The Perfect Way by Osho

Author:Osho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Osho International

Eckehart was once sitting all alone under a grove of trees in a lonely place. A friend who was passing by saw him sitting there. He went up to him and said, “I saw you sitting, lonely, and I thought I would keep you company and so I have come over to join you.” Do you know what Eckehart replied? He said, “I was with myself, but you have come, and if anything I am feeling lonely now.”

Are you ever in your own company like this? This is satsang. This is prayerfulness. This is meditation. When you are all alone within yourself and there is no thought, no thought of anyone, you are in the company of your self. When the outer world is absent inside, there is the company of your self. In that companionlessness and solitude, in that absolute aloneness, the truth is realized because in your innermost being you yourself are that truth.

It is a question of being religious, not of appearing religious. Whenever anyone asks me about being religious the first thing I inquire of him is, “Do you want to appear religious or to become religious?” The two are quite different dimensions. Being religious involves a discipline for self-realization; appearing religious is just self-adornment. The garbs of the hermits and monks, their stereotyped, conventional robes, their looks, the decorative marks on their foreheads and bodies, and other paraphernalia – all these are for appearing religious. If you too want to appear religious like this, it is very easy.

But remember, appearing is for others, being is for oneself. I am not what others know of me from the outside. I am what I know myself to be from the inside. If I appear healthy to you, does it hold any value in it? The value is only in my actually being healthy.

Like religious clothes, religious qualities can also be worn. People wear them like ornaments of decoration. And this deception is even deeper. Man’s behavior can be of two kinds, like that of real flowers or like that of plastic flowers. The first come from the very life and being of the plant; the others have no life in them at all. They don’t bloom into flowers, instead they have to be put together. Authentic behavior blooms, false behavior is put together from the outside. Man’s behavior is very symbolic. It represents his interiority. What is meaningful is to change the interiority, not the behavior.

When we have a fever and the body is running a temperature, we don’t try to get rid of the fever by bringing down the temperature. We try to reduce the fever and this brings the temperature down. Temperature is only a symptom of the fever, not a disease in itself. It is only an indication, it is not an enemy. What would you call those who begin to battle with temperature itself?

This same kind of nonsense goes on concerning religious life, moral life. Outward indications are mistaken for the enemy, the symptoms are taken for the disease, and we begin to fight with them.

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