Life, Career and your Genius
This comes again and again in everybody’s life: whatsoever you are doing you get tired of, you get fed up, you get bored with it. It is very easy to be interested in a new thing – it needs great guts to remain interested in an old thing. That’s what makes a person a genius. Otherwise everybody will become a genius. The only difference between a genius and an ordinary person is that the genius has the guts to stick at something even when he is feeling bored, fed up.
These are plateaus that come. Mm? you work with great joy because something is new – there is a great exploration, new territory and you are enchanted… it is like a romance, a honeymoon. But by and by you become acquainted with the territory; you have looked into all the corners of it and there seems to be nothing new. Now you know all about it so the sensation is no more there, the thrill is no more there.
Now, it is at this point that if you can stick at it and make efforts to find something new in it, you will break through one plane, and on another plane the exploration starts again. If you simply listen to this boredom and you drop out, then those seven years will have gone down the drain.
That’s how many people lose their life energy: they don’t stick at things. It really needs courage to remain with the old, because when the plateau comes and everything seems to be just a repetition, doing the same thing again and again and again, one feels to change – change the wife, change the husband, change the job, change the friend, change the town, go somewhere else, do something new. But with the new again after seven years the same will happen!
You can change ten times in your life and after each seven years the same will happen, so the whole life will be a wastage. If you go on digging on the same spot for seventy years you will reach to some depth – and it can be reached from anywhere.
Now photography is such a creative thing and it is going to be more and more creative in the future because more sophisticated instruments will be available – they are available. You can do a thousand and one things with photography now; just a few years ago they were just impossible to do. One has to be creative, inventive… one has to look for new ways, new visions, new dreams. And sometimes this is natural, this is part of nature: one feels stuck.
Those who drop out are the rolling stones: they don’t gather any moss. And it has nothing to do with the work itself – it is just the tendency of the mind. Photography or painting or music, or dancing – anything – will come to the same point, and once you have made a pattern it will be repeated. This is really a sheer wastage of energies.
Go on working in it. If you are feeling stuck, that simply means that you have to explore new ways, new directions, new dimensions in it; and they are always there! Life is so mysterious that it is never finished. A man can go on working with a small thing and can devote his whole life to it and still there will be much to be explored after he has died.
This is the whole art of being a genius. The genius is just a little more stubborn than ordinary people, that’s all. He does not listen to the mind – he goes on hammering: he digs a hole. A sufi master – Jalaluddin Rumi – once took his disciples to a field. There were eight holes in the field and no hole had any water; the whole field was wasted. The disciples asked, ’Master, why have you brought us here?’
He said, ’To teach you something. This farmer wants to dig a well. He digs eight feet, ten feet, then he gets fed up with it and he thinks that this place is not right; he is bored so he starts digging at some other place. He has done this work the whole year round – he has destroyed the whole field and not a single hole has become a well. Now if he had dug at the same spot that well would have been one hundred feet deep.’ Jalaluddin said to his disciples, ’Remember this – the same applies to the inner world too.’
Just gather yourself together and don’t try to find excuses – simply start working with your total energy. From tomorrow morning start without thinking about it! Just go ahead, and within a few days it will be broken… and when it is broken, you will feel so thrilled. Whenever any plateau is broken, life takes on such a beauty and the work becomes such a joy. Then it is a second honeymoon and on a deeper level. And I am saying this to you to be remembered as a golden rule – it is so in every way, in every direction of life.
If you love a man, one day you will feel finished; that is the right moment to go on loving, to gather your energies and to explore the man again. If you can break that plateau you will see a new man arising before you… fresher than ever, younger than ever, more beautiful than ever. In fact you had never known such beauty and such depth. You have broken one more screen – the man is more available to you… again one day you will feel stuck! And remember: those who lose heart and escape, are great losers. Be a little more stubborn, stick to it. For three months do all that you can do with effort and then you tell me, mm?"
Source: from Osho Book “This Is It”
Work : Always try to reach more than you can grasp
[The center leader adds: … when I work in the centre, I often feel difficulties both working and meditating… I work much]
No, you work much. Working is never bad, and one can never work too much, never. We never work too much.
… We never work as much as we can, we never work to the maximum potential. In fact, at the most, people work fifteen percent of their potential – and those are the very hard workers.
As I see it, you are not working more than seven or eight percent. The more you work, the more you are capable of working. The less you work, the less you become capable of working. Life has its own logic.
Jesus says,‘If you have, more will be given to you. If you don’t have, even that which you have will be taken away from you.’ If you work hard you will get more energy. If you don’t work hard, if you don’t work at all and you avoid it, even the energy that you have will disappear. So whatsoever you want to do, do it, and do it to the optimum. And soon you will see that more and more doors are opening, and more energy becomes available.
Always try to reach more than you can grasp; always try to reach beyond your grasp. That is how one grows. If you always try that which you can do, you will always fall flat on the earth – you will not he growing. Try the impossible and it becomes possible. And if you don’t try the possible, even that will become impossible.
There is a time to work, a certain age limit where you can work hard. If you have worked hard at that age, in your remaining life the glow of work remains with you. If you miss that time, then you miss the glow. Then you simply repent that you missed the time when you could have worked hard. People who have been really working have a different type of energy in their old age – a glow, something, as if a light is burning inside. They may not be working then, but you know that they have earned a rest and now they can relax. Relaxation has to be earned.
So do whatsoever you can do right now, because right now you have energy, mm?
[The center leader answers: I find it difficult to work and meditate each day. I find it easier to work a lot, then spend some time meditating.]
You don’t understand the mechanism. In fact, one should continuously change, because the brain has many centres.
For example, if you do mathematics, then a certain part of the brain functions and the other parts rest. Then you read poetry: then that part that was functioning in mathematics rests and another part starts functioning.
That’s why in universities and schools we change periods – forty minutes, forty-five minutes — because each centre of the brain has a capacity to function for forty minutes. Then it feels tired and needs a rest, and the best rest is to change the work – so that some other centre starts working and one relaxes. So continuous change is very very good; it enriches you.
I understand the difficulty…. You do a thing and the mind becomes obsessed, you go mad after it. But that’s bad; one should not become so possessed. while doing it, become absorbed, but always remain a master; otherwise you will become a slave. and slavery is not good. Even slavery to God, to meditation, is not good. If you can’t stop doing a certain thing, or you only stop very reluctantly, that simply shows that you don’t know how to change gears in the mind.
So do one thing:: whenever you are doing something… for example, you are meditating and now you want to do something else. then after you stop meditating for five minutes simply exhale deeply, as possible. Then let the body inhale, don’t you inhale. Have a feeling that you are throwing out everything that was in the mind and in the body and in the system. Just five minutes, then start doing some other work, and immediately you will feel you have changed.
You need the neutral gear for five minutes, mm? If you change gear in a car, the gear has to first move to neutral – even if just for a single moment, but it has to move. The more efficient the driver, the faster he can move from neutral. So give five minutes to the neutral gear. You are not working at anything – just breathing, just being. Then by and by you go on dropping: after one month, four minutes; after two months, three minutes.
Then by and by there will come a point where just one exhalation is enough and you are finished with the work – closed, a full stop – and then you start other work. You try this, and next time you come you will be perfectly okay.
-Osho, “Hammer on the Rock, #3”
[Title] : Work : Always try to reach more than you can grasp [Source] : https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/72346
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