Nature Of The Fence

Same Fence

You have developed a fence mentality. You don’t believe. Either you are active or you become passive but both belong to the fence, the same fence: the mind.

Think of a fence made of wood – one plank is white, another is black; then again one is white, another is black. A fence made of wooden planks, colored in two colors: one pillar white, one black. That is the mind: one idea passive, one active; yin–yang, right–wrong, good–bad, the world–nirvana. Both belong to the same fence, and you go on choosing. Sometimes you choose the white, then you get fed up with the white, then you start loving and worshipping the black. But the black is as much part of your imprisonment as the white.

Mind is active, mind is passive – both are part of the mind. What it means is to go beyond passivity, negativity – white and black, day and night, love and hate, the world and God. Go beyond it. Just see the whole point that the active becomes the passive, and the passive again becomes the active.

This I have watched: people who are very active in the world are always, deep down, thinking to renounce all nonsense. Monks who have lived their whole life in the monasteries. Whenever they have confessed, they have always said that they always think that they have missed life, and are always fantasizing to come back to the world.  The active wants to become the passive, the passive wants to become the active.

Choice is of the mind. To be choiceless is to flow with the river. That’s why Hasidism insists, and Osho, Kabir, Nanak, Gorakhanath also insist, on not leaving the world. Renounce it and be in it. That looks difficult, almost impossible for the mind to conceive. The mind can conceive of the world and of renunciation because both belong to the same pattern. When I say, “Be in the world and not be of the world,” the mind becomes uneasy. It cannot be understood: “What are you saying?”

People come to Osho and say they would like to become sannyasins but they are in the world, “And how is it possible to be a sannyasin in the world?” Particularly in India, it looks absolutely absurd; the sannyasin is one who leaves the world. I(Osho) tell them, a sannyasin is one who lives in the world and yet is not of the world. They seem confused. When I(Osho) say these things to people, they look confused. They say, “Either this or that.” I say, “Both, together.”

When you take both active and passive together, they cancel each other, you become neutral. Then you are neither man nor woman, neither yin nor yang, neither body nor soul. You have gone beyond the duality, you have become transcendental. That transcendence is flowing with the river.