The Greatest Miracle*

To do a miracle is great, but not great enough. To do a miracle is still to be in the world of the ego. A real greatness is so ordinary that it claims nothing; it is so ordinary that it never tries to prove anything.

A man came to Lin Chi and said, “My master is a great psychic. What do you say about your Master? What can your Master do, what miracles?”

Lin Chi asked, “What miracles has your Master been doing?”

The disciple said, “One day he told me to go to the other bank of the river, and I stood there with a piece of paper in my hand. The river was very wide, almost one mile. He was standing on the other bank and from there he started writing with a fountain pen, and the writing came on my paper. This I have seen myself, I am a witness! What can your Master do?”

Lin Chi said, “When he is hungry he eats, and when he is sleepy he goes to sleep.”

The man said, “What are you talking about? You call these miracles? Everybody is doing that!”

Lin Chi said, “Nobody is doing that. When you sleep you do a thousand and one things. When you eat you think a thousand and one things. When my Master sleeps he simply sleeps; no tossing, no turning, not even a dream. Only sleep exists in that moment, nothing else. And when he feels hungry he eats. He is always wherever he is.”

What is the point of writing from one bank of a river to the other bank? It is just foolish. Only foolish people would be interested in it. What is the point?

Somebody went to Ramakrishna and said, “My Master is a great man. He can walk on the water.”

Ramakrishna said, “Foolish! Because I can simply go to the ferryman, and for just two pennies he takes me to the other side. Your Master is a fool. Go and make him aware that he should not waste his life. It can be done so easily.”

But the mind is always hankering. The mind is nothing but hankering, desiring something to happen. Sometimes it is thinking about money, to have more money, to have bigger houses, to have more respectability, to have more political power.

Then you turn towards spirituality; the mind remains the same. Now you want to have more psychic powers—telepathy, clairvoyance, and all sorts of nonsense. But the mind remains the same - you want more. The same game continues....

Now it is telepathy, or clairvoyance, or psychic powers: “If you can do this, I can do more than this. I can read people’s thoughts thousands of miles away.”

Life in itself is a miracle, but the ego is not ready to accept that. It wants to do something special, something that nobody else is doing, something extraordinary.

* - excerpt from “Osho Transformation Taro”.

Updated on 01-10-2018