A handful of dry leaves

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

A handful of dry leaves









WHEN I HEAR YOU SAY THAT YOU ARE ONLY HERE FOR US, I FEEL SUCH AN URGENCY ARISING IN ME, SUCH A DEEP URGE TO MOVE DEEP INSIDE BEYOND ALL MY LITTLE PIDDLY TRIPS AND LIMITATIONS, AND YET INSIDE REALIZING SUCH A DEEP HELPLESSNESS. IS THERE ANY SECRET OR SHORT CUT, SO I DON’T MISS?

Gautam Buddha was passing through a forest. It was fall time and the whole forest was full of dry leaves and naked trees were standing against the evening sun, looking so beautiful. Ananda, his close disciple, asked him,”I wanted to ask it many times, but other people were present. Now fortunately a few disciples have gone ahead, a few are coming behind, and this is a moment I am alone with you and I can ask the question.” And his question was,”Have you told us everything that you know or are there some secrets that you are holding back?”

Gautam Buddha bent down, filled his hand with dry leaves, showed him those dry leaves in his hand and said, ”Whatever I have told you is just like these few dry leaves; what I have not told you is just like the whole forest full of dry leaves. But it is not because I am a miser, it is not because I wanted to hold it back from you; even to say these few leaves has been such a difficult task. I have wasted my whole life in conveying something about these few leaves, but these few leaves are enough as far as understanding all the leaves of the forest are concerned. If you can understand these few leaves, just a handful, you have understood all the leaves of the whole forest.”

It is a question of understanding. You do not have to know all the oceans to come to the conclusion that ocean water is salty. From anywhere, just a little taste of the ocean will give you the taste of all the oceans which you may never visit.

Whatever was necessary, whatever was essential I have been telling you. Whatever is left untold is left untold because there is no way to tell it. If you can understand what I have told you, you will come to a situation, a position, a consciousness, a perceptivity, where you can know all that which I have not been able to tell you.

But I am not holding anything back from you.
this is a moment that you should be contented that you have come so close. Your urgency should not turn into a discontent; otherwise you will be thrown back far away.

Your urgency should be transformed into a deep contentment and a rejoicing that you have been able to be a fellow traveler of one who is fully awakened, and you have been a fellow traveler of many who are also searching and seeking with tremendous intensity something which the whole world is unaware of. If this contentment settles in you, perhaps the quantum leap will happen on its own accord.

I am not talking about such contentment. Your contentment should be a song, a dance, a rejoicing, a love, a sharing. Your contentment should not be dead; it should be alive and dancing.

Only the meditator knows there is no death

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sunderam
Truth Godliness Beauty

Only the meditator knows there is no death

"My work is not to answer you, but to help you to solve your questions"
This is a totally different kind of work.

I cannot do that tremendous harm to your intelligence, so my answers have to be looked at in a totally different way. I will give you the background, all the implications, and the question will be solved by you, not answered by me.

Unless a question is solved by yourself, your intelligence never becomes sharp, your consciousness never becomes alert. You go on accumulating ready-made answers in your mind, in your memory, which is simply a load, of no use. In any situation which is fresh and new you will be at a loss what to do, because you don’t have the ready-made answer.

I am working from a totally different angle. I want you to be capable, conscious, alert, intelligent, so whenever a new situation arises – and every day you are going to face a new situation – you are capable to respond with certainty on your own. It is a joy when you find an answer to any question yourself.

I don’t give you an answer while I am answering you; I am trying to put your whole situation before you. If you can become aware of the whole situation the answer will arise on its own, in your own intelligence. It will become a flame within you. And because it is yours, you will have a certainty, indubitability, a tremendous trust in it.

Any answer given from outside – you can believe it, but you cannot trust it. You can manage, you can force yourself to believe it because the person who has given it seems to be the right person. But all these are guesses – and a belief is not a trust. Belief is always in somebody else; trust is something that arises in you as a fragrance of your being, as your intelligence sharpening, as your consciousness growing.

Why does it happen? – because meditation and death are almost synonymous. Meditation brings you the realization of your being, on the one hand; on the other hand it kills your ego, and you have been attached, identified with the ego, not with the being. So the first experiences of deepening meditation feel like you are dying.

Obviously, when you die you will die to others. And in this continuous flow of millions of years, everybody has only seen somebody else dying. Nobody has seen himself dying, except very exceptional people whose meditation has gone so deep that the moment they are separated from their body they know that the body was always dead, consisted of dead materials; the life that was showing in the body was just the inflow of eternal life that was reflected in the body.

The constant river of eternal life flowing within you makes your body also look alive. The moment the eternal flow has moved, has changed its course, your body comes to its reality. But you never die. And the whole art of meditation is to make you aware and alert that you are not the body.

Meditation will take that fear away and meditation will also take away the idea that one is man and one is woman, because those things belong to the body. The consciousness is transcendental; it is neither male nor female.
You will have to dig deep through meditation to find the pure waters of trust within your being. It is going to be your own work on yourself. It is going to be your own creative exploration, adventure.

Yes, Buddhas can show you the path, but they cannot help you in any other way. I can tell you about meditations, but I cannot do meditations for you.
Never start from the secondary; always remember as a fundamental rule to start from the primary. And the primary reality and existence is you.

Hidden within you is satyam, shivam, sundram – the truth, the godliness and the utter beauty of it. That is the seed; take care of it, and you will soon have a vast tree arising in you, spreading its branches in all directions with millions of flowers.

You have to put aside your fear

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

You have to put aside your fear

The first glimpse of one’s own being is inevitably unbelievable, firstly because you have not known it before so you cannot recognize what it is. It is so vast that what you have been thinking of as yourself is just like a dewdrop coming in contact with the ocean.

The fear is necessary. The dewdrop cannot think in other ways except that slipping into the ocean is death. Although it is not true, we have to be compassionate towards the dewdrop too. It is beyond its comprehension. The ocean is so vast – it is almost a necessity to think, ”I will disappear and be lost.”

Naturally one becomes tremendously afraid. Only one thing can be done and that is to have courage and take a jump. That’s the fundamental function of the master, to tell you that ”I was also a dewdrop one day. I was also afraid when I came closer to the ocean. I was also as much in deep trembling as you are, but there was no way of going back. I have known being a dewdrop for millions of lives and it has been nothing but misery and darkness, anxiety. Why not take a chance and see?”

It is risky; one never knows what is going to happen when the dewdrop simply disappears in the ocean.” But I can say to you that the dewdrop does not disappear in the ocean. On the contrary, the ocean disappears in the dewdrop. The dewdrop becomes the whole ocean. It is not death, of which you have to be afraid; it is the eternal life, for which you have been searching.

The whole of history is a witness that those who have allowed themselves to disappear into the vastness of existence have not really disappeared. On the contrary, for the first time they have found themselves – so huge, without any limits, without any boundaries, without any bondages. This is freedom, to be oceanic; to be a dewdrop is to be imprisoned in a small boundary.

Your self is only a dewdrop. The ocean is a no-self.

This fear grips everybody. Those who can understand even the language of mountains and trees, those who are so sensitive they can feel – there are many references from enlightened people that when the river comes traveling thousands of miles from the mountains and the valleys and the plains and comes to the ocean, for a moment it trembles. Great anxiety grips it. A moment of decision, a decision of tremendous importance – whether to go back.

But there is no way to go back. You cannot travel backwards in time. You have only one possibility: to go ahead. If the river cannot go back, at least it certainly looks back to all those beautiful mountains it descended, to all those beautiful primeval forests it passed, to all those beautiful people. All the memories... just a moment of looking back. But it cannot stay long; it has to take a plunge into the ocean, knowing perfectly well that ”this is going to be my death.”

But it is not a death. The river itself becomes the ocean. It is expansion of your consciousness, of your being. You are becoming synonymous with the universe.

Sannyas is a commitment, it is a dedication, it is a declaration of your love, your trust. It is a declaration to the skies: “Now I am dropping the no from my being. It has tortured me enough. It has been a disease. I am entering into the world of yes, into life-affirmation.”


The effort on the path of sannyas is to drop your mind, and your mind can be dropped only if your no is dropped. Let me say it in other words:

No is mind.

Yes is your soul.

The master is already absolute yes, and slowly, slowly you also become absolute yes. Only then is the meeting, the merger, the dewdrop slipping into the ocean.

You have to be very watchful about your ego, because the language of the ego is no. The language of your being is yes. The language of the ego is doubt; the language of the being is trust. And only from trust can you grow into satyam, shivam, sunderam – into the ultimate truth, into the ultimate godliness, into ultimate beauty.

Your no will make you more and more small and ugly. Have you ever watched? – whenever you say no, something in you shrinks; whenever you say yes, something in you expands. Whenever you say yes, you are in tune with the universe, and whenever you say no, you declare your ego as separate from life, from existence.

It is up to you. In love you will find yourself filled with yes; in hate you will find yourself filled with no. In blissfulness there is no space for no; in misery there is nothing else but no.

So it is not as simple as you think; these simple words yes and no belong to two different planes of life: no to the lowest and yes to the highest

You have to put aside your fear


SUDDENLY, SITTING WITH YOU AGAIN, I TINGLE INSIDE. YOUR BEAT INSIDE THE TABLAS – A MAGIC MOMENT. IS THAT THE QUALITY OF NON-DOING?

When you are just sitting silently, then even the noises of the birds and the silent trees and a faraway cuckoo... they are no longer separate from you. You suddenly expand; you are not just hearing them, you become them.

”I tingle inside. Your beat inside the tablas – a magic moment.” It all depends on you. You can turn every moment of your life into a magic moment. I am only just helping you to have a few glimpses and to learn the knack of how to transform your life into a constant flow of magical moments – each moment bringing more and more wonder, each moment opening new mysteries.

You are not doing anything, you are just being here. The highest peaks of consciousness are when you are just a being – not doing anything, unmoving, utterly silent, as if you are no more. Suddenly the whole existence starts showering flowers on you.

I am not saying you should not do anything. You have to eat, you have to clothe yourself, you need a shelter, so some kind of doing will be needed. But doing should be only utilitarian; it will not give you the great experiences for which life is an opportunity. Your doing will give you a survival.

But just to survive is not to be alive. To be alive means to have a dance in the heart. To be alive means to have each fiber of your being full of the celestial music. To be alive means to experience the eternal flow of life force within your veins. That is possible not by doing; that is possible only by non-doing. So non-doing is the ultimate value. Doing is just mundane – out of necessity you have to do something.

This whole silence of existence, this whole beauty of all the flowers, this infinitude of the sky surrounding you, all become part of you. And the touch of the eternal and the infinite and the deathless brings so much joy that even when you are doing, slowly, slowly you will find even in your doing those joys, those ecstasies are entering into your work.

Then the work is no longer work. Doing is no longer doing; it becomes your creativity. Whatever you do now, you do with your totality. And the whole existence supports you, goes on filling you with more juice so you can pour that juice into your actions, into your doings. Suddenly you become a magician yourself. Whatever you touch becomes gold. Wherever you move, existence goes on welcoming you, and whatever you do, howsoever small, becomes part of your meditation.

Only when you start coming in communion with the universe, a tremendous change happens in you. Even your doing starts becoming just an expression of your non-doing. The day your doing also becomes an expression of non-doing, you have come back home.

.........You have touched the ultimate beauty and the blessing of existence