The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 8. THE USELESS
If somebody asks you what a house consists of, you will say, walls. And Chuang Tzu would say,
just like his master Lao Tzu, that a house consists not of walls but of doors and windows. Their
emphasis is on the other part. They say that walls are useful, but their use depends on the useless
space behind.
A room is space, not walls. Of course, space is free but walls have to be purchased. When you
purchase a house, what do you purchase? The walls, the material, the visible. But can you live
in the material? Can you live in the walls? You have to live in the room, in the vacant space. You
purchase the boat, but you have to live in the emptiness.
So really, what is a house? Emptiness surrounded by walls. And what is a door? There is nothing.
’Door’ means there is nothing, no wall, emptiness. But you cannot enter the house if there is no
door; if there is no window then no sun will enter, no breeze will blow. You will be dead, and your
house will become a tomb.
Chuang Tzu says: Remember that the house consists of two things: the walls, the material – the
marketable, the utilitarian – and the emp-tiness surrounded by the walls, the non-utilitarian which
cannot be purchased, which cannot be sold, which has no economic value.
How can you sell emptiness? But you have to live in the emptiness – if a man lives only in the walls
he will go mad. It is impossible to do that – but we try to do the impossible. In life, we have chosen
the utilitarian.
For example, if a child is playing you say, ”Stop! What are you doing? This is useless. Do something
useful. Learn, read, at least do your homework, something useful. Don’t wander around, don’t be a
vaga-bond.” And if you go on insisting on this to a child, by and by you will kill the useless. Then the
child will become just useful, and when a person is simply useful, he is dead. You can use him, he
is a mechanical thing now, a means, not an end unto himself.
You are really yourself when you are doing something useless – painting, not to sell, just enjoying;
gardening, just to enjoy; lying down on the beach, not doing anything, just to enjoy, useless, fun;
sitting silently at the side of a friend.
Much could be done in these moments. You could go to the shop, to the market, you could earn
something. You could change time into money. You could get a bigger bank balance because these
moments will not come back. And foolish people say that time is money. They know only one use
for time: how to convert it into more money and more money and more money. In the end you die
with a big bank balance but inside totally poor, because the inner richness arises only when you can
enjoy the useless.
What is meditation? People come to me and say, ”What is the use of it? What will we gain out of it?
What is the benefit of it?”
Meditation...and you ask about the benefit? You cannot understand it because meditation is just
useless. The moment I say useless, you feel uncomfortable because the whole mind has become
so utilitarian, so commodity-oriented that you ask for a result. You cannot concede that something
can be a pleasure unto itself.
The Empty Boat 139 Osho