Under the Influence of Grace

You exist in the world as a body; embodied, you exist here. If your body is ill how can you be healthy? If your body is poisoned you are poisoned. If your body carries too many toxins and is heavily burdened, you cannot be light; you cannot have wings. So now you have to work on your body and its purity.

There are foods which make you more earth-rooted; there are foods which make you more sky-oriented. There is a way of living where you are more under the influence of gravitation; there are ways of living where you become more available to the opposite phenomenon...of levitation.

There are two laws: one is gravitation, another is grace. Gravitation pulls you down; grace pulls you up. Science knows only gravitation; Yoga knows grace also. Yoga seems to be more scientific about it than science itself because every law must have an opposite. If the earth pulls you down there must be something which is pulling you up also; otherwise the earth would have pulled you, would have completely pulled you in. You would have disappeared.

You exist on the surface of the earth. That means there exists a balance between the law pulling you down and the law pulling you up. Otherwise you would have been destroyed by the earth long ago. You would have gone back into the womb of the earth and disappeared. But you exist. There is a balance between the opposites, and every law is possible only if the other, the opposite, exists. The name of the opposite law is grace.

You may have felt sometimes, unknowingly, one day in the morning, suddenly, you feel light...as if you can fly. You walk on the earth but your feet are not falling on the earth — you are so weightless, featherlike. And some day you are so heavy, so burdened, that you cannot even walk. What is happening? Then you have to analyze your whole style of life.

Something helps you to be light, and something helps you to be heavy. All that makes you heavy is impure, and all that makes you light is pure. Purity is weightless; impurity is heavy and burdened. A healthy man feels light, weightless; an unhealthy man feels burdened too much by the earth, pulled down too much. A healthy man does not walk; really, he runs. Even if an unhealthy man sits he is not sitting, he is sleeping.

Yoga knows three words, three gunas: sattva, rajas and tamas. Sattva is purity; rajas is energy; tamas is heaviness, darkness. What you eat makes your body and, in a certain sense, makes you. If you eat meat you will be more heavy. If you just live on milk and fruits you will be light. Have you observed sometimes being on a fast how weightless you feel, as if the whole weight of the body has disappeared? If you stand on a measuring machine it will show your weight, but you don’t feel it. What has happened? The body has nothing to digest; the body is freed from the day-to-day routine. The energy is flowing, the energy has no work to do — it is a holiday for the body. You feel relaxed; you feel beautiful.

One has to watch one’s food. Whatsoever you eat, it is no ordinary matter. You should be careful because your body is constituted of whatsoever you have eaten in the past. Every day you are constituting it with whatsoever you are eating. Eating less or more, or just right, also, makes much difference. You can be an obsessive eater — you can eat too much of that which is not needed — then you will be very, very low, very weighted down. You can eat just the right amount: you will feel happier, not weighted down — energy flowing, not blocked.

One who is going to fly into the inner world, is trying to reach the inner center, will need to be weightless; otherwise the journey cannot be complete. Being lazy you will not be able to enter that inner center. Who will walk up to that inner center?

Be careful what you eat, be careful what you drink. Be careful how you keep and care for your body. Small things matter. For an ordinary man they don’t matter because he is not going anywhere. Once you start on the path, everything matters.

Whether you are taking a bath every day or not — it matters. Ordinarily it doesn’t matter. Working in the market, in the shop, it doesn’t matter if you have taken a good bath or not. In fact, if you have been taking a good bath every day it may be a disturbance in your market. You may feel so light that to be cunning may be difficult; you may feel so fresh that to be cheating may be difficult. You may feel so virgin, innocent, that to exploit may almost become impossible. Being dirty may be a help in the market, but not in the temple. In the temple you have to be as fresh as dewdrops, as clean as flowers; only then can you enter the shrine. In the temple, where you leave your shoes, leave the whole world and all the burdens of it. Don’t carry them in.

Bathing is one of the most beautiful phenomena — very simple, but if you start enjoying it, it becomes a meditation for the body. Just sitting under a shower and enjoying it, swaying or humming a song or humming a mantra — then it becomes doubly forceful. If you are sitting under your shower and humming “aum” and the water falls on your body and the aum falls in your mind, you are taking double showers: the body is being purified by the water, it belongs to the world of elements, and your mind is purified by the mantra of aum. After the bath you will feel ready to pray; you would like to pray. After this bath and the mantra you will feel totally different; you will have a different quality and aroma around you.

Shauch, purity. means purity about food. purity. about body, purity about mind — three layers of purities. And the fourth, which is your being, needs no purity because it cannot become impure. Your innermost core is always pure, always virgin, but that innermost core is covered with other things which can become impure, which become impure every day. You use your body every day; dust collects. You use your mind every day; thoughts collect. Thoughts are just like dust. Living in the world, how can you live without thoughts? You have to think. The body collects dust, becomes dirty; the mind collects thoughts and becomes dirty. Both need a good, cleaning bath. It should become a part of your style. It should not be taken as a law; it should be just a way of living beautifully.

And if you feel pure then other possibilities immediately open because everything is linked with everything else; it is a chain. And if you want to change life always start from the beginning.

Osho, Yoga: A New Direction