Life is the Game of the Games, the Ultimate Game - OSHO

LIFE IN ITSELF IS NOT THE GOAL. The goal surpasses life. The life is just an opportunity to realize the goal. The goal is hidden deep in life; you cannot find it on the surface. You will have to penetrate to the very center. The life is like a seed. In itself it is not enough. You will have to work hard so the seed sprouts, becomes a tree and comes to bloom.

This is one of the most fundamental things to remember -- that man has to surpass himself, that life has to transcend itself. If you don't understand this, then you will be lost in the means and you will forget the end. That's what happens ordinarily. We become too attached with life and we forget that life was just an opportunity to understand something which is deeper than life, higher than life, superior, far superior, than life.

If you get too much obsessed with life itself, it is as if somebody was sent to the university and he became too much attached with the university and he could not leave it, and he could not even conceive of leaving it. The university is there just to educate you for something greater. For the universe, the university is to prepare you; that's why we call it the university. It itself is not the universe... just a preparation.
In the East, life is just like a university, a discipline, a training for something far beyond it. If you become too much attached with life, then you will be coming back again and again every year to the university. Then it is futile, pointless. A university is to get ready. A university has to be renounced one day. It is just a preparation. And if the preparation becomes endless, then it becomes a burden.
That is what has happened to many people. They take life as the goal. Then they go on preparing, they go on preparing endlessly. They never go on the journey, they simply prepare for the journey. And if their life becomes an impotent gesture, no wonder. It is natural, it has to be so.

Just think about yourself -- always consulting timetables, always getting ready to leave, always enquiring from the tourist office, and never leaving, never going anywhere. You will go mad.

Nothing is wrong with life itself, but if your attitude is this -- that life is an end unto itself -- then you will be in trouble. Then your whole life will become meaningless. The meaning is there, but the meaning is transcendental to it. The meaning is there, but you will have to penetrate to that core where it is revealed.

To think of life as the goal is to remain on the periphery. That periphery Buddha calls the wheel. The symbol of the wheel is very significant and has to be understood. The periphery, Buddha calls the wheel... it goes on moving.

You can watch a bullock cart moving. The wheels move. They move on something which is unmoving -- the center remains unmoving. The hub remains unmoving. On an unmoving hub, the wheel goes on moving.

If you only look at the wheel, you will be looking at the temporal. If you become capable of looking at the hub, you will be able to penetrate the eternal. If you only look at the periphery, you will be watching the accidental. If you become capable of reaching to the center, to the hub, you will be able to know the essential. And unless you come to know the essential, you will be repeating the same thing again and again and again.

The world is called the wheel because things go on repeating themselves again and again, and you by and by become repetitive. And the more you repeat yourself, the more you are bored. The more you are bored, the more dull and stupid you become. You lose intelligence, you lose freshness, you lose awareness. You become a robot, a mechanical thing.

Watch people around you. They have become robots. They just go on doing the same thing again and again. Every morning, every evening, they go on moving in the same rut, and of course they look dead. There is no spark in their eyes; you cannot find any ray of light.

Buddha calls this continuous repetition of the wheel, sansar. To get out of it, to get out of this rut, is nirvana.

Before we enter the sutra, a few things have to be understood.

Life is the game of the games, the ultimate game. It has tremendous meaning in it if you take it as a game and you don't become serious about it. If you remain simple, innocent, the game is going to impart many things to you.

Sometimes you were a tiger, and sometimes you were a rock, and sometimes you became a tree, and sometimes you become a man; sometimes you were an ant, and sometimes an elephant. Buddha says all these are games. You have been playing a thousand and one games, to know life in every possible way. By playing game after game, the player may experience all the permutations of matter in evolution. That is the goal of life.

When you exist like a tree, you know life in one way. Nobody else can know it except the tree. The tree has its own vision. When clouds come in the sky and the sun shines and there is a rainbow, only the tree knows how to feel it. It has a perceptivity of its own. When the breeze passes by, the tree knows how to be showered in it. When a bird starts singing, only the tree knows, only the tree has ears for it... for its music, its melody. The tree has a way to know life -- its own way. Only a tree knows that way.

A tiger has another way of knowing life. He is playing another game. An ant is playing a totally different game. Millions of games....

All these games are like classes of a university. You pass through each class; you learn something. Then you move into another class. Man is the last point.

If you have learned all the lessons of life and the lesson of being a human being, then only will you become capable of moving into the very center of life. Then you will be able to know what god is, or what nirvana is.

All through these games you have been trying to approach god -- through many directions, in many ways, in many perceptivities. But the goal is the same -- that everybody is trying to know what the truth is. What is the mystery of this life? Why are we here and who am I? And what is this that goes on existing?

There is only one way to learn it, and that is the way of existence. But if you just move from one class to another like a sleepwalker, a somnambulist, unconscious, dragged from one class to another, not moving deliberately and consciously, you will miss.

That's how many people arrive at the point of being human beings and they cannot see any god. That simply shows they have missed the lessons, they avoided the lessons. They were in the classes but they have not got the point. Otherwise every person who has arrived at the stage of being human must be religious.

Being human and being religious must become synonymous. They are not synonymous. Very rarely a few people are religious. By religious I don't mean a person who goes to the church every Sunday. By religious I don't mean a person who is Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist. By religious I don't mean that you belong to a religious organization.

When I say religious, I mean a person who is aware that life is so full of transcendence... that from everywhere life is overflowing into something bigger than life... that every step is leading you towards god, truth, nirvana, freedom... that whether you know it or not, you are moving towards the ultimate temple.

When a person starts feeling it in his very guts, then a person is religious. He may go to the church, he may not go to the church; that is irrelevant. He may call himself a Christian or a Mohammedan or a Hindu; that is irrelevant. He may not call. He may belong to any organization, he may not belong -- but he belongs to god.

And when I say god, remember that by god I mean that which transcends. That is always ahead of you. You are always coming closer to it, approaching closer and closer and closer, but it always remains ahead of you.

God is that omega point which always remains the goal. You come close to it but you can never possess it. It cannot be ever in your hands. You can drop yourself completely in it, you can merge yourself in it, but still you will know that much remains to be known. In fact the more you know, the more you feel that much remains to be known. The more you know, the more you become humble. The mystery, infinite, ineffable, cannot be exhausted.

That inexhaustible source, that transcendental source, is what I mean by god. And by calling a person religious, I mean one who has become alert about the transcendental.

When you are alert about the transcendental, your life has a beautiful charm, a grace. Then your life has energy, intelligence. Then your life has a sharpness, a creativity. Then your life has a holy aura to it. By becoming aware of the transcendental, you become part of the transcendental. He has penetrated in your awareness. A ray of light has entered into the dark night of your soul. You are no more alone, and you are no more a stranger in existence. You are deeply rooted in it. This is your home.

A religious person is one who feels existence as his home. A religious person is one who feels existence constantly evolving and evolving, going higher and higher, towards that ultimate omega point where you disappear, where all limitations disappear and only infinity is left, only eternity is left.

So this game of life has to be played very skillfully. Buddha calls skill, upaya. It is one of his most beautiful words. He says, 'be skillful'. If you are not skillful, you will miss much that is valuable. Be skillful means be aware. Just don't go on dragging yourself half asleep, half awake. Shake yourself into awareness. Bring more awareness into each act of your life, into each step of your being. Then only, with open eyes, you start seeing something which cannot ordinarily be seen when you are asleep, when you are unconscious. Shake all the dust from the eyes.

Be skillful and live life consciously. Otherwise life becomes boring. You feel it. You know how it feels. Sooner or later everything feels boring; one is bored to death. One goes on living because one is not courageous enough to commit suicide. One goes on living just in the hope that sooner or later one will die -- the death is coming.

Mulla Nasrudin was going on a world tour and he was travelling in a ship for the first time, and he was very seasick. The captain came to him and said, 'Don't be worried, Nasrudin. I have been working as a captain for twenty years and I have never seen any man die from seasickness. Don't be worried.'

Mulla said, 'My god! That was my only hope -- that I will die. You have taken even that hope!'

People are living just in the hope that some day or other they are going to die. So they go on saying to themselves, 'Don't lose heart -- death is coming.'

If you are waiting for death, if you are so bored, then there is no possibility for any encounter with god. The encounter can only happen in radiance, in sharpness, in awareness.

But why do we get bored? The buddhist explanation is of tremendous import. Buddha says you have done the same things -- not only in this life; you have been doing them for millions of lives, hence boredom. You may not remember them, but deep down the memory is there. Nothing is lost as far as memory is concerned.

There is a reservoir of memory. Buddha calls it alaya vigyan, reservoir of memory. It is exactly what Jung calls the collective unconscious. You carry it. The body changes, the identity changes, but the bundle of memories goes on jumping from one life to another. And it goes on accumulating, gathering. It goes on becoming bigger and bigger.

Nothing is lost as far as memory record is concerned. If you look into yourself, you have the whole record of the existence in you. Because you have been here from the very beginning -- if there was any beginning. You have been always here. You are an intrinsic part of this existence. All that has happened to existence has happened to you also, and you carry the record.

You may not know it, but you have loved millions of times.

Again falling in love -- it is nothing new, it is the very old story. You have done all the things that you are doing. You have been ambitious, you have been greedy, you accumulated wealth, you became very famous, you had prestige and power -- this has happened many many times, millions of times. And you carry deep down in the unconscious, the reservoir of memories, and whatsoever you are doing looks futile, pointless, meaningless.

I have heard:

A newspaper reporter was interviewing Mulla Nasrudin on his hundredth birthday. If you had your life to live over,' he asked, 'do you think you would make the same mistakes over again?'

'Certainly,' said the old Mulla, 'but I would start a lot sooner. I would start a lot sooner....'

This is what is happening. Out of mistakes you only learn how to start them sooner, you don't learn how to drop them. You only learn how to start them sooner and how to do them more efficiently next time.

Buddha says if you can penetrate this reservoir of memories then you will be really fed up. Then you will see -- 'I have been doing the same thing again and again.' And then in that state of awareness, you will start doing something new for the first time. And that will bring a thrill, a fresh air into your being.

Osho,
The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 2
Chapter #3
Chapter title: In accord with the way