The advaita of life

Most of us, when we think about our lives, we think in parts and fragments. We start living our lives the way we think. This kind of thinking is dangerous as it creates split personality. A worldly man who goes through all sorts of struggle in the world thinks that later in his life he would renounce the world and become a sannyasi, and finally have peace one day. Some people who get fed up with the world very early in their lives become sannyasis prematurely, they also feel lack of worldly comforts. There is starvation of love and emotional nourishment in their lives. This is all because of fallacious thinking of dividing organic unity of life that love and meditation are opposite to each other; that being worldly is against God. This kind of divisive thinking, according to Osho, is very harmful and the root cause of misery — both in the life of a worldly person and a sannyasi. Love is not against meditation, and meditation is not opposed to love. Rather, they both enrich each other. The meditative people feel pure love in their hearts, and the loving people are essentially meditative.

Osho says: Love is a basic experience, which can help you become meditators. The old religions have been preventing it, and they have been preventing it for a certain reason. If people can transform their love into meditation, then the priests, churches and synagogues are no more needed; people are totally free. No spiritual leadership is needed. And there are millions of priests around the world, like parasites on humanity. And naturally they will give you wrong ideas, against love, and they will give you ideas for meditation, but because you don’t have the basic experience.

The enlightened master elaborates this with an example of a swimmer: Love is like entering a swimming pool. Step by step you are going towards deep water. Then the floor of the swimming pool is divided into two parts, one for those who cannot swim and the second part for those who can swim. But those who want to learn swimming have to learn in the first part, which is not for swimmers. They have to learn it there. Once they have learned, slowly they will gather courage and enter the deep side of the pool, because for a swimmer it does not matter how deep the water is; the swimmer is always on the surface. The water may be a hundred feet deep, five hundred feet deep, or five miles deep, it makes no difference to the swimmer. It makes a difference only to the non-swimmer. Beyond five feet, everything is death. But the swimming pool is one — shallow, deep. And the boundary line is only a line until you learn how to swim. Love and meditation are just like a pool. Love is the shallow space in a swimming pool, for those who cannot meditate. But that is the place to learn meditation. And it is the same pool, it is the same water, it is the same kind of phenomenon. You are unable to go deeper because you are afraid even to enter it. The shallow part has been condemned, and you have been told to jump into the deep part without knowing how to swim.

A real meditator is also a real lover. A real lover is also a meditator. Lord Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Meera, and many such mystics are real lovers of life, because they are the greatest meditators this world has known. After going very deep within themselves, they realised that humanity and the whole universe is one. They could feel themselves in various forms of beings on this planet. That’s why they taught us love, compassion and reverence. Not only for human beings, but for animals, birds, trees and the whole existence. To them, totality of life is divine. Godliness permeates the whole existence. This is the real advaita of life.

Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance