She, some final touches

XVII. She is living like a child, playfully, totally, and in tremendous love for life.

She is love for life, life that can be sung, life that can be danced, life that can be loved. Life is enough unto itself.

There is no question and there is no answer. For her life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. You cannot solve a mystery; you can only dissolve into it.

She takes her life playfully, like children, playing by the sea beach, collecting seashells, coloured stones, making houses of sand: nothing to be serious about.

She lives like a gambler, because for her there is nothing higher than life: to live it is to be religious. Whatever is available to her, she is living totally.

Without asking for any meaning, she just enjoys the mysteriousness of existence.

The ignorance of life itself becomes the phenomenon of death. A single ray of knowing life has dissolved her firm belief in the certainty of death forever.

XVIII. She has an empty, open mind, but doesn’t hold on to it.

She considers her mind as one of the most beautiful, the most complex, the most evolved mechanisms.

She knows her mind is dangerous as a master, but beautiful as a servant.

She is able to drop her mind any moment, because her mind cannot hold her. She doesn’t cling to it. Mind is just a mechanism; you can get out of it any moment.

The doors are always open; there is nobody preventing her.

XIX. She is trusting existence but tethers her camel herself.

Trust brings a new breeze into her life, a new opening, a new door. In the beginning it will be difficult, just because of old habits. Once it starts happening, little by little, inch by inch, she will be filled with so much warmth that she will be able to risk more and more.

This doesn’t mean she will be passive. Existence has no hands other than her hands. So, she does whatsoever she can and then, whatsoever happens, she accepts it.

XX. She brings holiness to ordinary life.

She has dropped the division between the world and the divine, the material and the spiritual. She doesn’t divide existence into these old dichotomies; the material plane and the spiritual plane. There is only one reality: matter is its visible form, and spirit is its invisible form. Her approach is total, it is holistic, because she believes that man is both together, spiritual and material.

For her everything is sacred – taking a cup of tea, massaging her mother’s feet, or taking care of this beautiful planet.

So whatsoever work she is doing – urbanism, struggle against hunger, struggle for ecological balance, struggle against poverty, exploitation or oppression, struggle for freedom – whatsoever her work on the material plane, it is going to be benefitted, tremendously benefitted, if she becomes more spiritually rooted, centred, calm, quiet, cool, because then the whole quality of her work will be changed.

She knows that if she can make her ordinary life a thing of beauty and art, everything else will follow on its own accord.

So, she lives like the lotus flower lives in water, but the water touches it not. She is living in the world but remains untouched by it.

XXI. She is aware that each individual is unique.

Understanding that people are different, she drops the idea of inferiority and superiority completely. Humans are different, certainly, but they are not unequal. Everyone and everything is unique. Each thing exists in its own way. Each thing has its own soul. That’s why she understands that there can’t be any comparison, nor is there a one size bed that fits everyone. She may even be giving different answers to different questioners, because although their questions sound the same, she answers the questioner and not the question.

For her a leaf of grass is no less than the journey of a star.

XXII. She is living in the present.

She is living in the present. Each moment… what to do? Worry about the past? Worry about the future? Worry about death? Worry about time? Or enjoy this moment? For her each moment is so full of blessings!

She is aware that she cannot enter into the same river even once! Because such is the nature of life: everything goes on renewing itself. The golden gate is available only for those who are always alive to the new and who are open – and joyfully, not reluctantly – who are happy to drop the past and remain unburdened.

Knowing that tomorrow never comes, she has dropped the habit of promising.

XXIII. She is a scientist and a mystic both.

She is complete, entire; acquainted with the outside world and acquainted with the inside world as well, with the mind and the mystery, with the body and the being. As she can see out, so she can also see in.

In her vision there is only science with two dimensions. One dimension approaches the outside reality, the other dimension approaches the interior reality.

XXIV. She feels grateful.

She is aware that there is no reason, no ‘raison d’être’ for this existence to be, no reason for the rain this morning, for this melody, this beautiful song that the clouds are singing around her. That’s why she is living in tremendous joy, thankfulness and gratitude. That’s how she opens the doors of heaven herself.

XXV. She is responding, not reacting.

She has understood that anger, violence and destructiveness are the gates of hell, while understanding, compassion and silence are the doors of heaven.

XXVI. She is involved in the subject and all-inclusive in her thinking.

She doesn’t judge, unless she knows the whole story.

Looking at situations from different points of view and treating them all fairly and equally, she does justice to the complexity of issues and challenges.

Being not enclosed in her own viewpoint, in her own philosophy, in her own doctrine, she can penetrate to the very depth of your being and see your viewpoint also.

Because of her empathic skills, she has the key to understand anyone else.

Not knowing what is going to follow, she withholds her judgement, because unless you know the whole story, how can you judge? You read one page of a book; how can you judge the whole book?

She understands that to err is human and to forgive is also human.

XXVII. She is not in a hurry. She is moving slowly, but moving.

She is moving slowly, but moving, surrendering and becoming an insider in this tremendously beautiful existence!

XXVIII. Wholeheartedly she accepts and respects herself as she is.

She understands that she can only be what she is, and she is enjoying being that to the best of her ability.

She knows she is here because this existence needs her as she is. Otherwise, somebody else would have been here! Existence would not have helped her to be here, would not have created her. So she is fulfilling something very essential, something very fundamental… as she is!

She remains true to herself. She doesn’t try to be the first. She doesn’t become a commodity. She remains God’s creation.

XXIX. She is creative.

In playing music, in singing, dancing, painting, writing and so on, she is creating because she has got something, not to get something.

If she has written something she will say: ‘I have not written it. The writing was done by me, but existence was persuading me, encouraging me to write it down. I was used as an instrument, a medium.’

XXX. She is sharing and feels thankful to the one who accepts her gifts.

Somebody accepted your gift. This is such a great thing, because she could have rejected.

Somebody accepted you through your gift. She could have rejected; there was no necessity to accept it. The giver should be thankful. Then it becomes a sharing, otherwise it is always a bargain. You are expecting something – something more valuable than you have given…

Sharing means you are never expecting anything in return, you are simply giving. You are not even expecting thankfulness.

If asked for advice, she is the first one to follow it in order to find out if it is right to give it to somebody else.

Epilogue: Living our human dignity, a never-ending pilgrimage.

I walk again along the canals of that ‘Magic City of the Sixties’ of the last century, Amsterdam, a pleasure in those days. There is a market going on that Saturday on the Waterlooplein. A man sells second-hand books, and I take one of them in my hands; it looks so simple and beautiful. The strange title is ‘Tao Te Ching’. It’s full of paradoxes, very intriguing and a provocation to the mind of a young student.

It was written 2500 years ago by a man in China called Lao Tzu: never heard about him before! I don’t understand a word of it, but at the same time I have this intriguing feeling that everything worth knowing is there in that little book, and that my life will be well spent if I understand the meaning of these words at the end of my life.

So, I buy it; it costs no more than 50 cents and it’s the beginning of a life-long kind of love-affair with this man and his very few words.

Lieh Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, the three Taoist Masters, only talk about the Way – ‘Tao’ means the Way – they don’t talk about the goal at all.

They say: The goal will take care of itself; you need not worry about the goal. If you know the Way you know the goal, because the goal is not at the very end of the Way, the goal is all over the Way – each moment and each step it is there.

It is not that when the Way ends you arrive at the goal; each moment, wherever you are, you are at the goal if you are on the Way. To be on the Way is to be at the goal.

Hence they don’t talk about the goal, they don’t talk about God, they don’t talk about moksha, nirvana, enlightenment – no, not at all. Very simple is their message:

You have to find the Way.

Things become a little more complicated because they say: The Way has no map, the Way is not charted, the Way is not such that you can follow somebody and find it.

The Way is not like a super-highway; the Way is more like a bird flying in the sky – it leaves no marks behind. The bird has flown but no marks are left; nobody can follow.

So the Way is a pathless path. It is a path, but it is a pathless path. It is not ready-made, available; you cannot just decide to walk on it, you will have to find it. And you will have to find it in your own way; nobody else’s way is going to function.

Buddha has walked, Lao Tzu has walked, Jesus has walked, but those ways are not going to help you because you are not Jesus, and you are not Lao Tzu, and you are not Lieh Tzu. You are you, a unique individual. Only by walking, only by living your life, will you find the Way.

Osho, Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol 1, Ch 1

That’s what living our human dignity on this never-ending pilgrimage means to me! It’s not an ideal image to be realised at the end of our journey in a far away future, but our inheritance as human beings to be lived every moment, here, now.

It’s not a pilgrimage to Jerusalem nor a Hajj to Mecca, not a trek around Mount Kailash in Tibet nor a trip to the Sanctuary of Atotonilco ­the Sistine Chapel of Mexico, not a pilgrimage to Lourdes nor to the island of Shikoku in Japan, not to the Lagoons of Huaringas in Peru nor to the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, not the Camino de Santiago nor the festival of Osun-Osogbo in Nigeria, not to Glastonbury Tor nor to Stonehenge in England.

This pilgrimage you can do around the divine in anybody. You can even take seven rounds around yourself!

Featured image by Jason Leung on Unsplash and commons.wikimedia.org

Read the whole series

• A portrait of human dignity by Shanti