Just To Be Able To Dance 1
Osho,
Yesterday you said that an inward traveler has only direction and not destination. Will you please further clarify the distinction between the two?
The distinction is very subtle, but it is the same distinction as there is between the mind and the heart, as there is between logic and love, or even more appropriate, as there is between prose and poetry.
A destination is a very clear-cut thing; direction is very intuitive. A destination is something outside you, more like a thing. A direction is an inner feeling; not an object, but your very subjectivity. You can feel direction, you cannot know it. You can know the destination, you cannot feel it. Destination is in the future. Once decided, you start manipulating your life towards it, steering your life towards it.
How can you decide the future? Who are you to decide the unknown? How is it possible to fix the future? Future is that which is not yet known, future is an open possibility. By fixing a destination your future is no longer a future, because it is no longer open. Now you have chosen one alternative out of many – because when all the alternatives were open it was future. Now, all alternatives have been dropped; only one alternative has been chosen. It is no longer future, it is your past.
The past decides when you decide a destination. Your experience of the past, your knowledge of the past decides. You kill the future. Then you go on repeating your own past – maybe a little modified, a little changed here and there according to your comfort or your convenience; repainted, renovated – but still it comes out of the past. This is the way one loses track of future: by deciding a destination one loses track of future. One becomes dead. One starts functioning like a mechanism.
Direction is something alive, in the moment. It knows nothing of the future, it knows nothing of the past, but it throbs, it pulsates, but here and now. And out of this pulsating moment, the next moment is created. Not by any decision on your part – but just because you live this moment and you live it so totally, and you love this moment so wholly, out of this wholeness the next moment is born. It is going to have a direction. That direction is not given by you, it is not imposed by you; it is spontaneous. That’s what the Bauls call sahaj manush, the spontaneous man.
Excerpted From The Beloved, Vol.1 CH: 6
