There’s a very meaningful Sufi story: A man was very worried because every night someone would enter his garden and destroy all his plants. He did everything that could be done to protect it. He posted guards all along the boundary, but never was anybody seen entering the garden at night. Yet, every morning, the garden would be trashed.
The man did everything he could, but nothing helped. He then went to a Sufi master, in the hope that the master would be able to see things he and the guards could not. The master closed his eyes and said, “Do one thing, fix the alarm on your clock for two o’clock in the night.” The man said, “How is this going to help? My guards are continuously watching and patrolling around the house.” The master said, “There is no need to argue. Just do what I say. Fix the alarm for two o’clock. Then come the next day and tell me what happened.”
He was not convinced but he tried. At two o’clock, when the alarm went off, he woke up. He was standing in his own garden, wreaking havoc on his plants. He was a somnambulist — a sleepwalker! If we look deep within ourselves, we will see that in some way or the other, we are all sleepwalkers. We sow the seeds of our misdeeds in the deep sleep of unconsciousness, and then wonder why our lives are so miserable. When we love another person, we often end up taking things for granted in the name of love.
Osho suggests: Remain a watcher, remain a witness. Remember that. Remind yourself continuously. Sadness has come. It has happened to you; it is not you. The moment you remember this, suddenly you will see a distance arising between you and the sadness. It does not affect you any longer. When you lose awareness, it affects you; when you gain awareness, there is a distance.
The more your awareness rises, the more the distance increases. A moment comes when you are so far away from your sadness that it is as if it’s not there at all. The same has to be done with happiness too. It will be difficult, because one wants to cling to happiness. But by clinging to happiness, you are sowing the seeds of your sorrow. That’s how this parable is of tremendous significance.
The master himself — in his sleep, in his unawareness — came to the field, the wheat field and sowed the seeds of weeds. In deep sleep! He was a sleepwalker. In the morning he started asking, “Who has done this?” You are responsible for the wrongs in your life. You have brought them upon yourself. But in the morning, when you wake up, you ask, “Who has done this?” and start searching for the wrongdoer. The enemy is within. The enemy is hidden deep within your unconsciousness.
Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance
