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Chapter 13 - Truth is not divisible
So when I repeat Basho's haiku, don't just listen to the words. Try to feel the content of the words, not the container -- the words are only containers.
SITTING SILENTLY, DOING NOTHING, THE SPRING COMES
AND THE GRASS GROWS BY ITSELF.
He has said everything about meditation, all the essential ingredients. It is not something that you have to do; it is something that happens. You have just to wait; it happens in its own time. When the spring comes, the grass grows by itself. And just sitting won't do, because you can sit and your mind can go on wandering around the world. Hence, he has added: "Doing nothing" -- neither with your body, nor with your mind. Just sitting like a stone statue of Gautam Buddha, and waiting for the spring... There is no impatience: it always comes, and when it comes, the grass grows.
The world has come to a point... and it has been brought to this point by the Western attitude of action, and always action, and condemnation of inaction. Now the East can be of immense help. Action is good, it is needful, but it is not all.
Action can give you only the mundane things of life. If you want the higher values of life, then they are beyond the reach of your doing. You will have to learn to be silent and open, available, in a prayerful mood, trusting that existence will give it to you when you are ripe, that whenever your silence is complete, it will be filled with blessings.
Flowers are going to shower on you.
You just have to be absolutely a non-doer, a nobody, a nothingness.
The great values of life -- love, truth, compassion, gratitude, prayer, God, everything --
happen only in nothingness, in the heart which is absolutely silent and receptive.
But the West is too rooted in action. And there seems to be perhaps not enough time left for it to learn non-doing.
You will be surprised to know that India never invaded any country -- and India was invaded by almost all the countries of the world. Whoever wanted to invade India, that was the easiest thing. It was not that there were no courageous people, that they were not warriors, but simply the idea of invading somebody else's territory was so ugly.
It is a surprising fact that one Mohammedan conqueror, Mohammed Gauri, invaded India eighteen times, and he was thrown back by a great warrior king, Prithviraj. Mohammed Gauri was driven back, but Prithviraj never entered his territory.
Prithviraj was told again and again, "This is going too far. That man will gather armies again in a few years, and again he will invade the country. It is better to finish him once and for all. And you have been victorious so many times -- you could have gone a little further. He has just a small country by the side of India; you could have taken his country and... finished!
Otherwise, he is a constant worry."
But Prithviraj said, "That would be against the dignity of my country. We have never invaded anybody. It is enough that we force him to go back. And he is such a shameless fellow that even after being defeated dozens of times, he again comes.!"
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 138
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