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

CHAPTER 13. KRISHNA GOES TO THE WEST
Totapuri comes to Ramakrishna the next day and brings with him a sharp-edged glass. Ramakrishna
sits before him with closed eyes and his Master says, ”With this glass I am going to make a cut on
your forehead exactly above the seat of the third eye, the ajnachakra. The moment you feel the pain
of it you take up a sword and cut your mother in two.”
Ramakrishna is startled. He protests, ”What do you say? How can I behead my Mother with a
sword? It is impossible. I can behead myself if you ask me to do so, but how can I raise a sword at
Mother? And then where am I going to find a sword?”
Then Totapuri says to Ramakrishna, ”You are crazy. You have to find a sword from the same source
where you discovered the Mother who is not. If your imagination, your will can materialize a nonexistent
Mother, it can also materialize a sword. It is not that difficult. I know you are skilled in this
art. It needs an imaginary sword, a false sword to kill a false Mother. She was never real.”
Ramakrishna is still hesitant, but he knows Totapuri will leave him if he does not listen to his
instructions. He is aware that this Master does not believe in gradual progress, he stands for a
headlong leap, for sudden enlightenment. He closes his eyes again, hut he still feels reluctant. Then
Totapuri says reproachfully, ”Shame on you!” and cuts his forehead with the edge of the glass.
As soon as Ramakrishna feels the hurt he gathers courage to take up a sword and behead the
Mother And as soon as the Mother’s image vanishes, he enters the state of samadhi – the supreme
state. And on his return from this state he exclaims, ”The last barrier is down.”
The seed word, the mantra is going to be the last barrier for all those who use it as their spiritual
discipline. And like Ramakrishna, one day they will have to take up swords to finish it too. And it is
going to be a painful process. That is why I don’t recommend it, because I am aware that both you
and I will have to work hard at the end. It is better to be finished with it from the beginning.
You also want to know if aum is a word or something else. You quote Krishna as saying, ”If someone
can remember me in my aum form and live in aum at the time of his death, he will attain to the
ultimate, the eternal.”
This aum is an extraordinary word, a rare word. It is extraordinary just because it has no meaning
whatsoever. Every word has some meaning, this aum has none. For this reason this word cannot be
translated into any other language of the world, there is no way. If it had a meaning, it would be easy
to find an equivalent word with the same meaning in any language, but being meaningless this aum
is beyond translation. This is perhaps the only word on earth which has no meaning whatsoever.
People who discovered aum were in search of something which could be a bridge, a link between
the word and silence. While the word has a meaning, silence is neither meaningful nor meaningless;
it is beyond both, it is the beyond. Really aum came as a bridge between the word and silence. It is
constituted with the help of three basic sound forms: a, u, and m. A, u, and m are the basic sounds
of the science of phonetics: all other letters of the alphabet are their extensions and combinations.
And the same a, u, and m constitute the word aum, although it was not written as a word; it remains
a distinct and distinguished symbol. Aum in its original form is available in Sanskrit, where it is a
pictorial representation of aum; it is neither a word nor a letter. Aum is not a word but a picture. And
it represents the space where the finite world of the word – of sound – ends, and the infinite world
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 254 Osho