Maturity

Osho

(My note: This passage of the book is translated by me from the original Czech version, so there might be some mistakes. The page may not match the original either).

Get out of the game, page 159

“You will become mature only after you start meditating, otherwise you will remain infantile. You change toys – small children play with small toys, old, elderly children play with large toys – qualitatively, however, there is no difference in this. Maybe you notice something your child does. When you sit in a chair at the table, he climbs up on the table and says, “Dad, look, I’m bigger than you.” He stands higher, on the table, and says, “Look, I’m bigger than you,” and you laugh. But what are you doing yourself? Just look at how you walk when you have more money. You say to everyone around you, “Look! I’m bigger than you. ” Or when you become president or prime minister, see how you’re doing, how arrogant you are, how big your ego is. You tell everyone: “I beat you all. I’m sitting in the biggest chair. ” After all, it’s exactly the same game! From childhood to old age, you still play the same games. You can play the board game Monopoly, or you can really play them on the stock market, it’s the same game, only on a larger scale. One day you will understand that this is the essence of your childhood, it is your outwardly directed mind… Young children want to reach for the moon, and even the greatest scientists want to reach for the moon – and they have also succeeded. There is no big difference.

When you reach for what’s outside, maybe you will reach the stars, but you’ll still be like children. Even if you reached the moon, what are you going to do there? You will be the same! You will stand on the moon, and you will have the same nonsense in your head, you will carry the echo of the same nonsense in your heart. There will be no difference at all! You can be poor without money or you can be extremely rich; you may be completely unknown or the whole world may know you – there is no difference at all. Until the mind stops and turns inward, until it ascends to a completely different dimension and becomes meditation… Meditation turns the mind inward, to its inner source. Meditation makes you mature, only meditation makes you really an adult. Older age does not mean that you are really adults, because I see people who are eighty and still playing games, disgusting games of political power – even at the age of eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four! They seems to be sleeping in a really deep sleep. When will they wake up from it? When will they remember the inner world?  

And yet death will take everything you have accumulated – power, money, reputation. There will be nothing left, not a trace. Your whole life will be reset. Death will come and destroy everything you have done, death will come and prove to you that your palaces were nothing but houses of cards. Maturity means that you have come to know something immortal within you, something that will overcome death – and that is meditation. The mind knows the world, meditation knows God. The mind allows you to understand the object, meditation allows you to understand the subject . The mind deals with content, meditation deals with the bearer of content, that is, consciousness. The mind is obsessed with clouds, meditation searches for the sky. Clouds come and go; the sky remains, it persists. Search for the inner sky. If you find him, then you will never die. Knowing this means life. What you call life is not real life, because it will die one day. Only he who meditates knows what life is, because he has found the very source of eternity.”