Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 28. Alchemy
July 8
Alchemy
Meditation is alchemical; it transforms your whole being. It destroys all limitations, all narrowness; it makes you wide.
Meditation helps you to get rid of all boundaries: the boundaries of religion, nation, race. Awareness helps you not only to get rid of all kinds of logical and ideological confinements, imprisonments, but also it helps you to transcend the limitations of the body, the mind. It makes you aware that you are pure consciousness and nothing else.
The body is only your house; you are not it. Mind is only a mechanism to be used. It is not the master; it is just a servant. As you become aware that you are neither the body nor the mind, you start expanding, you become wider and wider. You start becoming oceanic, skylike. That transformation brings glory and victory to you.
July 9
Hankering For The Possible
When you desire the possible, the impossible can also happen. When you desire the impossible, even the possible becomes difficult.
There are two types of people, low energy and high energy. There is nothing good in being high energy or bad in being low energy. That's how two types exist. The low energy people move very slowly. They don't leap. They don't explode. They simply grow as trees grow. They take more time, but their growth is more settled, more certain, and falling back is difficult. Once they have reached a certain point, they will not easily lose it again.
High energy people move quickly. They jump. They leap. With them, the work goes very fast. That's good, but there is one problem with them: They can lose whatever they achieve as easily as they achieved it. They fall back very easily because their movement has been jumping, not a growth. Growth needs very slow ripening, seasoning, time.
Low energy people will be defeated in a worldly competition. They will always lag behind. That's why they have become condemned. There is such competition in the world. They will fall out of the rat race; they will not be able to remain in it. They will be pushed out, thrown out. But as far as spiritual growth is concerned, they can grow more deeply than high-energy people because they can wait and be patient. They are not in too much of a hurry. They don't want anything instantly. Their expectation is never for the impossible; they only hanker for the possible.
July 10
Breaking Bridges
It is always good to break bridges with the past. Then one retains an aliveness, an innocence, and one never loses one's childhood. Many times one needs to break all the bridges, to be clean and to start again from ABC.
Whenever you begin a thing, you are again a child. The moment that you start thinking that you have arrived, it is time to break the bridges again, because that means that a deadness is settling in. Now you are becoming just an entity, a commodity in the market. And anyone who wants to be creative has to die every day to the past, in fact every moment, because creativity means a continuous rebirth. If you are not reborn, whatever you create will be a repetition. If you are reborn, only then can something new come out of you.
It happens that even great artists, poets and painters, come to a point at which they keep repeating themselves again and again. Sometimes it has happened that their first work was their greatest. Kahlil Gibran wrote The Prophet when he was only twenty or twenty-one, and it was his last great work. He wrote many other books, but nothing reaches the peak of the first book, in a subtle way, he goes on repeating The Prophet.
So an artist, a painter or a poet, a musician or a dancer, one who has to create something new every day, has a tremendous necessity to forget the yesterdays so completely that there is not even a remembrance of them. The slate is clean and out of that newness, creativity is born.
July 11
The Neglected Heart
We have passed over our hearts, we have entered our heads directly without moving through the heart.
We have chosen a shortcut. The heart has been neglected, ignored — because the heart is a dangerous phenomenon. The heart is uncontrollable, and we are always afraid of anything that is uncontrollable. The head is controllable. It is within you, and in your hands; you can manage it. The heart is bigger than you. The head is within you. The same is not the case with the heart; you are within the heart. When the heart awakens, you will be surprised to find that you are just a tiny spot within it. The heart is bigger than you, it is vast. And we are always afraid of being lost in something vast.
The function of the heart is mysterious, and mystery naturally makes one apprehensive. Who knows what is going to happen? And how is one going to cope with it? One is never prepared as far as the heart is concerned. With the heart, things happen unexpectedly.
Strange are its ways, hence man has decided to bypass it, to just go directly to the head and contact reality through the head.
July 12
Comparison
My suggestion is that you enjoy music, enjoy poetry, enjoy nature, but avoid the temptation to dissect it. And don't make comparisons, because comparing is futile.
Don't compare a rose to a marigold. They are both flowers, so certainly they have certain similarities, but that is where their similarities end. They are unique too. A marigold is a marigold... the gold of it, such a dancing gold. The rose is a rose... that rosiness, that liveliness.
Both are flowers, so you can find similarities, but there is no-point in going into them. You may lose track of the uniqueness, and the uniqueness is beautiful. There are people who go on finding similarities: what is similar in the Koran and the Bible, what is similar in the Bible and the Vedas. These are stupid people; they waste their time, and they will waste other people's time. Always look at the unique and avoid the temptation to compare, because comparison will make whatever you are looking at mundane, mediocre.
Jesus turned water into wine. That is the miracle of a poet, that is poetry - turning water into wine. Ordinary words become so intoxicating when they come from a poet that can be drunk. But then there are professors, pundits, and scholars who do just the opposite: They are experts in turning wine into water. They are the real anti-Christs! Don't do that. If you can't turn water into wine, it is better not to do anything.
July 13
Eternity
Eternity is not the continuity if time forever. That is the meaning in the dictionaries :forever and forever. But forever is part if time - prolonged time, indefinitely prolonged, but it is still time.
Eternity is jumping out if time; it is non-temporal, it is no time. The present moment is the door to eternity. The past and future are part of time. The present is not part of time-the present is just between the two, between the past and the future. If you are absolutely alert, only then are you in the present; otherwise you keep missing it. If you are not alert, by the time you are alert it is already gone, it has become the past; it is so swift.
So between the past and the future there is a door, a gap, an interval-now-that is the door to eternity. Only in eternity is bliss possible: in time, at the most, pleasure; at worst, pain - but both are fleeting. Their nature is not different. Pain comes and goes, pleasure comes and goes. They are momentary, water bubbles.
Bliss has no counterpart. It is not a duality of pleasure and pain, day and night. It is nondual, it knows no opposite. It is a transcendence. Try to be more and more in the present. Don't move too much in imagination and memory. Whenever you find yourself wandering into memory, - into imagination, bring yourself back to the present, to what you are doing, to where you are, to who you are.
Pull yourself back again and again to the present. Buddha has called it recollecting oneself; in that recollection by and by you will understand what eternity is.
July 14
Zero Point
We have become accustomed to ups and downs: When we are up, we feel good, when we are down we feel bad. But just in the middle is a point that is neither up nor down; that is the neutral point.
Sometimes the neutral point is very frightening, because if one feels bad one knows what the case is; if one feels good one knows what is the case. But when one cannot feel either, one is simply in a kind of limbo and one is afraid. But that point is very beautiful. If you can accept it, that point will give you immense insight into your life. When you are up, the up disturbs you; ail pleasures bring fever, excitement.
And when you are down, again you are disturbed in a negative way. When you are up, you want to cling to that state; when you are down you want to get out of it. Something is there to work on and to remain occupied with, but when you are just in the middle, all fever is gone; it is a zero point. Through that zero point one can have immense insight into oneself because all is silent. There is no happiness, there is no unhappiness, so there is no noise of any kind, there is utter quiet. Buddha used this point very deeply in his work with all his disciples. It was a must, everybody had to attain it first, and then the real work started. He calls it upeksha - another name for neutrality.
