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Where is the goose? (OSHO)

Where is the goose? (OSHO)

The master tells the disciple to meditate on a koan:

A small goose is put into a bottle, fed and nourished. The goose goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, and fills the whole bottle. Now it is too big; it cannot come out of the bottle’s mouth – the mouth is too small. And the koan is that you have to bring the goose out without destroying the bottle, without killing the goose.

Now it is mind-boggling. What can you do? The goose is too big; you cannot take it out unless you break the bottle, but that is not allowed. Or you can bring it out by killing it; then you don’t care whether it comes out alive or dead. That is not allowed either.

Day in, day out, the disciple meditates, finds no way, thinks this way and that way – but in fact there is no way. Tired, utterly exhausted, a sudden revelation…suddenly he understands that the master cannot be interested in the bottle and the goose; they must represent something else. The bottle is the mind, you are the goose…and with witnessing, it is possible. Without being in the mind, you can become identified with it so much that you start feeling you are in it! He runs to the master to say that the goose is out. And the master says, “You have understood it. Now keep it out. It has never been in.”

The whole anxiety of man is that he wants to choose that which looks beautiful, bright; he wants to choose all the silver linings, leaving the dark cloud behind. But he does not know that silver linings cannot exist without the dark cloud. The dark cloud is the background, absolutely necessary for silver linings to show.

Choosing is anxiety. Choosing is creating trouble for yourself. Being choiceless means: the mind is there and it has a dark side and it has a bright side — so what? What has it to do with you? Why should you be worried about it?

The moment you are not choosing, all worry disappears. A great acceptance arises, that this is how the mind has to be, this is the nature of the mind — and it is not your problem, because you are not the mind.

If you were the mind, there would have been no problem at all. Then who would choose and who would think of transcending? And who would try to accept and understand acceptance?

And with the mind disappears the self. Then there is only a certain quality of awareness, with no “I” in it. At the most you can call it something similar to “am-ness,” but not “I- ness.” To be even more exact, it is “is-ness” because even in am-ness some shadow of the “I” is still there. The moment you know its is-ness, it has become universal.With the disappearance of the mind disappears the self. And so many things disappear which were so important to you, so troublesome to you. You were trying to solve them and they were becoming more and more complicated; everything was a problem, an anxiety, and there seemed to be no way out.

Awareness cannot exist with duality, and mind cannot exist without duality.

Awareness is non-dual, and mind is dual. So just watch. I don’t teach you any solutions. I teach you the solution: Just get back a little and watch. Create a distance between you and your mind. Whether it is good, beautiful, delicious, something that you would like to enjoy closely, or it is ugly – remain as far away as possible. Look at it just the way you look at a film….

Identification is the root cause of your misery. And every identification is identification with the mind.

Just step aside, let the mind pass.

And soon you will be able to see that there is no problem at all – the goose is out. You don’t have to break the bottle, you don’t have to kill the goose either

 

 

 

Beyond Psychology

OSHO



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