The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 5. THREE IN THE MORNING
Nasruddin said, ”It is so simple, so logical, work it out for yourself. The lion jumped, killed me and
ate me!”
At this point it was too much for the stranger! He said, ”Are you saying that the lion killed and ate
you, and you are sitting here alive?”
Nasruddin looked straight at the man and said, ”Ha ha, do you call this being alive?”
Look at people’s faces and you will understand what he meant. Do you call this being alive? So
bored to death, dragging?
Once a man said to Nasruddin,”I am very poor. Survival is impossible now, should we commit
suicide? I have six children and a wife, my widowed sister and old father and mother. And it is
getting more and more difficult. Can you suggest something?”
Nasruddin said, ”You can do two things and both will be helpful. One, start baking bread, because
people have to live and they have to eat, you will always have business.”
The man asked, ”And the other?”
Nasruddin said, ”Start making shrouds for the dead, because when people are alive, they will die.
And this is also a good business. These two businesses are good – bread, and shrouds for the
dead.”
After a month the man came back. He looked even more desperate, very sad, and he said, ”Nothing
seems to work. I have put everything I have got into the business, as you suggested, but everything
seems to be against me.”
Nasruddin said, ”How can that happen? People have to eat bread while they are alive, and when
they die their relatives have to buy shrouds.”
The man said, ”But you don’t understand. In this village no one is alive and no one ever dies. They
are simply dragging along.”
People are just dragging. You don’t need to look at others’ faces, just look in the mirror and you will
find out what dragging means – neither alive nor dead. Life is so beautiful, death is also beautiful –
dragging is ugly.
But why do you look so burdened? The constant chattering of the mind dissipates energy. Constant
chattering of the mind is a constant leakage in your being. Energy is dissipated. You never have
enough energy to make you feel alive, young, fresh, and if you are not young and fresh and alive
your death is also going to be a very dull affair.
One who lives intensely, dies intensely, and when death is intense, it has a beauty of its own. One
who lives totally, dies totally, and wherever totality is there is beauty. Death is ugly, not because of
death but because you have never lived rightly. If you have never been alive, you have not earned
a beautiful death. It has to be earned. One has to live in such a way, so total and so whole, that he
The Empty Boat 84 Osho