Murphy sutras (Law)



Beloved Osho, Please tell us a few more murphy sutras and a few murphy anecdotes too.

Osho – Gandharva, the Murphy sutras are really beautiful!

The first sutra: If wives were good, God would have one.

Second: Some people are born silly, some people acquire silliness, and some fall in love.

Third: After man came woman, and she has been after him ever since.

Fourth: Be thrifty when you are young, and when you are old you will be able to afford the things that only the young can enjoy.

Fifth: Never miss an opportunity to make others happy, even if you have to leave them alone.

Sixth: Heredity is something people believe in if they have bright children.

Seventh: When in Rome, do as the Romans do — eat spaghetti.

Eighth: Some men have no solution for any difficulty, but will find a difficulty for any solution.

If you don’t believe in this eighth sutra you can ask Asheesh. He is the perfect personification of this sutra! He has no solution for any difficulty, but you give him any solution and he will find the difficulty!

Ninth: There is no time like the present for postponing what you don’t want to do.

Tenth: Teamwork is essential — it allows you to blame someone else.

Eleventh: You can make it foolproof, but you can’t make it damn foolproof.

Twelfth: The height of futility is to tell a hair-raising story to a bald man.

Thirteenth: What is dumber than a dumb Italian? A dumb Indian.

Fourteenth: Adam was the happiest man on earth. Eve’s mother never told her that nice girls did not do it that way.

Fifteenth: You can’t get there from here, and besides there is no place else to go.

And a few anecdotes about Murphy….

The first: “I am getting more and more absent minded,” said Murphy to a few of his cronies. “Sometimes in the middle of a sentence I….”

“That fellow Bobo is so rude: this morning he was snoring in church!”

“Yes, I know,” said Murphy. “He woke me up!”

Murphy had recently become the father of triplets, and the priest stopped him on the street to congratulate him.

“Well, Murphy,” he said, “so the stork smiled on you.”

“Smiled on me!” exclaimed Murphy. “He laughed out loud!”

One friend met Murphy at the station. “Where are you going?” the friend asked.

“To Paris, for my honeymoon,” said Murphy.

“Without your wife?”

“Listen, when you go to Munich, do you take beer with you?”

One Sunday morning the preacher was ill and could not come to the church to perform his duties, so Murphy was doing his work. He was urging his congregation to sing.

“Now is the opportunity for all of you gifted with wonderful voices to show your gratitude towards the Lord. And for all of you without good voices, this is the time to get even with him!”

Murphy came home an hour earlier than usual and found his wife stark naked in bed. When he asked why, she explained, “I am protesting because I don’t have anything to wear.”

Murphy pulled open the closet door. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “Look in here. There is a yellow dress, a red dress, a print dress, a pant suit…Hi Chris!…a green dress….”

And the last: The son was sitting at the bedside of the elderly gentleman, Murphy, who was dying. “Where do you want to be buried,” the kid asked, “in Forest Lawn or Hillside Memorial Park?”

The old man creaked up on his elbow and answered, “Surprise me!”

Source – Osho Book “Come, Come, Yet Again Come”

If you are really into a relationship it will shatter you

A relationship is always a problem because the other becomes the mirror and the presence of the other help you to see your own face in many ways. And the same happens to the other – you become the mirror. Nobody wants to know his real face. That’s why down the centuries people have been escaping to the monastery. These are the cowards! They are avoiding relationship, because in a relationship they are reflected as they are. Alone, they can think of themselves whatsoever they want to think; they can create any image about themselves. So the first problem with relationship is that relationship reflects you and you reflect the other person. And your totality comes up – you are not just the surface.

The deeper you get involved in your relationship, the deeper feelings it will bring up. If you are really into a relationship it will shatter you. All your images will be shattered. All your faces will be tom. All your masks will start dropping. And whenever this happens the person starts to take revenge on the other. That’s why [your girlfriend] goes on saying no. Behind her no there is yes. In fact, she wants to say yes – that’s why she says no – but she is afraid of her own totality.

People have cleared a little ground of their being and they try to live comfortably there. Mm? – the whole is like a vast canvas. They don’t even want to remember. And whenever you are in love your deepest feeling is stirred. With that feeling all other feelings are stirred. Love is almost like a backbone to the feeling body. If your backbone is taken out you will be spineless . . . just a heap, a blob. Your spine holds you together. Exactly in the same way the feeling body is held together by the spine of love. If you are not in love you can control your anger very easily. In fact, if you are not in love at all there will not be any opportunities to be angry. You can control your sadness very easily if you are not in love. You can manage your life very conveniently; that’s what is being done in monasteries.

The so-called saints are nothing but people who have come to know one thing about themselves: that if they love, all chaos comes into being. If they don’t love the whole chaos disappears. It is a very cheap way to become peaceful. But this peace I don’t teach because this peace is the peace of death. I teach you living peace. I would like you to pass through the chaos and transcend it – rather than escaping from it. Escaping is not going to really change you. You have to pass through these situations.

Source – Osho Book “God Is Not For Sale”

Your Questions on Emotions

The Human Condition–ing          

                               

You spoke on the no-problem, the non-existence of our problems. I was brought up in a repressive Catholic family and spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy education system. Are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and repressions do not exist and can be dropped immediately? What about the imprints left on the brain and on the musculature of the body?

                               

This is a very significant question. The question is significant because it shows two different approaches concerning the inner reality of man.

The Western approach is to think about the problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning, to uncondition the mind, or to recondition the mind, to recondition the body, to take out all those imprints that have been left on the brain. This is the Western approach. Psychoanalysis goes into the memory; it works there. It goes into your childhood, into your past; it moves backwards. It finds out from where the problem has arisen. Maybe fifty years ago, when you were a child, the problem arose in your relationship with your mother; then psychoanalysis will go back.

Fifty years of history! It is a very long, dragging affair. And even then it doesn’t help much because there are millions of problems. It is not only a question of one problem. You can go into one problem’s history; you can look into your autobiography and find the causes and maybe you can eliminate one problem, but there are millions of problems. If you start going into each problem to solve one life’s problems you will need millions of lives. This is absurd!

Now, the same psychoanalytical approach has gone into the body: Rolfing, bio-energetics, and other methods are there which try to eliminate imprints on the body, in the musculature. Again, you have to go into the history of the body. But one thing is certain about both approaches, which are on the same logical pattern, that the problem comes from the past, so somehow it has to be tackled in the past.

The East has a totally different outlook. First, it says no problem is serious. The moment you say no problem is serious, the problem is almost ninety-nine percent dead. Your whole vision changes about it. The second thing the East says is: the problem is there because you are identified with it. It has nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with its history. You are identified with it; that is the real thing. And that is the key to solve all problems.

For example: you are an angry person. If you go to the psychoanalyst, he will say, “Go into the past: how did this anger arise? In what situations did it become more and more conditioned and imprinted on your mind? We will have to wash out all those imprints; we will have to wipe them off. We will have to clean your past completely.”

If you go to an Eastern mystic, he will say, “You think that you are anger, you feel identified with the anger. That is where things are going wrong. Next time anger happens, just be a watcher, just be a witness. Don’t get identified with the anger. Don’t say,’ I am anger.’ Don’t say,’ I am angry.’ Just see it happening as if it is happening on a TV screen. Look at yourself as if you are looking at somebody else.

“You are pure consciousness. When the cloud of anger comes around you just watch it and remain alert so that you don’t get identified. The whole thing is how not to become identified with the problem. Once you have learnt it...and then there is no question of ‘so many problems’ because the key, the same key will open all the locks. It is so with anger, it is so with greed, it is so with sex: it is so with everything else that the mind is capable of.

The questioner has asked: “You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the non-existence of our problems. Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family...”

You can, right now, become a non– Catholic. Now! I say. You will not have to go back and undo whatsoever your parents and your society and the priest and the church have done. That will be a sheer wastage of precious present time. In the first place it has destroyed many years; now, again, it will be destroying your present moments. You can simply drop out of it just as a snake slips out of the old skin.

“Are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and repressions do not exist and can be dropped immediately?” No, they exist. But they exist either in the body or in the brain; they don’t exist in your consciousness, because the consciousness cannot be conditioned. Consciousness remains free. Freedom is its innermost quality, freedom is its nature. In fact, even asking it, you are showing that freedom.

When you say “twenty– one years in a crazy educational system”; when you say “I was brought up in a repressive Catholic family”.... In this moment you are not identified. You can look: so many years of Catholic repression, so many years of a certain education. In this moment when you are looking at it, this consciousness is no longer Catholic; otherwise, who would be aware? If you had really become Catholic, then who would be aware? Then there would be no possibility of becoming aware.

If you can say “twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system,” one thing is certain: you are not yet crazy. The system has failed; it didn’t work. You are not crazy, hence you can see the whole system as crazy. A madman cannot see that he is mad. Only a sane person can see that this is madness. To see madness as madness, sanity is needed. Those twenty-one years of crazy system have failed; all that repressive conditioning has failed. It cannot really succeed. It succeeds only in the proportion that you get identified with it. Any moment you can stand aloof...it is there, I am not saying it is not there: but it is no more part of your consciousness.

This is the beauty of consciousness: consciousness can slip out of anything. There is no barrier to it, no boundary to it. Just a moment before you were an Englishman; understanding the nonsense of nationalism, a second later you are no longer an Englishman. I am not saying that your white skin will change; it will remain white, but you are no longer identified with the whiteness; you are no longer against the black. You see the stupidity of it. I am not saying that just by seeing that you are no longer an Englishman you will forget the English language, no. It will still be there in your memory, but your consciousness has slipped out, your consciousness is standing on a hillock looking at the valley. Now, the Englishman is dead in the valley and you are standing on the hills, far away, unattached, untouched.

The whole Eastern methodology can be reduced to one word: witnessing. The whole Western methodology can be reduced to one thing: analyzing. Analyzing, you go round and round. Witnessing, you simply get out of the circle.

The Eastern approach is to become mindful of the sky. The Western approach makes you more and more alert to the clouds, and helps you a little, but it doesn’t make you aware of your innermost core. The circumference, yes; you become a little more aware of the circumference, but not aware of the center. And the circumference is a cyclone. You have to find the center of the cyclone. And that happens only through witnessing.

Witnessing will not change your conditioning. Witnessing will not change your body musculature. But witnessing will simply give you an experience that you are beyond all musculature, all conditioning. In that moment of beyondness, in that moment of transcendence, no problem exists — not for you. And now it is up to you. The body will still carry the musculature and the mind will still carry the conditioning. Now it is up to you: if sometimes you are hankering for the problem, you can get into the bodymind and have the problem and enjoy it. If you don’t want to have it, you can remain out. The problem will remain as an imprint in the bodymind phenomenon, but you will be aloof and away from it.

That’s how a Buddha functions. You also use memory; a Buddha also uses memory but he is not identified with it. He uses memory as a mechanism.

So your question is right: problems will exist, but they will exist only in the seed form in the body and the mind. How can you change your past? You have been a Catholic in the past; if for forty years you have been a Catholic, how can you change those forty years and not be a Catholic? No. Those forty years will remain as a period of being Catholic. But you can slip out of it. Now you know that that was just identification. Those forty years cannot be destroyed, and there is no need to destroy them. If you are the master of the house, there is no need. You can use even those forty years in a certain way, in a creative way. Even that crazy education can be used in a creative way.

“What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?”

They will be there, but as a seed: potentially there. If you feel too lonely and you want problems, you can have them. If you feel too miserable without misery, you can have them. They will remain always available, but there is no need to have them, there is no necessity to have them. It will be your choice.

Meditations For Busy People: Double-Pointed Watching

Meditations For Busy People: Double-Pointed Watching

 

 

"Gurdjieff used to tell his disciples, “When the arrow of your consciousness becomes double-pointed, when your consciousness begins to flower at both ends, you will become an enlightened being.” Gurdjieff’s efforts in directing his disciples were all to this end. When you look at someone, look at him, but also keep trying to look at your own self: “I am looking, I am the observer.” Then you are sharpening the other edge of the arrow of your consciousness. One end is directed towards the object you see.

Don’t leave the world of objects. Rather, try to become aware of both the subject and the object simultaneously, the outer and the inner simultaneously. If both are there, only then can you be balanced between them.

Try this: in any way just become neutral, indifferent. Suddenly mind has no function. If you are for, you can think; if you are against, you can think. If you are neither for nor against, what is left to think? Be indifferent to the extremes. A balancing happens. This balancing will give you a new dimension of feeling where you are both the knower and the known, the world and the other world, this and that, the body and the mind. You are both and, simultaneously, neither — above both. A triangle has come into existence."

Osho, The Book of Secrets, Talk #61

Osho Book “My Way: The Way of the White Clouds

To me, the life of a white cloud is the life of a SANNYASIN, of a man who has renounced. The life of a householder is a fixed routine. It is a dead thing, it is a pattern. It has a name, it has a form. It moves on a particular track like railway lines. On the track trains are moving; they have a goal, they have to reach somewhere. But a sannyasin is like a cloud drifting in the sky – no iron tracks for him, no routes, no identities. He is no one and lives the life of a non-being, lives as if he is not.
If you can live a life as if you are not, you are on my way. And the more YOU are, the more disease will be there. The less you are, the more healthy you will be. The less you are, the more weightless you will be. The less you are, the more you will be divine and blissful.
When I say life is not a problem but a mystery, I mean you cannot solve it, you can become it. A problem is something to be solved intellectually; but even if you solve it, nothing is achieved. You have gathered a little more knowledge, but no ecstasy out of it. A mystery is something you can become. You can be one with it, merged. Then ecstasy arises, then bliss – then the ultimate that can happen to a being, the ultimate joy.
Religion takes life as a mystery. What can you do about a mystery? You cannot do anything about the mystery, but you can do something about you. You can become more mysterious. And then the similar can meet with the similar, the same can meet with the same.
Look for the mysterious in life. Wherever you look – in the white clouds, in the stars in the night, in the flowers, in a flowing river – wherever you look, look for the mystery. And whenever you find that a mystery is there, meditate on it.
Meditation means: dissolve yourself before that mystery, annihilate yourself before that mystery, disperse yourself before that mystery. Be no more, and let the mystery be so total that you are absorbed in it. And suddenly a new door opens, a new perception is achieved. Suddenly the mundane world of division, of separation has disappeared, and a different, totally different world of oneness comes before you. Everything loses its boundary; everything is with others, is not divided but one.
This can be done only if you do something with you. If you have to solve a problem, you have to do something with the problem. You have to find a key, a clue. You have to work on the problem. You have to move in a laboratory – you have to do something. If you have to encounter a mystery, you have to do something with you; with the mystery nothing can be done.
We are impotent before a mystery. That’s why we go on changing mysteries into problems, because with problems we are potent, with problems we feel we are in control. With mysteries we are impotent, we cannot do anything. With mysteries we face death, and we cannot manipulate. That’s why the more human intellect grows mathematical, logical, the less and less possibility of ecstasy is open before the human mind, less and less poetry is possible. Romance is lost; life becomes factual, not symbolic.
So when I say my way is The Way of the White Clouds, it is just a symbol. The white cloud is not being used as a fact, it is used as a symbol, as a poetic symbol; as an indication of a deep merger into the mysterious and the miraculous.
Source – Osho Book “My Way: The Way of the White Clouds”

You heard about law of cause and effect now create the effect and the cause follows

The Law of Magic    

      

 

    Part Two

I will tell you one of the deepest laws of life. You may not have thought about it at all. You have heard — the whole of science depends on it — that cause and effect is the base. You create the cause and the effect follows. Life is a causal link. You put the seed in the soil and it will sprout. If the cause is there, then the tree will follow. The fire is there: you put your hand in it and it will burn. The cause is there and the effect will follow. You take poison and you will die. You arrange for the cause and then the effect follows.

This is one of the most basic scientific laws, that cause and effect is the innermost link of all processes of life. Religion knows about a second law which is still deeper than this. But the second law which is deeper than this will look absurd if you don’t know it and don’t experiment with it.

Religion says: Produce the effect and the cause follows. This is absolutely absurd in scientific terms. Science says: If the cause is there, the effect follows. Religion says the converse is also true: you create the effect, and see: the cause follows.

There is a situation in which you feel happy. A friend has come, a beloved has called. A situation is the cause — you feel happy. Happiness is the effect. The coming of the beloved is the cause. Religion says: Be happy and the beloved comes. Create the effect and the cause follows.

This is my own experience, that the second law is more basic than the first. I have been doing it and it has been happening. Just be happy: the beloved comes. Just be happy: friends are there. Just be happy: everything follows.

Jesus says the same thing in different words: Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, then all else will follow. But the Kingdom of God is the end, the effect. Seek ye first the end — the end means the effect, the result — and the cause will follow. This is as it should be.

It is not only that you place a seed in the soil and the tree follows; let there be a tree and there are millions of seeds. If the cause is followed by the effect, the effect is again followed by the cause. This is the chain! Then it becomes a circle — start from anywhere, create the cause or create the effect.

I tell you, it is easier to create the effect because the effect depends totally upon you; the cause may not be so dependent on you. If I say I can only be happy when a certain friend is there, then it depends on a certain friend, whether he is there or not. If I say I cannot be happy until I attain this much wealth, then it depends on the whole world and the economic situations and everything. It may not happen, and then I cannot be happy.

The cause is beyond me. The effect is within me. The cause is in the surroundings, in the situations — the cause is without. The effect is me! If I can create the effect, the cause will follow.

Choose happiness — that means you are choosing the effect — and then see what happens. Choose ecstasy and see what happens. Choose to be blissful and see what happens. Your whole life will change immediately and you will see miracles happening around you...because now you have created the effect and causes will have to follow.

This will look magical; you can even call it “The Law of Magic.” The first is the law of science and the second is the law of magic. Religion is magic, and you can be the magician. That’s what I teach you: to be the magician, to know the secret of magic.

Try it! You have been trying the other your whole life — not only this but many other lives also. Now listen to me! Try this magic formula, this mantra I give to you. Create the effect and see what happens; causes immediately surround you, they follow. Don’t wait for the causes; you have waited long enough. Choose happiness and you will be happy.

What is the problem? Why can’t you choose? Why can’t you work on this law? Because your mind, the whole mind, which has been trained by scientific thinking, says that if you are not happy and you try to be happy, that happiness will be artificial. If you are not happy and you try to be happy that will be just acting, that will not be real. This is what scientific thinking says, that that will not be real, you will be just acting.

But you don’t know: life energy has its own ways of working. If you can act totally it will become the real. The only thing is, the actor must not be there. Move totally in it, then there is no difference. If you are acting half-heartedly then it will remain artificial.

If I say to you dance and sing and be blissful, and you try half-heartedly, just to see what happens, but you remain behind...and you go on thinking: This is just artificial. I am trying but this is not coming, this is not spontaneous — then it will remain acting, a waste of time.

If you try, then try wholeheartedly. Don’t remain behind, move into it, become the acting — dissolve the actor into acting and then see what happens. It will become real and then you will feel it is spontaneous. You have not done it; you will know then that it has happened. But unless you are total this cannot happen. Create the effect, be in it completely, see and observe the results.

I can make you kings without kingdoms; you only have to act like kings, and act so totally that before you even a real king will appear as if he is just acting. And when the whole energy has moved into it, it becomes reality! Energy makes anything real. If you wait for kingdoms they never come.

Even for a Napoleon, for an Alexander, who had big kingdoms, they never came. They remained miserable because they didn’t come to realize the second, more basic and primal law of life. Alexander was trying to create a bigger kingdom, to become a bigger king. His whole life was wasted in creating the kingdom, and then there was no time left for him to be king. He died before the kingdom was complete.

This has happened to many. The kingdom can never be complete. The world is infinite; your kingdom is bound to remain partial. With a partial kingdom how can you be a total king? Your kingdom is bound to be limited and with a limited kingdom how can you be the emperor? It is impossible. But you can be the emperor. Just create the effect.

Swami Ram, one of the mystics of this century, went to America. He used to call himself Badshah Ram, Emperor Ram. And he was a beggar! Somebody said to him: You are just a beggar, but you go on calling yourself the emperor. So Ram said: Don’t look at my things, look at me. And he was right, because if you look at things then everybody is a beggar...even an emperor. He may be a bigger beggar, that’s all. When Ram said: Look at me! in that moment, Ram was the emperor. If you looked, the emperor was there.

Create the effect, become the emperor, be a magician... and from this very moment, because there is no need to wait. One has to wait if the kingdom has to come first. If the cause has to be created first, then one has to wait and wait and wait and postpone. There is no need to wait to create the effect. You can be the emperor this very moment.

When I say, Be! Just be the emperor and see: the kingdom follows.... I have known it through my experience. I am not talking to you about a theory or a doctrine. Be happy, and in that peak of happiness you will see the whole world is happy with you.

There is an old saying: Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry, and you cry alone. Even the trees, the rocks, the sand, the clouds...if you can create the effect and be ecstatic, they will all dance with you; then the whole existence becomes a dance, a celebration.

But it depends on you, if you can create the effect. And I say to you, you can create it. It is the easiest thing possible. It looks very difficult because you have not tried it yet. Give it a try!

Osho, My Way: The Way of the White Clouds, Talk #3

Beyond the Hit-and-Run Mentality

 Beyond the Hit-and-Run Mentality

    

    There is a fear about the girl I am with. I am afraid to lose her...and that won’t allow me to have a deep relationship. Maybe I’m afraid to be alone, something like that.

  

    No, don’t be afraid, move deeper. It will happen because the more you become centred, the more relaxed you become, the more possibility there is to enter into a relationship deeply.

In fact it is you who goes into a relationship. If you are not there, tense, crippled, worried and fragmented, who is going to go deep? Because of our fragmentedness, we are really afraid of getting deeper into a relationship, into deep layers, because then our reality will be revealed. Then you will have to open your heart, and your heart is just fragments. There is not one man inside you — you are a crowd. If you really love a woman and you open your heart, she will think you are a public, not a person — that is the fear.

That’s why people go on having casual affairs. They don’t want to go deep; just hit-and-run, just touching the surface and escaping before anything becomes a commitment. Then you can only have sex, and that too, impoverished. It is just superficial. Only boundaries meet, but that is not love at all...maybe a body release, a catharsis, but not more than that.

The fear is that now you want to go deeper; it is not that the girl may be lost. You are afraid and hesitant. We can have our masks easily if the relationship is not very close, very intimate — the social faces function well. Then when you smile there is no need really for you to smile, just the mask smiles.

If you really want to go deep then there are dangers. You will have to go naked — and naked means with all the problems inside known to the other. When you cannot have an image, your reality will be open and vulnerable, and that creates fear. But we go on deceiving ourselves and saying we are not afraid of that, we are afraid that the girl may leave. That is not the fear. In fact deep down you may be wanting the girl to leave you so there is no trouble about going deeper into a relationship.

Go deeper. Nobody is hindering the path. The groups and meditations here are going to help you, and soon you will be able to. If you are there, then you can always find someone to love. If you are not there somebody else may be there but that will only be physical presence, and of no use, because you remain alone.

Go and watch couples, people married for years: they live a lonely life, and they live alone. They have never been together, and they have learned all sorts of tricks about how to avoid each other, how to escape the other. The husband says, “I love you,” and kisses the wife and everything, but these are just to keep away, not to go deep.

Don’t be afraid...just take the jump!