Osho - My methods are different from George Gurdjieff's

Question - Beloved Master I would like to try experimenting with alcohol a la gurdjieff, except i am broke. Can I have an alcohol allowance?

Osho - Deva  Shraddan, George Gurdjieff would not have given you that experiment. That was given only to people who are against alcohol! For example, if Morarji Desai had gone to George Gurdjieff, then he would have forced him to drink alcohol -- instead of his own urine! But not for you. So it is very difficult for me to allow you an alcohol allowance -- that would be against the spirit of George Gurdjieff. He would never forgive me!

The essential core of the experiment is to disturb you, to shatter you, to shatter your patterns, fixed patterns. If you are desiring alcohol, then that is the LAST thing that is going to shatter you. It will be fulfilling, it will not be shattering. Instead of alcohol, start drinking the water of life! 

"You know, you are the first man I have met whose kisses make me sit up and open my eyes."

"Really?"
"Yes. Usually they have the opposite effect."

With you, alcohol will not be of any help; the water of life may have the right effect. You may open your eyes and sit up. And one thing more is good about it: you can be broke and still you can enjoy it. No allowance is needed, so Laxmi need not worry about it. It gives you total self-dependence.  

One Saturday night George ended up at a party in an unfamiliar apartment building. He got very drunk and somehow found his way home in the wee hours. When he woke up the next afternoon with a terrible hangover, he realized that he had left his jacket, tie, shirt and shoes at the party.

With much difficulty he found the apartment building, but he had no idea which apartment he had been in. The only thing he remembered about it was a magnificent gold toilet. So he knocked at the first apartment. The door was opened by a man with a hangover.

"Hello," said George. "Did you have a party here last night?"
"We sure did!" groaned the man.

"And do you have a gold toilet?"
"A gold toilet? No, we sure don't."

So George had to go to the next door, and so on for three floors. Everyone was recovering from a party, but no one knew anything about a gold toilet. By the time he got to the last apartment, George was beginning to think he had imagined the gold toilet. The door was opened by a man with a hangover.

"Uh, hello," said George. "Did you have a party here last night?"
"We sure had a party here!" groaned the man.

"And do you by any chance have a gold toilet?"
There was a long silence.

Finally the man shouted back over his shoulder, "Hey, Harry -- here is the guy who shit in your tuba!"

So, Shraddan, the allowance can be allowed... but what about other people's tubas? You will create trouble. If you listen to my advice, forget the whole idea. It is good that you are broke. This is called a blessing in disguise. If you were not broke you would have gone a la Gurdjieff, and that would have led you into more trouble.

Gurdjieff certainly forced people to drink, but only the people who were against alcohol. He used to make toasts every night for all the kinds of idiots in the world. He had twenty-six categories of idiots. I don't know to which category you would belong, but you must belong to some category. Unless you are awakened you are bound to belong to some category or other.

An idiot is a person who is trying to find joy where joy does not exist at all, who is trying to search for something which he has never lost in the first place. The enlightened person is one who has looked into his being before searching for anything anywhere else. It is better to look in your own house. He has looked in and has found it there. Now his search has disappeared.

The person who is interested in alcohol must be living in misery, in a kind of suffering. That's why he wants somehow to forget it all. Alcohol is nothing but a chemical strategy to forget your miseries, anxieties, your problems, to forget yourself. 

My whole effort here, Shraddan, is to help you to remember yourself -- and you want to forget yourself. By forgetting yourself you will be creating more and more hell for yourself and for others. Remember, rather, remember yourself.

My methods are different from George Gurdjieff's. I am not in favor of any alcoholic beverages. I am not in favor of any psychedelic drugs either, because they all create illusory worlds for you and they all are distractions. They make you more and more oblivious of your own being, unaware of your own self.

My work is based in awareness. The word 'awareness' is the golden key here, the master key. You have to learn to be more aware. Howsoever painful it is in the beginning, be more aware, because it is by becoming more aware that one day you will become part of the celebration of the whole.

AES DHAMMO SANANTANO -- this is the eternal inexhaustible law.

Enough for today.