A hillbilly dragged his protesting son to a new school that had just opened in a nearby township. On arrival at the school the hillbilly Dad asked the teacher, “What kind of learning are you a-teachifying?”
The teacher replied, “Well, all the usual subjects. Reading, writing, arithmetic….”
The earnest Dad interrupted him, “What is this here arith…arith…what you said?”
“Arithmetic, sir,” repeated the teacher. “I shall be giving a full course of geometry, algebra, trigonometry….”
“Triggemometry!” cried the hillbilly. “Dang me! That’s just that what my boy needs – he is the worsest shot in the family!”
It is bound to be so. The moment a word reaches to you it immediately changes its meaning. It becomes your word, it takes your color.
The teacher asks her class who invented the bulb.
Everybody shouts, “Edison!” except for Pierino who shouts, “My father, my father!”
The teacher, perplexed, asks, “Your father, Pierino? What do you mean?”
“Well,” replies the little boy, “every night in bed my father says to my mother, ‘Switch off the bulb, and we will do another one!’”
The boy can have his own meaning, he can only have his own meaning. It is natural. You can hear great words, but from where you are going to give the meaning to those words?
Just the other day Mutribo has asked me: “Osho, did you hear about the Polack woodworm?”
Yes, Mutribo, he was found in a brick! A Polack woodworm, one thing is certain, cannot be found in wood. A Polack is a Polack! And the same is true about everybody.
Visiting the Russian gallows, the American ambassador was shocked by the horrid cries of the executed. He immediately ordered a modern electric chair to be delivered from the States, as a gift from the American people.
Paying another visit to the gallows a few months later, he was alarmed, when he heard far worse cries than he had heard on his previous visit. “What is going on?” he inquired.
The commissar said, “We received the electric chair, thank you, but we have no electricity…so we have to use candles.”
A monk was reciting the Diamond Sutra.