From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 23. CONSCIENCE: A COFFIN FOR CONSCIOUSNESS
The king got so puzzled that he left without asking the questions he had come to ask. When he went
back to his court, his advisers asked what happened. He said, ”What happened it is better to forget
about. This Master Nan-In seems to be absolutely insane! He was cutting wood; he said, ’I am a
woodcutter and Master Nan-In is not available right now.’ Then the same man came in a Master’s
robe and I asked him, and he said, ’A similar man was cutting the wood, but he was the woodcutter;
I am the Master.’”
One of the men in the court said, ”You have missed the point of what he was trying to say to you
– that when cutting wood he is totally involved in it. Nothing is left which can claim to be Master
Nan-In; nothing is left out, he is just a woodcutter.”
And in Zen language, which is difficult to translate, he was saying not exactly that ”I am a woodcutter,”
he was saying, ”Right now it is wood cutting not a woodcutter – because there is not even space for
the cutter.” It is simply wood being chopped, and he is so totally in it, it is only wood cutting: wood
cutting is happening. And when he comes as a Master, of course, it is a different configuration. The
same parts are now in a different accord. So with each action you are a different person, if you get
totally involved in it.
Buddha used to say, ”It is just as the flame of the candle looks the same, but is never the same even
for two consecutive moments. The flame is continuously becoming smoke, new flame is coming
up. The old flame is going out, the new flame is coming up. The candle that you had burned in the
evening is not the same candle that you will blow out in the morning. This is not the same flame that
you had started; that has gone far away, nobody knows where. It is just a similarity of the flame that
gives you the illusion that it is the same flame.”
The same is true about your being.
It is a flame.
It is a fire.
Each moment your being is changing, and if you get involved totally in anything then you will see
the change happening in you – each moment a new being, and a new world, and a new experience.
Everything suddenly becomes so full of newness that you never see the same thing again.
Then naturally, life becomes a continuous mystery, a continuous surprise.
On each step a new world opens up, of tremendous meaning, of incredible ecstasy.
When death comes, death too is not seen as something separate from life. It is part of life, not an end
of life. It is just like other happenings: love had happened, birth had happened. You were a child, and
then childhood disappeared; you became a young man, and then the young man disappeared; you
became an old man, and then the old man disappeared – how many things have been happening!
Why don’t you allow death also to happen just like other incidents?
And actually the person who has lived moment to moment lives death too, and finds that all the
moments of life can be put on one side and the one moment of death can be put on the other side,
From Ignorance to Innocence 334 Osho