Osho,
What are you preparing us, your sannyasins, for?

“I am preparing my sannyasins for everything and nothing. The second is more important. The first is only a preparation for the second. ‘Everything’ includes everything that is necessary for a person to get to his being, to be fulfilled, to be contented, to be in that ultimate state where there is no desire, no need; where one is sufficient unto oneself. That blessed state is the state of nothingness.

“Everything that is needed to reach nothingness implies a few fundamentals.

The first fundamental is to be a rebel.

“All the religions destroy the potential of rebellion in man. Obviously – because to teach rebellion means to teach those people to rebel against tradition, against convention, against society, against religion; and these are their vested interests. Rebellion has to be absolutely slaughtered. But the moment the spirit of rebellion dies in a man, man lives only a posthumous existence – because the spirit of rebellion is your real spirit.

“All the religions have done just the opposite.

They teach you to believe; I teach you to doubt. They teach you to have faith; I teach you to inquire.

“They give you everything ready-made; I am telling you that unless you attain it by your own effort it is absolutely useless.

“A God that is handed over to you is worth nothing. To simply imbibe like a parrot a holy scripture that comes through tradition is suicidal. You are poisoning yourself because the more knowledgeable you become, the less is the possibility for you to seek, search and find.

“Once you get this stupid idea that you know already, the question of inquiry does not arise.

The question of inquiry arises only when you feel that you know nothing.

“But no religion lets you know that you know nothing. They go on forcing knowledge, catechisms, doctrines, dogmas on you. They are stuffing your mind with all kinds of empty words. A word is always empty unless it contains your experience.

“My word cannot be real nourishment to you. It will be empty – it is only the container. And the content? There is no way to convey the content. I can pass you the container, the word, but how can I pass you my experience which is always left behind? The word goes to you and I see an empty, dead word in your hand. The thing that I wanted to express, to convey, to transfer, is left behind; it never leaves my being. Hence, truth is inexpressible.

Only idiots go on talking about truth. And they believe that what they are saying is true.

“They are only saying yakkety-yakkety-yak, and nothing else. They are chatterboxes, but they can believe that they are transferring something to you because they themselves don’t have anything other than the word. So they feel that they have transferred something.

“A man who knows can never feel that it is possible to transfer truth. Yes, he can inspire you to inquire, but he cannot transfer to you the truth itself.

So the first thing is the spirit of rebellion – which implies doubt, skepticism, inquiry.

“It needs tremendous courage because you will be going against all, all those who are in power; the politicians, the priests, the super-rich, the pedagogues in the universities are all in powerful positions.

“Your effort to inquire is a declaration against all of them, because they are saying, ‘Truth has been found by Jesus Christ; you need not worry about it. Simply believe in Jesus Christ.’ Now this is as stupid as somebody saying, ‘The theory of relativity has been discovered by Albert Einstein. You need not worry about the theory of relativity – simply have faith in Albert Einstein and everything is okay.’ Do you think by having faith in Albert Einstein you will understand anything about the theory of relativity? What does your faith in Einstein have to do with the theory of relativity? They are not related at all to each other.

“The same is the case with Jesus, Krishna, Zarathustra, Buddha, Mohammed. It is not possible for you to know what Jesus knows, just by having faith in Jesus. In the first place, how do you know that he knows? In the second place, how can you destroy the skepticism which is born in you from your very birth?

Faith is being taught; doubt is your natural capacity.

“Existence gives you the quality of doubt and the vested interests destroy that quality and cover it with beliefs. Beliefs are in their favor, not in your favor.

“I am a little bit crazy because I am speaking against my own profession, but I can’t help it.

I could have become a world teacher with millions of followers if I had not been crazy enough to start telling you the truth.

“The truth is that all the vested interests are against you: your individuality, your nature, your potentiality. They have their ideas, their expectations, and they want you to fulfill their ideas. They want you to become just puppets in their hands. And the more you behave like a puppet, the more respectable you will be….

To have the spirit of rebellion, all that you need is guts; and you have them.

“You have simply forgotten about them. Every individual is born with tremendous courage. Nature is not partial in that it gives courage to Alexander the Great and does not give you courage; it is not so. As far as nature is concerned it is absolutely communist. Communists are not communists, but existence is absolutely communist. It has no categories: it does not make courageous people and cowardly people. No, it simply creates courageous people.

Cowardliness is created by those who want to remain in power forever. They create the cowards, because only the cowards will not rebel.

“It is very easy: in thousands of years they have found all the tactics. They have become immensely crafty. They have found every possible way to weaken you, to destroy the very idea of being a rebel. To make you a coward they have created a hell – which exists nowhere. But from the very childhood you are programmed that if you do certain things you will suffer in hell….

“From your very childhood every religion is creating fear in you.

And the other side of the fear is greed. They are both created simultaneously, they are not two things.

“On one hand fear is created: if you do a certain thing you will be punished, and the punishment is made as exaggerated as possible. If you look at the ideas of all the religions about hell, you will be surprised. These scriptures were written by great saints, and I have always wondered whether these people were saints or some kind of sadists, because even to imagine all those tortures you need the mind of a sadist. You must be somehow enjoying the imagination….

My work with my sannyasins is of deprogramming.

“There are, in America, psychologists who call themselves deprogrammers. They are not – they are reprogrammers. If some parents find their children moving into some religion other than their own, even parents are known to kidnap their children. Something unknown in the whole history of man is happening today – parents are kidnapping their own children from the Moonies, from the Hare Krishna people, and taking them to psychologists who are pretending to be deprogrammers. What they actually do is not deprogramming, it is reprogramming. They erase the effect and the program of the Moonies; up to that point it’s true they are deprogramming. But then they reprogram the person to Christianity if he belongs to Christian parents, or to Judaism if he belongs to Jewish parents. This is reprogramming.

Those psychologists are in the service of vested interests. They are criminals.

“The child was trying to escape somehow from a prison; of course he was getting into another, but at least that one was new, something to explore. At least it was not as rotten as the old. The old was just a dilapidated building ready to fall any time. At least he was moving into a new house. It was going to be a prison also but more modern, with all the latest developments: television, radio, electricity, telephone. He was not losing anything: he was neither losing the prison nor was he losing anything else. He was really gaining some new improvements in the prison system. You reprogram him, you force him back into the old house which is going to fall any moment, and you call yourself deprogrammers. Then you charge the parents. You are criminals charging for your crime.

My work is exactly deprogramming. I simply deprogram you.

“Whether you are Hindu or Mohammedan or Christian or Jesus freaks or Witnesses of Jehovah or Hare Krishna people or Moonies – whatever your kind and whatever your trademark, it doesn’t matter – I simply deprogram you. And I am not giving you any program in its place.

I am leaving you alone, to yourself.

“I don’t give you any doctrine that replaces hell, that replaces heaven, that replaces God – no. I take away everything that you are programmed with and leave you to yourself to seek and search. Who am I to reprogram you?

So the first thing is: regain the rebellious spirit you were born with – which is not a program, which is your very being.

“The second thing: become an individual. The society tries to make you a person, never an individual. A person is one who has a personality, and a personality is a mask. Society teaches you how to sit, how to stand, how to behave, how to act in certain situations. In every possible way the society is preparing you so that you can fit with the status quo.

“My father, whenever he was angry with me, used to tell me. ‘You will always remain a misfit.’

“I said, ‘To me that is a word of tremendous respect. Yes, I want to always remain a misfit. In every society, in every place, in every nation, in every country, I want to remain a misfit because the moment I fit, then I am only a cog in a wheel. Then I am no more.’

Personality is the mask that has been given to you to keep your original face hidden.

“It is the whole garb that by and by you become identified with. If something remains fixed on your face for years you will become identified with it, because in the mirror you will see your face, and you will see the mask. In people’s eyes you will see the mask. People will be telling you how beautiful you look, how beautiful your eyes are, and you will get identified. There is no way to find out that this is just a mask, that behind it you are somebody else. This is not what you were meant to be.

“Personality is that which society manages to make you and individuality is that which society is afraid of. Personality is created by the society according to its own requirements, but individuality is wild, natural. It is not to fit into a mechanism; it cannot be made a cog in the wheel.

“I want you to be individuals, not persons.

Drop your personality. Drop all the ideas that people have given to you.

“Yes, sometimes those ideas are very gratifying. Somebody says, ‘How beautiful you are!’ Do you have the courage to ask, ‘Please give some proof’?…

“Others buttress your ego, say things – that you are so nice – so that you start behaving nicely because you have to keep up the standard people are expecting of you. They say you are beautiful and you start looking longer in the mirror and arranging your hair and make-up and everything. You have to keep up the standard: people think you are beautiful. You never think for a single moment that you are being manipulated. Those people are simply pulling your strings, and you are becoming a puppet.

“Anybody can be easily manipulated; you just have to know what kind of personality has been given to him. Just a little acquaintance, and then you know the strings from where he can be pulled so that he will dance to your tune. And the whole of society is doing that. People are dancing to the tune of the politicians.

Personality is your enemy. It is in the hands of those who are exploiting you, who are destroying you.

“You have to throw off the personality. You have to throw away all the ideas that have been implanted by others in you: that you are this, you are that – no. You have to discover who you are on your own. It is a little arduous, but tremendously fulfilling. Certainly it is a difficult operation because your personality has become almost your skin, so tight does it cling to you. You are so identified with it that you never think that you are not it.

“The first thing is to remember that you are not your personality. Who you are, you are not aware of because, before you could have become aware of your reality, of your original face, society had already forced a pattern, a model on you. It had already started cutting and chopping away anything that was not suitable to it. It started adding arbitrary, artificial things to you, to make you suitable to the society….

Just watch all your actions and reactions and see that your problem is your actions, your reactions, your responses.

“You have nothing to do with the other person’s actions; that is his problem. Return his problem to him – and this is the way to return it. Then you are completely clean, you come out of it clean.

This way, slowly your personality slips away, and your original face, which has a tremendous beauty and grace, starts to show. It has a beauty not of the body, but a beauty which is something deeper than the body, and a grace which is not attained by years of prayer in churches, in temples. Suddenly you feel a new color, a new fragrance around you. The moment your original face is discovered you are on the way toward freedom, authenticity, totality, fearlessness.

“This is what I mean by everything. Everything is the circumference and nothing is the center.

Everything is the cyclone and nothingness the center.

“But unless all those things happen – a rebellious spirit, individuality, your original face, freedom, fearlessness, authenticity, totality – you cannot enter inward. Society does not want you to go in. Society wants you to go out – the farther out from your center, the better, because the farther out you are the more useful you are to the society: you can be used as a means.

Society cannot use a person who is standing at his center. He is beyond society’s grasp.

“The person who is standing at his center – which is nothingness, pure nothingness, just space, pure space… When you look from that purity your eyes are capable of finding the truth everywhere. Your eyes are capable of finding beauty everywhere. Your eyes are capable of seeing that you were blind before.

“And it is not only your eyes, all your senses become tremendously capable. Now you hear, but you don’t listen. Then, hearing and listening are together. Of course you can hear right now because you have ears; but listening needs something more.

Behind your ears must be a silent awareness.

“Right now there is a crowd of thoughts behind your ears; there is no silence, so you only hear. I say one thing, you hear something else because that crowd is continuously meddling with everything that you hear. It is changing, editing, adding: it is doing all kinds of things when you are hearing but not listening.

Listening is possible only when your ears are attended by a silent space – you are just a watcher.

“Then you can hear the greatest music in the smallest things. Just in the wind passing through the pine trees you can hear the music that no musician can create. You can see beauty in such simple things – a bird on the wing – that you had never bothered about….

My effort is for nothing less than that: total transformation from the false to the original.”

END

 

Excerpted and abridged from: Osho, From Personality to Individuality, Talk #15 – Inexpressible Truth