There is a famous story of about Sufi mystic Sheikh Farid, that a man once asked him the way to attain God. Baba Farid looked into his eyes and felt his longing. He was on his way to the river, so he asked the man to accompany him and promised to show him the way to attain God after they’d had a bath. They arrived at the river and as soon as the man plunged, Baba Farid grabbed the man’s head and pushed it down into the water with great force. The man began to struggle to free himself from his grip. He was much weaker than Baba Farid but his latent strength gradually began to stir and soon it became impossible for the mystic to hold him down. The man pushed himself to the limit and was eventually able to get out of the river. He was in state of total shock while Farid was laughing loudly. After the man calmed down, Farid asked him, “When you were under the water what desires did you have in your mind?” He replied, “Desires! There weren’t any, there was just one desire — to get a breath of air.”
Farid said, “This is the secret of attaining God. This is determination. And your determination awakened all your latent powers.” In a real moment of intense determination, great strength is generated — and a man can pass from the world into truth; by determination one can awaken from the dream to the truth. In the “Wisdom of the Sands” discourse, Osho shares this insight: It is only through intensity that one arrives. When all your desires, all your passions become one flame, it is intensity. When there is only one desire left inside you and your total being supports that one, it is intensity. It is exactly what the word says: Intensity.
The opposite word is extensity. You are spread out, you have a thousand and one desires, many fragmentary desires — one going to the north, one going to the south. You are being pulled apart. You are not one, you are a crowd. And if you are a crowd you will be miserable. If you are a crowd you will never feel any fulfillment. You don’t have any center. Intensity means creating a center in yourself. When all the arrows are coming towards the center, when all the fragments are joined together, integration arises. Becoming centered, concentrated inwards, that is the meaning of intensity. In moments of danger when all your thoughts disappear, the crowd will become one. In that moment you will be one single individual, indivisible. You will be an undivided, single unity. Facing death has generated an intensity. Even love can evoke a similar intensity. All else becomes irrelevant, peripheral. When such intensity arises in meditation, it brings you to the ultimate. You arrive home.
Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance
