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

CHAPTER 18. NON-ATTACHMENT IS NOT AVERSION
Then I asked him, ”How can you search for a thing that you have not lost? Search implies that you
lost something and now you are trying to recover it. Therefore,” I said to him, ”it is not a question of
finding God. You would have to find God if you had really lost him. So first you have to know if you
have lost him. And if you come to know on your own that you never lost him, the search is complete.”
Non-attachment is our self-nature, we are born with it. So it is strange that in life, we all become
victims of attachment and aversion. Non-attachment is our very nature. If attachment is our nature,
we cannot manage to be averse to anything. If aversion was our nature, we could not fall prey to
attachment. For example, a branch of a tree sways westward with the westerly wind and eastward
with the easterly wind. How is it that the branch sways with the winds? Because it is neither in the
east nor in the west; it is just in the middle.
Let us take another example: when we boil water it becomes hot, and when we cool it it becomes
cold, because water in itself is neither hot nor cold. If water was intrinsically hot it could never
become cold; it could never be heated if it was basically cold. Water’s own nature transcends both
hot and cold, so we can easily heat or cool it as we like.
If attachment is our self-nature, there is no way to be repelled by anything. But we are easily repelled.
If clinging was our self-nature we could not give up anything, but we do give things up. In the same
way if renunciation was our self-nature. we could not cling to a thing, but we cling like leeches. It
simply means that neither attachment nor aversion is intrinsic to our self-nature. Therefore we move
in both directions – we now become attached and then averse to something. Because our innate
nature transcends both these states of mind, we can move conveniently into them.
Let us take yet another example. We can open and shut our eyes whenever we like, because
basically our eyes are neither open nor shut. If to be open was the very nature of the eyes, we could
never close them. And if they were inherently closed we could never open them. Eyes can be both
opened and closed at will because their self-nature transcends both states, they are beyond them.
Opening and closing is external to them; really it happens because of the eyelids. In the same way
our consciousness is essentially non-attached; it is only its eyelids, its coverings that get attached
or repelled by something.
So the first thing to understand is that non attachment is our self-nature; we are born with it. It is our
original face.
Secondly, we have to understand that it is only our self-nature that we can attain to; we can never
attain to that which is alien to our self-nature. Really we can achieve only that which we already
are at some deeper level of our beings. A seed grows into a flower because it is already a flower in
its depth. A rock cannot grow into a flower, because never mind its depth, not even its surface has
anything to do with a flower. If you sow a rock in the soil like a seed, it will ever remain a rock; it can
never turn into a flower. On the surface both rock and seed look alike, but if you sow them together
the seed will turn into a flower, while the rock will remain always the same. ,So we can say that a
seed becomes a flower because it is inherently a flower.
It is one of the fundamental laws of life that we can become only that which we already are at the
center of our being; what is hidden at the center becomes manifest at the circumference.
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 338 Osho