Osho:
The Secret of Life
The
seagulls of Happiness
Osho: Just like That #7: A Man Who Loved Seagulls
7th May 1975, Poona, India EXTRACT
There was a man living by the seashore who loved seagulls.
Every morning he went down to the sea to roam with the seagulls.
More birds came to him than could be counted in hundreds.
His father said to him one day:
I hear the seagulls all come roaming with you –
bring me some to play with.
Next day, when he went to the sea,
the seagulls danced above him and would not come down.
 The
greatest secret of life is --and remember it always --that life is a
gift. You have not deserved it in the first place. It is not your
right. It has been given to you, you have not earned it. Once you
understand this, many things will become clear.
If life is a gift then all that belongs to life is going to be a
gift. Happiness, love, meditation --all that is beautiful is going
to be a gift from the holy, from the whole. You cannot deserve it in
any way and you cannot force existence to make you happy, or to make
you loving, or to make you meditative. That very effort is of the
ego. That very effort creates misery. That very effort goes against
you. That very effort has destroyed you --it is suicidal.
Why is it so? If life is a gift, all that belongs to and is
intrinsic to life is going to be a gift. You can wait for it, you
can be receptive to it, you can remain in a surrendered mood,
waiting, patient, but you cannot demand, and you cannot force.
In life, only on the surface, in the marketplace, rights exist. As
you move deeper, rights disappear. As you move deeper, gifts appear.
This is one of the most basic things to remember always: you have
not deserved life, and life is there! Absolutely undeserved, you are
alive, with tremendous energy --alive!
How does it happen? And if life can happen without deserving it,
without any right to it, why not happiness? Why not love? Why not
ecstasy? They can all happen, but you have to understand the law.
The law is: don't try directly. Happiness cannot be pursued. It can
be persuaded. Persuasion is indirect. It is not an attack. You move,
but not directly, because when you are direct you are aggressive.
Nothing is as direct as violence. And nothing is as violent as
directness.
God has infinite patience. He works with care, and in very indirect
ways. He creates a baby, and takes nine months --he doesn't seem to
have any efficiency experts around him. This has been going on for
millions of years, and he has not learned anything; otherwise he
could have managed to create better instruments so that a baby could
be created within nine minutes. Why nine months? And from the very
beginning he has been doing the same thing; he has not learned
anything. He should ask the experts, particularly the efficiency
experts. They will show him how to produce, how to produce on a mass
scale, and not waste so much time --nine months per baby!
 But it is not only with babies --with flowers also he takes infinite
care; with birds, even with a blade of grass he takes infinite care
and time. He is not in a hurry. In fact it seems he is not aware of
time at all. He exists timelessly. If you want to be with him, don't
be in a hurry; otherwise you will bypass him. He will be always
loitering here and now, and you will always be going there and then.
You will always be like an arrow, and he is not like an arrow.
And to be with God is to be happy, to be with God is to be alive, to
be with God is to be in meditation.
But the whole training of man is how to do things fast. Speed
in itself seems to be a value. It is not. In itself it can create
only madness --and it has created madness.
Millions of people attain their targets: they wanted to be
successful, they are successful --but unhappy. They wanted to be
rich, they are rich --but unhappy. The richer they get, the
unhappier they become, because now even the hope is lost. They were
thinking that when they became rich they would be happy; now they
are rich, and happiness --they cannot see any sign of it anywhere.
Now, with unhappiness hopelessness also settles.
A poor man is never hopeless, a rich man always is. And if you find
a rich man who is not yet hopeless it is certain he is not yet rich.
Hopelessness is the symbol of being rich. A poor man can hope.
Millions of things are there which he has not got. He can dream, he
can hope that when these things are there he will have attained the
target. Then everything will be okay, he will be happy.
In the very search you create unhappiness. When you don't search,
happiness searches for you. When you search, you search alone and
you will not find. Where will you seek? How will you search?
Mind can never be happy. Mind is your accumulated discontent.
Mind is your accumulated unhappy past, the whole suffering that you
have passed through: it is a wound in your being. And the mind tries
to seek, to pursue, and you miss.
When you forget about happiness, suddenly you are happy. When you
forget about contentment, suddenly it is there. It has always
been there around you, but you were not there. You were
thinking: Somewhere in the future a target has to be achieved,
happiness earned, contentment practiced. You were in the future and
happiness was just around you like the fragrance of a flower.
Yes, God is a loafer. He is always loitering somewhere around. And
you have gone too far, seeking. Come back home! And just be. Don't
bother about happiness. Life is there as a gift; happiness is also
going to be there as a gift -- a gift from the whole, a holy gift.
When you are seeking too much you are closed; the very tension of
seeking and searching closes you. When you are desiring too much,
the very desire becomes such a tense state of affairs that happiness
cannot penetrate you. Happiness penetrates you in the same way as
sleep; contentment comes to you in the same way as sleep: when you
are in a let-go, when you allow, when you simply wait, they come.
In fact, to say they come is not right: they are already there. In a
let-go you can see them and feel them, because you are relaxed. In
relaxation you become more sensitive --and happiness is the subtlest
thing possible, the most subtle, the very cream of life, the
essence. When you are relaxed in a total let-go, not doing anything,
not going anywhere, not thinking of any goals, no target, not like
an arrow but like a bow, relaxing, without tension --it is there.
For small matters, the world of the market, you can move like an
arrow, because that is man-created. But for that which is not
man-created, you cannot be like an arrow --you have to be like a
relaxed bow. God is total relaxation.
Hence Patanjali says that perfect samadhi is like sleep, with only
one difference --otherwise the quality is the same, the same flavor,
the same taste --with just one difference: in sleep you are
unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious. But the relaxation, the
let-go, is the same. Everything untense, not going anywhere, not
even a thought of going anywhere, just being here and now --suddenly
everything starts happening.
You are not to do anything to be happy. In fact you have done too
much to become unhappy. If you want to be unhappy, do too much. If
you want to be happy, allow things, allow things to be. Rest, relax,
and be in a let-go.
Let-go is the secret of life. Let-go is the secret of religion.
Let-go is the greatest secret. When you are in a let-go many
things, millions of things, start happening. They were already
happening but you were never aware. You could not be aware; you were
engaged somewhere else, you were occupied.
The birds go on singing. The trees go on flowering. The rivers go on
flowing. The whole is continuously happening, and the whole is very
psychedelic, very colorful, with infinite celebrations going on.
But you are so engaged, so occupied, so closed, with not even a
single window open, no cross-ventilation in you. No sunrays can
penetrate you, no breeze can blow through you, you are so solid, so
closed, what Leibnitz called monads. You are monads. Monad means
something without any windows, with no opening, with every
possibility of opening closed. How can you be happy? So closed, how
can you participate in the mysteries all around? How can you
participate in the divine? You will have to come out. You will have
to drop this enclosure, this imprisonment.
Where are you going? And you think that somewhere in the future
there is some target to be achieved? Life is already here! Why wait
for the future? Why postpone it for the future? Postponement is
suicidal. Life is slow; that's why you cannot feel it. It is very
slow, and you are insensitive; otherwise postponement is the only
poison. You kill yourself by and by. You go on postponing --and you
go on missing the life that is here and now.
 For those who have attained to the here and now, the whole life
starts showering flowers on them. Many things start happening which
they never dreamed of.
When for the first time you are really relaxed in a meditative
state, you cannot believe that life is so beautiful, so euphoric,
such infinite bliss, such a sat-chit-anand; you cannot
believe it! It is unbelievable.
When a Buddha reports, nobody believes. When a Jesus talks about his
kingdom of God, nobody believes. Even those who follow, they also
are not absolutely trusting.
When Jesus brings the news, the good news of the kingdom of God,
nobody believes him. When Buddha talks about the infinite emptiness
within, nobody believes him. We cannot believe! How can we believe
unless we know? At least a glimpse is needed.
We live in such a suffering, hell; the news about the kingdom of God
seems to be just a dream, a poetry maybe, but nothing more. Religion
seems not more than literature: fictitious --great fiction, but
nothing more. It has to be so, it is natural in a way, because you
don't know where you are standing, what is happening all around you.
You are so insensitive, closed....
Open the windows, break the doors open! And run out of this
imprisonment, stand under the skies. Feel again! Thinking won't
help. Thinking can go on and on inside you without opening a single
window. Only feeling brings you out of yourself --and you are so
afraid of feeling, so much at ease with thinking and so afraid of
feeling, because feeling will bring you out. It will bring you again
into the very current of life. You will be in the river, moving
towards the ocean.
Feel more, think less, and by and by you will see that the more you
can feel, the more relaxed you are. The more you can feel, the more
you become aware of the secret of life --that you need not do
anything about it, you just have to be available. Just
available, I say, and everything comes to you.
Once the idea arises to catch hold, to cling, everything disappears.
This is the meaning of this Sufi story.
There was a man living by the seashore who loved seagulls.
 Love
is the very center of all feelings, love is the soul of all
feelings. All feelings hang on love. If you don't love, by and by
all feelings will disappear. If you love, all feelings will be
revived. And remember, I say all feelings: negative,
positive, all. When you love, you start hating also --immediately.
When you love, you start feeling anger also --immediately. When you
love, you feel sad, you feel happy. When you love, all feelings are
again back to life.
This is the trouble. That's why no society allows love; because if
it were the case that with love only good feelings, feelings that
society decides are good, came up, there would be no trouble. But
with love, the trouble is that not only heaven starts flowering, but
hell also. They are together, they are two aspects of the same coin.
They cannot be separated --and there is no need to separate them,
because a heaven without a hell would be poorer. A love without
anger would be impotent. A love without sadness would be shallow.
Life is a polarity, and through polarities life becomes richer and
richer and more and more complex. Life is not like ordinary
Aristotelian logic, life is more like Hegelian dialectics: thesis,
antithesis. Two polarities meet and fight, and a third phenomenon
arises: synthesis. A greater harmony arises out of two polarities;
then that greater harmony again becomes thesis, a new antithesis
arises, then again a higher rung of the ladder of synthesis is
reached.
This is how life moves. Life is Hegelian dialectics, it is not
Aristotelian logic. It is not simple duality. It again and again
reaches to oneness through duality --and that oneness again becomes
a pole. It creates another pole; the movement starts. This is how
life is trying to reach higher and higher pinnacles of being.
When you love you become happy, and you become sad also. These are
the thesis and antithesis. Love is a harmony, the synthesis. Life
moves through opposites, just like a river moves through two banks.
You cannot conceive of a river with one bank. If you conceive of
this, then all rivers disappear. If you try to ensure that one shore
will be better, then rivers cannot exist.
That's what has happened to human consciousness. In the very
beginning man decided against hate, against anger, against all
negative poles, that they are not good. They are not good if they
are alone, they are very bad. If a man is simply angry without love,
he is mad. This anger is a disease. But if a man is angry because of
love, a father angry with his child, with love, then anger has a
beauty of its own.
No child will ever feel bad towards a parent who was angry with
love. But a parent who was simply angry without love cannot be
forgiven. The child may forget him, but he cannot forgive. Just
anger, with no love? It is illness. It is poisonous. But if you are
angry with love, the child understands. He understands your love.
And in that bigger whole of love, the anger fits. It is just love in
action, nothing else; and the child immediately feels it, and loves
you more for it.
A husband angry without love is just ego, trying to possess,
dominate. A husband angry with love is not ego trying to possess,
but love, trying to help. Even if anger is needed, love is ready to
be angry.
When love arises, all feelings erupt; a volcano explodes and man
becomes afraid. So it is better, man decided, not to touch this
volcano. Let it be there, hidden, because it brings negatives also.
But those who know, they say don't be afraid of the negative. The
negative is bound to be there with the positive, like a shadow is
bound to be with you. If you want no shadow, you will have to kill
yourself. Then only can the shadow disappear. But nothing is wrong
in a shadow. If you are there, nothing is wrong. If love is there,
nothing is wrong.
Somebody asked Saint Augustine, "Tell me in one sentence, in a
simple sentence, the whole message of Christ, because I am an
ignorant man, and I cannot understand the subtleties of theology.
And I don't know much about morality, so don't give me complex
disciplines I may not be able to follow. Give me a simple
discipline, so simple that I can understand and follow."
It is said Saint Augustine closed his eyes and meditated, and then
he said, "Then there is only one thing --love, and everything
else will follow."
Love is the greatest morality, because it brings the feeling part of
you up, and the thinking part goes down. Nothing is wrong with the
thinking part, but it is playing the role of the master, which is
wrong. Reason is good if it helps feeling. Feeling should be the
master and reason should be the servant. Feeling should guide and
reason should manage. But if reason becomes the master and feeling
has to follow, you will be dead... because how can you be alive only
with reason? Life is feeling. Trees can exist without reason, but
they cannot exist without feeling.
Now even scientists are becoming more and more aware that trees
feel, and feel tremendously. Stars, rocks, rivers --they cannot
exist without feeling. Feeling is their very life. Birds, animals,
the whole --exist with feeling. Except man. Man is upside down. The
head has become the prominent thing, and head has been suppressing
feeling.
And it has happened all over life in that way. Politicians rule,
dominate; in fact, poets should be the guides, not politicians. But
as it happens in the atomic individual, so it happens on a vaster
scale in society. If feeling rules the individual, then poets will
rule life, then poets will rule nations. The world will be totally
different. If the head rules, if reason rules the individual, then
politicians will rule the world, and the world is going to be
constantly in trouble, constantly at war, in constant conflict.
It is good to feel, and if feeling surrounds you, then there is
nothing wrong in thinking. If thinking follows feeling --beautiful;
it helps. It is like a radar. It opens the way for the feeling to
move on. It protects the feeling from dangers. It helps the feeling
to know what is going to happen next, to plan a little. It is good!
But good only as a servant.
If you love, you will have a deep affinity with existence. Trees
will talk to you. Birds will start coming nearer to you. Animals
will not be afraid of you -there is no need. Man creates fear
because of his head. With his heart he is again one with the
universe.
There was a man living by the seashore who loved seagulls.
Every morning he went down to the sea to roam with the seagulls.
More birds came to him than could be counted in hundreds.
 Thousands
of seagulls gathered around him. They jumped and hopped, and they
flew and they danced, and they moved with him on the shore. The man
was accepted by the seagulls, because feeling is everywhere
accepted. That is the language of existence: feeling. Reason is the
language of humanity, not of existence --a local phenomenon, not
universal. Feeling is the language, the forgotten language. If you
understand feeling, you understand the whole.
If you start really feeling, and your heart starts really throbbing
with feeling, you can ask a tree, and a tree is always ready to
reveal its secret. You can ask a bird, and the bird is ready to
reveal its secret. You can ask existence, and existence is ready
to reveal its heart. That heart is God, the kingdom of God, the
ecstasy, the final liberation, moksha, nirvana; whatsoever you want
to call it, you can call it.
More birds came to him than could be counted in hundreds.
He knew the language of feeling. It is love. Nobody is afraid of
love, not even birds. And they can certainly feel more than you
because they have no thinking apparatus, no disturbance of the mind.
It is said that when Buddha attained to enlightenment, trees
flowered out of season. It may not be a fiction, it may be true. And
one day we may be able to prove it scientifically, because if an
earthworm, not related to a plant at all, of a totally different
species, is thrown into hot water, and the death, the torture, the
violence, is felt by the plant and the plant goes through a turmoil,
a terrible turmoil, shaken to the very roots, then the other thing
also seems possible.
Buddha attains to nirvana, he becomes enlightened. One life has
reached the goal: it does not seem too fictitious that the trees
around him suddenly flower out of season, in celebration. If pain
can be felt, celebration can also be felt. Just a few steps more and
science will be saying, "Yes, this is not a fiction." Life sometimes
is stranger than fiction. It is.
His father said to him one day:
I hear the seagulls all come roaming with you – bring me some to
play with.
Now an idea had entered the head. The man was no longer the same.
Love was not there. The heart was not functioning that day. A desire
had entered. He had a target now. He had come to the seashore now
with a business. He was no more a friend to the seagulls --he was
going to catch them --he was the enemy.
Next day, when he went down to the sea,
the seagulls danced over him and would not come down.
The seagulls cannot understand what you are thinking in the mind but
they can understand the vibes that you are creating around
--and you are continuously creating vibes around you. You are a
continuous broadcast of vibes, continuous. Whatsoever happens
in your heart, it is just as if someone has thrown a stone in a
lake: ripples arise, and they go on and on and on --they will go to
the very end, to the very shore, all around. A feeling arises in
you; immediately a stone has been thrown in the lake of your being.
An idea arises in you --ripples arise. They go all around.
Those seagulls don't know exactly what the father has said to the
son, because they don't understand the local language of man. They
don't know what has really happened, but deep down they still know
that this man is not the same. Somebody else has come, a stranger,
not the old friend. Now he has come with an idea. The idea is not
known, but throughout his whole body he is now not in a let-go. He
has some idea to do, some plan, some desire. He is not the same
relaxed man with whom seagulls could feel at home.
 And
this is the secret of the whole of life: not only seagulls but
happiness, meditation, ecstasy --they all come to you when you are
in a total let-go, in a deeply friendly mood, in a loving attitude
towards existence. When you are at the heart, they come. When
you are persuading them, and you think that happiness is something
like a right, that you have to pursue it, suddenly the seagulls of
happiness are not descending. They will dance above your head but
they will never come down to play with you, to move with you, to
jump and hop! No, they will never become one with you. They will not
descend into your being.
Yes, happiness is a seagull. Meditation also is a seagull. Ecstasy
is also a seagull. Existence understands only let-go. If you are
in a let-go, you will attain. You will attain to whatsoever
this existence can give you --and it can give you infinite
blessings, infinite benediction. It can give you total
satiety, contentment. You can become a Buddha.
Existence is ready to give, but you are not ready to take it,
because you are thinking in terms of how to snatch it. Existence
gives to you as gifts; you cannot snatch, you cannot conquer, you
cannot achieve. You surrender, please. Please, be in a let-go.
All that is beautiful is like seagulls. Remember this: nothing can
be done. The feast is already ready --you have been invited. You can
enter from the front door. But you are foolish, you are trying to
enter from the back door, and in existence there is no back door.
You are trying to enter like a thief. The front door is open for
you, and the host is waiting on the steps to receive you, and you
are trying to enter from the back door like a thief.
Life has no back doors. You cannot steal life. You cannot be a
thief. Life gives, and gives infinitely and gives unconditionally.
You please be just in a let-go. Let the seagulls descend and play
with you, and loiter with you on the seashore. Everything is ready.
The feast, the host --everything is ready, just waiting for you to
come in from the front door. Effort is not needed. Effort is the
back door. Effortlessness is needed.
Let life happen, don't try to force it. Through doing, only
worthless things are achieved; through no-doing --all that is
beautiful, all that is sacred, all that is divine.
Enough for today. |
