In Sri Lanka one great mystic was dying…. He was worshipped by thousands of people. They gathered around him. He opened his eyes: just a few more breaths would he take on the shore and he would be gone, and gone forever.
Everybody was eager to listen to his last words. The old man said, “I have been teaching you for my whole life about blissfulness, ecstasy, meditativeness. Now I am going to the other shore. I will not be available anymore. You have listened to me, but you have never practiced what I have been telling you. You have always been postponing. But now there is no point in postponing, I am going. Is anyone ready to go with me?”
There was a great pindrop silence. People looked at each other thinking that perhaps this man who had been a disciple for forty years…. He may be ready…. But he was looking at the others ― nobody was standing up.
Just from the very back a man raised his hand. The great mystic thought, “At least, one person is courageous enough.”
But that man said, “Please let me make it clear to you why I am not standing up. I have only raised my hand. I want to know how to reach to the other shore, because today of course I am not ready. There are many things which are incomplete: a guest has come, my young son is getting married, and this day I cannot go ― and you say from the other shore, you cannot come back.
“Some day, one day certainly, I will come and meet you. If you can just explain to us once more ― although you have been explaining to us for your whole life ― just once more how to reach the other shore? But please keep in mind that I am not ready to go right now. I just want to refresh my memory so that when the right time comes….”
That right time never comes.
It is not a story only about that poor man, it is the story of millions of people, of almost all. They are all waiting for the right moment, the right constellation of stars…. They are consulting astrology, going to the palmist… inquiring in different ways what is going to happen tomorrow.
Tomorrow does not happen ― it never has happened. It is simply a stupid strategy of postponement. What happens is always today.
A right kind of education will teach people to live herenow, to create a paradise of this earth, not to wait for death to come, and not to be miserable till death stops your misery.
Let death find you dancing and joyous and loving. It is a strange experience that if a man can live his life as if he is already in paradise, death cannot take away anything from that man’s experience.
My approach is to teach you that this is the paradise, there is no paradise anywhere else, and no preparation is needed to be happy. No discipline is needed to be loving; just a little alertness, just a little wakefulness, just a little understanding. And if education cannot give you this little understanding, it is not education.
My conception of a world academy means that the whole world should have the same education of meditation, of art, of creative science.
If we can create a sane educational system around the world, then the divisions of religion and the discrimination between white and black and nations, the ugly politics that exists because of them, and the stupid behavior of men preparing continuously for war….
Whenever I see a soldier I cannot believe that this man has a mind at all. Even animals don’t become soldiers. But man seems to have only one interest: how to kill, how to kill more efficiently, how to go on refining instruments for killing.
Osho is known for his revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation, with an approach to meditation that acknowledges the accelerated pace of contemporary life.
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