A new understanding is always a sort of non-understanding

The soma group is present. The group leader says:

It was a beautiful group… couldn’t have been better.

There’s a question inside me to do with the mind, with thinking or being thought through, discerning action or non-action, being one with the meditations and being very separate and distant, understanding in a new way and not understanding.

Don’t make a problem out of it. In fact it is a solution, not a problem. Whenever a new way of understanding arises, in a sense one starts feeling that one understands no more, because all the old patterns of understanding disappear. And that’s what you were always thinking was your understanding. So when the whole edifice collapses you feel that you understand no more; you don’t know what is any more. And yet a subtle feeling arises that a new way of looking at things is happening. These both come together, they are bound to come together; they cannot come separately.

If the old style of thinking and the old patterns of the mind continue then the new cannot arise, because the new arises only out of the death of the old. When the old ceases, only then the new arises. So this is a transitory period – where the old has collapsed and the new is so new and unfamiliar that you have not yet settled with it. It is just like changing a house. One is taking all one’s things away in a truck. The old is left and the truck is just on the way and the new has not arrived. A transitory period… but good, beautiful. Something is growing.

Whenever something new arises one feels as if all understanding is lost, because the past pattern no more functions. So be happy about it, and don’t make a problem out of it, If you make a problem out of it there is every possibility that you may again start pulling out of the old, clinging to the old, bringing it back home. It’s good. A new understanding is always a sort of non-understanding.

The real beginning of knowledge is always a beginning of feeling oneself to be ignorant. The Upanishads say, ‘Those who think they know, know not,’ because the very idea that you know does not allow you to know. The very idea that one is ignorant makes you vulnerable, open. Like a child, your eyes are full of wonder. Then it is difficult to decide whether the thoughts are yours or they are entering you from the outside, because one has lost all moorings. And there is no way to judge, no criterion to judge whether these thoughts that are arising in you are yours or somebody else’s thoughts entering you. But there is no need to be worried because basically the mind is only one, it is the universal mind – call it God or call it in Jungian terms ‘the collective unconscious’.

We are separate only on the surface, deep down we are not separate. Just the visible part is separate, the invisible part is still one. So when you relax and you become silent and you become more humble, more childlike, more innocent, then it will be difficult in the beginning to see whether these thoughts are ours, are coming out of the blue, or somebody else is sending his messages and you are just a receiving end. But they are coming from nowhere. They are coming from the deepest core of your being – but that is the core of everybody else also.

So a really original thought is nobody’s… it carries nobody’s signature. It is simply there out of the collective, out of the universal, out of the one mind – mind with a capital ‘M’. So when the individual mind, the ego mind relaxes, the universal mind starts over-flooding you. That’s what’s happening.

Allow it, enjoy it. Become as perfect a receiver as possible, and don’t be bothered by the anxiety of whether this is yours or not. Nothing is yours or everything is yours. So decide either way. Both are right. Either say ‘everything is mine’ then there is no problem, or say ‘nothing is mine’; then too there is no problem. But don’t create a problem out of it, otherwise the beauty of it, the innocence will be disturbed. Good.

Osho, Dance Your Way to God, Ch 11