The Journey of Being Human ─ Is It Possible to Find Real Happiness in Ordinary Life?

This is the fifth book in Osho's LIFE ESSENTIALS series.

Man is a bridge, says Osho, between the animal and the divine – and our awareness of this dual aspect of our nature is what makes us human. It is also what makes us restless, full of conflict, so often at the crossroads of selfishness and generosity, of love and hate, frailty and strength, hope and despair. The Journey of Being Human looks into how we might embrace and accept these apparent contradictions, rather than trying to choose between them, as the key to transforming each twist and turn of life’s journey into a new discovery of who we are meant to be.

The Osho Life Essentials series focuses on the most important questions in the life of the individual. Each volume contains timeless and always-contemporary investigations and discussions into questions vital to our personal search for meaning and purpose. The Osho Life Essentials series focuses on questions specific to our inner life and quality of existence, for example: Is it possible to have an authentic spirituality without a belief in God? What is meditation and how does it work? What can I do as an individual to make the world a better place?

The Journey of Being Human
Man is the only conscious being on the earth; that is his glory and that is his agony, too. It depends on you whether it will be agony or glory. Consciousness is a double-edged sword. You have been given something so valuable that you don't know what to do with it; it is almost like a sword in the hands of a child. The sword can be used rightly, can protect, but the sword can harm, too. Anything that can become a blessing can also become a curse; it depends how you use it.


I have heard you say that life itself is so fulfilling, so overflowing, so blissful-then what is it that makes a person miserable?
Life is overflowing, life is blissful, but man has lost contact with life. He has become too self-conscious. That self-consciousness functions as a barrier, and one remains alive yet not truly alive. Self-consciousness is the disease.
The birds are happy, the trees are happy, the clouds and the rivers are happy, but they are not self-conscious. They are simply happy. They don't know that they are happy.
Buddha is happy, Krishna is happy, Christ is happy, but they are pure consciousness. They are happy, but they don't know that they are.
There is a similarity between unconscious nature and supraconscious beings. Unconscious nature has no self, and the supraconscious beings also have no self. Man is just in between. He is no longer an animal, no longer a tree, no longer a rock, and yet not a buddha. Hanging in between is the misery.
Just the other day a new seeker wrote me a letter, saying, "Osho, I don't want to become a sannyasin, I don't want to become superhuman like Buddha or Christ. I simply want to become just human. Help me to become just human."
Now, this is too ambitious, and it is impossible. Just to be human is impossible. Try to understand it. Because that means you are saying, "Let me just remain the process, in the middle." Man is not a state, man is only a process. For example, if a child says, "I don't want to become a youth, I don't want to become old. Let me just remain a child"-is it possible?
The child is already becoming a youth, he is on the way. Childhood is not a state; you cannot remain in it, you cannot stick to it, it is a process. Childhood is already going, youth is already coming. And so is youth going; howsoever hard you try to remain young, your efforts are doomed to fail because youth is already turning into old age.
Just to be human, you ask-you ask the impossible. You are too ambitious. You can become a buddha, that is simpler. You can become a god, that is simpler. But to say that you would like to just remain human is impossible because humanity is just a passage, a voyage, a journey, a pilgrimage. It is a process, not a state. You cannot remain human. If you try too hard to remain human, you will become inhuman. You will start falling. If you don't go ahead, you will start slipping backward ... but you will have to go somewhere. You cannot remain static.
To be human simply means to be on the way of being a god, and nothing else. God is the goal. To be human is the journey, the way. The way can never be permanent, it cannot become eternal. Otherwise it will be very tiring. The goal will never arrive then, and you will be just on the journey, on the journey, on the journey.
To hope is to be human. But to hope means to hope to go beyond. To hope means to desire beyond. To hope means to hope to surpass, to transcend. This is really the state of a human being-that he is always surpassing, going, going ... somewhere else is the goal.
The person who has asked it must be a beautiful person, in fact ready for sannyas-but he does not understand what he is saying.
Man is miserable because man has to be miserable. It is nothing of your fault, it is nothing like that you are in some error. To be human is to be miserable, because to be human is to be in the middle-neither here nor there, but hanging in limbo. Anguish arises because of the tension.
One home is lost-the home where birds are still singing, animals still moving, trees still flowering-the Garden of Eden. That one home is lost. Adam has been turned out; Adam has become human. When Adam was in the Garden of Eden he was an animal; he was not an Adam, he was not a man. God turned him out of the garden. That very expulsion became humanity.
Man is expelled from one home so that he can search for another home-bigger, higher, deeper, greater. One home is lost, there is a nostalgia; man wants to become animal. It is very difficult to forget that Garden of Eden; it was so beautiful. And there are moments we become animal-like-in deep anger, in violence, in war. That's the enjoyment of being angry.
Why do you feel so happy in being angry? Why do you feel such a rush of energy in destroying something? Why in wartime do people look more radiant, more healthy, more sharp, more intelligent?-as if life is no longer a boredom. What happens? Man falls back. Even for a few days, a few months, man again is an animal. Then he knows no law, then he knows no humanity, then he knows no god. Then he simply drops his self-consciousness, becomes unconscious, and murders, kills, rapes-everything is allowed in war. That's why man needs war continuously. After each ten years a big war is needed, and small wars have to be continued all the time. Otherwise it will be difficult for man to live.
Man becomes a drunkard, becomes a drug addict. Through drugs, man tries to reclaim the lost home, the lost paradise. When you are under the influence of LSD, you are back in the Garden of Eden-from the back door. LSD is the back door of the Garden of Eden. Again life seems psychedelic, colorful; again trees look luminous as they must have looked to Adam and Eve, as they must be right now for birds and tigers and monkeys. The green has a luminosity to it. Everything looks so beautiful. You are no longer human, you have fallen back. You have forced your being to fall back; hence tremendous appeal exists in alcoholic beverages and drugs. Since the very beginning of human history, man has been after drugs.
In the Vedas they called it soma, now they call it LSD, but it is not a different thing. Sometimes it was ganja, bhang, now it is marijuana and other things, but it is the same old game.
Chemically it is possible to fall back, but you cannot really go back. There is no going back; time does not allow that. One has just to go forward.
You cannot move backward in time. The reverse gear does not exist. When Ford made his first car, there was no reverse gear. Only later on they realized that it was very difficult to come back home. You had to take long turns, travel unnecessary miles; then you could come back. Then the reverse gear was added as a later thought. But in time, there is no reverse gear; you cannot go back.
Man has dreamed about it, fantasized about it. There are science fiction stories in which man can go back into time. H. G. Wells had an idea of a time machine, where you sit in the machine and you put it in the reverse gear and you start moving backward. You are young, you become a child, then you become a baby, then you are in the womb. Backward you start moving. But no time machine exists. It exists only in poets' minds, in fantasies.
To go back is not possible. There is only one possibility-to go ahead.
Man has to remain in anguish. There are only two ways-either make it possible to go back, or to go beyond humanity. Humanity is a bridge. You cannot make a house on it. It has to be passed. It is not to be lived upon.
When the Mohammedan mogul emperor, Akbar, built a special city, Fatchpur Seekeri, he asked his wise men to find something, a maxim to put on top of the bridge that joined the city to the rest of the world. They looked, they searched, and they found a saying of Jesus. It does not exist in the Bible; it must have come from some other source, from Sufis. There were many Sufis in Akbar's court. The saying is: "The world is like a bridge-don't make your house on it." The saying is still there on the bridge; it is beautiful. That's how it is.
Humanity is a bridge. Don't try to be just human, otherwise you will become inhuman. Try to become superhuman; that is the only way to be human. Try to become a god; that is the only way to be human. There is no other way. Have your goal somewhere in the stars, only then you grow.
And man is a growing phenomenon, a process. If you don't have any goal, growth stops. Then you are stuck, then you become stagnant and stale. That's what has happened to millions of people in the world. Look at their faces-they look like zombies, as if they are asleep or drugged, stoned.
What is happening to these people's hearts? They don't show any freshness, aliveness, no spurt of life, no flame ... dull. What is happening to them? They have missed something. They are missing something. They are not doing that for which they are made, they are not fulfilling that destiny which has to be fulfilled.
A man is here to become superman. Let superman be your goal. Then only will you be able to be man, and at ease.
The more you will be transforming into a superman, the more you will find you are not in anguish, not in anxiety. The buds are coming soon, there will be great rejoicing. Soon there will be blossoms. You can wait, you can hope, you can dream.
When you are not going anywhere, when you are trying just to be human, then the river has stopped flowing. Then the river is not going toward the ocean. Because to go to the ocean means to have a desire to become the ocean. Otherwise why go toward the ocean? Going toward the ocean means merging into the ocean, becoming the ocean.
Godliness is the goal. You can be human only if you go on making all efforts, all possible efforts, to become divine. In those very efforts, your humanity will start shining. In those very efforts, you will become alive.
Life is fulfilling, but you are not in contact with life. Old contact is lost, new has not been made. You are in a transmission, hence you are so dull, hence life looks so mediocre, sad, boring-even futile.
Says Jean-Paul Sartre: Man is a useless passion-futile, impotent passion, unnecessarily making much fuss about life, and there is nothing in it ... meaningless is life. The more you become enclosed in your self, the more life becomes meaningless. Then you are miserable. Then misery has some other payoffs.
When you are happy you are ordinary, because to be happy is just to be natural. To be miserable is to become extraordinary. Nothing is special in being happy-trees are happy, birds are happy, animals are happy, children are happy. What is special in that? It is just the usual thing in existence. Existence is made of the stuff called happiness. Just look!-can't you see these trees?... so happy. Can't you see the birds singing?... so happily. Happiness has nothing special in it. Happiness is a very ordinary thing.
To be blissful is to be absolutely ordinary. The self, the ego, does not allow that. That's why people talk too much about their miseries. They become special just by talking about their miseries. People go on talking about their illnesses, their headaches, their stomachs, their this's and that's. All people are in some way or other hypochondriacs. And if somebody does not believe in your misery, you feel hurt. If somebody sympathizes with you and believes in your misery-even in your exaggerated version of it-you feel very happy. This is something stupid, but has to be understood.
Misery makes you special. Misery makes you more egoistic. A miserable man can have a more concentrated ego than a happy man. A happy man really cannot have the ego, because a person becomes happy only when there is no ego. The more egoless, the more happy; the more happy, the more egoless. You dissolve into happiness. You cannot exist together with happiness; you exist only when there is misery. In happiness there is dissolution.
Have you ever seen any happy moment? Watched it? In happiness, you are not. When you are in love, you are not. If love has ever made its abode in your heart, even for a few moments, you are not. When you see the beautiful sun rising, or a full moon night, or a silent lake, or a lotus flower, suddenly you are not. When there is beauty, you are not. When there is love, you are not.
Hearing someone, if you feel there is truth, you simply disappear in that moment. You are not, truth is. Whenever there is something of the beyond, you are not; you have to make space for it. You are only when there is misery. You are only when there is a lie. You are only when there is something wrong. You are only when the shoe does not fit.
When the shoe fits perfectly, you are not. When the shoe fits perfectly, you forget the feet, you forget the shoe. When there is no headache, there is no head. If you want to feel your head, you will need a headache, that is the only way.
To be is to be miserable. To be happy is not to be. That's why Buddha says there is no self. He is creating a path for you to become absolutely blissful. He is saying there is no self so that you can drop it. It is easy to drop something when it is not. It is easy to drop something when you understand that it is not, it is just imagination.
Mulla Nasruddin was telling his friends in the tavern one day about his family. "Nine boys," he said, "and all good except Abdul. He learned to read."
Now when a person learns to read, difficulties arise; now the self is arising. In villages, people are more happy. They are closer to animals than in big cities-they are far away. In primitive societies, the aboriginals are more happy. They are closer to trees and nature than in London, Tokyo, Mumbai, New York. Trees have disappeared, only asphalt roads-absolutely false-concrete buildings, all man-made.
In fact, if suddenly somebody from outer space comes to Mumbai, New York, Tokyo, London, he will not find any signature of god there. All is man-made. Looking at Tokyo or Mumbai, one will think man made the world. These concrete buildings, these asphalt roads, this technology-all is man-made. The farther away you go from nature, the farther away you go from happiness ... the more and more you are learning to read.
God expelled Adam because he ate from the tree of knowledge-he started learning to read. God threw Adam out-he became knowledgeable. A man is bound to be more miserable if he is more knowledgeable. The misery is always in exact proportion with your knowledgeability.
Knowledgeability is not knowing. Knowing is innocence; knowledgeability is cunningness. It is very difficult for an educated person not to be cunning. It is almost impossible, because the whole training is cunning. The training is of logic, not of love. And the training is for doubt, not for trust. And the training is to be suspicious, not to be trusting. And the training is that everybody is trying to deceive you, so be aware. And before somebody else tries to cheat you, cheat-because that is the only way to be protected.
Says Machiavelli: The best way to defend oneself is to be aggressive. You see, all the governments of the world call their military organization, army, the "defense." They are all arrangements for attack, but they call it "defense." Even Hitler called his military his "defense." Nobody down the ages has ever said, "I am attacking." They say, "We are defending." They all follow Machiavelli. They all respect Mahavira, Mohammed, Moses, and they all follow Machiavelli. As far as respect is concerned, go to the temple, read the Bible. But as far as actual life is concerned, read The Prince, read Machiavelli, read Chanakya.
In Delhi, the Indian capital where politicians live, they call it Chanakya Puri-the city of the Machiavelli. Chanakya is the Indian counterpart of Machiavelli, even more dangerous than Machiavelli. The more a person becomes educated, the more Machiavellian, cunning.
When Machiavelli's book The Prince was published, he was thinking that all the kings of Europe would invite him, and he would be posted on a high post as an advisor to some king, But nobody called him. The book was read, the book was followed, but nobody called Machiavelli. He was surprised. He inquired. Then he came to know that reading his book they had become afraid of him. He was so cunning that to give him a big post was dangerous. If he followed his own book, he would destroy, he would throw the king away. Sooner or later he would become the king. He lived a poor man's life, he could never get into any powerful post.
Education makes you more cunning. Of course, education makes you more miserable. To be religious is to wipe out all this nonsense. To be religious means to learn how to unlearn, how to uneducate yourself again. Whatsoever the world has conditioned you for, you have to uncondition it. Otherwise you are in clutches. Man is miserable because man is caught in his own net. He has to come out of it-and only a distant star will be helpful.
Maybe there is no god. I'm not worried about it. But you need a god, a distant star to move toward. Maybe by the time you reach there you will not find God, but you will have become a god by that time. Reaching to that star, you will have grown.
Man is miserable because man has learned the tricks to be miserable. Ego is the base of it. Man is miserable because bliss, happiness, is so obviously available-that creates the trouble.
The first time I met Mulla Nasruddin happened this way: I saw him fishing in a lake. I had not heard about him. I watched him. Hours passed, not a single fish. I asked him, "What are you doing here? Just close by there is another lake, and don't you know?-there are lots of fish there."
He said, "I know. There are so much fish in that lake that it is even difficult for them to swim. The lake is full of fish."
"But then why are you sitting here? I don't see any fish at all."
He said, "That's why I am sitting here. What is the point of fishing in the other lake? Any fool can do that. To fish here is something!"
The ego goes on fishing in lakes where fishes are not. That which is obvious, that which is available, is not attractive. That's why we miss God. God is available, God is your very surround. He is the very atmosphere we breathe in and out. He is our very life. He is the ocean in which we live, are born, and will dissolve. But he is so close, no distance. How to feel him?
Watch it in your own life. Whatsoever you have loses interest for you. You have a beautiful house. It is beautiful only for your neighbors, not for you. You have a beautiful car. It is beautiful only for others who don't have cars, it is not beautiful for you. You have a beautiful woman or a beautiful man-it does not make any appeal. You have it, that's enough. People are attracted only to that which they don't have. The nonexistential attracts.
I have heard:
"Say, Ramon," said Mulla Nasruddin, as they met in the street one day, "I have been meaning to ask you something."
"Go ahead, Mulla," said his friend.
"My wife is kind of fat. In fact, when she takes off her girdle at night she is one great big blob. Is your wife like that?" questioned Nasruddin.
"Ah, no. My wife has a gorgeous figure. In fact, she is so trim she does not wear anything underneath, and she is a real knockout," replied Ramon.
"Well," continued Nasruddin, "my wife is so ugly, she covers her face up at bedtime with creams and curlers. Does not your wife do that?"
"Ah, no. My wife does not need any creams or makeup, and her hair is magnificent," replied the friend.
"Well, Ramon, I have only one more question. How come you are chasing my wife?" demanded Nasruddin.
That's the way of the ego-always chasing somebody else's wife, always chasing something that you don't have. Once you have, all interest is lost.
So an egoist remains miserable, because to be happy one has to be happy with that which one has. You cannot be happy with that which you don't have; you can only be unhappy with that. You can be happy only with that which you have. How can you be happy with that which you don't have? And ego is always interested only in that which you don't have.
You have ten thousand dollars-ego is no longer interested in it. It is interested in twenty thousand. By the time you have twenty thousand, it is no longer interested in it. It is interested only in thirty thousand. And so on, so forth ... it goes on.
The ego only gives you goals, but whenever those goals arrive, it does not allow you to celebrate. One becomes more and more miserable! As life passes, we go on gathering misery, we go on piling up misery. And it is very difficult to realize this-that you are causing your own misery; that is against the ego. So you throw the responsibility on others.
If you are miserable you think the society is such, your parents were wrong. If you listen to Freudians, they will say it is because of your parents, your parental conditionings. If you listen to Marxists, they will say it is because of the social structure, the society. If you listen to the politicians, they say because it is the wrong type of government. If you listen to the educationists, they say because some other type of education is needed.
Nobody says that you are responsible-the responsibility is thrown on others. Then it is impossible to be happy, because if others are making you miserable, then it is beyond you to be happy-unless the whole world is changed according to you.
Now it is difficult to choose your parents. It has already happened. What to do?
Somebody asked Mark Twain, "What does one person need to be really happy?"
He said, "The first thing is that one should choose his parents rightly."
Now that is impossible, it has already happened. You cannot choose your parents now. One should choose a right society. But you are always in a society. You don't choose it. You are always in the middle of it. And if you want to create it to your heart's desire, your whole life will be wasted. And it will never be changed because it is such a big phenomenon, and you are so tiny.
The only hope of any transformation is that you can change yourself. That is the only hope, there is no other hope.
But the ego does not want to take the responsibility. It goes on throwing the responsibility on others. In throwing responsibility on others, you are throwing your freedom also, remember. To be responsible is to be free. To give the responsibility to somebody else is to be a prisoner.
That is the religious standpoint. The religion says you are responsible. That's why Marx was so much against religion. His reasoning is clear-cut. He knew it perfectly well-that either religion can exist in the world or communism. Both cannot exist together. And he is right: Both cannot exist together. I also agree with him.
Our choices are different. I would like religion to exist, he would like communism to exist, but we agree that both cannot exist together. Because the whole standpoint of communism is that others are responsible for your misery. And the religious standpoint is that except you, nobody else is responsible. The communist says a social revolution is needed for a happy world. The religious person says a personal revolution is needed to be a happy person.
The world is never going to be happy, it has never been so, and it is never going to be so. The world is bound to remain unhappy, only individuals can be happy. It is something personal.
It needs consciousness to be happy. It needs intensity to be happy. It needs awareness to be happy. The world can never be happy because it has no awareness. Society has no soul, only man has it. But it is very difficult for the ego to accept this.
It happened:
Mulla Nasruddin made life very difficult for his associates because he believed he was infallible. Finally one of his workers spoke up. "Nasruddin," he said, "you surely have not been right all the time?"
"There was one time I was wrong," admitted Mulla.
"When was that?" asked the surprised worker. He could not believe that Nasruddin would ever admit that he was ever wrong, even one time. He could not believe his own ears. He said, "When was that?"
"The one time," recalled Mulla Nasruddin, "when I thought I was wrong, but I was really not."
Ego is tremendously defensive. Ego is never wrong, hence you are in misery. Ego is always infallible, hence you are in misery.
Start looking in the loopholes. Make your ego fallible-and it will fall and disappear. Don't go on supporting it, otherwise you are supporting your own misery. But we go on supporting it. In good ways, in bad ways, we go on supporting it.
You call somebody a good man, a moral man, a very respectable man. He has his own supports and props for his ego. He goes to the temple every day, to the church, reads the Bible or the Gita, follows the rules of the society. But he is just trying to find props for his ego-he is a religious man, a respectable man, a moral man.
Then there is somebody else who never follows the rules of society-never goes to the church. Whenever he finds any opportunity to break any rule, he enjoys it. He is enjoying another sort of ego-the ego of the criminal, the ego of the immoral person. He says, "I don't care." But both are finding supports for the same miserable thing. Both will be in misery.
As Muldoon walked down the street, he pinched a strange woman on the behind, threw a brick through the jewelry store window, and cursed a poor old lady. "That should do it!" he said to himself. "When I make my confession I will have enough to talk about."
Even when people go to confess, they don't want to confess small sins-they are not worth confessing. This is the experience of many priests of many religions-that people exaggerate their sins. When they come to confess, they exaggerate. They may have killed an ant and they think they have killed an elephant. They exaggerate, because it is not ego-fulfilling to do such a small thing.
The ways of the ego are very subtle. If you go to the jail and you listen to the talk of the people confined there, you will be surprised. They all go bragging that they have done so many robberies, and they have killed so many people. They may not have done anything at all, but there-that is the way of the ego. Then you are miserable, and then you become worried. Why? You create a barrier between you and life. Ego is nothing but barrier.
When I say drop the ego I mean drop all demarcation lines. You are not separate from life, you are part of it.... Like a wave, you are part of the ocean. You are not separate at all. Neither as a saint are you separate, nor as a sinner are you separate. You are not separate at all. You are one with life. You are neither dependent on life, nor are you independent of life-you are interdependent.
When you understand that we are all interdependent, linked with each other ... life is one; we are just manifestations of it ... then you start becoming blissful. Then there is nobody who can prevent you from bliss.
Bliss is very obvious. Bliss is very close. Bliss is so natural and so close that mind tends to forget it. Every child is born in a blissful state, and every person-almost every person-dies in tremendous misery. Only rarely someone-a buddha, a Jesus-dies in a blissful state. What happens? What goes wrong?
When a child is born he is not separate. When the child is in the mother's womb he is part of the mother, he does not exist separately. Then he is born-then, too, he remains part of the mother. He goes on being fed by the mother. Then he goes on hanging around the mother. Then, by and by, he grows.
This growth can be of two types. If he grows as ordinarily people grow, then he grows into an ego, he becomes hard, he gathers a hard crust around himself, and that will make him miserable. That is not the right way to grow. Something has gone sour, something has gone wrong.
To me, if the mother is religious, if the father is religious, if the family is religious ... and when I say religious, I don't mean that they are Christians or Hindus or Mohammedans or Jains or Buddhists-that has nothing to do with religion. In fact, all these things never allow religion to evolve. If the child is forced into a dogma, into a dogmatic ideology, then the ego will gather, then the ego will become Christian, and the ego will be against the Hindu and against the Mohammedan. Then the ego will become Hindu, and will be against the Christian and against the Mohammedan.
But if the house is really religious-by religious I mean meditative, loving-they help the child to be, but yet without the ego. They help the child to feel more and more the affinity, the unity, that exists. The child has to be helped; he is helpless, he does not know where he is, he does not know where he is going. If he is loved and there is a meditative rhythm in the family and the family vibrates with silence, understanding, the child will start growing into a more organic way of being. He will not feel himself separate, he will start learning how to become part.
That has not happened. I am not telling you to have any grudge about it-but you can do it right now. You can stop helping your ego and you can start dropping the burden. Make it a point not to miss any opportunity where you can feel one with anything. If it is a full-moon night, feel one with the moonlit night. Allow to flow ... stream with it, dance, sing ... and drop your ego.
There is nothing better than dance for dropping the ego; hence I insist that all meditators should dance. Because if you go really in a whirlwind, if you are really a whirling pool of energy, if you really are in the dance, the dancer is lost. In the dance the dancer is always lost. If it is not lost then you are not dancing. Then you may be performing, then you may be manipulating, then you may be doing some bodily exercises, but you are not dancing.
Dancing means so lost, so drunk-and enjoying the energy that is created by dance. By and by you will see your body is no more so solid as it was before. By and by you will see that you are melting; the boundary is losing its sharpness, it is becoming a little vague. You cannot exactly feel where you end and where the world starts. A dancer is in such a whirlpool, he becomes such a vibration, that the whole life is felt as in one rhythm.
So whenever you can find a time, a place, a situation ... you are in love with somebody; don't miss this opportunity. Don't talk nonsense, don't bring your ego and bragging. Drop that! Love is tremendously divine, God has knocked at your door. Be lost. Hold hands with your woman, or with your man, or with your friend. Get lost! Sing together, or dance together-but get lost. Or sit together-but get lost! And feel that you are no more an individual. Sitting by the side of a tree, get lost.
That's how it happened to Buddha. In that moment the bodhi tree and Buddha became one. For five hundred years after Buddha, Buddha's statues were not built. Instead, only the bodhi tree's picture was worshipped. It was tremendously beautiful. Those people must have understood. Just the bodhi tree was worshipped. In Buddhist temples there was just a symbol of the bodhi tree. Because in that moment Buddha completely disappeared. He was not there, only the bodhi tree was. He was completely lost.
Disappearing, you appear. Nonbeing is your way of real being.
And this can happen in ordinary life. You need not go to the Himalayas or to a monastery. There are millions of chances in ordinary life, millions of momentous situations where this can happen. You just have to be a little watchful and a little courageous to use them. Once you start using them, more and more situations will be coming. They have always been coming, but you were not aware so you missed them.