Mystery of Life

This thought on the Mystery of Life is by Osho from his book Courage, the Art of Living Dangerously. I have borrowed this book and want to give it back tomorrow evening - the books owner is hosting of the big reggae party taking place after the marketplace. ..and I am determined to finish it tonight!!


"The whole history of philosophy, religion, science, mathematics has the same root, the same mind -- the same itch. You may scratch yourself one way, somebody else may do it differently, but the itch has to be understood. The itch is the belief that existence is not a mystery. Mind can feel at home only if somehow existence is demystified.
Religion has done it by creating God, the Holy Ghost, the Only Begotten Son; different religions have created different things. These are their ways to cover up a hole that is uncoverable; whatever you do the hole is there. In fact the more you cover it, the more emphatically it is there. Your very effort to cover it shows your fear that somebody is going to see the hole.
The whole history of mind, in different branches, has been doing patchwork to conceal this hole -- particularly in mathematics, because mathematics is purely a mind game. There are mathematicians who think it is not, just as there are theologians who think God is a reality. God is only an idea. And if horses have ideas, their God will be a horse. You can be absolutely certain it will not be a man, because man has been so cruel to horses that man can be conceived only as a devil, not as God. But then every animal will have its own idea of God, just as every human race has its own idea of God.
Ideas are substitutes for where life is mysterious and you find gaps that can not be filled by reality. You fill those gaps with ideas; and at least you start feeling satisfied that life is understood.
Have you ever thought about this word understand? It means standing under you. It is strange that this word has by and by taken a meaning that is far from the original idea: anything that you can make stand under you, that is under your thumb, under your power, under your shoe, you are the master of.
People have been trying to understand life in that same way, so that they could put life also underneath their feet and declare, "We are the masters. Now there is nothing that is not understood by us."
But it is not possible. Whatever you do, life is a mystery and is going to remain a mystery."