Gratitude

Question: Fourth question: Osho, the day I attain, how will I thank you? Don’t get into useless worry from now. When an unprecedented event like attainment happens, you will also find a way to say thank you. That’s a small matter! When such a great thing happens, do you think you won’t be able to find a way to express gratitude? You will find God and not find a way to say thank you? It will happen on its own. Don’t worry about it. And there is nothing to practice in advance—that you will rehearse gratitude. If you practice it, it will be false. And if a false practice persists, then at that moment you may end up thanking from that same falseness. At least let that gratitude be spontaneous—don’t prepare for it. Don’t rehearse it.

Beloved Osho, how can I thank you?

There is no need: just be what you can be. Allow yourself to blossom. Enjoy in glory -- and that will be thankfulness enough. Anybody who blossoms close to me has already shown his gratitude. Saying it would be profane. Saying it would destroy the beauty of the unsaid, the silent. If you have really come to a point when you want to say thank you to me, then don't say it; I will understand it. By saying it, you will be bringing down something from a very high level. You will be surprised to know that in India, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, perhaps the oldest, you rarely hear anybody thanking somebody else. No child will thank his parents; no parents will thank their child. In the West that is part of your formal training: on each occasion say, "Thank you." I was thinking about the…

Beloved Osho,

YOU'VE SAID MEDITATION IS A FLOWERING. AND FOR US, THE PERFUME OF THE FLOWER IS GRATITUDE. IS THERE ANYTHING WE CAN DO FOR YOU? Yes. Meditation, compassion and gratitude. Whenever you are meditative, you feel blissful; whenever you are in compassion, you feel ecstatic. And then gratitude arises -- not towards anyone in particular, gratitude just arises. It is not towards me or towards Jesus, or Zarathustra or Buddha, it is simply gratitude. You feel so grateful just for being here, just for being alive, just for being able to be meditative, just for being able to be in compassion. You feel simply grateful. That gratefulness is not towards anybody, it is towards the whole. If you feel grateful towards me it is a gratitude of the mind. If you meditate and if you flower in compassion you will feel simply grateful, not grateful towards me. Then there is no…

Beloved Osho, is enlightenment the only way a disciple can truly express her gratitude to her master?

Maneesha, even enlightenment is not enough to express the gratitude the disciple has for the master. There is simply no way. The gratitude of the disciple remains unexpressed. It is one of those mysteries which can be experienced but cannot be explained. It will look strange to you when I say that the closer the disciple comes to enlightenment, the more difficult it becomes for him to express the gratitude -- because now he is coming to a point which he had never known before. He has been grateful all the way along, but enlightenment, the experience of one's own unfolding, is just too much. You can simply shed tears, or dance -- but everything is ineffectual; it shows your intention only, but not the gratitude. The depth and the greatness of gratitude is such that no word can express it, no experience can express it. But in a way,…