Rest

 

 

Learn to sit silently, doing nothing -- just sitting resting in yourself, relaxing in yourself. It takes a little time because we have been brought up to be restless, we have been brought up by people who have been restless themselves. They have poisoned us, they have corrupted us, not knowingly, not intentionally -- they may have been good people, they may have even tried to help you, but they were unconscious, and unconscious people cannot help, they can only harm. Inspite of good intentions they are bound to harm. They have made everybody restless, fidgety. Everybody is always running, rushing, not knowing where, not knowing why, for what. Speed in itself has become important, as if it has some intrinsic value.

 

I used to live with a professor when I was a student in the university. He was a very busy man and always rushing from this university to that, from this country to that. He was a visiting professor of many universities all over the world, on many consulting boards... always on the run.

 

Whenever he was at home he would play chess, playing cards, monopoly -- stupid things. I used to ask him why. And he would say 'To kill time.'

 

I said 'This is strange: you don't go by train when you have to go to another town, you rush by aeroplane to save time. And when time is saved you play monopoly to kill time' And you think you are a professor of logic and philosophy -- you are a fool! If this is for what time is to be saved, then why save it in the first place? Then go by bullock cart! You will enjoy the scene and the villages and so many things on the way. Journeying by aeroplane is not really a journey. You enter a capsule in one place, you get out of the capsule in another place to save time -- and then what do you do with the time?

 

He said 'You always create trouble for me. In fact in talking with you I feel afraid that you will create some trouble. Now I know that I cannot answer you you are right.'

 

He died in a plane crash finally, I had been telling him again and again 'You will die...' because in India, only a bullock cart is safe!...'you are running unnecessarily.' He had enough money and I would ask him, 'Why do you go on like this?' 'To earn money.' And I said 'You don't have any child.'

 

He used to give me money and I would waste his money. I told him 'I don't believe in money or anything -- I simply waste it. If you give me money I will waste it. Never ask me "What happened to it?"'

 

To earn money he was going to New York and to Washington and to London, and ho had no child, his wife was divorced. I was the only person who was living with him so he had to give money to me -- what else could he do with the money?

 

I said to him 'This is stupid: you have enough money -- you can retire, you can enjoy your life and play cards and chess and whatsoever you want.' But he continued. It was just the old rut, the old habit.

 

A meditator has to learn to do only the essential and not to waste one's life in the unessential. A meditator has to learn how to relax, how to rest, and enjoy rest. And slowly slowly one settles into one's own centre. And the moment you touch your own centre you have touched eternity, you have touched timelessness, you have tasted nectar for the first time.

 

The whole of religion exists for this experience. If religion is not going to give you the experience of the immortal, of the eternal, then it is absolutely pointless.

 

My sannyasins are going to taste it. They are moving slowly deeper and deeper into it, relaxing into it. That's what sannyas is all about: an exploration of eternity.

 

-Osho, "The Golden Wind, #6“