Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 19. Preparing The Way
May 6
Preparing The Way
There is nothing you can do. Enlightenment happens when it happens, but by your doing you prepare the way.
You cannot force enlightenment to happen. It is not a cause and effect thing. But you do something; you prepare the way for it. You can do something that can hinder the way-it happens when it happens, but if you are not ready, you may bypass it, and you may not even recognize it.
Many people come near the first glimpses of satori, Samadhi, enlightenment, in the natural course of life, but they cannot recognize it because they are not ready for it. It is as if a very great diamond is given to someone who has never heard of diamonds. He will think it is a stone, because he has no way to recognize it.
One has to become a sort of jeweler so that one can recognize. When it happens, it happens only then. There is no way to force or manipulate it. You cannot make it happen, but if it happens you will be ready to recognize it. If you stop meditations your readiness will disappear. Continue meditations so that you are ready, you are throbbing, waiting, so that when it passes by your side you are open to receive it.
May 7
Asleep In A Train
Just the other day I was reading a sentence of Jean-Paul Sartre. He says that life is like a child who is asleep in a train and is awakened by an inspector who wants to check the ticket, but the child has no ticket and no money to pay for one.
The child is also not at all aware of where he is going, what his destination is and why he is on the train. And last but not the least, the child cannot figure it out, because he never decided to be on the train in the first place. Why is he there?
This situation is becoming more and more common to the modern mind, because we are somehow uprooted, and meaning is missing. One simply feels, "Why? Where am I going?" You don't know where you are going, and you don't know why you are in the train. You don't have a ticket and you don't have the money to pay for it, and still you cannot get out of the train. Everything seems to be chaos, maddening.
This has happened because the roots in love have been lost. People are living loveless lives, somehow pulling themselves along. So what to do? I know that everybody one day feels like a child in a train. Yet life is not going to be a failure, because in this big train there are millions of people fast asleep, but there is always somebody who is awake. The child can search and find somebody who is not asleep and snoring, someone who has consciously entered the train, someone who knows where the train is going. Being in the vicinity of that person, the child also learns the ways of becoming more conscious.
May 8
Suffering
Nobody wants to suffer, but we carry the seeds of suffering within us.
The whole point if working on ourselves is to burn those seeds. The burning itself may cause a little suffering, but it is nothing compared to a whole life of misery. Once the seeds of suffering are destroyed, your whole life will become a life of delight. So if you are just avoiding suffering, and avoiding facing suffering that is inside you, you are creating a situation in which you will be full of suffering your whole life.
Once the wounds you are carrying come to the surface they start healing. It is a healing process. But I know that when you have a wound you don't want anybody to touch it. You don't really want to know that you have it. You want to hide it, but by hiding it, it is not going to heal. It has to be opened to the sunrays, to the winds.
It may be painful in the beginning, but when it heals, you will understand. And there is no other way to heal it. It has to be brought to consciousness. Just the very bringing to consciousness is the process of healing.
May 9
Interpretation
Thinking is nothing but a habit if interpreting. When thinking disappears the lake of the mind is silent, calm, and quiet. Then there are no more waves, no more ripples-nothing is distorted, the moon is reflected perfectly.
Thinking is like ripples in a lake, and because of the ripples, the reflection cannot be true; the moon is reflected, but the ripples distort it. God is reflected in everybody, we mirror God, but our mind is so full of thoughts, wave rings, clouds, that whatever we come to see is no longer the same; it is not that which is. The mind has imposed its own thoughts on it, it has interpreted it, and all interpretation is a distortion. Reality needs no interpretation; it needs only reflection. There is no point in interpreting; the interpreter goes on missing the point.
If you see a rose, it is there: there is no need to interpret it, there is no need to dissect it, there is no need to know about its meaning. It is its meaning. It is not a metaphor; it does not stand for something else. It is simply there! It is reality, it is not a symbol. A symbol needs to be interpreted, a dream needs to be interpreted. So psychoanalysis is right, because it interprets dreams, but philosophers are not right, because they interpret reality. A dream is symbolic, it stands for something else. An interpretation may be helpful to find out what it stands for. But a rose is a rose; it stands only for itself. It is self-evident.
May 10
Noise
Life is noisy, and the world is too crowded. But to fight with noise is not the way to get rid of it; the way to get rid of it is to accept it totally.
The more you fight, the more nervous you will be, because the more you fight, the more it will disturb you. Open up, accept it; noise too is part of life. And once you start accepting it, you will be surprised: it will no longer disturb you. Disturbance does not come from the noise; it comes from our attitude toward the noise. The noise is not the disturbance; it is the attitude that is the disturbance. If you are antagonistic to it, you are disturbed; if you are not antagonistic to it, you are not disturbed.
And where will you go? Wherever you go some kind of noise is bound to be there; the whole world is noisy. Even if you can find a cave in the Himalayas and sit there, you will miss life. Noise will not be there, but all the growth possibilities that life makes available will not be there, either, and soon the silence will look dull and dead.
I am not saying don't enjoy silence. Enjoy silence; but know that silence is not against noise. Silence can exist in noise. In fact, when it exists in noise-only then is it real silence. The silence that you feel in the Himalayas is not your silence; it belongs to the Himalayas. But if in the marketplace you can feel silence, you can be utterly at ease and relaxed, it is yours. Then you have the Himalayas in your heart, and that's the true thing!
May 11
Changing Climates
Seasons change. Sometimes it is winter, sometimes it is summer. If you are always in the same climate, you will feel stuck.
One has to learn to like that which is happening. That is what I call maturity. One has to like that which is already there. Immaturity is living always in "oughts" and "shoulds" and never living in the “is” – and “is” is the case. “Should” is just a dream.
Whatsoever is the case is good. Love it, like it, and relax into it. When sometimes intensity comes, love it. When it goes, say goodbye. Things change... life is in flux. Nothing remains the same, so sometimes there are great spaces and sometimes nowhere to move. But both are good. Both are gifts from existence. One should be so grateful that whatever happens, one is grateful, thankful. Just enjoy it. This is what is happening right now. Tomorrow it may change; then enjoy that. The day after tomorrow something else may happen.
Enjoy that. Don't compare the past with futile future fantasies. Live the moment. Sometimes it is hot, sometimes very cold, but both are needed; otherwise life will disappear. It exists in polarities.
May 12
Nothing Happening
Feeling quiet is also a happening and it is a greater happening than other things that are noisy.
When you are crying or shouting, you feel that something is happening. When you are not crying, not shouting, not screaming, just feeling a deep silence, you think nothing is happening. You don't know that this too is a great happening, greater than the others. In fact, those other moments have paved the way for this one. This is the goal. They are just the means. But in the beginning it will look empty, everything gone. You are sitting, and nothing is happening.
Nothing is happening, and "nothing" is very positive. It is the most positive thing in the world. Buddha has called that nothing nirvana, the ultimate. So allow it, cherish it, and let it happen more, welcome it. When it happens just close your eyes and enjoy it so it comes more often. This is the treasure. But in the beginning, I can understand, it happens to everybody. There are many things people call explosions.
When they disappear and the real thing comes, they don't have any notion of what it is and they simply miss their explosions. They would like those explosions to happen again. They may even start forcing them, but they will destroy the whole thing.
So wait. If something explodes on its own, it is okay, but don't force it. If silence is exploding, enjoy it. You should be happy about it! This is the misery of the world - people don't know what is what, so sometimes they are happy when they are miserable and sometimes when they should be happy, when happiness is really close, they become miserable.
