The Path of Trust, Part 4: A Gratefulness No-Knowing

 

Osho.

Friends,
First, a few words about “the Great Lie.”

Hitler in Mein Kampf freely shares his secrets on how he would seduce a people to adopt his intolerant vision with their eyes wide open. Keep your propaganda simple, and if the lie is brazen — lie big, because as Hitler accurately forecast, “Only a big lie succeeds in politics!”

Hitler before he committed suicide in his bunker in 1945 foresaw the return of Fascism. If that was more than the vain hope of a dying madman it will succeed because people of the present and the near future adopt his fundamental political device.

Tell a lie as the truth and keep telling it until it becomes a hypnotic suggestion.

Tell a lie like Newt Gingrich let slip in an interview on Fox last week that all Muslims are synonymous with Nazis, or foment and follow that popular right wing suggestion that “Obama is a Muslim.”

Tell these lies frequently and with time we will see more and more people believe it as we are seeing today in America. Use then this rote lie to undermine fact, undermine truth. Undermine the world.

***

The above was a hard thing to say but it must be said. Said and balanced by alternatives. Bitter beginnings are a blessing, because they can lead to sweet endings.

I offer the final installment of the Path of Trust Series, taken from my book Messiahs. I have only altered the opening (see brackets) to cover an important milestone approaching in my spiritual life.

[October 15 is not only Nietzsche's birthday but it is my birthday. My second birthday, actually. A new birth. On that day, seven weeks and four days from this posting it will be 30 years-and-counting that I met Osho in India. I've been testing his] experiments, and I haven’t really figured out anything. In the beginning I had many questions. When my master responded, he didn’t answer them as such; it was as if he made my questions vanish. Over time the clouds of questions slowly disappeared and left behind just a sky made of answer.

Not all of his hypotheses agreed with me, but that was not a problem. My master always encouraged me to follow my own way, to celebrate being as equally unique a human being as he was. If something didn’t work, it only meant that we still needed to find techniques in meditation or therapies that harmonized with my individuality. The essential hypothesis he suggested to me was that ultimately existence itself is the teacher.

Life is the master.

When I also discovered this through my own experimentation, I began to see the master’s sutures of insight slowly become my own.

Thus I begin to understand the second step a disciple takes with a master. You begin to experience union with him or her. In the beginning you fall into a rhythm with the master as your most cherished beloved, but it is not a romantic affair of soul mates. The one-on-one coupling I’ve shared with women in this life, as rich and fulfilling as it has been, is nothing compared to the disciple-master relationship. It is one-ego-on-no-ego. It is one I-diot in love with a Nobody. It is a one-on-zero affair. You are somebody. You are trying to be something whereas the master is a no-thing being. And there’s the mysterious paradox. He is full of this emptiness, he is a monsoon cloud bursting with rain, and like rain his emptiness nourishes a thirsty soul. Even the pitter-patter of his showers on the roof of your resistance is comforting to you.

Osho at 21 shortly after his enlighenment.

The master is an empty void that has a bright awareness about it. You feel that he has arrived. Yet he is a vacant, non-present presence. A body walks up to you and talks to you. A man dances with you but even though the body is total and animated in its moves, it appears just as empty as a corpse. You dance with him and become aware that this corpse is far more alive than you. It is as if the sky decided one day to hide inside the shell of a human body so it could relate to you and love you. The only hint of the sky’s masquerade is the bright and penetrating emptiness of his eyes.

You find yourself falling in love with zero. It is like the legend of the great lovers, Tristan and Isolde. They adored each other with such intensity that they both disappeared into that love. They became so aware of love that they became love. Love liberated them from being egos, from being limited in time or confined in sexually identified minds and bodies. They became love’s eternity, love’s endless sky. In the same way, staying close to a master you begin to disappear into his state of union and non-separation. Tasting his no-thing-ness, your starved soul begins to become wet with his nectar. Once this has happened, once the master gets his emptiness under your skin, his physical existence becomes irrelevant. The sky was not the body. It was just visiting you. You are not the body either. In those moments when the master merged with you, he showed you that you are also the sky hiding behind form.

To merge with a master is called Satsang. There is no appropriate translation in any Western language for this Sanskrit word. I can say this, from my own experience: Satsang happens when you come close to a master, so close that his emptiness helps you to dissolve into “it.” Suddenly, unexpectedly, you disappear into his whole in the clouds. The mind and all its thoughts fall away; the emotions and all their turbulence of hurts and expectations vanishes. You become light and lightning-bright with the same focusless attention of the master. Satsang is a coupling. He has disappeared and so have you. For a moment there is no master, no disciple. No-thing.

At this juncture prose must be left behind. The language of books is a language of the clouds, of the idiots; its expression is extraordinary. Language separates, distinguishes. Words and sentences are like Tristan-and-Isolde egos before they dissolved into no-ego. Language dissects the flower of a master-disciple union into its parts. Language divides and dismantles the mystic flower of Satsang until it lies in pieces on the floor, killed. The only way to understand what I’m saying is to find a master, sit with him or her and disappear into his love and awareness.

A look with no intention.
A robe of green, fluttering,
Like a poplar tree sage in a desert.

A moonlight leaf,
Causing the cockerel to purr in the almond tree.
The hum held in your hands,
The eyes wide open gazing backwards
At something beyond the seen:

The one you recognize in me.

A rocking moves my frame from nowhere,
And meeting draws closed our eyes.
And you never saw me.
And I never saw you.

So that we could re-member.

Through moments of Satsang with my master I have tasted the essence of the Apocalypse [Revelation] of the Awakened Ones. As far as I understand it, this is one of their secrets: No messiah as such is coming to save us. The savior sleeps within each of us.

Worship not the awakened mystics. Understand them as the reflections of your own divine potential. Their physical sojourn on this earth is an invitation to ignite the fire of your sleeping consciousness. To indicate this truth, they led you from the periphery of the outer apocalypse to the untapped majesty hiding within self.

Messiahs, pp. 222-223

John Hogue

(23 August 2010)

PS — Osho is gone from his body just over 20 years now. In that passing was a last barrier removed. Now, like this morning, sitting behind my house on an incomparable late summer day, I experience no barrier, no loss, no limit. The Zero I knew embodied that even then was already “gone” is already not-there-ing with me now. You too can have this experience. It is never too early or too late because this very special love is beyond time. If you feel a calling, I can provide directions on the way. Just Contact Me.

http://hogueprophecy.com/2010/the-path-of-trust-part-4-a-gratefulness-no-knowing/