Vacillation

 

 

Your mind will vacillate. Mind is vacillation, mind is either/or, mind is always in that space of "to be or not to be." If you really want to grow, mature, if you really want to know what this life is all about, don't vacillate. Commit, involve! Involve yourself with life, get committed to life, don't remain a spectator. Don't go on thinking whether to do or not -- "Should I do this or that?" You can go on vacillating your whole life, and the more you vacillate, the more trained you become in vacillation.

 

Life is for those who know how to commit -- how to say yes to something, how to say no to something decisively, categorically. Once you have categorically said yes or no to something, then you can take a jump, then you can dive deep into the ocean.

 

People are just sitting on the fence. Millions of people are fence-sitters -- this way or that, just waiting for the opportunity to come. And the opportunity will never come, because it has already come, it is there!

 

My own suggestion is that even if sometimes it happens that you commit to the wrong thing, even then it is good to commit, because the day you will know it is wrong you can get out of it. At least you would have learned one thing: that it is wrong, and never to get into anything like that again. It is a great experience; it brings you closer to truth.

 

Why do people vacillate so much? -- because from the very childhood you have been told not to commit any mistakes. That is one of the greatest teachings of all the societies all over the world -- and very dangerous, very harmful. Teach children to commit as many mistakes as possible, with only one condition: don't commit the same mistake again, that's all. And they will grow, and they will experience more and more, and they will not vacillate. Otherwise a trembling... and time is passing by, out of your hands, and you are vacillating.

 

I see many people standing on the shore vacillating, whether to take the jump or not. Here it happens every day.

 

Just a few days ago, one young man came to me. For three years he has been vacillating whether to take sannyas or not. I said, "Decide either yes or no, and be finished with it! And I am not saying decide yes, I am only saying DECIDE. No is as good as yes. But wasting three years? If you had taken sannyas three years ago," I told him, "by this time you would have known whether it is worth it or not; at least one thing would have been decided. Vacillating three years, nothing has been decided. You are in the same space, and three years have gone by.“

 

Atisha says: DON'T VACILLATE. TRAIN AS THOUGH CUT OFF.

 

This is the secret of meditation, the last sutra today.

 

TRAIN AS THOUGH CUT OFF.

 

Mind is vacillation. The discipline of a meditator is to become so watchful of the mind, so alert to the mind and its stupidities -- its hesitations, its tremblings, its vacillations -- to become so watchful that you are cut off.

 

That is the whole purpose of watching: watching cuts you off.

 

Watch anything in the mind, and you are cut off. Watching is a sword.

 

-Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #21“