From Darkness to Light Chapter 6 contd..

From Jabalpur University to Sagar University there is not much distance – one hundred miles. But
Sagar University was in many ways unique. It was a small university compared to Benares University

or Aligarh University, which had ten thousand students, twelve thousand students. They are just like
Oxford or Cambridge – big universities, big names. Sagar University had only one thousand students
and almost three hundred professors, so for every three students, one professor. It was a rare place;
perhaps nowhere in the world can you find another university where there is one professor for three
students.
And the man who had founded the university was acquainted with all the best professors around
the world. Sagar was his birthplace; Doctor Harisingh Gaud was his name. He was a world-famous
authority on law, and earned so much money – and never gave a single pai to any beggar, to any
institution, to any charity. He was known as the most miserly person in the whole of India.
And then he founded the university and gave his whole life’s earning. That was millions of dollars.
He said to me, ”That’s why I was a miser; otherwise there was no way – I was a poor man, I was
born a poor man. If I were doing charity and giving to this hospital and to this beggar and to that
orphan, this university would not have existed.” For this university ... he had carried his whole life
only one idea, that his birthplace should have one of the best universities in the world. And certainly
he created one of the best universities in the world.
While he was alive he managed to bring professors from all over the world. He gave them double
salaries, triple salaries, whatsoever they wanted – and no work, because there were only one
thousand students, which even a small college has in India; one thousand students is not a large
number. And he opened all the departments which only a university like Oxford can afford. Oxford
has nearabout three hundred and fifty departments.
He opened all the departments which exist anywhere in the world. There were hundreds of
departments without students but with full staff: the head of the department, the assistant professor,
the professor, the lecturer. He said, ”Don’t be worried. First create the university – and make it
the best. Students will come, will have to come.” Then all the professors and all the deans were
all in search of the best students. And somehow this professor, S.S. Roy, who was the head of the
department of philosophy, got his eye on me.
I used to go every year to the university for the inter-university debating competition. And for four
years I was winning the trophy and for four years he was listening to me, as a judge – he was one
of the judges. The fourth year he invited me to his home, and he said, ”Listen, I wait for you for one
year. I know that after one year, when the next inter-university debating competition is held, you are
bound to be there.
”The way you present your arguments is strange. It is sometimes so weird that it seems ... how did
you manage to look from this angle? I have been thinking about a few problems myself, but I never
looked from that aspect. It strikes me that perhaps you go on dropping any aspect that can happen
to the ordinary mind, and you only choose the aspect that is unlikely to happen to anybody.
”For four years you have been winning the shield for the simple reason that the argument is unique,
and there is nobody who is ready to answer it. They have not even thought about it, so they are
simply in shock.
”Your opponents – you reduce them so badly, one feels pity for them, but what can we do? And I
have been giving you ninety-nine percent marks out of a hundred. I wanted to give you more than

a hundred, but even ninety-nine .... It has become known to people that I am favorable to a certain
student. This is too much, because nobody goes beyond fifty.
”I have called you to my home for dinner to invite you to leave Jabalpur University and come here.
Now this is your fourth year, you are finished when you graduate. For post-graduation you come
here. I cannot miss having you as my student; if you don’t come here then I am going to join
Jabalpur University.”
And he was a well-known authority; if he wanted to come, Jabalpur University would have been
immensely happy to accept him as head of the department.
I said, ”No, don’t go to that much trouble. I can come here, and I love the place.” It is situated ...
perhaps it is the best-situated university in the world, in the hills near a tremendously vast lake. It is
so silent – such huge trees, ancient trees – that just to be there is enough education.
And Doctor Harisingh Gaud must have been a tremendous lover of books. He donated all his
library, and he managed to get as many books as possible from every corner of the world. A single
man’s effort ... it is rare; he created Oxford just single-handedly, alone. Oxford was created over
one thousand years; thousands of people have worked. This man’s work is really a piece of art.
Single-handedly, with his own money, he put himself at stake.
So I loved the place. I said, ”You need not be worried, I will be coming – but you have seen me
only in the debate competitions. You don’t know much about me; I may prove a trouble for you, a
nuisance. I would like you to know everything about me before you decide.”
Professor S.S. Roy said, ”I don’t want to know anything about you. The little bit that I have come to
know, just by seeing you, your eyes, your way of saying things, your way of approaching reality, is
enough. And don’t make me frightened about trouble and nuisance – you can do whatsoever you
want.”
I said, ”Remember that financially I am always broke, so I will be continuously borrowing money from
you and never returning it. Things have to be made clear beforehand; otherwise later on you can
say, ‘This you never said.’ You will have to lend me money whenever I want. I am not going to return
it, although it will be said I am borrowing – but on your part you have to understand that that money
is gone, because from where can I return it? I don’t have any source.
”Second, you have to make arrangements in the university for my free lodging and boarding. Thirdly,
you have to ask the vice-chancellor, because I don’t know him – or you can introduce me to him –
for his special scholarship. He is entitled to give one special scholarship. Other scholarships are
there, which are smaller scholarships given to talented people – first class, first gold medalist, this
and that; I want the special scholarship which is three times more than any other scholarship.
”It is special because the vice-chancellor is entitled to give it to anyone talented, not talented, in the
good list of the university, not in the good list of the university; it does not matter. It is his personal
choice – because if they start thinking about my character certificates and this and that, I cannot
produce a single character certificate.

”I have been in many colleges because I have been expelled again and again. So in four years time
.... People study in one college, I have studied in many, but all that I can bring from them is expulsion
orders. I cannot produce a single character certificate – so you have to recommend me. You are my
only character certificate.”
He said, ”Don’t be worried about that.”
So I moved to Sagar. This is the coincidence that I was going to tell you about. When I was filling in
the form, the same boy appeared again! He said, ”What subjects?”
I said, ”My God! Who told you that I had come to Sagar?”
He said, ”You are asking that? For days I never see my car, my driver; in my house strangers come
and live. They say they are your guests, and I have to make arrangements for them. And you think I
have to know how you have come to Sagar? My driver has brought you here; he told me.
”So I said, ‘If he is going to Sagar what am I going to do here, because who will write my papers?’
So I ran fast and I have caught you in time. Just exactly four years ago, in the same way we met.”
I said, ”That’s true. So you are going to fill in these subjects again?”
He said, ”It’s perfectly okay, because I have nothing to do with the subjects. I don’t know anything
that happened in these four years because I was engaged in drinking and in gambling and all kinds
of things. And you managed well; two first classes by one person – you did well. Now once more
you will have to do it.
”And as far as things from my side are concerned, I am ready to double them. Everything that you
want you take, but just don’t try to leave me, because without you I am nobody. My father gave such
a great party and all the relatives gathered, and it was such a celebration. And I was only thinking
of you – that this whole celebration should be for you.
”Do you know what my father said when I came home and I told him that I have topped the university?
He said, ‘That means in that university all kinds of stupid people must study; otherwise how could
you have got the gold medal? That is a simple proof that all the fools go to that university. You
change your university.’ I said, ‘I am going to change it but the same fools I will meet anywhere.’”
This was the only celebration for me. To my father it was impossible that I would get even third class,
because I was never going to the college and was continuously being expelled from one college
after another. Finally a college accepted me with the condition that I would not attend the classes
because the same will happen again.
”You will fight with the professors, argue, and we will have to expel you. So the best way is –
examinations are close – you simply do whatsoever you want to do anywhere else except the college
campus. Don’t come to the college campus. As far as your attendance is concerned, I will take care,”
the principal told me.
”But,” I said, ”you have to take care of two persons, because wherever I am expelled my friend has to
move from that college too because he can not live without me. So as many times as I was expelled,
he also had to move.” I said, ”You will have to take care of two persons.”

From Darkness to Light Chapter 6 contd..

And I said, ”You please sit down, there is no need to continue to stand. Sit down, be at ease, and I
will go and close the door.”
He said, ”Why are you closing the door?”
I said, ”The door has to be closed. Passengers are passing by, what will they think? You
are trembling, perspiring, in an air-conditioned room? No, I don’t want you to look so silly and
embarrassed.” I virtually forced the person to sit down. I was forcing him to sit down, and he wanted
to stand up.
He said, ”Can’t I stand?”
I said, ”You just first relax. Do you want to go to the bathroom or have you already done it? Anyway
there is no need to worry – you just sit down.”
That man looked at me and looked all around. It was just a small cabin for two persons and he was
thinking, ”this type of man, he can do anything.” But he tried somehow to figure me out; anyway he
wanted to be acquainted. And he said ”By your face you look religious.”
I said, ”Yes, when I look in the mirror I also feel that this man looks religious. But I am not religious.
Never go by the appearance, appearances are not always real.”
”No,” he said, ”you are still trying to befool me. You are a religious man.” Now he was trying somehow
to categorize me.
I said, ”If you say, and if it consoles you, helps you in some way, okay, I am a religious man.”
The man was a brahmin – I had seen his name on the door. In the air-conditioned compartment
they have the passengers’ names on the door, so I had seen that he was a Bengali, a high-caste
brahmin, a chattopadhyaya. So he said, ”What religion?”
I said, ”Religion is just religion – there is no adjective to it.”
He said, ”That I cannot believe. You must be a religious Hindu sage.”
I said, ”If it helps you, I am.”
And he fell at my feet, and he said, ”I knew from the very beginning that you are not mad, that you
are a sage. And sages and mad people look alike, behave alike. Everything that you said now
makes sense.”
But I said, ”One thing I have just said to console you – really I am not a Hindu, I am a Mohammedan.”
And now you cannot believe what a terrible mess he fell into. He had touched the feet of a
Mohammedan! A Hindu brahmin, a high-caste brahmin, is afraid even of touching the shadow
of a Mohammedan. If he touches even the shadow of a Mohammedan he will have to take a bath to
cleanse himself. And he had touched actual feet!
Now the situation had become much worse. The chattopadhyaya said, ”But why did you lie to me?”

I said, ”I was just trying to console you. I never thought that you would fall at my feet. Before I
could prevent you, you had already done it. But don’t be worried, I am really a brahmin. I was just
checking what happens: if some Mohammedan looks like a brahmin sage and you touch his feet,
what will happen to you? I was just trying to see.”
He said, ”That’s right.” And a great smile ... and he relaxed in his seat and he said, ”I knew from the
very beginning – such a nice person could not be a Mohammedan. Those Mohammedans are all
butchers.”
I said, ”You are right, because I was born a Mohammedan so I know perfectly well they are all
butchers.”
This way I have seen many well-educated people trying to figure out ... and I told them, ”Why are
you bothering to figure out about me? If you take that much trouble to figure out about yourself you
will become enlightened! You need not worry about me. You do your work, whatever you want to
do; you simply accept me as absent, I am not here. Behave as if I am not here and do whatsoever
you want to do.
”If you want me to close my eyes, I can close my eyes. If you want me to go to sleep, I will go to
sleep. But please be at ease; just forget about me. But don’t try to become familiar with me – that I
don’t allow. We are going to remain strangers for ten hours.”
In fact we are all strangers.
Even if we live our whole life together it makes no difference, we remain strangers; we just settle for
consolations, and we start taking the other for granted. It is a make-believe that you know the other
– your wife, your mother, your father, your brother, your friend – it is just a make-believe that you
know them. You know nothing about the other because that is impossible – for the simple reason
that you don’t know anything about yourself yet. Without knowing oneself it is impossible to know
anybody else.
The trouble is you can be introduced to somebody else, but how can you be introduced to yourself?
Who is going to do that?
You can be introduced to somebody else because that introduction is just arbitrary. The name, the
caste, the country, the religion, the profession – these are all arbitrary and accidental.
It happened ... really a great coincidence, almost inconceivable, but it happened so whether it is
conceivable or not makes no difference. When I was standing at the window after my matriculation,
to obtain entry into a college, there were many people who were filling in forms and I was waiting
to get my form. When I was filling in my form a boy just of my age came to me, and he said, ”What
subjects are you taking?”
So I showed him my form and said, ”These are my subjects.”
He said, ”Oh, okay, I will fill in these subjects also.”

I said, ”But this is strange. You have come to the college – don’t you have any idea what you want
to study?”
He said, ”It is all the same to me. My father wants me to study so I have come to the college. I don’t
have any interest in anything, I have just come to enjoy. My father is rich. He wants me to be in
college so okay, I will be in college and have fun and enjoy. Any subjects will do.”
But I said, ”These subjects perhaps may be difficult for you: philosophy, logic ....”
He said, ”I don’t care even what they mean. I don’t know, I have never heard this word ‘logic’ before.”
”Then,” I said, ”It is perfectly okay.”
And he asked me, ”Will you please give me your fountain pen?”
I said, ”This is too much – you don’t have your own fountain pen?”
He said, ”I am not a man who is interested in these things.”
He showed me a packet of cigarettes. He said, ”I am interested in cigarettes, not in fountain pens;
and I am not going to attend any class or anything. My father is going to send me the money and I
am going to enjoy, and I am going to ask him for more and more. He has enough, and I am the only
son so I am not wasting anybody else’s money. It is my own, I am going to inherit it anyway.”
I gave him my fountain pen and he filled in the form. He even had to look at my form for the spelling
of the words that he was filling in. But this way we became friends. I liked the boy, he was sincere,
and not a hypocrite in any way. We became friends. He needed me and I needed him, because I
needed so much money for books and he had so much money that I said, ”This is good.” And he
was not interested in books at all.
But I was his first friend in the college. And he had everything: a car, a driver, a bungalow – I needed
all these things so I said, ”That’s perfectly good – you came at the right time. And whatever your
need is, I will manage, you don’t be worried.” So I had to do examinations for both of us. In three
hours time, half was mine and half was his. In one and a half hours I finished my paper and then I
would start his paper.
But he said, ”This is a great bargain.” He said, ”If I can pass, my father is going to be mad with
happiness. He cannot believe that I can pass, because in matric he had to give such a large bribe
to push me through. And now he knows that in college it is going to be difficult.”
I said, ”You don’t be worried, you will pass first class.” And he passed first class with a B.A. After
the B.A. I left Jabalpur because one of the professors in Sagar University, S.S. Roy, was persistently
asking me, writing me, phoning me to say, ”After your B.A. you join this university for your postgraduation.”

From Darkness to Light Chapter 6

Every child’s original face is the face of god



Question 1
BELOVED OSHO,
HOW DO WE, THE COMMUNE, ENSURE THAT OUR CHILDREN MAINTAIN THEIR ORIGINAL
FACE?
The original face of every child is the face of God. Of course my God is not a Christian, a Hindu, a
Jew. My God is not even a person but only a presence.
It is less like a flower and more like fragrance. You can feel it but you cannot catch hold of it. You
can be overwhelmed by it but you cannot possess it.
My God is not something objective, there.
My God is your very subjectivity, here.
My God can never be indicated by the word ”that.”
He can only be indicated by the word ”this.”
The God of my vision and experience is not to be searched for in the synagogues, temples,
mosques, churches, in the Himalayas, in the monasteries. He is not there because He is always
here. And you go on looking for Him there.

When I say every child’s original face is the face of God, I am saying that God is synonymous with
life, existence. Whatsoever is, is divine, sacred. And there is nothing else than God.
God is not to be understood as quantity, but as quality. You cannot measure it. You cannot make a
statue of it, you cannot draw a picture of it. In that sense it is absolutely impersonal. And if you look
at the faces of children when they arrive, fresh from the very source of life, you will see a certain
presence which cannot be named – unnameable, indefinable.
The child is alive. You cannot define its aliveness, but it is there, you can feel it. It is so much there
that howsoever blind you are you cannot miss it. It is fresh. You can smell the freshness around a
child. That fragrance slowly, slowly disappears. And if unfortunately the child becomes successful,
a celebrity – a president, a prime minister, a pope – then the same child stinks.
He had come with a tremendous fragrance, immeasurable, indefinable, unnameable. You look into
the eyes of a child – you cannot find anything deeper. The eyes of a child are abysmal, there is no
bottom to them. Unfortunately, the way society will destroy him, soon his eyes will be only superficial;
because of layers and layers of conditioning, that depth, that immense depth will have disappeared
long before. And that was his original face.
The child has no thoughts. About what can he think? Thinking needs a past, thinking needs
problems. He has no past, he has only future. He has no problems yet, he is without problems.
There is no possibility of thinking for him. What can he think?
The child is conscious but without thoughts.
This is the original face of the child.
Once this was your face too, and although you have forgotten it, it is still there within you, waiting
someday to be rediscovered. I am saying REdiscovered because you have discovered it many times
in your previous lives, and again and again you go on forgetting it.
Perhaps even in this life there have been moments when you have come very close to knowing it, to
feeling it, to being it. But the world is too much with us. Its pull is great – and there are a thousand
and one directions the world is pulling you. It is pulling you in so many directions that you are falling
apart. It is a miracle how people go on managing to keep themselves together. Otherwise their one
hand will be going to the north, another hand to the south, their head must be going towards heaven;
all their parts will be flying all over the place.
It is certainly a miracle how you go on keeping yourself together. Perhaps the pressure from all sides
is too much so that your hands and legs and heads cannot fly. You are pressed from everywhere.
Whenever I see ... and I don’t know why people go on sending me beautiful paperweights – I don’t
have any papers. What am I going to do with paperweights? Perhaps they think there are hundreds
of books in my name so there must be so much paperwork around me, all over my room papers and
papers. There is not a single paper.
Yes, paperweights go on coming, and whenever a paperweight comes I am immediately reminded of
you. You would have been flying like papers in the strong wind, but there are so many paperweights


to keep you pressed and give you an idea that you are one individual. You are not – you are many,
and in the crowd of this many-ness of your existence, your original face is lost.
Even if by chance you happen to meet your original face, you will not be able to recognize it, it will
be such a stranger. Perhaps you come across it once in a while, just by accident, but you don’t
even say Hi! It is a stranger and perhaps deep down, a certain fear – that is always there with every
stranger.
That’s why people try to become acquainted, introduced to strangers, the sooner the better. They
don’t want to be left in that state of fear, that somebody is absolutely unknown to them. They don’t
know what he can do, what he intends to do, what kind of person he is. Maybe he is a murderer, a
thief.
I played around this theme so many times because I was continuously traveling in India, and I was
always traveling in an air-conditioned coupe. So at the most two persons – that too very rarely
because in India very few people can afford to travel in the air-conditioned coupe, except people like
me who have nothing to lose. Just poor people like me can travel like that because we cannot be
more poor than we are.
But once in a while a minister, a governor, a rich industrialist, a scientist, a vice-chancellor – people
like that were my fellow travelers. And I always tried to see what happened to them if I continued to
remain a stranger. And I enjoyed – it does things to people.
I was not doing anything, I was just trying be a stranger, which really I am. They would ask me,
”Where are you going?” – just anything to begin with.
I would say, ”Anywhere will do.”
They would say, ”Anywhere will do?” – and I could see the fear arising: ”Is the man mad? But no,
he does not look mad.” They would then say, ”Are you joking?”
Once I said, ”Why should I joke with you?”
In India, it is a convention that you joke only with certain relatives. Joking is very confined, to a
certain relationship. You joke only with your wife’s brother, otherwise you don’t joke; only that’s
acceptable to the society. I said, ”But you are not my wife’s brother, why should I joke? Or are you
my wife’s brother? Perhaps you are. But I don’t remember ever seeing you before.”
The man became really more shaky and I could see the trembling arising – and he had to travel with
me for at least ten hours, twelve hours, or even twenty-four hours. But still he tried: ”What is your
name?”
I said, ”The moment you asked me, it was just on the tip of my tongue. Now I am trying hard to
remember. I have a name, I certainly remember ... I know it is there but you will have to give me a
little time. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come what can I do? What can you do? But it doesn’t
matter anyway, you can call me any name. Anyway every child is born without a name and we give
him one. All names are arbitrary, so it does not matter whether you call me Ram, Rahim, Ibrahim,
Moses, Jesus, Christ; anything will do.”