“You can drop your mind this very moment because the mind cannot hold you. Mind is just a mechanism, a machine; you can get out of it any moment.”
What’s wrong with me that I cannot see what you are showing to me?
Nothing specially wrong with you, just the same human problem: the problem of the mind. If you are intelligent you can put it aside immediately, right now. All that is needed is an intelligent grasp, just a single moment’s glimpse, and you are out of it — because the mind is not holding you, you are holding the mind.
It happened:
A man came to Sheik Farid, a Sufi mystic, a great Sufi mystic and a very strange man. The man said, “How can I get out of my chains, my attachment, my ideas, my prejudices?”
Farid had his own way of answering things. Rather than answering to the person he simply ran to a pillar which was nearby, clung to the pillar and started shouting, “Save me from the pillar!”
The man could not believe what is happening — is he mad or something? And he was shouting so loudly that people started coming from the street in. A crowd gathered and they asked, “What is the matter with you? Have you gone crazy? You are holding the pillar, not the pillar holding you. You can leave it!”
And the man also said, “I had thought that this man is a man of great understanding and he seems to be just a madman! I had asked a very subtle question, a very spiritual question which has always been asked by seekers: how to get out of my attachments with ideas things people? And rather than answering me he simply jumped and clung to the pillar and started shouting, ‘Save me from the pillar!'”
Farid looked at the man and he said, “If you can understand this, then you don’t need any answer. Go home and ponder over it. If the pillar is not holding me, neither your chains are holding you — you are holding them. I can leave the pillar — look I am leaving the pillar and I am saved! You also leave…”
The man must have been really intelligent — he understood. There was a shock for a moment, the way the question was answered, but in that very shock he could see the point. It penetrated to his very heart.
He touched the feet of Farid and said, “It is finished! I have asked the same question to many mahatmas, to many saints, and they gave me great discourses on it, and nothing happened. And your mad effort to answer me has immediately transformed something in me. Now I am not going back to my old world, I am going to be with you. I have found the man I was searching all my life. I needed a man like you who can hit me so hard, who could show me my stupidity.”
You can drop your mind this very moment because the mind cannot hold you. Mind is just a mechanism, a machine; you can get out of it any moment. But you have invested so much in it that YOU cling to IT, and then you go on asking how to get out of it. The doors are open; there is nobody preventing you. You can come out of it! But rather than coming out of it you simply go on asking, “How to come out of it?” There is no question of “how”. […]
Osho, Tao: The Golden Gate, Vol 2, Ch 9, Q 1 (excerpt)
Series compiled by Shanti
All excerpts of this series can be found in: 1001 Tales
Featured image (detail) by John Patterson on Unsplash
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