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Chapter 18 - Inside you god is hidden
only hope for the defense of the free world against the spread of communism, and he too takes a parachute and jumps.
Then Rajiv Gandhi gets up. "I am the leader of the greatest nation and the greatest democracy of the world, India, and I am the most intelligent and youngest world leader; I must jump." And he too jumps out of the plane.
Then the pope rises and says to the young man, the hippie, "My son, I am old and have lived my lifetime. Take the last parachute and jump." But the young hippie protests, "Father, hurry up. There are two parachutes left, one for each of us. Put on one of them and jump."
"But how is that?" asks the pope. The young man replies, "That guy who said he is the most intelligent and youngest world leader -- he took my sleeping bag!"
Just a little more intelligence is needed and you can come out of the gloom, the misery, the hell in which the whole humanity is living. The secret of coming out of this hell is to remember yourself. And this remembrance will become possible if you understand the idea that you are alone.
You may have lived with your wife or with your husband for fifty years; still, you are two.
Your wife is alone, you are alone. You have been trying to create a facade that "We are not alone," that "We are a family," that "We are a society," that "We are a civilization," that "We are a culture," that "We are an organized religion," that "We are an organized political party."
But all these illusions are not going to help.
You have to recognize, howsoever painful it appears in the beginning, that "I am alone and in a strange land." This recognition, for the first time, is painful. It takes away all our illusions
-- which were great consolations. But once you have dared to accept the reality, the pain disappears. And just hidden behind the pain is the greatest blessing of
the world: You come to know yourself.
You are the intelligence of existence; you are the consciousness of existence; you are the soul of existence. You are part of this immense godliness that manifests in thousands of forms: in the trees, in the birds, in the animals, in human beings... but it is the same consciousness in different stages of evolution. And the man who recognizes himself and feels that the god he was searching and looking for all over the world resides within his own heart, comes to the highest point of evolution. There is nothing higher than that.
It makes your life for the first time meaningful, significant, religious. But you will not be a Hindu, and you will not be a Christian, and you will not be a Jew; you will be simply religious. By being a Hindu, or a Mohammedan, or a Christian, or a Jaina, or a Buddhist, you are destroying the purity of religiousness
-- it needs no adjectives.
Love is love -- have you ever heard about Hindu love? Mohammedan love? Consciousness is consciousness -- have you ever thought about Indian consciousness or Chinese consciousness? Enlightenment is enlightenment: whether it happens in the white body or in the black body, whether it happens in the young man or in the old man, whether it happens in a man or in a woman, it does not make any difference. It is the same experience, the same taste, the same sweetness, the same fragrance.
The only person who is not intelligent is one who is running around all over the world in search of something, not knowing exactly what; sometimes thinking perhaps it is money, sometimes thinking perhaps it is power, sometimes thinking perhaps it is prestige, sometimes thinking perhaps it is respectability.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 184
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