Osho Rajneesh Book "The Tongue-Tip Taste of Tao"

The Tongue-Tip Taste of Tao

9 October 1978 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

Deva means divine, shravano means listening – the art of divine listening. And that’s what meditation

is. If one can learn how to listen rightly, one has learned the deepest secret of meditation. People

hear but they don’t listen. Hearing is one thing – listening, altogether different; they are worlds

apart. Hearing is a physical phenomenon; you hear because you have ears. Listening is a spiritual

phenomenon. You listen when you have attention, when your inner being joins with your ears.

And once you have learned how to join your inner being with your ears, you can join it with any

sense. It can be joined with the eyes or with the nose or with the sense of touch or taste, and slowly

slowly you can join it with all your senses simultaneously. In that moment, god is available. But it

is easier to start with the ears... particularly for you it will be easier. So start on a journey of divine

listening.

Listen to the sounds of the birds, the wind passing through the trees, the river in flood, the ocean

roaring and the clouds, the people, the far-away train passing by, the cars on the road – each sound

has to be used. And listen without any imposition on what you listen to – don’t judge; the moment

you judge, listening stops. If you say ’good’ or ’bad’, ’I like it,’ ’I don’t like it,’ you are no more listening;

you have taken an attitude, and whenever one takes an attitude attention disappears. Attention lives

only when you have not made a conclusion.

The really attentive person remains without conclusions; he never concludes about anything.

Because life is a process – nothing ever ends. Only the foolish person can conclude; the wise

will hesitate to make conclusions. Conclusion is possible only when everything has come to an end,

and nothing ever comes to an end: it goes on and on forever. So listen without conclusion. Just

listen – alert, silent, open, receptive. Just be there, totally with the sound that surrounds you.

And you will be surprised: one day suddenly the sound is there, you are listening, and yet there

is silence. It is true silence that happens through sound. Escaping to the mountains is of no help;

that silence is false. The real silence has to happen in the marketplace, surrounded by all kinds of

sounds and yet silent within, utterly silent. That pregnant silence becomes the door to god.

[Deva Jivana means divine life.]

To live surrendered to god is to live a divine life – to live as if god is living through you, to disappear

as an ego and function only as a passage for god, to become a hollow bamboo so that god can

make a flute out of you. The song has to be his.... And that is the greatest transformation possible.

Man can live in two ways. One is the egoistic way – then your ego is the centre of your life. The

other is to live without any ego, utterly empty inside. Then god can become a guest in you, then he

lives through you.

To live with the ego is to live a worldly life. To live without the ego is to be a sannyasin; that is the true

religious life. The whole art consists of dying as a person so that the impersonal and the universe

can flow through you. It is just like a seed dying in the soil; then god starts growing like a tree.

To live in the ego is to live in misery, in hell, because it is small. It is almost like living in a dark cell,

hence it is suffocating, it is nightmarish. Man’s being is vast and the ego’s confinement is very small.

The ego is very very limited and the being is infinite. To force the being, which is infinite, into a finite

thing is to create misery. It is imprisonment. Hence the desire to be free.

Every heart is burning with the desire to become freedom, but freedom is possible only if you

disappear. You cannot be free – you are the imprisonment itself. When you are not, freedom is,

and in that freedom there is no worry, no fear, and in that freedom, because there is no fear, love

arises.

Once god starts living through you, you are eternal. Then there is no death, then time is irrelevant,

then bliss is continuous; it is a continuum.

Prem means love, dharmo means religion. Love is a by-product of religion, love is the fragrance

of the flower of religion. But to understand religion one has to understand what religion is not,

because religion has become contaminated with so many things which are not religion at all. Hence

the fragrance of love is missing. On the contrary, just the opposite has happened; religions have

created much hatred in the world. Rather than bringing human beings closer to each other in a

loving embrace, they have created conflict, war, violence. Religion has become something ugly, and

the reason is: it got mixed up with something which is not religion.

Three things which are not religion but which have become religion have to be understood. The first

is: ritual. Ritual is not religion at all; in fact, ritual is a way of covering up your neurotic tendencies. It

is neurosis. Giving a beautiful facade to it, giving it a religious garb, does not help. Neurosis remains

neurosis; you only change the name. The neurotic mind moves in habits, routines – it is repetitive.

It moves in a groove, it goes on doing the same thing again and again and again. Once it becomes

religion then many neurotic people are thought to be religious.

That’s why in the East there are not so many mad people as there are in the West, and the reason

is that in the West the ritual has disappeared, almost disappeared. So every neurotic has come out

naked into the light. In the East the ritual is a protection. If somebody is doing a ritual you respect

him: you think something significant is being done. All that he is doing is hiding his anxiety, keeping

himself occupied with something. He is afraid of himself. He cannot face himself; he is afraid of

coming across himself, he keeps himself occupied. Maybe he goes on turning the beads of his mala

or he repeats ’Ram, Ram, Ram...’, or he does something repetitively every day. His ritual is not

different from other, secular, rituals.

Smoking is a ritual – it keeps you occupied. So whenever a person feels nervous he starts smoking

to avoid that nervousness. It becomes a beautiful occupation, but it is a religious ritual: taking the

smoke in and then throwing it out, and taking it in and throwing it out. k is a mantra, it is a repetitive

process. It makes one feel good – nervousness becomes occupied. When people are happy they

forget smoking; when they are unhappy they immediately remember it.

So ritual is not religion – that has to be understood – and that is almost ninety percent of religion.

And once you drop all rituals you are standing naked in the sunlight, and that is the beginning of

the inner journey one has to face. If one is neurotic, then that neurosis has to be faced, one has

to become aware of it, because only through becoming aware of it is it going to dissolve. Hiding it,

keeping it somewhere in the basement, giving it a beautiful covering, is not going to help; it is not

going to change it at all. So the really religious person is non-ritualistic.

The second thing: religion is not belief. To believe is to avoid enquiry. The person who believes,

believes out of fear, not out of understanding. There is no need to believe if there is understanding.

Understanding needs neither belief nor disbelief. It is the fearful mind: out of fear one wants to

cling to some belief system. It gives solace, consolation. It makes one feel as if one knows, and

one knows not. It gives you a false notion of knowledge, and deep down remains ignorance and

darkness. It hides people’s stupidity. Only stupid people believe... and disbelieve, which are the

same. It doesn’t matter whether you believe or disbelieve – it is stupid.

The intelligent person enquires. He will not believe in god, he will not disbelieve in god. He will not

take any standpoint. He will say ’I will enquire, I will remain open. I will not move from an already

accepted conclusion because then there is no movement, no possibility of movement. If I have

already accepted something as true, the enquiry is finished. It is an abortion; now there is no point

in enquiry. One has already taken a conclusion, a priori.’ The intelligent person enquires, he goes

into enquiry. Enquiry is arduous but it is beautiful too, because it is only through enquiry and the

suffering and the pain and the ecstasies that come out of it that one grows.

And thirdly: religion is not morality. That is another deception. People become do-gooders. That is

not true virtue – it is a camouflage. It brings respectability, it gives you a good ego feeling. It makes

you feel that you are somebody important, significant – not only in the eyes of the world but even

in the eyes of god – that you can stand upright, even encountering god; you can show all the good

deeds that you have done. It is egoistic, and religion cannot be egoistic.

Not that a religious person is immoral, but he is not moral; he is amoral. He has no fixed character.

His character is liquid, alive, moving moment to moment. He responds to situations not according

to a fixed attitude, idea, ideology; he simply responds out of his consciousness. His consciousness

is his only character, there is no other character.

If these three things are understood then one can understand what religion is. Religion is sanity –

going beyond the neurotic mind. Religion is enquiry – going beyond belief systems and disbelief

systems. And religion is consciousness – going beyond the confinements of character.

Downlod Book Here