The Great Path - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 1. THE DARKNESS INSIDE
become sober and conscious, she would be willing to marry me but I would refuse. This is how I
missed. What to do – there was no way out.”
Whenever you’ll open your eyes, you will find nothing but ugliness and misery all around you.
Everything looks fine when you are in an unconscious state. This is the reason why you find it
difficult to conceive: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING. You say, ”Impossible!” That’s why one
needs to go through pain. That is called tapascharya, spiritual practice. Whenever one begins to
become aware, first he will have to go through suffering. For lives you have created misery around
you, who else would pass through it if not you? That is what we have called the karma.
Karma simply means: the misery created all around by you for life after life. Knowingly or
unknowingly you have sown the seeds of misery, now who will reap the crop? So whenever you
come to your awareness, you see the crop – long and wide. You will have to pass through this farm.
But you sit there out of fear. Looking at the field and realizing what a great bother it is, you close
your eyes and get drunk. But the more you become drunk, the more the crop grows. Each birth of
yours adds something into the chain of your karmas, not reduce anything. It takes you deeper and
deeper into a pit, the hell comes closer and closer.
As soon as you are filled with awareness, the first thing that will happen is you will begin to see
misery, the hell around you. Because you are the one who has created it. However, if you remain
courageous and pass through the misery consciously, you will have cut the crop. You won’t have
to go through the same miseries again. Once you have gone through this chain of miseries – the
chain of karmas, the chain tied around your soul.... If you could pass through it without losing your
consciousness, courageously, unworried; if you could determine, ”whatever misery I have created,
I’ll go through it, I’ll go to the end of it. I want to arrive at that initial moment when I was innocent and
the journey of suffering had not started yet, when my soul was absolutely pure and I had not gathered
any misery – I am determined to penetrate up to that point regardless of any consequences, pain,
or sorrow.”
If you could show this much courage then sooner or later you are bound to cross your misery and
reach the very point where this sutra of Shiva, CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING, will become
clear to you. And once you have become centered in your consciousness, no misery will ever be
caused by you. Only an unconscious man creates misery all around him.
Have you seen a drunkard walk on the street staggering along? That’s how your life is. You take a
step in one direction and the foot lands in another direction. You set out to go at one place, but reach
somewhere else. You leave home to talk about one thing but end up speaking something else. You
see this happening every day, and yet you fail to understand why it is so. You go out to ask someone
an apology, but return home after having squabbled more. Are you in your senses? You begin with
a loving talk but end up with hostility.
One man, drunk, was walking down the street looking at the sky. A car passed by him. The driver
barely managed in saving the accident. He stopped the car and said to the man, ”Sir, if you won’t
look in the direction where you want to go, you might end up going where you are looking now.” And
we are all....
You have no idea where you are going, why you are going, where you are looking, why you are
looking. You are constantly on the move, because there is a restlessness within which does not
The Great Path 15 Osho