Weekly Column in THE HINDUSTAN TIMES
New Delhi, June 11, 2001
Swami Chaitanya Keerti
A SPIRITUAL person lives a very simple and spontaneous life. He does not pretend to gain respect from society.
He transcends the ordinary notions of respectability, right and wrong, good and bad. His respectability comes from within himself.
Osho tells us the story of the great sage, Eknath. He used to sleep in a Shiva temple. One day, the king had gone to visit him on the advice of his own spiritual master, who had grown tired of him because he was too argumentative, too rational.
The king had agreed out of curiosity, but he was sceptical. “If my own master cannot make me a convinced seeker of truth, how can Eknath?” he kept asking himself.
The king went early in the morning and was shocked to find Eknath fast asleep with his feet on Shiva’s statue. “Is he a saint or the devil?” he wondered.
When Eknath woke up, the king greeted him by saying, “I have been sent by my master.” Eknath laughed and replied, “While I am alive, there’s nobody else who is a master.”
That was the last straw for the king. He said, “You seem to be an insane person. In the first place, you sleep beyond sunrise. Then you rest your feet on Shiva’s statue.” Eknath replied, “Tell that to your master. And remember one thing: Wherever I place my feet, there is God. And whenever a saint wakes up, that is sunrise.”
Osho used to say, “My waking up is not a mechanical phenomenon. I am a free man- I will wake when I want to, and I will go to sleep when I want to. I act according to my consciousness, my awareness. I don’t have any rules for my life. My life is my only discipline.”
Osho reminds us: If you become religious by practicing discipline, you’ll be a bogus religious man. Discipline has nothing to do with religion. If you practice religion, you’ll be false. Ordinarily, it has been told to you, whatsoever you preach, practice it.
And I say to you, if you practice it, you will become false, because practice means you’re creating a character armour around you.
You’ll be living according to a certain ideology and it will function as a barrier. It will become your prejudice.
A religious man is absolutely unprejudiced. He has no philosophy, he has no ideology.
He is very, very natural. He is more like animals, more like small babies, more like trees and rocks and yet very, very different from them. The difference comes from awareness. Religiousness is your nature. No practise is needed for reaching that state.
The author is the editor of the Hindi Osho World.
