Osho - How many of your Sannyasins do You personally know

Question - I was wondering earlier, how many of your Sannyasins do You personally know? I mean, there are over a thousand People here. Do you know most of them personally, I mean?

Osho - I know them individually, not personally. And I make a distinction between
knowing someone personally and knowing someone individually. Ordinarily we know people only personally: their name, their qualifications, their job and things like that, which are all superficial. You can change the name but the individual remains the same. You can change the job but the individual remains the same. You can change the address, you can change his wife, but the individual remains the same.

I am not interested in people's personalities. I know them individually. That means I know them in their very essence. When I pass by the side of a sannyasin, I don't know the name but I know at what stage of meditation the individual is or whether he has at all progressed in meditation or not.

I know whether the individual has come to taste something of the higher qualities of love or is still thinking that sexuality is all there is. I know just by looking in the eyes of anybody whether the person has any inner approach to himself or he lives just outside himself. That inner approach is his individuality, and that outside life is his personality. I am not concerned with the personality at all.

The person may be a man or a woman -- does not matter. What matters is his essential being, how close he has come to his essential being. Closer he comes to it, a certain aura arises around his body, a certain fragrance. You can immediately recognize that here is someone who is very close to the center, and when somebody reaches the center, then it is as if a house was dark and suddenly you have switched the light on. Even from the outside you can see through the windows the house is on light.

Ordinary people are just without light. Even from their windows you can see only darkness. And when a person reaches to his center of individuality, suddenly he is aflame. And you can see -- from his eyes, from his gestures, from his words, the way he walks. His words start becoming more poetic. His walk becomes more of a dance. His gestures have a grace that was never there before. I am knowing my people only in that inner context, and it is almost impossible to know them personally. One million people around the earth -- how can I know
their names? But I can know them. And the moment I look into their eyes, they also know that they have been found where they are.

Source - Osho Book "Last Testament Vol 4"

^Top Back to Enlightenment