< Previous | Contents | Next >
Chapter 13 - Truth is not divisible
SITTING SILENTLY, DOING NOTHING, THE SPRING COMES
AND THE GRASS GROWS BY ITSELF.
R.D. Laing must have read this small haiku of Basho. There are moments in life when you don't know what to do. But still you go on doing something as if all the answers need some kind of doing to find them, as if all the questions can be solved by doing. The whole of the East stands on a very different level. It says: the questions that cannot be solved by doing can only be solved by non-doing. Don't go on searching for something else to do; there are questions which cannot be solved by any doing. In fact, every doing will make them more complicated.
For example, if you are not falling asleep one night and you want to go to sleep, and you ask, "What to do?" and somebody suggests, "Do this mantra, do this chanting; count from one to a hundred and then backwards from a hundred to one," all these efforts will keep you awake. They are not going to help you to fall asleep because doing them needs awareness, not sleep.
I would say to you, forget all about sleep. What is wrong in it? If you are not able to fall asleep, enjoy it. Lying down in your bed, doing nothing, the night comes and sleep follows.
There are things which do not have to be done, which have to be allowed to happen. The West knows only one category of things: everything that has to be done. Unless you do it, how can it happen? But they are forgetting that there is a category which is not available to doing, which is available only to a state of relaxedness, of non-doing.
I have seen an American book on relaxation, and the title of the book is YOU MUST
RELAX! The very word "must" makes even relaxation some kind of tremendous effort. And the book has sold millions of copies because America is one of the places where people suffer from sleeplessness most.
Poor people cannot afford sleeplessness; it is a rich man's disease. Poor people snore perfectly, rich people suffer. Even sleep -- which is so natural to all the animals, to all the trees -- even that has become difficult for man, and the reason is that our whole day is full of doing. And the doing is so much that when we go to bed, the mind needs time to drop the habit -- but before it can drop it, you start a new doing: methods of sleep. So you continue in the same rut of doing. You never touch a deeper layer of your being where all is relaxed, where all is at rest, where nothing moves... just eternal silence.
This is the time, certainly, to find the right answer for R.D. Laing's question: "What to do when we don't know what to do?" He is still asking, "What to do?" That is the Western conditioning of the mind. He should have asked, "What not to do when we don't know what to do?"
Doing has failed. Now let us try non-doing -- and non-doing is another name for relaxation, another name for meditation.
Basho is absolutely right. The world has known great poets but perhaps none of them was a great meditator like Basho; hence his poetry is not just poetry, it is the very essence of his meditations. Each word contains immensities.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 137
< Previous | Contents | Next >