From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

3 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove
Question 1
OSHO,
WHAT IS RENUNCIATION? WHAT IS ITS PLACE IN YOUR RELIGION?
CHAPTER 5
Ecstasy is now – why wait?
THE idea of renunciation is one of the fundamentals of all pseudo-religions. Its phenomenology has
to be understood very deeply.
All the religions have been preaching a division between this world and that world which is beyond
death – between the soul and the body. The body belongs to this world, the soul belongs to that
world; hence if you want to achieve the world beyond death, which is eternal.... and the happiness
there is unending, the happiness here is not worth calling happiness; it is momentary, it is dream
stuff. It comes, and even before you have been able to grasp it, it is gone. It is illusory, it is a kind of
mirage in the desert.
When you are far away you see a lake of water. You are thirsty and great hope arises in you. And the
lake is absolutely real as far as you can see, because the only proof of its reality, that water is there,
is that the trees are being reflected in the water. If there is a mountain by the side, the mountain is
reflected in the lake, the sun is reflected in the lake. What more. proof do you need? Without water
these reflections cannot happen. You rush with great hope, but as you come nearer, you find the
lake is receding; the distance between you and the lake remains the same.
It was just an illusion created by sunrays reflected back from the hot desert sand. When sunrays
are reflected back, they move like waves, and their movement from far away creates the illusion of
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