Meditation Is Undivided

Opposites make you strong

 by Osho

Once there were two men who ate exactly the same food, but one had two bowls while the other had only one. The man with two bowls divided his food into bitter and sweet, and put only the bitter in one bowl and only the sweet in the other. The man with one bowl naturally mixed the bitter and the sweet together. As time passed, the first man grew thinner and thinner, and gradually wasted away, while the second, who ate just the same food, grew healthier and healthier daily. At last, the first saw his approaching death, and in desperation asked the second the secret of his vitality and vigor.

Not being fooled by taste

"You, having two bowls," the second replied, "divided the bitter from the sweet, and so believed in the importance of taste that you did not allow the food you took to sustain you with its own inner life. But I had only one bowl and so mixing the bitter and the sweet together, have not been fooled by the matter of taste, for whatever I have been given to eat I have taken simply as food, and it has yielded its nourishment to me, praise god."

The first man rose from his deathbed and with a great effort picked up one of his bowls and dashed it to pieces; and in the one bowl that remained he ate gratefully of the food his friend offered him and was whole again.

Dividing outside - dividing inside

This is a beautiful story, a Sufi story. If you divide, you will be divided within too. If you divide existence into good and bad, God and devil, consciousness, unconsciousness, heaven and hell, this division is bound to create a division in you. You will be split in two; you will become a schizophrenic…

We have a very dualistic ideology. God is light; then who is darkness? Then there must be two gods -- the god of the darkness also. Then not only are you schizophrenic, your whole existence is schizophrenic. Not only are you divided, you have divided existence itself.

Beautiful opposites

No, day is beautiful, so is night. Day is godly, divine, so is night. You may be surprised to know the word "day" comes the from the same root as "divine." They both come from the same root. So day is divine, and night? -- nobody says night is divine. Night too is divine. And it will be better if you eat of both, day and night. It will be good if you have one bowl.

Undivided you become:
strong like a sword
fragile like a flower

Eat sweet and bitter, good and bad, consciousness, unconsciousness. Enjoy both and you will be nourished, and you will become very, very strong. Your strength will not be the opposite of softness, no. The stronger you will be, the more fragile too. This is beauty, when a strong man is fragile like a flower. Strong like a sword and fragile like a flower.

Osho, excerpted from Ecstasy - The Forgotten Language #5

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In this Osho quote Osho tells a Sufi story about our tendency to dvide life: This is good, this is bad. Dividing we become schizophrenic. Taking live as one, including bitter and sweet, will make you strong. Meditation makes you strong like a sword and fragile like a flower - and most of all: undivided.