Chapter 4. A
Lecture on Knowledge and Knowing
Osho lectured at eight o’clock
in the morning, every morning – one month in Hindi, one month in English. And
once every month there was an intensive, ten-day meditation camp, where the
meditation described in The Silent Explosion and a number of other active or
‘chaotic’ techniques Osho had devised were practised… This was the first day of
a series of lectures in English, on Lao Tzu, on the Tao Te Ching, and the first
day of a ten-day camp. It was raining. In fact it was pouring.
The monsoon in Maharashtra was
at its height. A queue, shorter than I had expected, was ushered past the side
of Osho’s house. We went through some dripping shrubbery then, with a sudden
shock, turned into a large auditorium which had been built onto the back of the
house.
Chuang Tzu the auditorium was
called, I knew that much already, and it was a dramatic piece of architecture. With
a sweeping marble floor and columns rising to a high ceiling it hit a
classical, almost Grecian note… and was about the last thing you’d expect to
find in this erstwhile Raj hill-station, some hundred miles south of Bombay.
All along the back it was open to the garden.
I picked my way through the
people already sitting on the floor, heading for the back. They were all
sitting quietly, I remember being struck by that, how still everyone was. A lot
of the men had beards and long hair, but they weren’t exactly Hippies. Everyone
was wearing orange, the immemorial colour of the sadhu, the religious vagabond
in India; though different shades of it were worn and in a variety of styles (frequently
it was faded, like an old pair of Levis, and worn as a sort of cloak).
I sat down and leant up against
a marble pillar at the back. Everyone continued to sit very still. Behind me
birds sang in the cold wet garden. From time to time you could hear old steam
trains hooting down at Poona railway station; it wasn’t far, less than a mile
away. The sound was small and distant, yet incredibly poignant; a perfect acoustic
miniature on the still morning air.
Suddenly everyone was rising to
their feet. Osho had come out of a small door at the front. He paused and made
namaste, hands raised, the palms joined together as for prayer, the ancient
Indian gesture of greeting. He was a smaller man than I had expected, but more
powerfully built: bald, with a beard streaked with grey, yet somehow very young
and vital. He was dressed in a simple white robe and carried a fresh hand towel
folded over one arm. The namaste was formal and very slow, he swept the audience
making, so far as I could see, eye-to-eye contact with a large number of
people.
Finally he lowered his hands
and crossed to a high-tech modern armchair which was waiting for him. Someone
in the front row read out a short passage from the Tao Te Ching, just a few
cryptic lines. Osho sat there in silence, looking down. He appeared to be
studying his hands. The silence deepened, the birds sang. Then he began.
“Religion is not knowledge, it
is knowing” he said quietly.
“Knowledge is of the mind,
knowing is of the being.
“So the first thing to be
understood is the difference between knowledge and knowing.
“Knowledge is never of the
present, it is always of the past.”
The voice is calm but fast.
There is a sense of urgency, but no sense of impatience. The tone is pleasant –
indeed eminently reasonable.
“Knowing is always immediate,
knowing is here and now. You cannot say anything about it, you can only be it.”
There is no faltering – no
trace of hesitation.
“Knowing has no past, it has no
future, it has only the present.
“And remember, present is not
part of time.
“People ordinarily think that
time is divided between past, future and present. They are absolutely wrong.
Time is divided between past and future, present is not a part of time at all.
You cannot catch hold of it in time. Pursue it and you will miss…
“Present is eternity crossing
time….”
Certainly it was a virtuoso
performance. I had never heard anyone who could just sit down and spontaneously
talk like that. Some sannyasin had told me all Osho’s books were just his talks
typed out, and hearing him I could well believe it. It sounded as though he was
reading it out as he spoke – not only in the sense that the sentences were
already all but punctuated, but that one felt one was being led through the
stages of a carefully reasoned argument whose conclusion, when it came, would
be quite inescapable… I felt overwhelmed: I began to space out. Trains hooted
far away. Chuang Tzu became increasingly dream-like. Above Osho’s head, above
the whole sea of orange, there was an enormous cut-glass chandelier hanging
from the ceiling. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it before. It looked like
something left over from a ballroom during the Raj. Its presence added a
raffish, surreal quality to the proceedings. It looked like…booty. Piratical,
that was the word I’d been looking for to describe Poona. Piratical.
I began to feel positively
sleepy… Something I didn’t understand at all at the time was this: that Osho
was a great hypnotist; perhaps, in terms of being able to hypnotise large groups
of people, a world-class one. Listening today to a tape of that long-ago
lecture, there’s a lot of hypnotic technique I can recognise now of which I had
no suspicion at the time. The trailing esses, the odd emphases, the gaps. There
are passages where the whole vibe of the lecture changes. Osho’s voice loses
that driving, metaphysical quality, and slows down… it becomes personal, as
though he is talking to you, and to you alone…
“Inside everything is so dark.
You close your eyes and there is dark night, you cannot see anything… even if
something is seen it is nothing but part of the outside reflected in the inner
lake…”
The voice is really silky now…
it is the voice of a lover. The pauses between the words are getting longer and
longer – you start to hear the silences between them rather than the words
themselves.
“…thoughts floating which you
have gathered in the market-place, faces coming and going, but they belong to
the outside world. Just reflections of the outside, and vast darkness… I was
slumped, rather loutishly, against my marble column at the back. I just
couldn’t get a handle on it – the washed-out, apricot robes and rags, the
God-talk, the chandelier out of a Hollywood movie. I kept nodding off, then waking
up with a lurch, the way you do on a bus. Bits I heard with jagged vividness.
Gurdjieff. Rabia the Sufi. Bokuju.
Who…? By now Osho was well into
his stride. His delivery never faltered. On and on he went. More and more, on
the occasions on which I tried to rouse myself, I felt I’d had enough of
sitting on this freezing marble floor. I wish, I thought with sudden venom, I
wish you would bloody well shut up!
Time and time again he appeared
to be tying everything up into a final, exceptionally neat rhetorical bow… only
to start off once more.
“Enough for today” he said
suddenly, at the very moment I had finally given up all hope of ever getting
out of there; and all around me sannyasins were scrambling to their feet.
Osho rose fluidly from his chair.
He made another less lingering namaste and, towel untouched and still folded
over one arm, fresh as a daisy, made his exit through the same little door by
which he had entered.
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