What is Enlightenment?

CHAPTER 21
Enlightenment – The Only Way Home
19 November 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1
WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?

Enlightenment is not something special, it is one of the most simple, natural phenomena. Just because it is so simple and natural it has become extraordinarily difficult for man to understand.

Man’s mind is attracted towards the difficult. There is challenge, something to prove, something to feel one’s mettle. Man is interested in going to the moon. It is absolutely pointless. There is nothing there at all; it is a dead planet. But man is ready to risk his life to go to a dead planet where he is not going to meet anybody, even to say hello.

Man is interested in reaching Everest. The peak, the highest peak in the world is so narrow that you can barely stand on top of it. You cannot do anything else there, and there is nothing else to do... eternal snow. But for a hundred years, hundreds of adventurers have been going to climb Everest. The majority of them have died on the way, but still it has not prevented new adventurers, new climbers.

One has to understand this point very clearly: the difficult is attractive because it is ego-fulfilling.

The impossible is very magnetic; it pulls you to risk everything, to risk even life, because if you can manage that which has been thought up to now impossible, you have fulfilled your ego the way nobody has yet been able to fulfill it. You are the first man, like Edmund Hillary on Everest – the first man in history – but what is the point?

What have you gained? What has humanity gained? No, nobody even asks the question. Everybody knows, deep down, the answer; that’s why nobody asks the question.

The more difficult, the more impossible, the more attractive: its impossibility has a fascination. The ego is not interested in the simple, in the ordinary, in the day to day; everybody is doing it. Because of this stupid ego, religions turned enlightenment also into something very difficult, perhaps the most difficult thing in existence. It has to be so. It is the realization of God, it is the realization of eternity.

It is going beyond death; it is moving into the very mystery of existence.

All the religions of the world have been exploiting your ego. And the ego is very vulnerable to being exploited; it is just ready to be exploited: show it a goal, give it a way, make it difficult, almost impossible. I say almost impossible; I’m not saying absolutely impossible, because if you make it absolutely impossible then the ego loses hope. You have to keep the candle of hope burning. It is
difficult but possible – almost impossible, but yet possible. But it is possible only for rare, superhuman
beings.

All the religions learned the simple strategy, in what man becomes interested, and why. And they want you to remain interested your whole life. It is not something that you achieve today and you are finished tomorrow. Religion does not deal in the commodities which you can get and be finished with. It deals with commodities which you can never get, but only hope for. And you go on hoping till death comes and destroys you.

Enlightenment itself is absolutely simple, but to say so is to destroy all priesthood. To say it is ordinary is to take away the very base of all the religions, their great scriptures, great masters, rabbis, messiahs. What meaning will these people have if enlightenment is an ordinary, simple, human experience?

No, they all will deny that it is simple and human, and they will all emphasize that it is superhuman, very arduous. Hindus say it takes thousands of lives to attain it. Buddhists say even Gautama Buddha, such a superman, had to pass through millions of lives before he could manage to reach the peak which is enlightenment. In fact the very idea of extending life into millions of lives is a by-product of making the experience of enlightenment so difficult, so impossible, so far away, that one life is not
enough.

How can you attain enlightenment in one life? One life is too short. Perhaps that is the reason that in Mohammedanism, Judaism, Christianity, there exists nothing equivalent to enlightenment. These three religions were born outside India. These three religions believe only in one life. Just in one life, all that you can do is to believe in a savior, in a messiah: cling to his apron and he will take you.

You cannot depend upon your own effort, because what effort can you make?
From Unconciousness to Consciousness (p.236-248)
Osho
http://www.oshorajneesh.com/download/osho-books/world_tour_talks/From_Unconci...