The Great Path - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 7. MEDITATION IS THE SEED
you decide immediately whether he is good or bad, but in your full awareness, who is good, who is
bad?
Whatever you have become is accidental. You have not gone about it in full awareness. Things
happen around you and you flow unconsciously with them. You float like a wisp of straw in a river;
you go wherever the current takes you. The straw thinks that it is travelling; and so you think you are
doing something. How can you be the doer when you are totally unaware?
This sutra says that knowledge becomes indestructible only when the seed of meditation breaks and
gives way to the eternal spring of consciousness. Then even when you sleep, you are not asleep.
You are never asleep; you are fully conscious inside. Then when you make love you do so in full
consciousness. When you eat, drink, walk or talk, you are completely aware. Then your whole life
becomes an expanding consciousness. This is what we call Buddhahood, and it means: the state
in which a man lives who is in full consciousness.
Now knowledge cannot be destroyed, now wisdom never fades. The flame within never burns low. It
burns constantly and without flickering. When this happens – that the seed of meditation breaks and
there arises from within the eternal knowledge and the constant stream of consciousness – then
there is no birth; then you shall not reincarnate again.
You return to the body only in a state of unconsciousness. You are asleep and so you descend again
to the body. The day your consciousness becomes constant the journey of the body will end. No
longer will you descend into this narrow prison. No one in his full consciousness would choose to
live in a body, for it is a bondage; it is a chain you have forged around yourself. This is imprisonment,
slavery; and why would you want to be a slave knowingly?
You descend into the body unknowingly. You have lost your way in the dark. The day your eyes
become filled with light you will stop descending into the body. Then where will you be? You will
be a part of the great void, a bodiless part of it. This we call Brahma. Others call this God,; yet
others call it nirvana or moksha. Call it by any name, it makes no difference. Between religions
there is nothing more than a difference of words, and all words are correct, for each word indicates
one quality of that supreme state.
Nirvana means: the extinguishing of the lamp. Buddha likes this word. He would say: ”When the
lamp is extinguished, where does the light go?” What would you say? Where has it gone? You
will not be able to point to a specific place. The light is bound to be somewhere, for nothing in this
existence is ever destroyed. Whatever is, is! Whatever is not, is not! There is no way for a thing
that is not, to be; and there is no way for a thing that is, not to be. The flame, the light, must be
somewhere – somewhere in the vast expanse, one with existence. Up to now it had a form, now it
is formless. Now it is liberated from the lamp, but that does not mean that it is lost.
The lamp was made of clay, the flame was totally separate. What has the flame to do with the
clay? There is no relationship between the two. The flame did not owe its existence to the lamp; the
lamp did not have to become the flame. The lamp was merely the body that contained the flame.
You snuffed out the flame, and the connection between the fuel and the flame was broken. The
flame was lost in the vastness and became a part of the great light. Therefore Buddha referred to
this supreme state as nirvana, total extinction, for the flame dies down and becomes one with the
supreme sun.
The Great Path 138 Osho