When I hear you talk about past lives I get scared. I have never had any remembrance, just a vague feeling, and somewhere I know that I don’t want to know… Unless it’s a remembrance of you. And about future lives, I get so sad – Just the idea of starting all over again, the family, the school, the fight for survival, and, above all you won’t be there.
How will I remember you; how will I not forget this tremendous gift that you are? I would like this moment to stretch into eternity . . . And forget about anything else. Is there any great magical surgery possible? I want to heal . . .
Kavisho, I am exactly doing the magical surgery you are asking about. Do you think my work consists only of communicating words, concepts, and philosophies to you? You are lying down on my surgical table.
There is no need for you to remember the past. Whenever I have talked about the past, it is just to make you aware that you have missed many opportunities before. Make it a point that you don’t miss now.
Thousands of lives have passed, and you have been moving in a wheel, in a routine. This time, come out of the circle. And if you can come out of the circle this time, there will be no future life for you – eternity will be yours.
And that’s what you are asking me: Is there any possibility to stretch this moment into eternity? This is the opportunity: this silence, this dance, this blissfulness can help you to come out of the vicious circle, and you will never enter another womb again. You will remain here – not embodied, but just as pure consciousness, spread all over existence.
My whole effort is to persuade you to take a jump from being a dewdrop and become the ocean.
And the surgery is not very difficult; it is one of the simplest things possible: just get out of your mind. Become a witness to the mind; watch all its traffic pass by. Don’t be part of the traffic; stand by the side of the road – because you are not the mind.
Once this statement becomes your experience – that you are not the mind – then there is no question of being born into another stupid routine. It is the mind and the identity with the mind which is the cause of continuously moving in a circle. Disidentify. You are neither the body nor the mind. You are simply the pure watcher.
It is a simple method – the simplest possible method for the greatest experience – the most shortcut way. Whenever you have time – lying down on your bed, no special posture is needed, or standing under your shower – just remain a watcher: of the body, of the freshness of the water, of the coolness, and of the thoughts that are passing in the mind. Just by watching, mind disappears. One day, you suddenly find an absolute silence within you – no traffic… the road is empty. The surgery is complete. You will not be born again in another body, although you will remain as part of eternal life.
And don’t be worried – I will be there. I am already there just calling you all to the sunlit peaks of consciousness from your dark valleys. Start climbing.
You can miss me only in one way, and that is: if you choose your mind, then you cannot choose me. If you choose me, you will have to drop your mind.
In the eternity of life, we all will be meeting – of course, without our old photographs, without our old faces. But nobody loses his individuality of consciousness even in the universal. He becomes part of the universal, and yet that universality does not destroy his individuality but enhances it. So not only me, but all the souls that have moved into time and gone beyond time, are still here now.
There is a beautiful story in the life of Mahavira. The followers of Mahavira have not been able to explain the mystery of the story. The story is certainly not historical; it is a parable, poetry, an indirect way of saying the truth. It says that Mahavira never spoke. The historical fact is that for forty years, he spoke continuously. But the story is that Mahavira never spoke. He was always silent, and in the audience there were three categories: one was of those who had left their bodies and had not entered in bodies again. They were all around – only visible to Mahavira, not visible to anybody else.
In the second category were human beings – seekers and searchers who had come to him, pulled by his great magnetic, charismatic personality.
And there was a third group, of his most intimate disciples – eleven disciples. They were also human beings, but they have to be put into a separate category because they had come to such communion with the master that they could understand his silence.
He never spoke – but those eleven disciples, called ganadharas, spoke to the people who could not understand silence. They said to people what Mahavira had communicated to them in his silence.
And there were two pieces of evidence whether they had heard rightly or not. One was that all the eleven had their own disciples: there were eleven branches of the disciples; if they all spoke the same message, that was one evidence that nobody had heard wrongly, that nobody was trying to make up the message himself.
And the second piece of evidence was that whenever those ganadharas, those eleven disciples spoke, the unembodied souls showered flowers, because they were able to understand the silence directly. And they were rejoicing because if these eleven people had not been there, Mahavira’s message would have been lost. Those unembodied people could not communicate with human beings. The flowers were showered on the eleven ganadharas as a proof to all human beings that souls – which had become enlightened before – were still supporting and giving evidence that what these people were saying was exactly what had arisen out of Mahavira’s silence.
It is very difficult to give historical proofs for it. But my own experience is that it may have some basis in reality, because I have come to know a few disciples of my own who can understand when I am not speaking. And whatever they understand is exactly what I wanted to convey, but kept it within myself. Here, also, many of you not only understand my words, but also my silences.
The day the electricity went off many times, I received many letters saying that it was such a great experience to sit silently for those few moments. In any other gathering in the world that would have been a disturbance; but in this gathering it was a tremendous experience – people loved those gaps.
Perhaps those electricity failures were managed; but those people must have come to know that we enjoyed it – and since that day, those electricity failures have stopped.
Kavisho, do not think of the past and do not think of the future. I am here with you and I know your heart. You are here with me, and there is no need to fear that you will miss the opportunity. You are coming closer and closer to the fulfillment – to the ultimate contentment. You are going to be one of my most blessed disciples.
-Osho
From The Rebellious Spirit, Discourse #13
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