WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING AND YOU HEAR THE BIRDS SING AND YOU SMELL THE AIR, DO YOU NEVER THINK, “I WANT JUST TO ENJOY THAT, AND I DON’T FEEL LIKE GIVING A LECTURE”?
I feel it every day: I feel it every day when I listen to the birds in the almond. I always enjoy it, I always feel the tremendous beauty of it. That’s why I have to lecture every day — because then I HAVE to sing.
My lecture is a song. It is not against the birds that I am singing here; it is in symphony with them. This is MY way of singing. And trust me… when birds sing I feel happy; when I sing they feel happy. It is a bargain.
What I am saying to you is not a lecture. ‘Lecture’ is an ugly word. How can I lecture? This is a song, this is a spontaneous outflowing, it is an overflowing. I feel happy; that’s why I say so many things to you. In fact, it is not to explain anything to you. I am not explaining. It is simply to convey my joy, my delight in life; that’s the way I can dance. These words are my gestures.
And listen to me as you listen to a poet or to a bird. Never listen to me as you listen to a philosopher: it is not a lecture, it is not a sermon. I am not pouring morality into you. I am not giving you any “shoulds”, “oughts”; I am not giving you any ideals. I am simply conveying that I am tremendously happy… can’t you see it? I am simply conveying that I have arrived. You can also arrive. I am simply making so many gestures so that if one gesture is missed, another may not be missed; if another is missed, I will make a thousand and one gestures. Some day, some gesture may hit you in the right moment.
Some day, in some moment, you may be ready and ripe, and suddenly it will happen.
Listening to me is just a way to commune with me. I am speaking, you are listening — there can happen a great communion. When the listening is perfect, total, when you have just become ears, suddenly there will be an upsurge of energy, a lightning, a satori. You will have understood. And I will not have been trying to explain to you, and you will have understood. I am simply transferring understanding. These are not explanations.
You can miss me only if you are deaf — and many people are deaf. You can miss me only if you are blind — and many people only appear to have eyes: they are blind.
A man visiting an insane asylum found one of the inmates with his ears to a brick wall. “Here, take a listen here,” said the inmate, and the visitor obligingly put his ear at the indicated position.
“I can’t hear anything,” he said, baffled.
“I know,” said the inmate. “It has been like that all these years I have been here; I have not heard anything either.”
But still he is listening, putting his ear to the wall.
There are two misfortunes in life. There are people who go on listening to walls: lectures, sermons, priests, popes, SHANKARACHARYAS — people who have not experienced themselves, people who are second-hand, people who are carbon copies. If you listen to them you will listen for years, and you will not be able to find anything. They are walls, there is nothing inside them. This is one misfortune: getting attached to a wall.
There is another misfortune: you may be with a Buddha, a Krishna, a Christ, a Mohammed, but YOU may be a wall. Then he can go on hammering, he can go on saying, and you don’t listen. Jesus says so many times to his disciples: “If you have ears, listen; if you have eyes, see. I am here.”
These are not lectures that I am delivering to you. This is my being that I am sharing with you. Become more sensitive, become more loving, become more receptive, become more feminine, become a womb — and sooner or later you are bound to get pregnant with me.
But there are people who really don’t want to listen; they have some investment in not listening. There are people who come to listen, and yet don’t want to listen. They cannot miss listening, and they cannot allow it either. When they are not here they feel that they are missing something, they should have been here. When they are here they become stiff, they become afraid, they become scared. If they listen too much, if they go into it too much, maybe they will not be able to return. This is how they go on hanging; they remain in a limbo.
I have heard….
Mulla Nasruddin inserted a classified in a local newspaper offering a one-hundred-rupee reward for the return, with no questions asked, of his wife’s pet cat.
“That’s a mighty big reward for a cat — and in India!” observed the clerk, accepting the advertisement.
“Not for this one,” said Mulla cheerfully. “I drowned it.”
Now there are many people like that: they know they don’t want to listen, and yet they come and they try to listen. They know that they have already drowned the cat so there is no possibility of its being found again, but still they go on searching for it. Maybe they are trying to deceive others, but remember, mind it: if you try to deceive others, there is every possibility that sooner or later you will be deceived by your own efforts. When others are deceived, you will be deceived by their being deceived.
Be alert. You have to take me in tremendous alertness. Only then… only then will you be able to see what is transpiring here.
OSHO
From : The Path of Love – Chapter #8
