The Great Path - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 4. TO BE DEAD DO NOTHING
have to give up your body, bit by bit, in the course of meditation. All other offerings are useless. You
can offer ghee and wheat to the sacred fire, but it will do you no good. You will have to throw yourself
into the flames for the fire of life to be lighted. You have to stake your entire body. If you try to save a
part, your fire will not ignite the sacrifice will not take place. Give all of yourself! THE BODY IS THE
OFFERING!
KNOWLEDGE IS THE FOOD.
You live, now, on food. The food reaches your body. It is necessary. Realization, knowledge,
meditation, awareness are food for the soul. Until now you have fed only the body and have left the
soul hungry. Your body is well nourished, but your soul is starving.
Knowledge is food for the soul, so the more you become awakened, conscious, the more you know,
and by this I do not mean book knowledge. Knowledge means awareness. The more you are
established in the fourth state, turiya, the more your soul will be filled with life energy,. Your soul is
almost dried up; you have denied it all nourishment. You have virtually forgotten that it needs to be
fed.
Your body consumes food while your soul is fasting. This is the reason why many religions have
used fasting. Reverse the process: Let the body fast a few days and let the soul be nourished. This
does not mean that the body has to be starved. Give the body its normal requirements, but don’t let
all your effort in life be exhausted in feeding it. Let a major part of your life’s work be the awakening
of knowledge, for that is your soul’s food. Knowledge is the food.
WHEN KNOWLEDGE IS DESTROYED, THE DREAM IS SEEN.
If knowledge of the soul does not penetrate you, and if the flame within does not get its fuel, then
dreams arise in your life; then desires arise, and your life loses its way and staggers there in the
darkness. Then you live in illusion, in desires; then you merely keep thinking and weaving webs of
fantasy.
I asked Nasruddin, ”Mulla, where do you intend to go for your vacation this year?”
”I only go on vacation every three years,” he replied.
”What do you do in the remaining two years?”
”One year we spend in musing over the previous vacation and reliving it in our minds, and one year
we spend in planning the next vacation.”
At least Nasruddin goes on a trip every three years, but you do not go at all! Half your life is spent
in thinking of the past and the other half in thinking about the future. The journey never begins.
Either you roam around the byways of your memory, which is a dead dream, or you wander in your
imagination which is a dream of the future, which is still to come. You are divided in these two. The
present is in the middle, and that is where life is – but you miss it!
Knowledge, awareness, will awaken you, here and now, to this very moment. Knowledge will bring
you into the present. The past will fade. It has in fact faded. It is you who senselessly persist in
The Great Path 83 Osho