Послания любви. 365 писем Ошо - Бхагаван Раджниш (Ошо)

be a witness to it, and you will be in the jump.

It is time now to die to the old ego

and be reborn to the supreme self!

248. Love.

Logic is not all;

nor is consistency;

because even madness has its own methods,

rationalizations and inner consistencies.

A madman was throwing handfuls

of crumbs around his house.

What are you doing? someone asked him.

Keeping the elephants away, he answered.

But there are no elephants in these parts,

said the inquirer.

That’s right – my method is effective, isn’t it?

declared the madman.

249. Love.

Total acceptance of existence is impossible for the mind

because the mind exists as denial.

It exists with the no,

and with a total yes it dies.

So it continues to find reasons to say no

even if there are no reasons.

Walking with a disciple one day

Mulla Nasruddin saw for the first time in his life

a beautiful lakeland scene.

What a delight! he exclaimed. But if only,

if only…

If only what, master? asked the disciple.

If only they had not put water in it! said the Mulla.

250. Love.

Meditation is like the sea:

receiving the dirty river and yet remaining pure.

You need not be purified before it,

but you will come out of it purified.

Meditation is unconditional,

purity is not a prerequisite but a consequence.

251. Love.

Be as if dead,

and then dualisms will not contaminate you

and you will reach the state

of the non-arising of thought.

The brightness of self-nature will appear in full –

and when this happens you are no more.

This disappearance is the appearance of the divine,

so please – disappear!

252. Love.

Existence exists in order to exist –

and likewise life.

There is no meaning to it beyond itself

so never posit any meaning,

otherwise you will feel its meaninglessness.

It is not meaningless and it cannot be so

because there is no meaning in it all!

The very search for meaning is mean and ugly

because it comes from the utilitarian mind of man.

Existence simply is

and likewise life:

there is no purpose in it

and there is no end to it.

Feel it here and now!

Please do not practice it

because that is the way of the utilitarian mind.

Be playful

and only then will you know the playfulness

of the universe.

And to know that is to be religious.

253. Love.

Do not continue moving in the old rut –

and the way out is just by your hand.

The mind is the past, the dead past;

one has to break it somewhere and jump out of it

The mind is the prison, the slavery.

Be free of it.

And the moment is ripe.

Of course I know that you are still not clearly aware of it

but you are not unaware either.

Gather courage and jump into the unknown.

Just one step is enough

because the next follows it automatically.

But do not go on thinking and thinking and thinking.

Thinking promises to lead you somewhere

but the promise remains always a promise,

because thinking is just impotent

as far as life is concerned.

So please, be existential.

Do not hesitate.

And you have nothing to lose – because you

have nothing!

Realize this and be nothing – no-one.

254. Love.

Life is movement,

process,

fluidity;

but ideas become fixed,

so they become also anti-life.

They become dead blocks.

Do not remain with them.

Move.

And do not fear inconsistency

because life is not a syllogism,

life is not a theory

but a mystery.

Someone asked Mulla Nasruddin: How old are you, Mulla?

Forty.

But you said the same last time I asked you, five years ago!

Yes, I am always consistent and always stand by

what I have said.

255. Love.

Mind means consciousness somewhere –

centered,

focused and tense.

Meditation means consciousness nowhere,

and when it is nowhere it is everywhere –

decentralized.

Unfocused and non-tense.

Mind is agony by its very nature,

meditation – ecstasy.

Do not treat consciousness like a cat tied to a string.

This very treatment –

or mistreatment –

creates the mind.

The consciousness must be left

to itself, utterly free

to move and be

according to its nature.

Do not localize it.

Do not be partial.

This is the essence of my discipline of no-discipline.

Preserve the absolute fluidity of your consciousness

and then you will not be,

and when you are not and only consciousness is

then for the first time the doors of the divine

are open to you.

256. Love.

Yes, man learns by experience!

Two old drunkards

were in the habit of coming together twice a week

to the wine-seller to get drunk.

After years of this one of them died.

His old friend came in on the Saturday

and they told him his pal had died –

that the whisky had been taken into blood circulation

and so saturated his blood and his breath

that one night before going to bed

the old man went to blow out the candle

and his breath caught fire and he was burned to death.

The other man promptly called for a Bible

and took an oath that from that time forward

he would never blow out another candle in his life!

Yes, man learns by experience!

257. Love.

Do not imitate anyone,

do not follow anyone,

otherwise you will be just a pseudo existence –

and that is worse than suicide.

Be yourself –

and only then

can you be responsible

and authentic and real.

But ordinarily everyone is just secondhand and borrowed,

and that makes everything ugly.

Mulla Nasruddin went to a mosque and sat down.

His shirt was rather short

and the man behind him pulled it lower,

thinking it looked unseemly.

Nasruddin immediately pulled the shirt of the man

in front of him.

What are you doing? asked the man in front.

Don’t ask me, ask the man behind – he started it,

said Nasruddin.

258. Love.

The real religious experience

cannot be organized, taught or transmitted.

To systematize it is to kill it.

It is so living and moving and dynamic

that to impose a pattern on it is impossible;

and the experience is always so unique and individual

that it cannot be put into any category –

although it happens when the individual is not.

It cannot be followed,

for everyone has to find it for himself,

and that is the beauty of it,

and also its freedom and virginity.

It is not new in the sense of any opposition to the old,

it is new in the sense of timelessness –

that is, eternally fresh and innocent –

as every flower is new

and every sunrise is new

and every love is new.

It is not borrowed from the past,

it is not based on any tradition,

it is not derived from without,

it happens within,

without any causality.

It happens unconditionally.

It is not continuous with the mind,

it is a discontinuous explosion.

There are clouds in the sky

and the sky cannot be seen,

but there is no causal chain.

The clouds have gone

and the sky is clear

but there is no cause-and-effect relationship.

The sky has not even known the clouds!

It has not been affected by them in any way whatsoever.

259. Love.

Life becomes more authentic

in the direct encountering of death.

But we always try to escape the fact of death,

and so life becomes pseudo and phony.

Even death, when authentic, has a beauty of its own

while pseudo-life is just ugly.

Meditate on death

because there is no way to know life

unless you stand face to face with death.

And it is everywhere;

wherever life is death is also.

They are really two aspects of one and the

same phenomenon,

and when one comes to know this, one transcends both.

Only in that transcendence is the total flowering of consciousness

and the ecstasy of being.

260. Love.

Man adds everything to his ego –

while everything goes on without him.

He is nothing,

but he thinks himself everything.

Mulla Nasruddin was walking past a well

when he had the impulse to look into it.

It was night, and as he peered

into the deep water

he saw the moon’s reflection there.

I must save the moon! the Mulla thought,

otherwise she will never wane

and the fasting month of Ramadan

will never come to an end.

He found a rope, threw it in and called down:

Hold tight! Keep bright, help is at hand!

The rope caught in a rock inside the well

and Nasruddin heaved as hard as he could.

Straining back he suddenly felt the rope give way

as it became loose and he was thrown on his back.

As he lay there panting

he saw the moon riding in the sky above.

Glad to be of service, said Nasruddin.

Just as well I came along, wasn’t it?

261. Love.

Are you really aware of what anger is?

Are you really aware of it when it is present?

I ask these questions

because man is never present in the present.

Man lives in the past

and only becomes aware of anything

when it has become a part of his memory.

One becomes aware of anger and sadness

only when they are all over,

and then awareness is just pseudo-awareness;

it is not awareness but remembering,

and remembering leads nowhere

because it is running in a circle.

Then one can fight with anger

but can never understand it,

and fighting with anger is anger –

of course more subtle

and therefore more strong and more poisonous.

So do not think about anger or sadness or happiness

and do not understand remembrance to be awareness

but be aware when anger is present.

Be totally conscious of it,

live it consciously and do not escape from it

and then you will know what it is.

To understand it is to transcend it.

Then you will find a silence descending on you

which passes all understanding.

262. Love.

Never to have seen the truth

is better than to have seen it

and not to have acted on it.

263. Love.

One should never be afraid of rising thoughts or desires

but only of the delay in being aware of them.

264. Love.

The purest ore is produced from the hottest furnace;

and the brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.

265. Love.

Be empty and you will know.

Be empty and you will be the mirror.

Only total nothingness is capable of knowing all!

I have heard that the nun Chiyono studied for years

and meditated for years on the ultimate questions

of existence

but was unable to find the light.

The thinking was filling her so much

that she could not be a passage for the divine.

She was so filled with herself

that she could not be a host to the divine guest,

and the more she longed for enlightenment

the further off it was.

But one moonlit night she was carrying an old pail filled with water

– and the thing happened!

She was watching the full moon reflected

in her pail of water

when the bamboo strip that held the pail staves broke.

The pail fell all apart,

the water ran out,

the moon’s reflection disappeared –

and with it Chiyono herself disappeared.

She was not – but the enlightenment was there!

She wrote this verse:

This way and that way

I tried to keep the pail together,

hoping the weak bamboo

would never break.

But suddenly the bottom fell out:

no more water

no more moon in the water –

and emptiness in my hand!

266. Love.

One day Lin-chi was asked: What is the essence of meditation?

Lin-chi came right down from his seat

and taking hold of the questioner by the front of his robe,

slapped his face, then let him go.

The questioner, of course, stood there stupefied.

Then Lin-chi laughed and said to him:

Why don’t you bow?

This woke him from his reverie,

and when he was about to make a bow to the master

he had his first taste of meditation!

Please read this again and again and again,

and if you do not have the same taste

then slap your face yourself

then laugh and bow down to yourself –

and then you will certainly have the same taste.

267. Love.

The sun is rising high in the sky.

Its light enters the house through an opening.

The dust is seen moving in the ray of light

but the empty space of the room is unmoving.

Now close your eyes and be silent.

Then ask yourself: Who am I –

the moving dust or the unmoving space of the room?

Do not answer intellectually,

because intellectual answers are not answers,

but wait and realize.

Hsu Yun says: The mind is nothing but foreign dust.

Who are you – the mind? – the foreign dust? or —?

268. Love.

The mind exists to raise questions,

but only questions.

It never answers,

and it can never answer.

That is beyond it,

it is not meant for that,

that is not its function.

But it tries to answer,

and the result is the mess called philosophy!

Meditation never questions,

but it answers.

It is the answer,

because it is life,

because it is existence.

Question – and there is no answer.

Do not question – and you are the answer.

Why is it so?

It is so because

the questioning consciousness, mind, is disturbed,

and the non-questioning consciousness, no-mind,

is silent, quiet and at rest in its suchness.

Philosophy comes out of questioning,

religion, out of the non-questioning consciousness.

Logic is the method of philosophy

and meditation the method of religion.

269. Love.