---
section: Library
booktitle: "Believing the Impossible Before Breakfast"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "BELIEV"
dategiven: "08 February 1978 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #8"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "7802085"
shorttitle: "BELIEV08"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "Believing the Impossible Before Breakfast: Chapter #8"
---

```style
.sutra {
  font-style: italic;
  white-space: pre-wrap !important;
}
```
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Bodhi means awareness, intelligence, meditativeness, enlightenment. It is one of the most potential words, it has many aspects to it. The word 'buddha' comes from bodhi; because he attained bodhi he is called Buddha. And that has to be your life's work. Nothing less than that can ever satisfy a man.


Only in Buddhahood is there contentment; all other forms of contentment are just consolations, just comforts at the most, illusions created by the mind. To live constantly in discontent is so painful that the mind creates illusions of contentment; those illusions keep people going, they help people. If you take away all the illusions a person will not have any reason to live for even a single moment more. They are needed. In unawareness illusions are a must, because through illusions we create pseudo meanings in life, and naturally until the real has happened we have to go on creating pseudo meaning. When a person becomes fed up with one pseudo meaning he creates another. He becomes fed up with money, he moves into politics; he gets fed up with politics, he starts moving into something else. Even the so-called religion is nothing but a subtle illusion.


The real religion has nothing to do with so-called religions -- Christianity, Hinduism, Islam. The real religion is the shattering of all illusions. It is to live in discontent, in deep suffering, in utter pain, and to search for the real thing. The search is possible only if you recognise the real pain of life and you don't go on taking tranquillisers. And there are so many psychological painkillers; they are devices of human beings. Just to avoid the discontent, the pain, the meaninglessness of life, the emptiness of life, we fill it with great illusions. It is a make-believe, but it cannot last for a long time; sooner or later one illusion wears out. And you know from the very beginning that you are creating it: you become fed up. You become fed up with one woman, you search for another and then for another. We just go on substituting new illusions for the old and we call it life. It is moving in a circle: you never go anywhere.


The day you see what you have been doing to your life, the day you see the pain of it, the anguish, the agony, and you don't try to take any painkillers, you live in that agony, then you are moving towards the real. Only that agony can lead you towards the real: that agony will push you to find something which can destroy the agony and can bring ecstasy. Avoid the pseudo illusions. The path is of great pain and only a few attain. That's why only a few attain, because in the first place people can't start out on it; in the first place they can't accept the pain of life, but that pain is the source of all growth.


So bodhi means awareness of all that you are and of all that your world is. Seeing the naked truth of it all, not avoiding, not escaping, looking into it through and through: that is bodhi, the beginning of intelligence, the beginning of mindfulness, the beginning of awareness.


This is the first step, and the last step becomes Buddhahood: when one starts living with that which is and not for a single moment creates a dream to avoid it. Then one day, the opening. The very pain of life becomes the cause for life's opening. Awareness is the path of great agony, but the greater the agony, the greater is the possibility for the ecstasy.
And deva means divine; bodhideva means divine awareness.


Dhyana means meditation, and mudra means a gesture -- a gesture of meditation. Meditation is a gesture of receptivity, a gesture of welcome, a gesture of let-go, a gesture of surrendering to reality. It is the beginning of non-aggressiveness.


The mind is aggressive: aggressive for money, aggressive for power and even aggressive for god. Aggressiveness can be forgiven as far as money and power are concerned because they are worthless things. But as far as higher things are concerned -- love, prayer, meditation, god -- one cannot be aggressive, because they cannot be done; they have to be received, accepted. They cannot be brought, they come. They are not within our hands: we can only open and receive them. We can remain closed and can miss them, but there is no way to manipulate or manufacture them. So only the non-aggressive mind attains to higher kinds of things.


This is the meaning of your name: become a gesture of passive receptivity, just a womb, ready to be impregnated by god... waiting, welcoming, praying, but in no way searching, seeking. There should be no effort to conquer, but on the contrary a prayer that you should be conquered. In your defeat is your victory; when you are utterly surrendered, you have arrived. And you need not go anywhere: all that is needed comes to you.
This trust is the gesture of meditation.


[A sannyasin says that he had a nervous breakdown last year and is not particularly anxious to have another. Osho suggests that what he needs is not catharsis but a slowing down. He should do everything very slowly -- eating, walking, talking, meditating.


The whole of the West is on the verge of a breakdown, Osho says. Speed has become a god. The speedier you are, the better you are thought to be. Be lazy! make it your style.]


[A visitor is unsure whether or not to take sannyas. Osho tells her her heart is absolutely ready.


She replies: I have worked with another teacher but I have been very drawn to you for a while.]


No, no, it's there, that something just on the verge... a great leap ahead. The heart is ready; just the head is a little hesitant. But the head is always hesitant, it is a coward. It always hesitates; if one leaves the head to decide then nothing will ever be done. It is inconclusive: it only pretends that it can come to conclusions, it never does. Whenever you conclude, you conclude from the heart. This is something very strange: the head argues and the heart concludes. The heart never argues and the head never concludes; they are two different processes. Ordinarily people think that the conclusion comes out of the argumentation. In fact they are completely different; they are parallel lines which never meet. All conclusions from the head are false. It is really the head pretending 'This is my conclusion'; the conclusion has been taken by the heart. First the heart takes it, then the head pretends that this is its conclusion, mm? -- just to keep face, so the impotency is not exposed.


The heart is ready! And every day is a transition day, every moment is transitory, because every moment we are growing.


Don't let that debar you, that you have been working with a teacher; one has to work with many teachers. Whenever the need, a teacher comes into your life. Needs change, then teachers change. But I am not a teacher.


So once you are trapped by me, you are trapped! (she laughs) Then you are finished; it becomes a full-stop in your life. I have nothing to teach; I am just to transform. Teaching is done by those who don't know how to transform people; it is a poor substitute. Once you allow me, I simply start destroying you and creating the new person. Sannyas is nothing but a gesture from your side that you are ready and you will not prevent me, that's all. That is the meaning of sannyas, that now you say yes to me, you give me a blank check, that's all. Then whatsoever I write, goes!


[She says: I can see much benefit in being here and being able to be with you, and the contact. I find it difficult to know how, when I leave, how this contact... ]


Don't be worried about the future. Mm? don't be worried about the future; everything is taken care of. It is not only your question; I have thousands of disciples all over the world and I am working on them. They are continuously related to me; the space makes no difference. Once the hearts are related then nothing makes any difference; space, time, even life, death -- nothing makes any difference. Once two hearts are welded together, then even if I leave my body or you leave your body, it doesn't make much difference. Sometimes it becomes even easier without the body, because the body is always a hindrance. And sometimes being far away you feel closer to me because the heart longs much, thinks much, remembers much. When you are close here, you start taking me for granted.


So that is not to be worried about; wherever you are, I will be available. The only essential thing is that you have to become available to me.


Prem means love, and sharda is the name of the goddess of wisdom -- goddess of love and wisdom; that will be the full meaning of the name. Love is wisdom, remember: there is no other wisdom. Only love knows, only love can know, only love has the capacity to know.


This is the age when love can become wisdom. When one is young it is very difficult to understand that love can be wisdom because love is more earthly. In a young man love is more of lust, more earthly, rooted in the body; it is too mixed up with passion and desire. As you grow old, love also grows mature.


Children have one kind of love which is that of need, of dependence: they love you because you support them in their survival. Their love is only a kind of thankfulness, a gratitude. Because they cannot survive without you, they love you. Their love is a kind of bargain, a survival measure.


Then there is another kind of love when one is a little older. It is passion, it is unconscious desire; it is a kind of possession. One is no more oneself; one is simply possessed by certain unknown energies, and they drive one. The love of a young man has a drive in it; the love of a child has a need in it. The child wants to get, the young man wants to give.


The moment you grow older, when both the loves have passed -- the child is no more there and the young man is no more -- then love is neither of need nor of passion. It has a very different attitude, a great purity: it is simply love. So only old people know what love is. Only they can know because they have passed through all the turmoils of life; everything has disappeared but love remains. That love is wisdom. That love is the door to the god, to the divine.


Soma means the moon, and ananda means bliss -- moon bliss. In the East we categorise bliss in two ways: one is sun bliss -- it comes out of passion, it is sexual, it is hot; another is moon bliss -- it is cool, it has no fever in it, it is as cool as the moon. And when bliss is cool, it is eternal. When bliss is a fever you can only have it for a moment or two because you cannot remain in that feverish state for long; it will drive you mad.


So sun bliss happens only momentarily. That's what happens in a sexual orgasm: it is a sun bliss. For a moment, there is an intensity, a peak, but then it is gone and you are left in darkness, you are left in a kind of sadness. The valley is darker now because you have seen the peak. You hanker for the peak, and the peak is never more than for the moment. It is non-feverish, it is not like a peak, it is very plain ground. Moon bliss has the quality of eternity in it.


In the East coolness has a significance that western languages cannot understand, and naturally so. In England, a good reception is called a 'warm reception'; in India (chuckling) we cannot call it a warm reception. There is not a single word which can be used as a translation for warm reception, because a warm reception will not be a reception at all! In English, just as there is a word like warmth there is a word 'coolth'. It has existed for four hundred years but it exists only in big dictionaries. Nobody uses it, it is out of use; it has never been used. Warmth is known but coolth is not known at all, because of the climate. The Tibetans have a very warm heaven and the Indians have a hot hell. The Indian heaven is very cool, it has to be.


So moon bliss is cool bliss. Ordinarily we cannot understand cool bliss, we cannot understand cool love; we understand only hot love, but hot love is nothing compared to cool love. And cool love is not cold love, it is just non-feverish, it has no passion in it; it has immense compassion in it but no passion.


So this has to be your search: somananda -- moon bliss. You have to seek and search for a kind of bliss which can become a continuity in you, which need not come and go, which becomes your very way of life, which becomes your breathing, your heartbeat, which is with you wherever you are. And I will help you to grow it. Everybody has the capacity and the potential; just a little work is needed on it.

[A sannyasin asks: Would you tell me my chief characteristic?]


Mm, come here! Come close and put your hands towards me. Just look at my hand, and if anything starts happening in the body, allow it, but go on looking at my hand wherever I move it.


... You have a good characteristic: it is love, mm? So remember it, because love can create great trouble and can create great joy also. One has to be very very alert, because love is our basic chemistry. If one is alert about one's love energy, then everything goes right. The characteristic is very good, but one has to be very alert about love.


Always love something higher than yourself and you will never be in trouble; always love something bigger than yourself. People tend to love something lower than themselves, something smaller than themselves. You can control the smaller, you can dominate the smaller, and you can feel very good with the inferior because you look superior -- then the ego is fulfilled. And once you start creating ego out of your love, then you are bound for hell.


Love something higher, something bigger, something in which you will be lost and which you cannot control; you can only be possessed by it but you cannot possess it. Then the ego disappears, and when love is without the ego, it is prayer.
			

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