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Chapter 1 - The Hidden Harmony
I the same? Are you the same? Both rivers have changed. You may be here again tomorrow, but you will not find me; somebody else will be here.
Life is changing. "Only change is eternal," says Heraclitus -- only change never changes.
Everything else changes. He believes in a permanent revolution. Everything is in revolution. It is how it is there. To be means to become. To remain where you are means to move; you cannot stay, nothing is static. Even the hills, the Himalayas, are not static; they are moving, moving fast. They are born, then they die. The Himalayas is one of the youngest mountain ranges in the world, and it is still growing. It has not reached its peak yet, it is very young --
every year it grows one foot. There are old mountains whose peaks have been attained; now they are falling down, old, their backs are bent.
These walls you see around you, every particle of them is in movement. You cannot see the movement because the movement is very subtle and fast. Now physicists agree with Heraclitus, not with Aristotle, remember. Whenever any science reaches nearer to reality, it has to agree with Lao Tzu and Heraclitus. Now physicists say everything is in movement.
Eddington has said that the only word which is false is rest. Nothing is at rest, nothing can be; it is a false word, it doesn't correspond to any reality. "Is" is just in the language. In life, in existence, there is no "is"; everything is becoming. Heraclitus himself, when he says about the river -- and the symbol of the river is very, very deep with him -- that you cannot step in the same river twice, he also says that even if you do, you are the same and you are not the same.
Just on the surface you look the same. Not only has the river changed, you have also changed.
It happened: A man came to Buddha to insult him -- he spat on his face. Buddha wiped his face and asked the man, "Have you anything more to say?" -- as if he had said something. The man was puzzled, because he never expected this type of response. He went away. The next day he came again -- because the whole
night he couldn't sleep; he felt more and more that he had done something absolutely wrong, he felt guilty. The next morning he came, fell at Buddha's feet and said, "Forgive me!"
And Buddha said, "Who will forgive you now? The man you spat upon is no more, and the man you were who spat is no more either -- so who will forgive whom? Forget about it, now nothing can be done about it. It cannot be undone -- finished!... because nobody is there, both parties are dead. What can be done? You are a new man and I am a new man."
This is the deepest message of Heraclitus: everything flows and changes; everything moves, nothing is static. And the moment you cling, you miss reality. Your clinging becomes the problem, because reality changes and you cling.
You loved me yesterday; now you are angry. I cling to the yesterday and I say, "You have to love me, because yesterday you were loving and yesterday you said you would love me always -- now what has happened?" But what can you do? And yesterday when you said that you would love me always, it was not false, but it was not a promise either -- it was simply the mood, and I believed in the mood too much. At that moment you felt it, that you would love me always and always and always, forever; and it was not untrue, remember. It was true to the moment, that was the mood, but now that mood has gone. The one who said it is no more.
And if it is gone, it is gone; nothing can be done. You cannot force love. That's what we are doing -- and making much misery out of it. The husband says, "Love me!" The wife says,
"Love me because you promised -- have you forgotten the courting days?" But they are no longer there. Those persons are no longer there either. A young man of twenty, just remember: Osho - The Hidden Harmony
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