Meditation: A Flight Beyond The Mind
Beloved Osho,
I don’t have a question – just a feeling of hope;essness. I can’t believe my questions, I have a feeling they come from something brittle and unreal.
I don’t have a question – just a feeling of hopelessness. How does hopelessness arise? You must be hoping too much; it comes out of too much hope.
If you don’t hope, all hopelessness disappears. If you expect too much, frustration is bound to come. If you are trying to succeed, you are bound to fail.Whatsoever you want to try too hard, just the opposite will happen..
You must have been trying too hard to fulfill some hope then hopelessness comes. If you really want to get rid of hopelessness – and every wants that – then get rid of hope. Drop all hope and suddenly you will see that with the hope, hopelessness has disappeared. Then one comes to an inner tranquility where no hope exist – and no hopelessness. One is simply calm and quiet and collected – a deep reservoir of energy, a pool of energy, cool.
But for that you have to sacrifice hope. The question shows that you are still hoping… Go a little more deeper and further: if you are really hopeless, hopelessness will disappear.
Don’t hope for anything. There is no need because all that you can hope for is already given. What more can you hope for?
You are here, everything is here – just being is all. But you don’t appreciate, you are asking for some dead mouse, some power trip, some ego trip, some success in the eyes of the world. Those are not going to be fulfilled, even Alexanders have failed. Even Alexander dies a poor man, a beggar, because everything that you accumulate is snatched back from you, you go empty-handed. Empty-handed you come; empty-handed you go.
So why bother about success, riches, power – material or spiritual? Just be… And being is the greatest miracle. Turn within yourself – what Buddha calls parabvrutti. Turn yourself a complete turn, a total turn, and suddenly you are so full of joy, you don’t need anything. In fact you have so much that you would like to shower it on others.
But things go on moving from one extreme to another. You hope – then by and by the pendulum moves towards hopelessness. If you are too much in love with life, by and by you move and become anti – religious. The pendulum goes on mowing toward the opposite.
Somewhere in the middle one has to stop. And if you stop in the middle, time stops with you. And when time stops, all hope, all desires have stopped. You start living. Now, now is the only time and here is the only space.
Somewhere a deep balance is needed. Just between the two, exactly between the two, is transcendence.
So, you have lived with hope – now the hope has failed and you are living in hopelessness. Now, let hopelessness also fail; you drop hope and hopelessness together. You just transcend that attitude which lives in the future. Live here now! Living in hope is living in the future, which is really postponing life. It is not a way of living, but a way of suicide. There is no need for any hope and there is no need to feel hopeless. Live here now. Life is tremendously blissful, it is showering here and you are looking somewhere else. It is just in front of your eyes, but your eyes have moved far away, they look at the horizon. It is within you, but you are not there.
I am not for hope; I am not for hopelessness. I am against all extremism. All excess is futile.
Buddha used to say. ‘My path is the middle path.’ That is the path of transcendence.
Osho, From the book ‘Ancient Music in the Pines’
