When the Shoe Fits - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 6. SYMPHONY FOR A SEABIRD
Life is not understood through time, it is understood through meditation. It is a going inwards. Time is
an outer movement time is on the periphery. A man can live for a thousand years and remain stupid.
Actually he will become more stupid because he will grow. And if you have a seed of stupidity in
you within a thousand years you will become such a vast tree that millions of stupid people can
rest under you. Whatsoever you have, grows; nothing is static, everything is growing. So a stupid
person becomes more stupid, a wise person becomes more wise – but time has nothing to do with
understanding.
Understanding is not temporal, it is not more experience. It is not the quantity of experience that
makes you wise, it is the quality. A single experience can give you more wisdom, if you bring the
quality of awareness to it, than you may gain in many lives. A man may have made love to many
women, thousands of women, thousands of times. Do you think he knows what love is? There
is quantity! You ask a Byron, a Don juan, there is quantity. Don Juans keep records, they go on
counting how many women they have conquered. There is quantity, but have they known love? One
single love can give you wisdom if you bring quality to it. The quality has to be brought by you.
What is that quality? That quality is awareness. If you make love to a single woman for a single
time, with your total being, fully alert, you have come to know what love is. Otherwise you can go on
and on and on, it becomes a repetition. And then you need not do anything, the wheel repeats by
itself, it becomes automatic. Wisdom is something that happens when you bring awareness to any
experience. The meeting of awareness and experience is wisdom. Experience plus awareness is
wisdom. With experience plus more experience plus more experience quantity is gained, but there
is no quality.... which would make you free and knowing.
Whenever a child is born, if the mother loves the child if the father loves the child, they will not force
themselves on him because they will know at least this much: they have been failures. So why give
the same pattern to this child? Why destroy another life again? But look at the stupidity. They would
like the child to follow their path. And they have not reached anywhere, and they know deep down
that they are empty, hollow, but again they are forcing a child to move on the same path, to reach
the same hollowness in the end. Why? Because it feels good to the ego to know that ’my child is
following me’.
You may not have reached anywhere but if your son is following you it gives you a good feeling. As if
you have attained, the son is following you. And if you are not satisfied by a son, then you can gather
followers, disciples. And there are many who are always ready to fall into anybody’s trap; because
people are so unfulfilled that they are ready to follow anybody’s advice. And the problem is that
because of others’ advice they are unfulfilled – and they go on asking for it again and again. Mind is
a vicious thing. You are so empty and hollow because you have been following others’ advice; yet
again you are searching for others to advise you. When will you become aware that basically you
are missing because you have not followed your inner voice?
So a master cannot give you rules. If a master gives you rules, know well he is a pseudo-master.
Escape from him! A master can only give you understanding, and show you how to understand
yourself – then rules will come but they will come out of your understanding.
HOW SHOULD YOU TREAT A SEA BIRD? AS YOURSELF, OR AS A BIRD?
OUGHT NOT A BIRD TO NEST IN DEEP WOODLAND OR FLY OVER MEADOW AND MARSH?
When the Shoe Fits 87 Osho