Thursday 27 December 2012

The real miracle is resurrection


Question:

SOMETIMES I WANT TO SCREAM, ”STOP, OSHO! NOT SO FAST! I’M NOT UP TO IT!” I HAVEN’T BEEN HERE FOR TEN DAYS BEFORE I AM HAVING TO CONFRONT MY ATTACHMENTS, MY POSSESSIVENESS, MY JEALOUSY, MY FEAR OF DYING AND DISTRUST, IN ADDITION TO DIARRHEA. JUST AT THE POINT WHEN I FEAR THAT YOU HAVE ASKED TOO MUCH, IT ALL PASSES; WHAT I FEARED WAS TOO HARD TO FACE BREAKS AWAY AND I’M NOT THERE – JOY AND GRATITUDE RUSH IN. EVERYTHING THAT IS HAPPENING IS A GIFT – THE VERY GIFT THAT I NEEDED TO GROW. A SENSE COMES THAT ALL IS POSSIBLE. THANK YOU, BELOVED ONE.

Amitabh, it is an arduous journey, the journey to the ultimate core of your being. It is an uphill task, it is moving towards the peak. And when you are moving towards the peak you have to unburden yourself of many things, you have to become more and more weightless. You can’t go on carrying rubbish with you. Slowly slowly, attachments, possessiveness, jealousy, greed, fear, anger, all have to be dropped, because as you move towards higher altitudes things start becoming heavier and heavier. As you move towards purer layers of being, many things which you were never aware of become so clear, and you feel so stupid that you are carrying them, that you have carried them for lives together. It is difficult to drop them, because one becomes accustomed to one’s habits. Those habits may be creating misery, but still it is difficult to drop them because they have become so familiar; they have become part of your style of life. You are identified with them; without them you will be somebody else. And one is afraid – afraid to be somebody other than one is. One is always afraid to go into the unknown. The fear of death is nothing but the fear of the unknown.

How can you be afraid of death, Amitabh? You have not encountered it yet. You have not seen its face – whether it is ugly or beautiful. You cannot say anything – whether it is going to be a curse or a blessing. You have no idea about it; how can you be afraid of death? No, no one is ever afraid of death. People are really afraid of losing their attachments with life, with their lifestyles. One thing is certain: that death will change you totally, that death will take you into a dimension of which you are absolutely unaware. One thing is certain: that death will not leave you intact as you are. It will take away your body, it will take away your mind; it will take away all that you had thought you consist of. It will leave only the purest consciousness within you. Hence the fear of death, and hence the fear of going deep into meditation – they are the same. Meditation does the same work as death. Meditation is a willful death: you start dying, disappearing, evaporating of your own accord. And to be close to me has no other purpose. To be close to me is to be close to your death.
The ancient Eastern sutras say that the master is nothing but death, and the disciple is one who is ready to die. But death is a prerequisite for being reborn. Jesus cannot be resurrected if he is not crucified. Once a Christian missionary was asking me, ”How do you explain the fact that God allowed Jesus to be crucified?”
Christians have been at a loss to explain it. On the one hand they say that Jesus is the onlybegotten son of God... and the father must have been absolutely cruel to allow Jesus to be crucified. Everybody was waiting for a miracle to happen that day; even the enemies were thinking that something was going to happen. Thousands of people gathered to see the miracle. They had seen Jesus, known Jesus, they had looked into his eyes, they had felt his vibe. He was a rare man: he had something of the supernatural about him. He had something which is not ordinarily available: a depth, a height. He had roots going deep into the earth and wings to fly to the ultimate. People had felt all this: the grace, the beauty, the grandeur of his being. They had felt the peace, the silence, surrounding him. They had felt the nourishing love that continuously flowed from his being towards others. Something was bound to happen – God could not leave Jesus, God had to do something. They were waiting for the last moment. It seems that even Jesus himself was waiting for something to happen, because in the last moments he said, ”Why have you forsaken me? What have I done?” It shows that deep down somewhere he was also hoping that something would happen, that maybe at the last moment he would be saved. But there seems to have been nothing happening. God seems to be absolutely cold, indifferent, not concerned. Of course, Christian theologians, priests, have been worried about it. They can’t answer why God did not do anything on that day.
This missionary was asking me. I said, ”You don’t understand the whole phenomenon. If God had done any miracle and Jesus had been saved, the whole story would have been very ordinary. God did not do anything; he allowed Jesus to die. In fact, he helped in every possible way for him to die, because that is the only way to be resurrected.” The real miracle is resurrection – not saving you but helping you to die as you are so that you can be as you should be. God allowed Jesus to die on the cross. And the story is beautiful: on the third
day Jesus is back, resurrected, new, young, no more son of man but only son of God. He is so new, so fresh, that even his own disciples fail to recognize him. He meets two of his disciples who are going towards a village, escaping from Jerusalem, because now they are afraid that the next thing is going to be that the disciples will be caught and they will be killed. The rumor is hot: the master has been killed, now the disciples will be killed. Everything is destroyed and not even a trace is left behind of this man and his work. So they were escaping. Jesus meets them on the way, believing that at least his own disciples will recognize him. But they don’t recognize him – they talk with him as if he were a stranger. Jesus is very much puzzled. Then they enter a small restaurant to eat something – they are tired – and Jesus breaks bread. Then they suddenly recognize him, because that is the way Jesus used to break bread; something of the old, then recognition happens. Then they suddenly come awake, as if they have come out of sleep or out of a dream, and they say, ”Is it you? We could not recognize you on the way.” And they had been walking for at least three hours, talking – and they had been talking about their master being crucified to the master himself! Jesus must have been laughing inside himself, that they were talking about the master but they couldn’t recognize him. People are recognized only by their old habits. When Jesus breaks bread, immediately the disciples recognize him, because ”That is the way of Jesus! Only he used to break bread that way!”’ As if suddenly the clouds disperse, the darkness is gone, and they see that Jesus has come back. The form is so new... no trace of the old.
My own feeling is that Jesus must have deliberately broken bread in the old way just to give them a clue.
God allowed Jesus to die so that a resurrection became possible.
Amitabh, I am going to help you to die. That’s the function of a master: he has to be a death. And, yes, to die is difficult, hard. That diarrhea is nothing but a mind thing: you are so much afraid that fear is creating diarrhea. But it is good – it will cleanse the body. Your body, your mind, both need deep cleaning. That’s why whenever clouds are not there ”joy and gratitude rush in.” Whenever you are ready to die you will find joy and gratitude rushing in – whenever you accept. If you resist, then there is a problem. If you resist, then you will scream, your very being will scream, ”Stop, Osho! Not so fast! I’m not up to it!” Nobody is up to it! Who wants to die? And dropping all your old patterns is a great death, greater than the ordinary, physical death, because when you die ordinarily you only change the body, you change the garments. Your old habits, old patterns of thinking and feeling, continue in a new life, in a new body. Just the surface changes, nothing else. The ordinary death is really ordinary; it is not much of a death. It only scratches the surface; it changes your skin, that’s all. Otherwise you remain the same person: death after death you remain the same person. But the death that happens in a love affair with a master is absolute, irrevocable. It is a point of no return. You cannot go back, you cannot fall back to the old patterns again; that becomes impossible. You have to go on moving ahead. And, of course, the mind screams, ”Stop, Osho!” But because I love you, I cannot stop. Because I love you, I have to kill you. ”Sweetheart,” gushed the ardent swain, ”let me adore your lovely face and I will buy you a sable muff. Let me hold your hand and I will give you a red fox scarf. Let me kiss you and I will give you a mink cape. Let me....” ”Stop!” cried the girl. ”That’s fur enough!”
Yes, Amitabh, many times you will scream, ”That’s far enough!” But I cannot stop. I am utterly helpless in that way; it is not within my hands to stop. I have to go on. The more you scream, the faster I have to go, so that soon the work is done. Your screaming is coming from your mind. And your question is significant, because your heart is feeling deep joy and gratitude. Your mind is saying, ”No, stop!” Your heart is saying, ”Everything that is happening is a gift – the very gift that I needed to grow. A sense comes that all is possible. Thank you, Beloved One.”


Two different layers, two different planes of your being – the head and the heart – are both expressed in your question. A part of you, the superficial part which is afraid of death – the ego, the mind – is crying, begging, ”Stop!” It is because of this superficial plane of your being that you have been escaping again and again from here. Of course, the mind is very cunning and it tries to find excuses. If there aren’t any, it can invent; it is very capable of managing. It can create illnesses in the body so that you don’t blame the mind. What can you do? This has been happening to Amitabh for at least three years continuously. He comes, he comes with great love, and then the mind starts playing tricks. And the mind has been playing a really subtle
trick on him: each time he comes he starts losing weight, and naturally a point comes when he becomes afraid of losing so much weight that he has to go back. This is a mind trick. If you become aware of it this time, the mind will not be able to do it. And the excuse is such that nobody can blame you, you cannot blame yourself. It is natural: when the body starts losing weight you have to go.
There is no visible reason why his body should lose weight, because Amitabh remains a vegetarian in America and here too he is a vegetarian. Even people who are nonvegetarians in the West and who come here and become vegetarians don’t lose weight. So a vegetarian coming to India will not lose weight; there is no reason. The doctors cannot find any reason at all. It is something in the mind; it is a trick of the mind, a subtle strategy. And the mind has to be very subtle, because Amitabh’s love for me is tremendous. But as the
moment of death comes close the mind freaks out. And Amitabh will not listen to the mind, hence the mind has to take support from the body. And the body always follows the mind. If the mind wants to create a certain illness, the body simply has to submit to the mind, surrender to the mind. Ninety percent of diseases are now known to be mind-created, mind-oriented. Many diseases that happen here around me are more or less mind-created. You want a valid reason to escape, and any small thing won’t do because your love for me is great. Something really dangerous has to be created: your life has to be at risk, only then will you go.
On one plane your mind says, ”I’m not up to it. Stop, it is enough! Go slowly!” But there are a few things which can only be done in a sudden blow, in a single blow. The slower you go, the more painful they are. It is better to cut the knot with a single blow of the sword rather than to go very slowly and make the whole process unnecessarily painful. Secondly: you are aware of another plane, too. Your heart says, ”This is what you need – you need a death, because only after death is a resurrection possible. The old has to cease for the new to be.” The mind has to go for the heart to take total possession of your being. Hence you feel gratitude, you feel joy, you feel great thankfulness. And you understand that it is needed in order for you to grow that all these things – attachments, possessiveness, jealousy, fear of death, distrust – have to be dropped. They are ugly. They are hanging around you, they are parasites – they suck your blood. They don’t allow you freedom, they don’t allow you the impossible. But in those rare, crystal-clear moments when the heart is functioning as a master and not as a slave, you know: ”A sense comes that all is possible.” Yes, all is possible, even the impossible is possible... because what I am trying to do really is to put you in order. You are in disorder; everything is there but upside down. Things have to be put right side up, things have to be rearranged. You have all that can create the orchestra, but everybody is trying to play on his instrument within you as if they are not part of an orchestra but a solo performer. The flute player is playing his flute with no idea of what others are doing. The sitar player is playing his sitar with no connection to the flute. The tabla player is playing the tabla absolutely unaware of the flute and the sitar... and so on and so forth. They are doing all that they can do, but they are only creating a chaos, a noise, which is destructive. They all have to be put in tune with each other, and then the same noise will become a great music.
Yes, Amitabh, all is possible, because you are carrying within you a buddha. Amitabh is one of the names of buddha; it means infinite light. In the East we love to give many names to those who have arrived home. Each name represents a certain aspect. Buddha is called Tathagata because he is like a wind which comes and goes from nowhere to nowhere – eternal movement, no beginning, no end. Buddha is also called Amitabh; amitabh means infinite light, pure light, knowing no boundaries.

When the mind disappears, all darkness disappears. When the mind dies, only light is left – and a light that needs no fuel, a light that is uncaused. You are carrying a buddha within you as a seed. It is difficult to believe, because you know only your mind – and thinking of a buddha and your mind, the distance seems to be unbridgeable. And it is unbridgeable! If we try to reach the buddha through the mind the distance is unbridgeable, but if we try to reach the buddha through the heart there is no distance at all, there is no need for any bridge. Just the other day Bodhidharma was saying that there is no attainment. How can you attain the already attained? There is no question of becoming; becoming is not needed because you already have BEING. Your future is not in the future, it is already in the present. Your now contains all: your past, your future – all that you have been and all that you will be and all that you can be. Your present moment contains infinity in it. Just the other day we were talking about Buddha asking Subhuti, ”Subhuti, what do you say? When I was living with another buddha in my past life, Dipankara Buddha, what had I attained?” Now anybody who is only knowledgeable will answer, ”You attained buddhahood. You attained truth, nirvana.’ But Subhuti says, ”Bhagwan, you did not attain anything when you were with Dipankara Buddha, because there is nothing to be attained. You simply became aware of your inner treasures. That is not attainment. You had simply forgotten about it and you remembered. Where is the question of attainment?” A forgetfulness and a remembering, that’s all. The whole story of man, of every man: a forgetfulness and a remembering.
A girl was walking along a country road and almost stepped on a frog. She was about to go on, when he began to speak. ”I have not always been a frog,” he croaked. ”I was once a tall, dark, handsome man, but was transformed into this creature you know now by a wicked and magical genie. The spell can only be
broken if I spend a night under the pillow of a beautiful girl.” The girl, of course, was skeptical, but the pleading eyes of the unhappy frog caused her to take him home that night and put him under her pillow. Sure enough, when she awoke the next morning, there beside her she found a tall, dark, gorgeous hunk of a man.
Well, you know, to this very day her mother does not believe that story!
Amitabh, frogs can turn into princes because princes have turned into frogs. You can become buddhas because you are buddhas turned into frogs. Maybe orange frogs... but the buddhahood is already the case. It is not something that is going to happen in future, it is already the case. You have only to look in. But your attachments keep you engaged outside. Your jealousies, your possessiveness, don’t give you time to look in, space to look in. In a subtle, surgical way I have to help you to come out of your dreams, attachments, jealousies, possessiveness. Once you are out of these illusions you are a buddha, as everyone else is. Yes, all is possible, Amitabh, and I am here to help you to make it possible. The impossible can happen, and I am trying to create the right space for it to happen. But there are going to be a few painful moments. You will have to accept those painful moments too, because they are only creating the right context in which bliss can descend in you. That’s why again and again you feel joy and gratitude rushing in.


Allow me, cooperate with me. Let your head be cut by me. Surrender your head. It is happening – slowly slowly you are gaining courage. And it is not very far away. But all depends on you. I cannot force buddhahood on you, I can only help you to discover it within your own being. But before you discover it, a few things which are hindrances have to be dropped, and you will not be a loser. On the way towards buddhahood nobody has ever lost anything. And whatsoever we lose is not worth keeping – what we gain is so infinite, is so eternal, that one never feels sorry for what has been lost. We are carrying pebbles, colored pebbles, thinking that they are precious diamonds. They are not. Your hands have to be emptied first and then diamonds will go on showering on you. They are always showering, it is just that your hands are not empty. Your hands are so full of ordinary stones that there is no space for the diamonds to be. Be a little more empty. And this time don’t allow the mind to play tricks upon you.





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