Meditation is an individual revolution

Beloved Osho,

Waduda and I are leading a group called “meditation in the marketplace” which includes teaching people how their minds create their reality. One of the exercises is showing people ways to fulfill their desires.

Does showing people how to fulfill their desires bring them to a state of meditation, or does it lead them further away from it?

Wadud, meditation in the marketplace is my whole message, but the sense in which you have understood it is not right.

Firstly, meditation is not something within the mind.

The world is within the mind. Meditation is beyond the mind.

The mind creates the world, but the mind cannot create meditation. The mind can create frustration, satisfaction, pleasure, pain, anxiety, anguish or an animal-type contentment, the buffalo contentment – but the buffalo is not in meditation.

You are right when you say the mind creates its own world; it projects itself upon objects. The same object can be a beloved, a friend, or a foe. You can die for the same person, you can kill the same person too. You can desire riches, power, prestige, respectability; you can even desire desirelessness. You can create a world empire, you can be Alexander the Great; or you can renounce the world and can be a recluse in the mountains, in the Himalayas – it is your mind game.

It is true that your world is your mind projected on a screen. But you are going to help people to be satisfied with their desires.

You have asked a very significant question: Is it going to help them towards meditation, or is it going to take them away from meditation?

It is going to take them away from meditation. You are not going to be a friend; you are poisoning people if you help them to be contented with their desires.

A divine discontentment is a basic step towards meditation, not contentment. If a man is contented with his money with his power, with his respectability, why should he meditate? You have given him the opium, you have drugged him.

Wadud, this has been done by all the religions down the ages – giving opium to the people, making them contented, teaching them that being contented in the world is spirituality. They consoled people, but consolation is not religion.

Religion is revolution.

And revolution never comes out of contentment; it comes out of tremendous discontentment.

Just for an example, you can look at the history of India. For ten thousand years it has suffered all kinds of humiliations, slaveries, poverty, sickness; yet there has not been any revolution. Strange… for thousands of years millions of people in India are being treated almost like animals or even worse, but they have not revolted. They have been perfectly content because the religions – Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas, were all teaching one thing: if you are contented in the world, you will be rewarded in the other world a millionfold. To be discontented is unspiritual. If you are poor, accept it as a gift of God. […]

 

Karl Marx was not wrong when he said, “Religions have proved to be the opium of the people.” On that point I agree with him absolutely.

Wadud, you are going to do the same thing. You are my sannyasin, and you are going into the marketplace to help people to be contented.

Take meditation to the marketplace – but meditation does not mean contentment. Yes, a contentment comes, but that is not in the beginning of meditation – that is the ultimate fulfillment of meditation.

The first contentment is against human beings, and the last contentment is the fulfillment of all your potential. That is the kingdom of God, but that is nothing to be practiced by you; hence, there is no need to talk about it. It comes on its own accord.

As your meditation deepens, as you become more silent, as you become more peaceful, as you become more balanced, centered, alert, conscious, a contentment starts following you like a shadow; but that is not your doing.

I do not teach contentment.

But people have been cheated and befooled. You will be loved by people, respected by people if you go in the marketplace and help them to be contented with their desires, with the situation in which they find themselves. You will not sharpen their minds, you will not bring more intelligence to them. You will make them dull, you will make them mediocre. Idiots are always contented.

You will not be helping them towards a transformation of being because for that, discontentment is needed. A man has to be so discontented with the world that he is ready to be transformed whatsoever the cost, that he is ready for any risk. And meditation is a risk.

It is a risk because your ego has to be sacrificed. Either you can exist, or meditation can happen.

Ordinarily you think, “I am going to meditate.” You do not understand the phenomenology of meditation. You cannot meditate. You are the barrier, you are the only disturbance. If you want meditation to happen, you have to disappear. You have to drop this idea of yourself being somebody.

You have to become a nobody. The moment you are nobody, a silence descends on you, followed by a contentment. It is not contentment with the world; it is contentment with existence, with the stars, with the roses, with the ocean, with the rocks, with the mountains. It is not contentment with being a president of a country or a prime minister; it is not contentment with being the richest man in the world. It has nothing to do with your so-called world of ambitions. It is a very non-ambitious state. You are utterly empty, even empty of yourself.

Only in that emptiness, contentment blossoms, flowers -but that contentment is divine.

It is not something that you have done, it is something that you have allowed to happen. You have not been a hindrance; you have become a hollow bamboo, a flute, and you have allowed the song to pass through you. It is not your song. It has not got your signature; it is the song of existence itself.

Go to the marketplace, take meditation to the marketplace, Wadud, but understand exactly the implications of it. It is not meditation to help people to be contented as they are – you have drugged them, you have stopped their transformation, you have somehow consoled them that “You are perfectly right as you are; there is no more in life. You have already got more than you deserve.”

And people will listen to you.

They have listened for thousands of years to this kind of nonsense. There are reasons why they have listened to it: because it is very consoling, relaxing, making you free from any struggle to grow, helping you to remain wherever you are. And you are in the ditches. All the religions, through different theoretical explanations, rationalizations, have been telling people, “Wherever you are, whatever you are, just silently do your duty and you will be benefited.” Revolution, transformation, are not religious words.

And to me there is no authentic religion without revolution, without transformation.

I would like to say, first you need divine discontentment to begin the journey of transformation. You have to be so utterly disgusted with the world you are living in, with the personality that you are living in, that you can start a journey of transformation. The beginning of the pilgrimage has to be a tremendous discontentment.

Otherwise, man is lazy. If you tell the man, “There is nowhere to go, you are already where you are supposed to be and God is taking care of everything. You need not worry; all that you can do is pray. Thank God for your poverty, thank God for your sickness, thank God for your old age, thank God for your slavery”… what else have you got to thank God for?

Any revolution means revolution against God because he is the creator, he is the maintainer of the world. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. He can see everything that is happening, has happened, has yet to happen – past, present, future. He can reach every nook and corner of the world, he has thousands of hands. You have seen the pictures of God with thousands of hands: those thousands of hands are saying, “Don’t be worried, there is one hand for you too.” He will take care.

Any complaint is disrespectful. Any complaint means you are more intelligent than God – you are saying that you can create a world better than God has created. You can create a human personality more luminous, more cheerful, more integrated than God has created. Any complaint, any grudge, any grumbling is against God. Accept your slavery with thankfulness, accept your humiliation with prayer – this is what religions have been teaching to the people. This is how they have taken meditation into the marketplace.

Wadud, this is an ancient story. You are not doing anything new. All the priests of all the religions have been giving the same consolation: “Keep the status quo as it is. God above, everything is okay with man, with the world.” […]

 

If you want to change, you will have to do something. You have relied on God for long enough, and the situation has been going from bad to worse. It is time to take the situation into your own hands; at least for your life you should feel responsible.

Meditation is not a social revolution, it is an individual revolution. It is an appeal to the individual soul: You take responsibility in your own hands. Don’t be contented, because there is so much more potential in you. You are only seeds, and if seeds become contented that is suicide. You have to become sprouts, you have to become trees, you have to dance in the breeze, in the sun, in the moon, in the wind. You have to blossom, you have to release the fragrance that is hidden in you. And unless your fragrance is released, you will not find contentment, authentic contentment that comes on its own – not created by you; that is strictly hypocrisy.

Somehow you can manage, convince yourself that “This is my fate.” Nobody has any fate. Strange lies repeated for millions of years have become truths. You don’t have any fate. Your birth chart is just an exploitation by cunning people, because the stars are not interested in you. It is very ego-fulfilling that all the stars are interested in you – when an idiot is born, all the stars are interested in the idiot. […]

I have heard that three men were discussing whose profession was the oldest. And one man who was a priest said, “My profession is the oldest because the first thing man did was to pray and thank God.”

But the second man said, “All nonsense. My profession is older.” He was a surgeon. He said, “God has taken a rib out of man to make woman. I am a surgeon, and the first surgery was done by God. Before that, there was nothing but chaos.

The third man laughed and he said, “That makes the point, that my profession is the oldest.”

They said, “Your profession? Before that there was only chaos.”

He said, “Yes, but the point is, who created the chaos?”

He was a politician. Without him, of course, it is very difficult to create chaos.

There is no God – we are still living in chaos, and the politicians are still creating it. It is not that once upon a time they created the chaos; they are still on the job.

Meditation is a revolution in the individual.

Social revolutions have failed. There have been social revolutions – the French revolution, Russian revolution, Chinese revolution – they all failed. Something in the very mechanics of revolution is such that it is bound to fail, because the people who succeed in throwing off the old regime, the old power, the old government, the old society, are part of the old society; that’s one thing. They have been conditioned, educated by the old society. They have been fighting with the old society with the same means, same lies, same strategies. And they have been successful because they proved more cunning, more violent, more powerful than the old power. And once they come into power, power corrupts – and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And because they have come into power after a struggle, they make every arrangement so that nobody can overthrow them. […]

 

All social revolutions have failed, and in the future also there is no hope that any social revolution will ever succeed, because the very mechanism is self-defeating.

Hence I teach the only revolution that can be successful, and that is a revolution in the individual. Make the individual more discontented so that he starts asking, “Is there a way to go beyond this discontentment? Is there a way to get out of this anguish?”

Meditation is the way to go out of discontentment, out of anguish.

You have to become just a watcher, a witness of the mind.

Wadud, you say mind creates the world – true.

But meditation is not mind, and mind cannot create meditation. Meditation is getting out of the mind, becoming a watcher of the mind, witnessing all the stuff that goes through the mind – the desires, imaginations, thoughts, dreams, all that goes on in the mind. You become simply a witness. Slowly slowly, this witnessing becomes stronger, becomes more centered, rooted. And suddenly you understand one thing: that you are one with the witnessing, not with the mind; that the mind is as much outside you as anything else.

The market is outside you, the mind is outside you, the body is outside you. You are the innermost core – everything is outside you.

This experience of the innermost center brings a contentment. You don’t bring it; it comes, it simply rains over you.

A contentment that you have practiced is false.

A contentment that comes to you on its own accord is authentic.

Go to the marketplace, teach people how to be watchers of their minds, but remember not to teach them to be contented with their desires. We have to make them more discontented, till the real contentment comes. If you make them contented, then the real never comes. You are satisfied with something plastic; that becomes the barrier.

Wadud is a psychotherapist. His wife Waduda is also a psychotherapist. They both work together. They are experts as far as mind is concerned, but mind has to be transcended.

Mind is not our game, mind is not our world.

Our world is beyond the mind.

Meditation in the marketplace is a beautiful idea, but understand exactly what meditation is – not only intellectually, but existentially. Experience something that you are going to share with people; otherwise, you will be just parrots repeating something which you know not.

And I prohibit my sannyasins from repeating anything that they know not. Unless you know, it is better to say, “I am ignorant, I do not know.” That ignorance is yours: at least it is true. Knowledge borrowed from somebody else is against your self-respect. It is not yours and you cannot share it – you don’t have it.

All that you know is in the mind, and meditation is an experience of the heart. So first let your heart sing and dance.

Rejoice in meditation. Then go to the marketplace.

Osho, The Osho Upanishad, Ch 33, Q 1 (excerpts)