Osho
Just think, you are falling in love with a woman because of your chemistry. You are feeling sexual, attracted because certain chemicals are released in your body, certain hormones are moving in your blood. If those hormones are taken out, if that chemistry is changed, you would not feel attracted. All love would disappear. The moment you think of the chemistry of love, love disappears. Then there is only chemistry – two chemistries attracted to each other, almost victims of chemistry. The joy, the gladness, the glory, the splendor are all gone.
The scientist tries to supply answers, although the scientist has failed. But people have not yet heard about it. This century has seen one of the greatest phenomena: the scientist has failed, utterly failed, because the scientist has come closer and closer to truth, and the closer the scientist comes to the truth, the more bewildered he becomes. The closer he comes to truth, the more the truth seems to be more and more mysterious, unknowable.
Before he died, Albert Einstein said, “The world to me is now more unknowable than it was when I started my work. I had started with the idea that I would find a few explanations, I would make things a little better explained, I would help to create a few explanations. But all those explanations that existed in my youth are no longer there. I am simply bewildered. I am dying not as a physicist but as a mystic. And next time, if I am to come back, I would like to be born as a plumber rather than as a physicist.”
A great statement because the plumber knows more about the mystery: he lives it, enjoys it. By “plumber” he means, “I would like to be an ordinary person, a very ordinary person – a farmer, a gardener, a plumber. I would not bother about demystifying existence. I would rather live it, experience it. I would rather sing about it and dance about it.”
Life is strange, and that is the basic contribution of religion to the world. Religion helps you to go into the mystery without demystifying. That’s where theology goes wrong. Theology is not religion. Theology is the same endeavor as science: trying to find explanations. Zen masters are right when they laugh at your questions, and Sufis are perfectly right when they answer your questions in absurd ways – the answer does not relate to the question at all. If you become puzzled, it is a great step; if you forget your knowledge, if you unlearn your explanations, it is really a great step toward God. Live without explanation, and you will live a religious life.
The first layer is common – if I have a stone in my hand you will all be able to see it – it is a common objectivity. When you see me, you never see me, you see only my body; when I see you, I never see you, I see only your body. But nobody can see what is inside your mind. A person can see your behavior: how you act, what you do, how you react. He can see anger on your face, the redness, the cruelty that takes over, the violence in your eyes, but he cannot see the anger within your mind. He can see the loving gesture that you make with the body, but he cannot see the love. And you may only be making a gesture, there may be no love. You can deceive others just by acting, and that is what you have been doing.
Your body can be known by everybody else, not your mind. The objective world is common and that is the world of science. Science says that is the only reality because, “We can’t know about your thoughts, whether they exist or not nobody knows. Only you say they do, but they are not common, objective; we cannot experiment with them, we cannot see them. You report them but you may be deceiving us, or you may be deceived, who knows?” Your thoughts are not things but you know well that they exist. Not only do things exist, thoughts also exist. But thoughts are personal, private, they are not common.
The outer layer, the first layer, the reality on the surface, creates science. The second layer, of thoughts and feelings, creates philosophy, poetry. But is this all? Matter and mind? If this is all then you can never be centered, because mind is always a flux. It has no center: yesterday you had some thoughts, today you have other thoughts, tomorrow you will have other thoughts again; it is like a river, there is no center in it.
In the mind you cannot find any center: thoughts change, feelings change, it is a flux. So you will always remain ill, ill at ease, you can never be whole. But there is also another layer of existence, the deepest. The first is the objective world: science and its world. The second is the thought-world: philosophy and poetry, feelings, thoughts. Then there is a third world which is of religion, and that is the world of the witness: the one who looks at the thoughts, the one who looks at the things.
That one is one, there are not two. Whether you look at a house or you close your eyes and look at the picture of the house inside, the looker remains the same. Whether you look at anger or you look at love, the looker remains the same. Whether you are sad or happy, whether life has become a poetry or life has become a nightmare, makes no difference: the looker remains the same, the witness remains the same. The witness is the only center, and this witness is the world of religion.
When Jesus says, “Go and heal people,” he is saying, “Go and give them their centers, make them witnesses. Then they will neither be involved in the world, nor involved in their thoughts; they will be rooted in their being.” And once you are rooted in the being then everything changes, the quality changes; then you can pray.
But then you will not pray for the wrong reasons, then your prayer will be a gratitude. Then you will pray, not like a beggar, but like an emperor who has too much of everything. Then you will give, but you will not give for the ego, you will give because of compassion, you will give because giving is so beautiful and makes you so blissful. Then you can fast, but that fasting will not be an obsession with food, that fasting will be totally different.
Once he went to a village, and some people brought a blind man to him. They said, “This man is our friend, and he cannot see. We tried to explain to him that light exists, that there is a sun, but he does not believe it. He refuses to believe. He does not accept it. Not only does he refuse to accept it, but he tries to convince us that we are wrong, that there is no such thing as light. He uses so much logic and reasoning that he invariably wins and we lose. When we heard you were coming to town, we thought we would take him to you so you could make him understand that light exists.”
Buddha replied, “No, I will not make him understand anything. I can make you understand a few things.”
The friends were very surprised. They said, “What do we need to understand? We tell him that light exists, then he says, ‘If light exists, I would like to touch it and feel it. You can touch and feel everything that exists.’” We say, “Light exists and he says, ‘If light exists I would like to hear its sound, hear its voice. If something exists, you can rub it against something else and produce a sound.’ So we are helpless.”
Buddha said, “The mistake is yours. It is madness to try to explain what light is to a man who is blind. Light cannot be explained, light has to be seen. You cannot think about light, you have to perceive light. You do not have to develop a conception of what light is; you only have to experience light. If you try to explain light to him knowing perfectly well he is blind, you are mad, and he is right in what says. It is better to take him to a doctor than to a thinker. He needs treatment, not reasoning. Don’t try to make him understand; get his eyes treated. If he can see, he will come to know what light is without your telling him. If he is blind, no matter how much you try to make him understand, he can never know what light is.”
They took him to a doctor for treatment. After a while, the film was removed from his eyes and he could see. Then he said to his friends, “I am sorry. Light exists, but I did not have the eyes to see. Whatever you told me was futile. Explaining to me through words something I had no experience of was futile. Your talking seemed useless to me, and I felt that all your talk of light was only to prove that I was blind. I thought you talked about light just in order to prove me blind. Now I know light exists because I have the eyes to see.”
Truth is also something not to be thought about; it has to be directly perceived. Truth cannot be studied, it can only be experienced. For truth, you also have to open a kind of eye inside, only then can you perceive it, not by reading any scripture. You can teach a blind man as much as you want about light and explain it to him, but what will happen? He may also start to repeat what you say, but those words cannot open his eyes. They cannot make him have an experience. He cannot have direct perception.
For truth, eyes are also needed. Not thought, not studies; an inner seeking, a method is needed. No scripture is capable of giving you truth. What the scripture cannot give can be attained through inner seeking.
Then I can try to understand what is happening to you. Even through instruments much can be known about you, but that will remain objective and scientific. So really, whatsoever I am studying is not the real thing that is happening to you, but the effects that your body is recording.
You cannot penetrate a master, what is happening to him, because really nothing is happening there. The deepest center of an enlightened man is nothingness. Nothing is happening there. And if nothing is happening, how can you study it? You can study something. You can study the Alpha waves; what is happening to the mind, to the body, to the chemistry, you can understand. But really deep down, when someone becomes enlightened, there is not anything happening. All happening has ceased.
This is what is meant – the world has ceased. Now there is no sansara, no happening. He is as if he is not. That’s why Buddha says, “Now I have become a no-atman, no-self. There is no one inside me. I am just an emptiness. The flame has disappeared, and the house is vacant.” Nothing is happening. What can you record about it? At the most you can record that nothing is happening. If something happens it can be recorded objectively.
The method of science remains objective, and science is very much afraid of the subjective, for many reasons. Science and the scientific mind cannot believe in the subjective, because firstly, it is private and individual and no one can enter in it. It cannot become public and collective, and unless something is public and collective, nothing can be said about it. The person who is saying may be deceived, or may be deceiving others. He may be a liar. Or, he may be just in an illusion, not a liar. He may be thinking and believing that this has happened to him, and this may be just a delusion, a self-deception.
So for science the truth must be objective. Others must be able to participate in it, so we can judge whether it is happening or not. Secondly, it must be that it can be repeated; it must be repeatable. If we heat water it evaporates at a certain degree – it must be repeatable. So we repeat and repeat and again and again it evaporates at a certain degree. If it evaporates only once at a hundred degrees and never gain, or sometimes at ninety and sometimes at eighty, it cannot become a scientific fact. It must be repeatable, and the same conclusion should be achieved through many repeated experiments.
But the subjective realization is not repeatable – it is not even predictable. And you cannot invite it; it happens. You cannot force it. You may achieve a deep meditation, you may have a very elated peak experience, but if someone says, “Repeat it here,” you may not be able to repeat it. On the contrary, because someone says, and you make an effort to repeat it, this very effort may become the barrier. Even the presence of observers may be distracting. You may not be able to repeat it.
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