Osho – Sadhu means simplicity: A blissful simplicity

[To a new sannyasin Osho says:]

Osho – Raise your hands and close your eyes. Feel like a bird flying into the sky; these are your wings. If you start feeling like moving upwards, allow the body. If the hands start moving upwards, allow them; if the body starts swaying, go into that. Go into that feeling of flying… you are going higher and higher and higher and beyond the clouds.

Ananda means blissful, sadhu means simplicity: a blissful simplicity. And the word ’sadhu’ has a special meaning. Ordinarily the simplicity is a practised simplicity – you practise it. If you practise it long enough it becomes a character. That makes you a gentleman but not a sadhu; that makes you a good man but not spiritual. Deep down you are carrying all complexities, repressed. You have managed a facade, you have created a mask. It helps… it helps to move, to relate. As far as the society is concerned nothing more is needed but as far as your own being is concerned it is a falsity.

It helps in the society but it hinders you when you want to go within. So this simplicity, practised, cultivated, is not the simplicity that sadhu means. Sadhu means a simplicity that has arisen in you spontaneously, uncultivated, unpractised. It is not a character; it is spontaneity. It is not an armour around you. It has no motive. The practised simplicity has a motive in it: it gives you respect, respectability, it makes you honoured in the society.

It helps your so-called relationships; it functions like a lubricant. People like you because you never hurt anybody; you only hurt yourself. People love you because you go on buttressing their egos by your simplicity. They like you and of course their liking helps your life. Mm? You can be a good businessman and a good salesman, a good politician. And I am saying it especially to you because japan has created, cultivated, too much gentlemanliness… too much of it. The japanese is the most perfect gentleman.

But that is a facade, a mask; behind it everything is totally different. The politeness that one shows outside is not the real politeness. One has all kinds of poisons hidden behind it. Sadhu means a simplicity that comes not by motivation but by understanding. You understand life and you see how tiny you are, how small, how atomic… just a small particle in this vast universe, a drop in the ocean. In that very seeing the ego disappears.

Not that you have to work and throw it out; if you throw it out it will come in from the back door. If you don’t throw it out and just see the point of its meaninglessness, how can you fight with existence? How can you be cunning with existence? How can you cheat god?

It is just impossible. In cheating god you will be cheating yourself; in deceiving the universe you will be deceiving yourself, and in that very deception you will become false, more false, more false. A day comes when you are just layer upon layer of falsity and untruth and lies. And then it becomes very difficult to know who you are, because whenever you go inside you find these lies and dishonesties and deceptions and all kinds of curtains upon curtains, layer upon layer. One is lost in the jungle of lies.

Sadhu means a simplicity that comes through seeing the real. We are tiny, very very tiny; to claim any ego is just stupid. We are here not knowing why. One day we are here, another day we are gone. Life is so mysterious! How can you be an egoist in such a mysterious existence? And life is moving so perfectly, in such a harmony, that you need not improve upon it. You can trust it. That trust is what brings real simplicity. When you don’t trust you try to deceive.

You try to become clever and cunning, mm? because you are constantly afraid that life may not help you, may be inimical to you. But when you understand, how can life be inimical to you. It is your mother, it goes on mothering you. Its constant support is needed for you to survive, to exist, to be. To distrust, mistrust life, is almost like a tree distrusting the earth in which it is rooted. No, the tree trusts the soil. So a man of understanding trusts life, and out of that trust comes a simplicity, unpractised, uncultivated. And then it has beauty… then it has utter beauty. That is the meaning of sadhu.

Source: from Osho Book “Only Losers Can Win in This Game”