The bhikkhu who guards his mind
And fears the waywardness of his thoughts
Burns through every bond
With the fire of his vigilance
Yes, meditation is fire – it burns your thoughts, your desires, your memories; it burns the past and the future. It burns your mind and the ego. It takes away all that you think that you are. It is a death and a rebirth, a crucifixion and a resurrection. You are born anew. You lose your own identity totally, and you attain to a new vision of life.
That vision of life is what is meant by god, dhamma, tao, logos. You can choose your name for it because it has no name of its own. In fact it is not expressible at all; it can only be indicated, hinted at.
The bhikkhu who guards his mind
And fears the waywardness of his thoughts
Burns through every bond
With the fire of his vigilance
Mind is confusion. Thoughts and thoughts – thousands of thoughts clamoring, clashing, fighting with each other, fighting for your attention. Thousands of thoughts pulling you into thousands of directions. It is a miracle how you go on keeping yourself together. Somehow you manage this togetherness – it is only somehow, it is only a facade. Deep behind it there is a clamoring crowd, a civil war, a continuous civil war. Thoughts fighting with each other, thoughts wanting you to fulfill them. It is a great confusion, what you call your mind.
But if you are aware that the mind is confusion, and you don’t get identified with the mind, you will never fall. You will become fall-proof! The mind will become impotent. And because you will be watching continuously, your energies will slowly be withdrawn, away from the mind; it will not be nourished any more.
This experiment
that I am doing here
is just to create
the first specimen
of the new man.
You are participating
in a great experiment
of tremendous import.
And once the mind dies, you are born as a no-mind. That birth is enlightenment. That birth brings you for the first time to the land of peace, the lotus paradise. It brings you to the world of bliss, benediction. Otherwise you remain in hell. Right now you are in hell. But if you resolve, if you decide, if you choose consciousness, right now you can take a jump, a leap from hell into heaven.
It is up to you: you can choose hell, you can choose heaven. Hell is cheap. Heaven needs great effort, perseverance, resolve. Hell means you can remain unconscious, you can remain as you are. Heaven means you have to rise above yourself, you have to transcend. You have to move from the valley towards the peaks.
And those peaks are yours, but you have to pay for them. Climbing to those peaks is arduous effort. Be watchful, be meditative, and one day you will find yourself on the sunlit peaks. That is liberation, moksha. That is nirvana – cessation of the ego and the birth of God.
You are entitled to be gods. If you are not, only you are responsible and nobody else. Listen to the Buddha. Don’t only listen to the Buddha – act, be committed to the life of consciousness, get involved.
But let me remind you again: this is only one dimension of life – immensely rich, but still one dimension. You will have to do something more. I am giving you a more arduous task than Buddha did. Buddha gave you one dimension; I want you to have all three dimensions, and a synthesis.
A new man is needed on the earth. The old is rotten and finished, it has no future, it can’t survive. It has come to the very end of its tether. It is on the deathbed. Unless a new man is born – East and West meeting, all three dimensions together – humanity is doomed.
This experiment that I am doing here is just to create the first specimen of the new man. You are participating in a great experiment of tremendous import. Feel blessed. Feel fortunate. You may not be aware of what you are participating in, but you may create history! It all depends on how committed, how involved you become with me and with my experiment.
This is the greatest synthesis possible, that has ever been tried….
Enough for today.
Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha Vol 1, Ch 7 (excerpt)
