The first question:

Osho,
Can you tell us more about the essential?

Man is also a seed, a possibility, a potential, a hope, a promise. But the seed is not yet the flower. In essence it has the capacity for millions of flowers, but not in reality. Those flowers have to be actualized. The essential is that which you are born with – which is your very being.

That is exactly the purpose, or should be the purpose, of education: to help you to seek and search your essential, to help you to grow it. The word education means to draw out, that which is in has to be brought out – just as you draw water from a well. But something has gone basically wrong: the whole educational system is doing just the opposite of this. Rather than drawing anything out of you, it forces, imposes things upon you.

That which is imposed upon you is nonessential; it creates your personality. The essential is your individuality, the nonessential is your personality. In other words, the essential is your very soul, your being; the nonessential is your ego. All that helps the ego is nonessential, all that helps you to become egoless is essential. Ambition is nonessential, greed is nonessential, desire, any kind of desire, is nonessential.

Meditativeness is essential. To be silent, to be still, just to be alert, aware: that is the first step, the door into the essential. And once you have found in deep, profound silence what you are meant to be, you have found your destiny. And then life has a sense of direction not imposed by others but discovered by yourself.

The function of the master is educative – not informative but educative, educative in the original sense of the word. He is not to give you a certain character because that will be imposed upon you. He is not to make you a Christian or Hindu or a Buddhist. He has to help you to know what you can be, because that which you can be you already are in essence, in the potential. You can be a Christ, you can be a Buddha, you can be a Krishna – but you cannot be a Christian; Christianity is something imposed from the outside. You cannot be a Hindu. Nobody is born a Hindu, it is nobody’s destiny to be a Hindu; it is the effort of others to lead you astray from your destiny. Nobody is born to be a communist or a fascist, but everybody is born with a certain direction in which he will find fulfillment.