“The moment a synchronicity happens… between the heart of the man of the vertical and the heart of the man who is not yet vertical… you also start moving vertically.”
Beloved Master,
You once said, “The moment is rare when eternity penetrates time.” Can you speak more on this?
The question seems to be simple but the answer is very complex. And the complexity becomes multidimensional, because the answer can come only from your own experience, not from outside. Just as the question is arising in you, the answer has to also be part of your interiority. But I will go into a little detail, to explain what I mean when I say that the moment is rare when eternity penetrates time.
Time is that in which we live – it is horizontal. It is from A to B to C to D; it is in a line. Eternity is vertical. It is not from A to B and from B to C. It is from A to more A to still more A. It goes on upwards. The moment is rare because it happens only when meditation has reached ripening, maturity, when you have touched your innermost core.
Then suddenly you become aware that you are a crossroads. One line goes horizontal; in other words, mediocre, ordinary, meaningless and leading finally to death. […]
Wherever you are going horizontally, with whatever speed, you will end up in some graveyard. It is strange that every moment our graves are coming closer to us – even if you don’t move, your grave is moving towards you. The horizontal line of time is, in other words, the mortality of man.
But if you can reach to the center of your being, the silences of your innermost center, you can see two roads: one horizontal, another vertical.
You will be surprised to know that the Christian cross is not Christian at all. It is an ancient, Eastern, Aryan symbol, the swastika. […]
The Christian cross is simply a part of the swastika. But it also represents the same thing: the vertical, the horizontal. Christ’s hands are horizontal; his head and his being are pointing in a different direction.
In a moment of meditation, you suddenly see that you can move in two directions – either horizontal or vertical. The vertical consists of silences, blissfulness, ecstasies; the horizontal consists of hands, work, the world.
Once a man has known himself as a crossroads, he cannot be disinterested, he cannot be unintrigued about the vertical. The horizontal he knows, but the vertical opens a door to eternity, where death does not exist; where one simply becomes more and more part of the cosmic whole; where one loses all bondages, even the bondage of the body.
Gautam Buddha used to say, “Birth is pain, life is pain, death is pain.” What he was saying was, to move on the horizontal line, you are continuously miserable, in pain. Your life cannot be a life of dance, of joy. If this is all, then suicide is the only solution.
That’s the conclusion the contemporary Western philosophy of existentialism – of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and others – has come to, that life is meaningless. On the horizontal plane it is, because it is simply agony and pain and disease and sickness and oldness. And you are encaged in a small body while your consciousness is as vast as the whole universe.
Once the vertical is discovered, one starts moving on the vertical line. That vertical line does not mean you have to renounce the world. But it certainly means that you are no more of the world, that the world becomes ephemeral, loses importance. It does not mean that you have to renounce the world and escape to the mountains and the monasteries. It simply means that you start – wherever you are – living an inner life which was not possible before.
Before you were an extrovert; now, suddenly you become introvert. As far as the body is concerned, you can manage very easily, if the remembrance is there that you are not the body. But the body can be used in many ways to help you to move on the vertical line. The penetration of the vertical line, just a ray of light coming into your darkness of horizontal life, is the beginning of enlightenment.
You will look the same, but you will not be the same. Those who have a clarity of seeing, to them you will not look the same either. And at least for yourself, you will never look the same. And you can never be the same. You will be in the world, but the world will not be in you.
Ambitions, desires, jealousies will start evaporating. No effort will be needed to drop them, just your movement on the vertical line and they start disappearing – because they cannot exist on the vertical line. They can exist only in the darkness of the horizontal, where everybody is in competition, everybody is full of lust, full of will to power, a great desire to dominate, to become somebody special.
On the vertical line all these stupidities simply disappear. You become so light, so weightless, just like a lotus flower: it is in the water, but the water does not touch it. You remain in the world, but the world has no longer any impact on you. On the contrary, you start influencing the world – not with conscious effort, but just by your sheer being, your presence, your grace, your beauty. As it grows inside it starts spreading around you.
It will touch people who have an open heart and it will make people afraid who have lived with a closed heart – all windows, all doors closed. They will not come in contact with such a person. And to convince themselves why they are not coming in contact with such a person, they will find a thousand and one excuses, a thousand and one lies. But the basic fact is that they are afraid to be exposed.
The man who is moving vertically becomes almost a mirror. If you come close to him, you will see your real face – you will see your ugliness, you will see your continuous ambitiousness, you will see your begging bowl. […]
On the horizontal line, only beggars exist, because they are all rushing for more, and because the more cannot be fulfilled – not that you cannot get to a position you want, but the moment you get it, there are higher positions. For a moment maybe a flicker of happiness, and the next moment, again the same despair and the same race for more. You cannot fulfill the idea of more. It is intrinsically unfulfillable. And this is the horizontal line, the line of more and more and more.
What is the vertical line? Of being less and less and less, to the point of utter emptiness, to the point of being nobody. Just a signature – not even on sand, but on water. You have not even made it and it has disappeared. The man of the vertical line is the authentic sannyasin, who is immensely happy in being nobody, immensely happy with his inner purity of emptiness, because only emptiness can be pure; who is absolutely contented with his nakedness, because only nothingness can be in tune with the universe.
Once this tuning with the universe happens, you are no more in a sense. In the old sense, you are no more. But you are for the first time the whole universe. Even the faraway stars are within you; your nothingness can contain them. The flowers and the sun and the moon… and the whole music of existence. You are no more an ego, your “I” has disappeared. But that does not mean that you have disappeared. On the contrary, the moment your “I” has disappeared, you have appeared.
It is such a great ecstasy to be without the feeling of “I,” without the feeling of any ego, without asking for anything more. What more can you ask? You have nothingness. In this nothingness you have become, without conquering, the whole universe. Then the singing birds are not only singing outside you. They appear outside because this body creates the barrier.
On the vertical line you become more and more consciousness and less and less body. The whole identification with the body disappears. In nothingness, these birds will be within you; these flowers, these trees and this beautiful morning will be within you. In fact, then there is no without. Everything has become your vision. And you cannot have a richer life than when everything has become your within. When the sun and the moon and the stars and the whole infinity of time and space is within you… what more do you want?
This is exactly the meaning of enlightenment: to become so nonexistent as an ego that the whole oceanic existence becomes part of you. […]
On the vertical line, you become less and less and less and less. And one day, you are no more.
A Zen master, Rinzai, had a very absurd habit, but beautiful. Every morning, when he would wake up, before opening his eyes he would say, “Rinzai, are you still here?”
His disciples said, “What kind of nonsense is this? You ask ‘Rinzai, are you still here?'”
He said, “I am waiting for the moment when the answer will be, ‘No. Existence is, but Rinzai is not.'”
This is the ultimate peak human consciousness can reach. This is the ultimate benediction. And unless one reaches to this peak, one will remain wandering in dark pathways, blind, suffering, miserable. He may accumulate much knowledge, he may become a great scholar, but that does not help. Only one thing, a very simple thing, is the essence of the whole religious experience, and that is meditation.
You go inwards. It will be difficult to get out from the crowd of your thoughts, but you are not a thought. You can get out of the crowd, you can create a distance between you and your thoughts. And as the distance grows bigger, the thoughts start falling like leaves which have died – because it is you and your identity with the thoughts that gives them nourishment. When you are not giving them nourishment, thoughts cannot exist. Have you met any thought somewhere standing by itself?
And just try to be indifferent – the word of Gautam Buddha is upeksha. Just be indifferent to the whole mind and a distance will be created. And then come to a point from where all nourishment to the thoughts is stopped. They simply disappear; they are soap bubbles.
And the moment all thoughts disappear, you will find yourself in the same situation, asking, “Rinzai are you still here?” And you will wait for that great moment, that great, rare opportunity when the answer will be, “No. Who is this guy Rinzai?”
This silence is meditation. And it is not a talent. Everybody cannot be a Picasso and everybody cannot be a Rabindranath and everybody cannot be a Michelangelo. Those are talents. But everybody can be enlightened because it is not a talent; it is your intrinsic nature, of which you are unaware. And you will remain unaware if you remain surrounded by thoughts. The awareness of your ultimate reality arises only when there is nothing to prevent it, when there is nothingness, surrounding you.
The vertical line is rare. It is perhaps the only rare thing in existence, because it takes you on the journey of eternity and immortality. The flowers that blossom on those paths are inconceivable by the mind. And the experiences that happen are unexplainable. But in a very strange way the man himself becomes the expression. His eyes show the depths of his heart, his gestures show the grace of the vertical movement. His whole life radiates, pulsates and creates a field of energy.
Those who are prejudiced, those who are already determined and concluded… I feel sorry for them. But those who are open, unprejudiced, have not concluded yet, they will immediately start feeling the pulsation, the radiation. And a certain synchronicity between the heart of the man of the vertical and the heart of the man who is not yet vertical… The moment the synchronicity happens, in that same moment you also start moving vertically. […]
Osho, Hari Om Tat Sat, Ch 27, Q 1 (excerpts)
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