete and humanity would be finished. Then when Kennedy and Khrushchev were almost ready to crash on the question of Cuba they published the magazine and showed that now only four minutes were left, and this year with Ronald Reagan coming into power they have published showing that only two minutes are left.


Two minutes seem to be so small, but in fact they are not that small. If the whole of human history is only twenty-four hours then two minutes are big. But compared to eternity, even twenty-four hours are nothing. There have been millions of years when man was not on the earth -- he has just appeared and can disappear any moment. So there is no need to be worried about human beings -- about their insults and about their disrespect and about their condemnation -- there is no need to worry at all. My sannyasins have to be very aware from the very beginning that it is a choice between existence and a tiny, stupid part, which is dominated by past absurdities.


Once you decide 'I am ready to risk everything, to gain a harmony with existence, to be in a deep love affair with existence,' you are a sannyasin. To me sannyas means a love affair with the whole -- and of course, love demands much! It demands commitment, intensity, passionate fervour.
Love is so valuable that one can always sacrifice oneself for it.


How long will you be here?
-- I will be here four weeks.
-- Then come back again, because that is not even seconds! (laughter) Good!
			

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