Friday 22 February 2013

"WHEREVER SATISFACTION IS FOUND, IN WHATEVER ACT, ACTUALIZE THIS."


You feel thirsty, so you drink water. A subtle satisfaction is attained. Forget the water, forget the thirst. Remain with the subtle satisfaction that you are feeling. Be filled with it; simply feel satisfied.

But the human mind is mischievous. It only feels dissatisfactions, discontent. It never feels satisfaction; it never feels content. If you are dissatisfied, you will feel it and you will be filled by it. When you are thirsty, you feel it: you are filled with thirst; you feel it in the throat. If it grows you feel it all over your body, and a moment will come when it is not that YOU are thirsty, you will feel that you have become the thirst. If you are in a desert and there is no hope of getting water, you will not feel that YOU are thirsty; you will feel that you have become the thirst.

Dissatisfactions are felt, miseries are felt, pains are felt. Whenever you suffer, you become the suffering. That is why the whole life becomes a hell. You have never felt the positive; you have always felt the negative. Life is not such a misery as we have made it; misery is just our interpretation. A Buddha is happy here and now, in this very life. A Krishna is dancing and playing on a flute. In this very life here and now, where we are in misery, Krishna is dancing. Life is neither misery, nor is life bliss. Bliss and misery are our interpretations, our attitudes, our approaches, how we look at it. It is your mind -- how it takes it.

Remember, and analyze your own life. Have you ever taken account of happy moments, of contents, of satisfactions, of blissful glimpses? You have not taken any account, but you have taken every account of your pain, suffering, misery, and you go on accumulating. You are an accumulated hell, and this is your own choice. No one else is forcing you into this hell; this is your own choice. The mind takes the negative, accumulates it and becomes negative itself. And then this is a self-perpetuating misery. The more negatives you have within the mind, the more negative you become, the more negatives are accumulated. The similar attracts the similar, and this has been for lives and lives. You miss everything because of your negative approach.

This technique gives you a positive approach, a total reversal to the ordinary mind and its process. Wherever satisfaction is found, in whatever act, actualize this, feel it, become one with it. Don't take it just as a passing phase. The satisfaction can become a glimpse of a greater positive existence.

Everything is just a window. If you become identified with a pain, you are looking from a window, and the window of pain, of suffering, opens only towards hell. If you are one with a satisfactory moment, a blissful moment, an ecstatic moment, you are opening another window. The existence is the same, but your windows are different.

Wherever satisfaction is found, in whatsoever act, actualize it -- wherever! No conditions: wherever! You see a friend and you feel happy; you meet your lover or beloved and you feel happy: actualize this. Be happiness in that moment, and make that happiness a door. Then you are changing the mind, and you will start accumulating happiness. Your mind will turn positive, and the same world will look different.

One Zen monk, Bokuju, is reported to have said, "The world is the same, but nothing is the same because the mind changes. Everything remains the same, but nothing is the same because I am not the same."

You go on trying to change the world, and no matter what you do the world will remain the same because you remain the same. You can get a bigger house, you can get a bigger car, you can get a more beautiful wife or a husband, but nothing will change. The bigger house will not be bigger. The beautiful wife or husband will not be more beautiful. The bigger car will remain the smaller one because you are the same. Your mind, your approach, your ways of seeing are the same. You go on changing things without changing yourself. So only a miserable person leaves a hut and moves to a palace, but the miserable person remains the same. He was miserable in a hut; now he will be miserable in a palace. This misery may be palatial, but he will be miserable.

You go on carrying your misery with you, and wherever you move you will be with yourself. So no outer change is basically a change; it is just an appearance. You simply feel that there has been a change, but there is no change. Only one change, only one revolution, only one mutation can be there, and that is if your mind changes from negative to the positive. If your outlook is focused on misery, you live in hell; if your outlook is focused on happiness, the very hell becomes the heaven. Try this! This will change your very quality of life.

But you are interested in quantity. You are interested in how to get more rich -- in quantity, not in quality. You can have two houses and two cars, a bigger bank account, many things. Quantity changes: it becomes more and more. But your quality remains the same, and richness is not of things. Richness is of the quality of your mind, of your life. Even a poor man can be a rich man as far as quality is concerned, and even a rich man can be a poor man. Almost always this is the case, because a person concerned with things and quantity is totally unaware that a different dimension is there within him -- the dimension of quality. And that dimension changes only when your mind is positive.

From tomorrow morning, for the whole day, remember this: whenever you feel something beautiful, satisfactory, something blissful -- and there are many moments in a twenty-four-hour day -- be aware of it. There are many moments when heaven is just near you, but you are so attached and involved with the hell that you go on missing it. The sun rises, the flowers open, the birds sing and the breeze blows through the trees. It is happening! A small child looks at you with innocent eyes, and a subtle feeling of bliss enters into you.; or someone smiles and you feel blissful.

Look all around, and try to find the blissful; be filled with it. In that moment forget everything. Be filled with it, taste it, and allow it to happen to your whole being. Be one with it. The fragrance of it will follow you. It will go on resounding within you the whole day, and the resounding, the echoing feeling, will help you to be more positive.

This is accumulative. If you start in the morning, in the evening you will be more open to the stars, to the moon, to the night, to the darkness. Do it for twenty-four hours experimentally, just to have a feeling of what it is. Once you can feel that the positive leads you to a different world because you become different, you are not going to leave it. The whole emphasis will have changed from negative to positive. Then you look at the world in a different, a new way.

I am reminded of one anecdote. One of Buddha's disciples was taking leave from his master. The disciple's name was Purnakashyapa. He asked Buddha, "Where am I to go? Where am I to go to preach your message?"

Buddha said, "You yourself can choose where "

So he said, "I will go to a far corner of Bihar" -- It was known as Sukha -- "I will move to Sukha province."

Buddha said, "It is better if you change your choice because the people of that province are very cruel, violent, mischievous, and no one has yet dared to go there to teach them non-violence, love, compassion. So please change your choice."

But Purnakashyapa said, "Allow me to go there BECAUSE no one has gone there, and someone has to be there."

Buddha said, "Then I will ask you three questions before I allow you to go. If the people of that province insult you, humiliate you, how will you feel it?"

Purnakashyapa said, "I will feel they are very good if they simply insult me. Then they are not beating me. They are good people; they could have beaten me."

Buddha said, "Then the second question: if they start beating you, how will you feel?"

Purnakashyapa said, "I will feel they are very good people. They could have killed me, but they are simply beating me."

Then Buddha said, "Now the third question: if they really kill you and murder you, then at the moment when you are dying how will you feel?"

Purnakashyapa said, "I will thank you and them. If they kill me, they will have freed me of a life where many errors were possible. They will have freed me so I will feel thankful."

So Buddha said, "Now you can go anywhere. The whole world is heaven for you. Now there is no problem. The world is a heaven, so you can go anywhere."

With this mind, nothing is wrong with the world. With your mind, nothing can be right. With a negative mind, everything is wrong -- not that it is wrong; it is wrong because a negative mind can see only what is wrong.

"WHEREVER THE SATISFACTION IS FOUND, IN WHATEVER ACT, ACTUALIZE THIS:" 

This is a very delicate process, but very sweet also, and the more you proceed in it, the sweeter it becomes. You will be filled with a new sweetness and fragrance. Just look for the beautiful; forget the ugly. Then a moment comes when the ugly also becomes the beautiful. Just look to the happy moment, and a moment comes when there is nothing which you can call unhappy. There is no unhappy moment then. Be concerned with the blissful, and sooner or later there will be no misery. Everything is beautified by a positive mind. 

Osho



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