Buddha’s bhumis: 7 – 9

Discourses

The Ten Grounds of the Way: Accepting the call of the beyond, centering, sagely intelligence. (part 4)

To read the other parts of the discourse go to: The Ten Grounds of the Way

Osho

The seventh is durangama – far-goingness, accepting the call of the beyond. There is a beyond everywhere. We are surrounded by the beyond. That beyond is what God is; that beyond has to be penetrated. It is within, it is without; it is always there. And if you forget about it… as we do ordinarily, because it is very uncomfortable, inconvenient, to look into the beyond. It is as if one looks into an abyss, and one starts trembling, one starts feeling sick. The very awareness of the abyss and you start trembling.

Nobody looks at the abyss; we go on looking in other directions, we go on avoiding the real. The real is like an abyss, because the real is a great emptiness. It is vast sky with no boundaries. Buddha says: durangama – be available to the beyond. Never remain confined to the boundaries, always trespass boundaries. Make the boundaries if you need them, but always remember you have to step out. Never make imprisonments.

We make many sorts of imprisonments; relationship, belief, religion – they are all imprisonments. One feels cozy because there are no wild winds blowing. One feels protected although the protection is false, because death will come and will drag you into the beyond. Buddha says: Before death comes and drags you into the beyond, you go on your own.

A Zen monk was going to die. He was very old, ninety years old. Suddenly he opened his eyes and he said, “Where are my shoes?”

And the disciple said, “Where are you going? Have you gone crazy? You are dying, and the physician has said that there is no more possibility; a few minutes more.”

He said, “That’s why I’m asking for my shoes: I would like to go to the cemetery, because I don’t want to be dragged. I will walk on my own and I will meet death there. I don’t want to be dragged. And you know me – I have never leaned on anybody else. This will be very ugly, that four persons will be carrying me. No.”

He walked to the cemetery. Not only that, he dug his own grave, lay down in it, and died.

This is what Buddha means by durangama: such courage to accept the unknown, such courage to go on your own and welcome the beyond. Then death is transformed, then death is no longer death.

Such a courageous man never dies; death is defeated. Such a courageous man goes beyond death. For one who goes on his own to the beyond, the beyond is never like death. Then the beyond becomes a welcome. If you welcome the beyond, the beyond welcomes you; the beyond always goes on echoing you.

The eighth is achala: centering, grounding, immovability. And Buddha says one should learn to be centered, unmoving, grounded. Whatsoever happens, one should learn how to remain unwavering. Let the whole world go into disappearance, let the whole world dissolve, but a Buddha will go on sitting under his bodhi tree, unmoved. His center will not be wavering, he will not go off-center.

Try it. By and by, you start coming closer to your center. And the more close you come, the more happy you will feel, and a great solidity will arise in your being. Things go on happening, but they are happening outside; nothing penetrates to your center. If you are there, then nothing makes any difference. Life comes, death comes, success, failure, praise and insult, and pain and pleasure – they come and go. They all pass away, but the witnessing center always remains.

The ninth is sadhumati: intelligence, awareness, mindfulness. Buddha is very much in favor of intelligence, but remember that he does not mean intellect by it. Intellect is a heavy thing, intelligence is more total. Intellect is borrowed, intelligence is your own. Intellect is logical, rational; intelligence is more than logical. It is super-logical, it is intuitive. The intellectual person lives only through argument. Certainly, arguments can lead you up to a certain point, but beyond that, hunches are needed.

Even great scientists who work through reason come to a point where reason does not work, where they wait for a hunch, for some intuitive flash, for some light from the unknown. And it always happens: if you have worked hard with the intellect, and you don’t think that intellect is all, and you are available to the beyond, someday a ray penetrates you. It is not yours; and yet it is yours because it is nobody else’s. It comes from God. It comes from your innermost center. It looks as if it is coming from the beyond because you don’t know where your center is – to be intuitive.

Buddha uses intelligence in the sense of awareness, in the sense of mindfulness. The Sanskrit word, sadhumati, is very beautiful. Mati means intelligence, and sadhu means sage: sagely intelligence; not only intelligence, but sagely intelligence. There are people who may be rational but are not reasonable. To be reasonable is more than to be rational. Sometimes the reasonable person will be ready to accept the irrational too – because he is reasonable. He can understand that the irrational also exists. The rational person can never understand that the irrational also exists. He can only believe in the limited logical syllogism.

But there are things which cannot be proved logically, and yet they are. Everybody knows they are, and nobody has ever been able to prove them. Love is; nobody has ever been able to prove what it is, or whether it is, or not. But everybody knows – love is. Even people who deny – they are not ready to accept anything beyond logic – even they fall in love. When they fall in love then they are in a difficulty, they feel guilty.

But love is.

And nobody is ever satisfied by intellect alone unless the heart also is fulfilled. These are the two polarities inside you: the head and the heart. Sadhumati means: a great synthesis of both, head and heart. Sadhu means the heart, and mati means the head.

When the sagely heart is joined together with a sharp intelligence, then there is a great change, a transformation.

That’s what awareness is all about.

Osho, The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4, Ch 7 (excerpt part 4)

To read the other parts of the discourse go to: The Ten Grounds of the Way

Audio submitted by Siddho Varza

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