Enjoy change, don’t resist it

[1]

Amrit Sadhana [1]

I had a wonderful experience of how meditation can affect even hardcore businessmen when I was facilitating a Meditation Intensive in Punjab. It was kind of a retreat where people stayed for three days and spent time with themselves. We did lots of active and passive meditations created by Osho. There is a beautiful meditation from Vigyan BhairavTantra, an ancient Sanskrit treatise which has 112 methods of self-realisation and on which Osho has spoken extensively.
The meditation is about recognising and accepting change as the way of life. It runs like this: “Here is the sphere of change, change, change. Through change consume change”.
In this meditation, the participants are asked to perceive change everywhere — in nature as well as within. There was a lush rose garden near the meditation hall. Obviously, there couldn’t be a better environment to experience this meditation. It was a sunny morning and a group of hundred-plus people were asked to roam about among the profusion of colours. Roses of various hues and shades — from pink to purple to yellow to white. Big and small of all sizes and shapes. If you watched them closely, you could notice that they were in different stages of life: buds, half bloomed, in full bloom, withering and withered. The leaves, too, varied in age, from the tender greenish sprouts to the dried brownish yellow. The meditators were moving around, consciously watching every phase of the life.
In the second, stage we started looking at the people moving around. Weren’t they going through the same phases? Young, middle-aged, old, on the threshold of death... People paused in front of each person, looking into each other’s eyes and this unavoidable truth hit hard on the face.
In the third stage, we all turned in and looked at the various modes of lives we have gone through. I asked everybody to sit down and close their eyes and revisit all the stages of their lives — childhood, puberty, youth, old age; changes in their bodies, thoughts, emotions, dreams, and now at which point of life they were. One day they will be no more. There were tears in some people’s eyes. Moments of revelation!
With the revelation came a deep acceptance: if change is the way of life why not accept it? If this is what living means, why not celebrate it? Isn’t it beautiful that we are all part of the ever-changing flow; that a moment is never repeated, everything is ever renewing itself? This realisation made everybody dance vibrantly, triumphantly. Yes, now we know the secret! We rejoice in it!
After the meditation, one middle-aged Sikh businessman came to see me. His eyes still had the moist hangover of a profound experience. He said, “It has been an eyeopener to me. I used to resist change — in my factory, in the office, at home. I thought change was an insult to my decisions, as if it was my defeat. And due to this I had created a hard crust around me. People used to shun me. But today, for the first time, when I saw and felt the river of change outside and inside, I was shaken to the roots. I realised that by fighting change I was fighting life”.
This businessman represents most of the contemporary human beings. In modern times, the human mind is in great confusion. Life around it is changing fast but the mind, by its very nature, is averse to change. Because it is a dead mechanism that subsists and thrives on the past. Science and technology have changed things outwardly but deep down humans still hold on to the old values, age-old conditioning. And the fact is that we are living in the post-Einstein era in which the discovery of the expanding universe is part of our knowledge. Now we cannot go back to the static universe. Once we realise that to exist is to change, we will relax into change and flow with it. Of course, it is a hard battle because the mind seeks permanency, and life is eternal, not permanent. Meditation is the only way that can make the mind realise and make it drop the old.

— Amrit Sadhana is in the management team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune. She facilitates meditation workshops around the country and abroad.