Osho Story on Hassan and Rabiya al-Adabia
Osho – For an enlightened person everything is beautiful and for an unenlightened person everything is ugly. For an unenlightened person there are two categories: less ugly, more ugly. No beauty exists. Whenever you say to a person, ‘You are beautiful,’ in fact you are saying, ‘You are less ugly.’ Watch when you say it again and then find out what you really mean. Do you really mean beautiful? — because that is impossible for your mind; your mind cannot see beauty, you are not so perceptive. At the most you can manage to say that this person is less ugly than others — and less ugly can become more ugly any moment, with just a change of mood.
Your friend is nothing but the person least inimical towards you. You have to be that way because your mind is so messed up, it is such a chaos; everything is muddled, murky, you cannot see direct. Your eyes are covered with millions of layers, it is really a miracle how you manage even to see; you are completely blind.
You cannot hear, you cannot see, you cannot touch, you cannot smell. Whatsoever you do, it is impure; many things come into it. You love, and millions of things are there: immediately you start being possessive, and you never know that being possessive is part of hate, not part of love. Love can never possess. Love is giving freedom to the other. Love is an unconditional gift, it is not a bargain. But to your mind love is nothing but less hate, that’s all. At the most you think, ‘I can tolerate this person; I cannot tolerate that person so I cannot love him. This person I can tolerate.’ But the valuation remains negative.
When you are enlightened the valuation becomes positive. Then everything is beautiful; even your mountain, your neurosis is beautiful — even a madman is something beautiful. God may have gone a little astray and sinned, but it is God. So nothing can be wrong for an enlightened person. Everything is right — less right, more right. The difference between the devil and God is nothing, the difference is only of less and more. God and the devil are not two poles, enemies.
Hindus have beautiful words; no other country has been so understanding about words. Sanskrit is really something which exists nowhere else — very perceptive people! The English word devil comes from the same root as DEVA; deva means god. Devil and god come from the same root: DEV. Dev means light; from the same dev comes the devil; and from the same dev comes deva, DEVATA, the divine. The words divine and devil come from the same Sanskrit root dev. It is one phenomenon. Your seeing may be different, your standpoint may be different, but it is one phenomenon. An enlightened person will say even to the devil: ‘How beautiful! How divine! How wonderful!’
It happened: one Mohammedan mystic woman, Rabiya al-Adabia, changed many lines in her Koran. Wherever it is said, ‘Hate the devil,’ she crossed it out. Then once another mystic, Hassan, was staying with Rabiya, and on the journey he had forgotten his own copy of the Koran somewhere, and in the morning, for morning prayers, he needed it. So he asked for Rabiya’s copy; Rabiya gave it to him. He was a little surprised in the beginning because the Koran had collected so much dust — that meant it was not used every day. It was not used at all it seemed; for many months it had not been used — but he thought it would be impolite to say something so he opened the Koran and started his morning prayer.
Then he was surprised even more, even shocked, because NOBODY can correct the Koran, and there were many corrections. Wherever it is said, ‘Hate the devil,’ Rabiya had simply crossed it out completely, rejected it.
He couldn’t pray, he was disturbed so much: this Rabiya had gone heretic, she had become an atheist, or what?… because it is impossible for a Mohammedan to conceive that you can correct the Koran. It is God’s word, nobody can correct it. That’s why they say that now no more prophets will be coming, because if a prophet comes again and he says something which is not in the Koran, it will create trouble. So the doors have been closed after Mohammed — he is the last prophet.
And they are very clever. They say there have been many other prophets in the past: he is not the first, but he is the last. And now no more messages will be coming from God — he has given the final one with Mohammed. So how dare this woman Rabiya! She is correcting the Koran? He couldn’t pray, he was so much disturbed. He finished somehow, went to Rabiya.
Rabiya was an enlightened woman. Very few women have become enlightened in the whole world; Rabiya is one of them. Looking at Hassan she said, ‘It seems you couldn’t do your prayer. It seems the dust on the Koran disturbed you. So, you are still attached to things like dust? And it seems my corrections in the Koran must have shocked you very much.’
Hassan said, ‘How… how could you know?’
Rabiya said, ‘I passed by when you were praying and I felt all around you much disturbance; it was not a prayerful prayer at all. It was so neurotic, the vibrations — so what is the matter? Tell me and be finished with it!’
Hassan said, ‘Now that you have started yourself, don’t think I am impolite, but I couldn’t believe a woman like you could correct the Koran!’
Rabiya said, ‘But look first at my difficulty: the moment I came to realize, the moment I came face to face with the divine, after that, in every face I can see that same face. No other face is possible. Even if the devil comes to stand before me, I see the same face. So how can I hate the devil now that I have realized the face of the divine that I have come to see? Now every face is his. I had to correct, and if ever I meet Mohammed I have to tell him frankly that these words are not good. They may be good for the ignorant because they divide; but they are not good for those who know, because they cannot divide.’
Source – Osho Book “And the Flowers Showered”