:: BOOK OF THE MONTH ::

A BIRD ON THE WING

In Pune, India, there is a fast flowing river with a waterfall pounding over some boulders in a spot near the Osho commune. I sat there one evening with a friend and tried to think how I could tackle the job of introducing this book, and Osho, to you.

For me, rivers have a way of dissolving mental rubbish and reducing everything to its simplest terms. Sitting there, listening to the sound of night time and the rushing water, looking at a river plant being tussled in all directions by the current, I was reminded of the Zen story of Chiyono. When she became enlightened, she wrote a poem:

This way and that way
I tried to keep the pail together, 
hoping the weak bamboo
would never break… 

And I cried: for me, for Chiyono, for the plant. The river spirit seemed to be changing and broadening my focus about the task. 

And I felt a feeling of Osho growing inside, in the sounds, in the wind, in my friend.

I had the sense that my whole life has been an introduction to Osho, to becoming a disciple of His, to everything that I was that moment. It all became necessary, perfect.

I felt how much Osho personifies Zen, how everything about him is like everything else that I know, but none of it is him; how the river, India, is like him, a flow of paradoxes and contradictions, but deeply balanced, deeply right.

It is the most appropriate thing that Osho should speak on Zen, because he feels so Zen-like – incomprehensible, yet totally simple.

And this Zen of his being is not the Zen that many in the West have adopted intellectually, not the Zen that has often been misinterpreted as the path of least resistance, the way that requires nothing of you, for: “The grass grows by itself”, but a Zen so fast and deep that it goes beyond all words and concepts.

The word Zen comes from the Japanese Za-zen, which means sitting quietly, doing nothing. And watching Osho speak, one gets the feeling that he also is just sitting, doing nothing. A process that seems unrelated to him is happening. A discourse happens; like a ripple in the river, there is no effort or preparation. It happens all by itself! There is no interference on his part; his being speaks to your being. What is so incredible is that he can do nothing, and continue to do everything as usual, or rather everything around him happens as it should.

As with every deep teaching, by and by, the key to the door is lost, and we are left with a mere shell of the original experience. And because religion is another way of seeing whatever is – and, I find, a truer way- we take the message and run it through our minds of shallowness and fear, distort it until the key no longer fits and the door has become a wall. The truth seems to be that we don’t have the vaguest idea of what the ancient wise ones were talking about, although we pretend so well.

In this selection of stories, as well as in the spontaneous questions and answers, which follow each talk, Osho shows us the incredible liquid versatility of his being. Religions has always been for ‘wings’, transcendence, and against ‘roots’, pleasure, the world.

Osho tells us that wings cannot develop without roots, just as a tree cannot flower independent of its seed, its roots. The growth is a continuum; you cannot skip the birth pains, the suffering, the effort, the pushing upwards, and begin with the flower, the bliss, the meditation. But that is precisely what we all seem to try to do: ignore our own sickness and pretend to health.

Osho is for both ‘this’, the roots, and ‘that’, the wings. There is no choice to be made, he says. If you accept the roots, explore them deeply and consciously. In other words, be where you are; that is the nourishment the roots need to blossom into wings.

In A Bird on the Wing, Osho is not explaining Zen stories. If he were, he would only be perpetuating the whole game of spiritual materialism.

What he is doing is taking us deeper into the mystery of these stories. He says that life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. Mysteries cannot be solved- H2O is not a river- but mystery can penetrate you. Often, in the activity of finding out, we are closed to what we seek by the very tension that the search causes.

And for me the secret of understanding Zen – or Osho – is not to try to argue, to solve, to make sense out of it. Zen makes no sense, and if it did, I doubt that it would have any value for transformation. The understanding of Zen, or Osho, is an understanding of the heart, of the deeper layers of being, not of the mind. Which is to say….

Nothing can really really be said.

In this book, we are all invited to enter the door, and be mystified into understanding.

Ma Yoga Sudha