My Fav Books – 2

This book by Osho is my religion, my sacred stuff! I personally don’t read scriptures, but if there would be one to whom I would read every day and would pray to it would be this one. This book is no less than a Bible, a Gita for me. And the number one reason for this is that “this book fits with my experience of life, my truth”. When I read this book last year, I was blown away by the content of it, and how it gave me answers to almost all of the questions that were nagging me with my past incidents of life. Amidst all the controversies surrounding Osho, deep gratitude for him arouse in me.

I would use to always thought that why only sitting down and focusing on one’s breath is called meditation and why not any other task done with mindfulness and awareness is known to be meditation. This book is mostly about “Mindful meditation” which Swamiji talks about in his book “A million Thoughts”. In this book, Ohso teaches that every work of ours can become a prayer and meditation.

The best thing about this book is that it teaches how to deal with and get free from addictions, habits, anger, lust, passions, and all other emotions without fighting with them and how fighting with them will actually cause more harm to us than good.

This book starts with the notion that man is in deep sleep, we do most of the things just out of our habits without even realizing what we are doing. It all happens as if it is happening in a dream.

Quoting from the first chapter of the book titled “Of Men and Rats” :

We go on living absolutely inattentive to what is happening around us. Yes, we have become very efficient in doing things. What we are doing, we have become so efficient in doing that we don’t need any awareness to do it. It has become mechanical, automatic. We function like robots. We are not men yet; we are machines.

Hence, the whole work that has to be done is to become consciousness again and lose the mind. You have to throw out of your system all that you have gathered as knowledge. It is knowledge that keeps you asleep; hence, the more knowledgeable a person is, the more asleep.

That has been my own observation too. Innocent villagers are far more alert and awake than the professors in the universities and the pundits in the temples. The pundits are noting but parrots; the academicians in the universities are full of nothing but holy cow dung, full of absolutely meaning noise- just minds and no consciousness.

People who work with nature- farmers, gardeners, woodcutters, carpenters, painters- they are far more alert than the people who function in the universities as deans and vice-chancellors and chancellors. Because when you work with nature, nature is alert. Trees are alert; their form of alertness is certainly different, but they are alert.

#TheWriteChoice