:: MAIN STORY ::

NEWNESS IS DEATHLESSNESS

Osho says, “celebration is possible only when existence is a continuous newness, and existence is always young.”

“ When nothing grows old, when nothing really dies -- because everything is constantly reborn -- it becomes a dance. Then it is an inner music flowing.” 

Osho shares “if you can learn this art -- and this is the art I am calling meditation -- of never becoming old, then existence will always protect you. Then the day the universe comes to an end, then you too will be saved; the day great dissolution happens, then you too will be saved. Of course, enough land for you will have to be saved also. But the art of it is that you remain like a new-born child, you never become old. Yes, the body will become old and will even die, but still you don't become old. Let your soul remain new, like a new shoot, like a morning dewdrop, ever fresh, -- then existence will always provide you protection. The moment you become old, you have gone against existence, you have called for your own death. If you are always new you are deathless.”

“Moment to moment your death happens, and moment to moment you are reborn. It is not that you are one day born, live a hundred years, and then die.  No, you are dying every moment, and every moment you are born anew. Every moment the old finishes and the new begins. It is only a myth that the universe was at one time created and is one day going to dissolve. Right now the universe is being created and right now it is dissolving; this is a fact.

It is not that God created the universe sometime and then went to rest, as the Christians think -- that God created the world in six days and then took a rest on the seventh day, so the seventh day is a holiday. The creation was completed in six days, and then God went on holiday -- and he has been on holiday ever since!  No, it is not so. Because you get tired, you think God must also need holidays. If God also gets tired, then he is not infinite -- his energy can be exhausted. If God also gets tired, then in that very moment the whole of creation will come to an end.

No, it is not that God once created the universe; he is creating it every moment. Creation is eternal. The universe is not a historical event, it is eternalness. Every moment the creation is going on. These plants are growing, buds are breaking into flowers, eggs are hatching, young birds are getting ready to fly -- each moment. Nothing is static. Nowhere in all the vastness of the universe is there ever a pause; there is no holiday, creation is an eternal celebration.

And what is true for the whole universe is true for you too because you are also a small image of the vast. You may be only a drop in the ocean , but still you are a drop, and in each moment you are also being created and dissolved. That which is the past has been dissolved, and that which is to come is being created: and between these two is your existence.

This story from the Puranas is very beautiful. As the universe dissolves, everything is destroyed except for a child, an innocent -- Balkrishna or whatever name we want to give him. With him the whole of creation begins again. Its meaning is multidimensional; try to understand all the dimensions.

First, all the grownups, all the old ones die, only a small child remains. All the cunning and experienced disappear, all the clever and the wise are destroyed. Only an innocent child survives, who knows nothing, while all the pundits and scriptures and religions, all the monks and saints are annihilated. What would this mean?

There is a certain security in innocence which is missing in cleverness. Lao Tzu says that he once saw a bullock cart in which some people were riding, overturn. Two of the people were killed, and a third was half-dead, his limbs broken. But there was a fourth man who received no injuries at all. When the cart turned over he was thrown off and landed on his back in the road, and there he lay. Lao Tzu was surprised at the man's relaxed manner and approached him to find out how he was. The man, he discovered, was drunk. The three who were in their right senses were dead or injured, while the man so out of his senses that he was not even aware that the cart had capsized, suffered no injury. He was in such a state of unawareness that it made no difference to him whether he was in or out of the cart.

This is worth understanding. It is quite a usual scene to find drunkards lying in the roadway; for them, falling down is a normal occurrence. If you fall the way they do, you will find yourself in hospital with broken bones, but they are quite unharmed. It seems that there is an art here that is known only to the drunkard. There is, and the art is simply this -- that the drunkard is not conscious. When you are conscious and something happens, you try to defend yourself; if you are unaware there is no question of trying to defend yourself. In the moment that the accident happens, the aware person experiences fear and in trying to save himself he contracts his muscles.

When this cart overturned, three of the passengers were in a state of tension, fighting against gravity in an effort to save themselves. It is in that state of tension that the body gets damaged, and the bones broken. But for the drunkard there was no awareness of falling from the cart, so there was no fighting to save himself. He must have fallen as though he were not there, as though it was only a bag or bundle that had fallen, with no bones inside it to get broken. The drunkard fell as though there was nobody within him.

When there is no one inside seeking to save himself, no defender, then there is no resistance, no ego, no one to put on an air of bravado. Having no resistance, the drunkard simply fell; the others, resisting the fall, had to come to grief. People must have regarded this drunkard as being under the protection of God's grace. Lao Tzu says, "Only the drunkard is saved, the sober man breaks." The reason the drunkard is saved is that he is not aware of himself. 

In this story everyone dies except for a small child. All who wanted to save themselves are destroyed; only a child survives. It often happens this way when a house is on fire -- the adults die, and a helpless baby survives. In their frantic efforts to escape, the adults find themselves trapped and burn to death, and it is only the baby, smiling contentedly in his cradle, who is saved.  Many times this happens.

There is a mystery behind such happenings, and the mystery is that the child is not doing anything to protect himself. God protects those who do not seek to protect themselves. And those who are trying to protect themselves are fighting with God. It means they are saying, "I have no trust in you, I will have my own arrangement." But in the face of the dissolution of the universe our own efforts are not going to be of any use. Even now they do not work; it is only your illusion that you are protecting yourself. In this struggle of life, where dissolution is happening all around from one moment to the next, you too are being destroyed, because you are not like little children; otherwise you would be saved.

This story carries a still deeper meaning: all that is past has dissolved and the future has not yet arrived. Whenever it arrives it arrives in the present moment. In essence you have always been a child, but you carry the whole past with you. You know all the records, you keep the files, ledgers and accounts, you know the bank balance, what you did or what you did not do, what has happened and what did not happen. All this you carry in your memory -- and it does not exist anywhere except in your memory! Even the future you carry in your mind -- what is to be done and what is not to be done, whether the plans will materialize or not, how they will work out and how they will not -- all this vast network too you carry in your mind. And this too is nonexistent. In existence there is only pure present moment -- where all past has disappeared and the future has not yet come.

In this present moment, who are you? What is your experience and knowledge? In this moment you have no ledgers and records; in this present moment you are just like a small child, newly born in this very moment from the mother's womb, who has no answer even to the question, "Who are you?" and who knows nothing, whose slate of the heart is clean, on which nothing has yet been written. This heart, clear of all writing, is the pure heart of the child.

So the meditator keeps becoming each moment as the heart of a child. Meditation means cleaning off the rubbish of the past, dissolving all you have learned in the past, cleansing and unlearning all that you have come to know, making it all unknown again, dissolving everything that you have gathered around you and becoming fresh, light, new again -- like a shoot on a tree. Let the dead leaves fall, and let this fall happen every moment, so that spring follows after every fall, new shoots come and you are completely fresh and new, untarnished by any signs of the past.

The meditator's experiment is to become in each and every moment so clean that not even a single trace of the old is to be found in him. From moment to moment, the meditator frees himself from the past, goes on dying to the past, and does not fall into the trap of creating his own future. There is no need to create the future, it will happen on its own. You don't need to trouble yourself about it -- it will happen without you.  The sky is not asking you whether it is allowed to go on being, the moon and stars do not seek your consent and nor have the rivers asked your permission to go on flowing. Time, too, runs its course without asking you... so why should you bother?

Wipe away the past, let its dust not settle on you, and don't try to give birth to the future. It will be born of its own accord. Then you are free like a new-born child, innocent, and this innocence is meditation. And when the creation happens from within you, all your life energy becomes the creator's energy. Then you are the divine. The one who is pure and simple like a child is the divine.”

NOWHERE TO GO, BUT IN
# 10

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