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

CHAPTER 4. RELIGION HAS NO HISTORY, IT IS ETERNAL
When someone asks Einstein to explain his theory of relativity, he is reported to have said, ”It is
very difficult to explain. There are hardly a dozen persons on this earth at the moment with whom I
can discuss this theory, yet I will try to explain it to you through an illustration.” By way of illustration
Einstein always explained that time is a concept of the mind. He said if someone were made to sit
by the side of a burning stove, time would pass for him in a different way than it would if he were
sitting by the side of his beloved. Our pleasure and pain determine the measure of time.
Samadhi is beyond pleasure and pain. It is a state of bliss, and there is no time in bliss, neither
long nor short. So no one who has achieved samadhi can say when Krishna was born and when he
departed. All that one in the state of samadhi can say is that Krishna is, that his being is everlasting,
eternal.
Not only Krishna’s being, everybody’s being is everlasting, eternal. All being is eternal.
Asleep in the night, you all dream, but you may not have observed that the state of time in a dream
undergoes a radical change from what it is in your waking hours. A person dozes for only a minute
and in that brief minute he dreams about something that would ordinarily take years to happen in
the waking world. He dreams he has married a woman, that his wife has borne him children, that
he is now busy with the marriages of his sons and daughters. Events that would take years are
compressed into a tiny minute. When he tells us his whole dream after waking up, we refuse to
believe how it could happen. But he says it is a hard fact. The mind undergoes a change in the
dreaming state, and with it the concept of time changes.
And time stops altogether in the state of deep sleep, which is called the state of sushupti in Sanskrit.
When you wake up in the morning and report you had a deep sleep last night, this knowledge is not
derived from the state of sleep itself, but from your awareness of the time of your going to bed in the
night and of leaving it in the morning. But in case you are not aware of it, you cannot say how long
you slept.
Recently I visited a woman who has been in a coma for the last nine months, and her physicians say
that she will remain in the coma for three years and will also die in the coma. There is hardly any
possibility of her regaining consciousness. But if by some chance she regains her consciousness
after three long years, will she be able to say how long she has been in the coma? She will never
know it on her own.
In deep sleep the mind goes to sleep, and so it has no awareness of time. And in samadhi the mind
ceases to be. Samadhi is a state of no-mind.
So one cannot know through samadhi when Krishna was born and when he died.
Rinzai was a famous Zen monk. One fine morning, in the course of his lecture, he said that Buddha
never happened. His listeners were stunned. They thought perhaps Rinzai had gone out of his
mind, because he had been living in a Buddhist temple where he worshipped Buddha’s idol and was
a lover of Buddha. Sometimes he was even seen dancing before the statue of the Sakyamuni, and
now the same person was saying, ”Who says Buddha ever happened?”
His audience said, ”Have you gone mad?”
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 65 Osho