Eternity

Beloved master, you once said, "the moment is rare when eternity penetrates time." can you speak more on this?

Vadan, the question seems to be simple but the answer is very complex. And the complexity becomes multidimensional, because the answer can come only from your own experience, not from outside. Just as the question is arising in you, the answer has to also be part of your interiority. But I will go into a little detail, to explain what I mean when I say that the moment is rare when eternity penetrates time. Time is that in which we live -- it is horizontal. It is from A to B to C to D; it is in a line. Eternity is vertical. It is not from A to B and from B to C. It is from A to more A to still more A. It goes on upwards. The moment is rare because it happens only when meditation has reached ripening, maturity, when you have touched your innermost…

Osho, on the one hand Doolandas sings of life’s transience, and on the other, after drinking the nectar of love he plunges into carefree ecstasy where time becomes infinite! Please explain this paradox to us.

Narendra! A moment too is a fragment of the eternal—just as the drop belongs to the ocean, the atom to the vast. In a single small leaf the sap of the whole tree is flowing. In a tiny flower the entire existence has poured its beauty, its color, its fragrance—its all. The great poet Tennyson has said: if we could fully understand even a single flower, we would understand the whole of existence. For what appears small from the outside is, by unending pathways, joined to the whole. This flower would have no fragrance if it were not of the earth. It would have no colors if it were not linked with the sun. It would have no life if the breath of air did not move through it. The deeper you inquire, the more you will find the flower has already disappeared; little by little, the whole cosmos has…

Beloved Osho, a glimpse of your eyes, a flash of total love -- it happens in a second but stays forever. Osho, how could this happen?

It is a simple phenomenon. A moment of love is a moment of eternity. The depth of it is so great that time cannot erase it. Although the happening was in a single moment, it is like a woman becoming pregnant: the happening is in a single moment, but it gives birth to a child who may live seventy, eighty years, who may give birth to many more children. It may become a tree: many branches, and each branch bifurcating into new branches. I am reminded.... If you go to Bodh Gaya, where Gautam Buddha became enlightened, the tree under which he was sitting is still there, although it is not the same tree but the continuity of the same tree, a child of the same tree. When Ashoka was the emperor of India, he sent his daughter Sanghamitra, who had become a sannyasin, to Sri Lanka with a branch…

Beloved Osho, the other day I visited sita ma. I looked into her eyes and felt almost as if time had stopped and exploded. Completely overwhelmed and with much reluctance I came away, laughing and crying. Can you talk about the moment when time stops, when I feel as if everything is rushing at me and at the same time, away from me, all in a split second which also seems like a lifetime and leaves me feeling like a small child?

Do you understand what is meant by eternity, unending, forever? Just think what it means -- forever -- and your mind will feel tired. Wherever you go, go on, go on... it never comes to an end. Hellfire just for the few small sins that you loved somebody's wife, you picked somebody's pocket -- eternal hellfire? And just because you donated to Mother Teresa's orphanage and you made a hospital for the poor and opened a school for the poor, you will have eternity in paradise with all pleasures, joys -- unending! Is there some measure, is there some justification? The book was published nearabout seventy years ago, and in seventy years not a single Christian theologian has been able to answer Bertrand Russell. On all other points I agree with him, he is perfectly right -- in fact not only he, nobody should be a Christian -- but on…