05 Jan You become respectable and your misery remains (OSHO)
When the pain in Mulla Nasruddin’s back became unbearable, he reluctantly went to a specialist to diagnose his problem.
“Well,” said the doctor, “your problem can be cured by an operation, two weeks in the hospital and six months totally horizontal.” “Doctor, I can’t afford the cost of all that!” shouted Nasruddin.
“Well then, for twenty-five dollars I can retouch the X ray,” suggested the doctor. This is cheap! retouch the X ray but it is not going to make you healthy. That’s what we are doing, continuously retouching the X ray and thinking that somehow the miracle will happen. When you are decorating your ego you are retouching the X ray. That is not going to help in any way , it is not going to help you become healthy. It is cheaper no operation is needed, no expense is involved. But what is the point? Your misery remains.
You become respectable and your misery remains. You become highly praised by the society, your misery remains. You are decorated with gold medals but your misery remains. These gold medals are not going to destroy your misery; they are like retouching the X ray. All decoration on the ego, for the ego, is nothing but deceiving yourself. And you go on becoming weaker and weaker and weaker because the ego goes on becoming weaker every day. Your body will become weaker, your mind will become weaker, and by and by the ego that you have created out of the body and mind combination will become weaker. Fear will become greater and greater; you will be sitting on a volcano that can any day explode. It will not allow you rest. It will not allow you relaxation, it will not allow you any moments of peace.
Once you understand it then the whole energy is put into another direction. One has to know oneself. One has not to be worried about what others say about you. The ego is very deceptive. It goes on hearing what it wants to hear. It goes on interpreting what it wants to interpret. It never sees the fact. It never allows the fact to reveal itself to you. People who live in the ego live behind curtains. And those curtains are not inactive – they are active curtains. Whatsoever passes through the curtain, the curtain changes it.
People go on living in a mental world of their own creation. Ego is the center of their world, of the false world – call it ‘illusion’, ‘maya’ – and around the ego they go on creating a world… which is nobody else’s world. Only they live in that world.
When you drop the ego, you drop a whole world that you have created around it. For the first time you are able to see things as they are – not as you would like them to be. And when you are capable of knowing the facts of life, you become capable of knowing the truth.
Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within
Osho
