From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY
Just as darkness makes you afraid, too much brightness also makes you blind and afraid. Don’t be
afraid, there is nothing to be afraid of It is your nature; there is nothing to be afraid of, it is your being.
If you allow this tremendous intensity of light of the collective conscious, you enter into the cosmic
conscious.
Cosmic consciousness is neither dark nor light.
If you can find just the middle point between light and darkness – very soothing, warm from the
side of light, cool from the side of darkness – it is the meeting, the ultimate meeting of the polar
opposites.
And this cosmic consciousness is what I call enlightenment.
In darkness you were lost, but the fear, the trembling, the death surrounding you kept something of
you still there: a very subtle ego which you cannot catch hold of You feel you are lost but there you
are still, because you are afraid. If you are not there, who is afraid? The darkness is so much that
you are focused on darkness, and you are not in your focus at all.
In the cosmic consciousness you are really lost. There is no fear, there is no way of going back, or
of going anywhere. Hence I call this the arrival – from where you had never departed in fact. It was
always there above you, hanging above you, for millions of lives, just waiting, waiting. But to reach it
first you will have to go deep down to the very roots.
Friedrich Nietzsche again... because this man I find tremendously insightful. On the whole he is
a mess, but in fragments he has such penetrating insight, which is rarely available anywhere else.
He says, ”Before you can reach heaven, you have to reach to hell. Unless you have fathomed hell
completely, there is no way to heaven.”
It looks very absurd. And he used to write in maxims; he never wrote essays explaining anything,
that was not his way. Insights never come in essays, in theses; they never come for Ph.D., D.Litt.
degrees. No. For a Ph.D. degree you have to sit in a library and do a clerical job, just collecting from
here and there. You can simply take a pair of scissors and if you can cut from this book and that
book, this journal and that journal, and just go on collecting them in a file, sooner or later you will be
a Ph.D. There is not much more to it.
Men like Nietzsche only write maxims. One day suddenly he will write a maxim, and then for months
he will not write. This is the meaning of what he says.... Now, Jesus cannot understand it. Jesus
says, ”If you want to avoid hell, come follow me, I will take you to heaven. That’s the only way to
avoid hell.” Nietzsche is saying, ”If you avoid hell, heaven is already avoided, because heaven is a
second step. You have missed the first step.”
In another passage, a similar passage, Nietzsche says, ”Before you can reach to the top of a tree
and can understand the flowers blossoming there, you will have to go deep to the roots, because
the secret lies there. And the deeper the roots go, the higher the tree goes.” So the greater your
longing for understanding, for cosmic consciousness – because that is the ultimate lotus, the lotus
paradise – then the further you will have to go to the deepest roots in the darkest underground; and
the way is only one.
From Ignorance to Innocence 390 Osho