Enlightenment is not a device. All devices are for enlightenment, but enlightenment itself is an absolute reality. You think it is now miles away while before it used to be just around the corner. That was a device – to make you feel that it is just around the corner. It is certainly miles away, but those miles are very relative – they depend upon the intensity of your longing. They can be longer, they can be shorter; you can go on for lives searching for it, and you can find it today.
You have to understand the idea of relativity. Those miles are not a reality in themselves – they depend on you. If your longing is just lukewarm, then those miles are very long – perhaps too long.
Perhaps it may not be possible for you to reach it. But if your longing is a flame in your heart and you are afire with it, it is a question of life and death, then those miles miraculously become very short – sometimes so short that a master can say, “You can have it right here and now,” and they disappear completely.
[…]
You have to purify your consciousness, you have to deepen your meditation, you have to make your lovingness unconditional. And you have to move beyond the mind, beyond the body, to a point within yourself which is the center of your being, which is going to become enlightened. For that a very deep desire is needed, a desire for which you can risk everything, a desire for which you can be ready to die.
Then enlightenment is just by the corner… even the corner is too far away. Perhaps to the man of total longing, enlightenment is just within him; hence I say it is a relative phenomenon, it is very elastic. Those miles can be long, those miles can be very small – ultimately it all depends on you.
-OSHO
From The Rebel, Chapter Three
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Image may be NSFW.
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