Tackling the enemy within

Osho narrates a Sufi parable:

A man was very worried because every night someone would enter his garden and destroy all the 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."

The man was unconvinced but he tried it. Two o'clock, when the alarm went off, he was awake. He was standing in his own garden, wreaking havoc on his plants. He was a somnambulist—a sleepwalker! In some way or the other, we all are somnambulists. We sow our seeds of misdeeds in the deep night of unconsciousness, and then we wonder why our lives are so miserable. We love others and soon we see that we are doing something else in the name of love. It isn't difficult to see if we use a little intelligence and a little awareness.

Osho says:

You love somebody, and then you start possessing him. Tares are entering your relationship. You love, and then you become jealous. Now weeds are growing. You love, and for trivial things you get angry. You love meaningless, petty things. Thus hate arises. Now the wheat is getting mixed with tares. When you love you feel happy. Every love starts with deep happiness, a celebration, and every love ends in deep sadness. The other day I was reading The Hollow Men, a poem by T S Eliot. The poem ends with these lines: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper." Well, this is how everything ends. Your love, your meditation, your virtue. Not with a bang, but a whimper. But it need not be this way. If we wake up, we become alert. We need to shake ourselves up.

Osho gives us a method of mindfulness: 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 also. It will be difficult, because one wants to cling to happiness. But if you want to cling to happiness, you are sowing the seeds of unhappiness. 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 somnambulist. In the morning he started asking, "Who has done this?"

You have been doing things to yourself. In the morning, when you wake up, you ask, "Who has done this?" And you start searching for the enemy. The enemy is within, the enemy is just your unconsciousness.

SWAMI CHAITANYA KEERTI