Pail Of Water

Wholeness

LIVE IN JOY, Buddha repeats, IN HEALTH, EVEN AMONG THE AFFLICTED.

By health Buddha means wholeness. Health comes from the same root as ‘healing’. A healed person is a healthy person, a healed person is a whole person. By “health” Buddha does not mean the ordinary, medical meaning of the term; his meaning is not medicinal, it is meditational – although you will be surprised to know that the words ‘meditation’ and ‘medicine’ both come from the same root. Medicine heals you physically, meditation heals you spiritually. Both are healing processes, both bring health.

But Buddha is not talking about the health of the body; he is talking about the health of your soul. Be whole, be total. Don’t be fragmentary, don’t be divided. Be an individual, literally: indivisible, one piece.

People are not one piece; they are many fragments, somehow holding themselves together. They can fall apart at any moment. They are all Humpty-Dumpties, just bundles of many things. Any new situation, any new danger, any insecurity, and they can fall apart. Your wife dies or you go bankrupt or you are unemployed – any small thing can prove the last straw on the camel’s back. The difference is only of degrees.

Somebody is boiling at ninety-eight degrees, somebody at ninety-nine; somebody may be ninety-nine point nine degrees, but the difference is only of degrees, and any small thing can change the balance. You can go insane at any moment, because inside you are already a crowd.

So many desires, so many dreams, so many people are living in you. If you watch carefully, you will not find one person there but many faces, changing every moment. It is as if you are just a marketplace where so many people are going and coming, so much noise, and nothing makes sense.

You can dream only if you are many. You can dream only if you have many desires. I have none. Dreams are a by-product of desiring: what you desire in the day, you dream in the night. Dreaming is a hangover; something has remained incomplete in the day that has to be completed. The mind is a perfectionist; it wants to try, in every possible way, to complete things.

The mind simply cuts you off from your dreams. It has created two kinds of worlds: one, the dreaming world, totally separate, and one, the so-called waking world, totally separate. You live in compartments. When you enter into dreaming you forget all about waking; when you enter into waking you forget all about dreaming.

The Buddha is awake even while he is asleep. He has no compartments in his being. He is not many, he is one. Because he is one and he has no clinging to memories and no desires for the future, the present is enough for him. Then he lives moment to moment in its totality; he does not go on living partially. Your dreams simply show that you live partially, and the unlived parts have to be lived in your dreams. If you live totally each moment, then there is no possibility of any dreams.

Buddha says: LIVE IN JOY, IN HEALTH, EVEN AMONG THE AFFLICTED.

This is a very important sutra to be remembered – more so because the Christians are creating a totally wrong approach to life. They say: When there is so much misery in the world, how can you be joyous? Sometimes they come to Osho and they say, “People are starving and people are poor. How can you teach people to dance and sing and be joyous? There are so many people afflicted with so many diseases, and you teach people meditation? This is selfishness!”

But that’s exactly what Buddha is saying. He is saying: LIVE IN JOY, IN HEALTH, EVEN AMONG THE AFFLICTED.