This silence . . . this moment . . . so precious . . . so beautiful. To keep avoiding it and missing it seems so absurd.
Beloved Master, why? What is so difficult about dropping this whole game and just being?
Deva Gayan, the question you have asked is beautiful. “This silence . . . this moment . . . so precious . . . so beautiful. To keep avoiding it and missing it seems so absurd. Beloved Master, why? What is so difficult about dropping this whole game and just being?”
If the whole game is dropped, and you remain just being. . . soon you will get tired of it, bored with it. The game also has its significance. Its whole significance is that it makes your being just silent, a beauty. Without this game, this crowd, this noise, without this marketplace your temple will not have the beauty that it has. Life is a dialectic.
In the night you see the whole sky full of stars. Do you think that in the day the stars hide somewhere? They are still there where you see them in the night, but in the light of the sun it is difficult to see them. You can see them if you go into a deep well, where it is almost as dark as night.
I used to have, by my house, a deep well. My family used to keep me away from it, and finally they closed it, because it had chains and you could go deep into it. Whenever I could get a chance – nobody was looking at the well – I would simply go into it. There was a place from where it was so dark that for the first time I became aware that from that darkness you can see stars in the sky.
To see the stars, you need the darkness. And stars are so beautiful, but they will not be there without darkness. You have to understand the beauty of darkness too.
Life is so beautiful, but it would not be so beautiful if there was no death. Just think – if you go on and on and on living, a point will come where you would like to die. You have lived enough; now life itself has become a boring experience because it is the same round every day, and the wheel has moved for so many years, again and again.
When I say life is a dialectic, I mean it exists between two polarities, and both the polarities help each other. You cannot take one polarity away; if you take one away the other will also disappear. The silence is beautiful – nobody will disagree with you, Deva Gayan – but the great moment is when you understand that the noise of the marketplace is also beautiful because the beautiful silence and the beautiful noise are part of one whole. The day and the night, the summer and the winter, childhood and old age, all have tremendous beauty. The moment you see the beauty of [both] together you have transcended them.
This transcendental experience, you can call enlightenment; you can call awakening; you can call realization; you can call the truth – these are only different names for the same experience. But our mind always goes on trying to keep one and avoid the other.
You are asking, “This silence . . . this moment . . . so precious . . . so beautiful. Then why do we go on avoiding it, missing it?” That too is beautiful. That makes the contrast. It is just a silver line on a black cloud. You can write with white chalk only on a blackboard. If you take away the blackboard, the writing will also disappear.
To see this contradictoriness as complementary is to become mature. Then you don’t want to drop anything, then you don’t want to escape from the world, then whatever happens, you love it. The noise has its own place, and the silence has its own place, and they both enrich each other. There is no need to get out of the game. The game is tremendously beautiful. Just understand that this is the game, and because of the game, we have divided it into two parts; otherwise, nobody is the enemy, not even death. In this absolute acceptance of everything, you have already gone beyond.
Grandma Faginbaum takes her grandchildren shopping and leaves the house empty, except for her parrot standing on its perch by the door. The plumber arrives to fix something in the house and knocks on the door.
“Who is it?” asks the parrot.
“It’s the plumber,” replies the man. Nothing happens. The plumber knocks again.
“Who is it?” asks the parrot.
“The plumber,” he replies.
There is silence. The plumber, who has a heart condition, is getting impatient. He knocks again.
“Who is it?” squawks the parrot.
“It’s the plumber!” he yells and collapses in a faint.
Half an hour later, grandma returns with the kids. The little girl points at the body on the ground.
“Who is that?” she asks.
The parrot squawks, “It’s the plumber!”
It is a game.
Let it continue.
Just go on laughing and enjoying – it is the plumber!
-Osho
From Hari Om Tat Sat, Discourse #11, Q4
Copyright © OSHO International Foundation
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