Delhi123.com
July 25, 2001
by Swami Chaitanya Keerti
I came across an interesting meaning of the word “development”: develop means unveil. Velop is veil and de-velop means unveiling. And we already know the meaning of envelop: veiling. Osho gives a similar meaning to meditation: that which comes out from within, emerging from within, an unfoldment.
Generally what people understand by education is accumulation of knowledge that we acquire from outside – from our teachers, books and other sources. This is not the real education; this is merely collecting information. No doubt, information is very important in our life. Even what I am giving you is also information. What we do with it depends on our capacity to understand. And that capacity differs from person to person. The real development or growth of the individual depends on this inner capacity. So it is possible that some people may be more educated as far as accumulation of information is concerned, they may be very scholarly. This scholarliness is the development of the computer called mind only.
They may have more megabytes or gigabytes of memory than the other people. This is not the total development of the individuality. The real health of individuality will be missing, as the real health is the flowering of wholeness, it is never partial. Meditation is the education of the innermost being. Meditation is being in touch with our roots, our source within, and the unfoldment of wisdom that does not depend on knowledge accumulated from outside. It is not tuition from outside; it’s an intuition—knowing that happens in the BEING.
Some people call it a gut feeling. But it is actually the BEING that knows it for sure. The purer the being the better the knowledge. This knowledge is true wisdom. It may not get you high profile jobs and elevated status in the society, but you would certainly become a richer being with tremendous amount of inner strength.
Meditation is your connectivity with your inner source. The more you meditate, the more you are – qualitatively speaking. The more you spend time with your own being, the more illumined you become. The more you seek the other the poorer you become—you actually become off-centre.
Meditation is centering within. Yes, by centering I don’t mean you will stop relating with others. Sure you will be relating but not out of any desperation or craving, but out of the feeling of sharing your richness of being. You will be sharing your love, wisdom and illumination. Beggars have nothing to share. Only rich people like Buddha, Mahavira, Meera, Guru Nanak and Osho can share because they have discovered some inexhaustible treasure of illumination within their being. They share their being through their discourses or songs. They share with their presence. That’s the meaning of having darshan of the Enlightened Ones. Their aura, their vibrations penetrate your being if you come close to them in satsang with them. This kind of education used to take place in the ashramas of the sages or in the sanghas (communes) of the Buddha in ancient times and we used to call these places the Gurukulas.
Now we have millions of schools, colleges and universities, but it is rare to find real education. We are certainly riding high on the information highway; our heads have become the heads of elephants with loads of information. But what is missing is the transformation of the individual into really enlightened beings. Everybody is speeding with the speed of light to become a Bill Gate or a Bill Clinton and the whole world and even India, this land of the sages is seeking satsang or darshan of these Bills, but nobody is interested in the Buddha. That’s the reason why no Buddha is born these days. The world full of Bills and without Buddhas is in great imbalance.
This world with so much information and so little transformation is a miserable world.
It needs to balance itself with bliss. Meditation is the door to inner bliss.
The writer is the Editor of the Osho World Hindi monthly
