Читать книгу OSHO: The Buddha for the Future - Maneesha James - Страница 13

I am not interested in creating beliefs in you and I am not interested in giving you any kind of ideology. My whole effort here is—as it has always been, of all the buddhas since the beginnings of time—to provoke truth in you. I know it is already there; it just needs a synchronicity. ~ Osho

Through my work with the creation of the darshan diaries a long and intimate relationship begins with Osho’s words. In fact, it had begun with the book I’d read before meeting Osho, The Dynamics of Meditation.

I had delved into a few other “spiritual” books. They were serious, turgid for the most part, their language arcane and musty. It always took some perseverance to excavate their meaning, to translate what I read into the vernacular and an everyday twentieth-century context. Or they were “new-agey” and simply did not resonate with me—why, I couldn’t put my finger on.

As I’ve said earlier, though I was resistant to becoming a disciple, on reading the first book of Osho’s I knew I was reading the truth. Fast-forward some years, and I submit a question for discourse: “When you speak I hear the sound of truth resonating in me, yet I am not enlightened. How is it I can recognize that which I haven’t realized?”

There are many things in this small portion of your question, Osho responds. When you hear me you are hearing existence itself, just the way you hear the wind passing through the pine trees or you hear the sound of running water. When you hear my sound and truth starts resonating in you, it is simply a bridging between the master and the disciple. If what is coming from me originated in existence itself, and you are in love, in trust, feeling one with me, you will start resonating with the same truth that is making me a vehicle.

It does not need you to be anybody special; it just needs a loving heart, a trusting heart with open doors so the breeze that is coming is not obstructed, so the fragrance that is flowing can overwhelm you, can surround you, can open your heart like a rose opening its petals.

But your problem is, “How is it possible, because I am not enlightened?”

With his wonderful humor, Osho then asks:

Who said that to you? I am saying every day you are enlightened, and you are so stubborn that sometimes I also start feeling it would be better I join you and become unenlightened. Why keep this separation? Either you become enlightened, or I am going to become unenlightened. There is a limit to everything! I don’t know who the person is who goes on spreading these rumors that you are not enlightened. What is the source of this knowledge?

I know it: for thousands of years you have been told you are not enlightened. The people who were telling you that you are not enlightened were on an ego trip. They were enlightened, you were not enlightened; they had arrived, your journey is going to be very long, perhaps many, many lives.

As far as I am concerned, I want to say not only are you enlightened, the trees and the rivers and the mountains and the stars, all are enlightened. Otherwise is not possible. I want to make it absolutely clear to you: to be alive is to be enlightened. Wherever there is life, wherever there is love, enlightenment is just hidden underneath. You may not recognize it. The whole effort is to help you to recognize it.

All the meditations are nothing but an effort to feel your enlightenment—which is already the case; whether you feel it or not it does not matter. If you feel it you will rejoice; your life will become a dance, moment to moment, of tremendous glory and majesty, of grace and gratitude. If you don’t recognize it you will remain miserable, asking all kinds of idiots, frauds, "How can I become enlightened?"

Then why has this whole humanity become unenlightened? How have they managed? Just by forgetting, just by being too involved in other things. The world is vast, and the mind goes on taking you into new desires, new longings, new achievements, new greed. Slowly, slowly a curtain falls between you and your mind, and the mind completely forgets your being. It forgets completely that there is an inner world also, not only an outer existence. The outer is very poor in comparison to the inner. But once you get involved with the outer, it is so vast that there is a possibility you may wander around in the universe for millions of lives. And you may not realize that you are wasting your time… that it is time to look in.

Maneesha, promise me to never ask again, "I am not enlightened, how to become enlightened?”

Sitting directly in front of him and just feet away, though I remain with my eyes remain closed, I have to grin.

And the last part of your question is, “How is it that I can recognize that which I have not realized?” If you can recognize it, that is an absolute guarantee that you must have realized it in some unconscious way. Perhaps you have forgotten your realization. Each child is born with the realization.

Osho then recounts a myth about Buddha—that he was born standing, and the first thing he did was to take seven steps in front of his mother and declare to the universe, “I am the most enlightened person ever.”

Osho instructs us, “After I have gone from here tonight, everybody has to take seven steps and declare to the whole world, ‘I am the most enlightened person!’ Try it, and you will really rejoice. And you will never fall back again into the old ignorance and start looking for how to become enlightened. Finish it tonight!”

This is greeted with great laughter. A friend recalls that after Osho leaves there is lots of fooling around, people in groups or smatterings declaring their enlightenment, while others—presumably not quite that keen yet—quickly make their escape.

… And you are asking how one can recognize if one has not realized. It is a question as if you are given a rotten egg in a restaurant and you say, “This is rotten.”

And the manager comes and says, “Are you a hen? Have you ever produced an egg? If you have never produced an egg, on what authority are you saying that this is rotten?” There is no need. You can recognize things that you may not have consciously realized, but which must be an undercurrent of realization within you. Except that there is no other way.

How do you realize when you fall in love that it is love? Certainly somewhere deep inside you there must be a hidden corner that already knows what love is. I am simply saying that there must be a certain realization in your being about beauty, about truth, about the ultimate sound of existence. That’s what makes you recognize. You are much more than you think you are.

Gautam Buddha continually says to his disciples, "It is not a question of realization, it is only a question of remembering. What you have forgotten you have with you"… just a little search in all your pockets—also in the pockets that you are keeping secret even to yourself.

This discourse makes so clear to me that reading or listening to Osho from the mind—that is, constantly checking if we agree with one or another point—is so not what he is talking is about or why he is talking to us. He is not trying to impose his truth on us—he will say myriad times it is simply his joy to share his understanding, his vision—but to activate the recognition of our own truth, to create a resonance. And I still experience a palpable response in reading or listening to his words; not an intellectual accord but a physical sensation. (Some years later I will have the same experience sitting just feet away from Krishnamurti as he delivers a lecture. Though he is so different from Osho and his approach too intellectual for me, I recognize a physical response that affirms I’m in the presence of an awakened one. There’s just a knowing… it’s a felt experience.)

*

And yes, it can also be said that Osho speaks to our minds—gives us words as “toys for the mind” as he puts it—because that’s where most of us live and that’s who we think we are. The mind that is constantly thinking and feeling is familiar. So, in listening to words, it is assured; this is known territory. The mind relaxed, the pandemonium of the mental parade begins to fade. The body, too, relaxes, by degrees letting go of its habitual tension.

Mind-body calmed down, the poetry and humor invite us deeper now, into the welcoming space of the heart, where the sharp edges of ourselves, the ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine’ begin to soften. This is a space from where the mind is very peripheral, even obsolete. Then, as I experience it, there is a falling even deeper inside. Here the words sound more like music and the experiencer dissolves into the gaps.

He is not an orator, Osho insists; he simply talks because we cannot be silent. Talking has never been used this way before—to lead the other into the space of no words, no-mind. “Everything I say is a device. My speaking to you is a device so that you can just be here—your mind is engaged, listening to me, and something invisible can go on transpiring between me and your hearts. That’s the real thing…the real work is from my heart to your heart.”

*

Toward the end of 1975, Osho introduces us to the Sufis and “the way of the heart.” This series is so beautiful, so moving…so juicy! The title, Until You Die, is based on one of the Sufi stories, which concludes that before we die physically we must die metaphysically, and such a death is not possible without help.

Sufis sing, they don’t give sermons, Osho explains, because life is more like a song and less like a sermon. They dance, and they don’t talk about dogmas because a dance is more alive, more like existence, more like the birds singing in the trees and the wind passing through the pines; more like a waterfall, or clouds raining, or grass growing. The whole life is a dance vibrating, throbbing, with infinite life.

He spells out to us why society has an investment in cutting the child off from his or her heart: the heart is wild and unpredictable. The heart will inevitably rock the boat! He also talks of why, whenever we move into the vast territory of the heart, we feel both joy and fear:

Mind is more secure, and with the mind you know where you are. With the heart no one ever knows where one is. With the mind everything is calculated, mapped, measured, and you can feel the crowd always with you. With the heart you are alone; nobody is with you. Fear grips, fear possesses you: where are you going? Now you no longer know, because when you move with a crowd on a highway you know where you are moving, because you think the crowd knows. The moment you start falling toward the heart … and it is a falling, falling like falling in an abyss. That’s why, when somebody is in love, we say he has “fallen in love”. It is a fall—the head sees it as a fall—someone has gone astray, fallen. The heart is unmapped, unmeasured, uncharted. Tremendous fear will be there.

Osho returns to this theme some months later in his talks on Jesus, Come Follow Me. While many Christians, notably the “experts,” are offended by his interpretation of Jesus, in my view it is only through Osho that Jesus emerges as a real person—a misfit, a lover of the common man, and a mystic:

Jesus is the culmination of all aspiration. He is in agony as you are, as every human being is born—in agony on the cross. He is in the ecstasy that sometimes a Krishna achieves. He celebrates; he is a song, a dance. And he is also transcendence. There are moments, when you come closer and closer to him, when you will see his innermost being is neither the cross nor his celebration, but his transcendence.

Christ has something in him that cannot be organized. The very nature of it is rebellion, and rebellion cannot be organized; the moment you organize it, you kill it. Then a dead corpse remains. You can worship it, but you cannot be transformed by it. You can carry the load for centuries and centuries, but it will only burden you, it will not liberate you.

That’s why, from the beginning, let it be absolutely clear: I am all for Christ, but not even a small part of me is for Christianity. If you cling too much to Christianity, you will not be able to understand Christ.

In October of the following year, The Discipline of Transcendence, Buddha’s sutras, becomes the focus of the discourses. “Buddha is the most shattering individual in the whole history of humanity,” Osho says by way of introduction. “His whole effort is to drop all props. He does not say to believe in anything. He is an unbeliever, and his religion is that of unbelief. He does not say, ‘Believe!’ He says, ‘Doubt!’”

The very idea of a God somewhere taking care consoles you, Osho continues. It makes you feel that life must have some meaning, some order. God is not a discovery but an invention, and God is not the truth, but the greatest lie there is:

Buddha says: You can change your life; beliefs are not needed. In fact, these beliefs are the barriers for real change. Start with no belief, start with no metaphysics, start with no dogma. Start absolutely naked and nude, with no theology, no ideology. Start empty! That is the only way to come to the truth.

Then Osho recounts the following joke:

A traveling salesman opens the Gideon Bible in his motel room. On the front page he reads the inscription: “If you are sick, read Psalm 18; if you are troubled about your family, read Psalm 45; if you are lonely, read Psalm 92.”

He is lonely, so he opens to Psalm 92 and reads it. When he is through, he notices on the bottom of the page the handwritten words: “If you are still lonely call 888-3468 and ask for Myrtle!”

“If you look at the scriptures you will always find a footnote,” Osho observes; “it may not be written in visible ink, but it is there, and far more real than anything a scripture can offer. Buddha’s message is ‘Be a light unto yourself’: Appa deepo bhava.”

*

Each month Osho talks on the words of a different master, and each month we fall in love with the newcomer. Each month the newest arrival seems to speak more eloquently than the last, hitting the spot more powerfully than anyone else has. When he speaks on Jesus, Osho seems to fill that role perfectly. He becomes Jesus—and an even more plausible, authentic Jesus than I have ever heard portrayed. When he talks on Buddha, Osho is that astute, pragmatic master Buddha surely was. And when he speaks of Kabir, Osho is a god-filled, ecstatic poet. Through the years we hear, too, of Heraclitus and Madame Blavatsky, Pythagoras and Patanjali, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Nanak, Gorakh; Kahlil Gibran and Friedreich Nietzsche, Atisha and the Zen masters, the Hassids and the Baul mystics.

The whole ashram is affected by the changing discourses. When Osho is speaking on Buddha, his essence—a heightened sense of awareness—permeates us, diffused into the very milieu of the ashram. When he speaks on Tantra, attractions become more conscious and many are drawn to each other and into sexual play—lighthearted, tender and caring. Invariably, though it originated in India, this path is misunderstood by the contemporary public. Osho is labeled the “sex guru,” and rumors spread of orgies. (If there are any, I am not invited!)

His capacity to verbalize so many apparently contradictory views creates confusion for some of us. Taking us from one approach to another—from Sufis and the way of love to Buddha and the path of awareness, and so on—is an effective deterrent for anyone wanting to create an ideology, a set of beliefs on which to rely. It’s just not possible; hearing so many different, even seemingly opposing, approaches means we are constantly thrown back on ourselves, obliged to find our own understanding, our own particular and unique path. And that’s exactly Osho’s intention.

He explains that he doesn’t respond so much to the question as to the questioner herself. So over the years we hear different responses to the same or very similar questions. For example, he is asked over the course of any years who he is. “I am not,” “I am the gate,” “I am an invitation,” “I am your friend,” “I am consciousness,” he has responded. “I am just an ordinary man,” “I am a child on the seashore of time, collecting seashells, colored stones,” “I don’t exist as an ego. I am not solid at all. If you go through me, you can pass through me without coming across anybody. I am empty.” “I am someone who is non-temporal and non-spatial. But my ‘I’ is all-inclusive. You are included, the questioner is included. Nothing is excluded.”

“You will only know who I am when you know yourself,” is the answer I receive on one occasion. At another time, he says the very question “makes no sense at all. Rather, ‘What is?’ is the only relevant question—not who, but what, because the what can be the whole. It can be asked about the totality, about all that exists. The question ‘What is?’ is existential, and there is no dichotomy in it; it does not divide. But the question ‘Who?’ divides from the very start. It accepts the duality, the multiplicity, the duality of beings. There is only being, not beings.”

His answer to the same question elicits laughter when he responds, “To be frank with you—which usually I am not—I don’t know who I am.”That wonderful sense of humor is never far away, and his response to yet another questioner includes a joke.

Osho begins:

G.O.K. Now let me explain to you this code word G.O.K. This is my answer.

A doctor was shown around the London hospital by several physicians. He looked at the filing system and noticed the bright idea they had of abbreviations—D for diphtheria, M for measles, TB for tuberculosis, and so on. All the diseases seemed to be pretty well under control except one indicated by the symbol G.O.K.

“I see that you have a sweeping epidemic of G.O.K. on your hands,” he said. “But just what is G.O.K.?”

“Oh,” said one of them, “when we can’t diagnose we put G.O.K.—God Only Knows.”

I see Osho as being like a prism: when the light hits one facet of the prism, that aspect is illumined and it is that that he expounds on.

Confusion is a device, he adds; it can shake us out of our sense of certainty, which effectively keeps us closed. His effort is to point us to the state of no-mind, a state which functions from not knowing, a state of innocence:

So those who have listened to me for a long time, listen simply. They simply listen, they don’t cling. They know perfectly well, now that they are aware of the game, that tomorrow I will contradict. So why carry it for twenty-four hours? The pain of carrying the weight, and then the pain of dropping it… slowly, slowly it dawns in your awareness that there is no need to cling; this man contradicts. This man is consistently inconsistent.

Once you have understood that, you listen to me as one listens to music. You listen to me as one listens to the wind passing through the pine trees, you listen to me as one listens to the birds singing in the morning. You don’t say to the cuckoo, “Yesterday your song was different,” and you don’t go to the roseflower and say, “Last season the flowers were bigger”—or smaller— “why are you contradicting yourself?”

You don’t say to the poet, “In one of your poems you said this, and in another poem you have said something else.” You don’t expect a poet to be consistent, so you don’t ask. Poetry is not a theory, it is not a syllogism, it is a song.

I am not a philosopher. Always remember that I am a poet, not a philosopher. Remember always that I am not a missionary, but a musician playing on the harp of your heart. Songs will go on changing… you need not cling to anything, then there will be no confusion at all.

The people who are always hankering for consistency can never enter into the mystery of life. Consistency is something manmade, it is arbitrary. Existence is not consistent. And now even physicists agree with the poets and the mystics.

You must be aware that modern physics believes in the theory of uncertainty; modern physics believes in the illogical behavior of atoms, of the unpredictability of the behavior of electrons. It was such a shock to the modern physicists, because they had always believed that matter behaves consistently. The whole foundation of science has been shaken; these twenty years, it has been such a shock. People have not yet become aware of it, because the theories are so complicated and so subtle that they will never become part of common knowledge. And they are so against common sense—they look more like fairy tales, stories written for children.

Life is a very mixed puzzle. Whatsoever you make out of it is going to be arbitrary, you cannot figure it out in reality. My suggestion to my sannyasins is to forget all about figuring out what it is. Rather, live it; rather, enjoy it! Don’t analyze it, celebrate it.

*

One of the most memorable series of all for me is on the words the fifteenth-century Indian mystic, Kabir. Like Jesus, Kabir was of the marketplace—he was a weaver of cloth, illiterate. Osho calls Kabir “the Christ of the East.”

“Kabir is a harbinger, a herald of the future, the first flower that heralds the spring. He is one of the greatest poets of religion. He is not a theologian; he does not belong to any religion. All religions belong to him, but he is vast enough to contain all. He’s a great beauty, a great poetry, a great orchestra.”

Where the Sufis touch my heart, Kabir claims it completely, and his ecstasy infects us all. The musicians set his poetry to music, creating songs that decades later I will not be able to hear without a pricking of tears…. “Just one look at the real man standing there, and we are in love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love!”

It is time to put up a love swing!

Tie the body and then tie the mind so that they swing between the arms of the Secret One you love.

Bring the water that falls from the clouds to your eyes.

And cover yourself over entirely with the shadow of night. Bring your face up close to his ear, and then talk only about what you want deeply to happen.

Kabir says, “Listen to me, brother, bring the face, the shape, and the odor of the Holy One inside you.”

How exquisitely moving it is to hear those words from Osho’s lips—from one who exudes the perfume of that “holy one inside”!

This then, is our daily diet, our “spiritual breakfast”: imbibing the masters of the past. Osho explains that he speaks on such an assortment of paths to make us enriched:

… to make you available to all the joys possible in the spiritual world, to make you capable of all kinds of ecstasies. Yes, Buddha brings one kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through intelligence. And Jesus brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through love. Krishna brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through action. And Lao Tzu brings another kind of ecstasy: the ecstasy that comes through inaction. These are very different paths, but they all come into you, and they all meet you in your innermost core.

Be simply a man, a human being, with no Jewish, Christian, Hindu ideologies hanging around you. Drop all that dust and let your mirror be clear, and you will be in continuous celebration, because then the whole existence is yours.

At the conclusion of many of these discourses my heart is so full that it cannot be contained. I am happier than I can ever have imagined possible.

*

Seductive though his talking is, as Osho constantly reminds us the words are in themselves are not the message. In not just hearing his words but listening to him, we can receive that which can’t be conveyed by words. Hearing is something anyone with functioning ears could do; it is a passive, mechanical job of the brain. Listening is active, in that you have to consciously participate, to be in a position to receive not only what is being said but what is between the words. He tells us that the art of being a disciple is the art of imbibing, of being like an absolutely porous sponge, and often I feel exactly like that.

It’s an interesting play to watch my thoughts and feelings become engaged in the words, and then to choose to disengage from both and consciously sink into the space of silence, the gap between words… that place that, being other than mind with its thoughts and feelings, cannot be described. If it could, I would choose expanded, weightless, timeless, only awareness, no separation, and complete fulfillment.

Osho is more present than anyone I have ever met and yet also absent in a curious way. When I’m with someone, most of me may be engaged, but occasionally my eyes might dart off to notice someone walking by, or I am scratching myself or shifting from foot to foot. Sometimes perhaps I appear to be present but internally I’m thinking of how to respond to the person or wondering if I should be doing something else, and so on.

I don’t see or sense any of that happening with Osho: he is always one hundred percent here and now. He is present inasmuch as he is completely open and present to each moment, for example, to a person sitting on front of him, explaining what his concern is. And yet inside that so-utterly-present person there isn’t a sense of a “personality”—the usual collection of traits, characteristics and mannerisms, the manifestations of a particular ego that we regard as being intrinsic to each other. Instead, he is filled with space and it’s that which gives me the feeling of his being absent. Even more curiously, both states—the complete presence and the absence—are there at the same time.

Maybe it’s that combination that creates his charisma. I will sit just a few feet from him for many, many years, and—in his sitting with eyes closed, or listening, talking, gently touching someone’s head or laughing with us—witness how this remains a constant.

Speaking of what those around Jesus experienced, Osho explains that the real thing was just to be in the presence of this man:

Have you observed?—very few people have what you call “presence.” Rarely do you come across a person who has a presence—something indefinable about him, something that you suddenly feel but cannot indicate, something that fills you but is ineffable, something very mysterious and unknown. You cannot deny it; you cannot prove it. It is not the body, because anybody can have a body. It is not the mind, because anybody can have a mind. Sometimes a very beautiful body may be there, tremendously beautiful, but the presence is not there; sometimes a genius mind is there, but the presence is not there; and sometimes you pass a beggar and you are filled, touched, stirred—the presence.

Those who were in the presence of Jesus, those who were in his satsang; those who lived close, those who lived in his milieu, breathed him. If you allow me to say it: those who drank him and ate him, who allowed him to enter into their innermost shrine…. That transformed, not the prayer; prayer was just an excuse to be with him. Even without prayer it would have happened, but without prayer they might not have found an excuse to be with him…

Being with a master is so new to most of us that, ironically, it needs a master to explain to us who he is and to provide words to articulate how his presence is affecting us.

“Does being in the presence of the master really change a man?” someone asks in discourse.

“You are changed by everything!” Osho replies:

… the sun rises in the morning, your sleep disappears…. When the sun sets in the evening, you start falling asleep….When you listen to great music, is some chord in your heart touched and moved or not? Listening to great music, do you become music or not? Seeing a dancer, does not a great desire arise in you to dance? Listening to a poet, listening to great poetry, for a few moments you attain to a poetic vision. Some doors open, some mysteries surround you.

Exactly the same happens on a more total level in the presence of a master—because the master is a musician, and the master is a poet, and the master is a painter, and the master is a potter, and the master is a weaver…and the master is all things together….

To be in the presence of the master…to be open, vulnerable, available—available to his touch—then his magic starts flowing into you. And this happens every day to you! Still the mind goes on suspecting. Still the doubt goes on raising its head.

Have you been transported into other worlds being with me? Has it not happened to many of you? Is it not happening right now? Are you the same person when you are far away from me? Have you not felt that something changes, something starts happening to you—strange, unknown. Some energy starts moving; some light starts descending; some silence blooms inside you; some unknown song starts flowing in your being as the wind passes through the pines. Have you not heard the sound of running water through my words? Through my silences? Just looking at me, sometimes with open eyes and sometimes with closed eyes, has it not happened again and again to you?

But I know, the question arises. The more it happens, the more mind creates doubts: Maybe it is just hypnosis? That’s what people all around the world say about me, that “This man is a hypnotist!” Many people are afraid to come, because if they come and if they are hypnotized, then what? The mind says, “Maybe this is just hypnosis.” The mind says, “Maybe you have fallen into an illusion. Maybe this is just a delusion, some magic—otherwise why does it disappear?”

When you go away from me, when I am not with you and you are not with me, when you forget about me, why does it disappear? The mind, naturally, asks these questions. It disappears because you have not yet learned how to remain on those high planes of being, how to remain in those plenitudes…. When you are with me, there is trust—and trust transforms. When you are alone, the trust is lost; you are not yet capable of trusting yourself. The function of the true master is to prepare the disciple in such a way that sooner or later the master is no more needed, and the disciple can remain on his own in those higher planes of being—where joy is and grace is.

*

One day, at one of the discourses in Chuang Tzu Auditorium, right in the middle of his talking—literally in mid-sentence—Osho stops. His head has been tilted slightly upward and his eyes are not directed at any of us but are gazing out beyond the periphery of the auditorium, beyond the garden. Is one of his hands raised in a gesture at that particular moment?—I can’t remember, but I do recall how electrifying these few moments are when he is suddenly silent, sitting absolutely still, as if suspended in time and motion.

Sitting only feet away from him, I catch my breath, watch and wait. After what seems an eternity but must be just a few moments, Osho slowly returns to himself, as it were. He looks at us, the sea of expectant faces in front of him, as if he wonders who we are and what we are doing here. It is an oddly awesome sensation to witness. He looks up at the large clock on the wall, then down at the clipboard that holds the sutra or questions—looks at it as though for the first time—and resumes speaking, but with words that don’t seem related to those he’s last uttered.

Of course the episode is the pivot of collective gossip after discourse, but I don’t imagine anyone will be bold enough to ask Osho about it. However, Anurag, one of the editors of the discourse books, is:

“What happened to you yesterday when you stopped speaking for a few moments during discourse?” or something to that effect, she asks. There is a collective holding of breath. I feel a bit embarrassed. It seems audacious to ask such a thing; on the other hand I have to admit I am dying to know!

Osho then explains that if enlightenment happens after a certain age, it is such a colossal upheaval that it is difficult to “remain in the body.” It is a difficulty for him, Osho continues, and yesterday for a moment he had just started wandering off out of his body. Perhaps it is on this occasion that he says talking to us is his “anchor” to his physical form, to the earth. Each enlightened person has his or her own particular anchor to keep grounded—for example, food was to Ramakrishna what talking is to Osho.

What makes that incident particularly memorable for me is the realization that Osho is making an effort to stay in his body, and doing so because of us. I see now that I have starting taking him for granted. I have never thought, as he leaves discourse each morning, that it might be the last time I will see him. Now it is evident that in spite of his efforts, any moment he might just suddenly pull up anchor and depart into the cosmos. A sobering thought…. How staggering, yet again, is the realization of who he is and why he is still with us.

“What,” Osho was once asked, “did we do to deserve you as our master?”

Chuckling, he replies, “I don’t know anything about you, but I must have done terrible karma to deserve you!”