These Games Keep You Retarded

Osho: Om Mani Padme Hum, Chapter 9

Osho,
You have now been enlightened for almost thirty-six years. How does it feel to be beyond the beyond the beyond?
P.S. can I meet you in the pub afterwards?

Vimal, it seems you have taken too much drink, because we are in the pub! This place can only be described as belonging to those who are drunk with the divine... so drunk that they have forgotten their nationality, forgotten their church, forgotten even who they are.

Vimal is asking me if I can meet him afterwards in the pub, but beyond this pub there is no other place so drunk with the divine dance and song. What I am teaching you is to find a source within yourself which can make you a drunkard.

The joy of this life, the bliss, the ecstasy, belongs only to those whose wine is not coming from the outside -- that is very ephemeral, very temporal, made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. There is another wine which grows within you. The moment you start moving inwards, there is no need for anything else to make you oblivious to all the misery that surrounds you. There is no need for any other drug.

A few idiots in the West have started calling a drug "ecstasy." Now that is absolutely against all the laws of the world, because ecstasy has been for centuries copyrighted by my people! And it is not an outside drug, it flows in the very juices of your life. You don't have to move even an inch; wherever you are you can be surrounded by all possibilities of blissfulness. And these possibilities of blissfulness are not temporal; it is not that tomorrow morning you will have a hangover. The more you drink, the more sober, the more sane, the more alert, the more conscious you become.

Unless a drug is found within your being, you are bound to look for it somewhere else. It raises a tremendously significant question. As long as we can remember in human history...the oldest, ancientmost scripture is the Rig Veda of the Hindus, and the Rig Veda talks about a certain drug, somrasa.

One of the most intelligent men of our century, Aldous Huxley, became very interested in searching for what this somrasa was, because the seers of Rig Veda used to drink it and dance around the fire. Certainly it seems it must have been a drug, and particularly to the Western objective thinker it cannot be anything else than a drug.

Aldous Huxley experimented with all kinds of drugs and finally he decided that LSD seems to come very close to the description of somrasa. In the hope that in the future LSD will be more refined -- because it is a synthetic drug, manufactured; hence there is every possibility to improve upon it, to take away all the ingredients which can be harmful and leave only that which brings health, wholeness, awareness, and a tremendous insight into the mysteries of existence.... Hoping that some day scientists were going to discover it, Huxley had already named it soma, just to pay respect to the ancient seers of Rig Veda.

But Aldous Huxley was in a deep misunderstanding.

The somrasa that is being described in the Rig Veda is certainly a drug just like marijuana which used to grow in the Himalayas. Perhaps it still grows there but we have not been able to find the place where it grows.

And the fire they were dancing around has nothing to do with the inner fire of life. I have looked into the Rig Veda as deeply, as sympathetically as possible. The people who are talking about the somrasa and the fire ritual were even sacrificing human beings, not to mention sacrificing other animals. The Hindus, who go on continuously making trouble in this country because of their insistence that cow slaughter should be stopped, should read their ancientmost scriptures. All their priests were slaughtering cows as a sacrifice to the fire god, and they were all eating the meat of the cows. Now, these people cannot be said to be meditative.

I absolutely deny the Rig Veda and the prestige that it has in the minds of men, because people don't read it and people don't analyze it and people don't see its stupidities and all kinds of inhumanities.

In the Rig Veda women are just a commodity. You can purchase women in the marketplace in any auction. Even the so-called seers had many wives, and they were not even satisfied by that. That is an absolutely ugly state, that any human being reduces so many women into cattle. Over and above all that, they were continually purchasing beautiful girls in auctions.

People have forgotten -- times change, words take on new colors. Now in India the word wadu simply means the newly married woman. But in the times of the Rig Veda, wadu meant a woman who has newly been purchased from the market. Every so-called seer had two kinds of women: one group was his wives and the other was wadus. The word wadu is not respectable; it simply means a prostitute, purchased -- a commodity, not a human being. It can be sold at any moment.

And the miracle was that the children from the married wife would be the legitimate children, and the children from the purchased wife would not be legitimate. Man has done so much inhumanity to other human beings that it is incalculable.

How can a child be illegitimate?

Parents can be illegitimate, but a child cannot be. Every child is as innocent as any other child. It does not matter whether the child is born to a prostitute or to a purchased woman or to a married woman. In all cases the child is absolutely legitimate. But people are very cunning in throwing their responsibilities on others. Parents are never called illegitimate. Children are called illegitimate.

These seers accumulated immense wealth, had many slaves, used to eat meat -- I cannot conceive that they had found the inner ecstasy I am talking about. All the circumstantial evidence goes against them. And look at their prayers -- their prayers are so stupid that one feels embarrassed that these people were called great seers. Their prayers are in the Rig Veda, and the Rig Veda consists of ninety-eight percent prayers. Only two percent can be sorted out, cleaned, interpreted in a way that makes some sense. Otherwise, ninety-eight percent of it consists of such prayers that you will not believe....

One seer is praying to God, drinking that ancient LSD of Aldous Huxley, "This time, my God, listen to my prayer: your clouds should rain only on my fields, not on the fields of my enemies. You have never listened to me but this time I am sacrificing so many cows, so many horses, and you have to listen. Give more children to me, and don't give a single child to my enemies." And who are the enemies? -- other seers, and they are also praying! Prayers which look so stupid.… "If you are compassionate, give a proof to me: the milk in the breasts of my enemy's cows should dry up."

These are religious people? "Give victory to me, to my friends, and defeat to my enemies and their friends." I cannot think of these people as meditative. Aldous Huxley was absolutely wrong. Somrasa was nothing but some horrible drug; perhaps it may have been marijuana, because it still grows in Kulu Manali and in other parts of the Himalayas. There is no need to cultivate it, it simply grows naturally. Those are the places where the Rig Veda was composed.

As far as I am concerned, my interest is that all the governments of the world and all the religions of the world, all the moral teachers of the world have been against drugs; still drugs are more predominant today than they have ever been. The more they have been condemned, prohibited, made illegal, the more attractive they have become. People used to drink and take drugs at a certain stage, but the latest information from California is that school children are taking drugs, and small boys and girls are suffering in jails because they have been found taking drugs.

It is a strange story

All the religions are against drugs, all the governments are against drugs, all the teachers, all the moralists are against drugs, and the influence of drugs goes on growing. There must be something deeper in it than people have looked into.

My understanding is that unless man finds a drug within himself, which I call ecstasy, he will go on finding some kind of drug as a substitute in the outside world. Only meditation can stop a person from taking drugs. No law can prohibit them -- all laws have failed. It only creates hypocrites.

I am not against ecstasy, but when I say ecstasy I don't mean the drug that is available in the market. I mean the ecstasy that you are born with, that you are still holding inside you, and you have not touched. Just a little taste of it and everything else on the outside immediately becomes meaningless.

You have the source of the infinite ecstasy within you.

Yes, I teach you to be drunkards, but your drink has to come from your own innermost center. And the difference can be very easily understood: every outer drug will make you unconscious, addicted, and every time you will need more and more of it because your body will become immune to it.

Still, in India, there are a few ancient traditions which have fallen into the same fallacy as Aldous Huxley. But they have gone farther than Aldous Huxley; they drink all kinds of alcoholic beverages, they use all kinds of drugs. A moment comes when no drug can make them unconscious, no drug can bring them what they have been trying to find -- a way to forget themselves, to forget this miserable world, to forget all these people. The last resort is that there are ashrams in Assam; they are the only remnants of a very long-standing tradition. They keep cobra snakes as a last resort -- when no drug affects you, the cobra is allowed to bite you on your tongue. Only then do you feel a little shaken, but the miracle is that the cobra dies! The man is so full of poison... but the poor cobra was not aware; otherwise he would have escaped.

I have been concerned about why man has remained so much interested in poisons. The reason is not too far away to see; you just need a clarity. Man is so miserable that he cannot live consciously with this misery. He needs a few gaps, at least a few holidays from this miserable anguish, anxiety, and all kinds of tortures. Drugs have been a tremendous help. But not only the chemical drugs -- Karl Marx is right when he says that the religions of the world are nothing but opium for the people. These religions have also proved to be consolations. They have also given hope, they have also given a certain future and taken away your consciousness from the present and its misery.

That's the function of any drug.

My effort here, Vimal, is to make you drop all future, all hope, all illusion, and just relax in the moment knowing perfectly well that this is the only moment which exists. All else is either memory or imagination.

One who is in the present immediately drowns in his own well...of something which is not poisonous, but it is certainly ecstatic. And once you have known your own source, there is no need to go anywhere, to any pub or to any church or to any temple.

The young doctor, inexperienced with operations, is instructed to stand at the head of the patient so that without getting in the way, he can watch the expert do an abdominal operation. He is also instructed not to speak, but after a while he can't resist: "How’s your end, sir?" says the young man. "All right," says the expert, looking up, "why?"
"I only wondered, sir," says the young man, "because my end's been dead for ten minutes."

Because he was told not to speak, he remained silent! The man is dead and the surgeon goes on operating....

There are a few things which all traditions have prohibited people to speak, and it needs immense courage to go against the whole tradition of mankind. For example, everybody has been told not to support any kind of drug in any way, and people have remained silent. I have not come across a single statement in which somebody has dared to say that the predominance of drugs shows something immensely significant, and it cannot be simply outlawed; it cannot be simply prohibited. But I want to say it.

Let it be on record that unless man finds the authentic drug which is in his own being, there is no force on the earth which can prohibit alcohol, which can prohibit marijuana, which can prohibit hashish, which can prohibit LSD. More and more drugs will be coming in, and the miracle is that the people who are trying to prohibit these things -- ninety percent of them are themselves using them.

Just a few days ago in America there was an international conference of homosexuals, and one MP from England represented the homosexuals of England. He is a member of the parliament, and certainly he is a homosexual; otherwise why should he be their representative? And in the conference he said, "You must be thinking that I am a strange person, being a member of parliament and representing the homosexuals, but I want you to know that at least fifty-six members of the parliament in England are homosexuals." They may not have the courage to come out... and these people will make laws against homosexuality!

Perhaps you have never thought about it that Jesus continued to drink alcohol, but no Christian has the guts to say that a man with the qualities of Jesus should not drink alcohol. Only if he has not found the alcohol within is there a possibility to search for alcohol without. Every night it was party time -- and it is strange that even after two thousand years, people drink alcohol in the name of Jesus. Naturally, if Jesus can be an alcoholic then why make it a prohibition?

If even Jesus needs it then I don't think anybody
can be in a position to say who does not need it.

I have heard about a strange ritual that happens every year in the Vatican. The Pope comes out in all his regalia, with the cardinals following, and the rabbi from Rome comes with a big scroll. He hands over the scroll to the pope, the pope looks at the scroll, gives it back to the rabbi and everybody wonders what is the matter. What is written on the scroll? Finally one young man dared to ask, "It has been going on for two thousand years; now we should at least know the content of the scroll. The whole ritual... and there seems to be no meaning."

The scroll was opened for the first time, and it was found that it was the bill for the Last Supper! And the question is who is going to pay it? Obviously, Jesus was a Jew -- the rabbis should pay it, but the rabbis had denied Jesus, they crucified him. They don't accept him as one of them; the pope should pay it. But the discussion is such that there is no way to decide. Jesus is a Jew -- of course his followers are Christians -- and why should Christians pay for a Jewish party? So every year the bill comes, the bill goes back.

Vimal, the way to understand me is to always remember that I am insisting -- from every corner, in every possible way -- only on a single target, and that is your innermost being. Whatever I may have said... never be too much concerned with what is said. Be concerned about what it indicates.

I want you to drop all games -- worldly games, spiritual games, games that the whole of humanity has played up to now. These games keep you retarded. These games hinder you from growing into consciousness, into your own ultimate flowering. I want to cut away all this rubbish that prevents you.

I want to leave you alone, absolutely alone, so that you cannot take anybody's help, so you cannot cling to any prophet, so that you cannot think that Gautam Buddha is going to save you. Left alone -- utterly alone -- you are bound to find your innermost center.

There is no way, nowhere to go, no advisor, no teacher, no master.

It seems hard, it seems harsh, but I am doing it because I love you, and the people who have not done it have not loved you at all. They loved themselves and they loved to have a big crowd around themselves -- the bigger the crowd, the more they feel nourished in their egos.

That's why I called even enlightenment the last game. The sooner you drop it, the better. Why not just simply be? Why unnecessarily hurry here and there? You are what existence wants you to be. Just relax.

Farmer Giles is worried about the performance of his prize bull; he doesn't seem to be interested in the cows. So he goes to the vet who prescribes a course of pills for the bull.
A few weeks later, a friend comes by and asks Farmer Giles how the bull is getting on.
"Just great!" says Giles. "The vet gave me these pills for the bull and from the first day the old fellow has been unstoppable! In fact, I am making a fortune; the local farmers can't get their cows 'round here fast enough!"
"Great!" says his friend. "And what are these pills then?"
"Well," says Farmer Giles, "they are great big green ones -- and they taste just like peppermints."

Osho,
Has Jesus ever laughed?
Irven N. Resnich reports on the controversy between philosophy and theology about laughter:
Aristotle, in his second book of poetics, raised laughter to the standard of an art, whereas Christian theology has been against laughter since the days of the bible. For monks, a life of penance does not allow laughter. Basilius Caesarea and Hugo of St. Victor totally condemned laughter; in some monasteries it was only tolerated if it did not spread.
The question came up of whether laughter darkened the human nature of Jesus. According to Christian tradition, Jesus himself never laughed, although the philosophical traditions of Aristotle, Quintillion, Porphyry and Boethius emphasize that laughter is a typically human ability. The clergymen gave various answers, but many of them pointed out that a lot of saints had never laughed either, and that Jesus, as a human being, was of course able to laugh, but he voluntarily renounced it. Not a theologically satisfying solution.

Doctor Amrito, only on one point do I agree with Christian tradition: Jesus certainly never laughed. As far as I can see, he had nothing to laugh at.

First, he is a bastard. Others may have laughed, but you cannot expect Jesus to laugh. Jesus was a poor carpenter, undernourished -- laughter needs some overflowing energy. And to look at Jesus' statements -- he seems to be a crackpot. Crackpots never laugh. They have to keep their seriousness. Laughter brings you down to the status of ordinary humanity. Those who want to pretend to be special -- how can they laugh? Such a mundane activity.

All these controversies are absolutely futile. I will give you a few reasons to contemplate which will make you clear why he did not laugh:

An ancient tradition says:

Before Jesus Christ, nobody knew what a headache looked like.

True misery for a man is when there are no more problems to be solved.

And Jesus had no more problems to be solved. He was the only begotten Son of God. He knew everything. Not a single time in his whole life -- which was not very long, just thirty-three years -- did he ever say about anything, "I don't know." He knew everything, and whenever a person is so knowledgeable, laughter becomes impossible.

Women do have a sense of humor -- look at their boyfriends!

Poor Jesus was never chosen by a woman as a boyfriend. And still you want him to laugh? You are expecting too much from a poor carpenter.

His teaching life was only three years, from thirty to thirty-three. And in these three years his whole effort was to frighten humanity as much as he could, because his whole business depended on people becoming afraid of hell. That was the fundamental psychology he was working on. But when you are teaching people about hell, laughter will not fit in.

There is always more hell that needs raising.

And in three years how much hell can you raise? You may not be aware, it is an unrecorded fact but passed on by word of mouth, from generation to generation, that when Jesus used to threaten people with hellfire, particularly women used to faint. Men started trembling, perspiring. Now this is not a situation for anybody to laugh, and particularly Jesus himself.

A man can learn much by imitating the behavior of a duck -- keep calm and unruffled on the surface, and paddle like crazy underneath.

Jesus managed it perfectly well. All that unruffledness, all that seriousness is just on the surface -- underneath he is also paddling like crazy, but you cannot see it. So nobody has ever observed him laughing.

It is said, a change of trouble is as good as a vacation.

He never changed anything. In those three years of his teaching, he continuously insisted on the same thing....

There is a contemporary parallel -- J. Krishnamurti. He managed for a longer time than Jesus. He started teaching when he was twenty-five, and he went on teaching till he died at the age of ninety. Nobody has ever seen him laughing. In fact, if you are laughing and by chance you come across him, you will stop. Just his face...

He used to come to India once or twice a year, and he used to speak only in three or four places -- Delhi, Bombay, Varanasi, Adyar. I had told my sannyasins everywhere to always sit in the front row, and the moment he would see my sannyasins with their red clothes and malas, he would completely forget what he had come to teach about. He would become so angry...his people came to me to say that "This is not right; he is getting old, he may have a heart attack. And you are making it such a trouble for him that wherever he goes, he finds sannyasins sitting in the front row. Then he forgets everybody else. Then he forgets for what he has come, what was the subject that he was going to teach -- furious, so furious that he starts hitting his own head!" Now seeing such a man, can you laugh?

The happiest time in anyone's life is just after their divorce.

But that time never came into Jesus' life. I have tried to find something the poor fellow might have laughed at, but there was nothing in his life. Sitting on a donkey, moving with twelve fools -- you are a laughingstock, you cannot laugh.

And it is not only true about Jesus.

It is true about almost all your saints -- Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, it doesn't matter to what church they belong. The saint is not supposed to laugh. The reason is simple: the saint is supposed to be working hard, moving towards the ultimate goal of life. There is no time for laughing. The whole thing is too serious. And because ordinary human beings laugh, obviously, the logic is clear: if you want to prove that you are extraordinary, you have to stop laughing. You have to stop doing many things which ordinary people do. You may even start doing things which are absolutely stupid and idiotic, but you have to be certain only about one thing -- that ordinary people don't do those kind of things.

You will see saints standing on their heads. Now, if existence wanted you to stand on your head, the feet would have grown out of your head. But any kind of nonsense... Mahavira used to pull out his hair. He would not allow a small razor to shave his head -- every ordinary human being is doing that. And because he was pulling out his hair, thousands of people would gather to see this tremendously sacred event.

If you look at your saints and their histories, you are bound to come to the conclusion that almost a hundred percent of them needed psychiatric treatment. But we have lived under their influence, and they have such a long tradition that its burden is heavy on our hearts, too.

He has been warned that Paddy is a bit of a fool, but the postmaster decides to hire him anyway, because the post office is really short-staffed. His first day on the job, Paddy is given the work of sorting letters, and to everyone's surprise, he separates the letters so fast that his motions are literally a blur.
Very pleased about this, the postmaster approaches him at the end of the day.
"I want you to know," he says, "that we're all very proud of you. You're one of the fastest workers we've ever had."
"Thanks a lot," replies Paddy, "and tomorrow, I'll try and do even better."
"Better?" asks the postmaster, astonished. "How could you possibly do better?"
"Well," says Paddy, "tomorrow I'm going to read the addresses."

All kinds of idiots have become your saints. In fact, a man who is intelligent is not going to become one of your saints, because to be a saint literally means to be a slave of the crowd. The crowd dictates. The crowd tells the saint how he has to live, what he has to eat, where he has to sleep. The saint is simply the slave of a vast crowd and because he obeys, the crowd pays him with deep respect.

And remember one thing: in life everything needs a certain qualification, except being a saint. Nobody is asked for any qualification, no interview.

Pope the Polack goes to the optician for an examination. "I want to make a few tests," says the optician, "so cup your hand and put it over your right eye."
The pope cups his left hand and places it on his forehead.
"No!" says the optician. "Cup your hand and cover your eye." This time the pope cups his right hand and covers his forehead.
In desperation, the optician takes a large paper bag and places it over the pope's head.
Then, he cuts out a hole in the bag over his left eye. Before he can ask the pope to read the chart, he sees his eye is full of tears. The optician immediately cuts a hole in the bag over his right eye, and tears fall from both the Pope's eyes.
"For God's sake!" shouts the optician. "Why are you crying?"
"Ah!" sobs Pope the Polack, "I was really hoping for something more stylish."

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho

Osho: Om Mani Padme Hum, Chapter 9