Gratitude

Beloved Osho,
In my mind I am writing to you almost every day. All these questions and statements boil down to the following: Gratitude – I want to say thank you, Osho, beloved master – and attention. Could you say in discourse, one single time, “Hello, Hareesh,” so everybody can hear it, so that I am certain that you and everybody else knows I am existing as your lover and fellow dance-partner?

Hello, Hareesh…. But this will not be enough. It will be just plates without anything to eat, to drink. It will look like a desert where nothing grows.

And people are saying “hello” to each other without any reason; so I say… but I would like to present you also something, so “Hello Hareesh” is not empty. My first present:

A man sitting in a bar is complaining to the bartender: “After one year and three thousand dollars with that psychiatrist, he tells me I’m cured. Some cure! A year ago, I was Nancy Reagan – now I’m nobody.”

A Roman Catholic, a famous priest, and a Protestant minister, also very famous and well- known, had a heated discussion over the merits of their respective faiths.

Finally they agreed to differ, and as they parted the Catholic said, “Let us go our ways – you continue to worship God in your way and I will continue to worship him in his way.”

The minister’s wife… my second present… was becoming upset that her husband exclaimed, “Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus!” every time he reached orgasm.

“It’s perfectly proper, my dear,” he assured her, “and in accordance with The Bible where it says, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'” And the third:

The Catholic priest heard a number of women confess that the grocer’s new delivery boy had seduced them all. He made them each put ten dollars in the poor box.

The delivery man appeared last, and the priest asked angrily: “What have you got to say for yourself?”

“Just this,” replied the boy, “either you cut me in on those ten dollars or I take my business to another parish.”

Hareesh, keep your business here!

I can understand a deep desire in everybody to be loved, and I love you all whether I know your names or not. Names are just labels stuck to you. You have come here in the world without names, and you will leave this world without names.

As far as I am concerned you don’t have a name; and if you look within yourself, you will not find any name there. You are a nameless reality – and it is good, because every name creates a boundary around you, makes you small.

But your question is significant. Attention can do two jobs: if it is forced, it nourishes the ego; if it is prayed with gratitude, it nourishes the soul.

I cannot say anything against your question. Your question is so full of love, gratitude, that I can repeat as many times as you want, “Hello, Hareesh.” It will not strengthen your ego, it will weaken it. And so many people here, hearing me calling to you, “Hello, Hareesh,” are also repeating the same. Then it becomes a tremendous energy field, a brotherhood of spirituality, where everybody is to share his abundance.

It is perfectly right. Many would have liked the same, but could not gather the courage.

You are a courageous man. And you are asking “… and everybody else knows I am existing as your lover and fellow dance-partner.” Here we are not gathered to talk about nonsense – about God, heaven and hell. Here we have gathered to rejoice, to sing, to dance together in such an ecstasy that individualities melt into each other and it becomes one organic whole.

I have seen it becoming one organic whole many times, when you all laugh together.

Even the Germans don’t understand why they are laughing – but they are intelligent people: seeing that everybody is laughing, they also participate. In fact, they laugh louder than anybody else, so nobody suspects that they are Germans. Of course, outside Buddha Hall they enquire of people, “What was the matter? Why were people laughing so much? I could not get it.”

My suggestion to all the German sannyasins is: Forget trying to get it – that is what is troubling you! You are engaged in trying to get it and the moment passes…. Everybody is laughing, and you are always second; you cannot laugh first because you have not got it yet.

Here it is a temple of celebration, utterly pagan. Nobody is serious, nobody is bothering about how to reach heaven, how to get a harp, sit on a cloud and go on singing for eternity, “Alleluja, alleluja….” Those are the idiots. They have been taken up just to relieve the earth.

If you can rejoice with me you have understood me.

If my music has touched your heart, it is enough.

I am not here to convert anybody; I am just here to help you learn a little dance of the soul. This is the most religious phenomenon: the dance of the soul – no fear of punishment, no greed for any reward.

This moment is all in all.

Osho, Osho The Great Pilgrimage From Here to Here, Ch 8, Q 2

Note: Hareesh left his body on 23rd May