Namaste Dear Friends ~ This is a bit long but well worth the read, I think.
I just love OSHO's interpretation of the ancient Upanishads.
Osho on Upanishads - The word upanishad is tremendously important. It
simply means sitting down close to a Master; it is a communion. The
Master is living in wholeness; he is living herenow, he is pulsating
herenow. His life has a music, his life has a joy, a silence of immense
depth. His life is full of light.
Just to sit silently by the side of a Master is enough, because the
presence of a Master is infectious, the presence of the Master is
overwhelming. His silence starts reaching to your very heart. His
presence becomes a magnetic pull on you: it pulls you out of the mud of
the past and the future. It brings you into the present. Upanishad is a
communion, not a communication. A communication is head-to-head and a
communion is heart-to-heart. This is one of the greatest secrets of
spiritual life, and nowhere else, at no other time, it was understood so
deeply as in the days of the Upanishads.
The Upanishads were born nearabout five thousand years before. A
secret communion, a transmission beyond the scriptures, a communion, a
transmission beyond the scriptures, a communion beyond the words... this
is what UPANISHAD is – you sitting silently, not just listening to my
words but listening to my presence too. The words are only excuses to
hang the silence upon. The silence is the real content, the word is only
a container. If you become too much interested in the word you miss the
spirit.
So don’t be too much interested in the word. Listen to the heartbeat
of the word. When a Master speaks, those words are coming from his
innermost core. They are full of his color, of his light. They carry
some of the perfume of his being. If you are open and vulnerable,
receptive, welcoming, they will penetrate into your heart and a process
is triggered.
What Carl Gustav Jung calls synchronicity explains exactly what
happens between a Master and a disciple. It is not the same as what
happens between a teacher and a student. Between teacher and a student
there is a communication; some information is transferred by the teacher
to the student, but no transformation – only information. The teacher
himself is not transformed, he himself has not arrived. He is repeating
words from other teachers, he may be even repeating words from other
Masters, but he has not known himself; his words are borrowed. He may be
very scholarly, he may be very well-informed, but that is not the real
thing. Information is not the real thing – transformation.
And unless one is transformed he cannot trigger the process of
transformation in others. Carl Gustav Jung calls this synchronicity. The
Master cannot cause your enlightenment. It is not a scientific process,
it is far more poetic. It is not a law like the law of cause and
effect; it is far more liquid, far more loose, far more flexible. The
Master cannot cause the enlightenment to happen in you, but he can
trigger the process, and that too only if you allow, not against your
will. Nothing can be done to you unless you are totally receptive. This
can happen only in a love affair.
Between the teacher and the student there is a business: between the
Master and the disciple there is a love affair. The disciple is
surrendered; that is the meaning of ”sitting down”. He is surrendered,
he has put his ego aside. He is simply open, in tremendous trust. Of
course, doubt will hinder the process.
Doubt is perfectly good when you are collecting information: the more
you doubt, the more information you will be able to collect, because
each doubt will create questions in you and questions are needed to find
answers. But each answer will be doubted again in its own turn,
creating more questions. and so on, so forth.
But with a Master doubt is a hindrance. It is not of asking a
question, it is a quest of the soul; it is enquiry of the heart, it is
not intellectual curiosity. It is NOT curiosity, it is far more
important – it is a question of life and death. When one is tired of all
questions and all answers, when one is fed up with all philosophy, only
then one comes to a Master. When one has accumulated much information
and still remains ignorant, and all that information does not create any
light within his soul, then he comes to a Master, to sit by his
side. There are no questions any more; he knows now one thing. that all
questions are futile. He has tried and he has seen the whole futility of
it. Now he sits in silence, open, available, receptive, like a womb.
The disciple becomes feminine, and only in those feminine moments the
Master, without any effort on his part, starts overflooding the
disciple. It happens naturally.
The DISCIPLE IS not doing anything, the MASTER IS not doing anything –
it is not a question of doing at all. The Master is being himself and
the disciple is open. When your nose is not closed by cold and you pass
by the side of a flower, suddenly the fragrance is felt. The flower
is not doing anything in particular; it is natural for the flower to
release its fragrance. If you are open to receive it you will receive
it.
The word upanishad means coming to a Master, and one comes to a
Master only when one is tired of teachers, tired of teachings, tired of
dogmas, creeds, philosophies, theologies, religions. Then one comes to a
Master. And the way to come to a Master is surrender. Not that your
being is surrendered – only the ego, the false idea that you are
somebody, somebody special. The moment you put the idea of the ego
aside, the doors are open – for the wind, for the rain, for the sun –
and the Master’s presence will start entering in you, creating a new
dance in your life, giving you a new sense of poetry, mystery, music. It
is synchronicity.
The Master is beating in a certain rhythm, he is dancing on a certain
plane. If you are ready, the same dance starts happening in you – in
the beginning only a little bit, but that’s enough, that little bit is
enough. In the beginning only dewdrops, but soon they become oceanic.
Once you have tasted the joy of being open you cannot be closed again.
First you may open only a window or a door, and then you open all your
windows and all the doors. And a moment comes in the life of a disciple
when not only windows and doors are opened, even the walls disappear! He
is utterly open, available multidimensionally. This is the meaning of
the word upanishad.
The Upanishads are written in Sanskrit; Sanskrit is the oldest
language on the earth. The very word sanskrit means transformed,
adorned, crowned, decorated, refined – but remember the word
”transformed”. The language itself was transformed because so many
people attained to the ultimate, and because they were using the
language, something of their joy penetrated into it, something of their
poetry entered into the very cells, the very fiber of the language. Even
the language became transformed, illuminated. It was bound to happen.
Just as it is happening today in the West, languages are becoming more
and more scientific, accurate, mathematical, precise.
They have to be because science is giving them its color, its shape,
its form. If science is growing, then of course the language in which
the science will be expressed will have to be scientific. The same
happened five thousand years before in India with Sanskrit. So many
people became enlightened and they were all speaking Sanskrit; their
enlightenment entered into it with all its music, with all its poetry,
with all its celebration. Sanskrit became luminous Sanskrit is the most
poetic and musical language in existence.
A poetic language is just the opposite of a scientific language. In
scientific language every word has to be very precise in meaning; it has
to have only one meaning. In a poetic language the word has to be
liquid, flowing, dynamic, not static, allowing many meanings, many
possibilities. The word has to be not precise at all; the more imprecise
it is the better, because then it will be able to express all kinds of
nuances.
Hence the Sanskrit sutras can be defined in many ways, can be
commented upon in many ways – they allow much playfulness. For example,
there are eight hundred roots in Sanskrit and out of those eight hundred
roots thousands of words have been derived, just as out of one root a
tree grows and many branches and thousands of leaves and hundreds of
flowers. Each single root becomes a vast tree with great foliage.
For example, the root RAM can mean first ”to be calm”, second ”to
rest”, third ”to delight in”, fourth ”cause delight to”, fifth ”to make
love”, sixth ”to join”, seventh ”to make happy”, eighth ”to be
blissful”, ninth ”to play”, tenth ”to be peaceful”, eleventh ”to stand
still”, twelfth ”to stop, to come to a full stop”, and thirteenth ”God,
divine, the absolute”. And these are only few of the meanings of the
root. Sometimes the meanings are related to each other, sometimes not;
sometimes even they are contradictory to each other. Hence the language
has a multidimensional quality to it. You can play with those words and
through that play you can express the inexpressible; the inexpressible
can be hinted.
The Sanskrit language is called DEVAVANI – the divine language. And
it certainly is divine in the sense because it is the most poetic and
the most musical language. Each word has a music around it, a certain
aroma. How it happened? It happened because so many people used it who
were full of inner harmony. Of course those words became luminous: they
were used by people who were enlightened. Something of their light
filtered to the words, reached to the words; something of their silence
entered the very grammar, the very language they were using.
The script in which Sanskrit is written is called DEVANAGARI;
DEVANAGARI means ”dwelling-place of the gods”, and so certainly it is.
Each word has become divine, just because it has been used by people who
had known God or godliness. This Upanishad in which we are entering
today is the smallest – it can be written on a postcard – and yet it is
the greatest document in existence. There is no document of such
luminosity, of such profoundness anywhere in the whole history of
humanity. The name of the Upanishad is ISA UPANISHAD.
The world of the Upanishads is very close to my approach. In fact,
what I am doing here is giving a rebirth to the spirit of the
Upanishads. It has disappeared even from India, and it has not been on
the scene at least for three thousand years. There is a gap of three
thousand years, and in these three thousand years India has destroyed
its own achievement. The first thing is that Upanishads are not
anti-life, they are not for renouncing life. Their approach is whole:
life has to be lived in its totality. They don’t teach escapism. They
want you to LIVE in the world, but in such a way that you remain ABOVE
the world, in a certain sense transcendental to the world, living in the
world and yet not being of it. But they don’t teach you that life has
to be renounced, that you have to escape from life, that life is ugly or
life is sin. They rejoice in life! It is a gift of God; it is the
manifest form of God. This fundamental has to be remembered.
Upanishads say that the world is the manifest form of God and the God
is the unmanifest form of the world, and every manifest phenomenon has
an unmanifest noumenon inside it.
Source - from Osho Book "I am That"
