The Sufi who intrigued God
A person who meditates sincerely generates tremendous energy within and around him. Existence blesses him with healing powers that are also felt by others. The same could happen to a devotee whose prayers originate from his heart and is not a mechanical ritual taught by priests. Authenticity is needed in both the cases. The healing power with the meditator or the devotee is not something of his own, but a blessing from the divine or God’s grace. The blessed one cannot claim it as his own.
Many go on an ego trip of changing the world as a missionary. When the flower blooms, it has the fragrance that spreads around.
The flower does not go into an ego trip; ego is a great destroyer.
In one of his discourses on The Hidden Splendour, Osho makes this point with a Sufi story:
One Sufi mystic was so full of love and joy — his life was filled with laughter, music and dancing.
So God became very interested in him because he never asked anything; he never prayed. He never went to the mosque, he never even uttered the name of God. If anybody asked him whether God exists or not, he simply laughed, but never answered.
God became intrigued with the mystic and came to the Sufi and said, “I am immensely happy because that’s how I want people to be. I don’t want them to pray for an hour and do the opposite in the remaining 23 hours. I don’t want them to become pious once they enter the mosque, and when they go back, they leave their piousness in the mosque and are just their old selves: angry, jealous, full of anxiety and violence.”
“I have watched you and I have loved you. That is why you have become the prayer. You are, right now, my only argument in the world that something more than man exists — although you have never argued, you have not even uttered my name. Those are superfluous things... but you live, you love, you are so full of joy that there is no need for any language; your very presence becomes the argument for my existence. I want to give you a blessing. You can ask for anything.”
The Sufi said, “But I don’t need anything. Forgive me, I cannot ask because I really don’t need anything. You are generous, you are loving, you are compassionate, but I am so full, there is no space within me for anything else. You will have to forgive me, I cannot ask for anything.”
God said, “I knew you would not ask for anything. Don’t ask for yourself, but you can ask for others, because there are millions of people who are miserable, sick and have never known anything for which they can be grateful. I can give you powers to do miracles, and you can change the lives of all these people.”
The Sufi said, “If you are insisting, then with a condition I can accept your gift.”
God said, “With a condition You are really strange. What is the condition ”
The Sufi said, “My condition is that I should not become aware of what is happening through me, by you. It should happen behind my back, it should happen through my shadow, not through me. I may be passing and my shadow may fall on a dead tree, and the tree may become alive again, but I should not know it, because I don’t want to fall back.”
“If I know it — that I have done it, or even that God has chosen me as the instrument to do it — it is dangerous. So my condition is: a blind man may start seeing, but neither should he know that it is because of me, nor should I know that it is because of me. My shadow behind my back will do all the miracles.”
And it is said that God said to him, “You are not only strange, you are unique and rare. And this will be so: you will never know what things are happening around you. Miracles will happen. And I will remember your condition.”
Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance