Just A Quantum Leap
You can live in a kind of lethargy forever and ever; nothing will happen to you. And I am not saying that godliness does not happen to those who wait. It happens only to those who wait! – but waiting has a different quality. Waiting has to be aflame, only then does it happen. Every fiber of your being should be awake, alert: any moment it is going to happen, how can you fall asleep?
Jesus is reported to have said again and again to his disciples, “Be awake. Don’t fall asleep.” And he tells the parable where a master told his servants, “I am going on a pilgrimage but I may return any day, any moment, day or night. You have to be awake for twenty-four hours a day because I may come at any time, and I will come without informing you.”
This is the situation: the servants have to keep watch day and night. They have to be alert, the master can come at any moment.
Godliness can come at any moment – you have to be alert, watchful. Your waiting should be alert, watchful, intense. That is your doing. Waiting is not against doing. Waiting is the highest kind of doing, the subtlest kind of doing. Waiting is the greatest art of doing.
The fourth question:
Osho,
Why is it said that life is stranger than fiction?
Because life is! Fictions are only reflections of life; how can they be stranger than life? Fictions are only parts of life. Life is a very complicated whole: it does not begin, does not end. Your fiction starts and ends.
I know a person who always reads his novels from the middle. I asked him, “What is the point?” He said, “This way you remain more in suspense – the end is not known, the beginning is not known. If you start from the beginning you are only curious about the end. I am curious in a double way. I enjoy it more totally!”
Life is like that – it is always in the middle. You are always in the middle, the beginning is not known. Religions have tried somehow to supply the beginning. All those philosophies on how the world began are just nonsense, because the world never began. It has always been in the middle. That is the mystery, but the mind hankers for the beginning.
And then there are people who supply the answers. They say, “On a certain day God created the world.” And what was he doing before that? Just sitting there stupidly? And how long had he been sitting? Christians say, “God created the world exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus – on a certain Monday he started, and ended by Saturday evening, and rested on Sunday.” Then what was he doing before that? – immense eternity! He must have got bored. In fact he must have committed suicide or must have gone mad.
Excerpted From The Wisdom Of The Sands, Vol. 1 CH: 8
