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• HEALTH AND WHOLENESS LIE BEYOND DUALITY

HEALTH AND WHOLENESS LIE BEYOND DUALITY
Daily News & Analysis, Mumbai
29th October 2005
Swami Chaitanya Keerti

Zen master Sosan says cryptically: “The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”

It is difficult for us to comprehend that one could live without preferences. Yet it is already the case with nature – trees, birds, animals, rivers, mountains, planets are all moving with the natural flow of existence without any preference. It is only ma who finds this difficult. And the difficulty comes from his mind.

Mind is a great divider, an arbitrator of good and bad, right and wrong. Give your mind anything and soon you will see that it has created a duality. First it divides everything and then it creates conflicts between the divided parts. Then, in a vicious circle, it tries to give solutions to the conflicts created by itself. It is like disease giving us the cure, telling us ways to health.

Contrasting the eastern and western approaches, Osho explains: “the west says mind can become ill, and can be healthy. Western psychology depends on this. But for the east, mind as such is the disease, it cannot be healthy. The word ‘health’ is beautiful. Health, healing, whole, holy – they all come from the same root.”

All the sages of east have advised us to meditate and transcend the mind to be in the realm of witnessing consciousness. Krishna and Ashtavakra term it as Sakshi bhav. J. Krishnamurti calls it choiceless awareness.

Mind is a phenomenon of choice. Osho proclaims: “You choose and you are in misery. Choose and you are in the trap, because whenever you choose you have chosen something against something else. If you are for something, you must be against something: you cannot be only for, you cannot be only against. When the ‘for’ enters, the ‘against’ follows as a shadow. When you choose, you divide. Then you say, “this is right, this is wrong.”

“But life is unity. Existence remains undivided, existence remains in a deep unison. This is natural Advaita, non-duality, the real health that comes from oneness and wholeness.