For real questions there are no answers

Bhagwan spoke at length about Subud, saying it was helpful but was a partial truth and, in itself, not complete.

Tonight, David – having passed through one or two groups – is taking sannyas. As he sits in front of Bhagwan with this eyes closed, I remember that he is a potter and look at his hands as they lie passive in his lap.

Clean-shaven, grey-haired, with the polite, cool demeanour of the typical Englishman, David seems somewhat of an enigma here. I marvel again at the incredible and all-embracing attraction of Bhagwan to so many diverse people.

Bhagwan smiles warmly at David as he shows him his new name. I suspect the English rather amuse him…

This will be your new name: Swami Deva Giresh.

Deva means divine and Giresh means god of the mountains. The full name will mean: god of the divine mountains. And I am giving this name to you for a certain reason – that your path will be almost as if one is climbing a mountain. A few people move towards height and few people move towards depth. Ultimately they both culminate in the same experience, but the paths are different.

A person who moves into depth has to learn more let-go, more relaxation, and a person who has to go up-hill, has to learn more effort, more technique, more will… and will is going to be your path. If you try relaxing, it will be very difficult and you will not succeed in it. You can succeed very easily in creating great will.

So the path towards the mountains is the path of will. It is arduous but you will enjoy it; it will not be arduous for you. And that has also to be understood – that something may be arduous to one person and it may be very very beautiful to another. And something may be very easy to one and may be very difficult to another. It depends on the person.

I can see in you a very very great possibility of a willpower that can explode. And if you don’t allow it, you will be going against yourself.

The path towards the mountains is the path Glasser calls ‘the path of positive addiction.’ There are two types of addiction in life – one is negative addiction: a man becomes an alcoholic or a man becomes a heroin addict or a smoker or anything. Then there are positive addictions: a man becomes a meditator or a man becomes a runner or a great swimmer – these are positive addictions. The addiction is the same – if you are an alcoholic, you will miss it if you don’t drink; then you will miss it tremendously. The same will happen to you if you become positively addicted.

If you run every morning for one hour and one day you don’t run, you will feel very very sad and depressed and that something is missing – and a guilt feeling too. Of course there is no question of any guilt about whether you run or not, but you will feel a guilt feeling too. If people who are will-oriented become negatively addicted, their life is wasted. If they become positively addicted then they are great creators. The addiction is the same, the mind is the same….

So if you can start working on positive addictions you will be tremendously benefited. For example, meditation: choose one meditation and then put all your effort in it. That effort has to be very regular because will is created only out of regularity. It has to be very persistent and a continuity has to be maintained. Even to miss for one day is to destroy much – and at least one hour every day has to be given to it.

Many people have been doing research work on addictions and it has been found that it takes at least sixty minutes per day to become addicted to something… less than that won’t do. And it takes at least three to four months to really become addicted: one hour every day for four months; that is the period. Once you have become addicted, then there is no need for any effort. It becomes natural, it becomes your second nature.

After doing a meditation for one hour every day for three, four months, without break, any meditation will do and you will start finding trance-like states. It can happen through running.

Runners know about it – that after running a certain distance they lose the mind and suddenly there is a transcendental state, a trance-like state. They don’t know who they are anymore; they are just pure energy. Joggers know that, dancers know that – that after a certain moment the dancer disappears… there is only dance. When that moment comes, it is the meditative moment, and it can be done through anything.

In Japan they have used all kinds of things – archery, swordsmanship, wrestling – for meditation. And anything active will be good for you – something like Vipassana won’t help much. If you just have to sit silently it will be unnecessary trouble for you. So choose some active meditation – the Dynamic is good, Kundalini is good, dancing is good – and then persist.

After three, four months, you will become a perfect meditator. The only thing is to be regular and not to relax the effort. It is only a question of three, four months – that is the most important period. Once the foundation is there and you have become positively addicted, then the addiction works.

Giresh: I’ll do it!

Anything you would like to say to me?

Giresh: Really, anything I say I find the wrong words for. The words seem to be lies on this sort of subject.

They are!

Giresh: And the only question I have I find that I can’t really…

Ask it – that’s right! No real question can be asked – only unreal questions can be asked. Real questions have to be lived, so one has to struggle with them, encounter them. And for real questions there are no answers; only life gives the answers and you have to fight for them. Only for unreal questions the answers exist.

Giresh: Yes!

An unreal question is such a simple question, any answer will do. But a real question, an authentic question – which is not really a question but a quest – there is no way to answer it.

Buddha used to say to his disciples to never ask ten types of questions – he had made ten categories of questions never to be asked – and those are the real questions, very basic questions.

He would say, ‘Don’t ask these questions. Anything else you can ask and I will answer, but these questions have not to be asked and cannot be answered. You will have to move into the mysteries of life, you will have to live, you will have to go through the darkness and find a way.’

That’s why they are not so easily available to the mind, and that’s why it is very difficult to be articulate about them, to put them into words. They don’t belong to the world of the words. They belong to the world of facts, not to the world of fictions.

The word is the world of fiction. It is very good to spin theories, stories, poetries, philosophies around the word, but the fact is a naked thing, bare, raw. It has no philosophy about it; it is simply there just like a rock on the path. You have to do something about it. You can step over it, you can jump, you can by-pass it; but you have to do something. It is not a question that has to be solved – it is a rock standing there in front of you. You have to do something about it and only doing solves real questions.

Good! At least this awareness is very good – that you know that something is there but it cannot be put into words. But I know what it is… because that real question is not different; it cannot be.

Each human being basically has only one question. The thousand and one other questions are just ways to avoid that real one, so one creates a great cloud around oneself of many questions and thinks this is important and that is important. And this is just a trick of the mind so that you can forget about the real.

This is a solace: this is like giving a child a pacifier so he does not ask for the real breast and he can fall into sleep, he can hypnotise himself by the pacifier. But the real question is bound to be the same, it cannot be different – different for me and different for you – because it concerns our being and at that point we are not different. Mm? – that being is exactly the same…. So I know what it is.

But it is good that you are alert about it. Start working on meditations and by and by you will become able to see exactly what it is. Not only that: you will be able to see in it the way too, because the real question is the door for the real answer. Once you understand it, half the answer is already in your hands.

Good, Giresh! Good!

Osho, This Is It, Ch 14

Note by Osho News: Gireesh came to Pune with his Subudh name, David. There is also a discrepancy about the spelling of his name. Suruchi writes: “Sometimes Girish was spelled Gireesh” – or Giresh as in this transcription.