A Silent Waiting Heart
Osho,
I received a letter from one of your sannyasins in Europe. She says there is nowhere to go except to be with you. Meanwhile she enjoys being alone and doing small things and is grateful that at least we are all under the same sky.
Can you please say something to all your sannyasins who are silently waiting?
It is a great time, because it is a time of test – a test of your trust, your love. Silently waiting is what I have been teaching my whole life. Don’t desire, but wait.
These are two dimensions, very significant, to be understood. When you desire, you are aggressive to catch hold of something. In the ordinary world desire is the way because so many people are competing, struggling for the same thing. Moreover, the outside world is the world of quantity. It is not inexhaustible; everything outside is exhaustible. You cannot wait, because while you are waiting others may grab the whole thing.
The inner world is totally different. There, a desire is a disturbance, an obstacle, because in the inner world you are alone – no question of competition. Nobody else is trying to go ahead of you; nobody is pulling your legs from behind.
And the inner world is so delicate that if you are aggressive you will destroy it. It is like being aggressive to a rose flower: you may get it, but it will not be the same rose flower that you had seen dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun. It will be something dead – just a corpse, a memory, and nothing more.
The inner reality is even more delicate. The very desire is enough to prevent you from getting it. Hence a totally different approach is needed: that is, of silent awaiting.
The guest comes.
The host just has to be patient.
And in the subjective field of consciousness, there is nothing to grab. It is not a quantity, it is a quality. If you are silently waiting – with no desire, no expectation – there comes one moment when your silence is total and your waiting is unpolluted. Then the doors open. You are taken into your own innermost shrine. That has been my teaching.
And this is a good opportunity to give a chance to silent waiting. While you were with me you were so filled with me, with my presence, with my words, that you never thought about waiting: I was available. Now I can be available not from the outside but only from the inside. And that is a great meeting – of utter fulfillment, of absolute joy. So don’t make it a despair, don’t fall into anguish. Don’t feel that you are far away from me.
You are far away only when you are not silent. You are far away only when waiting is not there; otherwise you are very close to me. Wherever you are, the silence will join you with me. And your waiting will prepare the whole ground for the meeting, which is nonphysical, nonspatial, nontemporal.
Excerpted From The Path Of The Mystic CH:28
