Osho – There is a story I would like to tell you about a Sufi mystic, Sheikh Farid. He was going towards the river one day to take his morning bath. A seeker followed him and asked him, “Please, just wait for one minute. You look so filled with the divine, but I don’t even feel a desire for it. You look so mad and just watching you I have come to feel that there must be something in it. You are so happy and blissful and I am so miserable, but even the desire to seek the divine is not there. So what to do? How to create the desire? ”
Farid looked at the man and said, “You come with me. I am going to take my morning bath. You also take a bath with me in the river and maybe, right while you are taking a bath, the answer can be given. Otherwise we will see after the bath. You come with me.”
The man became a little puzzled. This Sheikh Farid looked a little mad: while taking a bath how was he going to answer? But nobody knows the ways of the mystics, so the man followed. They both went into the river and when the man was taking a dip, Farid jumped on him and pressed him down in the river. The man started feeling restless. What type of answer was this?
At first he thought Farid was joking, but then it became dangerous. He was not going to leave him! He struggled hard. Farid was a very heavy, strong man and the seeker was very thin — as seekers are. But when your life is at stake…. Even that thin-looking man threw Farid off, jumped on him and said, “Are you a murderer? What are you doing? I am a poor man. I have just come to ask you how the desire can arise in one’s heart to seek the divine and you were going to kill me!”
Farid said, “Wait. A few questions first. When I was pressing you down in the river and you were suffocating, how many thoughts were in your mind?”
The man said, “How many? Only one thought — how to get back to the air to take a breath.” Farid asked, “How long did that one thought stay?”
The man said, “That, too, did not stay long because my life was at stake. You can afford thinking when nothing is at stake. Life was in danger — even that thought disappeared. Then to come out of the river was not a thought; it was my whole being.”
Farid said, “You have understood. This is the answer. If you are feeling suffocated in this world, pressed from all sides, and if you feel nothing is going to happen in this world except death, then the desire to seek truth or God, or whatsoever you name it, will arise. And that, too, will not last long. By and by that desire is no more a desire, it becomes your being. The very thirst becomes your being. “I have shown you the path,” said Farid. “Now you can go.”
Just try to understand the whole situation in the world. If it is already destroying you, jump out of it. The real question is not how to seek God; the real question is how to understand that where you are thinking life is, there is no life but only death.