His capacity to verbalize so many apparently contradictory views creates confusion for some of us. Taking us from one approach to another—from Sufis and the way of love to Buddha and the path of awareness, and so on—is an effective deterrent for anyone wanting to create an ideology, a set of beliefs on which to rely. It’s just not possible; hearing so many different, even seemingly opposing, approaches means we are constantly thrown back on ourselves, obliged to find our own understanding, our own particular and unique path. And that’s exactly Osho’s intention.
He explains that he doesn’t respond so much to the question as to the questioner herself. So over the years we hear different responses to the same or very similar questions. For example, he is asked over the course of any years who he is. “I am not,” “I am the gate,” “I am an invitation,” “I am your friend,” “I am consciousness,” he has responded. “I am just an ordinary man,” “I am a child on the seashore of time, collecting seashells, colored stones,” “I don’t exist as an ego. I am not solid at all. If you go through me, you can pass through me without coming across anybody. I am empty.” “I am someone who is non-temporal and non-spatial. But my ‘I’ is all-inclusive. You are included, the questioner is included. Nothing is excluded.”
“You will only know who I am when you know yourself,” is the answer I receive on one occasion. At another time, he says the very question “makes no sense at all. Rather, ‘What is?’ is the only relevant question—not who, but what, because the what can be the whole. It can be asked about the totality, about all that exists. The question ‘What is?’ is existential, and there is no dichotomy in it; it does not divide. But the question ‘Who?’ divides from the very start. It accepts the duality, the multiplicity, the duality of beings. There is only being, not beings.”
His answer to the same question elicits laughter when he responds, “To be frank with you—which usually I am not—I don’t know who I am.”That wonderful sense of humor is never far away, and his response to yet another questioner includes a joke.
Osho begins:
G.O.K. Now let me explain to you this code word G.O.K. This is my answer.
A doctor was shown around the London hospital by several physicians. He looked at the filing system and noticed the bright idea they had of abbreviations—D for diphtheria, M for measles, TB for tuberculosis, and so on. All the diseases seemed to be pretty well under control except one indicated by the symbol G.O.K.
“I see that you have a sweeping epidemic of G.O.K. on your hands,” he said. “But just what is G.O.K.?”
“Oh,” said one of them, “when we can’t diagnose we put G.O.K.—God Only Knows.”
I see Osho as being like a prism: when the light hits one facet of the prism, that aspect is illumined and it is that that he expounds on.
Confusion is a device, he adds; it can shake us out of our sense of certainty, which effectively keeps us closed. His effort is to point us to the state of no-mind, a state which functions from not knowing, a state of innocence:
So those who have listened to me for a long time, listen simply. They simply listen, they don’t cling. They know perfectly well, now that they are aware of the game, that tomorrow I will contradict. So why carry it for twenty-four hours? The pain of carrying the weight, and then the pain of dropping it… slowly, slowly it dawns in your awareness that there is no need to cling; this man contradicts. This man is consistently inconsistent.
Once you have understood that, you listen to me as one listens to music. You listen to me as one listens to the wind passing through the pine trees, you listen to me as one listens to the birds singing in the morning. You don’t say to the cuckoo, “Yesterday your song was different,” and you don’t go to the roseflower and say, “Last season the flowers were bigger”—or smaller— “why are you contradicting yourself?”
You don’t say to the poet, “In one of your poems you said this, and in another poem you have said something else.” You don’t expect a poet to be consistent, so you don’t ask. Poetry is not a theory, it is not a syllogism, it is a song.
I am not a philosopher. Always remember that I am a poet, not a philosopher. Remember always that I am not a missionary, but a musician playing on the harp of your heart. Songs will go on changing… you need not cling to anything, then there will be no confusion at all.
The people who are always hankering for consistency can never enter into the mystery of life. Consistency is something manmade, it is arbitrary. Existence is not consistent. And now even physicists agree with the poets and the mystics.
You must be aware that modern physics believes in the theory of uncertainty; modern physics believes in the illogical behavior of atoms, of the unpredictability of the behavior of electrons. It was such a shock to the modern physicists, because they had always believed that matter behaves consistently. The whole foundation of science has been shaken; these twenty years, it has been such a shock. People have not yet become aware of it, because the theories are so complicated and so subtle that they will never become part of common knowledge. And they are so against common sense—they look more like fairy tales, stories written for children.
Life is a very mixed puzzle. Whatsoever you make out of it is going to be arbitrary, you cannot figure it out in reality. My suggestion to my sannyasins is to forget all about figuring out what it is. Rather, live it; rather, enjoy it! Don’t analyze it, celebrate it.
*
One of the most memorable series of all for me is on the words the fifteenth-century Indian mystic, Kabir. Like Jesus, Kabir was of the marketplace—he was a weaver of cloth, illiterate. Osho calls Kabir “the Christ of the East.”
“Kabir is a harbinger, a herald of the future, the first flower that heralds the spring. He is one of the greatest poets of religion. He is not a theologian; he does not belong to any religion. All religions belong to him, but he is vast enough to contain all. He’s a great beauty, a great poetry, a great orchestra.”
Where the Sufis touch my heart, Kabir claims it completely, and his ecstasy infects us all. The musicians set his poetry to music, creating songs that decades later I will not be able to hear without a pricking of tears…. “Just one look at the real man standing there, and we are in love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love!”
It is time to put up a love swing!
Tie the body and then tie the mind so that they swing between the arms of the Secret One you love.
Bring the water that falls from the clouds to your eyes.
And cover yourself over entirely with the shadow of night. Bring your face up close to his ear, and then talk only about what you want deeply to happen.
Kabir says, “Listen to me, brother, bring the face, the shape, and the odor of the Holy One inside you.”
How exquisitely moving it is to hear those words from Osho’s lips—from one who exudes the perfume of that “holy one inside”!
This then, is our daily diet, our “spiritual breakfast”: imbibing the masters of the past. Osho explains that he speaks on such an assortment of paths to make us enriched:
… to make you available to all the joys possible in the spiritual world, to make you capable of all kinds of ecstasies. Yes, Buddha brings one kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through intelligence. And Jesus brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through love. Krishna brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through action. And Lao Tzu brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through inaction. These are very different paths, but they all come into you, and