A lifetime of gathering things
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
This quote of Osho summarises pretty well where my spiritual wandering took me five years ago…
“The West went to the other extreme - they devoted their whole energy to material advancement, forgetting completely that material advancement in itself is meaningless. It leads you nowhere; it leads you only into deep frustration, finally, into a meaningless life where you can see clearly that you wasted your whole life collecting rubbish, junk. And it does not give you peace, it does not give you silence. It has not been able to make you aware of truth. And now death is approaching and your hands are empty. Your whole life has been just a desert.”
It occurred even before reading this to me that the things that I had gathered in my life, an outline of 45 years of living in books, dvd’s, clothes and computer equipment, were all just so much rubbish which I had to look after, and which I had to have space to house. It gave the occasional moment of pleasure to remember and hold the dvd of a great film or book, but most of the time these things spent their days sitting in a cupboard. After eight years of Buddhism, Osho lectures, and varied spiritual reading it was not that I was letting go of it, but that it was dropping away from me.
It was a moment of detachment, a shift in perspective where the warm somewhat-romanticised feelings I had for ‘things’ almost totally fell away. Some of my behaviour changes, before then I was a completist collector of boxed sets of certain dvds and books, that behaviour has entirely gone, I no longer collect things. I used to collect fridge magnets on all my holidays, don’t do that anymore.
It launched a new period of minimalist living for me. I got rid of a lot of things, and much of what I couldn’t get rid of I stored in boxes in the garage. Now I keep just a few things nearby — my Mac, the desk it sits on, a dresser for a few clothes, my bed. I really don’t need anything more. On my dresser sits my Buddha statue. I don’t need a house now, a room is enough.
Today I hardly ever think of the content of the boxes or any of the places I used to live in. I certainly don’t miss them.
Comments
‘They’ smack you when you are born … and it gets continually worse … until we ‘die before we die’ are ‘born again’ or find Nirvana. Same thing really … 🔆
Ah, yes.
A lifetime of memories-the pleasures and joy, sadness and regret.
I just have my photo’s in my iPhone and on my Mac, which are kinda an aide-de-memoire for remembering what people and situations looked like. So in a way the memories are still there.
Are these ideas things?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_precepts_(Taoism)
The further I go in the spiritual life, the more I leave all precepts behind and just live a simple, natural life with an extra helping of kindness and compassion. It just seems that the energy behind forbidding yourself things is naturally somewhat violent, it’s like you do yourself an injury.
I think in a way this is true for the Five Buddhist Precepts as well. Take “do not kill”, in a way any animal kills other animals from time to time, a cow’s tail is a built-in fly swatter, an elephant will step on ants from time to time. Even plants can be said to be alive, and without eating plants the whole animal kingdom would vanish. So it is natural for human beings to also kill from time to time, but living with kindness means that you do not want to.
In essence I think instructions of the kind “don’t live with anger or hatred in your heart” or “don’t feel envious” which are in the Ten Taoist Precepts are not helpful. They lead to denying emotions and thus repression, which will lead to a buildup of negative energy in the unconscious. If you can explain to people the thought patterns of the ego, the bad sides of my-making and identification, you can arrive at states of growth where these things drop away naturally and much more easily.
It’s better to develop one’s natural patterns of life, than to adopt a series of rules about how one’s heart and mind should behave, which you then have to struggle to keep. Better to think of these Taoist precepts as goals one can try to grow towards, and in the process mindfully examine the roots of for example your anger or hatred.
These are a few of my favourite things
So all those limos he owned were "meaningless"?
I wonder if those cars were rubbish to him.
It’s funny because the song sings about “snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes” and in the end talks about remembering them because “then I don’t feel so bad”. There is something about remembering your favourite things that warms the heart, but I don’t think it is attachment…
They were actually all the same model of car, the Rolls Royce ‘Silver Spur’, because Osho found that the drivers seat suited his back well. He didn’t actually own any of the cars, they were managed by a fund you could invest into, and many wealthy sannyasins did. The fund was liquidated with a small profit on Osho’s departure from the States, and the money returned to the original investors. I happen to know this because my father invested in the fund.
Osho had a very cavalier attitude to his personal possessions. In India in the 1970s there was a long period when he’d be seen with a towel draped over his arm, which he would give away. Sometimes he’d give away one of his robes, or a watch.
This is ‘vairagya’, which means “the falling away of worldliness, the return of innocence. When you start to feel that everything that you’re going to experience through your senses is not going to be enough. And worldly things begin to appear like dross instead of gold. Not totally, but it begins to happen, until only a transparent layer remains.” (Ram Dass, Be Here Now)
A comment on vairagya in Buddhism: “Technically the word vairagya means control over desires. As Buddha explained, desires are the cause of suffering in the world. Buddha meant desires in a broader sense of attachment as well. Desires hook and attach people to things and to others, making them dependent and defining the meaning of life.” (Anonymous from Google search)
An explanation of sadhana…
I see truth in this, it makes sense to me.
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