The last part of Shanti’s essay: How long is that road from the man we are to the man we can be, from our present state to our potential as a human being and as mankind?
How long is that road …
from being ungrateful or even grumbling about our life …
to being aware that there is no reason, no ‘raison d’être’ for this existence to be, no reason for this rain this morning, for this melody, this beautiful song that the clouds are singing around us, to living in tremendous joy, thankfulness and gratitude?
from reacting to happenings with anger, violence and destructiveness …
to responding to them with understanding, compassion and silence?
from living in our own ‘bubble’ and being limited to our own point of view …
to being no longer enclosed in our own viewpoint, in our own philosophy, in our own doctrine, but willing to penetrate to the very depth of someone else’s being and see her viewpoint also; ready to look at situations from different points of view and treating them all fairly and equally; doing justice to the complexity of issues and challenges and using our empathic skills as the key to understand someone else?
from being ready to judge almost immediately …
to withholding our judgement, not knowing what is going to follow, understanding you can’t judge the whole book by having read just one page of it?
from moving fast and in a hurry …
to moving slowly, but moving, surrendering and becoming an insider in this tremendous beautiful existence?
from being unloving towards ourselves, having comments about this and that, urgently wanting to make changes here and there …
to understanding that we can only be what we are and enjoying to be that to the best of our ability; knowing we are here because this existence needs us as we are, otherwise somebody else would have been here, existence would not have helped us to be here, would not have created us, so we are fulfilling something very essential, something very fundamental … as we are!?
from expecting something in return when we have given something – for preference something more valuable than we have given …
to being thankful that somebody has accepted our gift: this is such a great thing, because she could have rejected, there was no necessity to accept it?
from giving advice to people – asked or unasked – advice that we don’t practise or live ourselves …
to being the first one to follow it in order to find out if it is right to give it to somebody else?
from creating to get something – in playing music, in singing, dancing, painting, writing and so on …
to creating because we have got something?
How long is that road from the man we are to the man we can be,
from our present state to our potential as a human being and as mankind?
My feeling and my trust is that this road is really a ‘Great Pilgrimage’: a pilgrimage from here to here!
Indeed, we wouldn’t recognize these hints about our potential if we didn’t know them already: after all, it takes one to know one! It is thanks to that we know them already that we can recognize them.
Sure, they may be asleep, snoring, unconscious, but these characteristics of the Homo Novus are not unlike butterflies waiting to fly out of caterpillars, like seeds resting in us to become alive, to grow … but they are here already!
That’s why the Great Pilgrimage is from here to here.
That’s why we can start nourishing and living this Homo Novus right now!
Instead of projecting her outside of us and far away into the future, we can trust … that the door to our innate ‘imprisoned splendour’ is always open, that “the kingdom of heaven within” is available always and everywhere, that our “original face” has never left us and that there is no need to postpone living it out right now.
Links to previous postings:
Part 1
Part 2
Shanti is a regular contributor
All articles by this author on Osho News
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