Meditation

The Ultimate Alchemy

The are some points to ponder over before we step into the unknown ……” NO one can start a book like Osho, but an ultimate alchemist can split the Atma Pooja Upanishad with such a startling mixture of depth and finesse—an enlightened sorcerer enchanting us with deceptively uncomplicated language and daring us to glimpse at what “begines with the unknown and ends with the unknowable.”

Time and again when I read this book, I find myself exclaiming out loud and reaching for a piece of paper or closing out loud and reaching for as can inside in an effort to keep some remembered of the impact of a spilt –second of understanding, a tantalizing tongue—tip taste of Osho’s words of truth .a small flame leap inside as I am given glimpse after glimpse of the extraordinary –or as he says, “the extraordinary ordinary”—word of an enlightened consciousness.

The Ultimate Alchemy is an invitation into the expanse that is Osho. Just as the rushes of old gave birth to the Upanishads in revolt against the dead, ritualistic structure that had grown up around the Vedas, so Osho takes these ancient sutras and breathes twenty—first century life into them. Here is a living response to word of eternal truth from one who dwells in the unknowable and who understand the need and the search of modern man – his longing to discover an inner to find respite from the increasing global collective of the mind, given to us by our tradition, our relegation, our politicians and our home videos.

For a westerner, whose religion are based on right—actions and doing good, and whose whole psychological understanding rests on the notion that we can become “well-adjusted personalities,” this invitation to step away from our mind can come as quite a shock. Osho is a compassionate, humorous, Zen-like genius at persuading contemporary man to explore this possibility and start dipping his big toe – the part of him that is furthest away from his head – into “the only solution”: the water of meditation. “The greatest freedom is to be free from one’s mind….because it is a subtle bondage so deep that you never feel it as a bondage. Be constantly aware this your mind is not your consciousness is the energy, mind is just the thought content.”

These eighteen discourses, which alternate between responses to the sutras and answers to an international audience of seekers’ questions, show the master alchemist at his extraordinary work, helping us to find our essential essence, the real gold inside. Fire is needed to burn away our dream and illusion, to transform our base metal into gold, and these talks are strong. Yet at precisely the right moment, they are tempered with such a gentleness, love and humor that whatever the flames have not yet consumed gets the change to melt in another way.

Osho suggests we “drink” the massage of the Upanishads because “…although they use words—they have to—they stand for silence.” He also says, “if I am respondinding to this Upanishad, it is simply because I have fallen in love with it. ”No one could find a better way to describe his words or this book.