Tarot in the Spirit of Zen

by Osho

  So the immoral person finds himself in two difficulties. One comes from the outside because he starts losing people’s respect; and in this world respect is the most valuable thing in people’s eyes because it is a nourishment for the ego. The moment you lose respect your ego starts dying, your ego is hurt, your ego is wounded. Secondly, something inside you starts creating an inner torture for you—your conscience. That conscience is also created by the same society.

  Hence, society pressures you from both sides, outer and inner. You are just crushed between these two rocks. So cowards cannot be immoral people; cowards are always moral people. In fact they are not moral but only cowards! Because they are cowards they cannot be immoral—that is too dangerous, too risky.

  And the moral people, the so-called moral people, live a superficial life. They are bound to live a superficial life because their conscience is not their own—what else can be their own? They don’t possess even their own conscience, what else can they possess? They are the poorest people in the world.

  And they are not moral because they understand the beauty of being moral; they are moral simply because they don’t have guts enough to be immoral. They follow the dictates of society and conscience just out of fear. There is fear of the law and there is fear of hell; there is fear of the policeman and there is fear of God. They are constantly trembling, their life is nothing but a constant trembling. Their prayers arise out of that trembling—naturally those prayers are false; they are fear-oriented. Even their conception of God is nothing but a projection of their fear.

  That’s why these people are rightly called “God-fearing” people. They are not God-loving people. And remember, one who fears God can never love God. And one who loves God need never fear God. Fear and love can’t exist together; it is impossible. Their coexistence is not possible in the nature of things.

  But society pays you enough to be moral, gives you as much ego as it is possible to give—not only here but in the afterworld too. There are also places, special places reserved for you in heaven. The sinner is suffering here and the sinner will suffer in hell too, and the so-called saint is respected here and he is going to be respected in the other world too.

  This is a strategy, a very subtle psychological strategy of society to exploit you. But because of this strategy you have completely lost track of real morality—a morality that is not dictated by fear, a morality that does not arise out of cowardice, a morality that is not fear-oriented.

  A totally different vision of morality has been given by the buddhas, by the awakened ones of all the ages. Their vision is that real morality comes not out of conscience but out of consciousness. Become more conscious, release more conscious energy in your being, explode into consciousness—and then you will see you are living a life in absolute attunement with existence. Sometimes it may be in tune with society and sometimes it may not be in tune with society, because society itself is not always in tune with existence.

  Whenever society is in tune with existence you will be in tune with society; whenever society is not in tune with existence you will not be in tune with society. But the real moral person never cares, he is even ready to risk his life. Socrates did that, Jesus did that. Buddha was constantly living in danger. This has always been the case, for the simple reason that they were living according to their own light.

  If it fits with society, good; if it does not fit with society it is bad for society but it has nothing to do with you. Society has to change itself. Socrates is not going to change himself, Jesus is not going to change himself according to society, Buddha is not going to live according to the crowd. The crowd consists of blind people, of utterly unconscious people who are fast asleep, who know nothing of themselves. To follow them is the most stupid thing in the world that a man can do. One should be intelligent enough to wake up one’s own consciousness.

  Real religion consists not of conscience but of consciousness. Religion really consists in creating a different kind of morality—not the so-called ordinary morality, but a morality that is spontaneous, a morality that arises by itself and is not imposed, a morality that is a consequence of your own intelligence.

  Knight of Clouds: Fighting

  In the fight you can create the notion of the ego; in the challenge, in resistance, you can create the notion of the ego. If you drop fighting and you float with the stream, by and by you will come to know that you do not exist separate from the whole.

  Everybody is going upstream, trying to fight with the river—why? Because in the fight you can create the notion of the ego; in the challenge, in resistance, you can create the notion of the ego. If you drop fighting and you float with the stream, by and by you will come to know that you do not exist separate from the whole. That’s why people love challenge, people love danger, people want to fight. If there is nobody to fight they will create something or other to fight, because only in fighting can their ego be maintained. And it has to be maintained continuously; it is just like a bicycle—you pedal it, and you have to go on pedaling otherwise it will fall. You have to continuously pedal it.

  The ego needs continuous pedaling. Every moment you have to go on fighting with something or other. Once you stop fighting, suddenly you find the cycle has fallen. The ego cannot exist without the fight.

  Never compel anybody to do something and never compel yourself to do something; let things happen, then existence will be doing them through you. There are two ways of doing things: one, you do; another, existence does them through you. If you do them, you create anxiety for yourself, anguish, misery, because then you become result oriented; you think, “Am I going to succeed or not?” You become more concerned with the end result than with the process. And then you are constantly worried; and whatever happens you will be frustrated.

  If you succeed you will be frustrated because the success will not deliver the goods that you were thinking were going to be delivered by it. If you fail, of course you will be in misery.

  People who fail are in misery and people who have succeeded are in misery. In fact those who have succeeded are more in misery than those who have failed because a failure can still hope. A man who has really succeeded cannot hope. He becomes absolutely hopeless. Now he has nowhere to go, he has succeeded—ask the very rich people why they are in such misery. A poor man we can understand, but why are rich people in so much misery? They have succeeded and now, being successful, they have come to realize that it has been useless, that success has not given them anything. It has simply wasted their whole life.

  Failure fails, success fails. There is only one possibility: that you know your being. Only that can satisfy, only that never fails. But that is not part of “becoming.” That has nothing to do with time. Right now, this very moment, it is available. It is already there in its total glory. The king is on the throne within you but you never look there. You are in search of money, knowledge, prestige, power, and you go out. And, to all those who go out I say—come in!

  Drop learning, learn unlearning. Come in! Drop the doer; learn how to do things without doing them. This is the greatest secret of all, the greatest miracle that can happen to anybody—you simply become a passage, a vehicle, a hollow flute, and songs start flowing through you.

  Just don’t come between you and yourself. Please, put yourself aside, don’t get in the way. If you can learn only one thing, how to stand aside, you have learned all. And then you become aware that everything is going on by itself. The whole is working. The part is not needed to work, it only needs to participate. It only needs not to create trouble and conflict. It only needs to be with the whole.

  Page of Clouds: Mind

  Don’t be cunning and calculating. Don’t try to be clever; the more clever you are, the more miserable you will be. This existence can be contacted only in innocence, childlike innocence.

  All your cleverness will lead you into falsities, new falsities, again and again. One has to drop being clever. See the point, that’s what Jesus means when he says, �
��Unless you are like small children, you will not enter into the kingdom.” He is saying, drop your cleverness. Don’t be cunning and calculating. Don’t try to be clever; the more clever you are, the more miserable you will be. This existence can be contacted only in innocence, childlike innocence. Your knowledge is not going to help, only your innocence.

  Function from the state of not knowing, never function from the state of knowing.

  The knowledgeable person is the closed person—and you have all become knowledgeable. You have read books, scriptures, you have been taught in the church, in the college, school, university; you have accumulated much knowledge. Now you go functioning from this knowledge that you have accumulated, and it is all borrowed—it has no roots in you. It is all rubbish, but you go on sitting on top of it. It gives you ego, certainly. The bigger heap you have of knowledge, the higher the peak of it you sit on. You go on exhibiting your degrees, you go on throwing your knowledge all around, you are continuously making others feel that they don’t know as much as you know.

  The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it. The stupid person is one who has become very stubborn about borrowed things—very stubborn about his Christianity, about his Hinduism, about this and that—very stubborn. The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it. Stubbornness is the indication of a stupid man. He is closed. He may be a great pundit, a great scholar, but that doesn’t make any difference; he is closed. He is surrounded by his knowledge—not even a small aperture is left for existence to enter him. His heart becomes unavailable. He lives surrounded by a wall; he walls people out. And the wall is made of knowledge—very subtle, the bricks almost invisible.

  The more you understand, the less you realize that you know. When understanding grows, knowledge starts disappearing—in the same proportion. The more understanding you become, the less knowledgeable you are. And the ultimate in knowing is absolute ignorance, innocence, childlike purity.

  Yes, Socrates is right when he says, “I know only one thing: that I don’t know anything at all.” Remember it: spiritual perception opens up only when you have dropped all principles. This is the essential message of Zen. Get rid of principles. Don’t be confined by any philosophy, by any guesswork, however clever it is. Remember only one thing, that unless something is your experience it is not worth keeping. Drop it.

  Don’t gather rubbish, don’t gather unnecessary luggage. This is my observation of thousands of people: I see them carrying such great psychological luggage, and for no reason at all. They go on gathering anything they come across. They read the newspaper and they will gather some crap from it. They will talk to people and they will gather some crap. They go on gathering … and if they start stinking … no wonder!

  Just observe what kind of thoughts go on inside your mind. Just one day sit, close your doors, and write down for half an hour whatever is passing in your mind, and you will understand what I mean … . Just write for half an hour, and you will be surprised what goes on inside your mind. It remains in the background, it is constantly there; it surrounds you like a cloud. With this cloud you cannot know reality; you cannot attain to spiritual perception.

  This cloud has to be dropped. And it is just with your decision to drop it that it will disappear. You are clinging to it—the cloud is not interested in you, remember.

  Ace of Clouds: Consciousness

  If you understand it, the world is a great device to make you more conscious.

  Your enemy is your friend, and the curses are blessings, and the misfortunes can be turned into fortunes. It depends only on one thing: if you know the key of awareness.

  When somebody insults you, that is the moment to keep alert. When your wife looks at somebody else and you feel hurt, that is the moment to keep alert. When you are feeling sad, gloomy, depressed, when you feel the whole world is against you, that is the moment to be alert. When you are surrounded by a dark night, that is the moment to keep your light burning. And all these situations will prove helpful—they are meant for it.

  I don’t believe what others call meditation, that ten minutes or twenty minutes you do it and then just be your ordinary self for twenty-four hours, and then again for twenty minutes meditate. This is stupid. It is like saying to a person, “Every day in the morning for twenty minutes, breathe. And then forget all about it, because you have to do many other things. The next morning you can breathe again.”

  To me, meditation is exactly like breathing. So whatever you are doing and wherever you are, do things more consciously. For example, you can raise your hand without any consciousness, just unconsciously, out of habit. But you can raise your hand with full awareness. And you can see the difference between the two. The act is the same: one is mechanical, another is full of consciousness and the quality is tremendously different.

  Try it, because it is a question of taste and experience. Walking, just try for a few minutes to walk consciously; be alert each step and you will be surprised that the quality of your walk is totally different, it is relaxed. There is no tension and there is a subtle joy that is arising out of your relaxed walking. And the more you become aware of this joy, the more you would like to be awake.

  Eating, eat with awareness. People are simply throwing food into their mouths, not even chewing it, just swallowing it. Millions of people in America are suffering from overeating. Strange world we are living in: one thousand people are dying every day in Ethiopia because they don’t have food, and millions of people are dying in America because they have too much food. These people who are suffering from obesity, fatness, cannot resist eating more and more. No doctor can help them unless they become aware while they are eating.

  If they become aware, a few things happen as a by-product. Their eating will be slowed down. They will start chewing, because unless you chew your food you are putting an unnecessary burden on your whole system. Your stomach has no teeth. One has to chew forty-two times each bite, then anything that you are eating becomes liquid. A man of awareness only drinks, because before he swallows he has changed that solid food into liquid. And when you are chewing forty-two times, you are enjoying the taste so much. One bite taken by an unconscious man gives forty-two times more taste to the conscious man. It is simple arithmetic: the unconscious man will have to eat forty-two bites just to have the same taste—and then he becomes fat, and still unsatisfied. Still he feels the need to eat more. The man of awareness eats only as much as his body needs. He immediately feels that now there is no need, the hunger is gone, he is content.

  Meditation has to be spread all over your twenty-four hours. Even falling asleep, remain alert to how sleep is descending on you, so slowly, so silently, but you can hear its steps. The darkness is growing, you are relaxing—you can feel the muscles, the body, the tensions that are preventing the sleep—and soon you will see the whole body has relaxed and the sleep has come. Slowly, slowly, a great revolution happens. Sleep comes to you, but something deep inside you goes on remaining awake, even in sleep.

  2 of Clouds: Schizophrenia

  Schizophrenia is not a disease that happens to a few people—it is the normal state of humanity. Everybody is divided, split.

  One scientist, B. F. Skinner, did an experiment worth remembering. A white mouse was starved for two or three days so it was very hungry; really, the mouse was just hunger, ready to jump and eat anything available. Then it was put on a platform. Just below the platform there were two similar boxes, the same color, same size, and both boxes contained food. The white mouse could jump in either the right box or the left.

  The mouse immediately jumped, not even a single moment of thought. But whenever he jumped into the right box, he would get an electric shock. And there was a trapdoor, so he would fall inside another box through the trapdoor and would not be able to reach the food. Whenever he jumped into the left box, there was no shock and there was no trapdoor, so he would reach the food. Within two or three days he learned the trick: he would jump in the left box and avoid the rig
ht.

  Then Skinner made a change, he changed the places of the boxes. The mouse jumped into the left box and found that there was an electric shock. Now it was disturbed, confused as to what to do and what not to do. So before jumping it would tremble and waver, doubtful.

  This is how a philosopher is—a white mouse, trembling, doubtful what to do: left or right, and how to choose? And who knows … ? But then it got accustomed again.

  Then Skinner again made a change. The mouse became so confused that although it was hungry it would wait, trembling, looking at this box and that—and how to decide? Then he decided the thing you have decided: he jumped between the two boxes—but there was no food, this was not going to help. And after a few weeks of experiment, the white mouse went mad, neurotic.

  This is what is happening to you: you have become confused—what to do, what not to do? And the only thing that comes to the mind is that if it is difficult to choose this, difficult to choose that, then it is better to make a compromise, just jump in the middle.

  But there is no food. Of course, there is no electric shock, but there is no food either.

  You miss life if you jump in the middle. If it were possible for the white mouse to mount both boxes, he would have done that. These are the two possibilities that open for reasoning: mount both horses or just jump in the middle.