Gratefulness

 

 

Be grateful to everyone.

 

Because everybody is creating a space for you to be transformed -- even those who think they are obstructing you, even those whom you think are enemies. Your friends, your enemies, good people and bad people, favorable circumstances, unfavorable circumstances -- all together they are creating the context in which you can be transformed and become a buddha. Be grateful to all.

 

-Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #5"

 

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Life is god's grace, ant so is death. Love is god's grace, and so is all that ever happens, good and bad too. The whole duality of existence is god's grace. One who understands this is not only grateful for all that is good but is also grateful for all that appears bad; that is real gratefulness. To be grateful only for the happy moments is nothing of gratefulness; that is simple greed, cunningness, but it has nothing to do with gratefulness.

 

Real gratefulness arises only when you are grateful even for unhappy moments, for all the pain and the suffering and the anguish that life brings. The moment one is capable of feeling grateful for both pain and pleasure, without any distinction, without any choice, simply feeling grateful for whatsoever is given.... Because if it is given by God, it must have a reason in it. We may like it, we may not like it, but it must be needed for our growth. And pain is needed as much as pleasure, darkness as much as light. Winter and summer are both needed for growth. Once this idea settles in the heart, then each moment of life is of gratitude.

 

Let this become your meditation and prayer: thank god every moment -- for laughter, for tears, for everything. Then you will see a silence arising in your heart that you have not known before. That is bliss.

 

Anand means bliss, peter comes from the Greek, petros; it means rock. Your full name will mean: rock of bliss.

 

Everything else in life is in a constant change. Bliss is the rock of eternity: it is always the same, no change ever happens in it. It is the centre of the cyclone; all changes happen on the periphery.

 

The search for truth is the search for that rock which is timeless. One has to go within oneself until one finds that point, that unmoving point on which all movement depends. Life is like a moving wheel, but the wheel is moving around something unmoving. All movement needs a non-moving centre; the movement cannot exist without a non-moving centre.

 

Time exists as a wheel around the centre of eternity. Call it God, call it truth, call it bliss, the supreme self, or whatever you wish, but one thing about it is certain, that it has the quality of a rock- -unchangingness, eternally unchanging. So it cannot be the body, because the body changes; and it cannot be the mind, because the mind changes; it cannot even be the heart, because the heart changes. We have to go deeper and deeper and deeper: we have to disidentify ourselves from the body, from the mind, from the heart. We have to go on disidentifying till we arrive at the point where only the witnessing self is left, where nothing more is there to deny, reject -- just pure I-am-ness. Not 'I am the body', not 'I am the mind', but simply 'I am'.

 

When that I-am-ness is left, one has arrived. One has found the rock -- the rock of eternity, the rock of timelessness; the rock which is beyond all movement, all change, all death.

 

-Osho, "Won't You Join the Dance?, #8"