Cosmology

It is an unimportant point in a very interesting inspiring discourse, but why do you say that the sun will be finished in four thousand years? My atlases of the earth and the universe give a figure for the next major change in the sun's present output -- to a red giant stage -- to be about five billion years or so -- which would annihilate life on earth. Are you trying to start a stampede? Or is this an 'intentional imperfection' inserted into your discourse as in a persian rug?

Now scientists find fault. It is faulty. The world was not created four thousand years before. Then why was this man saying it? This man was not a scientist; this man was saying something not as a fact but as a parable. He was not talking about a scientific theory for the creation, he was not interested in any scientific theory -- he was simply talking in parables. He was emphasising one fact: that the world is not going to be forever and it has not been there forever. It is dreamlike. It has been created and it will disappear. So don't be too involved in it, it is not the real thing -- seek the creator, find out who is the creator. Don't waste too much time with the creation. But now there are scientists who will prove that he is wrong and there are Christians who will try…

I am asking you to clarify my doubt.

So experiment with sleep if you want to experience the gap between death and the next birth. One more delight will come: if you can sleep while remaining aware, and awaken while remaining aware, then every day when you say, I slept six hours at night—that is said in the day’s scale. Once you experience six hours of night directly, you will never again mistakenly say, I slept six hours. That is the day’s scale, not the night’s. We have not yet made a clock for night and sleep. Then you will be utterly at a loss. Someone will ask, How long did you sleep last night? You will say, If you ask in the day’s time I can answer, but for the night’s time there is no measurement yet. There is no clock that can tell how long, in night’s terms, we slept. I went to see a woman…

Osho, when you speak of five thousand years, why do you speak specifically of five thousand years?

We know about five thousand years. About those five thousand years we know something; the rest we do not know.

Time stretches behind and ahead—one direction. Space—field, expanse—spreads to all sides, and keeps expanding and expanding. It has no boundary. We too are a part of this expanding vastness; I am not separate from this expanse. But it is difficult to see that I am related even to that star millions upon millions of miles away. It is hard to conceive that the star unknown to me is a part of my breath. Yet consider: morning comes, the sun rises, and a bud in your garden opens—can you say there is no relation between that bud and the sun? Are they not parts of one greater Whole, one grand unity? The sun rises—and the small bud in your garden bursts into blossom. The sun is so far away. Light from the sun takes ten minutes to reach the earth. And a sunbeam travels at 186,000 miles in a second.