The Forgotten Language

“Feeling is the language, the forgotten language. If you understand feeling, you understand the whole.

“lt is said of Lukman, one of the wisest men ever born — he is the founder of Yunani medicine — that he would go to plants, to bushes and trees, sit there, feel them, and ask them, “What use can you be put to? What disease can you be helpful in?” It is said that he discovered millions of herbs, just by feeling them. The herb would say, “It will be good if you use me in tuberculosis; I can help.”

“This looks like a myth, fiction. But scientists have been at a loss: if this is a fiction, then how did Lukman come to know?...because whatsoever he knew has been proved by all scientific experiment to be right. And no laboratories such as exist today existed then; not such refined instruments, not at all! If this is a fiction, then a greater problem arises: How did he come to know? And not one or two or a hundred herbs…millions! If he had been experimenting with crude implements then it would have taken at least ten to twenty thousand years for him to discover all that. That seems to be more fictitious. The first fiction seems to be nearer reality…that he asked.

“There is the same story in India also. Ayurveda, the Indian medicine, is based on the same secret. Those secrets were revealed by the plants themselves. But then a language is needed, a language which is universal and not local to humanity.

“Feeling is that language. Greek or Arabic or Sanskrit won’t do. No language originating in the mind is divine language. No, the divine language originated in the heart. Feeling is the language.

“If you start really feeling, and your heart starts really throbbing with feeling, you can ask a tree, and a tree is always ready to reveal its secret. You can ask a bird, and the bird is ready to reveal its secret. You can ask existence, and existence is ready to reveal its heart.”

Osho, Just Like That