Panch Mahavrat or The Perennial Path The Art of Living

Author(s): Osho Rajnish
Publisher: Osho Rajnish

Page 95

CHAPTER 8. PERFECT KNOWLEDGE
sitting in that boat, there would be a quarrel. You will pardon that boat but you will not pardon the man. You pardoned the boat because you accepted it, because there was no other way for you not to accept it. You could not pardon the man because it was found difficult to accept him.
When both the situations - whether an empty boat bumps or a boat with a sailor bumps against your boat - are one and the same to you. That is total acceptability. Even if there is the least amount of difference in your attitude you miss total acceptability. If one person throws flowers at you and another person throws stones at you, and if you accept both the situations, you make no distinction between the two, then there is total acceptability. Then you have no desire of having a different thing than that which is happening in this world. You are pleased with this entire, huge, endless universe where waves are moving in the ocean, tempests of wind are rising, flowers are growing on trees, stars are moving in the sky, someone is abusing and someone is singing songs. You accept the whole as it is. Tathata is the third maxim for a Sadhak.
To reach the state of full of awareness, one has to begin with being a witness and finish with total acceptability. At first separate yourself an as observer from being a doer, combine your knowledge with your action and then like your acceptability with the whole. Awareness becomes stronger and goes deeper slowly by following these three steps. Buddha is called tathata. He liked this name very much, whenever he passed through a village he said that tathata is passing. It means one who has achieved the mental attitude of total acceptability. Thus came thus gone. Just as the swans fly over a lake, and cast their shadows and are gone, neither the swans nor the lake know about these reflections. There is no desire to do anything other than what is happening. Whatever happened, just happened, no account is kept, there is no hope for success or failure, no frustration is entertained and no victory is considered.
Tathata is an individuality is emptiness - in a void. It should be said, it is a living void within. It is a void which is surrounded by bones, flesh and tissues. He is a tathata who becomes like this void. He reaches the fourth stage. To be a tathata is to jump from collective unconsciousness to cosmic unconsciousness. In the condition of a witness, we go from the outer world, and the individual enters the unconscious. In awareness, the individual goes beyond unconscious, and enters collective unconscious. In collective unconscious the individual has to practise to be a tathata, then he enters the cosmic unconscious. There is no Sadhna left after cosmic unconscious. There is no Sadhana in tathata. In this stage, everything in life goes on by itself, no effort is needed to work it up. The effort to go within is no longer there, what one was within is lost. Tathata is the achievement to sink deep down the abyss of life. Religion is the door. Yoga is the process of going up to that door. And tathata is the presiding God in that temple.
THE DOER AND THE SLEEPER
An unawakened - sleeping - person is not a doer. Things are happening to him, but he thinks I am doing. The awakened person also is not a doer but thinks I am not the doer. This is the only difference. There is no difference in their actions but there is difference in their attitude - knowing - of their performance. The awakened also walks, the unawakened also walks. An individual full of awareness walks with the knowledge of, 'I am not', and a person without awareness walks full of ego - full of pride. This is the difference.
The crystallization of an awakened person happens when an individual takes birth in such a person. Jung also says the same thing which Gurdjieff says, when a person is a awake within, his individuality
The Perennial Path: The Art of Living
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Osho