The first question:

Question 1

OSHO, FOR ME, YOU ARE ALL THE MASTERS THAT HAVE BEEN BEFORE AND ALL THE MASTERS THAT WILL COME. MORE AND MORE A STRANGE KNOWING GROWS THAT ONLY DEATH IS THE DOOR TO THIS PERFECT UNION WITH 'I DON'T KNOW WHAT'. LOVING THE MASTER -- LOVE -- ONLY GIVES US GLIMPSES OF WHAT DEATH CAN MAKE US SEE. IS THIS NOT SO?

Prem Puneeta,

LOVE is a small death, and death is great love. They are not two things. Love is a small wave in the ocean of death. Hence people are afraid of love too, as much as they are afraid of death.

People only pretend the game of love, they don't go into it. They keep a distance from any deep commitment, from any total involvement, because if you really go very close in the world of love, the flame of love is going to burn your ego.

People love -- at least they pretend, they believe that they love -- because life without love is meaningless. If they don't love life is meaningless; if they really love the ego disappears. Hence they make a compromise: they go only so far. They don't go to the deepest core of it, they only touch the surface. They cannot remain without it; without it they are utterly futile. Then life is a desert with no significance, no song. Then life is utterly futile -- you only vegetate, you don't really love, you don't really live. Loving and living are synonymous.

So people have to at least play the game of love; that keeps them involved. But they don't really go into it. They keep out of it, because if they really go into it then the ego disappears. Then they are no more, then God is.

The experience of orgasm, of deep orgasmic joy, is the first experience of God. God comes when two lovers meet and merge into each other. When two are no more two, when that union happens, God penetrates you. Then the beyond comes to the earth, the sky meets the earth.

But rarely are you in an orgasmic unity; rarely are you so much in tune with the other that you are ready to sacrifice your ego. In fact, you go on doing the contrary: your love is also an ornament for your ego; your love is also a new treasure to strengthen the ego, to gratify the ego. Rather than destroying it, your games about love go on nourishing

But Puneeta, your insight is absolutely right: love can only give you glimpses. If you allow the ego to disappear, love will make you available to something of the unknown. Love will teach you how to die; love is the first lesson of death. Death is the crescendo of love, the highest peak. Those who know how to love know how to die. Their death is not an end; it is a beginning, it is a birth, it is moving into the divine. It is transcending the human and entering the superhuman. It is transcending the mortal and entering into the immortal. Death is a portal, a door.

But death is a door only if you have learned the lesson through love. Love is the school that prepares you for death. Love and life are synonymous: if you love you live. If you love and live you become capable of dying.

Millions of people die, but without being capable of dying. They die in unconsciousness. Then death simply takes them back into another body; then death simply helps them to enter into another womb. And the whole wheel starts moving again, the same repetitive wheel.

Those who die consciously... And love makes you utterly conscious. Love makes you alert, because love is light. It dispels all darkness, all unconsciousness. It becomes a lamp inside you. And if you have that lamp, death has a totally different quality: it is not death at all; it is life abundant, it is life infinite, it is life divine, it is life eternal.

Yes, Puneeta, you are right: "LOVING THE MASTER -- LOVE ONLY GIVES US GLIMPSES OF WHAT DEATH CAN MAKE US SEE. IS THIS NOT SO?"

It is so, but it is only love that will prepare you. The greater the love, the greater is the preparation. Hence one has to remain grateful forever towards all that love has contributed -- and not only the love for the Master. Even loving a tree or a rock or an animal or your woman, your man, your child, even these loves prepare you for the great love that happens between the disciple and the Master. All your loves are involved in it, implied in it.

Love towards the Master is the whole spectrum of love. The way you have loved your woman will be there, the way you have loved your man will be there, the way you have loved your mother will be there, and the way you have loved your child will be there. The way you have loved music, the way you have loved poetry, painting, dancing, all your loves, the whole multiplicity of loves, all the dimensions of love, will join together. Between the Master and the disciple, love comes to its whole spectrum. It becomes the whole rainbow, all the seven colors. And that love will prepare you for the ultimate quantum leap, death.

In the ancient scriptures, the Master is defined as death. You will be surprised: ancient scriptures say ACHARYO MRITYU, the Master is death. If you have known the Master, you are coming closer and closer to death. Coming very close to the Master is coming closer to the ultimate death. One day the disciple and the Master both disappear.

The Master has already disappeared. The Master is the person who has attained to nothingness. The Master is one who is already dead, who is no more, who is just an absolute emptiness. If you come close to the Master... And that's what disciplehood means: coming closer and closer to somebody who is no more. And of course, to come closer to somebody who is no more is going to destroy your ego utterly. One day, through the Master, you taste your first experience of death.

Hence people avoid living Masters, because living Masters are nothing but death. People love dead Masters because they cannot do anything to you. It is beautiful to worship Buddha, it is very, very convenient to worship Jesus, it is difficult to come close to me. It was difficult to come close to Buddha too when he was alive. Remember the paradox: when Buddha is alive he is death, hence the fear. When Buddha is dead then there is no problem -- you can worship, you can hold the statue of Buddha close to your heart. Now the Buddha is just a toy, he is in your hands. He cannot destroy your ego; in fact, your ego will use him. Even Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, are used by the ego to become stronger.

Only a living Master is fire enough, flame enough, to bum you totally, utterly, absolutely. SATSANG, to be with the Master, is the ultimate in love and the beginning of death.

Puneeta, your insight is beautiful, a gift of your meditativeness, of your love for me, of your love for the commune. Go on moving in the same direction. Don't go astray. Many fears will arise. Many times the mind will say, "Go back! It is too dangerous." Don't listen to the mind, listen to the heart. The heart knows what is right, the heart feels what is right.

It is a feeling; that's why you don't know: "I don't know for what, towards what." The movement is happening. You cannot know it, but you can feel; the feeling is there. And one day the feeling becomes knowing.

When feeling becomes knowing, one has become enlightened. Knowledge is not real knowing. When feeling becomes knowing one is enlightened. The moment feeling becomes knowing, there is no distinction between being and knowing, that is called wisdom. Then your heart starts pouring not only your joy, not only your songs, but your wisdom too. That's how all the great scriptures were born.

Mohammed was an ignorant person, illiterate, but when it happened -- this knowing, this feeling, this being happened  -- when he managed to die in the love of God, this illiterate, ignorant person started pouring immensely beautiful verses. The Koran has tremendous beauty, simplicity and beauty both together. It is not complex. It has the beauty of the roses, the stars. It has the music of the birds, and the wind passing through the pine trees, and the sound of running water. And it came out of a man who never knew how to read, how to write, who had no knowledge but who had a heart. In fact, because he had no knowledge it was easy for him to feel, and it was easy for him to dive deep into feeling, so deep that he touched the very rock-bottom of being.

And this is how Jesus speaks. His prose is not prose, it is poetry. There is no comparison. Jesus' statements have such poetry in them, they are incomparable; so are Buddha's. They are all unique in their own ways. They are peaks, different peaks reaching beyond the clouds. But one thing is exactly the same: they are rooted in the same experience. The experience is not of knowledge; the experience first is of feeling and then is of being.