Question : What do you Teach and What is your Doctrine?
Osho : I am not teaching a doctrine. Teaching a doctrine is rather meaningless. I am not a philosopher; my mind is antiphilosophical. Philosophy has led nowhere and cannot lead anywhere. The mind that thinks, that questions, cannot know.
There are so many doctrines. But a doctrine is a fiction, a human fiction. It is not a discovery but an invention. The human mind is capable of creating infinite systems and doctrines, but to know the truth through theories is impossible. A mind that is stuffed with knowledge is a mind that is bound to remain ignorant.
Revelation comes the moment knowledge ceases. There are two possibilities: either we can think about something, or we can go into it existentially. The more a person thinks, the more he moves away from what is here and now. To think about something is to lose contact with it.
So what I teach is an antidoctrinaire, antiphilosophical, antispeculative experience. How to be, just to be. How to be in the moment that is here and now. Open, vulnerable, one with it. That is what I call meditation.
Knowledge can only lead to fiction, to projecting things. It cannot be a vehicle for the attainment of truth. But once you have known the truth, knowledge can be a vehicle to communicate, to share with someone who doesn’t know. Then language, doctrines, theories can become a means. But it is still not adequate. It is bound to falsify.
Anything that has been known existentially cannot be expressed totally. You can only indicate it. The moment I express what I have known, the word goes to you but the meaning is left behind. A dead word comes to you. In a way it is meaningless, because the meaning was the experience itself. So knowledge can become a vehicle of expression, but not a means toward the achievement of realization.
The knowing mind is a hindrance, because when you know you are not humble. When you are stuffed with knowledge there is no space within you to receive the unknown. The mind must become vacant, void: a womb, a total receptivity. Knowledge is your past. It is what you have known. It is your memory, your accumulation, your possession. The accumulation becomes a barrier. It comes between you and the new, between you and the unknown.
You can be open to the unknown only when you are humble. One must constantly be aware of one’s ignorance: that there is still something unknown. A mind that is based on memories, information, scriptures, theories, doctrines, dogmas – is egocentric, not humble. Knowledge cannot give you humbleness. Only the vast unknown can make you humble.
So memory must cease. It is not that you should be without memory, but that in the moment of knowing, in the moment of experiencing, memory must not be there. In that moment, an open, vulnerable mind is required. This moment of emptiness, of void, is meditation, dhyana.