The following excerpt is from Osho’s talks on the Baul Mystics. These talks are compiled into two volumes titled “The Beloved”. This is from the Vol 1, discourse #10. To listen to the discourse and to read the full transcript please click here.
Life is a Gift
“We don’t have any claim on life. Have you ever noticed it, that we don’t have any claim? If we were not, there would be no way to be and there would be no way to appeal it. There would be no way to complain against it. If you are not, you are not. The next moment you can disappear.
Life is fragile, and without any claim. We have not earned it! That is the meaning when we say it is a gift. A gift is something that you have not earned: you don’t have any claim over it. You cannot say that you have some right to get it. A gift is something that is given to you.
Life is a gift. It has been given to you for no reason at all. You cannot have earned it, because how can you earn it if you were not? Life is a gift, but we go on forgetting it, we are not even thankful. We don’t have any gratitude. We certainly complain for a thousand and one things which we may think we are missing in life, but we never feel grateful for life itself.
You may complain that your house is not good: the rains have come and it is leaking. You may complain that your salary is not enough. You may complain that you don’t have a beautiful body. You may complain that this is not happening and that is not happening – a thousand and one complaints. But have you ever seen that the whole life, the very possibility that you can be, breathe, look, see, hear, touch, love and be loved, is a gift? It has been given to you because God has so much to give, not because you have earned it.
The Baul lives in tremendous gratitude. He sings and dances – that is his prayer. He cries. He simply wonders why, for what has life been given to him, for what has he been allowed to see the rainbows in the sky, for what has he been allowed to see flowers, butterflies, people, rivers and rocks? For what? Because life is so obvious you tend to forget the tremendous gift hidden in it.
In the beginning, everybody must have been a Baul, because civilization was not there to corrupt, society was not there to destroy. Priests and churches were not there to give you a character, to give you a narrow passage. In the beginning, life must have been overflowing.
Everybody must have lived out of their own beings – not because of any commandments, not because of scripture. There was no scripture and there was no commandment. Moses had not appeared yet. Everybody must have been a Baul in the beginning – and every child, when he is born, is a Baul. Watch a child to understand what this phenomenon of being a Baul is. See children delighting for nothing – just shouting out of joy, just running here and there out of overflowing energy.
When you become a Baul you again become a child.“
I was listening to this discourse during my morning walk and the Sun was just coming up …
It had rained the previous night and the temperature was around 22 deg C. Just the right temperature for people like me. Not too cold and importantly not hot and/or humid.
The Master of Masters is so right !! A beautiful morning, birds chirping, flowers blooming and the whole setup comes for free. Added to all that Nature gives us as a gift, we have gifted ourselves a whole range of comforts – a TV that lets you watch anything happening anywhere, Apps that can play any song and cars that can take you anywhere.
And yet we complain. We are forever trying to live someone else’s life while having no gratitude for the one we have been gifted.
Osho says it again and again …. just live, we have everything that we need. The Bauls are doing it, why can’t we do it as well ?
Just Do It :).
Thank You Master.