Question: How can the cosmic be achieved?
Osho: By becoming aware of your fragmented mind, of your conceptions, your attitudes, your prejudices. By becoming aware of the mind that feels, hears, chooses. When you see a flower, it is not only that the flower is there. Between you and the flower, a particular mind exists, a particular attitude about the flower exists. Otherwise there would be no barrier between you and the flower. You would be one. You and the flower are two extremes of one existence, two ends of one single moment.
If your mind is not there, your consciousness and the flowering of the flower are two extreme points of one process. But if your mind is there (as it is always there), you are not just seeing the flower. Your seeing has a projection behind it, you are seeing in terms of your own conceptions, your own likes and dislikes. You say, ”This is a rose.” But there is no such thing as ’rose’. The rose itself doesn’t know that it is a rose. We are the ones who have called it that.
And the moment you say ’rose’, everything that is associated with the word ’rose’ stands between you and the particular flower in front of you. The word has so many associations. If your culture says that a rose is beautiful, then the flower becomes beautiful. If your culture is against roses, then it becomes ugly. If your experience with roses is associated with pain with thorns, then the rose becomes one thing. If your associations are happy, then the rose becomes something different. But all the while, the rose itself remains the same.
You see it with your mind. Your mind destroys that which is real and creates something imaginary, hallucinatory. If you have no mind; if you can see the rose without your mind; if your seeing is totally innocent, completely fresh; if your seeing is not coming from the past; if you and the rose are living simultaneously in this moment – if you are without mind: just aware, just existential – then the rose is not known as something separate. Then you know it to be part and parcel of your consciousness.
Then the flowering of the rose is your own flowering; then the perfume of the rose is your own perfume; then your consciousness is the rose’s consciousness. The rose is knowing itself through you. Identification is not an act of dualism, but of total being. Through your consciousness, the rose has come to know itself. This is the feeling! It cannot be expressed exactly, but the feeling is like this: that either you have flowered in the rose, or the rose has become conscious of itself through you.
Source: “The Eternal Quest” – Osho
