Question – Beloved Osho, I am a Rasa addict, and I can see how this dependency leads to misery. the coolness of meditation scares me though. Can Zorba survive the Buddha, or can the Buddha really remain juicy?
Osho – It has not been possible in the past, or only with very few individuals. With the majority of humanity it has not been possible — the coexistence of Zorba and Buddha in one being. But the difficulty is not in Zorba and Buddha, in being a materialist and a spiritualist simultaneously: the difficulty is in our idea of what is spiritual and what is material.
We go with the division from the very beginning — we start with the split. Then the problem arises: Can Zorba survive Buddha? Can Buddha survive Zorba or remain juicy? We begin with the split.
If you begin with the split and you accept the idea of division, certainly it will be very difficult for Buddha to be juicy, because he will fall from your respectability. You will not accept him as a Buddha. It will be difficult for Zorba to be with Buddha, because your idea of Buddha is too serious — and Zorba is not serious. You start with a certain idea, and then there is difficulty. It is created by you. Start living both together. In fact you are living both together without being aware of it. You are a spiritual being, and you have a material body; and both are functioning in deep synchronicity, without any conflict.
Do you see there is any conflict between your body and your soul? You can’t even see where the body ends and the soul begins. They are one whole. Your awareness, your meditation, your physical health, your physical well-being — what is the conflict between them?
Your meditation and your enjoying music — why should it be a problem? Your meditation will make you capable of enjoying music more than an ordinary man who has no idea of meditation. And your experience of music and its depth will help to make your meditation more juicy, more musical, not so dry, not so dead — more alive.
Where is the contradiction? Why should there be any contradiction? Your love and your spiritual growth are the same process. It is just like you cannot walk with one leg alone; you need two legs to walk. There is no conflict. Both legs function in a deep synchronicity. And that twoness is all over you. Both my hands are making one gesture. They are not making two gestures, they are making one gesture. Although the hands are two, the gesture is one — and there is no conflict. And both of your hands are connected with the two sides of your brain, and while both hands are making one gesture, both sides of the brain are speaking; it is not just one side.
Man should be aware that many musical instruments can play together, and they will create one music; it will be an orchestra. So there will be no question that Zorba cannot survive Buddha. It is Zorba who is becoming Buddha. The Buddha is not somebody else; it is Zorba, finding not only joy in small things of life, but also joy in his own being. That’s all that a Buddha is. And there is no contradiction.
If I enjoy being silent, I enjoy speaking too, because whatever happens in silence needs to be given and shared in words — however difficult it may be. But my silence and my words are just two wings. If a man is dumb and deaf, do you think he will be in silence? Logically it would seem he will be in silence — that’s why I say logic is not relevant to life. The man who is dumb and deaf will not be in silence, because he has not known sound. Without knowing sound you cannot know silence. That is the basic complementary which looks contradictory in logic.
When silence becomes sound, it is expression. When sound becomes silent, it is the gathering of the juice. When silence becomes sound, it is sharing. But they are both together, in a different way.
People think that blind people must be living in darkness. That is logically right, existentially wrong. The man who has not seen light cannot see darkness. It is impossible. And if a man can see darkness, he is not blind. How can he see darkness? Seeing needs eyes.
So the blind man does not have any idea of darkness because he cannot see light. When you close your eyes you certainly see darkness because you are aware of light. But the blind man has never opened his eyes and has never seen light; so he lives in a third space which cannot be named because there is no word for him. Seeing is nonexistential to him: he simply does not see, neither light nor darkness.
What I am indicating is that where you see a duality between body and soul, between Zorba and Buddha, your question is: Can Zorba survive Buddha? Can Buddha remain juicy? In fact only a Zorba can be a Buddha, and only a Buddha can be a Zorba. Zorba alone, without being a Buddha, is very superficial. Buddha alone, without being a Zorba, has depth, but no life. Together there will be depth, and there will be playfulness — and life and love and celebration.
So you need not be afraid of meditation; it will not kill your experience of rasa, it will enhance it. And your experience of rasa, juice, will enhance your meditativeness. Never be afraid of opposites. Don’t choose one; that’s where man has got into trouble. Choose both together and you will remain whole. Perhaps people will not see Buddha in you — so what? Who cares whether people recognize the Buddha or not? Certainly a Buddha cannot care; he is not worried about recognition.
Perhaps it will be difficult for people because they have always accepted a Buddha who has killed his Zorba, who is almost a murderer of half his being. They have accepted, they have respected him. They cannot accept and they cannot respect… at least for the time being, till it becomes a universal phenomenon. It will not fit with their old categories.
But you need not be worried. The worry is also coming from the old categories; somehow they are hanging in the mind: “If I become a meditator, perhaps it will destroy my rasa. All my juice will be finished; then I cannot love, then I cannot paint, then I cannot play music, then I cannot enjoy a joke.” This is sheer stupidity: the Buddha becomes more and more sensitive.
Meditative awareness does not kill your experience of juice, rasa, it deepens it — although it is going to be difficult for the world to accept. But there is no need for any recognition. If you are fulfilled and whole, that’s what is needed. And if both are there — the Zorba and Buddha, the experience of rasa and the experience of meditation together — they will be just like darkness and light.
Don’t choose between darkness and light, because choosing one is dangerous. If you choose light, you cannot close your eyes; your eyes cannot have a rest. You will drive yourself mad because your eyes continuously need to open and close. That is a moment of rest, cleansing. Any dust coming onto your eyes is wiped away. Your eyelids are functioning like wipers, always bringing liquid to the eyes and cleaning them, continuously keeping them clean so you can see with clarity.
If your eyelids are taken away, soon you will be blind because your eyes will get dry, they will shrink. They will be covered with dust, they will lose all juice and life. And they are the most delicate part of your body. So your body is very protective. If you choose darkness, then you cannot open your eyes; then you are choosing blindness. And that’s how it has always been. People have been choosing. I teach choicelessness. And choicelessness means both together, both the opposites together; we are not going to choose one.
In the UPANISHADS there is a prayer, the most famous prayer, but absolutely wrong. The prayer is: “Lead me from darkness to light.” That means, “Lead me from Zorba to Buddha, lead me from death to life, lead me from untruth to truth.” It looks very innocent — it is not so.
If you have understood what I am saying, it is a very dangerous prayer. It is choice: choosing between darkness and light, it chooses light. But you need both. Light alone will drive you insane. You need the silence of darkness, the rest of darkness too.
Light is a tension, it is tiring. Darkness is nourishment, it is rejuvenating. You cannot choose. Whoever wrote that prayer — which is the most famous prayer in Hinduism — is utterly wrong because he is making choices. He is choosing life against death. That is not possible.
Life and death are in a dynamic relationship. Death is a rest and a renewal; life alone will become really boredom. Death is something closer to sleep, a deeper sleep which one needs between two lives, so the old life is completely erased, and you are clean again to be reborn, renewed, fresh. If you choose only life you will be only getting older and older and older — and bored. And if there is no death, it will be terrible.
You would like to die at a certain point because you have experienced everything that life can give. Now how long can you go on repeating the same thing? — a hundred years, two hundred years, three hundred years, a thousand years… but a day is bound to come when you will wish, “Give me death! I don’t want life anymore because I want to rest.”
And untruth and truth — they are not to be chosen. Untruth and truth, both are needed together, because the untruth makes you aware of the truth. The untruth also has a function to fulfill: without knowing the false, you will never know the true. You have to be capable of knowing both — and the man of awareness knows both.
He knows what is untrue and what is true. It is not that he knows only the truth — awareness simply makes him aware of the distinction between the untruth and the truth. But he knows both, and he knows the essential relationship between the two — that they are as related as life and death, as light and darkness, and they cannot be separated.
Don’t ask for one thing — remain choiceless. And choicelessness will bring the Zorba to Buddhahood, without destroying the Zorba and without taking the juice out of Buddha. And the world will be immensely enriched by people who have the depth of a Buddha and also the playfulness of a Zorba.
Source – Osho Book “Light on the Path”