How can I live gracefully in my time?

How may I live gracefully in time? In my times?

There are no 'my times'. The time that is destroying your grace is the same -- always the same, and the same for everybody. It has no East, no West; it has no past, no future. The time that is disturbing you is the same disease -- the disease of not being herenow. What should be done? In fact, to ask the question that way is to ask a wrong question. Whatsoever you do will come out of the psychological mind, because you will do it to create grace. There will be a motive. So try to understand. Nothing can I can be done about it. Only understanding, just understand! No need to do anything positively for grace. Only one thing is needed to understand why you are missing grace -- WHY YOU ARE MISSING; not HOW TO ATTAIN. The difference is tremendous. If you ask rightly, you ask, "Why…

The contemporary ideal of living completely within the present moment, no less than the classical mystical notion of living totally within the divine eternal, is as impossible as it is inhuman. It results in a diseased rather than a graceful present. Graceful existence integrates present, past and future.

Buddha is saying: To be in desire is to be miserable. He is not saying desire about what: desire as such creates misery -- because in desire you start moving from the present, you start thinking of the future. You start thinking of dreams -- you are going to do this, and this is going to happen; and if this happens you will be happy, and if that happens you will be very very miserable. The moment you start dreaming and desiring you have missed contact with life; you disconnected. You are no more living in those moments of desire. Those moments of desiring are death moments. Life has stopped flowing. You are frozen. Whenever you are in desire you are not alive. Life and desire can't exist together. They are two gestalts, you can have only one at one time. If you move into desire, life disappears; if you…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, YOU OFTEN TALK TO US ABOUT GRACE. IT SEEMS TO BE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL WORD BUT MY UNDERSTANDING OF ITS MEANING FEELS LIMITED. I KNOW THAT IT IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE. COULD YOU SPEAK SOME MORE ABOUT IT? With modern science this has become a problem that any invention, any discovery needs so much money and so much mechanism that only governments or very big firms like Lockheed or IBM or people like these can afford to produce them. A scientist alone cannot work; he does not have the right instruments which are too costly. But he was surprised that at least there is one man who supports him. I have proposed that all the scientists of the world should make a world academy of scientists without any question of nation or race.

Those are the moments of purity, innocence, those are the moments which can be called divine. They are no more human. You have transcended humanity in those moments. Slowly slowly those moments become bigger and bigger, and one day it becomes such a simple process that whenever you want to you can go into that interval, into that thoughtlessness. Fully aware yet thoughtless -- that is meditation. And that is the only thing that can liberate you from all kinds of bondages, that can bring peace to you, and bliss and god and truth. Grace is never human, it is always divine. It is the beyond penetrating the gross planes of existence. It is matter penetrated by spirit. When matter becomes penetrated by the spirit it becomes luminous. That luminosity is grace, that aura is grace. Grace belongs to the beyond, to the eternal.

Osho, in intense moments of repentance at the feet of the Buddha, the golden fish remembered its past lives. In moments of grace, too, does one remember past lives? Please tell us.

It may be that happiness remains for years; it needn’t be momentary. You fall in love; the love can last for years, and you can be happy through it for years. Yet the statement remains true that happiness is momentary—the years will feel as if they passed like a moment. You’ve seen it in Hindi films: the dates on a calendar fly off in the wind! Just so, in happiness the dates fly by. Happiness is like a Hindi film. Days pass, months pass, years pass—but so swiftly! By its very nature happiness shortens time. Then bliss is another matter altogether; bliss means ultimate happiness. Happiness means: pain has left, but it stands waiting just around the corner, watching for when you are done with happiness so it can return. It never goes very far. Pain, during happiness, doesn’t go far; it stands at the door, saying, “All right, enjoy…