ISNESS

“It is as it is,
it always is“

Befriending Feelings

There is, Sadness & Loss.
This is my, Sadness & Loss.
May my, Sadness & Loss, BE WELL!

The only problem with sadness, desperateness, anger, hopelessness, anxiety, anguish, misery, is that we want to get rid of them. That’s the only barrier.

We have to live with them. We cannot just escape. They are the very situation in which life has to integrate and grow. They are the challenges of life.

Accept them. They are blessings in disguise. If you want to escape from them, if we somehow want to get rid of them, then the problem arises – because if you want to get rid of something, you never look at it directly. And then the thing starts hiding from you because you are condemnatory; then the thing goes on moving deeper into the unconscious, hides in the darkest corner of your being where you cannot find it.

It moves into the basement of your being and hides there. And of course the deeper it goes, the more trouble it creates – because then it starts functioning from unknown corners of your being and you are completely helpless.

So the first thing is: never repress. The first thing is: whatsoever is the case is the case. Accept it and let it come – let it come in front of you. In fact just to say “do not repress” is not enough. If you allow me, I would like to say, “Befriend it.”

You are feeling sad?
Befriend it, have compassion for it. Sadness also has a being.
Allow it – Embrace it – Sit with it – Hold hands with it.
Befriend it. Be in love with it.

Who told you that something is wrong in being sad?
Sadness is beautiful! Nothing is wrong with it. In fact only sadness gives you depth.
Sadness goes to the very bones, to the marrow.
Nothing goes as deep as sadness.

So don’t be worried. Remain with it and sadness will take you to your innermost core. You can ride on it and you will be able to know a few new things about your being that you had never known before. Those things can be revealed only in a sad state, they can never be revealed in a happy state. Darkness is also good and darkness is also divine. The day is not only existence’s, the night is also. I call this attitude religious….

A person who can be patiently sad will suddenly find that one morning a happiness is arising in his heart from some unknown source. That unknown source is godliness.

You have earned it if you have been truly sad; if you have been truly hopeless, desperate, unhappy, miserable, if you have lived in hell, you have earned heaven. You have paid the cost….

Confront life. Encounter life.
Difficult moments will be there, but one day you will see that those difficult moments gave you strength because you encountered them. They were meant to be. Those difficult moments are hard when you are passing through them, but later on you will see they have made you more integrated. Without them you would never have been centered, grounded.

The old religions all over the world have been repressive; the new religion of the future is going to be expressive. And I teach that new religion…let expression be one of the most fundamental rules of your life. Even if you have to suffer for it, suffer. You will never be a loser.

That suffering will make you more and more capable of enjoying life, of rejoicing in life.

Source- Osho, The Art of Dying

OSHO

Your mind also has form. If you are a Christian: then you have a form of the mind. You think in terms of being a Christian, you have a certain identity, the dogma defines you. But if you go still deeper, your mind also disappears. Then you are no longer a Christian.

At the deepest core you are neither a body nor a mind. Then what are you?

Buddha says. “Nothingness, no-thing-ness; now you are not a thing, now you are universal.” Now you are not confined in any idea; you are infinite. You are that which has always been there and will remain always. You are eternal. Then there is no birth to you and there is no death to you. You are like the sky clouds come and go and the sky remains untouched by them Millions of times clouds have come and gone, and the sky has remained pure and virgin. It has not been corrupted or polluted by them. You are the inner sky. When all forms disappear, the inner and the outer also disappear because they are also forms. Then there is nothing inner and nothing outer.

Oneness, sameness, Buddha does not call it God. Because to call it God you may start thinking again of form. But that’s exactly what the word God means, or should mean. God is that sameness that exists in all. God means existence, isness. The tree is, the rock is. the cloud is, man is – forms are different but isness is the same. As far as isness is concerned, a tree and you are the same.

The form is different: the tree is green and you are not green, and the tree has flowers and you don’t have any flowers, and the bird can fly into the sky and you cannot fly – but these are differences of the form. But isness is the same. To look into that isness is what meditation is all about. And to come to realize that isness is nirvana.

Rest In the Isness of All Things

Since everything is dependently arising, nothing has any true independent existence. Put another way, nothing that appears to exist actually exists autonomously, as a single entity. Why? Because everything is arising in dependence on something else.

From a deeper perspective, the nature of interdependence is the basic space that is the ground of all that arises. It is the space that transcends all thoughts. What it is, is: the isness of all things. It is the space of all possibilities and it is the space of awareness.

When your awareness embraces this space, then you can transform anything. Everything becomes possible. Nothing is impossible.

So, whatever is interdependent, or dependently arising, is “emptiness.” That does not mean it is nothingness, but it is emptiness. It is the is-ness, or the suchness, of that thing. The reality of it.

It is important for us to know that, to experience this, we don’t need to focus on emptiness for hours and hours at a time. We don’t need to have a long, long, long experience of emptiness. That’s not how it works. How it really works is simply directing your mind toward that reality and resting for a moment, or from moment to moment. That is enough to give you the experience of shunyata, which is the Buddhist term for “emptiness, openness, or the suchness of all things.”

That experience of shunyata is liberating. Because, as you can see clearly, we have a habitual misunderstanding of how things exist. We think that things exist independently. And that misconception is called unawareness, or ignorance. It is the cause, or the root, of all our confusions and sufferings, the beginning of every crisis. But if you can cut through that unawareness and connect to the fundamental principle of interdependence and emptiness, then you cut the root. You cut the cause of all confusions, all crises, right there.

Remember:

1. Whatever is interdependent, is emptiness
2. The nature of interdependence is the space of all possibilities
3. When we understand interdependence, everything is possible
4. The Buddhist term shunyata is translated as emptiness, openness

Physicists call that one reality electricity or energy Materialists, Marxists, communists, call that reality matter. Idealists call that reality mind. Yogis call that reality consciousness. Buddha calls that reality nothingness.

Now, this word nothingness is very important. Nothingness means: no-thing-ness. No thing is. All things are just forms, dreams. We are different only in form, and forms are just dreams. It is as if out of gold you can make many sorts of ornaments Those forms, different ornaments, are just dreams because the gold is the reality. Behind al! the forms is gold: behind all the forms is one reality Buddha says. ‘That sameness is the absolute ground of reality.”

If you go in, you leave the form. First you leave the form of the body. Have you observed it? People who are close to me and meditating come again and again to that insight. These sayings can be understood only if you have certain insights of your own: otherwise, it is impossible to understand them. When you are meditating, many times it happens that you forget your form, your body. You don’t know who you are and how you look – you forget your face. In fact, in deep meditation, you become completely oblivious of your body. When you close your eyes, you are formless.

THE ‘ISNESS’ OF LIFE

“At one point over a decade ago it felt as if everything I had ever learned was being erased, everything was zooming by the center of my forehead and being erased, then there was this pulsating sensation and the only words left were “I… IS…. I …. IS…. IS….. IS”

‘Isness’ carries different meanings depending on the conditions that give rise to its realisation. The ‘Isness’ that you experienced arises out of the conditions of ‘no-self’ and ‘spontaneity’. So much so that when ‘sense of self’ arises due to karmic propensities at work, nothing needs to be done at all, this ‘doing nothing’ is already the clearing of the karmic patterns — self-liberates. However it is not the case of Isness that arises out of “I AM”. It is similar to the case of discarding meditation…

“Isness that arises from “I AM” is a sensation of not wanting to add or subtract anything from the present moment but still with a strong sense of object and subject split intact. It is the act of letting things be as it is. However as the experience has not dissolved the subject-object split, there is still a clear separation of “I AM” and object and that already is not as it is. For in truth reality is always non-dual so when there is a split, it is already not “as it is”. ”