The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 10. WHOLENESS
Only a religious man can be beyond them; otherwise how can you be beyond them? The ego is too
much, the burden is too much, it is constantly on your head. You HAVE to forget yourselves.
But if wine can do so much, you cannot conceive of what the divine wine can do. What is the wine
doing? For certain moments, through chemical changes in the brain, in the body, you forget yourself.
But this is momentary. Deep down you are there, and after a few hours the chemical effect is gone,
your body has thrown the wine out and the ego asserts itself again.
But there is a wine, I tell you – God is that wine, Tao, or whatsoever name you like to call it. Once
you taste it, the ego is gone forever. Nobody ever comes back from that drunkenness.
That is why Sufis always talk of wine, Sufis always talk of women. Their woman is not the woman
you know – God is the woman. And their wine is not the wine that you know – God is the wine.
Omar Khayyam has been misunderstood, tremendously misunderstood; because of Fitzgerald he
has been misunderstood all over the world. Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat appears to be written in
praise of wine and women, but it is not at all. Omar Khayyam is a Sufi, a mystic. He talks of the
wine which comes through Tao; he talks of the wine in which you are lost forever and forever. This
intoxicant, this divine intoxicant, is not temporary, it is nontemporal, not momentary – it is eternal.
And Sufis talk of God as the woman. That embrace is eternal, it is ultimate; then there is no
separation. If you can understand this then you are intelligent, but not through your strategies,
cunningness, arithmetic, your logic.
If you can, look deep into existence. From where have you come? Where are you going? With
whom are you fighting, and why? These same moments that you are losing in fighting can become
ecstatic. Now look at the sutra: Wholeness.
You think of yourself as the individual. You are wrong. Only the whole exists. This is false – this
appearance that: I think I am. This is the most false thing in the world. And because of this ”I am,”
fight arises. If I am, then this whole seems inimical; then everything seems to be against me.
It is not that anything is against you – it cannot be! These trees have helped you, this sky has helped
you, this water has helped you, this earth created you. Then nature is your mother. How can the
mother be against you? You have come out of her. But you think I am as an individual, and then the
fight arises. It is one-sided. You start the fight, and nature goes on laughing, God goes on enjoying.
Even in a small child, the moment he starts feeling I, the fight arises.
In a supermarket, a small child was insisting on a toy. The mother said positively, ”No, I am not going
to buy it. You have got enough.”
The child got angry and said, ”Mum, I have never seen a meaner girl than you, you are the meanest.”
The mother looked at the child, at his face, the anger on it, and she said, ”Just wait, you will certainly
meet a really mean girl. Just wait!”
In one house, the mother was insisting that the child do his homework. He was not listening and
went on playing with his toys, so she said, ”Are you listening to me or not?”
The Empty Boat 178 Osho