RELIGION

RELIGION IS IRRATIONAL -- by the irrational and for the irrational. Reason cannot contain it; reason is so small. Religion is the vast sky of existence. Reason is a tiny human phenomenon. The reason has to be lost, has to be dropped. Only by going beyond the mind does one start understanding what is. That's the radical change. No philosophy can bring that radical change -- only religion. Religion is non-philosophic, anti-philosophic, and Zen is the purest form of religion. Zen is the very essence of religion. Hence it is irrational, it is absurd. If you try to understand it logically you will be bewildered. It can only be understood illogically. It has to be approached in deep sympathy and love. YOU CANNOT approach Zen through empirical, scientific, objective concepts. They all have to be dropped. It is a heart phenomenon. You have to feel it rather than think it. You have to BE it to know it. Being is knowing. And there is no other knowing. That's why religion has to choose a different kind of language. Religion has to talk in parables, in poetry, in metaphors, in myth. Those are indirect ways of hinting at the truth -- only hinting at the truth, no direct pointing; just whispering, not shouting. It comes to you in a deep rapport. These small poems of the Zen master, Ikkyu, are of immense importance. They are not great poetry, remember, because that is not the concern. The poetry has been used as a device, so that yom heart can be stirred. The poetry is not the goal. Ikkyu is not concerned with creating great poetry; he is not really a poet, he is a mystic. But rather than speaking prose, he speaks in poetry -- for a certain reason. The reason is: poetry has an indirect way of hinting at things. Poetry is feminine. Prose is masculine. Prose, the very structure of it, is logical; poetry is basically illogical. Prose has to be clear-cut; poetry has to be vague -- that's its beauty, its quality. Prose simply says what it says; poetry says many things. Prose is needed in the day-to-day world, in the marketplace. But whenever something of the heart has to be said, prose is always found inadequate -- one has to fall back to poetry. There are two languages in language. Each language consists of two languages: one is prose, the other is poetry. Prose has become very predominant because it is utilitarian. Poetry has disappeared by and by, because it has no utility. It is needed only when you are in love. It is needed only when you are talking of love, death, prayer, truth, God -- but they are not commodities. They are not sold in the marketplace, they are not purchased either. Our world, slowly slowly, has become linear. The other language, the deeper language, has lost its meaning for us. And because of the disappearance of the second language, the language of poetry, man has become very poor -- because ALL richness is of the heart. Mind is very poor, mind is a beggar. Mind lives through trivia. The heart is an opening to the profundities of life, to the depths of existence, to the mysteries of cosmos. Remember this there are two languages in language, two ways of speaking, two levels of linguistic usage. There is a language of clear truths, concepts and formulas, the language of pure logic, objective information, exact science. But that is not the language of the heart, and that is not the language of love, and that is not the language of religion. Science and religion are diametrically opposite. They belong to different dimensions of existence. They don't overlap each other's grounds, each other's fields. They simply never meet! They don't criss-cross. And the modern mind has been trained for science, hence religion has become almost out of date, of the past. There seems to be no future for religion. Sigmund Freud has declared that there is no future for the illusion called religion. But if there is no future for religion, there is no future for man either. Science is going to destroy humanity -- because humanity can live only through the poetic, the metaphoric. Life gathers significance only through the heart. Man cannot live by mind alone. Man cannot live by calculation, mathematics alone. Mathematics can serve, but cannot be the master. The head can only be the servant, and as a servant it is very useful; but when it pretends to become the master it is dangerous, it is fatal. The language of objective science lives in the world of facts. Things are as they are; you say what you mean, as precisely as you can, and as unequivocally. Speaking, then, is deciphering a puzzle, defining, prescribing limits -- this is this, not that. It is water, not steam and not ice. Here is here, not there. One is one, two equals two, dead is dead. This is the world of facts -- dull and dead, stale and stagnant. It is impossible to live just in the world of facts, because then you will never be able to relax. In fact, it is meaningless to live in the world of facts -- from where will you get the meaning? from where will you get the value? Then a rose has no beauty; it is only a botanical fact. Then love has no splendor; it is only a biological fact. How can one live in facts? Living in facts, life starts becoming meaningless. It is not an accident that the modern philosophical minds are talking continuously about meaninglessness. We have created it by deciding to live only in one language -- the prose language. It is a good thing that we have this language, the language of facts, the language of prose. Our world cannot do without it, true. It is needed, but it Can't be the goal of life. It can only serve. But we never use it when we Want to pour out our hearts and say what is really in us, hidden and almost impossible to name. A man is certainly poor if he has not felt the inadequacy of ordinary language. If there is somebody so unfortunate that he has not felt the inadequacy of ordinary language, that simply shows he has never felt love, he has never felt any meditative moment, he has not known ecstasy. His heart beats no more; he is just a corpse. He lives and yet lives not. He moves, walks, but all his gestures are empty; they contain nothing. If a man has not felt the inadequacy of the prose language -- the empirical language, the language of facts, mathematics -- that simply shows that he has not experienced any mystery of life, that he has not been living really. Otherwise, how can you avoid the mysteries? That he has never seen the full moon in the night; that he has never seen the beauty and the splendor of human eyes. That he has never laughed, that he has never cried; that he does not know what tears signify. That he is a robot. He is not man, he is not human -- he is inhuman. He is just a machine. He works, he earns, and then he dies. He reproduces and then he dies. But in vain -- he cannot say why he lived in the first place. It is true that this kind of language is needed, it is a need, but even if all the needs are fulfilled, the ultimate need remains unfulfilled by it -- the need to celebrate, the need to rejoice; the need to have a dialogue with the stars and the ocean and the sand; the need to hold hands, the need to fall in love, the need to dance and sing. The ordinary language cannot fulfill that ultimate need, and that ultimate need is what is specific to humanity. A man is man only in so far as he lives in that ultimate need. In questions of love and death and God and man, the first language is not only inadequate but also dangerous. If you use the first kind of language for the ultimate concerns of life, by and by your very language will destroy them. That's how we have destroyed God. That's how we have destroyed all that is beautiful and significant. Use wrong language and sooner or later you will be trapped by the wrong language, because your mind lives through language. You know only that which comes into your language; you know only that which you can clearly think about. If you have dropped the vague world of heart, the vague world of feelings, sensations, emotions, ecstasy, then naturally you are closed to God. And then if you say God is dead, it seems to be absolutely true. Not that God is dead -- only you are dead towards God. To be alive towards God is to move into poetry. Poetry is the rainbow bridge between man and God, between man as mind and God as mystery. That is the opening, the door, the threshold. Have you ever seen Khajuraho, Konarak, or other beautiful temples of India? In the old scriptures it is said that on each temple's threshold there should be a statue, a sculpture of lovers. It is very strange. Those scriptures don't specifically say why; they simply mention it for the architects, that it is a must. On each temple's threshold, on the door, there must be at least one couple in MAITHUNA -- in orgasm, in deep love, their limbs intertwined with each other, in great ecstasy. Why on the door? Because unless you know love, you cannot know the bridge between man and God. And the door is a symbol: the door is the threshold between the world of mind and the world of no-mind. It is love that bridges the world of mind to no-mind. It is only through love that we come to know the orgasmic mysteries of life. It is very significant -- although many temples are not built that way. People have been avoiding it. They are too moralistic and stupid. But the ancient prescription is of great significance: only love can be the threshold, because only love will make your poetry alive. If you use only the first kind of language, you will be destroying something very delicate in you. You will become more and more accustomed to the rocks and less and less aware of the flowers. But there is a second language, deep below the first, like a much older structure wide around the first. It is the language of what cannot really be said. Yes, poetry is the language of what really cannot be said. Still it HAS to be said . There is an urgency to say it -- and poetry is the language of that which cannot be said. That which can be said can be said through prose. How will you say that which cannot be said if you don't have poetry? It is the language of what cannot really be said, that language that you speak so as not to have to be completely silent, the language of emotion and ecstasy.

Take it Easy
Vol#1 Chapter#1 Back from the leaky road

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Subscription Costs   One Day (24 hours exactly) $6.95 One Month $19.95 One Year $49.95	Introduction Over a thirty-five year period hundreds of thousands of people from every walk of life were drawn to Osho. They asked questions, he answered. They read sutras to him, and he talked about them. The talks were recorded, and later filmed on video, transcribed into hundreds of books and translated into dozens of languages.
In the process, every tradition in the history of consciousness has been revisited for contemporary people. As each is teased apart and explained in the modern context, we can find the essential thread running through our history down to each one of us today. From the meaning of life and death to the struggles of power and politics, from the challenges of love and creativity to the significance of science and education. What is this mystery called existence? Where did meditation come from? Can we learn anything from Taoism? What is happiness? Why am I discontented? Where did my guilt come from? What is hope? Who am I?  Is there life after death? Asks one. Better you ask if there is life after birth, comes the reply. Here you will find the spiritually incorrect mystic at work, demolishing our sacred cows, one by one, in exquisite detail. With compassion and humor our insanities are laid out before us, leaving us with that uniquely human option of growing up rather than simply growing old.  Each talk is given "off-the cuff," extemporaneously without notes. And each has its own context. And when answering questions, the primary purpose is always to answer the questioner rather than the question. It is the individual and his or her transformation that is important, not just the words.  And finally a note of caution from the author:  "Always remember, whatsoever I say to you, you can take it in two ways. You can simply take it on my authority, ’Because I say so, it must be true’ -- then you will suffer, then you will not grow. Whatsoever I say, listen to it, try to understand it, implement it in your life, see how it works, and then come to your own conclusions. They may be the same, they may not be. They can never be exactly the same because you have a different personality, a unique being. Whatsoever I am saying is my own. It is bound to be in deep ways rooted in me. You may come to similar conclusions, but they cannot be exactly the same. So my conclusions should not be made your conclusions. You should try to understand me, you should try to learn, but you should not collect knowledge from me, you should not collect conclusions from me. Then your mind-body will grow.  "My message is not a doctrine, not a philosophy. My message is a certain alchemy, a science of transformation."

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