Osho on Accepting Challenge – In accepting the very challenge, one becomes a human being

Osho – Anand means bliss, sikha means a peak, a mountain-peak. Bliss is a peak. It is the highest peak of consciousness; there is nothing higher than that. All else – beauty, good, truth, consciousness – are smaller peaks compared to the peak of bliss. Bliss is the Everest of the mountains, of the Himalayas, of consciousness. And the real challenge is to conquer it. The outer Everest has been conquered but the inner Everest everybody has to conquer; nobody else can do it for you. Many have conquered it but it remains personal; it never becomes a public property.

If Albert Einstein discovers something it becomes public property. Then each and everybody following him has not to discover it again and again – that will be stupid; once the theory of relativity is known, it is known. Einstein may have worked for twenty years on it but anybody of normal intelligence can understand it within hours.

But what Buddha attained or what Christ attained remains personal. There is no way to make it collective. One has to attain it on one’s own, and it has to be again and again discovered. Buddhas and Krishnas become witnesses to it. They prove that it is, their being proves that it is; their very existence becomes a loud witness to it, but that’s all.

You have to go and trek in the mountains, with all the dangers and the insecurity, and you have to be alone in the search. You cannot go as a crowd, you cannot make it a group experiment. Each one has to go alone and each one has to find a way, because the way does not exist ready-made. By your very search you create it. It is a footpath, not like a super-highway. And each time it disappears; the moment one has reached, the footpath disappears. It is like the birds flying in the sky: they don’t leave any footprints. But the challenge is worth accepting, because only in accepting the challenge of this unknown, arduous, dangerous journey does one become a man.

In accepting the very challenge, one becomes a human being. Before that one remains below human Before that one is not born. Before that one only looks like a human being. With this challenge and the acceptance of the challenge something integrates inside; one starts having a centre. And the more one goes into the wild mountains, the more and more centred one becomes. The more one is left alone, the more the soul is born.

George Gurdjieff used to say that everybody is not born with a soul. He is right and he is wrong, both. Wrong because everybody is born with a soul, and right because that soul remains only a potential; it is not actual. Unless you take the challenge, it remains only a seed. A seed is not a tree. It may become a tree, it may not become. The seed has to accept the challenge to fall into the soil, to disappear and die in the soil, to hope, to wait, to trust that out of its death something will be born. This challenge slowly slowly kills your ego. And when the ego is gone, a new entity arrives – the soul, the self.

Source – Osho Book “Don’t Look Before You Leap”