Is your glass clean?

[1]

Amrit Sadhana [1]

While browsing the Internet I came across an enlightening story. A young couple moves into a new neighbourhood. The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the young woman sees her neighbour hanging the wash outside.
“That laundry is not very clean,” she said. “She doesn’t know how to wash correctly.
Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.”

Her husband looked on, but remained silent.
Every time her neighbour would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comment.
About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband: “Look, she has learnt how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this?”
The husband said, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”
And so it is with life. What we see while watching others depends on the purity of the window through which we look. The window is our mind, which is full of dust. What is the dust gathered by the mind? The dust is of our past memories, attitudes and projections born out of them. The layers of this dust are so heavy that it is difficult to look at things as they are.
For instance, someone has hurt you a while ago; you meet the person after a couple of years; is it possible to forget the old incident and look at the person through a clean screen? The scars on the mind are still hurting, in fact deep down you must be nursing the wound and waiting to pay him back in the same coin.
There are millions of incidents right from our childhood that are etched in our mind. They formulate our approach, our worldview. In psychoanalysis this is called conditioning, and we interact with people, interpret life through this thick wall of conditioning.
Life appears to be good or bad according to the conditioning we have had.
Is it possible to break through this wall and have a clean transparent view? Yes, the Osho meditations are designed to de-condition the mind so that people can drop their past and have a fresh vision of life. The Osho emphasis is on cleaning the mind and the body. And the method is catharsis. Osho used emotional catharsis as well as mental catharsis to throw out the accumulated stress and tensions that burden the consciousness. It is painful but it is like a surgery. The surgical pain is part of the curative process; it is a constructive suffering. The healing process follows this. The old wounds are healed; the glass is cleaned. Now you can watch the world through this clean glass.

Amrit Sadhana is in the management team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune