Panch Mahavrat or The Perennial Path The Art of Living

Author(s): Osho Rajnish
Publisher: Osho Rajnish

Page 87

CHAPTER 8. PERFECT KNOWLEDGE
The second maxim to remember is that the body is sure to die. Norman Brown has written a book entitled LOVES BODY. I think I should write a book entitled DEATH'S BODY. This body is simply the preparation for death. Nothing but death is to be had from this body. When we consider the world a deception, our grip on the world outside will be loosened. We have such a tight grip on our body that it seems to be everything to us.
He who thinks the body is everything cannot go within. He has caught the chain on the shore of the body very tightly. He shall have to give it up and let loose the boat. Don't think that this body will die and I am immortal. Don't entertain the desire to be immortal, you should know this much that when the body dies you are nowhere. If you say I am immortal, the Atma is immortal, the body will die, then you cannot go within. These are superficial words picked up by you. You have heard these words from the Gita and the Upanishad. These words are from the Koran and the Bible, not yours.
These words will stop you at the intellectual level - a barrier which has to be broken to go within. I shall discuss this point in the third maxim. It is enough if you remember that the body is to perish, and please don't link the second maxim - The Atma is immortal - because you don't know anything about it. You can know it, but when you will know it, it will not be necessary to repeat it. At present, know this much that the body is to die and there is no difficulty in knowing this.
The body is perishable, this is a living fact - the experience of the entire human race. It is not necessary to believe in somebody to accept this fact. This body was a child, it has become young, it is getting old, it is on the path of death. Every step it takes leads towards death. It lives in a gradual death-process. People are wrong when they say so and so died at the age of seventy. The process of dying is completed in seventy years. Nobody dies at that moment.
The process of dying is going from the moment of birth. Just as water is changed into vapour at 100 degrees though that change starts from the first degree, what we call life is only the commencement of death. It will be easy to loosen the grip on the body if this remembering about the body deepens. When you get up in the morning, look at your body thoughtfully and know that the body is to perish. When you go to bed at night, then also look at it thoughtfully and know that the body is to die. While taking a bath or taking your food, look at the body thoughtfully and remember that the body is to die. Repeat this several times during your daily activities. If this remembering like the turning of beads of a rosary enters your inner self, your attachment to the body will be broken in no time. Our identity within the body -'l' is shattered as soon as this is realised. It must be shattered, it must be wiped out. That identity must be broken. This is the chain tying the body.
Now the third maxim. We can never learn the truth by what we call the mind, the intellect or the thought. Man has produced thousands of philosophies, has established innumerable principles in the holy books. No one knows how many systems have been found out to show what life is. But philosophies have failed, they could not find the right answer.
Bertrand Russell has noted in his autobiography that when he went to the university to study philosophy as a young man, he had expected that he would get answers and solutions of at least the essential problems of life. Philosophy means that which should contain answers to those doubts and those questions which ariss in man's life. After his experience of 90 years, Russell has written that he was old enough then to say that he only got new questions from the study of philosophy, but could not get answers. Every answer which he considered true due to his foolishness became the source of other questions, he got nothing but that.
The Perennial Path: The Art of Living
87
Osho