Osho – A life lived unconsciously cannot be beautiful, a life lived unconsciously cannot have freedom. And without freedom, how can there be any beauty? Beauty is a shadow of freedom. A life lived unconsciously can only be mediocre, mundane, superficial. Only with consciousness does your life start deepening; it attains a new dimension, the dimension of depth. And the dimension of depth is the dimension of the divine.
God is not somewhere else, but in your own depths, in your own ultimate depths. Truth is not to be found somewhere else; it has to be searched and looked for withinwards. Truth is not something of the mind; otherwise it would have been very easy to attain it. Mind is a machine.
The great Western philosopher, the father of Western philosophy, Aristotle, defines man as a rational being, but his definition cannot be applicable to the millions. It is not even applicable to himself, because he is not a buddha. A very clever man, very logical, but without any consciousness. He lived his own life as unconsciously as anyone can live. He had two wives, and he writes in his book that women have less teeth than men. Having two wives he could have counted any time — but this was a superstition, very prevalent in Greece in those days. The male chauvinist mind cannot allow women to have anything equal to men, not even teeth! He never bothered to count — what kind of rationality is this?
In fact, unless you are conscious, you can’t be rational either. To live rationally means to live consciously, to live meditatively. And the moment you can live meditatively, you cannot only live rationally, you can live suprarationally — because life is not only reason, life is far more than that. Reason is only one of its dimensions, and life is multidimensional. Life plus consciousness, and you start becoming a buddha. Existence plus consciousness, and you start attaining life.
Consciousness is the whole chemistry, the alchemy. Life plus consciousness, and you are entering into the temple of God. Existence plus consciousness, and you enter into the temple of life. But if you live without consciousness you don’t have life, you don’t have God. If you have life you cannot miss God for long, because life is the first ray of God.
But people merely exist, they vegetate; they think they are already alive. This belief prevents them from creating life. When you are born, you are born only as an opportunity, as a space where life can grow. But it is not inevitable — and it is good that it is not inevitable. If it was inevitable, man would have been a machine as all other animals are.
It is tremendously significant to remember that existence has bestowed on you a great gift, and the gift is that you are born as a tabula rasa, nothing is written on you — you are born as a clean slate. Now you have to write something on it. You can write something imitating others, borrowed; you can write Vedas on it, Gitas, Korans, Bibles, but you will miss the whole thing. You destroyed a great opportunity.
You have to write your own song — not the song of Krishna and not the song of Christ, but your OWN song! You have to sing your own heart, only then will you be fulfilled. But people are simply repeating like parrots; hence they become very knowledgeable and still remain foolish, still remain ignorant.
Saint Augustine divides humanity into two categories; those categories are significant. The first category he calls “knowledgeable ignorance.” There are people who know too much and yet know nothing; their knowledge is all borrowed. Nothing has arisen in them, nothing has happened to them; they are simply repeating others. They may be very clever in repeating it, very efficient in repeating it, but they are functioning like computers. They are not yet human beings; humanity is not yet born in them. Their knowledge knows nothing, it is a pretension.
The universities are full of such people, and the world respects these people very much because knowledge is power. They know, that is the prevalent idea, and they are powerful. And in a certain sense the idea is true: a man who knows physics is more powerful than the man who does not know, but as far as his own life is concerned he is as ignorant as anybody else. There is no difference between the villager and the university professor as far as self-knowing is concerned — and that is the real treasure.
There is knowledge which knows not, and, Augustine says, there is also an ignorance which knows. What is the ignorance he is talking about, that knows? The ignorance of the innocent. The innocent person has cleaned his mind completely of all borrowed knowledge.
Meditation is nothing but a device to clean the mind, to give a shower to your inner being, so that all the dust, the so-called knowledge, is taken away and you are left clean, fresh, young. This is what Jesus says: Unless you are born again you will not enter into my kingdom of God.
This is what in the East we used to call the phenomenon of the DWIJ — twice-born. All brahmins are not dwij, but all dwijas are brahmins. All brahmins are not twice-born, but all twice-borns are brahmins. Christ is a brahmin, Mohammed is a brahmin. The brahmin is one who has known Brahman, one who has known the ultimate life, but the secret is, you will have to be born again.
What does it mean? It means you will have to die to your knowledge — borrowed, imitative, mechanical — and you will have to be again innocent as you were when you were born the first time. But the first childhood is bound to be lost; nobody can protect it. It is in the nature of things that the first childhood will be lost. But the second childhood can be attained, and with the second childhood starts life. Before that you were merely existing. With the second birth you are entering into the real mystery of that which is.
Let me remind you: don’t take life for granted. It has to be created, and it can be created only by choosing freely, by choosing on your own. Yes, there is a possibility you may go astray, there is a possibility you may commit errors, mistakes. But nothing to be worried about — mistakes and errors and going astray, they are all part of growth. It is only by committing mistakes that one learns, it is only by going astray that one comes back to the right path.
Those who never go astray remain impotent. Those who never commit any mistake because of fear, they never do anything — because if you do, there is a possibility you may commit some mistake. Afraid of committing mistakes, they never do anything. But without doing anything, how can you grow? You will remain hollow, you will not get any crystallization, you will not have any soul. You will be dead, you will be a corpse — walking, breathing, talking, but you will be a corpse because you will not have the taste of life eternal.
Source – Osho Book “The Dhammapada, Vol 4”