The Great Path - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 4. TO BE DEAD DO NOTHING
if your understanding were the right understanding, you wouldn’t need the scriptures at all; but you
are not wise, and that is a fact! The meanings that an ignorant person draws from the scriptures just
cause him more trouble and difficulty. No! You need living scriptures. THE MASTER IS THE LIVE
SCRIPTURE. Find a living guide to lead you on the right path.
Shiva says: THE GURU IS THE WAY. There is no other way. If you try to solve this problem yourself
you will find yourself drawn deeper into the problem, for the mind is a very subtle mechanism. To
avoid accepting anyone’s help we attempt to solve our problems by ourselves. If you discover that
your watch has stopped your first impulse is to do something immediately to try to make it work
again. The more stupid you are, the more strong impulse you have. A child doesn’t hesitate at all;
he fell what’s the big problem? First it was working now it doesn’t. Let me find out for myself. It is
not a very complex machine.
If you attempt to repair your own watch you will find yourself in the same state as Mulla Nasruddin.
I have heard: One day Mulla Nasruddin went to a watch repair shop. He placed his watch on the
counter. It was just a pile of little wheels and pieces. The watchmaker looked at the mess and then
he looked at the Mulla.
Nasruddin said, ”I dropped it. I can’t understand how it could have fallen.”
”I don’t understand why you bothered to pick it up,” said the watchmaker. ”It is beyond repair. Anyway,
a watch won’t fall into a million pieces just by dropping it.”
”Well, the fact is,” confessed the Mulla, ”I tried to repair it by myself.”
A watch is a simple mechanism compared to the mind. There is no mechanism on earth as
complicated as the brain. There are seventy million cells in your brain, each capable of collecting
ten million messages. Psychologists say that one brain can store all the written matter in the world.
All the knowledge of the world can be stored in one small brain. And it is such a small thing. It hardly
weighs one and a half kilos, yet it has seventy million tiny neurons, each invisible to the naked eye.
Once you grasp the immense complexity of the brain, you can understand why brain surgery is still
in its infancy. You try to cut something and thousands of other neurons get destroyed. Everything is
so delicate. Just a touch of a surgeon’s knife and big numbers of neurons are destroyed.
Even the knife is not needed; you try standing on your head for half an hour everyday and your
brain will be damaged. While standing on the head excess blood floods the brain and damages the
delicate tissue. The people who practice this posture for a long time are never very intelligent.
Man’s brain developed as it did because at some stage in his evolution he stood upright on his hind
legs, and the flow of blood to his brain was thereby reduced. For this reason the brains of animals
did not develop any further; because their brain and their bodies are on the same level. Their nerve
fibers are thicker, they are not thin. The whole dignity and speciality of man lies in the fact that he
stood up. By standing on two legs the gravitational force causes his blood to flow downwards. His
lungs and heart have to work harder to pump the blood upwards, only then the blood flows towards
the brain. And thus a limited quantity reaches the brain. This has made it easier for the finer, more
The Great Path 79 Osho