Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 50. Patience
December 9
Patience
Love is patient, and everything else is impatient. Passion is impatient, love is patient. And once you understand that to be patient is to be loving, and to be patient is to be in prayer, then everything is understood.
One has to learn how to wait. There are some things that cannot be done; they only happen. There are things that can be done, but those things belong to the world. Things that cannot be done belong to God or belong to the other world, or however you name it. But things that cannot be done - only these are the real things. They always happen to you; you become the receiving end-and that is the meaning of surrender.
Become a receiving end... be patient and just wait. Wait with deep love, prayerfu1lness, gratitude - gratitude for that which has already happened, and patience for that which is going to happen. Ordinarily the human mind does just the opposite. It is always grumbling for that which has not happened, and it is always too impatient for it to happen. It is always complaining, never grateful. It is always desiring, and never creating the capacity to receive. A desire is futile if you don't have the capacity to receive.
December 10
Homeless
Bliss is always homeless, it is a vagabond, Happiness has a home, unhappiness also has a home, but bliss has none. It is like a white cloud, with no roots anywhere.
The moment you get roots, bliss disappears and you start clinging to the earth. Home means security, safety, comfort, convenience. And finally, if all these things are reduced to one thing, home means death. The more alive you are, the more you are homeless.
That is the basic meaning of being a seeker: It means to live life in danger, to live life in insecurity, to live life not knowing what is coming next. It means always remaining available and always being able to be surprised. If you can be surprised, you are alive. Wonder and wander come from the same root. A fixed mind becomes incapable of wondering, because it has become incapable of wandering. So be a wanderer, like a cloud, and each moment brings infinite surprises.
Remain homeless, Homelessness doesn't mean not to live in a home. It Simply means never become attached to anything. Even if you live in a palace, never become attached. If a moment comes to move, you move without looking back. Nothing holds you. You use everything, you enjoy everything, but you remain the master.
December 11
Humbleness
Love is essentially humbleness - there is no other kind if humbleness.
If humbleness is cultivated without love, it is just another trick if the ego. When humbleness comes naturally out of love, then it is tremendously beautiful. So fall in love with existence-and the beginning is to fall in love with yourself.
Once you are in love with yourself you start feeling in love with many people, and by and by that space becomes bigger and bigger. One day you suddenly find that the whole of existence is included in it, that love is now no longer addressed to anybody in particular, that it is simply there for anybody to take - it is simply flowing. Even if nobody is there to take it, it is flowing.
Then love is not a relationship, it is a state of being. And in that state of being lies humbleness, true humbleness. Jesus is humble in that way; the pope is not humble. Somebody can cultivate poverty and become very egoistic about it, somebody can cultivate humbleness and become egoistic about it. To me, real humbleness arises as a fragrance of love.
It cannot be cultivated, you cannot practice it, there is no way to learn it. You have to go into love and one day suddenly you find that love has flowered-spring has come and love has bloomed and "there is a certain fragrance that was never there before: You are humble.
December 12
Cooperation
When Charles Darwin wrote his thesis about evolution and the survival of the fittest, another man, Prince Kropotkin if Russia, was writing a quite diametrically opposite thesis: that evolution happens through cooperation.
People have not heard much about Prince Kropotkin, and his thesis is far superior to Darwin's. It will take time, but he will win over Darwin. The very idea that one evolves through conflict is violent; it is a very lopsided idea. If you look through the eyes of Darwin, life is just a survival of the fittest. And who is the fittest? The most destructive, the most aggressive is the fittest. So the fittest has no value; it is not even human - the fittest is the one who is the most animal-like. Christ cannot survive, he is not the fittest. Buddha cannot survive, he is not the fittest, Buddha will be the most helpless man-and Jesus. Then Alexander survives, Hitler survives, Stalin survives, Mao survives; these are the fittest. Then only violence survives, not love. Only murder survives, not meditation.
The Darwinian vision is a very inhuman meditation about life. If you go into the forest and look through Darwinian eyes, you will see conflict everywhere: species destroying other species, everybody in conflict. It is a nightmare. And if you go to the same forest and look through the eyes of Kropotkin, there is tremendous cooperation. These species have been living in deep cooperation, otherwise nobody would have survived.
Violence may be part, but is not the whole; deep down is cooperation. And the higher you grow, the less and less violence the more and more cooperation there is. That is the ladder of growth.
December 13
One's Own Temple
A public temple is a public temple; one needs one's own temple, it is a private phenomenon.
In the East we used to have a separate room for meditation. Each family who could afford it would have a small temple of their own. And people would go there only to pray or meditate, not for anything else.
Everything about the place-the incense burning, the colors, the sounds, the air-becomes associated with the idea of meditation. If you have been meditating in the same room, the same place, every day at the same time, then the moment you enter the room and you take your shoes off, you are already in meditation.
The moment you enter the room, and you at the walls - the same walls, the same color, the same incense burning, the same fragrance, the same silence, the same time - your body, your vitality, your mind, start falling into a unity. They all know that this is the time to meditate. And they help; they don't fight with you.
One can simply sit there and go into it easily - more easily, more silently, more effortlessly. So if you can manage, have a small place - just a corner will do - and don't do anything else there. Otherwise the space becomes confused, mm? This is difficult to explain, but the space also becomes confused.
Make a small corner, meditate there, and every day try to do it regularly at the same time. If sometimes you miss, there's nothing to feel guilty about-it's okay. But even if out of 100 days you can make it regularly for sixty days, that will be enough.
December 14
Concentration
Concentration follows interest; it is a shadow of interest.
If you feel that concentration is missing, nothing can be done directly about concentration; something will have to be done about interest. For example, a child sitting in the school suddenly starts listening to birds chirping outside the window and completely concentrates on listening to that. The teacher shouts, "Concentrate!" and the child cannot concentrate on the blackboard, his mind returns again and again to the birds. They are so joyful and he is really interested in them, so his concentration is there.
The teacher says, "Concentrate!" He is concentrating - in fact the teacher is distracting him from his concentration. But the teacher wants his concentration for something for which he has no interest; that's why he finds it difficult to concentrate.
So always remember: If you feel that you go on forgetting things, that simply means that somewhere interest is missing, or you have some other interest. Maybe you want to earn money out of it, your interest is in the money but not in the work then you will start for getting things. So just watch your interest.
And whatever you are doing, if you are doing it with deep interest, there is no need to worry about remembrance - it simply comes. So just start taking more interest. Remain in the moment, take more interest in whatever you are doing. And after two or three months you will see that the memory simply follows.
December 15
Living At The Minimum
Human beings are not aware of their potential, and they go on living at the minimum. Now psychologists say that even very great geniuses use only fifteen percent of their intelligence - so what about the ordinary, the average person?
The average person uses about five to seven percent of his or her intelligence. But that is intelligence; nobody has bothered about love. When I look at people, I see that rarely do they use their love energy. And that is the real source of joy.
We use seven, or at the most fifteen, percent of our intelligence. So even our greatest genius lives at the minimum; eighty-five percent of intelligence will be a sheer waste; he will never use it. And one never knows what would have become possible if he had used 100 percent.
And we are not using even five percent of our love. We go on pretending at the game of love, but we do not use our love energy. Intelligence brings you closer to the outside reality, and love brings you closer to the inner reality. There is no other way; love is the only way of knowing the inner.
