:: NEWS TO SHARE ::

• DON’T BE SERIOUS, BE SINCERE 

• A LOVE AFFAIR WITH GOD

• ALL LIFE IS CONNECTED
  

Hindustan Times                                                                          Back to top
The Inner Voice, 4 August

DON’T BE SERIOUS, BE SINCERE 
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 Pioneer Daily                                                                            Back to top
New Delhi, 16 August

A LOVE AFFAIR WITH GOD
Swami Chaitanya Keerti  

Sufism is in the air again. A learned Mohammedan once approached Osho asking, "You are not Mohammedan, why speak on Sufism?" Osho said, "I'm not a Mohammedan but Sufi all the same. A Sufi need not be Mohammedan. A Sufi can exist anywhere, any form - because Sufism is the core of religions. Sufism can exist without Islam... It means love affair with the god. One is ready to dissolve into the whole. It is not confined by dogma or creed. Sufis have a special word - silsila. What Hindus call parampara, they call silsila. This means transfer from one heart to another, one person to another." 

In Beyond Psychology, Osho tells a Sufi story: A man after truth finds an old man beneath a tree. The young man heard one has to leave on a pilgrimage – but where to? Seeing the old man, he thought: He must know the road. The man instructed, "Follow the right till you come to a tree" - he described it in detail, leaves, fruit - "and you will find an old man like me but 30 years older. He will be your guide."

The traveller was happy. He thanked the man and rushed on. For 30 years, he wandered but the tree and old man never came. He was tired, older. Finally, he decided, "It is better to go home...! God knows, when the guide meets me, what guidance it will be." He returned. Again passed the tree - and was shocked! It was the same man, 30 years older. He said, "My God! Why did you waste my 30 years?"

The other said, "Did I waste 30 years - or you wasted mine? Then you were not ripe enough to be guided. You didn't look at the tree - but I described it in detail. I described your guide. You were in a hurry; too young. But I waited knowing one day you will come."


Hindustan Times                                                                         Back to top 
New Delhi, 20 August

ALL LIFE IS CONNECTED
Swami Chaitanya Keerti  

Life exists in non-duality — it throbs in oneness, because deep down everything is connected with everything else. This existential realization is God-realization. In Hsin Hsin Ming Book of Nothing, Zen master Sosan says: "One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction."

Osho explains: Life is an organic unity. Nothing is divided, everything is one. If you think it is divided, divisions are mind enforced. Otherwise everything intermingles, melts, merges into the other. It is happening all the time.

He gives the example: You eat a fruit; the fruit becomes your blood. The tree has mingled in you, the boundary is lost. And this fruit may have remained in many people's blood before, many animals, many plants, many rocks.

This energy that is the fruit has been there always in existence - melting, merging, emerging, moving from this to that, passing all boundaries.

Just watch any phenomenon. The fruit on the tree, what is it doing? Scientists say that the fruit is doing a miracle. It is transforming the earth, it is transforming the sunrays, it is transforming water. It is a miracle, because you cannot eat earth, you cannot eat sunrays directly. This fruit, an apple, is doing a miracle. It is transforming everything and making it so that you canabsorb it and it becomes your blood.

And this energy has been moving because it has always been there. The whole of the energy remains the same, because there is nowhere else to go, so the energy cannot be less or more.

Nothing is added to the universe, and nothing can be deleted. Where will you take it away? The whole remains the same.