Amrit Sadhana

You must have noticed that if you change queues, the one you have left will start moving faster than the one you are in now. Or the child who sings a nursery rhyme beautifully in front of his/her parents will be totally silent when s/he is asked to perform before visiting friends. Or when you dial a wrong number, the phone is never busy at the other end and you have to face the embarrassment of apologising to the receiver.

When your computer goes out of order, you start fiddling with it but it never works. As soon as you call a computer engineer, his sheer presence makes the machine jump into action as if nothing had happened before. You fall flat on your face.
Life is full of such mystifying incidents. When these things occur we feel so frustrated as if the whole existence is conspiring against us.
Is there some logic behind it? There may not be an intellectual explanation for such happenings because they are beyond the scope of logic, but there is certainly a law called Fetridge’s law. These unnerving incidents are governed by this strange law.
There is an interesting story behind the name.
This law was named after Claude Fetridge, a radio engineer for NBC, according to H. Allen Smith’s A Short History of Fingers (1963). The occasion was Mr Fetridge’s attempt in 1936 to broadcast the departure of the famous swallows from the Old Mission of San Juan Capistrano on their annual migration, which occurs every year on October 23. The NBC crew travelled to the chapel in Southern California. They had plenty of time to set up their sound equipment for the marvellous event. A nationwide audience waited to hear the whirring sound of the millions of wings. But nothing happened! The swallows, it turned out, had left a day ahead of time perhaps because it was a leap year. The expected event did not happen and Mr Fetridge earned a measure of immortality.
Fetridge’s Law has universal application. Important things that are supposed to happen do not happen, especially when people are looking for them. So do not ask why the telephone rings when you are in a shower or in a bathtub. You may be sitting near the instrument waiting for an important call, but it will remain silent, and the moment you are in a situation when you can’t answer it, its shrill ring tone will echo all over your house.
Looking at the frequency of these incidents we have to recognise the mystery, which is at the core of this universe. Scientists have noted that even the atoms change their behaviour when they are observed. There are innumerable mysterious forces at work in the vast existence. Man’s small intellect has yet to fathom their ways and systems.
It seems when we are anxiously trying for something the very anxiety becomes a barrier and we block the flow of energy. Do not expect anything, keep enjoying what you are doing and suddenly nature’s bounty showers on you.
Why things happen when you are not looking for them? Osho gives a deep reason: “When you are not looking for anything, a certain silence descends on you. And in that silence things start happening that were never happening before when you were looking for them. It is a very mysterious life. It does not follow your ordinary arithmetic.
“When you are running too much after silence, peace, meditation and enlightenment you simply get tired, bored and exasperated. It is never found that way. You cannot find anything of value while you are running. And naturally, your mind says: Run a little faster, you are not running fast enough. And the faster you run, the more tense you are, the more your eyes are blurred, the more dust you gather. You don’t know where you are running because you don’t know which direction the truth is.
“It is not in running after it, it is in sitting silently. And while you are perfectly a pool of peace, truth arises within you. You never reach truth; it is always truth that reaches you. And truth is not something that comes from outside, it arises out of the intensity of your silence. In fact, the intensity of your silence, a great silence crystallised, is truth”.

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