---
section: Library
booktitle: "Don't Bite My Finger, Look Where I'm Pointing"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "BITE"
dategiven: "24 March 1978 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #22"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "7803245"
shorttitle: "BITE22"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "Don't Bite My Finger, Look Where I'm Pointing: Chapter #22"
---

```style
.sutra {
  font-style: italic;
  white-space: pre-wrap !important;
}
```
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Nirjara. It is one of the most important words in the Eastern search for truth. It comes from the Jaina tradition. That tradition is very much unknown in the West but is one of the most important in the East, as important as the Buddhist tradition. But it never gathered too many followers so it remained almost unknown.


Nirjara means a state of consciousness where all conditionings have dropped. In the fall leaves drop and leave the tree naked, bare, with no foliage, and the naked tree and the naked branches stand against the sky; that nakedness is nirjara. When all the thoughts have dropped -- they are leaves -- when all desires have disappeared -- they are leaves -- and when your being is just naked, utterly naked, with no foliage, with nothing growing in it, when all has stopped, the world has stopped, in that moment one comes to know oneself, one comes to know who one is.


When desires and thoughts continue it is impossible to know oneself because those desires are distractions and those thoughts go on imposing themselves upon your being. Your mirror is never left alone; some cloud or other is always surrounding you.


When all the clouds have disappeared, that cloudless sky is nirjara, that contentless consciousness is nirjara. It is the ultimate state... and that is possible.


Coming to me is simply a gesture of your being that now something is going to happen, it is very close-by. It will only depend on how much courage you can gather to plunge into it. Nothing else is needed, only courage, and you have taken the first step by becoming a sannyasin.


Sannyas means trusting me, because the journey is unknown and no maps are available. Guides are available but no guidebooks. And the journey is such and so complicated that no books can be fair to it; they can only misguide, they cannot guide. Only an alive master can take you slowly slowly -- one who has travelled the path again and again, one who has gone to the beyond and come back to the earth, has gone beyond and come back to the earth, who has been shuttling between this and that continuously.


Sannyas means trusting somebody so utterly that your life becomes a secondary value to the trust. Even if one's life is needed, one is ready to give it. In that readiness the impossible becomes possible.


Sananda. It means blissful, joyful, cheerful. And they are all on different layers. Blissfulness is something absolutely inner, nobody can see it from the outside. It is not available on the surface; it is only in the depth, of the depth You cannot see it in the waves; you will have to dig deep into the profundity of your own being, only then will you find it. Joy is its outer expression; it is not bliss but just a reflection of bliss on the surface. Bliss is happening at the core, it vibrates your whole being, and joy arises on the surface.


So joy is a by-product of bliss; without bliss there is no joy. What people ordinarily call joy is not joy, it is something else; it is pleasure. When they say, 'I am enjoying', they are simply saying that this sensation is pleasurable, not that there is joy in it. Joy is not possible without bliss, it is a by-product of bliss. And in just the same way, cheerfulness is a by-product of joy.


Joy will arise sometimes and will disappear; cheerfulness becomes a characteristic of your personality. If joy comes again and again, again and again, then slowly slowly your personality is changed through it and it starts having a characteristic of cheerfulness; one is simply cheerful for no reason at all. Joy is happening so much again and again that it leaves traces on your face, in your eyes, in your lips, in your touch, in your vibe.


The real thing is bliss, the first by-product is joy and the second by-product is cheerfulness, but they are all joined in sananda. It is joy in all its expressions, in all its branches. And all have to be imbibed: if any one thing is missing out of these three, then you are missing one dimension of blissfulness. A really blissful person will be joyful and cheerful too. If cheerfulness is not arising that simply means that something is wrong. Maybe your surface is not in contact with your depth, your conscious mind is not in communication with your unconscious mind. Some bridge somewhere is missing, some link somewhere is broken. But whenever all bridges are functioning perfectly well, all these three things appear together. That is the perfection of joy.


Saki. It is a difficult word to translate into English but it can be understood. It is a Persian word and comes from the Sufi tradition. Literally it means 'the bartender' but that is just literally. Metaphorically it is of immense significance. It means god, it means the beloved, the one who goes on pouring wine into our being. He is the real bartender who pours juice into flowers and life into beings, who is green and red and gold in the trees, who is in the sun and is in the rivers -- that ultimate juice of being.


Life is intoxicating. People who are not intoxicated with life are simply fools, and with those fools are all the moralists, all the priests and all the scholars; they are very learned fools.


The only wisdom that I know of is the wisdom of being intoxicated. Be drunk with life and love! It is through being drunk with life and love that god arises. That is the metaphorical meaning of saki. Become a bartender!


... Next time when you come, be here for a longer period... then I will give you a few groups which will help centering. Centering is not difficult; we just have to work a little, because for the whole of our lives we are distracted from our centre. Every situation in life distracts you from yourself, so slowly slowly, you forget the way back home, you keep hanging around. The whole of life and its training is such that it helps you to go away from yourself and not close to yourself. It teaches you, it conditions you how to go away from yourself. So we have just to learn to balance it, that's all.


Once you know how to go in and how to be centred, you can be centred any moment, anywhere; in the marketplace suddenly you can become centred. Wherever you feel that you are becoming tense, just a small effort to centre and all tension disappears. You are again refreshed, again rejuvenated, again full of energy, again able to cope with life, its situations and its challenges.


Centering is a must. If you lose contact with yourself you will become more and more worried, tense and frustrated, because it is a kind of starvation. It is as if a tree has been uprooted and it has lost its roots in the ground. How long can it live? How can it live? How can it remain green? How can it bloom and be fruitful? Impossible! And that is the situation of man: he is no more rooted in his own being. That's why people look so sad, so dull, so dissipated.
			

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