< Previous | Contents | Next >
Chapter 6 - The Irrational Rationalist
I am absurd.
You will think that Dr. Kovoor uses all these terms in a very condemnatory sense. That is his business -- that is his problem. I am a religious man. If I can find a rose flower, I don't bother about the thorns. If I can see that the black cloud has a white, silver lining, I dance for the silver lining; and I feel thankful for the black cloud also because without it the silver lining cannot exist. I look through religious eyes. Even the negative turns positive. So maybe he has tried to condemn me, but that is HIS problem. Why should I take it as a condemnation? I take it as praise; he has complimented me. And these are my words that I like, that I enjoy.
Now, a few things that I am sorry to say that I cannot agree on with Dr. Kovoor.
The first thing: he says that man has no soul. That means man has no interiority, no intention. That means man has no meaning.
He goes on throwing theories upon me which I have never propounded, and then he condemns them. He is fighting with ghosts -- and he himself has created them. I have never said that man has an individual soul. We have individual bodies, but our soul is universal. On the periphery we are different; at the center we are one.
Now, he goes on condemning and criticizing, "How is it possible? When the body dies, where can the soul go? Nobody has ever seen the soul going." I have never said that the soul goes anywhere. There is nowhere to go! In fact, the body is nothing but the visible aspect of the soul, and the soul is nothing but the invisible aspect of the body. Man is an ensouled body and an embodied soul. These are two aspects of some energy: X or God. One aspect is the body, another aspect is the soul. When a man dies it is not that the soul goes somewhere.
When the man dies the soul moves into the unmanifested.
Now, he says one man, a certain Peter, has been revived seven times. He dies of a heart attack; through artificial techniques he is revived again. Again after a few days or a few hours he dies; again he is revived. In all, seven times. So Dr.
Kovoor asks what I say about it. Does the soul go and come back again, go and come back again? No. There is nowhere to go. The soul becomes unmanifest when the situations to manifest it are no more there. When the situations are there again, it becomes manifest.
It is just like the seed. Where has the tree gone? You cannot find it in the seed. It has disappeared in the seed. It has become unmanifest in the seed. Put the seed in the soil, and again the tree is there. And again the tree will die one day and will leave many seeds.
The manifest becomes the unmanifest, the unmanifest becomes the manifest. These are the two wings of reality. Nobody goes anywhere. There is nobody to go and nowhere to go.
I don't believe in individual souls. I believe in the universal ocean of consciousness. A wave arises; then the wave disappears. Where has it gone? It has gone to the same source from where it had arisen in the first place. It had risen out of the ocean; now it has gone back to the ocean.
There is a beautiful story about Junaid, a Sufi mystic. He was passing through a small village. It was evening, and a small boy was carrying a small candle. He was going to the mosque to put the candle there. The mosque was dark and it was a dark night, and the night was descending. Junaid just laughingly, jokingly asked the small child, "Have you yourself lighted this candle?" And the boy said, "Yes, sir." And Junaid said, "Then tell me one thing.
From where has this flame come? From where? And you say you yourself have lighted the candle, so you must have seen from where this flame has come." The boy must have been a Osho - The First Principle
102
< Previous | Contents | Next >