The Spiritual Life, Topic Twenty, Becoming Aware Of One's Own Holiness.

The Spiritual Life, Topic Twenty

Becoming aware of one’s own holiness.

From:  Maturity: The Responsibility For Being Oneself by Osho

Life has an inner pattern, it is good to understand it. Every seven years, physiologists say, the body and mind go through a crisis and a change. Every seven years all the cells of the body change, are completely renewed. In fact if you live seventy years, the average limit, your body dies ten times. Each seventh year everything changes—it is just like changing seasons. In seventy years the circle is complete. The line that moves from birth comes to death, the circle is complete in seventy years. It has ten divisions.

In fact man’s life should not be divided into childhood, youth, old age. That is not very scientific, because every seven years a new age begins, a new step is taken. P.24


Osho, in the book, Maturity: The Responsibility of Being Oneself, describes the human life cycle as including 10 stages in seven year spans. Osho’s description is very helpful in understanding the primary motivation and functioning of a person during each stage of life.

It may be helpful to use our understanding of  these seven year stages of human development to see how churches can function and help meet a person’s developmental needs at each stage of a person’s life.

UU A Way Of Life is focused primarily on people over 42 and particularly for people 56 and older. People over 56 are concerned primarily with the purpose of their lives and how they can actualize their potential. Their years of raising the next generation are over for the most part and so they are ready to refocus their attention on their own development.

While cultivating an interior spiritual life is important at each stage of life, it is even more important as one matures and finds that the things of the ego are not ultimately satisfying and fulfilling. More than in previous stages of life, they are aware that the idea that the idols in the world of the ego will make one happy has been a Big Lie.

Having had this dawning that the things of the ego does not make one genuinely happy, one then starts a search, in earnest, for the things that would be satisfying and fulfilling and help one bring to comforting completion the purpose of their life.

This search brings one to an experience of one’s own intrinsic holiness and this awareness contributes to peace and bliss and takes the whole world one step further on its evolutionary path to sanctification and enlightenment.

Video commentary - Take responsibility for your own peace of mind.

The Spiritual Life, Topic Nineteen, Take responsibility for your own peace of mind.

The Spiritual Life - Topic Nineteen

Take responsibility for your own peace of mind.

The people who are always considering others and their opinions are immature. They are dependent on the opinions of others. They can’t do anything authentically, honestly they can’t say what they want to say—they say what others want to hear. Your politicians say the things you want to hear. They give you the promises you want. They know perfectly well that they cannot fulfill these promises; neither is there any intent to fulfill them. But if they say exactly, truthfully, what the situation is, and make it clear to you that many of the things you are asking for are impossible, that they cannot be done, they will be thrown out of power. You will not choose a politician who is honest. 

It is a very strange world. It is almost an insane asylum. If, in this insane asylum, you become alert and aware of your inner being, you are blessed. p.22-23

A person can live their life based on “indirect self acceptance” or “direct self acceptance.”

People who live their lives based on indirect self acceptance only like themselves if other people like them. Their experience of their self worth, their self esteem, their self confidence is based on what other people think of them. These people are sometimes called “people pleasers” and “co-dependent.” These people organize their lives around other peoples’ functioning.

People who base their lives on direct self acceptance know what makes them tick. They examine their own life and lead it by internal values and standards which they have consciously chosen. Other people’s opinions and feedback is not the determining factor in what they think, how they feel, what their preferences and intentions are. These people have made their values and standards the center of their lives and not someone else's.

Do you live your life based on your own sense of right and wrong, and your own values, or based on someone else's?

The mature person who has actualized their potential is confident in their own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. They are their own person and not suggestible, and easily influenced by the thoughts and desires of others.

Mothers often tell their children, “Just because your friend jumps off a bridge, doesn’t mean that you should.” There is an important lesson here which even as adults we would do well to consider and use to guide our behavioral choices accordingly.

So today, consider who and what you are living your life for? Who and what have led to your decisions about how to live your life? Are your choices self determined or made for you by other people and circumstances?

A mature person knows that while they often have no control over the external circumstances that occur in their lives, they always have control over how they choose to respond.

An immature person easily plays the victim and makes others responsible for their unhappiness while a mature person knows that only their choices about how they will respond to life’s happenings can determine their sense of well being.

The mature person no longer makes other people, and life circumstances, responsible for their unhappiness. They have given up the blame game and taken responsibility for their own peace of mind.

Video commentary on love, peace, and bliss.

The Spiritual Life, Topic Eighteen, Love, peace, and bliss

The Spiritual life - Topic Eighteen

Where to find love, peace, and bliss.

Maturity has nothing to do with your life experiences. It has something to do with your inward journey, your experiences of the inner. The more a man goes deeper into himself the more mature he is. When he has reached the very center of his being he is perfectly mature. But at that moment the person disappears, only presence remains. The self disappears, only silence remains. Knowledge disappears, only innocence remains.

To me, maturity is another name for realization: you have come to the fulfillment of your potential, it has become actual. The seed has come on a long journey and has blossomed. Maturity has a fragrance. It gives a tremendous beauty to the individual. It gives intelligence, the sharpest possible intelligence. It makes him nothing but love. His action is love, his inaction is love; his life is love, his death is love. He is just a flower of love. P.16

Osho teaches that maturity does not come from life experience. Maturity comes from the meaning that one makes of one’s life experience.

Osho teaches that maturity does not come from external experiences but from inner awareness.

Many people say that when they retire they want to travel. They become tourists. Other people say that they are not tourists but pilgrims. As a pilgrim, one never needs to leave home. In fact leaving home can be a distraction.

Unitarian Universalists covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. If the pilgrim searches in the external world, the pilgrim will not find what they are looking for. For the spiritual actualization that they yearn for is to be found within, in silence.

Osho teaches that maturity is realization, the actualization of one’s potential, the acceptance and pursuit of becoming one’s true Self. This true Self is not individualized and personalized. The true Self is to be found in the cosmic consciousness of becoming one with the All which requires the dropping of the ego.

A mature person has recaptured the innocence and wonder of a small child. They are no longer calloused, cynical, narcissistic, bitter, resentful, angry, fearful. Nothing is about them as an individual. They have become a presence but no longer an ego. As Osho describes, the fragrance of maturity is love, peace, and bliss.

Video commentary on Memento Mori

The Spiritual Life, Topic Seventeen, Remember you are going to die.

The Spiritual Life - Topic Seventeen

Memento mori

From - Maturity: The Responsibility For Being Oneself by Osho

Life can be lived in two ways. If you live unconsciously you simply die; if you live consciously you attain more and more life. Death will come—but it never comes to a mature man, it comes only to a man who has been aging and getting old. A mature person never dies, because he will learn even through death. Even death is going to be an experience to be intensely lived, and watched, allowed. A mature man never dies. In fact, on the rock of maturity death struggles and shatters itself, commits suicide. Death dies, but never a mature man. That is the message of all the awakened ones, that you are deathless. They have known it, they have lived their death. They have watched and they have found that it can surround you but you remain aloof, you remain far away. Death happens near you but it never happens to you. Deathless is your being, blissful is your being, divine is your being, but those experiences you cannot cram into the mind and the memory. You have to pass through life and attain them.

Much suffering is there, much pain is there. And because of pain and suffering people like to live stupidly—it has to be understood why so many people insist that they should live in hypnosis, why Buddhas and Christs go on telling people to be awake, and nobody listens. There must be some deep involvement in the hypnosis, there must be some deep investment. What is the investment? 

To become old is not to become wise. If you have been a fool when you were young and now you have become old, you will be just an old fool, that’s all. The mechanism has to be understood; otherwise you will listen to me and you will never become aware. You will listen and you will make it a part of your knowledge, that “Yes, this man says be aware and it is good to be aware, and those who attain to awareness become mature … .” But you yourself will not attain to it, it will remain just knowledge. You may communicate your knowledge to others, but nobody is helped that way. Why? Have you ever asked this question? Why don’t you attain to awareness? If it leads to the infinite bliss, to the attainment of satchitananda, to absolute truth—then why not be aware? Why do you insist on being sleepy? There is some investment, and this is the investment: if you become aware, there is suffering. 

If you become aware, you become aware of pain, and the pain is so much that you would like to take a tranquilizer and be asleep. This sleepiness in life works as a protection against pain. But this is the trouble—if you are asleep against pain, you are asleep against pleasure also. Think of it as if there are two faucets: on one is written “pain” and on the other is written “pleasure.” You would like to close the faucet on which pain is written, and you would like to open the faucet on which pleasure is written. But this is the game—if you close the pain faucet the pleasure faucet immediately closes, because behind both there is only one faucet, on which “awareness” is written. Either both remain open or both remain closed, because both are two faces of the same phenomenon, two aspects. 8-10

Osho teaches that a person can live their life in one of two ways: in fear of pain, or in love of awareness.

When it comes to dying you have two choices: to die unconsciously or consciously.

Is the fear of death paralyzing and managed by avoidance and denial or is the idea of dying liberating and managed by curiosity and gratitude?

One of the benefits of living a spiritual life is having a positive and constructive way of managing our fear of death. The body surely will die but what happens to the spirit? This question is one of the fundamental existential questions that all wise and aware people consider and reflect on. It is this existential question which makes living life worthwhile, satisfying, and fulfilling. Some recognize, acknowledge, and examine this question while others deny it, dismiss it, and distract themselves with multiple idols of the ego.

Osho suggests that we consider our dying with curiosity. Osho teaches that it is in considering and examining our dying that we become wise. This wisdom involves an expansion of consciousness beyond our individual ego and it is this cosmic consciousness which lives forever.