AND NOW, AND HERE
On Death, Dying and Past Lives - by OSHO
First Published in Great Britain in 1995 by The C.W. Daniel Company Limited
Osho was born in Kuchwada, Madhya Pradesh, India, on Dec 11,1931. From his earliest childhood, his was a rebellious and independent spirit, insisting on experiencing the truth for himself rather than acquiring knowledge and beliefs given by others.
After his enlightenment at the age of twenty-one, Osho completed his academic studies and spent several years teaching philosophy at the University of Jabalpur. Meanwhile, he traveled throughout India giving talks, challenging orthodox religious leaders in public debate, questioning traditional beliefs, meeting people from all walks of life. He read extensively, everything he could find to broaden his understanding of the belief systems and psychology of contemporary man. By late 1960s Osho had begun to develop his unique dynamic meditation techniques… In the course of his work, Osho has spoken on virtually every aspect of the development of human consciousness. He had distilled the essence of what is significant to the spiritual quest of contemporary man, based not on intellectual understanding but tested against his own existential experience…. Osho left his body on January 19, 1990. – Pg 193
We can go through an experiment of entering into death of our own free will. And may I say that meditation or samadhi is nothing else but that. The experience of entering death voluntarily is meditation, samadhi. The phenomenon that will automatically occur one day with the dropping of the body – we can willingly make that happen by creating a distance, inside, between the self and the body. And so, by leaving the body from the inside, we can experience the event of death. We can experience death today, this evening – because the occurrence of death simply means that our soul and our body will experience, in that journey, the same distinction between the two of them as when the vehicle is left behind and the traveler moves on ahead. –pg 7
In meditation, too, one has to enter slowly within. And gradually, one after another, things begin to drop away. A distance is created with each and every thing, and a moment arrives when it feels as if everything is lying far away at a distance. It will feel as if someone else’s corpse is lying on the shore – and yet you exist. The body is lying there and still you exist – separate, totally distinct and different. – Pg 9
When one succeeds in recalling past lives and they begin to appear like dreams, immediately one’s present life begins to look like dreams too… Whosoever has remembered his past lives, for him the whole affair has suddenly turned into a dream, an illusion. Where are his friends of past lives? Where are his relatives, his wife and children, the houses he lived in? Where is that world? Where is everything he took to be so real? Where are those worries that gave him sleepless nights? Where are those pains and sufferings that seemed so insurmountable, that he carried like dead weight on his back? What became of the happiness he long for? What happened to everything he so toiled and suffered for? … Once you remember your past lives, you will find it difficult to figure out whether what you are seeing in this life is true or not. You will realize you have seen the same stuff many times before and none of it has endured forever – everything is lost… They all appeared and then they vanished, and so will the ones here now - they are already in the process of disappearing! If we can come to realize this, we will also experience what is known as maya. Along with this we will also experience that all happenings, all events are quite unreal – they are never identical but they are transient. One dream comes, is followed by another dream, and is followed by yet another dream.
Pg 48 -49
It is possible that in the course of his evolution a man may have once been an animal, but he cannot be born as an animal again. In the process of evolution one cannot fall back… It is possible to move ahead from the previous form of birth, but it is not possible, from an advance form of birth, to fall back… It is indeed possible for some one to have previously been an animal or a bird; he must have been. But how long he remained in those species is a different matter. If we delved into our past lives we will be able to recall the species we have passed through so far. We may have been an animal, a bird, a little sparrow… lower and lower. Once we must have been at such a point of inertness where it is difficult to locate any sign of consciousness.
Mountains are alive as well; however, they contain almost no consciousness. They contain ninety-nine percent inertness and one percent consciousness. As life evolves, consciousness keeps on growing and inertness keeps on decreasing. Godliness is one hundred percent consciousness. The difference between godliness and matter is of percentage…That’s why matter can ultimately become God…If we look into our tendencies, it seems that although we are no longer animals we have not yet become human beings either; it seems that we are stuck somewhere in between. As soon as an opportunity arises, we don’t lose much time in reverting to the animal level once again….- at times we jump out of our animal state and become human beings, but then we revert to the same state again... After a hard day’s work, man turns into an animal; hence the world of night is different from the world of the day. pg 51.
It will be helpful to understand this. One who cannot realize God within himself can never realize him at all…First you will have to know God in yourself; first the knower will have to know the divine – that is the nearest door.
But remember, it is very interesting that the individual who enters his self suddenly finds the entrance to all. The door to one’s self is the door to all. No sooner does a man enter his self than he finds he has entered all, because although we are outwardly different, inwardly we are not…. The distinction between ‘I’ and ‘you’ remains only so long as we have not entered within ourselves. The day we enter our I, the I disappears and so does the you – what remains then is all. – Pg 57
You may not have noticed, but all life’s illusions are caused by things revolving at great speed. The wall looks very solid, the rock under your feet feels clearly solid, but according to scientists there is nothing like a solid rock. It is now a well-known fact that the closer scientists observed matter, the more it disappeared… Mostly it was the scientist who used to declare that matter alone is truth, but now that very scientist is saying there is nothing like matter. Scientists say that the fast movement of particles of electricity creates the illusion of density… For example, when an electric fan moves with speed we cannot see the three blades; one cannot actually count how many there are. If it moves even faster, it will appear as if a piece of circular metal is moving. It can be moved so fast that even if you sat on top of it, you wouldn’t feel the gap between the blades; you would feel as if you were sitting on top of solid metal…. Pg 60
And remember, the gods we have created are made differently; each has this respective trademark. A Hindu has made his own God, a Mohammedan has his own. The Christian, the Jaina, the Buddhist – each has his respective trademark. All have coined their own respective words; all have created their own respective gods. A whole great God-manufacturing industry abounds! All parents are anxious to teach their children religion right from childhood, because once a child grows up he will start to think and cause trouble. He will raise all sorts of questions – and not finding any satisfactory answers, will do things difficult for their parents to face. This is why parents are keen to teach their children religion right from infancy – when the child is unaware of many things, when he is vulnerable to learning any kind of stupidity… Therefore those we call religious people are often found to be unintelligent. They lack intelligence, because what we call religion is something which poisoned us before intelligence has arisen – and even afterwards it continues its inner hold… But the problem is that if we come to believe that the same divinity exists in everyone, our God-manufacturing industry will suffer heavily. So in order to prevent this from happening, we keep on imposing our respective Gods… As long as God is different things to different people, as long as there are different places of worship for different people, as long as prayers are different and scriptures are different… the vexing troubles between religions will never come to an end. – Pg 62~65
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