The Last Testament, Vol 6

The Last Testament, Vol 6

Interviews with the World Press

Talks given from 31/07/86 am to 13/08/86 pm

English Discourse series

9 Chapters

Year published:

Many of the interviews from the World Tour have not been listed as being part of any Last Testament Volume and they have been arbitrarily assigned to Vol.'s 4, 5 and 6 in groups of thirty.

The Last Testament, Vol 6

Chapter #1

Chapter title: None

30 January 1986 pm in Kathmandu, Nepal

Archive code: 8601305

ShortTitle: LAST601

Audio: Yes

Video: Yes

Length: 85 mins

[NOTE: This discourse will be in the book "India Coming Back Home", which has not been published, as of August 1992.]

PEOPLE CLAIM THAT YOU ARE A MAN OF INTELLECT BUT NOT OF DISCRIMINATION -- YOU TRUST EVERYBODY AND EVERYBODY BETRAYS YOU.

The question is very strange because the first quality of intellect is discrimination. A man of intellect is bound to be a man of discrimination. Intellect has no function. Its only function is to decide what is right, what is wrong. Discrimination is its whole area. So if you say that I am a man of intellect, then the second part of your question becomes inconsistent with the first part. And you can see this is discrimination; the first part of your question is inconsistent with the second part.

You say that I trust everybody and everybody betrays me. I wonder how you have come to this conclusion. I certainly trust everybody but nobody has ever betrayed me, because my trust is not conditional. This has to be understood.

Your trust can be betrayed if you have a condition in it. If I trust you without any condition there is no possibility of betraying me. Whatever you do I will still trust you. You can kill me but you cannot destroy my trust. I will die trusting you.

If you do anything that appears to others as betrayal that simply means you are betraying yourself, you are falling from your own dignity. But you cannot betray me. I have never experienced any betrayal in my life. I cannot condemn anybody of betraying. Everybody has behaved the way that he could and I had never expected him to behave in any other way. I have trusted him the way he is. My trust is not a demand that you have to behave in a certain way. So whatever you do, you are doing to yourself, not to me.

But whoever has asked the question is unaware of an unconditional trust, an unconditional love. All our love, all our trust, is conditional. And because it is conditional it is not authentic, it is not true. Then if the person behaves a little bit differently, goes in a different direction than you have been demanding, directly or indirectly, immediately you start condemning him, that he has betrayed you. You had assumed that you had purchased the person and his future too. The future remains open. You cannot say what the other is going to do tomorrow and whatever he is going to do he is going to do to himself. You should not be affected by it. If you are affected by it then you are not a man of enlightenment.

I am not affected at all by what people do to me. My concern is that I remain the same whatever they do -- whether they are for me or against me, whether they are my friends or they become my enemies, it does not matter. My love, my trust, will remain the same.

I am amazed for many reasons. First, anybody who listens to me, who has read me, will find out very easily that I am not a man of intellect, because intellectually you can find a thousand and one inconsistencies and contradictions in my statements. But I do not see any inconsistency, any self-contradiction, because to me life is not logic and to find the truth of life, intellect is not the way. Life is a mystery, you cannot figure out what it is. You can experience it, taste it, sing it, dance it, but you cannot explain it. You cannot make a theory out of it.

The moment you start making a theory, immediately the mystery of life disappears. The function of the intellect is to theorize. Science depends on intellect. That's why it can be said that the whole effort of science is to demystify existence. Science divides existence into two categories: the known and the unknown. And what is known today was unknown yesterday, and what is unknown today may be known tomorrow so the distinction is not of any quality -- it is just a question of time and man's search. Science can conceive a day when all will be known and the category of the unknown will disappear. This is the way of the intellect: to demystify, to make everything known, to destroy the unknown.

How can you say that I am a man of intellect? I am doing just the opposite. My whole effort is to make even the known unknown. To bring mystery back into your life -- even in small things which you have started taking for granted, I want you to have another look.

I am reminded of one of the most beautiful persons of this century, D.H. Lawrence. He was walking in a garden with a small boy and, just as small children are curious, the boy was asking this question and that question. At one question, even D.H. Lawrence was stunned. The small child asked, "Please forgive me. I must be tiring you by asking questions, but this is the last: I want to know why the trees are green."

And the answer that came from D.H. Lawrence is significant; it is not the answer of the intellect. He said, "The trees are green because they are green."

The boy agreed, that's perfectly right. But Lawrence went on thinking, "Is that an answer? Will anybody who approaches life intellectually be satisfied with it?" But the reality is that whatever we know is surrounded by infinite unknowability; not only the unknown.

And that's where I make a difference. Objective science divides life, existence, into two categories -- the known and the unknown. The science of the interior divides life into three categories -- the known, the unknown and the unknowable. And the unknowable is the most important, because ultimately you have to face it. And the moment you face the unknowable you have to recognize your ignorance, you have to become again a small child.

Socrates is reported to have said, "When I was young I thought I knew everything." And he was a great intellectual. "When I grew a little older I was not so certain, a little older still and there was more uncertainty, a little older still and now I could not say with certainty that I know anything."

And before he died he said, "Only one thing I know, that I know nothing." This is from the man who had one of the keenest intellects; but he had something more, higher and deeper than intellect, and that is intuition.

I am not a man of intellect, because my whole work is with the unknowable. The method of science is intellect, the method of the inner world is intuition. Intellect is absolutely meaningless.

When you start moving inwards, deeper into meditation, awareness, consciousness, you will become more and more aware of the mysterious, the miraculous, and you will become aware of the fact that existence basically is unknowable. We can know little bits and pieces here and there and it is enough for our practical life but the deeper you move you always come across a wall.

There was a time one century before that scientists were very optimistic because science was coming to know more and more every day. But after Albert Einstein things have changed totally. Albert Einstein came to the deepest, the very inside of matter, and was puzzled because what he came to understand was so mysterious, so illogical, that even to make a scientific theory from it appeared impossible.

One thing was that as the atom was divided into electrons Einstein became aware that electrons don't travel from one place to another. They simply, from point A, disappear and appear at point B -- they don't travel between. You have no trace at all of their traveling, no footprints. How to explain it? It comes closer to magic than to science; it comes closer to the great experiences of the meditators than to science.

When I read this I remembered one of the great meditators: Basho says, "On the way to truth there is no path. It is like a bird flying in the sky, it leaves no footprints behind it." Of course in the air no footprints can be left. I simply remembered the words `it leaves no footprints behind it.'

And Albert Einstein finds electrons moving from point A to point B and in between no footprints. No trace. As if they disappear from one point and appear at another point -- which is absolutely illogical. It troubled Albert Einstein for many days to declare to his scientific friends that he had come across a phenomenon which was beyond intellect. But what could he do? This is the way existence is behaving and existence has no obligation to fulfill our requirements of intellect, logic, consistency. We have to go with existence; existence is not going to go with us.

The latest scientific researches have become more and more mystical and this is one of the greatest hopes, that soon we can make a single science. There is no need of religions and there is no need of science -- a single science with two wings. The interior wing which is mysterious and the outside wing which is also mysterious. Now it is possible because both are entering into the area of mystery.

It has happened many times but people don't take note of it because it is so rare.

You must have heard the name of Madame Curie -- she was one of the Nobel Prize winner scientists -- and she was working on a scientific problem for years and was not getting anywhere. One night she worked late and was really getting tired and fed up with the problem -- she was almost going to drop the idea and start some other project. What is the point of wasting time on something which has taken four or five years of her life and she is still just where she was at the beginning -- not a single glimpse, not a single clue. And life is short; you cannot waste your whole life on a single scientific problem.

That night she went to sleep thinking, "Tomorrow I am going to burn all the papers that I have written these five years -- I am finished with it." In the morning when she woke up she was surprised, she could not believe it. On her table, in her open notebook that she had left the night before, the answer was written. And the most puzzling thing was that the room was locked from within; nobody had entered. Her husband was also a scientist but if Madame Curie could not solve the problem in five years then he could not manage in just one night. And moreover, he was not at home, he had gone on a trip.

As she watched closely it became more and more mysterious -- the handwriting was hers. Then she closed her eyes and tried to remember what had happened, and then the whole scene revealed itself....

Now she remembered that in the night she had had a dream. She had gone to the table, written the answer, went back to her bed and forgotten all about it. It was not a dream, it was a reality, because the notebook and the answer was the proof that she had not dreamt, but from where did this answer come? Because there was nothing else on the page, only the answer.

It was not from her intellect -- from her intellect she had been working for five years. But because she got tired the intellect said, "it is beyond me." She slept with this idea that "I am finished with it" -- this was the decision of the intellect and in such moments intuition takes over. Intuition takes over only when intellect is finished. Intellect is for a lower reality -- for the mundane world. Intuition is for the higher reality, for the mysterious, for the miraculous.

Then she worked out backwards from the answer the whole process and found that the answer was right. This is similar, exactly similar to the case of Gautam Buddha. But nobody has even compared the two processes.

Gautam Buddha became enlightened on the night when he had decided to drop all efforts. He was tired, he has done everything that was told by the masters, teachers, scriptures and he did everything to his best and nothing had happened. Twelve years had passed since he had left his palace and his hands were as empty as ever. It was a full moon night, sitting under a tree he decided that the whole search was futile -- `I am finished with it.'

With the same attitude in which Madame Curie went to her bed, Buddha went to sleep under the tree. And in the morning when he opened his eyes, as the sun was rising, he was amazed to look at the world. It was not the world he had slept in. These were not the eyes that he had gone to sleep with -- he had new eyes and a new world. It was luminous, it was mystery all over. And all his anxiety had disappeared, all his questioning had disappeared -- there was absolute silence and immense tranquillity.

For the first time he felt he was at home, he had arrived -- now there was nowhere to go, the goal was achieved. The intellect had been working for twelve years -- tired, it dropped out of the way, gave space for intuition to move in; and what is impossible for the intellect is not impossible for intuition.

For intuition is a totally different approach, it is an innocent approach with no logic. It is the approach of the child when he is born and opens his eyes for the first time. He knows nothing but he sees everything, although he cannot say, "what are the walls and what are the pillars and what are people and what are animals?" -- he cannot discriminate. But he is seeing everything. He cannot describe, he has no words, but that does not mean that he is not seeing.

Intuition is pure seeing -- it is not a process, it is a quantum leap.

I am not a man of intellect. I have left it far, far away. Whatever I am saying to you is my intuitive experience. That's why you can find in my statements many inconsistencies because intuition knows no inconsistencies, no contradictions; but when you think about those realities with intellect you are looking from a totally different angle, with a totally different methodology -- that creates the trouble. You immediately see this is inconsistent, this is contradictory. Whoever has asked the question knows nothing about intellect and knows nothing about discrimination either. Because to know about intellect and to know about discrimination you have to be higher than both -- only from a sunlit peak can you see the lower realities.

This question was given yesterday too and I had chosen to answer it but because the time was up I had left it. I was surprised that today it is different -- it is not exactly the same question as it was yesterday. You cannot deceive me and you should never try it: yesterday it was more stupid and the person must have thought over and over again how to put it in a better way so it is less stupid. But stupidity is stupidity. It makes no difference.

Yesterday it was, "Osho, you are a giant of the intellect but you don't know discrimination."

The man must have thought `a giant of the intellect' and `is unable to discriminate' looks obviously nonsense, because intellect's function is discrimination. And if you are a giant of intellect, then your whole work is discrimination; very delicate and very refined discrimination.

But you did well to remove that word `giant' because I am not a giant, I am a simple human being. It would have been even nicer of you if you had removed the word `intellect' too. If you had said, "Osho, you are not a man of intellect," I would have appreciated your understanding. I am not.

But you had to put in the word 'intellect' because you wanted to make the point about discrimination. If you accept me as not a man of intellect then there is no question that I am not a man of discrimination -- the question cannot be made. Just to declare that I am not a man of discrimination, unwillingly you had to accept me as a man of intellect.

There is no need. You could have simply said , "Osho, you are not a man of discrimination," and I am not. I don't discriminate between friends and enemies, between men and women, between white and black, between Hindu and Mohammedan, between one nation and another nation; I don't discriminate in any way. All these discriminations are crimes.

All these discriminations have to be dropped and this is not the first time that this point has been made to me. On different occasions, by different people, for different reasons, it has been pointed out to me.

I would like to tell you a few points so that you can understand what is boiling in your unconscious.