Playing with Words

Let’s look here at how squinting at words, playing with them, opens avenues of insight that can lead to transformation and growth.

Beautiful
or
Be you to the full

You are also not just a human being – the whole cosmos has become consciousness in you; that too is a flowering. And when these two flowerings meet, that meeting is ecstatic, blissful. And through that meeting you for the first time become aware of a non-verbal existence. (2)

 

R.I.P. (Requiescat in pace – Rest in peace)
or
Repress
Ignore
Pretend

Osho hammers constantly on the themes of ‘get it out’, creating powerful tools like the Dynamic Meditation and the Mystic Rose… Release and live, repress and die.

 

Fine as in “How are you?” “Fine, thanks.”
or
Fucked up
Insecure
Neurotic
Emotional

The unconsciousness of daily interactions, all part of societal conditioning, includes using insincere and empty expressions that hide the reality of pain and discomfort while giving the impression of conforming to the norm of social interaction.

 

Obese
or
Overblown
Eating
Shit
Excessively

It is impossible to ignore the link between the explosion of obesity in western societies – notably the USA – and unawareness in eating habits: what is being eaten, the amount, the artificiality of the products… and the extent to which eating compensates repressed emotions and the insecurity arising from the untamed mind.

 

Blame
or
Be lame

Pointing the finger at others and shirking responsibility are great ways to give away all personal power. Rediscovering love, first for self then for others then in all its facets, is the greatest way to stop blaming. Blame is one of the many games the mind plays, but Osho shows us in manifold ways how to go beyond the mind and regain our power.

There is no guide, there is no holy scripture, there is no prophet, no savior. You are left alone to find your path. You will not find responsibility, you will find spontaneity. You will not find duty, you will find love.

Love knows no responsibility, because love itself is responsibility. To separate love and responsibility is simply stupid. But all moral systems of the world separate it. Their idea of responsibility does not correspond with existence, but only with their logic. (3)

 

Faith
or
Following/Feeling
All
In
The
Heart

Faith is one of the most impossible things – the most impossible. Really, to be in faith is to take a jump into madness. And all religious people, all religious minds, are in a way, mad. When I say mad I mean they leave reasoning; they don’t use reasoning because faith is absence of reasoning, absence of argumentation. Faith is a sort of love. It is a happening, not a mental construct. (4)

 

Intimacy
or
Into
Me
I
See

This, a favorite of trainers and therapists, is a beautiful example of the division between two worlds, the inner and the outer. Society confuses the two, points the finger and focuses of the periphery of physical interaction. On the path of growth and awareness the focus switches and the attention is drawn inwards to discover the richness (and emptiness) inside, in the inner world of the heart, beyond the mind.

Disease
or
Dis-ease

The French word malaise – also used in English – emphasises the lack of ease or comfort (that Osho calls ‘uncomfort’) in the body implied by sickness. The body is out of balance, all too often as a result of believing the programmed nonsense of the mind.

How it happens when the body energy is not flowing rightly you feel uncomfort? Because a gap exists in you, an absence, and you feel something is missing. This is disease in the beginning. First it will be felt in the mind. As I told you, first it will be felt in the unconscious. […]

From the unconscious it will come up to the subconscious; then you will feel irritated. You will feel that stars are wrong, whatsoever you do goes wrong. You would like to love a person, and you try to love but you cannot love. You would like to help somebody, but you only hinder. Everything goes wrong.

You think some bad influence, some star in the high sky – no – something in the subconscious, some uncomfort, and you get irritated, angry, and the cause is somewhere in the unconscious. You are finding the cause somewhere else. Then the cause comes to the conscious. Then you start feeling that you are ill, and then it moves to the body. It has been always moving to the body, and suddenly you feel ill. (5)

 

Listen
rearranged to
Silent

Even in the commercial world of sales there’s a well-known saying: “God gave you two ears and just one mouth. Maybe there’s a message here to listen more.” In my professional world of public speaking and presenting, training speakers to savour the silence instead of continuing talking is one of the hardest tasks!

… a moment will come when the storm has gone. In that moment, real silence happens to you. Real in the sense that now it is not cultivated; it is spontaneous. The stream is flowing. It is not anything that you have created; it is not anything that is happening because of your effort. Rather, on the contrary, you are not there. Only the silence is. And this silence is fearless. (6)

 

Individuality
or
In divided duality and indivisible

This word ‘individual’ is very beautiful, but it has been very much misused. Individual means ‘indivisible’: that which cannot be divided. You should not be called individuals; that is wrong language. You are ‘dividuals’, you can be divided. Only God is individual. When the ‘dividual’ disappears, the individual is. But there is no duality. It is not you, and God functioning through you. That is again the ego. (7)

Osho talks at great length of the subject of being an individual, an undivided personality, and on the subject of duality. Seekers on the path learn how duality causes friction, and non-duality leads to peace and tranquillity. Ramana Maharshi puts it perfectly:

Responsibility
or
Response ability

The capacity to respond, rather than simply ‘react’, is a function of developing awareness, openness and being in the here-now.

Make it a point that your life has to be a life of love, and if out of love you respond, that I call responsibility. Break the word into two: response-ability, don’t make it one. Joining these two words has created so much confusion in the world. It is not responsibility, it is response-ability. And love is able to respond. There is no other force in the world which is so able to respond. If you love, you are bound to respond; there is no burden. Duty is a burden. (8)

 

Alone
or
All one

Discovering the difference between being alone and feeling lonely, and a whole world of true relating opens up, demolishing the frontiers between you and humanity.

But the single moment of knowing the realization that you are alone – alone to tread the path, alone to create the path, alone to be committed to living, alone to be involved in the moment – can penetrate you and society vanishes. You are alone. There is no guru now, there is no one to be followed. There is no leader, there is no guide. You are alone; you are the aloneness. There is no one to adulterate it or contaminate it. It is so pure, innocent and beautiful. This aloneness is the path, this aloneness is meditation, this aloneness is Yoga. (9)

 

Evil
or
Live

Osho constantly reminds us of the paradoxes of life, that there’s no night without day, no hate without love, no evil without good. One of George Lucas’ favourite themes in his Star Wars movies is the inherent goodness that still resides somewhere deep even in the most evil characters.

Evil is not against you, you just don’t know how to use it. Poison is not your enemy, you just don’t know how to make medicine out of it. In wise hands poison becomes medicinal, in foolish hands medicine can become poison. It all depends on you, on your artfulness. Have you ever looked at the word evil? Read backwards, it is live. Life can become evil, evil can become life; it all depends on how you read it. (10)

 

Impossible
or
I’m possible

In essence, nothing is impossible. Even the word itself says “I’m possible”. Only the mind creates limitations:

If you go on the search for it, you have gone on an adventure. But the moment one is ready for the impossible, the impossible become possible. The moment one is ready to take the jump, the miracle happens. (11)

Atonement
or
Attunement and at-onement

Christian traditions make a great deal out of atonement, yet their version is deeply involved in concepts of guilt and repression. Osho makes it clear that genuine atonement is something entirely different, something far more glorious and noble, and totally disconnected from anything involving guilt:

Look at the present. This very moment God is within you and without you. And if you can live this God in total serenity, in total attunement, at-onement, you would know the ecstasy that I am talking about, the bliss, the benediction. (12)

 

Mistake
or
Mis-take

When making a film, a scene may be shot many times over until the director is satisfied. Each shot is called a ‘take’ and is given a number, and may be repeated over and over. It would be true to say that all takes but the one the director accepts are then ‘mis-takes’, just as we all experience simple misunderstandings in our daily communications.

You can commit as many mistakes as possible, still you are forgiven; you are already forgiven. Committing mistakes is a way of learning; without mistakes nobody can learn. Committing mistakes is a way of growing; without mistakes nobody can grow. So commit as many mistakes as possible…

[…] but remember only one thing: don’t repeat the same mistakes again and again, because then you don’t learn. Then the mistake becomes mechanical, it starts repeating itself. (13)

 

Words and phrases with meaning

These are endless, in virtually every language. Keep watching for them, such as:
– remember and remind: putting back into the mind or memory
– recreation: re-creation, re-generating energy and initiative
– ignorance: ignoring heart truth, being stuck in the mind
– integer: becoming whole again

Wonderful phrases such as:

When the head is empty, the heart is full.

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No meditation, no life. Know meditation, know life.

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… remind us of the powerful truth that Osho, in all his enlightened, connected wisdom, makes available to us.

Kaiyum is a regular contributor to Osho News

All articles by this author published on Osho News

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Excerpts from Osho’s discourses
(1) Book of Wisdom, Ch 26, Q 2
(2) That Art Thou, Ch 47
(3) Sat Chit Anand, Ch 30
(4) Kaivalya Upanishad, Ch 19
(5) Yoga, The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 2, Ch 7
(6) The New Alchemy to Turn You On, Ch 8
(7) Come Follow to You, Vol 2, Ch 10, Q 4
(8) The New Dawn, Ch 27, Q 2
(9) The Great Challenge, Ch 1, Q 1
(10) The Book of Wisdom, Ch 5
(11) That Art Thou, Ch 5
(12) Come Come Yet Again Come, Ch 15, Q 1
(13) Don’t Let Yourself Be Upset by the Sutra rather Upset the Sutra Yourself, Ch 57