GO AHEAD, MAKE A FACE
Daily News and Analysis
June 22, 2006
By Swami Chaitanya Keerti

Gurdjieff was a Russian master with mysterious ways of relating to people, such that each disciple who wrote about him described him differently. Everybody who met him would carry away the image of either a good man or a rascal, and many were the arguments on this subject.
Osho called Gurdjieff a master of changing faces. He had become so efficient at this that the disciple to his right would feel one thing, while the one to his left would feel differently. With the left of his face, he would show love, and with the other, anger. And outside, one disciple would say “What a loving man,” while the other would say,
“You are under some illusion... he was so angry!” Such mastery is beautiful. It is said no one had ever seen Gurdjieff’s real face, because he was always acting. He would show you the face you needed to see; never the face that was not needed by you.
Gurdjieff enjoyed it tremendously. He did it as a reminder that we live in a fake world, where one has to keep changing faces according to the situation. It is possible to recall one’s original face only through meditation. He said, “To me, and to the Upanishads, right conduct means just the right rules of behaviour with others.
You are not going to be here forever. You cannot change the world, you cannot change everybody; you can at the most change yourself. So it is better to change yourself inwardly. Don’t be in a continuous fight with everybody. Faces are helpful to avoid fights, unnecessary struggle, because that dissipates energy. Preserve your energy for inner work. And that work is so significant and it needs all the energy you can give to it.”
For the outside world, remain an actor, and don’t think of this as deceit. If children like toys to play with, you are not deceiving them by not giving them a real gun; let them play with the toy gun. Look at the other, at what he needs. Give out of consideration for him. This is all that is meant by right conduct.
(The writer is editor of Osho World magazine. )

“IS THE THEORY OF REINCARNATION TRUE?”
Afternoon Dispatch & Courier
15th June 2006
BY Osho

I do not deal in theories. I am a simple man, not a theoretician
I do not deal in theories. I am a simple man, not a theoretician. A theoretician is a great thinker. He knows nothing about reality, but he goes on creating theories about it. His whole life he goes around and around, and the truth, reality, is just at the center. But the theoretician is skilled in beating around the bush.
The moment you start trusting somebody else, you stop inquiring on your own. And I would not like you to stop your own individual inquiry. For thousands of years this is how man has been deceived and exploited. I want to destroy that whole strategy at its very roots. Trust only your own experience. It does not matter whether I say yes or no. What matters is whether you have experienced it or not. That is going to be decisive, that is going to transform your life.
There are three religions — Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism — which have taken a negative stand on the theory of reincarnation. They say it is not true.
This is a negative belief. Parallel to these three there are three religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism — which have taken a positive attitude. They say yes, reincarnation is a reality. But that is also a belief, a positive belief.
My approach is a third one, which has not been tried up to now. I say accept the theory as hypothetical, neither saying yes nor saying no. Accepting it as hypothetical means, “I am ready to inquire into it with no prejudice, positive or negative. I am ready to go into it without any preconceived idea, to see what is the truth.”
Religions have not used the word hypothesis at all. Either you are a believer or you are a non-believer. The non-believer is also a believer, only negatively. They are not qualitatively different, they are the same type of people. When you take a negative belief or a positive belief, your mind has already decided; before knowing, before experiencing, you have already decided what the truth is. This I call insincere, dishonest. And once you accept something negatively or positively, it is a capacity of the mind to create the hallucination of your belief.
In Mohammedans, in Christians, in Jews, you will not find children born who remember their past lives. But in Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism almost every day, somewhere some child remembers his past lives. People have tried to see whether his remembrance has any facts behind it or if it is just imagination. And so many cases have been found in which the facts were clearly in support of it.
In India it happens almost every day, in one place, in another place, there is a child who remembers. And no Hindu, no Buddhist, no Jaina is really going to inquire into it, because they are afraid their theory may prove wrong. But you cannot do that in a Christian country, in a Jewish community, in a Mohammedan land, because they have accepted that this kind of thing is absolutely unreal.
As far as I am concerned, reincarnation is a reality. It is my own experience.
But what is truth to me becomes theory to you. And I don’t want my truth
to be your theory. That’s why I said: I don’t deal in theories, in beliefs. My profession is truth.