east & west from osho

Go higher and higher and higher. There is no limit to it, so never be satisfied. Whatsoever you have, always be happy with it, but always remember that more is possible.

That is the point where being and becoming meet. And growth needs both the wings of being and becoming. There are people who become too satisfied with their being. They lose growth.

They become complacent… they lose tone. They simply become placid… no movement, no dynamism. They don’t know what ’divine discontent’ is.

So remember this.

Then there are people who are too much engaged in becoming. They lose all consciousness of being. They become ambitious. They are always discontent. They don’t know what divine content is.

Real growth is possible when you are divinely contented and divinely discontented together. You are happy, whatsoever you have got, you are grateful, whatsoever you have got, but you know much more is possible, and you go on praying for it. You are happy… you go on being thankful for it.

Whatsoever has happened, has happened without your earning it. It is a gift, a grace, so one is never complaining. One is not saying, ’I don’t have what I need.’ And more is always available. One feels thankful. With the past one is completely satisfied. With the present one feels absolutely thankful and grateful… but one is not dead.

In this contentment and thankfulness, there is a prayer that much more is possible. Tomorrow is coming… the future is coming. One remains excited. This contentment does not make one dull, rather it makes one more alive, because one becomes more aware of many more possibilities.

One remains throbbing. The centre remains contented, and the circumference remains throbbing and waiting for the guest to knock at the door, because more is possible.

This I call the meeting of being and becoming. At the same time, in the same moment, one is tremendously contented, and one is also tremendously discontented. This is the dynamism of life, the dialectics.

In the East, people became too much concerned with being. They lost becoming. The East became almost a dead world… nowhere to go, nothing to do, as if the past became all, future disappeared.

The West has become too concerned with becoming. The past is meaningless… even the present is meaningless. Present is also just a passage for the future. Herenow doesn’t exist. It has to be used as a means for some other end in the future. And when you reach the future, that will also become the present. Then again you hurry up.

Everybody is going. Nobody knows where they are going, for what they are going. Everybody has to become somebody. So the East became dead, and the West is becoming mad. Being alone makes one dead… becoming alone makes one mad. And there is a subtle balance between the two.

When you are neither dead nor mad, you are alive, tremendously happy, tremendously contented, and yet waiting for the unknown… always waiting, hopeful. Much is going to happen – so much has already happened. And every time something has happened, it has opened another door. These two things have to be remembered, mm?

And this I call the meeting of East and West – the meeting of being and becoming.

Impression

Every person should believe this..No matter what you look like on the outside the true beauty lies deep within......
But why do we find it so hard to completely, earnestly and actively live our lives with these words in mind? Why do we attach so much importance and value to the way we look?
Let me ask some questions:
Do you love others just because of their looks?
Don’t you love your girlfriend, boyfriend, sister,bro, mother, father, child, etc. because of who they are deep within?
Would you stop loving them if they gained a few pounds, developed acne, stopped putting on make-up or cut their hair?
I believe I know my readers well enough (and I still believe in the goodness of everyone) to say that you’d never do such a thing.
Then, why do we put so much pressure on ourselves? Why do we put ourselves down in ways that we’d never do to others?

We all struggle with what True Beauty means to us, don’t we?
I have come to learn that true beauty has nothing to do with my appearance. I know now that Amy Davis’ words are true and I am trying to live each day without worrying too much about my weight, cloths, hair etc. Instead, I want to focus on becoming a beautiful soul (if that makes sense).

29 Paasuram

sitramsirukAlE

vandhunnai sEvitthun

pottramarai adiye

pottrum poruL keLAi

pettram meitthuNNum kulatthil pirandhu

nee

kuttrEval engaLai koLLAmal pOgAdhu

ittraipparai koLvAn anru kAN gOvindA

ettraikkumEzEzu piravikkum unthannOdu

uttrEmE AvOm unakkE nAm AtseivOm

mattrai nam kAmangal mAttrElOrempAvAi

Hear why we have come in the early morning and worship your

lotus-like feet. Being born in the clan of cowherds you cannot refuse our

service to you. We have not come here just ask for the requisites for this

vratha but to pray that we should belong to you for all the lives to come and

should serve you alone. remove all the other desires of ours.

behind every joy and ecstacy...

The result of any struggle is always a feeling of joy and ecstasy. Life will be a dull and boring game if there are no challenges to face. Just imagine if there is no opponent in a game of football! Will the players get excited if they score a goal? Or if the opponent team is a weak team, will the winning be exciting?

If things are offered to us in a platter, we will not enjoy the same. 

The irony is that want to be glorious, but we don't like the fight! But if we stop and think for a while, struggles are the testing ground to be our very best. Have you heard of the story of a man took pity on a butterfly trying to come out of its cocoon and cut opened the cocoon so that the butterfly came out without the final struggle? The man waited for the butterfly to take its first fight of freedom. But the butterfly had awithered body and shrivelled wings. It never was able to fly! The man did not know that the strugle the butterfly undergoes is the God's design to secrete coating from the body of the butterfly so that the wings will be stronger. Since the butterfly did not go through this process, the butterfly never had a strong wings to fly and was crawling for the rest of its life!

We need struggles and crisis to make us stronger and more efficient. A ship is tested on the high sea and not on the safe waters of a harbour!

Over this weekend perhaps you can do an exercise. List all the struggles you have undergone and think for a while if you would have enjoyed the success if there had been no crisis!

Beautiful flowers

Be like a Bee

Have you ever paid attention to how a honey bee operates? How focused and determined that bee is to do its fair share of the work? How it does its leadership part to make sure that everyone else is having enough food, and shelter?

When you’re placed in a leadership role or you are pursing a leadership role do you sacrifice a lot to get to where you would like to be? Do you change your atmosphere,attitude, language, and behavior to fit the part? Think about it.

Bee’s are some of the best leaders in the world. They understand their roles from birth on what they should contribute to the hive to make sure themselves and their community is safe from harms way. They know that they will protect their queen from any harm that might come their way and will work endless hours until their job is complete and move onto the next task without having to be told to. They communicate with their team members on which flowers they have already been at and which areas they would like to target next.

They understand that if they don’t get their part of the job done then its going to weight heavy on the community to pick up their slack. Being lazy or procrastination is not apart of a bee’s lifestyle.

Now, I know I just threw a unique perspective at you about how bee’s operate in my perspective. No, I am not a bee expert but an observer. We all like to be leaders in organizations and companies that we are apart of. We try and educate ourselves in various industries to become masters (degree) in our fields of choices.

But, it seems that it gets to a point where sometimes the lazy inner person shows up more then what is necessary. The sacrifice to start a company, begin a new career, collect various degrees does not happen as seriously as it should be. Slacking and making excuses seems to be the normal rather then focus and determination being your best friends. We can praise and shout that we are changing the world by our consistent outspoken ways and life changing social media era but if we don’t take the time to step up and step out we won’t see no such change.

Operating our lives as hunny bees with working effectively and productively is what is going to assist us in completing our goals in life. When was the last time that you actually completed a series of goals on time? If it takes you longer then 8 minutes to answer that question then you should understand that you need to focus more on self development and preparation.

Now, this is not a blog post to bash our lovely smooth sailing life what we think but to be honest about what were trying to do. Over the course of this year I have taken the chance of teaching myself new strategies and skills to become a better leader. Leadership is going to be your best asset in trying to be apart of any company or to start a company. As a generation we have to take the chance to invest in ourselves a lot more then what we have been by studying books, courses, attending seminars and being involved.

Sometimes putting in those countless hours of preparation to develop your first product will have to be your main priority and you might lose some friends because of that. But, you have to understand what you’re trying to reach at in life.

A bee will always work hard every day until the job is completed. You need to place yourself in “bee mode” at times to make sure that long list of things to do is getting completed on time :)

Sane living

Alexander the great, went about conquering the world. He killed many and had several victories to his name. Eventually he died of a mosquito bite, while dying he asked his generals to lay out the arms of his dead body to show people around that he was carrying nothing with him. In his death bed, Alexander understood the futility of leading a life devoted to the pursuit of achievements.

Competing and striving for better status is what a rat race is all about. How wise is this way of living? There is succinct sutra in the Hindu scriptures – “we come empty handed and we leave empty handed, why do you struggle so much in the interim”. There is a stark truth in this pithy saying.

Remember that the point is not to give up on life, but to stop living it insanely. No one is asking you to denounce everything and go to the jungles or caves. You can function beautifully in the society without struggling or suffering its conditioning.

Many people are becoming more and more aware of the foolishness of indulging this rat race of existence. That’s all it takes. You just need to see the insanity to step out of it. Here are few simple truths of life that can help you get out of the rat race mentality.

Your mind conditioning is running you – A person who blindly involves himself in a rat race for success and achievement, is just living his conditioning. May be he/she was criticized as a child and felt the need to prove his/her worth to the society. This is just negative conditioning and it’s silly to the core. When you know that your programming was dysfunctional, you can easily step out of it. You are not your conditioning when you live consciously.

All is one eventually – This is not a spiritual concept. You can easily see the truth of life is “oneness”. Everything came out of one source into existence. We can call it the big bang or anything else to suit our intellectual needs, but the fact is that everything is that one source manifested as form. So when everything is the one, why are we trying to out do each other? When Jesus said – “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, he was pointing to the simple truth that everything is one, when you hate or resent someone you are eventually hating yourself. When you understand this you will immediately get out of the rat race.

Nothing matters in the end – The Alexander story proves it, you can also look at the lives of other famous men or women of our times. Do they really carry their achievements with them once their tenure on earth is terminated? Even the most stable and concrete structure eventually falls down and becomes dust. Why do you associate so much importance to material achievements? With time everything comes to an end, how ever immortal it may seem. Relationships, careers, popularity, all of this comes to end sooner or later. Enjoy what life gives you but stop struggling and suffering for it.

The future is not going to liberate you – Are you seeking your happiness in your future while suffering in the present moment? If you look closely does it not look insane to do so. The future is just a mind projection, a phantom image which has no reality. When it does come it will come as the present moment. Since you are always looking at the future for salvation, you will never be happy in the present no matter what it brings you. True happiness comes from within and not from acquiring this or that, everything else is just fleeting. With a rat race mentality, you will be happy for a moment when you achieve something and immediately start worrying about the next achievement.

Nothing you achieve will bring contentment – Have you not noticed this to be true in your life so far? You constantly strain and suffer to get ahead of the “mind created” competition, but to what avail? As soon as you achieve one thing you will strive for the next. Your life will be an endless struggle till you finally lay down for your last rites. What an utter waste of a life time? Contentment comes when you see that everything is pointless and the only thing that matters is your present moment enjoyment of what life gives you.

You don’t feel fulfilled because you don’t know your true self – Your true nature is peace. This is the call of spirituality all over the world. The mind conditioning is not your true nature, it’s just a bunch of ideas and thoughts that make you indulge in a rat race. You are afraid of the future because you seek your identity through it. Your essence or true nature is that of stillness, it’s a simple awareness of all that is. The only place where you can find your true nature is in the present moment awareness, when you mind stops churning out so much noise and fear.

Escaping the rat race is the first step to sane living. Focus on what you have rather than what you want to achieve. Continue with your duties and work but don’t seek yourself through them. There is a peace and joy to life when you are not constantly worried about the next thing to achieve.