AND ALL IS UTTERLY QUIET AND SILENT ( a Sannyas initiation )
The song is there, the dance is there, the flower exists and the sun and the moon and people. Look at them! Eyes are there – look into them… and don’t look with a deceptive mind: just have a look with great love. This will be your first step towards sannyas: be more loving; relax your hardness, become more loving.
And then the second step – when you have started loving more: look into the aesthetic world, the aesthetic dimension of life. Start in some moments just being, not even feeling. Sitting silently, doing nothing, just be… as if there is nothing to do; in fact there is nothing to do. All has already happened or is happening or is going to happen; one is not needed to push the river. Sometimes just sitting silently, idle, lazy, just be… and see the world happening! Then you will know what trust is.
Trust is not belief, trust is not faith even, because in fact trust has nothing as an object to believe in – it is a totally different quality of your being. The mind reasons, the heart feels, the hara trusts. If you are in the head you are bound to think; if you are in the heart you are bound to vibrate with love, feeling. If you are in the hara, suddenly all stops, everything comes to a halt as if nothing has ever happened, as if not a thing has ever happened, and all is utterly quiet and silent.
“Prem means love, astha means trust. There are mysteries in life which are available only to love, which are not available to reason, and the people who live confined to only their reason live a very very starved life. They miss the really real – they only live on the surface. they miss all that is beautiful because they miss inner sensitivity, inner receptivity.
One become vulnerable only through love. And when you are open the winds blow through you; then god comes in many many ways – in the crying cuckoo, in a flower, in this moon, or in the roaring sea, sometimes very vocal and sometimes very silent. But if one lives only confined in the head, one goes on missing; all the great messages are missed.
It is as if the diamonds were very very close, available, and one continued to collect pebbles on the shore. One can collect many pebbles on the shore – that’s what reason goes on doing: trivia, detail, the superficial reality, the peripheral. Reason goes only skin-deep, it never touches the core of reality.
So these are the three very important ‘h’s’: head, heart, and hara. People who live in the head only live ten percent. People who live in the heart live ninety percent, and people who live in the hara live a hundred percent.
The head is reasoning, analysis, concept-formation, logic. And you have a very analytical mind; that’s why I’m insisting that something is there, ready to explode. But you will have to allow it… and when the reason is very much trained we don’t allow: a trained reason becomes a hindrance for the flow of the heart.
The head is reason, the heart is love, the hara is trust. All trust arises out of the hara. The hara is just below the navel, two inches below the navel… and these are the three centres of consciousness.
The child is born – at that moment only the hara functions. Then the child grows and his heart starts functioning. Then the child is conditioned by the society, educated, cultured his head starts functioning. From hara to head is what we call ‘the social trip’; from head back to hara is what I call ‘the sannyas trip’.
So that is the meaning of sannyas. You will have to allow the heart a little more, and when the heart is throbbing with joy and is delighted with life, then allow the hara: slip even deeper, deeper than the heart.
There is a point in our being, the centre-most, the very core, which is neither thinking nor feeling… which simply is. That is the meaning of the word ‘be-ing’ – it simply is. The heart feels; it has gone a little further away from being. Feeling has entered, something is stirred. Silence is no more a silence; emotion has entered.
Then you go into the head: something even more foreign has entered, thought, which creates great turmoil. From the head it seems almost impossible to reach to the hara. Mm? between them is a bridge, the bridge of the heart.
Your name means, first, prem – love, and then astha – trust. In the head you already are – start slipping a little deeper: start looking at life without bringing your head in. The head is useful, use it when it is needed: when you are doing some puzzle, some problem, when you are facing some objective reality, use the head. It is good, it is a great detective; it works perfectly well as far as the objective search is concerned.
But when you are looking at a flower forget the head, otherwise the flower will disappear and there will be left only trivia, the chemistry of the flower. The psychedelic existence of the flower will disappear and you will find only a few elements out of which the flower is made… which are not really the flower. The flower was made out of them, but the whole is not the sum total of the parts – the whole is something plus.
If you see a beautiful man or a beautiful woman, the beauty is not just the sum total of the parts. It is something that is hovering around the sum total but it is something bigger, something greater, something higher. Yes, it is certain that if you take the parts away it will disappear; you will never find it. When the whole is functioning and humming, it is there. If you dissect the flower the beauty will disappear; if you dissect the song the rhythm will disappear. If you dissect a face the grace will disappear; if you dissect a child life will disappear. And the head goes on dissecting. It knows only one way: how to dissect, how to cut things into parts.
Use it when it is needed. It is a butcher, it is a murderer… it is very very german. It is very useful, there is a dimension where it is very useful, but to be confined to it is to live a very impoverished life. Start looking at other things
The song is there, the dance is there, the flower exists and the sun and the moon and people. Look at them! Eyes are there — look into them… and don’t look with a deceptive mind: just have a look with great love. This will be your first step towards sannyas: be more loving; relax your hardness, become more loving.
And then the second step – when you have started loving more: look into the aesthetic world, the aesthetic dimension of life. Start in some moments just being, not even feeling. Sitting silently, doing nothing, just be… as if there is nothing to do; in fact there is nothing to do. All has already happened or is happening or is going to happen; one is not needed to push the river. Sometimes just sitting silently, idle, lazy, just be… and see the world happening! Then you will know what trust is.
Trust is not belief, trust is not faith even, because in fact trust has nothing as an object to believe in – it is a totally different quality of your being. The mind reasons, the heart feels, the hara trusts. If you are in the head you are bound to think; if you are in the heart you are bound to vibrate with love, feeling. If you are in the hara, suddenly all stops, everything comes to a halt as if nothing has ever happened, as if not a thing has ever happened, and all is utterly quiet and silent.
There is something that is called trust; it is something one should not miss. To know it is to know god, to know it is to know samadhi…. to know it is to know the ‘summum bonum’, the highest good that is possible to man.”
Osho
Far Beyond the Stars
