World Health Day

LIVE IN JOY, Buddha repeats,

IN HEALTH,
EVEN AMONG THE AFFLICTED.

By health Buddha means wholeness. Health comes from the same root as ‘healing’. A healed person is a healthy person, a healed person is a whole person. By “health” Buddha does not mean the ordinary, medical meaning of the term; his meaning is not medicinal, it is meditational — although you will be surprised to know that the words ‘meditation’ and ‘medicine’ both come from the same root. Medicine heals you physically, meditation heals you spiritually. Both are healing processes, both bring health. But Buddha is not talking about the health of the body; he is talking about the health of your soul. Be whole, be total. Don’t be fragmentary, don’t be divided. Be an individual, literally: indivisible, one piece.

People are not one piece; they are many fragments, somehow holding themselves together. They can fall apart at any moment. They are all Humpty-Dumpties, just bundles of many things. Any new situation, any new danger, any insecurity, and they can fall apart. Your wife dies or you go bankrupt or you are unemployed — any small thing can prove the last straw on the camel’s back. The difference is only of degrees. Somebody is boiling at ninety-eight degrees, somebody at ninety-nine; somebody may be ninety-nine point nine degrees, but the difference is only of degrees, and any small thing can change the balance. You can go insane at any moment, because inside you are already a crowd. So many desires, so many dreams, so many people are living in you. If you watch carefully, you will not find one person there but many faces, changing every moment. It is as if you are just a marketplace where so many people are going and coming, so much noise, and nothing makes sense.

Just the other day, Subhash asked a question: “Beloved Master, do you ever dream?”

You can dream only if you are many. You can dream only if you have many desires. I have none. Dreams are a by-product of desiring: what you desire in the day, you dream in the night. Dreaming is a hangover; something has remained incomplete in the day that has to be completed. The mind is a perfectionist; it wants to try, in every possible way, to complete things. On the road you saw a beautiful restaurant, but you were in a hurry. You were going for some work and you could not enter into the restaurant. And the smell of the food was so enchanting and the color of the food…. You wanted to go in but you could not. You will dream about the restaurant; you will have to dream just to complete the whole process, so that it drops and no longer goes on hanging onto you. But your dreams will reflect your insanity.

A sane person cannot dream — but by a “sane person” I mean a shining one, a Buddha. I don’t mean by “sane” what YOU mean by the word. To you, the insane people are in the insane asylums and everybody outside is sane. That is not so. Just the wall of the asylum does not divide the sane from the insane. There are insane people inside and there are insane people outside. The people who are outside have not yet been caught or maybe they are still within the boundary of normal behavior. At least on the surface they can manage; in their innermost core they may be insane.

I cannot dream even if I want to; it is impossible. Whenever I am sitting I am simply sitting — there is no thought. And when I am sleeping I am simply sleeping — there is no dream. But Subhash must be suffering from dreams. Everybody is suffering, day in, day out.

“I am worried. Last night I dreamed I was alone with a hundred beautiful blondes, a hundred beautiful brunettes and a hundred beautiful redheads. It was horrible!”

“Good heavens, man! What is so horrible about that?” asked the psychiatrist of the patient.

“I dreamed that I was a girl, too!”

Your dreams will reflect you. Who else can they reflect? Your dreams are keys; through your dreams much can be known about you. The whole of psychoanalysis depends on your dreams for clues. When you are awake you are not trustworthy; what you say about yourself is deceptive. In your dreams you are more innocent, because there is nobody to control and repress. The conscience is fast asleep, morality is gone; you are more natural, more normal. In your dreams you are purer. Hence psychoanalysis has to depend on your dreams and through your dreams it comes to conclusions about you. This is a very sad state of affairs: that you cannot be trusted at all, because you say one thing and you are totally something else. And it is not that you deliberately try to deceive; deception has almost become your second nature. That’s why you immediately forget your dreams; it is a strategy of the mind. Within five seconds of waking up… when you wake up there is a little lingering, a little memory — just a few fragments, the last parts of your dreams. But within five seconds they are gone. By the time you are out of bed all your dreams have disappeared, you have forgotten all about them. Unless you make a very conscious effort you will not be able to remember them. This is a strategy of the mind, it simply closes the door, because your dreams can be a disturbance to you.

If you come to know that in your dream you killed your father it will be heavy on you, you may feel guilty. If you are a very very moralistic, puritanical person and you see that in your dream you had eloped, escaped with the wife of your neighbor and you were enjoying it, you will be disturbed. You will become suspicious about your morality, about your purity. It will hang over you like a dark cloud. The mind simply cuts you off from your dreams. It has created two kinds of worlds: one, the dreaming world, totally separate, and one, the so-called waking world, totally separate. You live in compartments. When you enter into dreaming you forget all about waking; when you enter into waking you forget all about dreaming.

The Buddha is awake even while he is asleep. He has no compartments in his being. He is not many, he is one. Because he is one and he has no clinging to memories and no desires for the future, the present is enough for him. Then he lives moment to moment in its totality; he does not go on living partially. Your dreams simply show that you live partially, and the unlived parts have to be lived in your dreams. If you live totally each moment, then there is no possibility of any dreams.

Once it happened:

A Sufi came to me, a very beautiful person, and doing Sufi meditation — ZIKR — he had become capable of reading other people’s thoughts. Some of his disciples, who were known to me, wanted him to come and read my thoughts.

I said, “Okay, bring him.”

The man was really capable. He would simply close his eyes and he would start saying what thoughts are passing within you. For half an hour he remained with closed eyes, very puzzled. Then he finally gave up. He said, “But I don’t see anything, just utter emptiness.” He said, “This is the first time that I can’t read. What have you done to me?”

I had not done anything to him. I said to him, “I have not done anything. I am simply sitting here, not doing anything to you or to anybody else. But how can you read if there are no thoughts? It is not that I have stopped your capacity to read.”

He was thinking that I had done some damage to his thought reading. I said, “I have not done anything. If you want, I can start bringing up a few thoughts. It will be an effort. Just the way I speak outside I will start speaking inside. I will have to think of my sannyasins and I will have to speak to them — then you can read. Your capacity is intact. But I was just sitting silently, the way I always sit when I am alone. Neither in the daytime am I thinking, nor in the night am I dreaming. All dreams disappeared the day desires disappeared. All thoughts became meaningless the day I came to know that I am not the mind. But I understand your difficulties, I understand your confusion….”

A wealthy tycoon went for a cruise on his fancy yacht, taking with him five buddies, six gorgeous girls and a sailor to man the ship. They encountered a serious storm and the boat went down with the tycoon and his buddies, but the women and the sailor managed to make it to a desert island along with a waterproof bag of limited provisions.

All went well for almost a week. Our sailor friend had his Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday well taken care of. The only problem was that they were running out of food.

On Sunday a voluptuous native woman approached bearing gifts of bananas, coconuts and other edibles. The gorgeous girls were overjoyed. “We are saved!” they cried.

But the sailor muttered resignedly to himself, “There go my Sundays!”

You are living inside in a very confused state. And not only young people; even when they become old the same state continues — not only continues, it becomes more and more confusing because, as you accumulate experience, your confusion becomes greater.

Interviewing the sixty-five-year-old rodeo champion in Amarillo, Texas, the New York newspaperman remarked, “You are really an extraordinary man to be a rodeo champion at your age.”

“Heck,” said the cowboy, “I am not nearly the man my pa is. He was just signed to play guard for a pro football team, and he is eighty-eight.”

“Amazing!” gasped the journalist. “I would like to meet your father.”

“Can’t right now. He is in Fort Worth standing up for grandpa. Grandpa is getting married tomorrow; he is one hundred and fourteen.”

“Your family is simply unbelievable!” said the newspaperman. “Here you are, a rodeo champion at sixty-five. Your father is a football player at eighty-eight. And now your grandpa wants to get married at one hundred and fourteen.”

“Hell, mister, you got that wrong,” said the Texan, “Grandpa does not want to get married — he has to!”

You go on accumulating. Your childhood is the closest to buddhahood. As you grow old you grow insane. As you grow old, you go farther and farther away from buddhahood. It is really a very strange state; it should not be so. One should grow TOWARDS buddhahood, but people grow in just the opposite direction.

Buddha says: LIVE IN JOY, IN HEALTH, EVEN AMONG THE AFFLICTED.

This is a very important sutra to be remembered — more so because the Christians are creating a totally wrong approach to life. They say: When there is so much misery in the world, how can you be joyous? Sometimes they come to me and they say, “People are starving and people are poor. How can you teach people to dance and sing and be joyous? There are so many people afflicted with so many diseases, and you teach people meditation? This is selfishness!”

But that’s exactly what Buddha is saying. He is saying: LIVE IN JOY, IN HEALTH, EVEN AMONG THE AFFLICTED.
LIVE IN JOY,
IN PEACE,
EVEN AMONG THE TROUBLED.

You cannot change the whole world. You have a small lifespan, it will be gone soon. You cannot make it a condition that “I will rejoice only when the whole world has changed and everybody is happy.” That is never going to happen and it is not within your capacity to do it either.

People have decided to be miserable; that is their decision, otherwise nobody is forcing them to be miserable. Poverty is their decision, maybe taken unconsciously, but poverty is their decision. You can see it happening. Just three hundred years ago the native people of America were as poor as one can imagine. They had the land — the same land — but they had chosen a life-style which kept them poor. Now America has become the richest country. It is the same country, but with a different type of people.

And you will be surprised that the first people who arrived in America were not very virtuous, religious types of people — no. In fact the virtuous and the religious remain miserable. The people, who reached America and Australia, the pioneers, were more down-to-earth people who believed in “Eat, drink and be merry.” These were the people who transformed the whole fate of the American continent; they transformed a poor country into the richest ever. Now the same can happen to this country, but it has taken a wrong style of life. And it has lived with this style of life for so many centuries that it seems it is the only way to live. And it worships people who support its style, because they fit with its ideology. The people of this country cannot agree with me because I am trying to change the very style of life, the very pattern, the very structure of their thought, their mind, their being. They can become as rich as any country in the world, maybe the richest, but first they will have to change their whole style of thinking, living, being. They worship poverty — how can they become rich? They condemn richness — how can they become rich? They condemn all joys of the earth, they are all for renunciation, they are anti-life. How can life shower upon them its grace, its bliss, its joys? They are not receptive; they are completely blind and deaf.

If the only way you can be happy is to have everybody else happy, then you are never going to be happy. Buddha is stating a simple fact. He is saying: LIVE IN JOY, IN HEALTH, EVEN AMONG THE AFFLICTED. He is not saying don’t help them, but by being ill yourself you cannot help them. By being poor yourself you cannot help the poor, although the poor will worship you because they will see how great a saint you are. They worshipped Mahatma Gandhi for the sheer reason that he tried to live like a poor man. But just by living like a poor man you are not going to help the poor. If the doctor also falls ill to help his patients, will you call him a saint? You will call him just stupid, because this is the time he needs all his health so that he can be helpful to people. This is strange logic, but it has prevailed down the centuries: that if you want to help the poor, be poor, live a poor life, live just like the poor. Of course the poor people will give you great respect and honor, but that is not going to help the poor, it will only fulfill your ego. And any ego fulfilled creates misery for you, not joy.

LIVE IN JOY, IN HEALTH, EVEN AMONG THE AFFLICTED. LIVE IN JOY, IN PEACE, EVEN AMONG THE TROUBLED. That is the only way to help, the only way to serve. First be selfish, first transform yourself. Your life in peace, in joy, in health, can be a great source of nourishment for people who are starving for spiritual food. People are not really starving for material things. Material richness is very simple: just a little more technology, a little more science, and people can be rich. The real problem is how to be inwardly rich. And when you are outwardly rich you will be surprised — for the first time you become more acutely, more keenly aware of your inner poverty. For the first time all meaning in life disappears when you are outwardly rich, because in contrast, the inner poverty can be seen more clearly. Outside there is light all around and inside you are a dark island. The rich man knows his poverty more than the poor person, because the poor person has no contrast. Outside there is darkness, inside there is darkness; he knows darkness is what life is. But when there is light outside you become desirous of a new phenomenon: you long for inner light. When you see that richness is possible outside, why can’t you be rich inside?

Source:

Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.

Discourse Series: The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 6 Chapter #5

Chapter title: Live in joy

25 October 1979 am in Buddha Hall

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘Health, nature, well-being, wholeness’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. From Darkness to Light
2. Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol 1, 2
3. Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1,2
4. Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 2
5. The Way of Tao, Volume 1
6. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 6
7. The Hidden Harmony
8. The Last Testament, Vol 1, 2, 3, 4
9. The Perfect Master, Vol 1
10. The Psychology of the Esoteric
11. The Rebellious Spirit
12. Philosophia Ultima
13. I Am That