Osho on Symbol of Mystic Rose

 

 

Love is the blossoming of your inner being just like a rose. That's why I have called this gathering and the talks, The Mystic Rose. Mystic, because only stupid people think that life can be understood. The greater is your intelligence, the more you will become aware of your ignorance; the wiser you are the less you know.

 

And the wisest is one who becomes absolutely innocent, and the whole of life, existence in its all dimensions, becomes just a mystery. A mystery to be enjoyed, loved, lived, but not to be understood. The very effort to understand existence is an insult. Love does not want to understand; love simply wants to share.

 

-Osho, "YAA-HOO! The Mystic Rose, #27, Q1"

 

⯎

 

The mystic rose is an ancient symbol of tremendous importance. [....]

 

Evolution needs to be not of the body but of consciousness; then it becomes a spiritual progress. But Darwin had no idea of any spirit in man. To him, man was just the body and nothing more. I propound a theory of spiritual evolution, and that has been the basic of all mysticism in the world. Man is born as a seed.

 

To accept the seed as your life is the greatest mistake one can commit. Millions of people are born as seeds, fresh, young, with tremendous potential of growth. But because they accept the seed as their very life, they die as a rotten seed; nothing happens in their life.

 

The symbol of the mystic rose is that if man takes care of the seed that he is born with, gives it the right soil, gives it the right atmosphere and the right vibrations, moves on a right path where the seed can start growing, then the ultimate growth is symbolized as the mystic rose—when your being blossoms and opens all its petals and releases the beautiful fragrance.

 

Unless you blossom into a mystic rose, your life is nothing but an exercise in utter futility. You are born unnecessarily, you are living unnecessarily, and you will die unnecessarily. Your whole biography can be reduced to a single word: unnecessary.

 

But if you can blossom and release that which is hidden in you, you have fulfilled the longing of existence. You have given back to existence the fragrance that was hidden in your seed. You have come to fulfill your destiny.

 

The mystics have never accepted man as the ultimate product. Man is only a beginning and one should not die as a beginning; that is ugly, insulting, damaging to your dignity. Man should reach to the absolute fulfillment—not only for his own contentment, but for the contentment of the cosmos. That is the secret of the mystic rose.

 

Yes, in a few traditions the mystic rose is also called the magic rose. Both words are meaningful. It is certainly magic when you see within yourself the blossoming of the rose, the beauty of it, and the divinity of it, and the truth of it.

 

Satyam, shivam, sundram.

 

You cannot believe your own eyes. You have never dreamed that you contain so much, that your potential is so valuable, that your interiority is a treasure inexhaustible, that you need not be in debt to existence forever. You can return to existence a millionfold what existence has given to you. That moment is of great joy, not only on your side but on the side of the whole cosmos.

 

The experience is such a mystery that there is no way to demystify it. You can experience it but you cannot explain it—that is the meaning of the word `mystic'—you can have it, but you become almost dumb. You cannot utter a single word that may carry something of that rose, its beauty, its fragrance, its dance, its music - nothing can be carried through any word.

 

The word 'magic' is also meaningful. Things like this only happen in magic. Unbelievable… you see with your own eyes things which should not be happening but they are happening. [....]

 

Magic simply means something unbelievable, so absurd, so irrational that you cannot find a way to figure it out. That's why both the words have been used, the mystic rose or the magic rose. But even the rope trick is nothing compared to your inner flowering. Because you don't think you have anything inner, just hollowness…but in that hollowness is the possibility and the potentiality of a rose blossoming.

 

And this is no ordinary rose; it does not die. It is not that in the morning it blossoms, dances the whole day, sings songs, plays with the wind and the rain and with the sun, and by the evening all the petals are fallen to the ground and tomorrow you will not find even a trace of it. This inner rose is eternal. Once you have found it, it will be always within you.

 

-Osho, "Satyam Shivam Sundram, #18, Q1"

 

⯎

 

The man in Japan who is thought to be the richest man, just because he has twenty-two billion dollars; and the richest man in America, who has four billion dollars—both are just poor in comparison to the person who has reached his own being, who has touched the reality of his eternal existence, whose mystic rose has opened its petals.

 

-Osho, "YAA-HOO! The Mystic Rose, #20, Q1"