by Osho
And this is not just a story. In fact the first beginnings of all the great inventions that are the fundamentals of all scientific progress were done in the East—in China and India. But India and China never developed them, knowing well that speed and efficiency only create more worry, make people tense … and time is not saved! Even if time is saved, what is one going to do with that time? You will worry in that time.
First you have the time, and then you worry and become anxious and ask for some entertainment, because now what to do with the time? First you save time, and then you ask how to kill time. So there are people who sell ideas for how to become speedier and more efficient; then there are people who go on selling ideas for how to entertain yourself when time is there. It is just absurd!
So try one thing—slow down. And just by slowing down ordinary processes, you will see how peaceful you can become. Eat slowly—take time! If you eat in twenty minutes, why not in forty? There is no hurry! Enjoy the food! Chew it more; it will be digested better. Your body will feel more at ease and at home. And of course when the body is at home, the mind too feels at home.
Sometimes when you don’t have anything to do, just sit silently doing nothing. There is no need to read the newspaper or to watch the TV. Don’t be in such a mad rush to occupy yourself. That is a way to escape from oneself. So sometimes when you have nothing to do, feel happy that you have some time when you have nothing to do. Then just sit silently, look at the stars or at the trees, or just close your eyes and look inward.
If you can sit silently every day at least for one hour, within three, four months, you will know for the first time what peace is. And unless one has known what peace is, one has not known what life is. Only in a surfacing of peace, when the springs of peace start flowing in you, do you feel the meaning of life. Otherwise it is much ado about nothing.
Page of Rainbows: Adventure
Life is an adventure. Invite constant adventures, and whenever a call comes from the unknown, listen to it. Risk all and go into the unknown, because this is the only way to live at the maximum.
Life is a great adventure, but people are so afraid that they cling to the familiar, to the known, to the well defined, to the logical. They never go beyond the boundary of the mind. If you live in the mind you are living in a grave. If you go beyond the mind you are really born, you have come out of the grave.
One can live each moment with such intensity, with such adventure, that each moment becomes a great gift because it brings so much joy, so much ecstasy. But one has to be ready to go on dropping the past. One should not allow the past to be accumulated. That becomes a prison wall around you. Each moment die to the past and remain fresh, and your life will be a great adventure. And it is only for the adventurous people to know what truth is. The non-adventurous live in comfortable lies.
Skill has something in it, and that is security. It misses something, and that is adventure. So all secure lives will be non-adventurous and all adventurous lives will be insecure.
If you are in a situation where you cannot have new friends every day, then use the beauty of old friendship as much as you can. If you are in a situation where friends change every day, that’s perfectly good—you have the opportunity to make new friends, fresh friendships. And fresh friendships have a beauty of their own. Life is more alive, there is more adventure. To be friendly with a stranger is more adventurous, to trust the stranger is more adventurous and more dangerous, and to go on finding new persons to love and be friendly with will help you to flow more. Again and again they will be gone—by the time things are settling and you are feeling that now things are becoming secure, they are gone. But it is good!
Ordinarily we would like to have all the joy with all the security—and that doesn’t happen. That’s not the way of life, and nothing can be done about it. That’s what we want: we want the impossible. We want security, safety, control, and we want joy, celebration, and great adventure. Both things cannot happen together, you cannot have both. They don’t come in the same package.
Life is an adventure. Invite constant adventures, and whenever a call comes from the unknown, listen to it. Risk all and go into the unknown, because this is the only way to live at the maximum.
Ace of Rainbows: Maturity
Maturity has nothing to do with your life experiences.
It has something to do with your inward journey, experiences of the inner.
The more a person goes deeper into himself, the more mature he is. When he has reached the very center of his being, he is perfectly mature. But at that moment the person disappears, only presence remains … . The self disappears, only silence remains. Knowledge disappears, only innocence remains.
Maturity is another name for realization: you have come to the fulfillment of your potential, it has become actual. The seed has come on a long journey, and has blossomed.
Maturity has a fragrance. It gives a tremendous beauty to the individual. It gives intelligence, the sharpest possible intelligence. It makes him nothing but love. His action is love, his inaction is love; his life is love, his death is love. He is just a flower of love.
The West has definitions of maturity that are very childish. The West means by maturity that you are no longer innocent, that you have ripened through life experiences, that you cannot be cheated easily, that you cannot be exploited, that you have within you something like a solid rock—a protection, a security.
This definition is very ordinary, very worldly. Yes, in the world you will find mature people of this type. But the way I see maturity is totally different, diametrically opposite to this definition. The maturity will not make you a rock; it will make you so vulnerable, so soft, so simple.
Maturity to me is a spiritual phenomenon.
2 of Rainbows: Moment to Moment
The mind cannot trust the moment; it is always afraid; that’s why it plans.
It is fear that plans, and by planning you miss everything—everything that is beautiful and true, everything that is divine, you miss.
Life is such a flux, nothing remains the same, everything moves. Heraclitus has said that you cannot step twice in the same river—how can you plan? By the time you are stepping the second time, much water has flowed, it is not the same river. Planning is possible if the past repeats itself. But the past never repeats itself, repetition never happens—even if you see something repeating itself, it is just because you cannot see the whole.
Heraclitus again—he says, every day the sun is new. Of course you will say it is the same sun—but it cannot be the same, there is no possibility of its being the same. Much has changed; the whole sky is different, the whole pattern of stars is different, the sun itself has become older. Now scientists say that within four million years the sun will die, its death is coming near—because the sun is an alive phenomenon and it is very old, it has to die.
Suns are born, they live—and they die. Four million years for us is very long; for the sun it is just nothing, it is as if the next moment it is going to die. And when the sun dies, the whole solar family will disappear, because the sun is the source. Every day the sun is dying, and becoming older and older and older—it cannot be the same. Every day energy is lost—a vast amount of energy is being thrown off in the sunrays. The sun is less every day, becoming exhausted. It is not the same, it cannot be the same.
And when the sun rises, it rises upon a different world, and the onlooker also is not the same. Yesterday you may have been filled with love; then your eyes were different, and the sun of course looked different. You were so filled with love that a certain quality of poetry was around you, and you looked through that poetry—the sun may have looked like a god, as it looked to the seers of the Vedas. They called the sun “God”—they must have been filled with so much poetry. They were poets, in love with existence; they were not scientists. They were not in search of what matter was, they were in search of what the mood was. They worshipped the sun. They must have been very happy and blissful people, bec
ause you can worship only when you feel a blessing; you can worship only when you feel that your whole life is a blessing.
Yesterday you may have been a poet, today you may not be a poet at all—because every moment the river is flowing within you. You are also changing. Yesterday things were fitting into each other, today everything is a mess: you are angry, you are depressed, you are sad. How can the sun be the same when the onlooker has changed? Everything changes, so a man of understanding never exactly plans for the future, cannot—but he is more ready than you to meet the future. This is the paradox. You plan, but you are not so ready.
In fact, planning means that you feel so inadequate, that’s why you plan—otherwise, why plan? A guest is coming, and you plan what you are going to say to him. What nonsense! When the guest comes, can’t you be spontaneous? But you are afraid, you don’t believe in yourself, you have no trust; you plan, you go through a rehearsal. Your life is an acting, it is not a real thing, because a rehearsal is needed only in acting. And remember: when you have gone through a rehearsal, whatsoever happens will be an act, not the real thing.
The guest has not arrived and you are planning already what you will say, how you will greet him, how you are going to respond. You are already saying things. The guest, in the mind, has already arrived—you are talking to him.
In fact, by the time the guest arrives you will be fed up with him. In fact, by the time the guest arrives he has already been with you too long—you are bored, and whatsoever you say will not be true and authentic. It will not come from you, it will come from the memory. It will not pop up from your existence, it will come from the rehearsal that you have been having. It will be false—and a meeting will not be possible, because how can a false man meet? And it may be the same with your guest: he was also planning, he also is fed up with you already. He has talked too much and now he would like to be silent, and whatsoever he says will be out of the rehearsal.
So wherever two persons meet, there are four persons meeting—at least; more are possible. Two real ones are in the background, two false ones meeting each other and encountering. Everything is false, because it comes out of planning. Even when you love a person you plan, and go through a rehearsal—all the movements that you are going to make, how you are going to kiss, the gestures—and everything becomes false. Why don’t you trust yourself? When the moment comes, why don’t you trust your spontaneity? Why can’t you be real?
The mind cannot trust the moment; it is always afraid, that’s why it plans. Planning means fear. It is fear that plans, and by planning you miss everything—everything that is beautiful and true, everything that is divine, you miss.
Millions of possibilities will be there. Don’t fix it beforehand. Just be aware and alert and let things happen.
3 of Rainbows: Guidance
We have lost contact with the inner guide. Everyone is born with that inner guide but it is not allowed to work, to function. It is almost paralyzed. But it can be revived.
Zen Masters teach swordsmanship as a meditation and they say, “Be moment to moment with the inner guide, don’t think. Allow the inner being to do whatsoever happens to it. Don’t interfere with the mind.”
This is very difficult because we are so trained with our minds. Our schools, our colleges, our universities, the whole culture, the whole pattern of civilization, teach our heads. We have lost contact with the inner guide. Everyone is born with that inner guide but it is not allowed to work, to function. It is almost paralyzed, but it can be revived.
Don’t think with the head. Really, don’t think at all. Just move. Try it in some situations. It will be difficult, because the old habit will be to start thinking. You will have to be alert: not to think, but to feel inwardly what is coming to the mind. You may be confused many times because you will not be able to know whether it is coming from the inner guide or from the surface of the mind. But soon you will know the feeling, the difference.
When something comes from the inner, it comes from your navel upwards. You can feel the flow, the warmth, coming from the navel upwards. Whenever your mind thinks, it is just on the surface, in the head, and then it goes down. If your mind decided something, then you have to force it down. If your inner guide decides, then something bubbles up in you. It comes from the deep core of your being towards the mind. The mind receives it, but it is not of the mind. It comes from beyond—and that is why the mind is scared about it. For the reason it is not reliable because it comes from behind—without any proofs. It simply bubbles up.
Try it in certain situations. For example, you have lost your path in a forest. Try it. Don’t think—just close your eyes, sit down, be meditative, and don’t think. Because it is futile—how can you think? You don’t know. But thinking has become such a habit that you go on thinking even in moments when nothing can come out of it. Thinking can think only about something that is already known. You are lost in a forest, you don’t have any map, there is nobody you can ask. What are you thinking about? But still you think. That thinking will be just a worry, not a thinking. And the more you get worried, the less the inner guide can be competent.
Be unworried. Sit down under a tree, and just allow thoughts to drop and subside. Just wait, don’t think. Don’t create a problem, just wait. And when you feel a moment of non-thinking has come, then stand up and start moving. Wherever your body moves, allow it to move. You just be a witness. Don’t interfere. The lost path can be found very easily. But the only condition is, don’t interfere with the mind.
This has happened many times unknowingly. Great scientists say that whenever a great discovery has been made, it was never made by the mind; it was always made by the inner guide.
Madame Curie was trying and trying to solve a mathematical problem. She did her best, all that was possible. Then she got fed up. For days together, weeks together, she had been working and nothing had come out. She was feeling just mad. No path was leading to the solution. Then one night, just exhausted, she fell down and slept. And in the night, in a dream, the conclusion bubbled up. She was so concerned with the conclusion that the dream was broken, she awoke. Immediately she wrote down the conclusion—because there was no process in the dream, just a conclusion. She wrote it down on a pad and then slept again. In the morning she was puzzled; the conclusion was right, but she didn’t know how it had been achieved. There was no process, no method. Then she tried to find the process; now it was an easier affair because the conclusion was in the hand, and it is easy to go back from the conclusion. She won the Nobel Prize because of this dream—but she always wondered how it happened.
When your mind gets exhausted and cannot do any more, it simply retires. In that moment of retirement the inner guide can give hints, clues, keys. The man who won the Nobel Prize for the inner structure of a human cell, saw it in a dream. He saw the whole structure of the human cell, the inner cell, in a dream, and then in the morning he just made a picture of it. He himself couldn’t believe that it could be so, so he had to work for years. After years of work he could conclude that the dream was true.
With Madame Curie it happened that when she came to know this inner process of the inner guide, she decided to try it. Once there was a problem which she wanted to solve, so she thought, “Why worry about it, and why try? Just go to sleep.” She slept well, but there was no solution. So she was puzzled. Many times she tried: when there was a problem immediately she would go to sleep. But there was no solution. First, the intellect has to be tried completely; only then can the solution bubble up. The head has to be completely exhausted otherwise it goes on functioning, even in a dream.
So now scientists say that all the great discoveries are intuitive, not intellectual. This is what is meant by the inner guide.
Lose the head and drop into this inner guide. It is there.
4 of Rainbows: The Miser
Generosity is the real richness.
The poor are always generous, the rich never. That’s how they become rich. If a rich man is gen
erous, a revolution has happened. A rich man becomes generous only when he has attained to a deep understanding that riches are useless. When he has come to know that all that this world can give is not worth taking, only then does generosity become possible—then he starts sharing.
Otherwise, you go on accumulating more and more and more. The mind goes on asking for more. There is no end to it. If you are not alert, all the riches of all the worlds will not be enough—because the mind does not bother what you have. It simply goes on saying “More!”
The mind goes on for more and more and more. It doesn’t bother what you have. You may be a beggar—it asks for more; you may be an emperor—it asks for more. The nature of the mind is to ask for more. It is not relevant, what you have. It is the very nature of the mind just to go on asking for more. A rich man goes on asking for more, and remains poor. He goes on desiring for more, and remains poor. It is difficult to find a really rich man.
Generosity is the real richness.
And to be generous, to share, you don’t need many things. To be generous, you just have to share whatsoever you have. You may not have much—that is not the point. Who has much? Who can ever have enough? It is never plenty, it is never enough. You may not have anything at all, you may be just a beggar on the road, but still you can be generous.
Can’t you smile when a stranger passes by? You can smile, you can share your being with a stranger, and then you are generous. Can’t you sing when somebody is sad? You can be generous—smiles cost nothing. But you have become so miserly that even before smiling you think thrice: to smile or not to smile? to sing or not to sing? to dance or not to dance?—in fact, to be or not to be?