Principal Upanishads

Minor Upanishads

Osho on Upanishads - The word upanishad is tremendously important. It simply means sitting down close to a Master; it is a communion. The Master is living in wholeness; he is living herenow, he is pulsating herenow. His life has a music, his life has a joy, a silence of immense depth. His life is full of light.

Just to sit silently by the side of a Master is enough, because the presence of a Master is infectious, the presence of the Master is overwhelming. His silence starts reaching to your very heart. His presence becomes a magnetic pull on you: it pulls you out of the mud of the past and the future. It brings you into the present. Upanishad is a communion, not a communication. A communication is head-to-head and a communion is heart-to-heart. This is one of the greatest secrets of spiritual life, and nowhere else, at no other time, it was understood so deeply as in the days of the Upanishads.

The Upanishads were born nearabout five thousand years before. A secret communion, a transmission beyond the scriptures, a communion, a transmission beyond the scriptures, a communion beyond the words... this is what UPANISHAD is – you sitting silently, not just listening to my words but listening to my presence too. The words are only excuses to hang the silence upon. The silence is the real content, the word is only a container. If you become too much interested in the word you miss the spirit.

So don’t be too much interested in the word. Listen to the heartbeat of the word. When a Master speaks, those words are coming from his innermost core. They are full of his color, of his light. They carry some of the perfume of his being. If you are open and vulnerable, receptive, welcoming, they will penetrate into your heart and a process is triggered.

What Carl Gustav Jung calls synchronicity explains exactly what happens between a Master and a disciple. It is not the same as what happens between a teacher and a student. Between teacher and a student there is a communication; some information is transferred by the teacher to the student, but no transformation – only information. The teacher himself is not transformed, he himself has not arrived. He is repeating words from other teachers, he may be even repeating words from other Masters, but he has not known himself; his words are borrowed. He may be very scholarly, he may be very well-informed, but that is not the real thing. Information is not the real thing – transformation.

And unless one is transformed he cannot trigger the process of transformation in others. Carl Gustav Jung calls this synchronicity. The Master cannot cause your enlightenment. It is not a scientific process, it is far more poetic. It is not a law like the law of cause and effect; it is far more liquid, far more loose, far more flexible. The Master cannot cause the enlightenment to happen in you, but he can trigger the process, and that too only if you allow, not against your will. Nothing can be done to you unless you are totally receptive. This can happen only in a love affair.

Between the teacher and the student there is a business: between the Master and the disciple there is a love affair. The disciple is surrendered; that is the meaning of ”sitting down”. He is surrendered, he has put his ego aside. He is simply open, in tremendous trust. Of course, doubt will hinder the process.

Doubt is perfectly good when you are collecting information: the more you doubt, the more information you will be able to collect, because each doubt will create questions in you and questions are needed to find answers. But each answer will be doubted again in its own turn, creating more questions. and so on. so forth

But with a Master doubt is a hindrance. It is not of asking a question, it is a quest of the soul; it is enquiry of the heart, it is not intellectual curiosity. It is NOT curiosity, it is far more important – it is a question of life and death. When one is tired of all questions and all answers, when one is fed up with all philosophy, only then one comes to a Master. When one has accumulated much information and still remains ignorant, and all that information does not create any light within his soul, then he comes to a Master, to sit by
his side. There are no questions any more; he knows now one thing. that all questions are futile. He has tried and he has seen the whole futility of it. Now he sits in silence, open, available, receptive, like a womb. The disciple becomes feminine, and only in those feminine moments the Master, without any effort on his part, starts overflooding the disciple. It happens naturally.

The DISCIPLE IS not doing anything, the MASTER IS not doing anything – it is not a question of doing at all. The Master is being himself and the disciple is open. When your nose is not closed by cold and you pass by the side of a flower, suddenly the fragrance is
felt. The flower is not doing anything in particular; it is natural for the flower to release its fragrance. If you are open to receive it you will receive it.

The word upanishad means coming to a Master, and one comes to a Master only when one is tired of teachers, tired of teachings, tired of dogmas, creeds, philosophies, theologies, religions. Then one comes to a Master. And the way to come to a Master is surrender. Not that your being is surrendered – only the ego, the false idea that you are somebody, somebody special. The moment you put the idea of the ego aside, the doors are open – for the wind, for the rain, for the sun – and the Master’s presence will start entering in you, creating a new dance in your life, giving you a new sense of poetry, mystery,
music. It is synchronicity.

The Master is beating in a certain rhythm, he is dancing on a certain plane. If you are ready, the same dance starts happening in you – in the beginning only a little bit, but that’s enough, that little bit is enough. In the beginning only dewdrops, but soon they become oceanic. Once you have tasted the joy of being open you cannot be closed again. First you may open only a window or a door, and then you open all your windows and all the doors. And a moment comes in the life of a disciple when not only windows and doors are opened, even the walls disappear! He is utterly open, available multidimensionally. This is the meaning of the word upanishad.

The Upanishads are written in Sanskrit; Sanskrit is the oldest language on the earth. The very word sanskrit means transformed, adorned, crowned, decorated, refined – but remember the word ”transformed”. The language itself was transformed because so many people attained to the ultimate, and because they were using the language, something of their joy penetrated into it, something of their poetry entered into the very cells, the very fiber of the language. Even the language became transformed, illuminated. It was bound to happen. Just as it is happening today in the West, languages are becoming more and more scientific, accurate, mathematical, precise.

They have to be because science is giving them its color, its shape, its form. If science is growing, then of course the language in which the science will be expressed will have to be scientific. The same happened five thousand years before in India with Sanskrit. So many people became enlightened and they were all speaking Sanskrit; their enlightenment entered into it with all its music, with all its poetry, with all its celebration. Sanskrit became luminous Sanskrit is the most poetic and musical language in existence.

A poetic language is just the opposite of a scientific language. In scientific language every word has to be very precise in meaning; it has to have only one meaning. In a poetic language the word has to be liquid, flowing, dynamic, not static, allowing many meanings, many possibilities. The word has to be not precise at all; the more imprecise it is the better, because then it will be able to express all kinds of nuances.

Hence the Sanskrit sutras can be defined in many ways, can be commented upon in many ways – they allow much playfulness. For example, there are eight hundred roots in Sanskrit and out of those eight hundred roots thousands of words have been derived, just as out of one root a tree grows and many branches and thousands of leaves and hundreds of flowers. Each single root becomes a vast tree with great foliage.

For example, the root RAM can mean first ”to be calm”, second ”to rest”, third ”to delight in”, fourth ”cause delight to”, fifth ”to make love”, sixth ”to join”, seventh ”to make happy”, eighth ”to be blissful”, ninth ”to play”, tenth ”to be peaceful”, eleventh ”to stand still”, twelfth ”to stop, to come to a full stop”, and thirteenth ”God, divine, the absolute”. And these are only few of the meanings of the root. Sometimes the meanings are related to each other, sometimes not; sometimes even they are contradictory to each other. Hence the language has a multidimensional quality to it. You can play with those words and through that play you can express the inexpressible; the inexpressible can be
hinted.

The Sanskrit language is called DEVAVANI – the divine language. And it certainly is divine in the sense because it is the most poetic and the most musical language. Each word has a music around it, a certain aroma. How it happened? It happened because so many people used it who were full of inner harmony. Of course those words became luminous: they were used by people who were enlightened. Something of their light filtered to the words, reached to the words; something of their silence entered the very grammar, the very language they were using.

The script in which Sanskrit is written is called DEVANAGARI; DEVANAGARI means ”dwelling-place of the gods”, and so certainly it is. Each word has become divine, just because it has been used by people who had known God or godliness. This Upanishad in which we are entering today is the smallest – it can be written on a postcard – and yet it is the greatest document in existence. There is no document of such luminosity, of such profoundness anywhere in the whole history of humanity. The name of the Upanishad is ISA UPANISHAD.

The world of the Upanishads is very close to my approach. In fact, what I am doing here is giving a rebirth to the spirit of the Upanishads. It has disappeared even from India, and it has not been on the scene at least for three thousand years. There is a gap of three thousand years, and in these three thousand years India has destroyed its own achievement. The first thing is that Upanishads are not anti-life, they are not for renouncing life. Their approach is whole: life has to be lived in its totality. They don’t teach escapism. They want you to LIVE in the world, but in such a way that you remain ABOVE the world, in a certain sense transcendental to the world, living in the world and yet not being of it. But they don’t teach you that life has to be renounced, that you have to escape from life, that life is ugly or life is sin. They rejoice in life! It is a gift of God; it is the manifest form of God. This fundamental has to be remembered.

Upanishads say that the world is the manifest form of God and the God is the unmanifest form of the world, and every manifest phenomenon has an unmanifest noumenon inside it.

Source - from Osho Book "I am That"