Birthday of American writer Mark Twain

30^th November is the birthday of the American writer extraordinaire Mark Twain. His novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are the most celebrated works of modern American literature. While these novels are often part of high school curriculum, Twain has irreverently remarked Don’t let schooling interfere with your education. A humourist, lecturer and publisher, Mark Twain’s wit and satire earned him adulation worldwide. A profound wisdom about life reflects from Mark Twain’s classic quotes –

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life.
A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Twain was born in 1835, shortly after an appearance of Halley’s Comet. He predicted that he would “go out with it” as well. In a spooky coincidence, Mark Twain died the day after the comet made its closest approach to the Earth.

Osho often relates anecdotes of and stories by Mark Twain in His discourses. Mark Twain used to infuriate his wife with his habitual foul language. One day she hit on an idea: she would cure him with a taste of his own medicine. Bursting into his study, she said, “Why the hell do you have to leave your goddamn cigar butts all over the place?” There was a pause. Then Twain looked up from his writing and said, “My dear, you may have learned the words, but you will never get the tune!”

Just be aware of your state of mind: the yearning is there, the thirst is there, the unfulfillment is there. That means you are ready to desire. Now desire, and do not listen to Buddhas: they are dangerous. Desire! Move! You will have to move your own way; you will have to suffer your own way. Nobody can escape suffering. The law is universal. Nobody can come to shortcuts; there are none. You will have to move your own way, you will have to pass through your own hells. When you have passed through them, transcended them, have become richer, experienced them and a maturity has happened to you — only then will desire fall. Desire will disappear and then there will be no negative part to it. Then the total desire will disappear because you will come to realize this is nonsense. “I have been creating my own hell.” And this is not intellectual, this is not in the mind. Your total being, your whole being, will come to conclude and this conclusion will be through your experience, not through anybody else’s. Then desire disappears without giving birth to another desire in a different guise. Otherwise you will go on changing the objects.

Sometimes you desire wealth and then you feel misery. And then you conclude that this desire is misery, so you start desiring God or you start desiring heaven or you start desiring liberation or you start desiring meditation, ecstasy — but you go on desiring. And if you go on desiring, you are simply changing the shape of the desire, the object of the desire. But DESIRE remains the same: YOU are not changing, you remain the same. You are moving in a pattern, in a circle. You are not moving anywhere. Hence, I go on saying again and again, be aware — beware of Buddhas, Christs, Krishnas. Beware of me because I go on saying things to you which you can believe and then it is dangerous. When I say something, try to understand it; do not conclude through it. Conclusion must come through your own life; only then will it be a mutation. And do not be in a hurry. There is no hurry; time is eternal.

Experience! Be authentic to your experience and allow the conclusions to come only through your own individual particular search. The truth will happen to you but it will not happen to you if you go on borrowing it from others. That becomes a substitute truth. It creates more problems than it solves. Your problems, as I see them, are ninety percent because of your borrowed knowledge. Only ten percent of problems are true. Ninety percent are false because they do not belong to you at all. First you start believing in a thing and then problems start to arise out of that belief. This is a borrowed problem which arises because you have believed, because you have concluded intellectually, rationally, that desire is futile. If this is really your conclusion, then how can unfulfillment still exist there? Unfulfillment is the seed of desire.

When you are unfulfilled it means desire: you want to seek fulfillment somewhere. When you are unfulfilled it means you are not that which you would like to be, you are not there where you would like to be. So desire, find, seek, move! Unfulfillment means discontentment with yourself. Fulfillment means: I am what I am; I am where I should be. Or wherever I am, I am absolutely content with me — fulfilled. Then there is no movement of desire. Movement is there but that movement is of life, not of desire. I will go on moving and each movement will happen through my life energy, not through desire. Desire is through mind. Life goes on moving but I will move like a river. The very energy will create a movement but the movement will not be according to desire. I will not desire first and then move. Try to understand this distinction.

I am speaking to you. This speaking can be of two types: it can be a sheer movement of life energy, or it can be part of a desire. If I desire it, then I will have to rehearse it. Then before coming to you, in my mind I will desire you to be present. Then in my mind I will think what to say, what not to say, how to say it and how not to say it. Then I will plan it; then I have moved into the future. Then I will repeat it. Then if it is not up to the standard I had planned I will feel frustrated.

I have heard that once Mark Twain was coming back from a lecture hall where he had lectured. When he came back, his wife asked him, “How was the lecture?”

Mark Twain said, “What lecture are you asking about — the one I rehearsed before, or the one I actually delivered, or the one I wanted to deliver and was delivering instead in the car while coming back?”

If I think about it beforehand it is desire. If I simply come to you and it is a response, not planned, not thought about, it is a sheer movement of life energy, there has been no planning for it, then it is life moving. If it has been planned then it is mind desiring. Movement will be there but it will be unplanned, spontaneous. Desire cripples movement. It doesn’t allow life energy itself to move. It plans, it chooses, it decides beforehand. Before the actual situation you have already decided. You will always be in difficulty because it is never going to be exactly the right response — because you cannot conceive of the situation beforehand. It always remains unknown. You will feel frustrated.

A mind which desires will always feel frustrated. Only a mind which doesn’t desire, which simply moves wheresoever life, the Brahman, leads it to — whether right or wrong, whether to hell or heaven, wheresoever the life energy leads, the one who is desireless moves within. Nothing can frustrate such a being. How? How can you frustrate him? And nothing can make YOU fulfilled. How can anyone make you fulfilled? With desire there is no meeting with fulfillment. With nondesire there is no meeting with frustration.

Be true and authentic to yourself and if you have not overcome desire do not believe that you have overcome it; that is not going to help. Know that you have not overcome. Know that ambition is there; know that as you are you are unfulfilled. You need something else. That need for something else… whether vague or not, whether you know what it is or not, makes no difference; you are not at this moment whole and total, at ease with yourself. You are not at home. Your home is somewhere else; you are searching for it. Know it because this knowing will be good and helpful. Know it and move into desire. Suffer it! Feel the pain of it, the frustration of it, and allow life itself to come to a conclusion. Please don’t you conclude; allow life itself to come to its conclusion. And when life comes to its conclusion, desire falls without any substitute desire being created there. It simply falls down. Just like dead leaves fall from a tree, desire falls from you — total desire. Then there is no negative part hidden behind it. And when you are in the state of nondesiring, all that is blissful happens to you, all that is ecstatic happens to you. You flower for the first time. And when there is no unfulfillment, you are fulfilled AS YOU ARE.

But before that happens, if you go on borrowing it will be difficult: you are creating unnecessary barriers for yourself. The conclusions may appeal to you but that appeal is of no meaning. I can convince you about something but that conviction carries no meaning because it has been forced by me. I can argue, I can convince, and you may feel this is right. But that feeling will not help unless your life energy concludes it, unless it is an inner conviction which arises within you and is not forced from without.

That is why I say buddhas are dangerous — because they are so convincing. When you move around them there is every possibility that you will become a victim, every possibility that you will get convinced. Their very being is convincing. That is why so many religions are created, so many sects are there. Whenever a buddha happens, an enlightened one, necessarily you get convinced, you become hypnotized — and you borrow conclusions. And then for lives together you go on with those borrowed conclusions and they become a burden.

Die to that burden! Be authentic to yourself and try to find out where you are. Even if it is hell, accept that “I am in hell.” The very acceptance that you are in hell will create the situation where you can move out of it. But you live in hell and you go on believing that you are in heaven. This is sheer nonsense and nothing can come out of it.

Source:

Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.

Discourse series: The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 2 Chapter #8

Chapter title: A distant star

7 September 1976 am in Buddha Hall

References:

Osho has spoken on famous writers and philosophers like Albert Camus, Aristotle, Berkeley, Byron, Bukharin, Confucius, Descartes, Feuerbach, Fyodor Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, Hegel, Huxley, John Milton, Kahlil Gibran, Kalidas, Kant, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Nietzsche, Rabindranath Tagore, Schiller, Shakespeare, Socrates, Voltaire, Wittgenstein and many more in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. Come Come Yet Again Come
2. Beyond Psychology
3. The Dhammapada: the way of the Buddha Vol.1,3,7,9,10,12
4. The Transmission of The Lamp
5. I am That
6. The Perfect Master
7. The Golden Future
8. Communism and Zen Fire, Zen Wind