“I am not really talking Sufism. If you are ready, if you are ready to go into this adventure, then you will attain to a taste of it. It is something that will start happening in your heart. It is something like a bud opening. You will start feeling a certain sensation in the heart – as if something is becoming alert, awake there; as if the heart has been asleep for long and now…the first glimmer of the morning – and there you will have the taste.”
Osho jokes, paradox, parables, wisdom, and absurdity – all to shake the reader out of his intellect and into the innocence of the mystic. Osho distills the essence of Sufism for the contemporary man, not to inform the reader about the state of mysticism but to create the situation in which we discover the mystic within ourselves.
From the Jacket
“The Sufi loves in the present. To live in the present, the basic need is to withdraw yourself from the past, to withdraw yourself from the future. Then there comes a concentration of energies, then this small moment becomes luminous, you pour your total energy into it – then there is joy and benediction. If you are miserable, it is only because you live in the past and in the future. A miserable man has past and future; a man who lives in bliss has only the moment, this moment. He lives in the now.”
Luminous and numinous, Osho’s words dance like fire yet refresh the reader like cool river water. At the core of his message one encounters the celebration of consciousness, the bliss of awareness, the power of presence, the serenity of silence, and the courage to free oneself from social conditionings and unconscious patterns. Perhaps that’s why very attempt to categories Osho falls short.
What remains true is that his talks and meditations continue to inspire millions around the world. Hailed as one of the most innovative and creative contemporary geniuses, Osho is an experience impossible to ignore.
I have heard about a great Sufi mystic, Abraham Adam. Once he was the Emperor of Bokhara, then he left everything and became a Sufi beggar. When he was staying with another Sufi mystic he was puzzled because every day the man was continuously complaining of his poverty. Abraham Adam said to him, “The way you abuse it, it may be that you have bought your poverty cheaply.
“How stupid your must be!” the man retorted, not knowing to whom he was talking, not knowing that Abraham was once the emperor. He said, “How stupid you must be to think that one buys poverty.”
Abraham replied, “In my case, I paid my kingdom for it. I would even give away a hundred worlds for a single moment of it, for every day its value becomes more and more to me. No wonder then that I give thanks for it while you lament it.”
The purity of the spirit is the real poverty. The word Sufi comes from an Arabic word safa. Safa means purity. Sufi means one who is pure in the heart.
And what is purity? Don’t misunderstand me; purity has nothing to do with morality. Don’t interpret it in a moralistic way. Purity has nothing to do with puritans. Purity simple means an uncontaminated state of mind, where only your consciousness is and nothing else. Nothing else really enters into your consciousness, but if you hander to possess, that hankering contaminates you. Gold cannot enter into your consciousness. There is no way. How can you take gold into your being? There is no way. Money cannot enter into your consciousness. Then you become impure. If your don’t want to possess anything you become fearless. Then even death is a beautiful experience to pass through.
A man who is really spiritual has tremendous experiences, but he never accumulates them. Once they have happened he forgets about them. He never remembers, he never projects them into the future. He never says that they should be repeated or that they should happen again to him. He never prays for them. Once they have happened they again happened. Finished! He is finished with them and he moves away from them. He is always available for the new, he never carries the old. And if you don’t carry the old you will find life absolutely new – incredibly, unbelievably new at each step.
Life is new, only the mind is old; and if you look through the old mind life also looks like a repetition, a boring thing. If you don’t look through the mind…Mind means your past, mind means the accumulated experiences, knowledge and everything. Mind means that through which you have passed, but which you are still hanging onto. Mind is a hang-over, dust from the past covering your mirror like consciousness. Then when you look through it everything becomes distorted. Mind is the faculty of distortion. If you don’t look through the mind you will be ready for death. In fact not looking through the mind you will know that life is eternal. Only mind dies – without mind you are deathless. Without mind nothing has ever died; life goes on and on and on forever. It has no beginning and no end. Accumulate – then you have a beginning, and then you will have an end.
This is the way, how to prepare yourself for death… When I say “how to prepare for death,” I don’t mean preparing for the death that will come in the end – that is very far away. If you prepare for it you will be preparing for the future and again the mind will come in. No, when I say mean the death that visits you every moment with each exhalation. Accept this death each moment and you will be ready for the final death when it comes.
Start dying each moment to the past. Clean yourself of the past each moment. Die to the known so that you become available to the unknown. With dying and being reborn each moment you will be able to live life and you will be able to live death also.
And that’s what spirituality is really all about: to lie death intensely, to live life intensely; to live both so passionately that nothing is left behind unlived, not even death. If you live life and death totally, you transcend. In that tremendous passion and intensity of life and death, you transcend duality, you transcend the dichotomy, you come to the one. That one is really the truth. You can call it God, you can call it life, you can call it truth, Samadhi, ecstasy, or whatsoever you choose.
Osho defies categorization, reflecting everything from the individual quest for meaning to the most urgent social and political issues facing society today. His books are not written but are transcribed from recordings of extemporaneous talks given over a period of thirty-five years. Osho has been described by The Sunday Times in London as one of the “1000 Makes of the 20th Century” and by Sunday Mid – Day in India as one of the ten people – along with Gandhi, Nehru and Buddha – who have changed the destiny of India.
Osho has a stated aim of helping to create the conditions for the birth of a new kind of human being, characterized as “Zorba the Buddha” – one whose feet are firmly on the ground, yet whose hands can touch the stars. Running like a thread through all aspects of Osho is a vision that encompasses both the timeless wisdom of the East and the highest potential of Western science and technology.
He is synonymous with a revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation and an approach to meditation which specifically addresses the accelerated pace of contemporary life. The unique OSHO Active meditations are designed to allow the release of accumulated stress in the body and mind so that it is easier to be still and experience the thought – free state of meditation.
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