Recently I came across a random poem aspiring to be something what it is not. It read:
“Looking to the future is something that is often done,
What will the coming years bring except for great fun?
How will the times change, what kind of person will I become?
This is a question often asked; I’ve contemplated it some.
To be respected, live happily, and be an example to all,
I want to bring a smile to everyone, the big or the small.”
The aspiration expressed in this poem is the aspiration that often springs in our hearts. While most of us try our best to fulfil our ambitions, often we don’t succeed. Many of us feel miserable and then the failure becomes a suffering. We start finding fault with ourselves; we feel incomplete.
This constant feeling of being incomplete is the rootcause of all misery. We spend our entire life trying to become something that we are not. We do all kinds of things to reach somewhere — what we assume is our goal. This goal has nothing to do with our inner reality because this goal does not originate out of our understanding of reality but from confusion and tension.
In reality, we are the seed that needs to flower. We are supposed to become what we are in our essence or potentiality. In that sense, We are perfect as we are, because we originate from the whole. The Upanishads declare:
Om Purnamidah Purnamidam Purnath Purnamudachyate.
Purnasya Purnamadaya Purnamevava shisyate
(This is the whole. That is the whole. From the whole springs the whole. Take the whole from the whole and only the whole remains.)
Meditation on this sutra can liberate us from all our anguish and misery. This wholeness is not something that will happen in future, nor it is something to be achieved. This wholeness is pulsating within us right now, in the present moment. The future never really comes. It is only a mental imagination functioning as conditioning. Meditation helps us become aware of this conditioning. Meditation is the key and witnessing our being without any divisions is the realisation.
In one of his discourses on Zen, Osho says: “You are carrying a masterpiece hidden within you, but you are standing in the way. Just move aside, then the masterpiece will be revealed. Everyone is a masterpiece, because God never gives birth to anything less than that. Everyone carries that masterpiece hidden for many lives, not knowing who they are. Often, they keep trying to become someone. Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece.
You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realise it. God himself has created you; you cannot be improved.” All we need to do is to settle in our witnessing consciousness and let the flower of godliness bloom. It happens by itself. as the Zen mystics declare:
“Sitting silently Doing nothing The spring comes And the grass grows by itself”
Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance
