Burning

Osho, I have just one prayer: that in the fire you have, I may be burned up completely and be lost.

Jesus has said: Do not try to save yourself, otherwise you will lose yourself. Jesus has said: Blessed are those who lose themselves, because then they can never be lost; they become available to the immortal. Only one thing here is stable; looked at from one side its name is meditation, from the other its name is love. Everything else is unstable. In this world only one thing is stable. If you look with the eyes of a devotee, its name is love; if you look with the eyes of the knower, its name is meditation, witnessing. But it is one and the same happening. Where meditation happens, the stream of love begins to flow; and where the stream of love flows, meditation happens. They come together, two sides of the same coin. I am not the eternal, nor are you; the existence of the life-breath is truth, of the…

Question: The fourth question: Osho, it seems to me that I am an unripe fruit...? There is no question of “seems”—you certainly are! Otherwise you would have fallen long ago. Ripe fruits don’t hang on trees; ripe fruits fall. Falling is the only proof that the fruit has ripened—no other proof. Don’t think that turning yellow means ripeness; falling does. The Upanishads say: “tena tyaktena bhunjithah.” They alone have truly enjoyed who have renounced—because renunciation shows they have fully tasted and understood that enjoyment is futile. The day enjoyment ripens, renunciation happens by itself. The day the fruit ripens, it falls. “‘It seems…’” Drop this talk of seeming; know for certain: I am an unripe fruit. Take this perception as truth, and the race to ripen will begin; the athato moment—the “now, therefore”—will soon come near. Only when a person ripens is he a whole person.

Is the fruit his alone? No—you don’t even understand what “fruit” means! The very meaning of fruit is this—the fruit is the burning. Here, this… this… the cause was your putting your hand in; the effect was your hand getting burned. But when this incident occurred, its dry samskaras will be left behind, because the incident happened to you. And if it didn’t happen to you, your hand is not burned. There is only the news that this person put his hand in—no more than that. This I call conditioning, I call it samskara; I don’t call it the fruit. The fruit was the burning that you have already unde

So each of us carries along only the reports of having undergone our respective fruits. And those reports do affect us. They affect us in the sense that they suggest to us the path of least resistance. A man who has committed murder repeatedly over the last ten lives has a strong likelihood of committing murder in this one too. The reason is that his tendency, his feeling, his samskara of killing, cultivated over ten births, has kept growing deeper. And to him that seems the simplest: if there’s a quarrel with someone, the first thing that occurs is, “Kill him.” No other option occurs to him. This is the nearest path; a dry groove has been etched there—water catches it and flows.

Osho, this aphorism from the Mahabharata seems to match your vision exactly—“muhurtam jvalitaṁ śreyaḥ, na tu dhūmāyitaṁ ciram.” “It is better to blaze for a moment than to smoulder for a long time.” Please be gracious and explain how this is possible.

So you may worship Buddha’s statue or read the Quran in the morning or go to church—it makes no difference; you do not trust because your life offers no evidence. Your life is smoke—and Krishnamurti speaks of a smokeless flame! You have not known even a smoky flame; only smoke. Wet wood smokes. The wetter the wood, the more the smoke. Remember: smoke is not part of the fire. People think smoke rises from fire. It does not. If the wood is utterly dry—with not a trace of moisture—there is no smoke. Smoke is from the water in the wood. Buddha rightly said: as long as your mind is wet with desire, there will be smoke. The day you are free of craving, of imagining, of the mind’s restless scrambling—when you are dry, like seasoned wood—then only flame will arise: a blazing, smokeless flame. That flame is life’s supreme wealth,…