OSHO – PYTHAGORAS ALSO INTRODUCED THE WORD ‘COSMOS’. ‘Cosmos’ means order, rhythm, harmony. Existence is not a chaos but a cosmos. Pythagoras has contributed much to human thought, to human evolution. His vision of a cosmos became the very foundation of scientific investigation.
Science can exist only if existence is a cosmos. If it is a chaos, there is no possibility of any science. If laws change every day, every moment — one day the water evaporates at one hundred degrees, another day at five hundred degrees — if water functions in a whimsical way and follows no order, how can there be a science?
Science presupposes that existence functions in a consistent way, in a rational way, that existence is not mad, that if we search deep into existence, we are bound to find laws — and those laws are the keys to all the mysteries. Just as it is true for science so it is true for religion too — because religion is nothing but the science of the inner. The outer science is called science; the inner science is called religion — but both can exist only in a cosmos.
There are laws of the inner world. Those laws have been discovered just as much as scientific laws have been discovered. Neither have scientific laws been invented, nor have religious laws; been invented. Truth is — you need not invent it And whatsoever you invent will be untrue — all inventions are lies.
Truth has to be discovered, not invented. Einstein discovers a certain law; Patanjali also discovers a certain law; Newton discovers gravitation, Krishna discovers grace — both are laws. One belongs to the earth, the other belongs to the sky; one belongs to the world of necessity, the other belongs to the world of power. One belongs to the visible and the other belongs to the invisible.
It is in the vision of a cosmos that Pythagoras became the originator of a scientific concept of the world. He was the first scientist because he provided the very foundation. His idea of cosmos has to be understood, because without understanding it you will not be able to understand what he is talking about.
The inner world, the world of the spirit, follows certain laws, and those laws are unchangeable, they are perennial. Hence I have called this series PHILOSOPHIA PERENNIS — the perennial philosophy. Those laws are not time-bound, they are beyond time. Time itself functions within those laws. If you want to do something in the outside world, you will need to know how the outer existence functions, because unless you know how it functions you are bound to fail.
Nature has no obligation to adjust to you — you will have to adjust to nature. You can win nature only by adjusting yourself to nature. You can become a conqueror too, but not against nature — with nature, in tune with nature. You can become a master of the inner kingdom too — not against the laws but in tune with those laws.
It is because of this mystic vision — that the world is not accidental, not anarchic, but an absolutely harmonious, cosmic, orderly world — that Pythagoras was able to discover many things for the seekers. One thing that he discovered was that music can become the milieu for meditation. He4 was the first to introduce that idea too to the West. In the East we have known it for centuries, that music is the best aid to meditation. Why? because music creates harmony around you, and the harmony around you can provoke harmony within you. If the outside is harmonious, the inside also starts falling in line with it — and that you have watched many times.
In the marketplace, you feel a great disturbance inside you — with the crowd you never feel at home. In the market-place the whole atmosphere is anti-music; there is no harmony, it is a chaos. And the outer chaos provokes inside chaos.
Go into a madhouse and be with mad people for a few hours and you will see: you start feeling something going crazy inside you. Go to the hospital and just be with the ill patients there for a few hours, and you start feeling a sickening is entering into you, a kind of sick feeling. You are NOT sick; you were not sick when you entered the hospital. What has happened? The sick vibe all around you starts synchronizing inside you, because the outer and the inner are not divided; they are part of one whole. The inner is the inner of the outer, and the outer is the outer of the inner. They cannot be separated. So each affects the other.
If you know meditation deeply, you can sit in the market-place and nothing will be disturbed because you have a powerful music going on inside you. It is so powerful that the market-place and its noise cannot affect it; on the contrary, people who are around you may start feeling a certain soothing effect, a calmness coming. If a real Buddha sits in the marketplace, he creates there too a Buddhafield, and whosoever enters into the Buddhafield is affected immediately — he starts falling into harmony. Something starts settling inside him; something starts getting together inside him. He becomes more centered, together.
That’s the secret of SATSANG — being with a Buddha. The whole secret is this: to be with the Master means just to allow his vibe to provoke your inner harmony which is fast asleep and you are unaware of it. But ordinarily if you go to the market-place, you come home a little lost, exhausted, tired, something is missing. You need rest; only after a good night’s rest will you be able to go to the marketplace again.
Music is a harmony — it is harmony between sound and silence. Sound belongs to the earth, silence belongs to the beyond. Music is, as Pythagoras believed and called it, numinous. The word ‘numinous’ comes from a Latin root NUMEN. It is a tremendously significant word, very pregnant with meaning. NUMEN means a nod from the above, a yes from the beyond.
Music creates such a harmony that even God starts nodding at you, saying yes to you. Music is numinous… suddenly the sky starts touching you; you are overwhelmed by the beyond. And when the beyond is closer to you, when the footsteps of the beyond are heard, something inside you gets the challenge, becomes silent, quieter, calmer, cool, collected.
In the Pythagorean mystery school, music was one of the greatest things — and that’s my effort here too. We have to create great music so that great meditative states become possible. Music is outer meditation: meditation is inner music. They go together, hand in hand, embracing each other. It is one of the greatest experiences of life when music is there surrounding you, overwhelming you, flooding you, and meditation starts growing in you — when meditation and music meet, world and God meet, matter and consciousness meet. That is UNIO MYSTICA — the mystic union.
In the East we have called it ‘yoga’. Yoga simply means union. The best definition of yoga, and the shortest, is by the great seer Vyasa. He says yoga is samadhi, yoga is ENSTASIS. Ordinarily samadhi is translated as ecstasy — that is not right, because ecstasy literally means to stand out. Samadhi is to stand in! It should be translated as ENSTASIS not as ECSTASIS. Yoga is ENSTASIS — standing in, doing nothing, just being. That state is meditation.
And anything that can help from the outside will have some music in it, only then can it help. The sound of running water in the hills can help, because it has its own music. The roaring waves of the ocean can help, because they have their own music. The singing of the birds in the morning can help, or the sound of insects in the silent night, or the rain falling on the rooftop — anything that creates music can also create meditation.
The Pythagorean school was a school of music, of song and dance. of great celebration. You are again living in that kind of school. People have forgotten that music can take you downwards, and can also take you upwards. The modern music takes you downwards; it is concerned with the lowest center of your being, with the sex center. It gives you sexuality; it is pornographic. It has lost all heights. It is ugly — it is really noise and nothing else, noise that drowns you — jazz or other pop music. It is simply a kind of intoxicant. It is so deafening that you feel lost and you think something is happening. All that is happening is that you are pulled more and more towards the earth, more and more towards the animal in you.
The ancient music, the classical music, has a totally different effect: it pulls you upwards, it takes you beyond gravitation. It is part of levitation; you start floating upwards and upwards. It has a more meditative quality in it. It reaches to your higher centers. The real music worth calling music will have something to do with SAHASRAR — your seventh center, but very rarely a genius reaches there to create such music. But if even your heart center is moved, it is more than enough. If your heart center starts dancing and revolving, you are very close to meditation.
JUST AS MUSIC is the meeting of silence and sound, for J Pythagoras philosophy is a meeting of religion and science. His concept of philosophy is that of a great synthesis. He is one of the greatest synthesizers ever — he always brings polar opposites together and makes them complementary. He is a great artist in destroying opposition. Wherever he finds opposition he starts searching for something which must be bridging the opposition, and that bridge is important.
Religion and science have been in conflict for centuries because they have not listened to Pythagoras. Otherwise, this division would never have happened. And this division has proved one of the most fatal calamities. Religion and science have been fighting as enemies; for centuries the church did not allow science to develop and grow. People like Galileo and Kepler and others were punished.
Religion was afraid of science. This is stupid, because science can only help religion, science can only prepare the ground for the inner science. The church people and the popes who were against science were simply behaving in a very stupid way — without knowing what they were doing. Truth cannot be crushed; nobody can crucify truth.
Slowly slowly, science gained ground, became powerful — it was good that it became powerful. But it started behaving in the same stupid way by destroying religion. It became a revenge. For three hundred years, the mainstream of scientific thinkers has been trying to destroy religion as hard as possible. They have declared God is dead. They have declared there is no soul. They have declared there is no afterlife. They have declared there is NO inner being in man. They have reduced man to a machine.
Man has lost all grandeur. Man cannot feel meaningful any more. It is because of this stupid approach of science, this revengeful approach of science, that all meaning has disappeared from the world. People are simply dragging themselves. There is no poetry — there is no possibility of poetry, because without a God the world cannot be a cosmos. Then it is only a mechanical phenomenon; there is no consciousness behind it. Without God, the world cannot be caring; it cannot be your mother — it is bound to be neutral. Whether you live or die, nature is not concerned at all.
Science has created the idea of a nature indifferent to man. This is dangerous, because man is so small and nature is so vast. And if this vast existence is absolutely indifferent towards you, how can you feel significant, meaningful? You will feel a stranger, an outsider, something accidental.
And science became so prominent that even philosophers started following the scientific way of thinking, which is a very lopsided way. Even philosophers lost hold of that great vision of unity, of oneness, of existence being a home.
The modern philosopher has no beauty compared to Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra. The modern philosopher is very ordinary; he is nothing but a professor of philosophy. His philosophy is not a delight in his being, it is not a song, it is not a music. All that he goes on doing is linguistic analysis. The modern philosopher is an ugly phenomenon. Modern philosophy has NO philosophy of life in it. At the most, it is a constant effort to go on sharpening logic — but for what? The whole effort seems to be useless. And modern philosophy has become just a shadow of science. It has lost its glory. It is no more the science of sciences; it is no more the queen.
With Pythagoras, philosophy was the highest peak of understanding, the highest flight towards truth. One wing has to be science, another wing has to be religion. Those were the days of great philosophers; the world came to know REALLY great philosophers.
In China, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Mencius, Lieh Tzu — all close contemporaries of Zarathustra. In India, Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Prakuddha Katyayana, Sanjay Vilethiputta, Makkhli Goshal, Poorna Kashyapa, and many more. In Greece, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle…. And the chain continues. In kan, the great Zarathustra. Twenty-five centuries ago, the world knew the highest flights of philosophy. Now, instead of a philosopher, what you find is just a poor specimen: a professor of philosophy.
I have heard a story: The King of the Cannibals decided to open his country up to tourism. A world-famous philosopher, who had a special interest in the primitive, was extremely eager to add this backward people to his studies. On his arrival in Cannibal-land, the philosopher demanded a private tour and a personal audience with the Cannibal King. Not only was this granted, but the Cannibal King himself conducted the visiting dignitary to all points of interest, while the philosopher busily jotted down notes on his yellow pad. Towards the end of the day, the King was moved to suggest a visit to his people’s most special and sacred structure. This, he announced, was the Cannibal Super-Market. There, in a shiny modern building, was housed the most complete and varied selection of human anatomical parts available anywhere in the world.
The philosopher enthusiastically agreed to see it, and they soon arrived at the building and went in. Here, lit by fluorescent lights, were row upon row of gleaming chrome-and-glass display cases. Inside, packaged neatly in clear plastic, with prices prominently displayed, were hundreds of items: legs, arms, hands, ears, etcetera. The philosopher eagerly scribbled notes while they toured the market.
At last they arrived at what the Cannibal King said was their most prized department human brains. As they walked slowly down the aisle, the philosopher noted the following signs: “Explorers’ brains — ten cents-a-pound”…”missionaries’ brains — twenty cents-a-pound”…”businessmen’s brains — one dollar-a-pound”…”commanding generals’ brains — ten dollars-a-pound”. The very last item had a display case of its own and its sign was especially large: “philosophers’ brains”, it read, “fifty dollars-a-pound!”
The philosopher could scarcely contain his delight. Unable to restrain himself, he turned to the Cannibal King and smugly inquired as to how it was, that of all the items in the super-market, philosophers’ brains were by far the most expensive.
“Come, come, my good man,” said the Cannibal King, “do you know how many philosophers we have to kill just to get one pound of brains?”
Modern philosophy and the modern philosopher is just worthless. It has lost it’s peaks: it no more moves into the beyond. It is neither science nor religion. It is just a very confused affair today.
For Pythagoras, science is a search for truth in the objective world and religion is a search for truth in the subjective world — and philosophy is a search for the truth. So science and religion are like two hands or two wings. They are not opposites but complementaries. And the world would be better if we were reminded of it again.
The church, the temple and the lab need not be enemies. They should exist in a kind of friendship. Man will be far richer then. Now, if he chooses science he becomes rich outside and goes on becoming poorer and poorer inside. If he chooses religion, he becomes rich inside, but goes on becoming poorer and poorer on the outside. And both are ugly scenes.
The West has chosen science; it has all the riches of the world, but the man is completely lost, feeling meaningless, suicidal. The man, when he looks inside, finds nothing but hollowness, emptiness. The inner world has become very poor in the West.
In the East, just the opposite has happened: people have chosen religion against science. Their inner world is calmer, quieter, richer; but on the outside they are starving, dying — no food, no medicine, no facilities to live a human life, living almost like animals or even worse.
This is the consequence of not listening to Pythagoras. The whole history of humanity would have been totally different if Pythagoras had been listened to, understood. There is no need for the East to be East and the West to be West. There is no need for anybody to be just a materialist or just a spiritualist. If body and soul can exist together — they ARE existing together in you, in everybody — then why can’t materialism and spiritualism exist together? They SHOULD!
A man must be materialist and spiritualist. To choose is fatal. There is no need to choose; you can have both the worlds — you SHOULD have both the worlds; that is your birthright.
I teach you this synthesis: you have to be a materialist, as materialistic as any materialist, and a spiritualist, as much a spiritualist as any spiritualist. And remember: both will be angry at you, because the spiritualist will not be able to forgive you for your materialism, and the materialist will not be able to forgive you for your spiritualism.
That’s why people are against me — all kinds of people! The religious people are against me because they cannot accept my materialist approach; and the materialists are against me because they cannot accept my spiritualist approach. I would like to remind you that you have to be both together. This will bring a new man and a new humanity on the earth — and it is utterly needed, absolutely needed: a new man, a new humanity, a new concept.
There is no need to choose. God has given you a body — that means you have to be a materialist; and God has given you a soul — that means you have to be a spiritualist. You have to be a meeting of the two: you have to be a yogi, a union. And if your body and soul ARE balanced, and your spiritualism and your materialism are balanced, in a rhythm, you will attain to the greatest music possible. And that music is meditation, that music is samadhi.
Source – Osho Book “Philosophia Perennis, Vol1″