The Hindustan Times, New Delhi
20 March, 2004
Swami Chaitanya Keerti
19 March
The simplest definition of enlightenment that Osho offers is that to live
one’s life here-now: this moment is all. He says: “You never have two
moments together in your hands, only one single moment. It is such a small
moment that there is no space for thinking to move, no space for thoughts
to exist. Either you can live it, or you can think. To live it is to be
enlightened, to think is to miss.”
Osho does not talk about enlightenment as a goal, that you have to decide
whether to accept it or not. He says: “Enlightenment is the realisation
that we have only the present moment to live. The next moment is not
certain – it may come, it may not come.”
Jesus says to his disciples, “Look at the lilies in the field, how
beautiful they are! Even the great Solomon was not so beautiful attired in
all his grandeur as these poor lily flowers.” And what is the secret? The
secret is that they think not of the morrow. They live now, they live here.
To live now is to be enlightened, to live here is to be enlightened, to be
a lily is to be enlightened this very moment! Don’t think about what I am
saying. Don’t think about it, just be here. This is the taste of
enlightenment. And once you have tasted it, you will want to taste it more
and more.
Osho adds: “It will bring you, for the first time, real contentment, real
blissfulness, authentic ecstasy. ” Once enlightenment gives you a taste of
the real, you will see that all your pleasures, all your happinesses were
simply the stuff dreams are made of; they were not real. And what has come
now, has come forever.
That is the definition of the real: a contentment that comes and never
leaves you again is real contentment. A contentment that comes and goes
again is not contentment, it is simply a gap between two miseries. Let that
be the definition. Anything that comes and never goes is reality.
Don’t be bothered about the word ‘enlightenment’. What you call it does not
matter; you can call it illumination, you can call it blissfulness, you can
call it self-realisation, you can call it actualisation of all your
potentials – whatever you want to call it.
But remember one quality: that it knows only a beginning, it knows no end.
(Osho Enlightenment Day is on March 21, 1953)
