When the shoe fits.....the leg is forgotten....

The title of this post is also the title of the book I am reading by Osho. It is so strange how I dismissed him earlier in my spiritual journey. And now, I just can't read enough of what he is written. It is such a shame that he died at 54. For the past couple of years I have engaged in an enquiry with myself which is about the need for continual practice. Why do monks/nuns anyone who takes on the spiritual journey have to do continual practice. Why doesn't the altered state of consciousness last. In this book Osho gives me an answer which I have recognised intuitively but never seen in print before. That is because....the holy grail of enlightenment will never be achieved by effort!....All effort is a projection towards some desired state. For that reason it may be experienced for the time of effort, i.e. meditation, spiritual practice but if the practice is not sustained then neither is the experience or the state.

In his book Osho meets a man who has been doing a continuous sustained practice for over 30 years and he asks him to 'drop it all'. The man has full confidence that the state will remain without effort but on the fourth day he runs into Osho's room at 4am claiming him to be an enemy because he has now lost the state of consciousness that he had. In complete calmness Osho explains that what there is to do now is to be a witness and then the state will return naturally and permanently. This really resonates for me because of an experience I had. I had been studying and practicing Mahayana Buddhism for almost 10 years. And before that on and off since the age of 12 I had been following a spiritual path. When I returned from a trip to India where I tracked the life of the Buddha I was in my flat one Saturday morning wondering what my next spiritual step was when I heard either my own thoughts or a voice which said 'give it up'. I remember this as clear as if it happened yesterday. I was filled with dismay because interest in all things spiritual was something that was who I was and I couldn't imagine life without my spiritual books, going to talks, workshops. But I listened and gave up and then some six months later I had an experience which on the face of it wasn't spiritual at all. But when I accidentally grabbed a book from my bookshelf and started to read it, to my astonishment I had a complete and total understanding that I know wasn't there before for that book. From this experience I once again entered the spiritual path.

There seems to be something in 'letting go' or 'dropping' that results in an expansion of consciousness. Trust and surrender is required for 'letting go' and this is rewarded with a permanent experience of an altered state of consciousness. I remember also reading a sentence from a book called 'from onions to pearls' where the author said something to the effect of 'I had been on every workshop there was to go on, tried every spiritual practice there was to try' and it was only when I completely gave up everything that I got everything'. The challenge is to know when is the right time to 'drop', 'let go' because the timing is right and the next stage must happen without effort and when the temptation to let go is just resistance because the spiritual practice is too challenging. This is where intuition comes in and learning to trust the inner process. It is very much an individual subjective thing and I can offer no definites here in this blog. It really is a question of trust and surrender.....