An essay by Devageet.
The courage to change, to risk something, is the essence of let-go. In fact, it takes trust and not courage. Let me explain: courage has something of the ego, seeing a situation as something to be overcome. Courage requires alertness and resources.
Trust, however, is deeper than biology; it requires not only alertness, but awareness too. Trust is rooted beyond the body-mind, in Existence itself. It is wider and deeper, it allows an individual to face a situation knowing that although it is happening to you, in reality it is happening for you.
Facing fear, any fear, no matter its cause, in my opinion, creates an instinctive biological reaction.
Trust with awareness is not primarily biological, it is not about winning or losing, it requires acceptance and surrender. But that does not mean it is passive or without resources. Trust goes beyond the fundamental biological programme of survival; it surrenders to the rhythms of life knowing death is included too.
In my opinion, Osho, in teaching the art of let-go, encourages us to face each event with awareness and courage while simultaneously recognizing that life is not an enemy but a gift, no matter what the situation. Sooner or later courage, along with the body, fails, and in that moment it is trust and awareness that allows death to come dancing onto the stage of life.
Trust is the antidote to fear, not courage; trusting myself, trusting my clarity, trusting life itself, these are the basic qualities of Conscious living. Speaking of change in terms of courage and risk misses the real issue, which is Fear, fear of change, fear of the new. I recall Osho, focusing his magnificent eyes on me in the dental room, saying, “Devageet, never act out of fear. Anything done out of fear is wrong, even if it appears right.”
He was a living example of the immense trust in Existence that he spoke of.
I am old now, wise enough to know that I am closer to death than at any other time in my life, despite being quite healthy. Health is a gift, not an issue, for me. Aging itself is a process of continual change, small and large, physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. Aging starts at birth, although when we think we have more years ahead than behind us we call it growth. Looking through different windows of my life I now can see that change is, and always was, a constant process. Isn’t change the very essence of life itself? All growth is change. Without change life shrinks into the terminal cosiness of what Osho named, “posthumous existence.”
It seems to me that change is not a matter of choice, it is a constant presence, a moment to moment conscious recognition of life as it is happening. Our choice is whether to flow with the changes or try to resist or deny them.
I am grateful for being a meditator. Meditation has brought many gifts. Great among them is the discovery of ‘awareness of awareness’. I meditated for years without being aware of consciousness itself. I thought meditation was a matter of techniques, hoping that ‘something’ ‘somehow’ would happen. It was the lightning bolt of Osho leaving his body that brought my fundamental error home to me. I had basked happily in his physical presence while he was among us, riding high on his spiritual tsunami. When he was no longer in his body I realized, painfully, that ‘my’ meditation was not a reality but merely my ‘idea’ of meditation: a thought. In order to discover meditation as an authentic living experience beyond the thinking mind I started at the beginning by asking myself, “what do I know, what can I know of myself that is not a thought?”
Osho had sown his seeds well. I began to discover awareness, recognising slowly that it had always been present, but I had been unconscious, unaware of its presence. Awareness of awareness opened doors beyond my mind, and Existence flowed in. New creative resources popped out of the blue. Old resources, from previous lives, became newly available. Cleaned of the corrosion of old, tired beliefs the gold shone through; old skills and talents learned and practiced long ago shone bright in the light of newly discovered consciousness. I was, and still am, amazed as awareness brings creative changes that affect every aspect of my life.
Authentic change first arises slowly – it has to push through so much crap – as an inner upsurge of new clarity. The changes emerge from an unknown inner place, an unknown inner self, and begin to organise new templates of consciousness, offering new views of reality that open new ways to live. Initially the old ideas, fears, tears, attitudes, beliefs and opinions, and other assorted consolation-and-distraction teddy bears, had to be recognized before being discarded: for the new to happen there needs to be space. Letting go of those old ‘friends’, old habits really, is not easy, at least for me. I have often chosen to keep them stored… “you never know, one day they might be useful again.” But as life gallops into the endgame the dead, crusty weight of the past flies off, carried by the wind of change itself. Totality carries no passengers. And changes come even faster without the time-laden surplus from the past.
I trust that whatever the future brings I will have enough clarity and awareness to see it as another adventure, and, since there have been many along the way, I have gratefully learned to trust life, and to trust myself.
The biggest change is yet to happen. Facing the reality of death is, for me, like preparing for a journey to an unknown place. I have been preparing for years. What else is meditation in its essence other than bringing consciousness to experience Reality beyond the mind, body and emotions? Meditation is my preparation for the ultimate change that death brings to everybody.
Osho has famously stated that Death is the greatest fiction, and having seen many of my past lives I know it is true. I have peeped beneath the Halloween costume of the Great Reaper, seen its rattle-boned reality, and whenever death comes I will welcome it as the greatest adventure yet to be consciously experienced: the biggest change of all.
Article by Devageet – German translation previously published in Osho Times – www.oshotimes.de
A former English dental surgeon, Devageet took sannyas in 1976. In 1978 he was invited to be Osho’s personal dentist and lived altogether 21 years in Osho’s communes. He developed ‘Oshodontics’, a groundbreaking therapeutic approach to self-healing and the self-transformation of individual consciousness by accessing body-held memories from physical organs and the teeth and jaws. He lives in England and conducts teaching seminars world-wide. oshodontics.com
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