Mind Is A Questioning

We will have a few questions from Yoga Sutra 38.

Question was asked to Osho – BELOVED OSHO, YOU ARE SO TREMENDOUSLY SUPERB AND DISARMING THAT SOMETIMES I WONDER, HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN A CORNER?

To be in a corner, one needs to be logical in the first place. I am not logical; you cannot force me in a corner. I am so illogical that it is impossible to force me in a corner. Remember this, if you cling to the intellect you can be forced in the corner anytime because you have something to cling to. Once it is proved that that is wrong, illogical, you will be in a corner. If you cannot prove your prejudice logically, you will be in a corner. But I am absolutely illogical – I have no prejudice to prove, I have nothing to prove. How can you put me in a corner? Let me tell you one anecdote:

A man was claiming to be God. He was taken to the Caliph, who said, “Last year someone was claiming to be a prophet – he was executed. Do you know about it?”

“Serves him right,” the man answered. “I had not sent him.”

Now you cannot put such a man in a corner. It is impossible because the illogical approach is an open approach. In fact there are no corners because there is no room – no walls around it. It is an open sky; one can move anywhere. You can be forced into a corner if you live in a room, walled, and there are corners. If you live under the sky, how can you be pushed into a corner? There is no comer at all.

And that’s why I teach you: why cling to prejudices? If you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian you can be put in a corner. But if you are neither – corners have disappeared – there is no possibility to force you anywhere. Then the whole sky is yours. And the moment you understand the beauty and the freedom of the whole sky, you will drop all prejudices, all ideologies.

I have no ideology, nothing to prove. I am here just to give you a glimpse of me.

And I am – very illogically here. In fact, I should have left before. Anurag has asked, “Why yesterday morning did you suddenly stop and put your hand to your head? Why?” It happens sometimes: I lose contact with my body. I should have gone, really. I am illogically here – trying somehow to put some weight on me so I can help you a little longer. You may not have been aware, but it has happened many times before. Mind is a mechanism: I am using it, sometimes I lose contact. Body is a mechanism: I am using it, sometimes I lose contact.

Sometimes I start moving into the abyss so fast that I have to stop for a single moment.

Not only that I am illogical – I am illogically here.

And those who want to be argumentative with me will be at a loss. They cannot defeat me because I am not trying to convince them and I am not trying to prove anything. I am not interested in converting you; I am just interested because there is something which I have and I would like to give it to you. If you are ready, open, and rapport with me, you can receive it. Otherwise later on you will repent very much.

It happened:

One drunk staggered into a crowded pub, pushed his way through the customers and approached the bar. Finding a man and woman in his way, he brushed the woman rudely aside, elbowed his way through to the counter and belched loudly. The man he had just pushed past turned to him angrily.

“How dare you push through like that and belch in front of my wife!” he said indignantly.

The drunk looked apologetic.

“I am sorry to belch in front of your dear lady,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was her turn.” I am like that drunk. You cannot corner me.

That’s what I am doing with your questions. What answer I give is not important – try to see that I am destroying your question. My answer is not an answer but a strategy to destroy your question.

There are people who answer your questions, they give you certain ideas, they fill you with certain ideologies, theories, dogmas, cults – I am not answering your question that way. If you watch, if you are aware, you will be able to see that I try to destroy your question. Not that you receive the answer, but that you lose the question.

If someday you become questionless, that will be the point of realization. Not that you will have any answer: you will not have any questions, that’s all. You can call it the answer, when there is no question.

A Buddha is not a man who has all the answers; a Buddha is a man who has no questions. The questioning has disappeared – the questioning has become absurd, irrelevant. He is simply there without any question. That’s what I mean when I say he is a no-mind. Mind always questions, mind is a questioning. As leaves come out of the trees, questions come out of the mind. Old leaves fall, new leaves come; old questions disappear, new questions come.

I would like to uproot this whole tree.

If I am giving you any answer, then many more questions will arise out of it. Your mind will convert that answer into many questions.

I am absolutely absurd. I am not a philosopher – maybe a mad poet, a drunkard. You can love me, you cannot follow me. You can trust me, you cannot imitate me. Through your love and trust something tremendously valuable will be transferred to you. It has nothing to do with what I say; it has something to do with what I am. It is a transmission beyond the scriptures.

So never in my life have I been cornered. It is impossible – you cannot corner a madman.

THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF INTELLECT, INTUITION, AND PRATIBHA IN THEIR PROPER PERSPECTIVE. PRAY, SPECIALLY EXPLAIN WHY AND HOW LIFE SHOULD BE PRATIBHA-ORIENTED AND HOW ONLY SUCH AN ORIENTATION IS ADEQUATE FOR LIFE AND LIFE’S EVOLUTION AT ITS HIGHEST AND BEST.

The intellect is the lowest functioning of your being, but because it is the lowest, it is the most efficient. Because it is the lowest, it is the most developed. Because it is the lowest, it can be educated, disciplined. Because it is the lowest, all the universities, colleges, schools, exist for it.

And every man has it more or less.

It is tremendously useful in the outer world. Without intellect it will be difficult for you to be of any utility. That’s why Lao Tzu says to his disciples, “Become useless.” Unless you are ready to become useless you will not be ready to leave intellect behind, because intellect gives you utility. You become a doctor – you become useful to society. You become an engineer, you become a professor – this and that. It is through intellect that you become somebody and the society can use you – and the society can use you as a means. The more utility you fulfill, the more the society values you; hence, the hierarchy – the brahmin, the kshatriya, the vaishya, the sudra.

Highest is the scholar, who is pure intellect – the brahmin. Lower than him is the warrior, the kshatriya, because he has to protect the country. Lower than him is the businessman, because he is the whole blood-circulating system of the society – he is the economics, the belly. And lowest is the sudra, the untouchable, the proletariat, because his work is manual, menial, and not much intellect is needed. The sudra needs the least development of intellect and the brahmin needs the highest development of intellect, but the whole division is because of intellect.

Intellect has its utility, but you are bigger than the intellect, vaster than the intellect. If you become identified with the intellect too much, you will become a doctor or an engineer or a professor, a businessman, a warrior, but you will lose your being. You will not be yourself. You can become identified with your function so much that you can forget your being. You can forget that you are a man. You can become so much of an engineer or a judge or a politician that you can forget that you are a man. You are losing much; then you are just a mechanism. The society will use you – while you can be used – then you will be retired from the society. Then the society waits for you – when you are going to die.

Retired people die sooner than they would have died if they were not retired; they become old sooner. Their life becomes less by almost ten years. What happens? They become useless. They can feel that everywhere wherever they go they are, at the most, tolerated; they are not needed.

And there is a great need in man to be needed – the greatest need is to be needed. Once you feel you are superfluous, once you feel you can be discarded in the dustbin, once you feel that you don’t function as a utility in the society; you start dying. The retirement becomes the date of dying also – you start dying fast. You yourself know that you will be a burden now. People will tolerate you, people may even sympathize with you, but nobody is going to take you seriously, nobody is going to love you and respect you. You are discarded.

If you get identified with the intellect too much, you are becoming a thing – like a mechanism. A good car, but when its utility is finished it is thrown to the rubbish heap. Then you are going to be used and thrown, and your innermost core will remain unfulfilled because you were not meant just to be used. You were meant to flower as a being; that was your destiny.

Higher than intellect is intuition. Intuition gives a little romance to your life, a little poetry. It gives you a few glimpses of the non utilitarian, of your being a person and not being a thing. When somebody loves you, that love hits your intuition, your moon center. When somebody looks at you with charmed eyes, magnetized, that exhilarates the moon energy within you. When somebody says that you are beautiful, your being feels enhanced. When somebody says you are useful, you feel hurt. Useful?

That doesn’t seem to be an appreciation. Because if you are useful then you are replaceable. Then you can be thrown, somebody else can replace you. But if you are beautiful then you are irreplaceable, then you are unique. Then when you will be gone from the world, something will always remain empty, something will always lack.

That’s why you hanker for love. Love is food for intuition. If you are not loved your intuition will not develop. The only way to develop intuition is to shower love upon you. So if a mother loves the child, the child becomes intuitive. If the mother does not love the child, the child becomes intellectual. If the child lives in an atmosphere of love and care and compassion – if the child is accepted for his own self, not for any utility that he can fulfill – then he grows tremendously inside and his energy starts moving through the moon center.

The moon center is almost non-functioning because you have not been loved.

Watch. If you tell a woman, “I love you because you have beautiful eyes,” she will not be happy, because tomorrow she can lose her eyes. Eyes are just accidental. Or some disease may happen and she may become blind, or the eyes may not remain beautiful. When you say, “I love you because you have a beautiful face,” the woman is not happy, because the face will not remain beautiful forever.

Old age is coming every day, every moment. But if you say, “I love you,” then she feels happy because this “you” is something permanent, not accidental, nothing can happen to it. When you say to a woman, “I love because…” then she never feels happy, because the “because” brings intellect in. You simply say, you shrug your shoulders and you say, “I don’t know why, but I love you.” The moon center starts functioning – the woman flowers.

Watch a woman when nobody loves her and watch her the next moment when somebody has said to her, “I love you.” A tremendous difference, of grace, dignity. A tremendous change – her whole face becomes enlightened with something new, a glow comes to her. What has happened? The moon center has released its energy.