PNTV: The Book of Understanding by Osho (#52)

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Hey, this is Bryan. Welcome to Philosopher's Nerds tv. Today we've got Osho. Can't see it because I took the COVID off of this book. We got Osho's Book of Understanding. Great book. Little philosopher's notes action here. About 10 of my favorite big ideas. Osho is intense. If you've read him, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, I think this might be a good place to start. The Book of Understanding. It's kind of a high level overview of Osho and how he sees the world. A few of my favorite big ideas we will look at now. So Zorba the Buddha. It's the first big idea that I cover here in the note. The biggest, the basic idea here is that Osho's encouraging us to embrace all of life, right? And a lot of spiritual aspirants are on what many people call the ascending path, right? Like a Buddha. We're getting to a point where you've transcended the world and its issues and you've kind of have clear consciousness and you can see things in a right view. But what often happens in the process is we cut ourselves off from the neck down. Ken Wilber says that we, we want our gurus to be dead from the neck down. We want them just to be kind of smiling, bobbing little heads that have none of the urges, the sensual urges that we have questing for things in the material world. And what Osho says is, look, we want Zorba the Buddha. Zorba is a character who, I think it's from a Greek novelist who is just totally sensual, totally into living life fully. So Osho is saying we want to merge the Buddha and Zorba. We want to merge east and west, spirituality and materialism. This idea of being in a meditative state with being in a sensual state and fully living this existence not as either or, but as a. Yes, and so that's pretty cool idea. Zorba the Buddha. It shows up in all aspects of our lives. Oftentimes we want to be spiritual, spiritual. And we can't be spiritual and sensual. We can't be spiritual and into creating businesses and circulating wealth and having luxury in our lives. It's an either or proposition. Osho says, let's get rid of that nonsense. Let's make it yes. And Zorba the Buddha. It's not just Osho who talks about this. All kinds of teachers talk about it, including Abraham Maslow, who, as you know, if you've watched some of these humanistic psychologist where you just know, came up with the idea of hierarchy of needs, the self actualizing individual. He said that at the top of the pyramid of the self actualizer. And you look at those individuals who are actualizing and transcending their self, they have exactly what Osho is talking about. The dichotomies between work and play, the dichotomies between all the different aspects of their personality tend to dissolve. And he says, what use is polarity? And when the most enlightened among us have fully expressed versions of all aspects of their being, which is pretty cool. So there you go. I talk about it a little bit more in the note. Moving on. Osho is all about actualizing our full potential. And he says that in life we don't get full stops. He says they're not even semicolons, they're just commas. They're just little baby stops in the root in Route 2, fully actualizing, in route to fully becoming what we're destined to become. Really cool idea. I like to describe it as. You have kind of a line here of here's what you're capable of doing and if this is what you're actually doing and there's a gap between what you're actually doing and what you're capable of doing. In that gap is where regret and anxiety and disillusionment and depression exist and what we need to do. And that's a gift. That's nature basically saying, you're capable of more. Give me more. Because when we give everything we have and we're fully expressing ourselves moment to moment to moment, and we're actually doing what we're capable of doing, that gap closes. And the anxiety and the depression and the regret and all that kind of ickiness dissolves as we fully show up. And Osho talks about it throughout the book, throughout all of his books, and says that we weren't born complete, we're born like a seed. And we need to do the work. We need to have the discipline and the passion to show up fully in life so that we can become the tree, we can blossom and flower and all the magnificence that we were destined to do. And to the extent we're not doing that, we're going to feel a certain amount of pain. So really big idea. We can talk about some more. We will talk about some more throughout all of these discussions. We do talk about it. We'll talk about it more and more and more in the months and years and decades ahead. Another really cool idea from the note, Osho says that balance is not a noun, it's a verb. Oftentimes we want balance. We want to be totally equanimous, totally balanced. Everything is just, ah, there's no chaos, we're dead from the neck down kind of thing. We can just reach this transcendent state of bliss. Everything is balanced. That's a noun. Actually, that's not a noun, but balance as a noun versus balancing, balancing as a verb where what we're doing is we're like a tightrope walker. Osho says, imagine a tightrope walker. The tightrope walker is not balanced. It's not just sitting up there. The tightrope walker as they move across the tightrope is balancing. They go from a little bit too far this way and then back this way. And just for a moment as they cross the center line, they're balanced. But the act is one of balancing. And Osho says that's exactly how our lives are. A well lived life is basically trusting ourselves and going over here and realizing, no, no, no, let's move over here, let's move over here. And for me, as I embrace this idea of B versus thinking I'm going to arrive at a balanced state, I relax. There's just a lot more spontaneity, a lot more fun, a lot more playfulness, a lot less rigidity. So a couple of things come into mind here. One, this idea of balancing is very much like the idea of flexibility. When we want to be balanced, it's like we want to be rich, we want to have everything fixed. We're too rigid. And I mentioned before that flexibility is kind of like the river that flows between two banks. On either side of flexibility, we have rigidity on one side and then we have chaos on the other. Rigidity is we're too structured. We're trying to be fixed and balanced once and for all. That's not how life works. The other side, we kind of say we give up and then we're too chaotic, we have no structure. Osho says we want to find that balancing point in between. That's flexibility. That's the hallmark of healthy human functioning. Really cool stuff. Another really cool idea, Tal Ben Shahar, the author of Happier and the Pursuit of Perfect that we cover. Awesome positive psychologist. He says something that I think is helpful and relevant here. He says we want to make our ideals not. I've mentioned this a couple times. We want to make our ideals not a distant shore that we're going to get to. But a guiding star. It's something we use to navigate, we use as a guiding point. But we know we're never going to get there. Right. It's just an ideal that we strive for. Same thing with balance. We're never going to get there. It's just a kind of beautiful star that's allowing us to kind of move toward a state where we're more harmonious, but we do so dynamically. Really cool idea. So think of the tightrope walker whenever you feel yourself kind of a little bit too tight or thinking that things should be perfectly balanced. That's a really cool one. Osho talks about the power of witnessing. Simply having the ability and the consciousness to witness anger or fear or depression. Just the act of witnessing it allows it to dissolve. It's an amazing thing. Usually we're too busy in it to actually step out, but that's a big part of our practice is to step out. Witness, witness, witness. He talks about that a lot. We've got a lot of other cool stuff in here. How about discipline? Osho talks about the importance of discipline, but it's got to be self discipline. It's not following someone else's rule book, but saying this is important to me. I want to be this type of human being. These types of behaviors will help me demonstrate and be this kind of human being. So I'm going to choose to do these things versus the Bible says I should do this. The Gita says I should do this. Anything outside of us imposed isn't healthy according to Osho. And I would agree. We, we want to choose it. We may choose the exact same stuff that's in the Bible or the Gita, but it becomes our conscious choice. He also says it's important to have discipline. Discipline is the path to freedom. Too often when we get on the spiritual path, we just want to go with the flow. But Lao Tzu, who I quote here, is one of the most ardent supporters of discipline. He says to not have discipline is egomania. You're going to fall back into the darkness. We need to have discipline, commit ourselves to practices and follow through again and again and again, again, diligently, patiently, persistently and playfully. A lot more stuff we can cover here. Check out the imitation is crime in the note. That's one of my favorite ideas. We're not going to have time to get to it right now. But that's Osho in a nutshell. Zorba, the Buddha playing full outgoing for your potential. And what else? Balancing important stuff all right. Hope you dug it. Talk to you soon.

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