BELOVED MASTER,
GURDJIEFF SAID THAT IN ORDER TO ATTAIN TO REAL WILL ONE WOULD HAVE TO SURRENDER
ONE'S FALSE WILL FIRST. IS THIS ALSO TRUE HERE?

Peter Markee, it is true everywhere. It is true forever. Truth is universal: time makes no difference, place
makes no difference. And this is one of the most fundamental truths of spiritual growth: the false has to be
given up because the false is the barrier. You remain deluded by the false; hence the search for the true
never starts. You believe the false to be the true. Then why should you endeavor to realize the true?
If you think that darkness is light, then where is the necessity to search for light? If you think this life is
all, then there is no question of seeking and inquiring about another life. If time is your total reality, then
eternity never becomes a quest for you.

The false will means the ego; the true will means egolessness. The false will is yours; the true will is
God's. The false will is personal; the true will is universal. The false will simply means that you believe
yourself separate from the whole; and the true will is dissolving this illusion of separation, becoming that
which you really are -- a part in this cosmic harmony, totally one with it. Then you don't have any separate
destination, you don't have any private goal. Then wherever the whole is going, YOU are going. You are
just a wave in the ocean.

And before the real can be known, the false has to cease, because the false is covering your eyes. You
are clinging to the false, to the toy. And unless you see the point -- that the toy is only a toy, not worth
clinging.... In that very moment of seeing the toy slips out of your hands on its own accord because you no
more cling to it. Seeing the false as false is the beginning of the truth. But that seeing is arduous.
For lives we have lived with the false and we have believed in the false. We have nurtured, nourished
the false. All our hopes, all our dreams, are rooted in the false. Our whole lives are investments in the false;
hence we are afraid even to look, we are afraid to observe, watch.The most frightening experience for humanbeings is to remember, to watch, to be aware; hence the difficulty  in  meditation.  It  does  not  arise  from  the  outside;  there  is  no  disturbance  outside.  The  real
disturbance  is  within  you.  You  really  don't  want  to  meditate.  You  are  in  a  double  bind.  You  listen  to
buddhas talking about the beauties and the blessings and the benedictions of meditation, and you become
greedy for it. But then you look at your own investment and you become frightened, so you try to meditate.
Yet you don't really want to meditate because meditation means you will have to see things as they are -- the
false as false, the true as true -- and that is going to shatter your whole effort of lives in a single moment.
Great courage is needed to meditate, courage to drop all the investments. Great intelligence is needed. In
fact, this is true intelligence: to see that howsoever and whatsoever efforts you make to realize the false, to
make it come true, they are going to fail. To see it -- that the whole effort is an exercise in utter futility -- is
intelligence. It has nothing to do with intellectuality; it is very simple.

See, watch, and don't be afraid and don't avoid seeing. And don't go on playing with yourself, deceiving
yourself. Don't remain in a double bind, with one hand creating and with the other hand destroying.
That's what people are doing: half of their being wants to continue as they are -- the stupid half, the
rational part, the arithmetic of their minds. And the other half, the intelligent half, the intuitive half -- the
heart -- wants to start anew, because you have seen for so long that nothing succeeds. And still you go on in
the same rut. It is time, the right time, to get out of the rut and to have a new birth.

What Gurdjieff was saying has been told by all the great masters of the world. "Awake," Buddha says. It
is the same; words differ. "Be watchful," Jesus says. Be as watchful as if the master of the house has gone
out and he has told the servants to remain alert because he may come any moment and he does not want
them to be asleep -- any moment he can come. They have to be alert, on guard, all the time. Jesus says to be
alert.

In alertness the first experience is that you have a personality which is false. Gurdjieff calls it the false
will. And you have something else, something impersonal in you, which is the true will. Your appearance
from the outside is false; what you experience from your innermost core is true. You are a mixture of the
accidental  and  the  essential,  of  the  incidental  and  the  intrinsic.  You  are  the  meeting  point  of  time  and
eternity,  a  crossroads  where  matter  and  consciousness  meet,  where  body  and  soul  meet,  where  real  and
unreal shake hands. Yes, you are exactly a crossroads. And you have to be very alert not to choose the false
-- because the false is very appealing. The false makes all kinds of propaganda for itself; the false will try to
convince you with all kinds of arguments.

The truth remains silent. Unless YOU are ready to receive it, it will not even knock on your doors. The
false is afraid that if much smoke is not created around it the falsity of it will be seen by you. So beware of
the rationalizations of the false, its propaganda, its argumentation, its proofs. And also remember the silence
of  truth  --  utter  silence,  absolute  silence.  Truth  will  never  persuade  you;  it  will  wait  --  it  can  wait  for
eternity. But the false cannot wait, it is momentary, it can't be so patient. It has to persuade you, it has to
seduce you as immediately as possible. The false is very hypnotizing. Their ways are totally opposite.
Truth is achieved through awakening, and the false is achieved through deep sleep. The false is like a
tranquilizer:  it  is  very  consoling,  comforting,  cozy,  secure,  safe.  It  gives  you  all  kinds  of  protections,
insurances. It goes on telling you, "Be with me and I will protectyou. I am your guardian, your guide, your
friend, your philosopher." The truth never claims anything.

Unless you become utterly fed up with the false and its claims -- which are all bogus.... It talks much,
but it never delivers any goods. Unless you become totally frustrated, fed up, bored with it, you are not
going to look at the silent truth; you are not going to listen to the still, small voice within. And that voice is
God's voice. It is universal; it has nothing to do with you.

The true will is not  yours.  It  is  the  whole speaking through you, functioning through you. The false
gives  you  the  idea  of  great  ego  --  "I  am  somebody"  --  and  the  true  takes  all  ego  away.  It  makes  you  a
nothingness, a nobody. Only through your nobodiness the whole can function unhindered.
Yes, Peter Markee, Gurdjieff is right. And whatsoever is true with Gurdjieff is true here too -- is true
forever. Wherever a master exists, the false has to be surrendered.

That  actually  is  the  function  of  sannyas.  It  is  a  device  to  surrender  the  false.  Sannyas  means  you
surrender your ego. You say to the master, "Please take this burden off my head." You bow down, you
touch the feet of the master. That is simply symbolic that "Now I will not function as a separate entity from
you."

And the master is one who has surrendered his will already, who exists no more as a person, who is only
a presence, a window into God. And when you surrender to the window you are surrendering to the skybeyond. The window will only make the sky available.

The  West  has  not  developed  the  technique  of  the  master/  disciple  relationship  yet.  A  few  rare
individuals tried, but they failed. Socrates was trying in Athens but he failed; he was not listened to. Jesus
was  trying  again;  he  failed.  The  West  has  remained  concerned,  concentratedly  focused  on  the  false.  It
believes in the ego. The East believes in egolessness.

The Western psychology says to make the ego stronger. It is a psychology of the false -- rooted in the
false, supporting the false. The East says: Let the ego melt, disappear, evaporate. It is the psychology of
egolessness. This is a totally different standpoint.

Gurdjieff was again trying to bring the East to the West. He also failed. It is very difficult; centuries are
against it, and the hypnosis and the conditioning of the society is against it. Even his own chief disciple,
P.D. Ouspensky, could not understand him, misunderstood him. He betrayed him, just as Judas betrayed
Jesus.

And do you know? -- Judas was the most cultured, educated person amongst Jesus' disciples; hence he
must  have  had  the  most  polished  ego.  He  was  an  intellectual.  The  other  followers  were  simple  people:
fishermen,  carpenters,  tax  collectors,  gamblers,  drunkards,  prostitutes  --  simple  people.  The  only  person
who was not simple was Judas; he was complex. He could have been a professor in Oxford or Cambridge or
Harvard and he would have done perfectly well as a professor -- he was a good arguer. There are a few
moments when he even argues with Jesus. And if you listen to the argument you will agree with Judas, you
will not agree with Jesus.

One day Jesus is staying in Mary and Martha's home and Mary brings very costly perfume and washes
Jesus' feet with that costly perfume. Judas immediately raises a question; he says, "This is stupid -- wasting
so much money unnecessarily!" And he gives a good argument -- a socialistic argument. He says, "This
much money could have been given to the poor. There are beggars outside the house. This money could
have fed many beggars for many days. It was rare perfume! Why waste it? The feet can be washed with
water -- there is no need!" And she had poured the whole big bottle of perfume!
Now, with whom are you going to agree? And do you know what Jesus said? Jesus said, "The beggars
will always be there. I will not be here always."

This does not seem to be a very appealing argument! Jesus says, "Don't disturb her. Don't disturb her
love, her faith, her trust. It's perfectly alright. It is coming from her deep love for me. Let her do it. And
beggars will always be there. Even if this money is given to them, nothing much is going to happen. Maybe
for a few days they will be able to eat; then again...."

With whom are you going to agree? Ninety-nine percent is the possibility you will agree with Judas --
and more so after Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao; after so much socialistic communist propaganda
all over the world, who will not agree with Judas? He seems to be the forerunner of socialistic philosophy.
And Jesus' answer does not seem to be very appealing, convincing. It seems to be evading the question,
evading the issue. But Judas betrayed Jesus for the simple reason that he was too much in his intellect, too
egoistic, too proud.

The same happened again with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Ouspensky was the most articulate disciple of
Gurdjieff. In fact, it is because of Ouspensky that Gurdjieff became famous in the world. It is Ouspensky's
books that have made Gurdjieff's name known to the world at large. But why did he betray him? In the last
years of his life he was very antagonistic to his master. Even to mention Gurdjieff's name in Ouspensky's
presence  was  an  offense  to  him;  he  did  not  tolerate  even  mentioning  Gurdjieff's  name.  It  has  been
completely dropped -- even in his books which were written before he disconnected himself from Gurdjieff.
He  changed  the  name  from  Gurdjieff  to  just  G;  he  would  not  write  the  whole  name.  He  would  simply
mention, "G said..." -- just like XYZ. And then -- he was clever enough -- whenever somebody asked, "You
yourself  mentioned  G,"  he  said,  "Those  were  the  days  when  he  was  right.  The  later  Gurdjieff  has  gone
insane. I am against the later Gurdjieff."

And why did he go against him? Gurdjieff was trying to destroy his ego totally and it was impossible for
him to accept that. He was in London, Gurdjieff was in Russia, in Tiflis, and Gurdjieff sent a message,
"Come immediately. Sell everything there. Don't waste a single moment. Bring all the money and come."
Those were the days of the first world war; it was very difficult to travel, dangerous to travel, and going
back to Russia was dangerous for Ouspensky because the Bolsheviks, communists, had come into power
and Russia, the whole of Russia was in a turmoil. There was no order, no government.

Still, the master had asked, so he sold all his possessions, his house, took all the money and travelled
back to Russia knowing perfectly well he was going into danger. The journey was long; three months it took

for him to reach, sometimes travelling by train and sometimes by horse and sometimes he was prevented and

the police were after him. But somehow he reached there -- the master had asked him to come, and he did.
He was hoping that as he had made a great sacrifice, so he was going to be patted on the back by the master.
And do you know what Gurdjieff did? The moment Ouspensky arrived he said, "Put down your money
and go back! Leave your money here and go back to London immediately!"

This  was  too  much.  He  became  antagonistic.  He  thought  Gurdjieff  had  become  insane.  He  was  not
insane.  Had  Ouspensky  followed  that  too,  although  it  was  very  illogical....  But  Ouspensky  was  a
mathematician, a logician, a great intellectual of this century, one of the most profound mathematicians that
we have ever produced. He could not believe all this nonsense. He travelled back, but he turned against,
turned very sour -- saying that Gurdjieff had gone mad.

That was his rationalization to avoid seeing the truth, that Gurdjieff was trying to destroy his ego totally.
That was the last hit on his head. If he had allowed it he would have become enlightened. He missed the
point -- and from the last rung of the ladder he missed and fell down. Sometimes it happens: you can miss at
the last moment.

Then  for  his  whole  life  Ouspensky  was  talking  against  Gurdjieff;  his  name  became  unmentionable.
Whatsoever he was teaching he had learned from Gurdjieff, but he was very secretive. He wouldn't allow
his disciples to read Gurdjieff's books. He wouldn't allow his disciples to go and see Gurdjieff. Ouspensky's
disciples could see Gurdjieff only after Ouspensky's death; and then they were surprised at how much they
had missed. Ouspensky was only a professor, nothing else. Gurdjieff was an enlightened man.
But the problem is always how to drop the ego. Gurdjieff offended many people in the West for the
simple  reason  that  in  the  West  there  is  no  tradition,  no  background,  no  context  for  the  psychology  of
egolessness.

That's why I have chosen to be here in the East. Even if people are coming from the West they have to
come to ME, because only in the Eastern space is it possible so surrender the ego. The whole milieu is
helpful; much effort is not needed.

And once the new commune is established it is going to become a very easy phenomenon, a child's play,
to drop the ego. When you see ten thousand sannyasins moving without the ego, without a head, you will
look foolish with a head. You will be in a hurry immediately so that your head can be cut off and you can
also run without a head and do all kinds of things which were not possible before -- because of the head.
Gurdjieff is right: the false has to be dropped. The false has to cease for the real to be.

 

Osho.

The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha,

Vol 8
Chapter #11
Chapter title: The psychology of egolessness