Drop the mind

..And when there is no questioning, there is a totally new quality to your consciousness. That quality is called wonder. Wondering is not questioning, it is feeling mystified by existence. Questioning is an effort to demystify existence; it is an effort not to accept the mystery of life. Hence we reduce every mystery to a question. The question means the mystery is only a problem to be solved, and once solved, there will be no mystery.

My effort in answering you is not to demystify existence but to mystify it more. Hence my contradictions. I cannot be consistent, I am not answering you. I cannot be consistent, because I am not here to make you more knowledgeable. If I am consistent, you will have a body of knowledge — very satisfying to the mind, nourishing, strengthening, gratifying.

I am deliberately inconsistent, contradictory, so that you cannot make any body of knowledge out of me. So if one day you start gathering something, another day I take it away. I don’t allow you to gather anything. Sooner or later, you are bound to be awakened to the fact that something totally different is transpiring here. It is not that I am giving you some dogma to be believed in, some philosophy to be lived by, no, not at all. I am utterly destructive, I am taking everything away from you.

Slowly slowly your mind will stop questioning. What is the point? When no answer answers, then what is the point? And the day you stop questioning is a day of great rejoicing, because then wondering starts. You have moved into a totally new dimension; you are again a child.

Jesus says, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of God.” He means unless you are ignorant again, innocent again, unquestioning and wondering, certainly.

Hence there is a difference between the question of a child and a grown-up person. The difference is of quality. The child asks, not to be answered; he is simply being articulate about his wonder. So if you don’t answer the child he forgets about his question and he starts asking another question. His purpose is not to be answered, his purpose is simply that he is talking to himself. He is being articulate about his wonder, he is trying to figure out what it is — the wonder, the mystery. He is not hankering for an answer, so no answer will satisfy him. If you give him an answer he will ask another question about the answer. His wondering continues.

When a grown-up person — educated, sophisticated, well-read, informed — asks a question, he asks it out of his knowledge, to gather more knowledge. The mind always hankers for more and more. If you have money, it hankers for more money; if you have prestige, it hankers for more prestige; if you have knowledge, it hankers for more knowledge. Mind lives in the “more.”

… …

Get out of the mind if you want to live. Get out of the mind if you want to live this moment. The mind cannot live in this moment, because first it has to decide, and the moment is lost in thinking. And by the time the mind has decided — if it ever decides — that moment is gone already. You are always lagging behind. Mind is always running after life, and lagging behind and missing it continuously.

..Jesus says to his disciples, “Look at the lilies in the field, how beautiful they are! Even the great Solomon was not so beautiful attired in all his grandeur as these poor lily flowers.” And what is the secret? The secret is that they think not of the morrow. They live now, they live here.

To live now is to be enlightened, to live here is to be enlightened, to be a lily is to be enlightened this very moment! Don’t think about what I am saying. Don’t think about it, just be here. This is the taste of enlightenment. And once you have tasted it, you will want to taste it more and more.

Don’t make a goal out of it; it is not a goal, it is the most ordinary state of consciousness. It is nothing extraordinary, it is nothing special. Trees are enlightened, and the birds are enlightened, and rocks are enlightened, and the sun and the moon are enlightened. Only man is not, because only man thinks and goes on missing.

The moment you realize that you are missing because you are brooding too much, then small glimpses start happening. Small gaps in the traffic of the mind, small gaps when there is no traffic: those are the moments of meditation. They can happen anywhere….

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune.

Discourse Series:

The Book of Wisdom

Chapter #2
Chapter title: The Enlightenment of the Lilly
12 February 1979 am in Buddha Hall

References:

Osho has also spoken on ‘Creativity, Love, Compassion, Meditation, Nature’ in many of His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourse titles:

  1. Ah, This!
  2. And The Flowers Showered
  3. Beyond Enlightenment
  4. Beyond Psychology
  5. The Art of Dying
  6. Be Still and Know
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