“The problem is that you live in the head. Come down from the head to the heart.”
A man was limping as he walked down a street, and wincing with pain.
A doctor stopped him and said, “If I were you I would get yourself seen to — you need your appendix out.”
So he had his appendix out. Presently he went to another doctor claiming that he still had the same trouble, so he was put on a course of tranquilizers. This did not help and he went to a hospital where they prescribed him a diet and remedial exercises.
Some weeks later he had to go to another surgeon because those medicines were not helping at all. The surgeon said, “Your tonsils have to be removed…” so the tonsils were removed. And this way he went on going from one doctor to another, from one surgeon to another, and parts of the body were slowly slowly disappearing. But the problem remained the same!
Then one day he was strolling in the marketplace and one of the doctors saw him. He said, “Glad to see you — you look better! You look perfect!” said the physician. “How did it happen? Who helped you finally? — because we had all failed. Was it my service that helped you?”
“Service my eye!” said the patient. “Both the pain and the limp went away the moment I took that nail out of my shoe!”
Sometimes things are very small, but if you go to knowledgeable people they look with magnifying glasses; they magnify everything. They are clever and efficient in creating problems, because they know the solutions. Their solutions are useful only if they create problems. Go to any expert, and immediately he will tell you so many problems that you were never aware of. He has to, because his whole expertise depends on your having many problems, and the more complicated they are, the more happy he is because now he has an opportunity to show his knowledge, his skill.
The real problem may be very small. The real problem is really small!
The problem is that you live in the head. Come down from the head to the heart. The head can become knowledgeable, the heart can never become knowledgeable. The heart can become wise. The heart knows in a totally different way. Its knowing is direct, immediate — it is not logical, it is intuitive. It is not inference, it is not a conclusion after a long argumentation.
It is a simple vision! One simply knows….
The heart is not a process of knowing: it is the opening of an eye.
Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3, Ch 1
Series compiled by Shanti
All excerpts of this series can be found in: 1001 Tales
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