Much More is Possible – Osho

To me, your discourses feel like an inside deep cleaning. Whatever load of pain, anger, or any negative feeling I carry with me when I come into discourse, it has disappeared when I walk out, and I feel light and refreshed. Sometimes, it doesn’t take me long to create another one, but I know it is not going to last longer than the end of the next discourse. When away from you, although I used to meditate every day, things were taking much longer to disappear. Can you comment?

Away from me you were trying to meditate, and that doer was your disturbance.

With me . . . I am not even telling you to meditate. I am just talking to you and creating a certain atmosphere in which meditation happens to you.

So while you are here, see the difference between doing and happening. Alone also, let it happen. If you become accustomed to my voice, perhaps you can put on the tape recorder: forget about meditation; you just listen and the meditation will come. And, slowly, slowly, this coming of meditation can be detached from listening to me.

You can sit by the side of the sea and listen to the waves crashing on the shore – so joyfully, so dancingly they come, and they have been doing that for millennia and they are not tired yet. Just listen to them. Or sitting under a tree, just listen to the birds, or the wind blowing through the tree.

Slowly, slowly, get rid of listening too. Just sit silently – because that listening was only a device. This is only a device to help you avoid doing. But the device is only for the beginning; soon you have to drop the device and it will be happening anywhere you are, and it will cleanse you the same way it does here.

And remember one thing: if it cleanses you that does not mean you have to be careless about collecting the garbage again because you know in meditation it will be cleaned away. You are using meditation for a very small job. It is not meant for that.

I have heard – it happened in Burma after the Second World War – a small airplane was left in the forest. The Japanese were surrendering, but a few stubborn samurais still wanted to fight, so they escaped in an airplane. Then they left the airplane in the forest, and were hiding somewhere in the forest.

But a tribe lived there, a very ancient tribe. They had seen airplanes in the sky, but they could not connect the two things, that this was the same thing they had called “the great bird.” They tried to figure it out: “What is it? It has wheels, so one thing is certain, it is a vehicle.”

They used it with two horses as a bullock cart. And it was working well and they were very happy: “This is great!” Then somebody who had been to the city, said, ”You don’t know – this is not a bullock cart, it is a car. Just… I don’t understand why these wings are there, but let me try…” And he tried, and it started.

Then they started using it as a car, and the man suggested, “You will need fuel, so somebody who goes to the city should bring fuel. No horses, no bullocks are needed, just fill it with fuel and use it as a car.” And they were immensely happy.

Then a man who had been in the army passed by and he said, “What are you doing! You are using a small aircraft as a car? This can fly.”

They could not believe it. They asked, “Is it a great bird?”

He said, “Yes,” and he was a pilot, so he showed them how to fly it.

Meditation can be used as a bullock cart – and that’s how you are using it, just cleaning the rubbish that you accumulate. But you will accumulate that rubbish every day and you will have to clean it every day. Meditation is a great bird, and you are using it for something it is not meant for, although it can do that work too.

So when it cleanses your burden, be careful not to collect it again. What is the need to collect the burden? – Just unawareness. And what you collect is all rubbish. You know it – that’s why, when through meditation it is cleaned away, you feel fresh. So why destroy your freshness? Don’t collect it. And the way is to be more alert, to be more meditative, even while you are doing other things. It is a great defense, it won’t allow any rubbish to collect. And slowly, slowly, you will be collecting less, and one day you will find, between two meditations, that you have not collected anything.

Now the bullock cart can become a motor car – and there is a great distance between the two. Now you don’t need the bullocks or the horses to carry it, and it can go faster. Now you have speed; otherwise, you can do the same thing every day and you will die the same.

And when there is nothing else to cleanse, then the meditation, your energy, starts rising up because there is no work on the ground. You can take off. You can become a bird in the inner sky. Then it will not be only refreshing, it will be growth. You will be growing, maturing, getting more centered, becoming more individual. And the higher you will go, the more and more you will see new things happening to you – the spring coming to you and the grass growing all around. The whole of life becomes so green, so full of juice.

You have found the way – now go on. There is so much to discover. It is your own territory you have forgotten, your own empire that you have forgotten. Remember it. The remembrance will come also by itself.

So what is happening is good, but not good enough. Much more is possible. Don’t be satisfied with small things.

Unless you have come to a point where you feel absolutely contented, don’t stop. That is the culmination of evolution, where each individual becomes a god.

-Osho

From The Path of the Mystic, Discourse #24

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