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Times of India                                                                          Back to top
The Speaking Tree, 31st August, 2004

SUFI PATH OF LOVE: FRAGRANT AND FRESH 
Swami Chaitanya Keerti   

We think of spirituality as something serious. Any thought about it makes us assume that we are going into something serious. The sacred and the serious have become synonymous. This is totally a false assumption, and not good for health and growth of consciousness.

The attitude of seriousness may lead people either into suicide or make them renounce the world. In India, millions of people renounced the world and became sadhus, but only a few of them attained enlightenment.

By renouncing the world, they made the world and themselves poorer as they did not contribute anything to the world. They themselves became dependent on the people who continued living the life of normal householders.

What did normal people get from such sadhus? Nothing significant, except hatred for the world, and a feeling of guilt because they could not renounce the world like these sadhus. Living life became sinful. Life, which is a precious gift of the divine, got contaminated by these holier-than-thou people. This is the end result of becoming too serious about spirituality.

Osho suggests: Be sincere, but there's no need to be serious. Seriousness creates sickness of mind. Meditation simply means leaving this mind behind and becoming free from its shackles.

He says: One has to be very playful about meditation, one has to learn to enjoy it as fun. One has not to be serious about it - be serious and you miss. One has to go into it very joyously. And one has to keep aware that it is falling into deeper and deeper rest. It is not concentration, just the contrary, it is relaxation. When you are utterly relaxed, for the first time you start feeling your reality; you come face to face with your being.

Meditation should lead us to ecstasy and not to seriousness, as ecstasy is our very nature. Osho adds: To be ecstatic is natural, spontaneous. It needs no effort to be ecstatic, it needs great effort to be miserable. That's why you look so tired, because misery is really hard work; to maintain it is really difficult, because you are doing something against nature.


The Hindu                                                                            Back to top
New Delhi, 6 Sept, 2004

SATYAM SHIVAM SUNDARAM  

ONE day Jalaluddin Rumi took all his students, disciples and devotees to a field. That was his way to teach them things of the beyond, through the examples of this world. He was not a theoretician; he was a very practical man. The disciples were thinking, "What could be the message, going to that faraway field and why can't he say it here?" 

But when they reached the field, they understood that they were wrong and he was right. The farmer seemed to be an almost insane man. He was digging a well in the field - and he had already dug eight incomplete wells. He would go a few feet and then he would find that there was no water. Then he would start digging another well... and the same story continued. He had destroyed the whole field and he had not yet found water. 

The master, Jalaludding Rumi, turned to his disciples and asked them, "Are you going to follow this insane farmer? Sometimes on one path, sometimes on another path, sometimes listening to one, sometimes listening to another... You will collect much knowledge, but all that knowledge is simply junk, because it is not going to give you the enlightenment that you were looking for. It is not going to lead you to the waters of eternal life. 

That's just one of the many stories you get to read in Osho's Satyam Shivam Sundaram, a rebel book from Tao Publishing P Ltd (www.osho.com). "And if becomes your habit to change paths — because the new has a certain attraction for the mind — you will move a few feet on one path, a few feet on another path, but you will never complete the journey." 

Tailpiece 

"What happens if you find two power centres in a political circle?" 

"It becomes an eccentric ellipse."