Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 12. DISCIPLINE, DEVOTION AND KRISHNA
Let us now go into this question in the context of Krishna.
In fact. all philosophical quarrels are childish. Even the biggest philosophical battles have been
fought over a problem which can be summed up in a child’s question: ”Which comes first, the chicken
or the egg?” It is really around this small question that all the great battles between philosophers
have taken place. But those who know will say the chicken and egg are not two. Those who raise
this question are stupid, and those answering it are even more stupid.
What is an egg but a chicken in the making? And what is a chicken but an egg fulfilled, come to its
fullness? Egg and chicken hide each other in themselves. The question of who precedes whom is
meaningful if egg and chicken are two separate things. The truth is that they are the same. Or we
can say that they are the two ways of looking at the same thing. Or they are two different phases,
two states of the manifestation of the same thing.
Similarly, seed and tree are not separate. Neither are light and dark. Nor are birth and death They
are two ways of looking at the same thing. Maybe, because we don’t know how to see a thing rightly,
we see it in fragments. For example, there is a big room inside a house and the house is locked.
Someone wants to have a look at the room and so he drills a hole through a wall. Now he peers into
the room from side to side. At first a chair will come into view, then another chair, and so on and so
forth. He cannot have a full view of the room all at once. And he can very well ask, ”Which comes
first and which afterward?” No arguments can settle this question. But if the person manages to
enter the room he can see the whole room together, and then he will not ask what comes first.
There is a laboratory in Oxford University which has to its credit some of the greatest explorations
and researches done in the present century. And I think this laboratory is performing the most
significant job for our future. It is known as the De La Warr Laboratory. There a miracle happened
when a bud was exposed to a camera, and it turned out in print to be the picture of the full flower
into which the bud was eventually going to bloom.
The film used in the camera had such high sensitivity, the highest ever, that it captured the hidden
potential of the bud in the form of a fully-blossomed flower. It was simply incredible how a camera
photographing a bud brought out the picture of the flower that the bud was going to be in the future.
At the moment of photographing it was only a bud, and no one knew what kind of flower it was
going to make. Maybe the flower was already present, physically present at some mysterious level
of existence which we cannot see with our physical eyes – but the extra-sensitive film used in the
camera succeeded in seeing it.
It was a breathtaking event, and even the scientists working at De La Warr were dazed and left
puzzled about how the magic worked. They thought that perhaps at some unseen level of existence
the bud and the flower were in existence simultaneously. The scientists thought perhaps through
some technical error the film had been exposed earlier, when it had taken in the picture of a flower.
Or, maybe some chemical mishap has brought about this inexplicable result.
So the scientists decided to wait until the bud turned into a full flower. But when it happened they
were amazed to see that it was exactly the same flower whose picture the camera had captured
earlier when it was only a bud. They now knew there was no chemical or technical error involved. A
photographic miracle – say a scientific miracle – had really taken
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 228 Osho