When the Shoe Fits - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 9. DUKE HWAN AND THE WHEELRIGHT
The word is with you, the Bible is with you, you can become a great scholar, a philosopher, you can
think and spin many theories around it, you can create a theology of your own – but Jesus will not
be there. You have to live with Jesus, his presence is the most significant thing.
The second thing to be remembered is that mind always likes theories, words, philosophies. It can
tackle them, it is a game the mind likes very much, because nothing is lost. On the contrary, mind is
more strengthened through them. The more you know, the more information you gather, the more
your mind feels ’I am somebody’.
With a living master the problem is this: you have to surrender, your ego has to be dissolved. It is
really a death experience to live with a master, you have to die. And unless you die nothing is going
to happen. Only through your death will rebirth happen. When you are no longer there, suddenly
the Divine is. So a living master is a death experience for the mind – a rebirth of the soul, but a
death of the ego. With dead masters you are not scared. The mind can go on playing the game with
the experts and the authorities, and the interpretation depends on you. In any theory the meaning
is not there in it; you have to put the meaning in, it is a game. You think you are reading the Gita,
the word of Krishna. You are wrong. The word is there, but who will give the meaning? You will give
the meaning.
So every scripture is nothing but a mirror: you will see your own face in it. You can read anything that
you like, but because the mind is very cunning, it will simply not listen to anything that goes against
it. It can interpret in its own ways and Krishna is not there to say: No, this is not my meaning.
It happened that when Sigmund Freud was alive but very old, just in his last year of life, he gathered
all his disciples to him – and he had a big following all over the world. He had created a very
significant school of psychoanalysis, and he was revered.
Twenty of his closest disciples were taking lunch with him. They started discussing what Freud
meant about something and they completely forgot that Freud was there. They became much
absorbed in the discussion, contradicting each other, arguing with each other. One theory –
twenty interpretations. And the master was alive, he was sitting there, but they had forgotten him
completely! Then he hammered on the table and said: One thing please! I am still alive, you can
ask me what I mean. Listening to you, I have become aware of what you are going to do when I am
dead. I am alive, yet nobody asks me what my meaning is. And you have twenty meanings already!
When I am dead, you will have two hundred, two thousand, two million meanings, and then there
will be no possibility to ask me what I mean.
That is how sects and creeds are born.
Jesus was a simple man, but look at the Catholics, the Protestants, the hundreds of sects of
Christianity and their interpretations. Jesus was a simple man, the son of a carpenter, he never
used the jargon of theology. He was not a man of words, he was a man of experience. He talked
simply in small stories, anecdotes, and parables. And he was talking to illiterate people, his meaning
was simple. But look... the Protestants, the Catholics, their theologians, they have made so much
out of him – a mountain! On simple matters they go on discussing and arguing and they get so lost
in it that Jesus is completely forgotten.
When the Shoe Fits 123 Osho