---
section: Library
booktitle: "The Shadow of the Bamboo"
booktype: "Diaries"
bookcode: "BAMBOO"
dategiven: "03 April 1979 pm"
place: " in Chuang Tzu Auditorium"
chapternum: "Chapter #3"
chaptertitle: "None"
acode: "7904035"
shorttitle: "BAMBOO03"
audio: "No"
video: "No"
esttime: ""
displaytitle: "The Shadow of the Bamboo: Chapter #3"
---

```style
.sutra {
  font-style: italic;
  white-space: pre-wrap !important;
}
```
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Prem Akiko. Prem means love, akiko is the name of a famous poem. Your full name will mean: love, the poem. Life can either be prose or poetry: these are the two possibilities. If someone lives through the mind, life becomes prose, and if someone lives through the heart, life becomes poetry. When life is poetry, life is religious. When life is only prose, life is mundane, meaningless. Then one really does not live, one only vegetates, one somehow manages to drag oneself; and the life that is a drag ends in death. But the life that is poetic, a song, a dance, ends in eternity.


Love knows no death, love conquers death; love conquers time. But love is not of the mind, it is not a question of thinking: one has to live it.


Deva Yasunori. Deva means God, yasunori is the name of a famous temple. Your full name will mean: God's temple. Man is God's temple, but man is visible and God is invisible, so it is very easy to forget the invisible. It is also very easy to become too occupied with the visible, hence people are obsessed with their bodies. The obsession with the body can be of two kinds: the positive kind and the negative.


There are people who are continuously thinking of themselves as their bodies only. They live on the physical plane, they only indulge on the physical plane, they have no idea that they are more than that. These are the materialists. There is a negative obsession with the body too; these people are the so-called spiritualists. They torture the body, they starve the body, they destroy the body in every possible way, thinking that by destroying the body they will be making God happy. Both these kinds of people look diametrically opposite and yet they are the same people: their focus is on the visible.


My sannyasin has to become a third kind. He has not to be obsessed with the body in either way -- positive or negative. He has to shift his attention from the visible to the invisible.


Once we become aware of what this consciousness inside us is, the body becomes a temple. Then the consciousness is the deity and the body is the temple that the deity abides in. And that's how one becomes balanced, healthy and whole.


Anand Eva. Anand means bliss, eva means life. The birth of the word "eva" is beautiful. When God created Eve he asked Adam to name her, and he named her Hava; from Hava comes Ava, Eva, Eve. Hava means life. And Adam called her life because she was his life -- not only was she his life, she was the mother of all living beings, of the whole of humanity.


Become more and more blissful, because it is only by becoming more blissful that one becomes more alive. Life and bliss go together in a deep synchronicity. If one is more alive, one is more blissful, and vice versa too: be more blissful and you will be more alive.


Misery dissipates energy and life. The miserable person is only half alive. The miserable person is always on his deathbed. The miserable person is not dead, that's true, but he is not alive either he is in a kind of limbo. He just goes on hanging around.


To be blissful means to get into deep rapport with existence. To be blissful means to live intensely, totally, without holding anything back. Then each moment becomes so tremendously significant, each moment brings new ecstasies, and new planes of existence open their doors. The more you become committed to life, the more mysteries will be made available to you. That is the only way to earn them. The keys to the mysteries of life cannot be given to each and everybody; one has to be so total that one earns them.


So be total in whatsoever you are doing, and do it with such great joy that it is no more work: it becomes worship.


Deva Regine. Deva means divine, regine means queen -- divine queen. It is the name given for Jesus' mother, Mary: the divine queen. But each being can become the mother of Christ-consciousness. It is not a question of giving birth to a child; it is really a question of giving birth to a new consciousness. In fact that is the meaning of the virgin mother: consciousness needs nobody else -- one can give birth to one's own consciousness without any help from the outside. One can be a virgin mother as far as Christ-consciousness is concerned. But the beautiful metaphor was lost and the theologians started insisting that this w as an historical fact: that Jesus was born out of a physically virgin mother. That is nonsense, that is sheer stupidity.


But on that sheer nonsense the whole of Christianity depends. It is really surprising that all the religions of the world depend on stupid things. Two are the basic things on which Christianity depends: one is the virgin birth and the second is the resurrection.


If you take these two things away the w hole edifice of the Christian church falls down... as if only these two things are important in Christ and nothing else. His teaching is not important, his being is not important, his transformed consciousness is not important. What is important is this stupid idea of virgin birth, one; and secondly, his physical resurrection after death. And both are stupid things; they have nothing to do with the real Christ.


The real Christ has something totally different to impart to the world. The real Christ is nothing but a new consciousness completely free from the mind, a consciousness with no content, a consciousness with no thought, with no noise, a consciousness pure, simple, virgin, utterly empty.


You can also become the mother of Christ-consciousness; you have to become. That's what sannyas is all about: each one has to become pregnant with God, and each one has to give birth to himself, utterly discontinuous with the past. It has to be absolutely new, not a modified form of the old. The old has to die completely, totally, utterly, and the new has to come up, absolutely fresh. Not a chain with the past, not a continuum; there has to be a gap between the past and the new. Then Christ is born; and man is fulfilled only when Christ is born in his being.


It has nothing to do with Jesus. Jesus became Christ; you can become Christ, everybody has the intrinsic capacity to become a Christ. Not to fulfill it is to miss the whole opportunity of life.


Deva Brigitte. Deva means divine, brigitte means strength -- divine strength. God is our strength. We are nobodies without him; we are just empty shells without him, just hollow bamboos. But if he sings, we become great music, we become great songs; if he sings then the hollow bamboo becomes a flute. But the song is his, the power is his.


A sannyasin has to learn to become a medium, just a pure medium, a vehicle, a chariot for God.


You have the capacity to very easily become a chariot for God. You are already ready; just a few steps and the revolution is possible. Be delighted, rejoice.
			

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