Tarot in the Spirit of Zen

by Osho

  Personality is that which is given to you by the society, culture, civilization, education; in other words, by others. People are giving you their opinion about you, and you are collecting those opinions. Those opinions are creating your personality.

  You must have observed very small children whose personalities are not yet developed. It takes time. For at least three or four years the child remains more of an individual than he may ever be again. He is authentic, sincere. He does not take any note of others’ opinions.

  It is because of this that if you want to remember your past you can go back only up to a certain moment—and that moment will be the age of either four years or three years, at the most three years. After that there is a complete blank. You have been here during those three years, but you don’t remember anything. You were nine months in your mother’s womb—you don’t remember anything at all.

  The reason you cannot now remember these three years is because you had no personality. It is the personality which accumulates the opinions of others and creates a false identity, a certain idea of “Who I am.” You don’t know exactly who you are, because to know who you are, you will have to dig deep within yourself through all the rubbish that has accumulated in the name of personality. You will have to become a child again.

  What you know about yourself is your personality. You know that you have a certain name—are you aware that you came into the world without a name? You have a certain education, a certain qualification—you know you were not born a doctor or an engineer or a professor. These are things added to you. Your degrees, your name, your fame … all these things are added to you. But this is what you are; as far as you are concerned, if all these things are taken away from you, what will you be? Just a zero … a plain slate, all writing has been removed.

  Your personality is all that you know about yourself—I am making it absolutely simple so that you can be alert—and your individuality is that which you don’t know, and you are.

  Meditation is an effort to get rid of personality and to reach your living sources of life, your individuality, the flame that you have brought from your mother’s womb—and that you had before your birth, even before you entered the womb of the mother. You have had your individuality since eternity. It is your essential consciousness, which is covered with so many layers of so many lives that it is lost completely and you have forgotten the way back to it.

  So remember: whatever you have learned from others is not you. That is your persona, and you have to find your innocence again. You have to find your essence before people started putting layers on you, before people started civilizing you, making you more cultured, more educated.

  XVI. Thunderbolt

  Man forgets many things intentionally. He tries not to remember, because remembering may smash all his ego and bring it all crashing down. But in this life, we get as much as we are willing to give up and let go.

  If a small glimpse of the truth comes to you, you will be upset, you won’t be able to understand.

  Have you noticed? Sometimes something suddenly wakes you up when you were deeply asleep. At five A.M. you were sound asleep, at the hour of deepest sleep, and something suddenly awakens you. Some noise, some firecracker goes off in the street, a car crashes into your door, some noise that immediately wakes you up. Instantly—you jump immediately from sleep to wakefulness. You come like an arrow from the depths of sleep. Usually when we come out of deep sleep we come very slowly. First deep sleep drops away, then dreams gradually start floating, then we remain in dreams for a while. But if something happens suddenly, you come like an arrow from the depths straight to awakening. Your eyes open and you wonder: Where am I? Who am I? For a moment nothing is clear.

  This must have happened to all of you at some time or other. You wonder, “Who am I?” Even your name and address will be gone. “Where am I?” This too will be unclear. It is as if you have suddenly come to some alien world. It lasts only a moment, then you come back together, because this shock isn’t such a great shock. And then too you are used to it—it happens every day. You get up every morning: you return from the world of dreams into the world of wakefulness. This routine is old, yet sometimes when it happens suddenly, you are startled and frightened.

  When the real awakening happens you will be completely speechless. You won’t have any idea what is happening. Everything will become calm and silent.

  Keep what I am saying to you. Make a jeweled box for it. Don’t take it as wisdom but only as information. Consciously make a box for it. Then gradually you will find, as experiences begin happening, that my words arise from your unconscious, and make clear and comprehensible the experiences that happen.

  For an experiment, simply try to hold air in your hand. As soon as you tighten your grip the air escapes. The tighter you clench your fist, the less air you hold, until in the end there is no air left. Loose your grip and air will rush toward your open hand. There is always air in an open hand, but from the closed fist it flees. One who keeps his hand open has it always full of air; it is never empty, every moment the air is fresh. Have you ever observed this? An open hand is never empty, and a closed hand is always empty; and if a little air remains in the closed fist, it is stale and old and decayed.

  They alone are able to enjoy who renounce. In this world, in this life, man gets as much as he is willing to give up and let go. This is paradoxical—but all the rules of life are paradoxical.

  It is sheer stupidity to hold on to anything in life. The great mistake is to grasp tightly; in doing so one loses what one would have got. In claiming that “it is mine,” we lose what is ours already.

  XVII. Silence

  When you go in, you touch a new kind of silence—the presence of silence itself.

  It is not only an absence of noise, it is something absolutely positive, almost visible, tangible.

  Even the profound silence to be found amongst the trees is nothing compared to the inner silence. The outer, however profound it is, remains shallow; it has no depth. One can go into a forest, one can go into the mountains—there is certainly silence, but it is in fact a negative silence. The marketplace and its noise are not there, the traffic noise is not there. The airplane passing by, the train, the people and the dogs barking, are not there. It is the absence of noise; hence it cannot be profound.

  When you go in, you touch a new kind of silence—the presence of silence itself. It is not only an absence of noise, it is something absolutely positive, almost visible, tangible—and that is the difference. The outer silence can be disturbed any moment, but the inner silence can never be disturbed. No noise can ever penetrate it. And once you have felt it, even in the marketplace you will remain silent. It becomes an undercurrent. On the surface you may be involved in activities, in working, but deep down it is all silent. Nothing disturbs it, nothing distracts you from it; you remain rooted in it.

  For thousands of years the monks, the nuns, have been leaving the world in search of silence. Of course they find a certain silence in the jungles and forests, in the monasteries—but that is just an absence of noise, it is not true silence.

  True silence can only be found when you move inwards. It exists in your very interiority. Then it has infinite depth and infinite height. It is immeasurable. And to know it is to know all.

  There are very few people who love silence, although many people say they would like to be silent. But the moment they are silent they are not happy; they start immediately searching for some diversion, distraction, some occupation. They are afraid of being silent and there is a reason why they are afraid—because the more silent you become the more you disappear.

  You are noise because you are your mind, you are noise because you are your ego. When the mind disappears, the mind and the ego both start evaporating. Then there is silence. Then you are really close to your authentic center, but you are unaware of it so you don’t know where you are going. It seems like you are falling into an abysmal depth, a bottomless phenomenon. Fear gr
ips you and you start searching for some diversion, some occupation—anything to cling to.

  And these are the people who hanker for immortality—and they don’t know what to do on their off day! Just think: if they are really allowed to be immortals, what will they do? People talk about beautiful things, not knowing what they are talking about.

  But if one loves silence then one loves existence, then one loves truth. Then one loves religion in its purest essence, because it is only through silence that one discovers the scriptures—scriptures that are hidden within you, sermons that are ready to explode within you, light that is waiting and waiting for you to come home. To love silence is what sannyas is all about. Sannyas can be defined as a tremendous love for silence.

  XVIII. Past Lives

  One dream comes, is followed by another dream, and is followed by yet another dream. The pilgrim starts from one moment and enters into the next one. Moment after moment, the moments keep disappearing, but the pilgrim continues moving on.

  My suggestion is, don’t ask whether the theory of reincarnation is true or not. To me it is true, to you it is not—not yet. Don’t take any position, negative or positive. Just remain open to the hypothesis. Explore. If you can go into your own past lives, that’s enough proof that everybody has a long, long past. And that gives another insight: if there are past lives, that means there are going to be future lives; this life is only just in the middle. Of course, to enter future lives is not possible because the future has not happened yet. But to enter the past is absolutely easy because it has already happened; the memory is there and the record is there. It is just that you have forgotten the way to the record room where it is kept.

  Take it as a hypothesis. With me, everything is a hypothesis. If you can trust only this much, that you are ready to explore, inquire, that will do.

  I have no doctrines to teach you, but only methods for you to find out the truth by yourself. Any truth that is not found by you is not truth. Truth is truth only when you have found it.

  When you lie down to sleep at night—when sleep begins to descend upon you and has almost caught you—bring your consciousness to the last thought in your mind, then go to sleep; and when you wake up in the morning and are ready to leave your bed, look back and find your first thought on waking. You will be very surprised by the result. The last thought of the night becomes the first one in the morning. In the same way, the last desire at the time of death becomes the first desire at the time of birth.

  In death, the body disintegrates but the mind continues its journey. The age of your body may be fifty years but that of your mind can be five million. The sum total of all the minds born in all your births is there in you even today. Buddha has given a very significant name to this happening. He was the first to do so. He named it the “storehouse of consciousness”. Like a storehouse, your mind has stored all the memories of all your past births—so your mind is very old. And it is not that your mind is the storehouse of only human births: if you were born as animals or as trees, as is surely the case, the memories of all those births are also present within you.

  People who have conducted profound inquiries into the storehouse of consciousness say that if all of a sudden the feeling of love swells in someone on seeing a rose, the reason is that there is a memory deep within that person of being a rose in the past, which is rekindled on feeling its resonance in a rose. It is not accidental if a person loves dogs very much. There are memories in his storehouse of consciousness that make him aware of his great kinship with dogs. Whatever happens in our lives is not accidental. A subtle process of cause and effect is working behind these happenings.

  “Who am I?” is a very fundamental question, and a very existential question at that. “Who am I?” is a question which involves the totality of our existence in all its depth and heights. This question will take me where I was before I was ever born, behind all my past lives. This question can take me where I was in the primeval beginning. The profoundness of this question is infinite. And so is its journey equally profound.

  XIX. Innocence

  If you really want to know, you will have to drop all your knowledge; you will have to unlearn it.

  You will have to become ignorant again, like a small child with wondering eyes, with alertness.

  Buddha himself is not very knowledgeable; neither is Jesus, nor is Mohammed. They are innocent people, simple people, but their simplicity is such, their innocence is such, their childlike quality is such that they have been able to penetrate into the innermost core of their beings. They have been able to know their truth; they have been able to reach the very core of their existence. They know, but they are not knowledgeable. Their knowing is not through scriptures. Their knowing has happened through watchfulness. Remember the source: real knowing comes through meditation, awareness, consciousness, mindfulness, watchfulness, witnessing. And unreal knowledge comes through scriptures. You can learn the unreal knowledge very easily and you can brag about it, but you will remain a fool—a learned fool, but a fool all the same.

  If you really want to know, you will have to drop all your knowledge, you will have to unlearn it. You will have to become ignorant again, like a small child, with wondering eyes, with alertness. You will be able to know not only your own being but also the being that exists in the world … the being that exists in the trees and the birds and the animals and the rocks and the stars. If you are able to know yourself, you will be able to know all that is.

  Innocence is your very nature. You do not have to become it, you are already it. You are born innocent. Then layers and layers of conditioning are imposed upon your innocence. Your innocence is like a mirror and conditioning is like layers of dust. The mirror has not to be achieved, the mirror is already there—or rather, here. The mirror is not lost, it is only hidden behind the layers of dust.

  You don’t have to follow a path to reach your nature because you cannot leave your nature, you cannot go anywhere else. Even if you wanted to, it is impossible. That’s exactly the definition of nature: nature means that which cannot be left behind, that which cannot be renounced. But you can forget about it—you cannot lose it, but it can be forgotten. And that’s exactly what has happened. The mirror is not lost but forgotten—forgotten because it is not functioning anymore as a mirror. Not that any defect has arisen in it, just layers of dust are covering it. All that is needed is to clean it, to remove those layers of dust.

  The process of becoming innocent is not really a process of becoming, it is a process of discovering your being. It is a discovery, not an achievement. You don’t attain to something new, you simply attain to that which you have always been. It is a forgotten language.

  It happens many times: you see a person on the road, you recognize him, his face seems familiar. Suddenly you remember also that you know his name. You say, “It is just on the tip of my tongue,” but still it is not coming to you. What is happening? If it is just on the tip of your tongue, then why can’t you say it? You know that you know it, but still you are not able to remember it. And the more you try, the more difficult it becomes, because making an effort makes you more tense. And when you are tense, you are farther away from your nature; you are farther away from that which is already there. When you are relaxed you are closer; when you are utterly relaxed, it will surface of its own accord.

  So you try hard, but it doesn’t come, so you forget all about it. Then lying down in your bath, or just swimming in the pool—you are not even trying to remember that man’s name—when suddenly it bubbles up. What has happened? You were not trying to remember, and you were relaxed. When you are relaxed you are wide, when you are tense you become narrow—the more tense, the more narrow. The passage between you and that which is inside you becomes so narrow that nothing can pass through it, not even a single name.

  All the great scientific discoveries have been made in this very mysterious way—in this very unscientific way, so to speak. Once you have dropped the effort you become relaxed, y
ou become restful. You become soft, you become wide, you become open. It is there inside, it surfaces. Finding the mind no longer tense, it surfaces.

  Innocence is there, you have simply forgotten it—you have been made to forget it. Society is cunning. For centuries man has learned that you can survive in this society only if you are cunning; the more cunning you are, the more successful you will be. That’s the whole game of politics: be cunning, be more cunning than others. It is a constant struggle and competition as to who can be more cunning. Whoever is more cunning is going to succeed, is going to be powerful.

  After centuries of cunningness man has learned one thing: that to remain innocent is dangerous, you will not be able to survive. Hence parents try to drive their children out of their innocence. Teachers, schools, colleges, universities exist for the simple work of making you more cunning, more clever. Although they call it intelligence, it is not intelligence. Intelligence is not against innocence, remember. Intelligence is the flavor of innocence; intelligence is the fragrance of innocence.

  And innocence has not to be achieved; it is already there. It has only to be discovered—or rediscovered. You have to drop all that you have learned from others, and you will immediately be innocent.

  Don’t just go on living on borrowed information. Start seeking and searching for your own intelligence. A negative process is needed; it is to be achieved through via negativa. You have to negate all that has been given to you. You have to say, “This is not mine; hence I have no claim over it. It may be true, it may not be true. Who knows? Others say it is so, but unless it becomes my experience I cannot agree or disagree.