Osho – Swami Anand Peter. Anand means bliss. Peter literally means a rock, but symbolically it means eternity. The rock represents the unchanging element. Ordinarily everything is changing, constantly — even rocks are changing. So it is only a metaphor, but it has great significance.
Man can live either in time or in eternity. Both alternatives are open because there is nothing like destiny, nothing like fate. Man is freedom: he comes without a fate. The future is open, always open; it is not determined when you are born — each act determines it. In each act is your choice, and each step you can change the very direction of your life.
Millions of people live in time, for the simple reason that they are born in a crowd which knows nothing of eternity. Their parents have lived in time, their teachers have lived in time, their leaders have lived in time, the whole society around them lives in time, between birth and death; hence every child starts imitating. That’s the way the child learns, but that’s also how he becomes conditioned.
It is rare phenomenon to get out of the rut of time, only a few people have managed up to now. Not even all the names which are thought to have escaped, not all the so-called saints and mahatmas and sages, not more than one per cent of your so-called saints, have been able to escape from the prison of time.
Although it creates much misery its walls are very invisible; hence there is a desire and longing to get ride of the misery, but you need great intelligence to see that the misery is bound to be there if you choose time as your lifestyle. Time means change — and when everything is changing you cannot cling to anything, you don’t have any support, no security. There is no earth underneath your feet, you are on shifting sands; hence one feels afraid, worried, anxious, and all this becomes the root cause of one’s misery, despair, hopelessness.
But there is a way, and the way is not to fight with misery, the way is to get out of the wheel of time. In a way it is very simple, but sometimes the simplest thing, the very obvious thing, is missed because it is too obvious and our eyes are searching for something great, something far away — and it is very close by!
Everybody has been told that time consists of three tenses — past, present and future — and that is absolutely wrong; time consists only of past and future. The present is a penetration of eternity, the present does not belong to time; it is transcendental. To live in the present is to get out of time, to be herenow, totally herenow, is to be out of the wheel. And the miracle is that the moment you are out of time you are out of misery. Misery is a by-product of time and bliss is a by-product of eternity, of timelessness.
And one can decide to move into eternity any moment, because it is always there. In fact the past is never there but we cling to it, the future is never there, but we cling to it; we cling to non-entities. And because both our hands are clinging to non-entities we miss exactly what is in the middle of both: the present, the real, the existential. And both our hands are full: one hand is full of the past, the other is full of the future. A part of our being is full of memories, another part is full of fantasies, dreams, projections; and between these two is the very subtle and delicate moment. It is just like a rose flower — crushed, missed. Meditation simply means not to miss it, to get in tune with it.
Slowly, slowly empty your hands of the past and the future so you can be full of the now — and that is transformation. It brings immense bliss, infinite bliss. It opens the doors of the divine.
Source – Osho Book “Nirvana now or never”