The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 5. THREE IN THE MORNING
The child cannot see that five can come out of many arrangements – there is not only one
arrangement which will total five. There can be millions of arrangements in which the total will
be five.
Howsoever you arrange your life the religious man will always look to the total and the worldly man
will always look to the fragment. That is the difference. The worldly will look to whatever is near, and
not see the far hidden there. The distant is not really very far away, it will become the near, it will
happen soon. The evening is coming.
Can you have a perspective in which the total life is seen? It is believed, and I think it is true also, that
if a man is drowning, suddenly his whole life, the total, is remembered. You are dying, drowning in a
river, with no time left, and suddenly in your mind’s eye your whole life is revealed from beginning to
end. It is as if the whole film passes across the screen of the mind. But what use is it now that you
are dying?
A religious man looks at the total every moment. The whole of life is there, and then he acts out of
that perspective of the whole. He will never regret as you always do. It is inevitable that whatsoever
you do, you will regret it.
One day the king went to visit a madhouse. The superintendent of the madhouse escorted him
to every cell. The king was very interested in the phenomenon of madness, he was studying it.
Everybody should be interested because it is everybody’s problem. And you need not go to a
madhouse: go anywhere and study people’s faces. You are studying in a madhouse!
One man was weeping and crying, hitting his head against the bars. His anguish was so deep, his
suffering so penetrating, that the king asked to be told the whole story of how this man went mad.
The superintendent said, ”This man loved a woman and couldn’t get her, so he went mad.”
Then they passed to another cell. In it there was a man spitting on a picture of a woman. The king
asked, ”And what is the story of this man? He also seems to be involved with a woman.”
The superintendent said, ”It is the same woman. This man fell in love with her too, and he got her.
That is why he went mad.”
If you get what you want you go mad; if you don’t get what you want you go mad. The total remains
the same. Whatsoever you do, you will regret it. A fragment can never be fulfilling. The whole is so
big and the fragment is so small that you cannot deduce the whole from the fragment. And if you
depend on the fragment and decide your life accordingly, you will always miss. Your whole life will
be wasted.
So what should we do? What does Chuang Tzu want us to do? He wants us not to be fragmentary
– he wants us to be total. But remember, you can look at the total only when YOU are total, because
only the similar can know the similar. If you are fragmentary, you cannot know the total. How can
you know the total if you are fragmentary? If you are divided in parts the total cannot be reflected in
you. When I speak of meditation I mean a mind which is no longer divided, in which all fragments
have disappeared. The mind is undivided, whole, one.
The Empty Boat 91 Osho