The Great Path - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 8. THE FOURTH STATE
you. This ray of light will make an alchemical change in your life. Your anger will abate, for how can a
witness be angry? Attachments will become less and less, for how can a witness have attachments?
Happenings will take place. There will be successes and defeats, there will be sorrows, there will be
joys, but you will be less affected by them, for how can the witness be affected? Joy will come and
you will witness it, sorrow will come and you will witness it, while a continuous stream flows within:
”I am the witness, not the one who is enjoying all this.”
No one will be able to tell how long it will take you. Everything depends on the sincerity of your
purpose, the intensity of your desire, your speed of progress – whether you crawl like an ant or
run like a deer. People walk in the realm of religion a slowly as if they are walking in a marriage
procession. This way you will reach nowhere. The marriage procession has nowhere to go; it just
circles around the town and comes back to the same place.
There was a man called Aesop. His moral fables are still the best the world has ever known. He was
a man of great wisdom. One day Aesop was sitting at the side of the road when a man came up to
him and said, ”Could you tell me, sir, how far away is the village, and how long it will take me to reach
there?” Aesop said nothing. He got up and walked alongside the man. The man was embarrassed
and also a little frightened by this strange behavior. He asked Aesop not to trouble himself, all he
wanted to know was the distance, and then he would be on his way.
Aesop said nothing but continued to walk with the man. After some fifteen minutes he stopped and
said, ”It will take you two hours to reach the village.”
”You could have told me that at the beginning!” the man exclaimed. ”There was no need to walk a
mile with me.”
Aesop replied, ”How could I estimate the time before I knew your walking speed? The distance isn’t
decided by the length but by the speed of the walker. Now I can tell you definitely that it will take you
two hours to reach the village.”
Everything depends on your speed. You can run and you will arrive sooner. You can waddle along,
and then we cannot say when you will arrive. Your speed can be such that in one moment you can
take the jump. You can also move in a half-hearted, lukewarm manner; then it will take you infinite
births to reach. If you stake all your being without holding back any part of yourself, if you put in
all your effort with the utmost intensity of your life form, you can reach here and now. For this is no
external journey; it is an inner journey. You have only to turn inside from wherever you are. If you
postpone for tomorrow or the day after, or the day after that... well, that is what you have been doing
for infinite lives!
Remember, nature is not interested in your religious attainments. Nature leads only as far as man
has already reached. If you wish to go beyond that only your own effort will take you. Nature can at
best make you an animal, and no further. Humanity has to be acquired. This is why man is in peril
– he lives in great danger.
All animals are tranquil, except man. They accept what nature gives; they have no goals. You
cannot get a dog stirred up by telling him that he is less of a dog than another. Whatever the breed,
whatever the form, the essential feeling of being a dog is the same in all dogs. This is not so with
The Great Path 148 Osho