The Great Path - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 5. THE KNOWLEDGE THAT IS SELF KNOWLEDGE
THE SOUL IS MIND. That very soul is worth seeking. Your mind also bears a ray of the soul, or else
it would no function. Even if you want to sin who will do it? You need energy to commit sin. The
energy comes from the same source; you are simply misusing the energy, but cannot switch over
from misuse to correct use, because at the root lies the ego.
There is only one sin: to consider oneself apart from the existence. All other evil follows like a
shadow. There is only one virtue: to know oneself and be one with existence. When the wave
merges with the ocean all virtues follow by themselves in its wake.
THE SOUL IS MIND.
ILLUSION IS LACKING DISCRIMINATION OF WHAT IS ESSENTIAL.
What is this illusion, this maya? Why is the mind fogged with darkness if the soul itself is the mind?
Why this inability to discriminate what reality is? You are unaware of the doer, the real artist within
you. You are oblivious of the fundamental principle within you. That which you presume to be the
doer is non-existent. You hold on to that which is not; hence the distress and confusion. All your
life you slave and toil, and your troubles are not diminished; in fact they have increased. In spite
of working hard all your life, in the end you find you have gained not a drop of joy; there are only
mountains and mountains of sorrow and pain. Yet man runs in this meaningless rat race until his
last breath.
Why this infatuation for what is worthless and meaningless? Try to understand. All that is
meaningless and worthless has one quality in common.
A man bought a new bungalow. He laid out a garden and planted some seeds flowers. When they
began to sprout he found that weeds had come up mixed with the flowers. He was worried, so he
went to his neighbor, Mulla Nasruddin, for advice.
”How am I to know which plants are flowers and which are weeds?”
”That is simple,” Nasruddin answered, ”Pull them all out! Those which come up again are the weeds.”
This is the quality of all that is worthless: pull it out and it is not destroyed. The meaningful, the
purposeful, is destroyed if you pull it out; not so the meaningless, the purposeless. You sow the
seeds of what is meaningful and you are not even sure if it will bear fruit, for there are thousands of
obstacles ahead. This is the speciality of the useless. Uproot it, and it grows by itself. The useless
and the ineffectual flower on their own. Uproot them a thousand times, and they will still persist.
The meaningless grows effortlessly, but the meaningful requires great effort. That is why you have
chosen the meaningless; it grows on its own. You don’t have to do anything to become a thief. The
habit of stealing grows like weeds. Do you have to work hard to become or to become sexual? You
don’t have to go through any prayer, any sadhana, any yoga. These things happen on their own. do
you have to go somewhere to learn how to be angry, to some university?No it grows like weeds. But
when it comes to meditation the difficulty starts. If you want to learn how to be truly loving there are
many difficulties in the way, while attachments grow and flourish like weeds. You learn love only with
great difficulty. Every moment you have to uproot all the weeds before you can plant the seedling of
The Great Path 89 Osho