Standing alone like a tall Lebanon cedar

Beloved Master,

As I look around me, at the people that have answered your call, my spirit flies with joy with the knowledge that these, my brothers and sisters, are some of the most extraordinary people on the planet. Seeing them with this awareness makes me drop from my head to my heart. For in the heat of dealing with my own stuff I forget to see them as they are, and not how I perceive them.

Please comment.

Michael Scott, it is one of the basics of human understanding that if you want to see the others as they are you have to be utterly empty, without any prejudices, without any preconceived ideas, without any judgmental attitudes.

Nobody ordinarily sees people as they are. They see them as they can. They see them through a thick barrier of their own mind, of their own conditionings. Unless you are capable of seeing… In pure seeing, philosia, you don’t have anything to project from your side, you don’t have any color to give to the object of your observation. Then only are you capable of seeing things, people, as they are in themselves.

One of the great German philosophers, Immanuel Kant, even dropped the idea that you can see things as they are in themselves, because he had no way of knowing meditatively. He was a great mind – but the greater the mind, the greater the difficulty of seeing clearly. Your mind grabs every information that reaches to you, screens it, sorts out whatever is adjustable with your existing knowledge, allows it, and whatever is going to disturb your mind – anything new, unfamiliar, a stranger – it rejects.

Science has discovered a surprising fact. Our mind used to be thought of in the past as a receiver of information from the world, and our eyes, our ears, our noses, all our senses as doors from where the existence can enter into us. This has been an ancient understanding prevailing for thousands of years. But just within these five years, science has become aware of a totally different situation. Your senses are not simple windows; your mind allows only two percent of information and discards ninety-eight percent of information. It is continuously on guard for what enters you. It should be in tune with your concepts, superstitions, ideologies, and if it is not, the mind is not going to get disturbed, to get in a chaos, by allowing a new idea which will not be fitting with you.

This makes things very different. It means your mind is not a vehicle of knowing, but a vehicle for preventing ninety-eight percent of the knowledge that was available to you. And the two percent that is allowed in is worth nothing, because it adjusts to you; it means it is the same stuff of which you already have enough.

Only a meditator can know people, can know things, can experience beauty as it is in itself, because he does not interfere, he does not censor, he is not on guard, he has nothing to lose. He has already dropped all that could have been the cause of fear. It is utterly empty.

Once in a while you are empty. In this moment you can see things with a clarity, with transparency. But when your mind starts, covered with your own thoughts, they protect you: they protect the dead against the living, they protect the static against the dynamic, they protect what has been given to you as knowledge against existential experience.

You are right when you say, “As I look around me, at the people that have answered your call, my spirit flies with joy with the knowledge that these, my brothers and sisters, are some of the most extraordinary people on the planet.”

If you are silent and your eyes are without any dust and your heart is just a pure mirror, this will be the experience of everyone. These people are certainly extraordinary! I am against the whole past, I am against all conditionings, I am against all ideologies, all organized religions. So only very few people, who have the courage to drop the whole past in its entirety, can have the opportunity to be with me.

To be with me is risky. It is dangerous – dangerous to your mind. To be with me finally means you will have to lose your mind. Of course it will not be a loss because you will be attaining something greater, something vaster, something unbounded. You will be attaining a state of no-mind.

Only a state of no-mind is an open door; without any judgment it allows you to see things as they are, not as they should be, not as you would like them to be, not to fit with you. Existence has no obligation to fit with your mind. But every mind is struggling somehow to make the existence fit with it. It is impossible; hence the misery, the frustration, the deep despair, the feeling of failure.

The great philosophers of the contemporary world, the existentialists, have lost all courage. They have lost their very nerve for the simple reason that they are the most refined, cultured, educated, rational minds. From their minds they cannot see any beauty anywhere, they cannot see any joy anywhere, they cannot see any hope anywhere. They are utterly in deep anguish.

But existence is celebrating. It goes on bringing new flowers, it goes on bringing new stars, it goes on bringing every moment something new. It is continuously renewing itself, and there is a song that surrounds the whole existence and there is a dance that you can see in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in the children, in the sages. But to see this you have to put your mind aside.

Sometimes it happens on its own. Listening to me, if you become too attentive, you slip out of your mind. Those few moments when you slip out of your mind, you will become aware of this extraordinary gathering of brothers and sisters.

These people have taken a tremendous step. They have risked their established mind to enquire into the unfamiliar and the unknown – and ultimately, the unknowable. They have put aside all their explanations in favor of the miracle and the mystery of existence. They have dropped their ambitions, their desires for money, power, prestige, respectability. Now their whole concern is simple and single: how to know, Who am I?

Without knowing yourself, all knowledge is futile; and if you know yourself, you need not know anything that is unnecessary. Knowing oneself, one comes to know the very innermost core of existence, the very center. Experiencing that center is so blissful, so ecstatic that there is no need…. You are no longer a beggar; suddenly you have become an emperor. The whole kingdom of God has become yours.

These people have taken a courageous stand against the whole world. It is not ordinary, it is absolutely extraordinary. To stand alone like a lion, and not to be a sheep in the crowd, is the greatest courage in existence. Very few people are able to get out of the mass psychology, of the collective mind. The collective mind gives a certain sense of false security. Naturally it gives you the idea that so many people – there are five billion people on the planet – cannot be wrong. Naturally there is no need for you to search for the truth individually. All these people have discovered it; it is easier and cheaper just to follow them… just to be a Christian, or a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a communist. It is very easy when a crowd surrounds you to feel warm and cozy.

Standing alone like a tall Lebanon cedar, utterly alone in the sky, far away from the earth, almost reaching to the stars… But the beauty of the cedars of Lebanon – their courage to go beyond the crowd, their courage to be alone…

Gautam Buddha used to call sannyas a lion’s roar. So whenever I am in a gap, if you are in tune with me, you are in a gap. Then you will become aware that you are surrounded by a strange crowd. It is not the ordinary crowd of the marketplace – these are seekers, these are enquirers. These are people who are ready to sacrifice everything for the truth. These are the people who have renounced all borrowed knowledge and are in search of something of their own, because that which is not yours, is not right. It may have been right for Gautam Buddha, it may have been right for Jesus Christ, but it is not right for you.

You are a unique individual in your own right.

You have to find the truth alone, not by following somebody else’s footsteps. The world of truth is something like the sky where birds fly but don’t leave any footprints. The world of truth also has no footprints of Jesus or Gautam Buddha or Lao Tzu. It is the world of consciousness: where can you leave the footprints?

All followers, without exception, are wrong. They are following someone because they are not courageous enough to seek and search on their own. They are afraid that alone, “I may not be able to find anything. And what is the need when Gautam Buddha has found?”

But you never think that when Gautam Buddha drinks, his thirst is quenched – but that will not help your thirst. Jesus eats, his hunger is gone, but that will not make you nourished. You have to eat, you have to drink; you cannot simply depend. So many great people have loved, what is the need for you to love? – you can simply follow them. But that will not be love; that will be only a carbon copy. And to be a carbon copy in this world is the ugliest way of being.

The only authentic man is always original.

He is not a replica, not a repetition. He is a new song, a new dance, a new beginning, always and always.

But you are right, Michael Scott, that “seeing these extraordinary people on the planet, seeing them with this awareness makes me drop from my head to my heart.”

That’s a beautiful symbol. That is a great indication. If you can move from the head to the heart, you have attained something which society has been preventing. Society does not want you to be a man of heart. Society needs heads, not hearts. […]

Osho, The Great Pilgrimage, Ch 25, Q 2 (excerpt)

Thanks to Nirbija for submitting the quote