What trusting a Guru really means ? Sadhguru

Questioner : Sadhguru, you say we should not simply believe anything, but rather experiment with life and see for ourselves. However, it seems to grow spiritually, tremendous trust in the Guru is needed. So what is the difference between the belief and trust ?

Sadhguru : Belief springs from your expectation. You have a set of rights and wrongs, goods and bads, divines and devils within you. When you say “I believe you”, you are expecting that I am going to live according to your rights and wrongs. Suppose I do something which is not within the field of your rights and wrongs, then the first thing that will happen is, you are going to come to me and say,”I believed you, and you did this”. So all that you are trying to do is, you want to mold me into your limitations. If your Guru can be contained within your limitations, then you better not go anywhere near that man because he will be of no help to you. He will solace you, he will comfort you, but this man is bondage; this man is not liberation. Trust is difference. Trust is your quality; it is not subject to anything else; it is simply there. When you say “I trust”, it means that you are not subjecting me to any particular kind of action, to any set of expectations that you have within you. When you say, “I trust”, it means’ “It does not matter what you do, I trust”. That is not falling into the framework of your limitations.

I never asked you to trust me. The very reason why I never used the word “trust” with people is because it is badly corrupted. If at all anybody here spoke about trust, it is to raise you beyond your own likes and dislikes, your own goods and bads, your own limitations. The basis of your personality are your likes and dislikes. The very feeling of “I trust you” raises you beyond this bundle of likes and dislikes,”no matter what you do, I trust you”. Trust does not mean, “If you do this, I trust you; If you do this, I don’t trust you”. That is believing, you are trying to fix the other person into your expectations. If you really want to make use of a Guru’s Presence, you must be willing to allow that Presence to overwhelm you, to overpower you, to destroy you in one way. At least for those few moments that you are with him, you should be no more yourself. Who you consider yourself to be should be absent in his Presence.

If this doesn’t happen, whatever you are talking about is of no significance. So, when people spoke about trust, this is what it meant, that you allow somebody else to enter you. If you have to allow somebody else to enter you, you have to become vulnerable. It is dangerous; you don’t know what he will do. Once he enters you, you are subject to anything, that’s always the fear, isn’t it so ? The very reason why you have built walls is, somewhere when you made yourself vulnerable, somebody did something which was not your expectation; this became a big fear and you built walls around yourself. Now, when you say, “I trust you”, you are willing to pull that wall down. Pulling that wall down means that somebody else does not have to live within the framework of your expectations. Whatever that person may do, it is okay with you. So one aspect is, the Presence of the Guru, the quality of who he is, does things to you. Another thing is, the moment you create that kind of situation that you are not bothered about what is going to happen to you, that itself is transformation.

The time frame I have with people is limited.  So I am making myself available only as a Presence, not as a person.  As a person, I am just keeping a certain face – in many ways within the framework of your expectations. If I have to use my person also as a device, then it needs much more trust, and maybe more time. People who are with me for longer periods of time find me an impossible person, which I am not with you. [Laughs] I am not yet using my person as a device with you because it needs more time, otherwise you will run away. You will definitely run away If I start using my person as a device. Only with a few people, I use my person as a device; with others, only my Presence.

See, right now you are a certain person; this personality is an unconscious creation of yours. This personality that you call “myself” is in some ways an accident, depending upon what kind of situations you have been exposed to. You took in certain impressions, and you became this kind of person. Your personality is constantly evolving, beaten around by life. Whichever way your life beats you, you will become that kind of shape and form. The situation around you are not expert sculptors; if you are being beaten around by every event that happens around you, in the end you will be a very ugly, shapeless person, that’s for sure, because it is an unconscious creation. Your personality is constantly being constructed by external situations. The way they beat you around, that is how your personality is. The one whom you call as Guru ins not a person. The whole process of self-realization means someone has transcended his personality and then he carefully crafts a personality as it is necessary for the kind of role that he wants to play.

In a limited way, on the surface, you too are building your personality to suit your activity. A being who is experiencing himself beyond limitations, does it in a very deep way. He structures every aspect of his life as it is necessary for the role that he has chosen to play; it is a conscious construction. When it is a conscious construction, it is just a device; it is not bondage anymore. Any moment, he can just pull it down. I first spoke about the Dhyanalinga in the “Wholeness Program”. This was a ninety day program with a certain group of people that we conducted in the middle of a forest. In this commited atmosphere, I started changing my personality.

Every day, they saw a new person. Some people were terrified, some of them were overjoyed, some of them were broken, some of them were made, but they saw that every day, I was building a new kind of person because I was stepping into a new role. My earlier personality could not have suddenly fulfilled that purpose, because people’s ability to experience my Presence is very limited; they mostly experience me as a person. Generally, your mind judges, “Oh, he is a good man, he is a bad man. He is a polite man; he is a generous man; he is an impolite man; he is an abrasive person”. Just in very rare moments, you are able to experience the Presence; most of the time, you are only clinging to the person. So the moment I announced the Dhayanalinga, I changed my personality completely. A few people who were deeply involved with the work just left because they said, “This is not fair; this is not the man that we came with.” I had prepared the situation, I had told them it was going to happen, but they didn’t take it as if it was really going to happen.

When it really started happening, suddenly the person that they knew, they loved and trusted, was just disappearing and a totally new person was coming up. I had warned them, “As I evolve this, many of you will leave.” They didn’t believe it, “No, we are commited. We like what you are doing. We are with you.” [Laughs] But when I started structuring a different person because I had to fulfill a completely different role, it was too shattering for them. This is happening to you in your lives, too, please see. People whom you think you love and trust, when their personality begins to change in the smallest ways, your reactions are violent, isn’t it ? So a Guru constructs his personality fully consciously the way it is necessary for this work. And even now, the way I operate has a person is very different in different places. It may be shocking for you if you see me in other kinds of situations. Suddenly you would feel,”I don’t know this man. Who is he ?” Because you have fallen into the comfort of knowing this kind of person, when you see another kind of person, you are unable to handle it.

So generally, a Guru creates his personality in such a way that people don’t know whether to love it or to hate it. He carefully crafts a personality where one moment, you think, “Yeah, I’m really in love with this man.” Next moment, you may feel completely different about him. And both of these emotions are not allowed to cross certain lines. Within those lines, you are constantly being thrashed around, so that after some time you will know, this is not a person. This is not a human being. Either he is a devil, or he must be divine.

That which is not in your experience cannot be taught to you intellectually. It can only be taught to you by taking you to a different dimension of experience. To take a person from from one dimension of experience to another dimension of experience , you need a device which is a higher level of intensity and energy. That device is what we call has Guru. The Guru-shishya relationship is on an energy basis. A Guru is touching you in a dimension where nobody else can touch you. There are many ways to move your energies to Agna. But from Agna to Sahasrar, there is no particular way to do anything; it is just a jump. It is because of this that the Guru-shishya relationship has been held as the most sacred relationship in this culture. If you have to take this jump, you need deep trust – otherwise, it is not possible.

Being is intrinsically valuable - Osho

The question : Osho, I have heard that enlightenment, or the natural state of man, is something acausal (uncaused) – it just happens. And all our endeavours to bring about awareness, to be aware, are actually taking us away from this state since they are all mind games, and these activities for self-awareness are just a “holy business”. I cannot imagine what my life would be if I gave up the search since it has permeated my life as long as I can remember. If there is no way to integrate, nothing one can do, why all this activity ? Why bother ? Yet what else is there to do ? Please comment.

Osho : It is one of the most significant question to be asked. We will have to go deep into it. It is true, absolutely true, that enlightenment is acausal; It cannot be caused by our efforts. But that does not mean that you have to cease making efforts, because then too it will not happen.

This mystery, this paradox, has to be understood deeply. The tendency of the logical mind is either to decide that enlightenment is causal so that one can make efforts to achieve it, or if it is acausal, it happens only of its own accord – then there is no need to make any efforts.

In both ways you will miss. If you think it is causal, and make efforts, you will miss, because it is not causal. If you think it is not causal, that hence there is no need to make any efforts, why bother ? You will miss again.

The reality is : you have to make all possible efforts, yet it is not going to happen through your efforts, but you will be prepared through your efforts to receive it when it happens.

It is acausal. It will happen. It is not a doing on your part. But when it happens, will you be ready to see it? That is the point, the very crux of the matter. When it happens, will you be ready to recognize it ? When it happens, will you be ready to welcome it, to open your heart to it, to receive it into your being ? Will you be ready to become a host to the guest when it knocks on your doors ?

Your efforts are not going to create enlightenment; your efforts are simply to make you more and more available to it, open to it, vulnerable to it. Your efforts are going to make a womb out of your being so you can be pregnant with it. It is going to happen from the beyond. And it is not that it is going to happen somewhere in the future – it is already happening. You are just not ready.

When it happened to Buddha, it could have happened to the whole earth, to the whole of humanity. But Buddha was ready to receive it and others were not ready to receive it. The sun rises: it will rise only for those who have eyes, it will not rise for those who are blind.

If you go to a physician, he can help – he can help you to get rid of your blindness. His medicines are not going to create the sunrise; his medicines are of no use as far as the sunrise is concerned. It happens on its own – it is already happening, happening everyday – but it never happens to a blind person or to the person who is not blind yet keeps his eyes closed.

Your efforts will only open your eyes. And this is the part of the opening of your eyes – to understand that enlightenment is acausal. But this is not your understanding, remember.

You say : “I have heard that enlightenment or the natural state of man is something acausal ….”

You have heard it. It is not going to help you – unless you start feeling that it is acausal. And how are you going to feel that it is acausal ? By making all possible efforts and failing again and again, one day suddenly the realization happens that efforts can’t make it. In that realization you don’t start thinking, “Why bother?” You don’t start thinking of stopping efforts. Efforts simply stop in that understanding. In that understanding efforts evaporate.

That’s how it happened to Gautama The Buddha. For six years he made all possible human efforts to achieve it, but because it is not an achievement he could not achieve it. And the more efforts he made, the more frustrated he became – obviously. If you don’t make any efforts for it you will not be frustrated, and when you make efforts with your total heart, it hurts to fail each time. He staked his whole life for it, and yet it was not happening. He was not holding anything back. If he had been holding anything back, then this understanding that happened to him would not have been possible – that all efforts are futile.

It happens only to those who are not holding anything back, when you have put all that you have at stake, when nothing is left behind, when you are utterly empty – you have emptied yourself totally – and it is not happening, then the understanding arises, “My efforts are futile. My efforts are ego efforts – the ego is futile. My efforts are my own mind games. The mind itself is the barrier.”

But this has to become your own experience. It is not going to help if you have heard it. You can hear great truths, but unless they arise in your own being, they are not true. A heard truth is a lie; only an experienced truth is a truth. And only the experienced truth liberates. How will you experience it ? You would like to have it without any efforts. You would Like to have it without any efforts. You would like to have it to happen as it happened to Buddha – minus those six years that preceded it.

Those six years of tremendous effort are a must. Then one day suddenly, one evening when the sun was setting, the revelation happened to him: ‘My efforts cannot take me beyond myself’. This is so natural. It is like pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings – it is utterly futile. But how is one going to know it ?

Those six long years…. And they must have looked to him like sixty years to him, because they were really painful – all kinds of ascetic practices, long fasts, torturing the body, doing all kinds of yoga exercises, many of which are just stupid, standing on your head, distorting your body, utterly ridiculous postures – he did all. Whatsoever was said to him, he followed it literally, word for word. He went to all kinds of teachers; they must have all been pseudo. Not even a single one of them was a Buddha, was yet enlightened. They gave him many strategies to work out.

If he had not been doing them perfectly well, they would have been safe. They would have told him,”Because you are not doing totally, hence you are missing.” But this was impossible. The man was so authentic, so sincere, so innocent totally, that even those pseudo teachers had to tell him, “Excuse us, forgive us – this is all we know. And you have done it all, and we cannot expect more from you. Now you have to go somewhere else. This is all we know, and now you know that this is not going to give you enlightenment – it has not given enlightenment to us either. But it is very rare to find a person like you. People come and they do it very partially. With them we can always say, ’Because you are not total, hence you are missing,’ but we cannot say this to you. Your innocence forbids it. Your totality…. We are ashamed. In fact, we ourselves have not done these practices so totally. Forgive us, and find another teacher. And if you ever find enlightenment, don’t forget us. If you ever find truth, please remember us – we are also seeking and searching. We are also blind” those teachers confessed to Buddha.

After six years of wandering, one evening, sitting silently underneath a tree, by the side of the River Niranjana, this revelation welled up within his being: that human efforts cannot help you to transcend humanity. It can only happen. It cannot be caused. But now these six years of austerity had purified him; this fire had made him gold. These six years had helped him to see the utter uselessness of the mind. Now he was ready to be silent, effortless, passive.

That night he slept with no search, not even for truth, because search creates desires, desires can be fulfilled only through effort – the search disappeared. The desires disappeared. The efforts disappeared. For the first time he slept toally relaxed – neither worldy desires tortured him nor other worldly desires. He had no dreams that night, that was the first night without dreams, because dreams are a by-product of your desires.

Buddha lived those six long years through all kinds of things like this. It is only by experiencing these things that one day one can conclude that this is all nonsense. And when it is your own realization that it is all nonsense – you need not drop it – it simply disappears.

That night he slept without dreams. And in the early morning when he opened his eyes and the last star was disappearing, something in him disappeared – the ego. He became enlightened.

This enlightenment is not something that has come from outside – it is your intrinsic nature. It has come from within. But the within and the beyond are synonymous; the within is the beyond. It is through the within that the beyond penetrates.

Then Buddha said, “Enlightenment is not an achievement – it is a gift from existence.” But those six years had prepared him to receive it.

Prepare yourself to receive it. It is acausal, but that does not mean that you have to stop all efforts. If you stop you will miss. If they stop on their own, because your understanding has penetrated so deeply that it is impossible to make any effort anymore, even if you want to, you cannot. In that state of effortless passivity you become the host and existence becomes the guest.

Overcoming Obstacles on the Path - Sadhguru

When we make an attempt to cross the threshold of where we are right now and move into other dimensions of experience, a few things gets mixed up. If you do not develop the necessary discrimination and balance within yourself, handling this mixup can lead to lots of confusion. You step into spiritual process and suddenly you don’t know where you belong. You don’t know whether you are this or that. People who don’t know any kind of spirituality, who just live their mundane life, seem to be dead sure of what they are doing. Spiritual people are always confused. [Laughs] It is good if you are confused. It means you are constantly stepping into new territory – that is why you are confused, and it is okay. If you live with the familiar forever, there will be certainty, but there will be no progress. If you are stepping into unfamiliar territory on a daily basis, you will always be confused. This confusion needs to be handled properly, productively, rather than becoming a self-defeating process.

It is doing like trapeze – when you are swinging on your own trapeze, it is fine. But when you let go and try to catch the other, that in-between space is terrible, because you are neither here nor there. This is the predicament of the people who want to explore, know, and experience other dimensions of life. They want to know the other side, but they are unwilling to release themselves from the familiar even for a moment, so the struggle becomes unnecessarily long. If you letgo of your trapeze anyway and jump, the trapeze on the other side is always in place. You could catch it, but instead you just swing and swing, you loosen the grip, or you hold it with your little finger. This is torturous.

When I talk about leaving the familiar to explore the other, it does not mean leaving physically. It does not mean you have to leave your home or office and go somewhere. It is not an external thing. It is an internal process – internally leaving things that you have been attached to , things that you have been identified with. Only because you have felt that you are not sufficient, you took this step of turning spiritual. Suppose you were just happy, absolutely fulfilled, just be eating your morning breakfast and drinking coffee, you would not have tried anything else. Somewhere, a realization came that this is not enough. You want to know something else; you want to experience something else. You want to be much bigger than who you are right now.

So when this state of mixup happens, you are neither here nor there, there will be confusion. If you are a devotee kind of person, confusion is not a problem; but such a thing is not possible if your mind questions everything. If unconditional devotion is not there, you will have to handle it the harder way, trying to make a sense of every little thing that is happening which is actually not reasonable. When you just about to reap the benefits of things that you have worked for all your life, suddenly they become meaningless. That’s not reasonable; but that’s the way it is.

So, if the spiritual process should not be painful, if it has to become a joyful process, one way is devotion – but that is out of question for most people. If that is so, the next thing you need to develop is a very keen sense of discrimination so that you are able to clearly see what is true, and what is not. Not arriving this from past experiences and conditionings of life, but out of very keen sense of discrimination. If you go into this, first of all you must have developed a razor-like intellect so that you can cut things clean and see. If you have a blunt knife, you cannot do this; it will mess up everything. It won’t give you a vision of anything.

So one of the things that you can do is to keep the intellect aside and become very devout; it will work. Or, you really sharpen the intellect to such a point that it will cut absolutely clean and give you a clear distinction of what is what. If these two things are not possible, the next possibility is that you just crank up your energy to such a pitch that none of this things matter. Your mind says something else , your emotions say something else, but your energies are so cranked up that it all doesn’t matter ……. Your mind can be wrong, you know that. Any number of times it has been wrong. It is continuing to be wrong, but your life energies cannot be wrong. Your life energies do not know any right and wrong; they know life and life alone; low pitch or high pitch, that’s all. If your energies are getting high-pitched, so high that they are almost slipping you out of the body, that’s very good. Otherwise, you must give yourself to service activity. Simply serve whatever you see has meaningful. Any one of this things, you must do, otherwise spiritual process becomes painful because there is a mix-up of realities. You are in transition from one state to another. You are neither here nor there.

You have heard of the hippie movement during the 60’s ? People wanted to break everything that was familiar and try to live their life in some other way. All conventions of society became so suffocating, they wanted to break this and do something new. In many ways very genuine people, but they did all the wrong things. They got so mixed up that they it became the most confused and tortured generation for a long time. But the longing and their sincere effort to break away from what they know and step into something that they do not know was wonderful. That generation was a tremendous possibility, if only they had a right kind of guidance. Not much of this movement happened in India, but especially in the United States, it really swept the country in a big way. When they did not know what to do and how to break their limitations, they got into alcohol, drugs and all kinds of things. One of the reasons was, to take away distinction. So, probably for the first time, men and women started dressing in a similar ways.

The hippie couple like this came to the Indian embassy in New York because India was one of the big destinations at that time. Because everyone was after mukti, nirvana, or very cheap hash, whatever, lots of people queued up to come to India because India was a promise of something else, they thought. So they came to the Indian Embassy where Shankaran Pillai was a concerned officer. He looked at this couple, couldn’t make out which is a man and which the woman. Then he asked, “Which one of you has a menstrual cycle ?” The man said “No man, I got a Honda”.

So stepping into spiritual process is like that – things get mixed up. When things get mixed up, don’t step back. What you need is a little more discrimination. If you step back, again you will fall back into the familiar, that is no good. After having made the effort to step into the unfamiliar, there is no point in stepping back into the familiar; that’s a backward step. You just need more discrimination, more vision to see things clearly; which needs sadhana, which needs some work. The ability to see life the way it is does not come free. You have to do the necessary things to get the discrimination. It won’t happen by accident.

Is it difficult ? It is not difficult. But if doing the right things is very difficult for you – yes, it is. Otherwise, if you are capable of joyfully doing whatever you recognize as the right thing to produce results, then it is not difficult. Simply sitting here without doing anything for the next two hours – is it very difficult ? If that is difficult , then sadhana is difficult. If you can simply sit for the next two hours without doing anything, no matter what is happening with your mind, no matter what is happening in the world, then sadhana is very simple and easy.

I see many of you going through these struggles and confusions. Some of you step back and struggle. Some of you are cursing me. “Before he came, we were fine. He came and confused all the hell out of us “. [Laughs] Because I’m not one of those sweet ones who have come to please you, to become popular with you. There is a saying in Telugu for people who go on hesitating to do things; they won’t take a drastic, decisive step when it is necessary. They say, these are the kind of people who want to do chicken masala, but every day, they go and ask the chicken, “Shall I grind the masala today?” The chicken will anyway say, “No, not today.”

I am not one of those. I cut the chicken and then grind the masala. [Laughs] If you are unwilling to cut up what is familiar and see the basis why you are inclined towards it, you will not step into the unfamiliar. Unless you begin to see the hollowness of where you are right now, you will not begin to seek something else strongly. If the longing is not strong, you will hang in between forever, in limbo. The longing will not become strong unless we open up our lives, dissect everything and see what it is; what it is worth, and what it is not worth. It is not about making it meaningless. It is not about making it ridiculous. Not glorifying it, not making it filthy, just seeing everything the way it is. If you see everything the way it is, you will see there is no point in stopping in one place, you must move; this will become very clear.

Only because you decorate your present situations with all kinds of sweet emotions, you cannot see them the way they are. This is not about demeaning your present existence. This is about seeing the limitation of where you are so that you can move to the next step of life.

Listen to your consciousness, not conscience. - Osho

Questioner : How to develop my conscience ?

There is no need to develop a conscience at all. What is needed is consciousness, not conscience. Conscience is a pseudo thing. Conscience is created in you by the society. It is a subtle method of slavery. The society teaches you what is right and what is wrong. And it starts teaching the child before the child is aware, before the child can decide on his own what is right and what is wrong, before the child is even conscious of what is happening to him, before the child is even awake. In a kind of sleep, in a kind of dream, the child lives in the beginning. In the mother’s womb the child sleeps for twenty four hours. Then after the birth he sleeps for twenty-three hours, twenty-two hours, twenty-one hours, twenty hours……….slowly, slowly. But he remains in a kind of limbo, neither awake not asleep. The child cannot make any distinction between what is real and what is unreal. And we start teaching the child what is right and what is wrong – we are conditioning him. We are conditioning him according to our ideas. All these ideas – from parents, from priests, teachers, politicians, saints – all these ideas jumble together inside him. They become his conscience.

And because of this conscience he will never be able to grow consciousness – because conscience is a pseudo consciousness. And if you are satisfied with the pseudo you will never even think of the real. It is very deceptive; the way we have been bringing up children is very deceptive. It is ugly, it is violent, it is against humanity.

That’s why millions of people live without any consciousness. Before they could have grown into consciousness, we gave them pseudo toys to play with. And their whole lives they think this is all that is needed to live a good life. And their whole life they will be rewarded if they follow the conscience, and they will be punished if they don’t follow the conscience.

From the outside they will be punished and rewarded, and from the inside also. Whenever you do something that your conscience says is wrong, you feel guilty, you suffer, you feel inner pain. You are afraid, you are trembling; it creates anxiety. And the fear about heaven, that you may lose heaven, and the fear of hell, that you may fall into hell….. with great inventiveness your saints have painted the joys of heaven and the miseries of hell.

This is conscience. Conscience is artificial, arbitrary. Conscience is needed because the society does not want you to be intelligent. Hence rather than making you intelligent, it gives you fixed rules of behavior: do this, don’t do that.

The day humanity drops this whole nonsense of conscience and starts helping children to grow their consciousness will be the greatest day, will be the real birth of humanity, a new human being , a new earth. Then we will help the child to become more intelligent, so whenever a problem arises the child has enough intelligence to encounter it, to face it, to respond to it. Why should one need any conscience? Intelligence is enough, consciousness is enough.

Conciousness will make you capable of responding to the present immediately, and your response will be true. Conscience is old, and the situation is always new – and your conscience is always old. There is no meeting ground. You go on responding according to the conscience cultivated in you by the society, forced into you by the society, conditioned in you by the society – and situation is totally different.

One of my friends went to Tibet. He is a very religious Brahmin, very orthodox. He went there to study Buddhist scriptures, but he could not stay in Tibet – he had to come back as quickly as possible. The journey was simply a sheer wastage, an unnecessary trouble, because to go into Tibet is not easy.

And the problem was that from his very childhood he had been taught to take a cold bath before the sun rises. Now to take a cold bath in Tibet before the sun rises……. He was telling me that it was impossible. And if he did not take the cold bath before sunrise, the whole day he would feel guilty. The society has taught him that without taking a cold bath in the morning, you cannot pray. Your prayer is useless. And without prayer, you cannot eat anything. So he was taking cold bath in the morning, and that was dangerous to life.

In Tibetan scriptures it is said that once a year it is a must that one should take a bath. Once a few Tibetan lamas came to stay with me, and those were the days when Maneesha was not there and Radha was not there to smell these people – and I suffered so much.

For those few, seven, eight days that they stayed in my house, I was almost out of house. Any excuse and I would escape from the house – the whole house was stinking, because they would not take bath. And a hot summer in India….and they would not take any bath. They were following their conscience.

It has been a difficult thing for me to talk to Jain monks. They used to come to see me; it was so difficult to talk with them – because they don’t cleanse their mouths, rinse their mouths, they don’t clean their teeth. That is not allowed. That is thought to be a part of beautifying the body – and how can a jaina monk beautify the body? He is so dead set against it.

Just to talk to them is so difficult – they have such bad breath. It is bound to be so. And the jaina monks are not allowed to take a bath either, because why should you be so careful about your body? The anti-body attitude. Their bodies stink, their mouth stinks.

One jaina nun became so much impressed by me and became so much interested in me that I told her,” You can atleast take a sponge bath – nobody will know. Just a wet towel, you can……and nobody will ever know that you have taken the bath.”

The idea appealed to her. She took one sponge bath, felt very good and very bad too. She told me, “It feels very good and I feel fresh, but it hurts inside that I have commited a sin.”

Do you ever think when you take a bath that you have commited a sin? And she had not even taken a full bath – just a sponge bath. But she felt so guilty that she had to fast for three days as repentance.

This is conscience. Conscience goes on making you a fool. Situations change, but the conscience cannot change, it cannot grow – conscience remains static. You go on living with ideas that were given to you in your childhood, by your ignorant parents, ignorant teachers. And you will llive according to them, and you will suffer much. And your response will never be true because it will never fit with the situation. You will always be lagging behind.

There is no need to develop conscience. The need is to drop the conscience and develop consciousness. Drop all that you have been taught by others, and start living on your own and searching and seeking…… Yes, in the beginning it will be difficult because you won’t have any map. The map is contained by the conscience. You will have to move without the map, you will have to move into uncharted, with no guidelines. Cowards cannot move without guidelines; cowards cannot move without maps. And when you move with maps and guidelines, you are not really entering into new territory, into new realms – you are going in circles. You go moving into known; you never take a jump into the unknown. It is only courage that can drop conscience.

Consciousness is neither Christian nor Hindu nor Mohammedan – it is simply consciousness. Conscience divides people, consciousness unites. What is the need of carrying a guide with you? Consciousness is enough. Whenever a certain need arises, your consciousness will respond. You have a mirror, you will reflect it. And the answer will be spontaneous. Life brings challenges, you bring consciousness to those challenges. And meditation is a way of dropping conscience and moving into consciousness.

The miracle is: if you can drop conscience, consciousness arises on its own – because consciousness is a natural phenomenon. You are born with it; just the conscience has become a hard crust around it and is not allowing its flow. Everything starts to fall in harmony with existence. And to be in harmony with existence is to be right – not to be in harmony with existence is wrong.

Nowhere to go - Sadhguru

Questioner : After years of doing sadhana, I still feel I might not be getting anywhere. What to do ?

Sadhguru : I doesn’t matter how many years of Sadhana you do, you will not get anywhere. Not that you might not, you will not because the idea of doing sadhana is not to go somewhere. The idea of doing sadhana is to come to a state where you can simply be here. To understand and know that what is here is everywhere, what is not here is nowhere. So, getting beyond the need to go somewhere – that is sadhana. Because there is nowhere to go. If you do not know how to be here and now, you will not know how to be anywhere. There is only here, there is only now; the rest is all in your head. So, sadhana is to bring you to a state where atleast for some period of time in the day, just sitting is good enough. Everything is that is worth knowing is here and now, and that is the only place you can be. If you live, you are here and now ; if you die you are still here and now. You cannot go anywhere. There is nowhere to go.

Sadhana is a device; it is a method to bring you to a certain level of maturity where the need to go somewhere is gone. What is why people steeped in sadhana are not moving anywhere. If you travel around the world, you will still not know whether the world is flat or round, forget about the intricacies of life. But if you are truly here, everything that is worth knowing is right here, because you cannot perceive anything on the outside. It doesn’t matter if you sit here or in the Himalayas or Africa or the United States or South Pole or North Pole. Maybe certain atmospheres are supportive, certain atmospheres are not supportive, that is a different thing – but essentially, you can only experience what happens within you.

So, wherever you go, only this is there. You know, these mountains here are called Velliangiri ; that means “White Mountian”. You can make them the Himalayas – that is what it means. We also call them “Kailash of the South”. If you sit here long enough or involved enough, they will become the Kailash; you don’t need to make the journey. You may make the journey and still not know anything. You may just sit here and know everything, because you can only experience what happens within you. You cannot experience what happens in the mountain; you cannot experience what happens in the sky; you cannot experience what happens anywhere; you can only experience what happens within you.

You can sit here, look at somebody, and experience love. You can close your eyes, just think about somebody, and experience love, isn’t it ? So, you can either stimulate it from outside or simulate it from inside, both are possible. Either you are on “push-start” or “self-start”. [Laughter] It is only a technology difference. Either you are a current machine or a past machine. You look at the moon, you look at the earth, you close your eyes, you open your eyes – still what is happening within you is all that is happening to you; nothing more, nothing less.

So, sadhana is to bring yourself to that level of maturity to simply see, it does not matter what you do, it does not matter whether you climb the peak or sit in the valley, it does not matter whether you are successful or not in the world, it does not matter whether you are well-known or not, it does not matter if you are eating whatever you dream of or drink kanji, it is just the way you experience it. This is not a trap; this is a beauty of life. There is really nowhere to go. You can sit here and be blissful, ecstatic; you can sit here and be miserable. You have a whole range of choice. You can sit here and think,”This is the most tortuorous moment in my life”. Life has not put any bondage upon you. Bondage is all your making. Existence has left you free, absolutely free. You can sit here and that’s it. Nothing needs to happen; still you can go through life in a most wondrous way because of what you do within yourself. Or you can go all over the place and do all kinds of things, and still go through life in an utterly miserable way. Both are your making.

So, sadhana is that blessed process through which you realize this, that there is nowhere to go. When the need to go stops, your sadhana is successful; then you just sit. Sitting need not necessarily mean you are physically sitting in one place. It is just that the itch to go into this and that is gone. If you sit, you are fine ; if you run, you are fine; if you fly, you are fine; if you walk also, you are fine. Wherever you are, you are just fine. Once the itch is gone, you are at ease. Once you are at ease, you don’t have to do anything. Just a little bit of waiting, that’s all. Only if you are in love, you can wait, because when you are in love with somebody, you are feeling emotionally pleasant. Love creates a lot of mental anxiesty because that is your idea of concern. So your mind is getting unpleasant, but your emotion is pleasant – and still it is worthwhile.

If you are irritated, agitated, frustrated, or angry, you cannot wait because you are unpleasant. Depending upon the type of karmic substance you have and the kind of active and dynamic help that you get from outside, the period of waiting may alter. It maybe a few moments, a few years, whatever, but just sitting and waiting. When your insides are pleasant, waiting for a few years is not a big deal. You just wait.

Osho, is it time I should become a sannyasin ?

It is already late! You have already waited too long. I have known you for years, you have known me for years. For what are you waiting ? The meeting should happen now. Still you are asking: “Is it time that I should become a sannyasin ?”

Are you dead? If you have any life in you, then this is the time. Now is the time. Remember Kabir(A mystic) was saying: Now wake up – wake up in the now, wake up here! Don’t postpone.

Is it not time to be getting home now ? You have waited already too long, too many lives. Sannyas is nothing but a passionate jump into the enquiry for the truth, a passionate search from where we come and to where we are going and who we are. That’s what sannyas is all about.

But you seem to be almost in a kind of sleep, that’s how everybody else is. The worldly dreams still seem to be important to you, hence the question. The world still seems to intoxicate you; money, power, prestige, are still haunting you. And you cannot be a sannyasin unless you are utterly frustrated with the world. And remember, I am not teaching escapism from the world; I teach transcendence, not escape. Be in the world, but don’t be of it.

A sannyasin is a person who lives in the world but lives meditatively, and meditation creates a distance. Then you can go on doing all kind of things but you don’t become intoxicated, you don’t become identified with them. To live in awareness, without any intoxication with money, power, prestige, is the way of a sannyasin.

You have fallen many many times. Are you not yet frustrated ? Are you not yet finished with the world? Are you still carrying some hope deep down in your heart? Are you still expecting that the world is going to deliver something to you ? It has never happened – to no one has it happened. And it is not going to happen to you.

The world only promises, it never delivers the goods. That’s its illusoriness; that’s why in the east we call it maya. Maya does not mean that it is not there – it is very much there, but it only promises. It never gives anything.

I have heard a story:

A man worshipped for many many years – he must have tortured God as much as possible. Morning, afternoon, evening, he was praying and praying and crying and weeping. And, finally, God has to appear, and he said,”What do you want? Be finished! Just take it and forgive me and forget all about me.”

And the man said,”I want something, a power, so that whatsoever I need is immediately fulfilled.”

So God gave him a box, a golden box and told him,”Whenever you are in need you can ask. Whatsoever you ask, the box will immediately give it to you.”

The man forgot all about God, he even to forgot to thank him. God waited a little, but the man was no more interested in him. He was looking at the box and he started asking,”Give me ten thousand rupees!” Suddenly ten thousand rupees appeared, and he was very happy.

And it continued: whatsoever he wanted used to come out of the box. Then one day, one sadhu – a wandering monk, also had a box – bigger than the man’s – exactly the same shape. The man became interested. He said, ”What is this?” The sadhu said,”This is a magic box. You ask anything, it gives you double.”

“Double?” The man asked, “If I ask ten thousand rupees,”. He said, “It gives twenty thousand!”.

He fell at the feet of the monk and said,”You are a monk, you have renounced the world – can’t you exchange? I have a small box. It gives only whatsoever you ask.” So they changed the boxes. It was late at night, so the amn thought, “In the morning , I will try out this new box”.

And in the morning he tried; he asked for ten thousand rupees…. And the box said,”Why not twenty thousand?”
And the man said,”Okay, twenty thousand.” And the box said,”Why not forty thousand?”
And the man said, “Okay , forty thousand.”
And the box said , “Why not eighty thousand?”

Then he became afraid, because nothing was coming out. He rushed to see the monk, but he had left; he had disappeared in the night.

In the East, we have called the world maya, illusory – it is like that box of the monk. You ask anything and it says, “Okay, you can have double.” But it never delivers any goods; it only promises. The world is almost like a politician – they promise but they never fulfill.

Are you not yet finished? Have you not seen it happening many times? Each time you are living an illusion, hoping, dreaming; sooner or later disillusion comes in, frustration comes in. But rather than seeing the reality of the world, you immediately jump on another illusion, you immediately start dreaming again.

Sannyas is seeing the reality of the world, that it never fulfills, that it cannot fulfill, that it is beyond its capacity to fulfill….. One turns in. One has been a beggar begging from this door to that door; when one turns in, begging disappears – one becomes an emperor. Then all is yours.

And you need not even ask for it – it is simply yours. This whole existence is yours, its whole beauty, its whole splendor, its starry nights, its sunsets and sunrises, its flowers and birds – all is yours. Not in the sense that you possess it, but in the sense that you can enjoy it.

A sannyasin learns how to enjoy, and the worldly man learns only how to possess. Remember these two things, they are basic. The worldly man only thinks of how to possess more – he never enjoys because he is concerned with possessing more and more and more. The sannyasin enjoys. Whatsoever he has he enjoys – and he enjoys the whole existence which need not be possessed.

Do you think first you have to possess the starry night, then you will enjoy it? Do you think first you have to possess all the birds, then you will enjoy their songs? This existence need not be possessed. And you can still enjoy. It is yours if you want to enjoy; it is not yours if you want to possess. To possess it is aggressive; it is aggression on existence. To enjoy it is prayerful.

Are you a seeker NOW ?

Questioner : Sadhguru, what should be the foremost quality of the seeker ?

Sadhguru : If you are a genuine seeker, that’s all. If seeking is the only quality you have, that is definitely the most important thing. Most of the seekers are only off-and-on seekers. In 24 hours, how many of you are even conscious of your seeking, and how many moments? “No, No, I attended all the programs, all the three. I also did 55 days of Hatha Yoga.” [Laughs] What you did yesterday is not the point. This happened……Charles.M.Schwab, who became one of the big steel magnets on the planet at one time (before the Mittals came), before he stood on his own feet, was working for Andrew Carnagie, another great entrepreneur. One day he sent a telegram to Carnagie, saying, “Yesterday, we broke all records.” So immediately, Carnegie sent back a message, “But what you are doing today?” [Laughs]

That’s all I am asking you – what are you doing today ? “No, I attended Isha Yoga, I did Bhava Spandana, I did Samyama, five Samyamas.” All that is fine, but what are you doing today ? That’s my question. People think, “Sadhguru……no compassion in him. It doesn’t matter what we have done, once again he is asking,’What have you done today?” Because if you are a seeker, what you were yesterday doesn’t mean anything to you. “What have you done today?” is the whole thing. The psychological survives, nourishes itself and flourishes on the past. The existential is of the now.

So unless you are truly concerned about what you are doing today, how you are right now, are you still a seeker ? “I have been a seeker for 10 years” – That doesn’t mean anything. Are you a seeker now ? Because the existential is only now ; the rest is all psychological. I see a lot of past seekers. They have been seekers for 25 years, 30 years – veterans. What to do with that ? Only if somebody is hungry now, you can serve them food, isn’t it ? If somebody is alive now, you can feed them. Somebody was – what can you do with them ? So if your seeking is in the past tense, it doesn’t mean anything. Are you a seeker now, right now ? If you are, that is what it means most to me because only then I can do something with you; if you are a past seeker, we are just neighbours. If you are a seeker now, I have something to do with you right now.