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Chapter 12 - Life itself is a miracle

It makes one feel afraid, so one never looks into it. Otherwise, even when you are in the crowd, you are alone; even if your name is known to people, does that make any difference?

You are still a stranger. And this can be seen... a husband and wife may have lived thirty years, forty years, fifty years together, but the more they live together, the more they become aware that they are strangers.

Before they got married they had the hallucination that perhaps they were made for each other, but as the honeymoon ends, that illusion disappears. And every day they start becoming distant and more distant -- pretending that everything is all right, everything is fine, but deep down they know that their strangeness is untouched.

This whole world is full of strangers. And if it was going to disappear the next moment, if it was announced on all the radios and all the televisions, suddenly you would see yourself in your utter nudity -- alone.

A small child had gone to the zoo with his father, and they were watching a very ferocious lion in his cage -- he was walking up and down. The boy became very much afraid; he was not more than nine. He asked his father, "Dad, if this lion gets out and something happens to you... please just tell me what number bus I have to take to reach home!"

In such a situation he is asking a very relevant question. He cannot conceive that if something happens to his father, something will also happen to him; but in case something happens to his father and he is alive, he needs to know the number of the bus. The father was shocked that he was not concerned about him at all. Whatever happens to him happens -- his concern is to know the number of the bus.

The very climate of death suddenly takes away all your masks, suddenly makes you aware that you are alone and all your relationships were deceptions, ways to forget your aloneness --

somehow to create a family in which you feel you are not alone.

But death exposes without fail. And this is only about small deaths; if the whole world is going to die, all your relationships will disappear before it. You will die alone, a stranger who has no name, no fame, no respectability, no power -- utterly helpless. But in this helplessness people will still behave differently.

An old man is about to have a date with a young woman; so he goes to the doctor, who prescribes him an aphrodisiac that will increase and prolong his libido. He takes his date to one of the best restaurants in town. When they have ordered their soup, he sends his date to powder her nose and then takes the waiter aside. "Put these pills into my soup," he confides in him, "just before you bring it out from the kitchen." The young lady comes back, but when, after fifteen minutes, the soup has not been served, the old man calls the waiter over. "Where is our soup?" he demands.

"It will be here in a few minutes," replies the waiter, "just as soon as the noodles lie down again."

At the time of death, the most important subject in the minds of people who are not conscious is going to be sex -- because sex and death are two sides of the same coin.

Life is so full of mysteries: you will be surprised to know that when people are crucified, just as they are crucified they almost always ejaculate. Doctors have been thinking why, and they have come upon the explanation that those sperms, which are alive, seeing the situation --

that the body is dead -- rush out of it. Their life out of the body is only two hours, but in two hours they may find some other body, some other center.

Osho - The Hidden Splendor 124

  

 

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