Osho – The body is a momentary phenomenon. One day it was not, one day it will not be again. It exists only for the time being — it is like foam; looks so beautiful from the shore, the foam, the white foam of a wave. And if the sun has risen, around the foam can be created a rainbow; looks so beautiful, looks like diamonds, looks so white and so pure. But if you take it in your hands, it starts disappearing. Only your hands are left wet, that’s all.
So is the case with the body. It looks beautiful, but death is growing in it, death is hiding in it, old age is waiting there. It is only a question of time. It is not that at a certain date you die. In fact, the reality is that the day you are born, you start dying. The child who is one day old has died a little bit, he has died one day. He will go on dying day by day.
What you call your birthday is not really your birthday — you should call it your deathday. The man who is celebrating his fiftieth birthday is really celebrating his fiftieth deathday. Death has come closer. Now, if he is going to live seventy years, only twenty years are left. Fifty years he has already died!
We are continuously dying as far as the body is concerned…it is foam disappearing. Don’t be deceived by seventy years because seventy years mean nothing in the expanse of eternity — what is the meaning of seventy years? It is foam, it is momentary.
UNDERSTAND THAT THE BODY IS MERELY THE FOAM OF A WAVE, THE SHADOW OF A SHADOW. It is not even the shadow, but the shadow of the shadow. Buddha wants to emphasize the unreality of it. It is the echo of the echo, very very far removed from reality. God is the real — call it truth. Buddha would like to call it dhamma — the law.
God is the ultimate reality; then the soul is his shadow and the body is the shadow of the shadow. Move from the body to the soul and from the soul to dhamma — to God, to the eternal law.Unless you achieve the eternal law, don’t rest, because nobody knows — today you are here, tomorrow you may not be. Don’t waste these precious days hankering, longing for futile things.
People go on collecting junk, and then one day they are gone. And then all the junk that they collected their whole lives is left behind. They cannot take a single thing with them.
It is said that when Alexander the Great died, he asked his ministers that when his casket was being carried to the grave, his hands should be left hanging outside the casket. “Why?” the ministers asked. “Nobody has ever heard of such a thing! It is never done! It is not traditional. Why this strange, eccentric idea? Why should your hands be left hanging outside the casket?”
Alexander said, “I would like to let people know that even I, Alexander the Great, am going empty-handed. I am not taking anything with me. My whole life has been a sheer wastage. I worked hard” — and he really worked hard, he struggled hard, he was a really ambitious person, mad after power, wanted to become the ruler of the world, and had more or less succeeded, had more or less become the ruler of the then known world….
But even he says, “I am dying and I cannot take anything with me; hence the whole effort has been just an exercise in futility. Let the people know, let them become aware, let the understand my foolishness, my idiocy. It may help them to understand their own life patterns, their life-styles.”