Why am I not curious about anything anymore

Satyam Shivam Sundram, Chapter #3

Question 1

BELOVED OSHO,
WHY AM I NOT CURIOUS ABOUT ANYTHING ANYMORE?

Devageet, twelve hundred years ago there was a mystery school exactly like this. The mystery school belonged to one of the greatest Sufis, Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi. The Turkish word mevlana means Beloved Master; it has never been used for anyone else.
In front of his mystery school was written in bold letters: „This place is not for those who are only curious.“
Curiosity has no spiritual meaning.
Curiosity is something like itching in your mind: if you itch it goes; if you don’t itch it goes also.
Curiosity has no passion in it; it is very superficial. Just by the way, an inquiry, a question arises in you — but it is not your quest, you are not to dedicate your life in searching for the answer to it. You are not even going to commit yourself to the exploration.
Curiosity is cheap. If somebody answers, good; if nobody answers, that too is okay. You are not deeply interested… it is not arising out of your heart. Curiosity has to disappear before you can attain to a passionate inquiry into existence.
So, Devageet, it is not a bad sign, but a tremendously important indication that you are on the right path. The path does not belong to the curious ones; it belongs to those who are committed, dedicated, who are ready even to sacrifice their lives for the experience of truth. As the curiosity disappears you are no more a student, you become a disciple.
That’s the only difference between the student and a disciple. The student is only curious, gathering knowledge from all the sources without much concern. It is not his essential search, just gathering knowledge to cover up his ignorance. But the ignorance remains there, and the more it is covered, the more dangerous, because you start forgetting it. And a man who has forgotten his ignorance is a man utterly lost.
To go on remembering that you are ignorant is to go on remembering that the night is not over and your morning has not yet come — that you have to go a long way still before the darkness will disappear and you will see the first signs on the horizon of the sun rising with all its colors and all its beauty and all its blessings.
The curious person is not at all accountable for anything deep. The moment you become passionately interested to know, it becomes a question of life and death. Without knowing, your life seems to be just a desert without any oasis anywhere. You have to know; only then will your life have some significance, some meaning, some relevance, some reason to go on existing.
But the disciple is only a beginning, not the end — but the right beginning. A moment comes when your passionate longing to know turns into still deeper waters. It becomes a longing not just to know, but to be.
Knowledge is always something there; there is a distance between you and the known. You are not one with it; the knower is separate from the known. That is the state of knowledge. It cannot quench your thirst. The water is there, you are there, but there is no connecting link. Your thirst will become even more fiery.
That great moment also comes in the life of the disciple when he drops the quest for knowing and starts the quest for being.
The curious is interested only in information.
The disciple is interested in knowledge.
The devotee is interested in transformation. He is not contented to know the truth; he will be contented only when he becomes the truth.
And in fact it is just poverty of language that I have to use the word `becoming‘. No one ever becomes the truth, because everyone is already the truth. Truth is your very being, not your becoming. It is not a process, it is not a path that has to be traveled, it is not some faraway goal that you have to reach.
Truth is something in your innermost being that has always been there from eternity to eternity whether you know it or not. Whether you realize it or not, whether you recognize it or not, it does not matter; it is there.
The devotee does not become the truth, he discovers that he is the truth. And this discovery is the greatest discovery possible for human consciousness.
So it is perfectly good that you are not curious about anything anymore. It is a sign of maturity, of moving from the state of the student to the disciple. And as I know you, Devageet, you have already moved even from the state of the disciple to the ultimate glory of being a devotee. Your quest, your inquiry is no more a dry exploration. It has become your love, it has become your very heartbeat. Naturally, all curiosity will disappear.
One day you will realize that even to know about truth, to know about godliness, to know about beauty… you are no more interested in knowing. Knowing about water is not going to help. Even knowing it scientifically, that it consists of oxygen and hydrogen, is not going to quench your thirst.
The most glorious moment on the path comes when your whole interest and passion becomes concentrated on a single point of discovering yourself, of discovering that you have always been, you are, even in this moment, and irrespective of whether you understand or not, you will remain always your authentic, your essential, your existential being. It contains all:
Satyam, shivam, sundram.
The truth, the godliness and the tremendous beauty that arises from the recognition of your being truth, of your being part of a divine existence. Your every gesture becomes a dance, your every silence becomes a song, your words become aflame with a new fire, with a new light — your whole life becomes a source of a magnetic force.
Just a few days before, a child was born in France. The mother had been working in an atomic plant. While she was pregnant for nine months she was exposed to atomic radiation and the doctors and the surgeons were very interested to know how it had affected the child.
And they were surprised: the child was very healthy, very radiantly healthy. They were thinking he may be blind, they were thinking he may be crippled. Those people had never seen such a beautiful child, so alive and so vibrant.
But then there was another shock and surprise: as they put the child on the table, all the instruments of the surgeons and the doctors started moving towards the child. The child had become a magnetic force.
Exposure to continuous radiation in very minute doses has been found by Japanese scientists to be very healthgiving. Bigger doses can kill; as the quantity becomes bigger it becomes dangerous. A qualitative change comes in through greater quantity. At the very minimum, soft doses of radiation can create immense health and well-being.
One scientist in Japan has been working for twenty years in Hiroshima and Nagasaki on this particular project: Is there any possibility of a certain quantity of radiation being life-affirmative? When he came back after twenty years to the university he belongs to, his colleagues could not believe it. They had all aged twenty years and that man seemed to have become younger than when he had gone. He is sixty-five, but he looks forty-five. He had discovered a tremendous thing.
He loves me immensely, and he has sent me a few small things. Just a small bottle of radioactive material… he has been using it for one year. He just puts it in his bathtub and the water becomes radioactive, but in a very soft and minimum dose. He has sent me a belt that he has been using for one year; it is filled with radioactive material from Hiroshima, and that belt, he feels, has taken away his old age, has taken away his diseases.
He was immensely concerned about my health, and he is going to come here. I have not used those things that he has sent, because what is a soft dose to one person may be too much to another. I have a very delicate physical structure, so I am waiting for him first to see the difference between me and himself, and then to decide.
As you move from the disciple to the state of the devotee, suddenly you start radiating something that has been dormant in you for centuries. You become a magnet — not an ordinary magnet, but a spiritual magnet. People will start moving towards you, not knowing why, but experiencing a tremendous desire to be with you and a great feeling of well-being and a great turning inwards.
I had started my journey alone, and without informing anybody I found that my caravan is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. People from faraway lands around the world have come, wondering why they are coming, not knowing the inner pull.
Devageet has the heart of a small child, utterly innocent. His transformation from disciplehood to the glorious space of being a devotee has come to him very naturally, very spontaneously, without any effort on his part. Just being in my presence, just being with me he has moved millions of light-years.
It is natural, Devageet, that your curiosities will disappear. Soon you will find another thing disappearing — your longing for knowledge. These are good indications of coming back home.
Perhaps just one step more and you will have forgotten curiosities, questions, quest for knowledge, and you will simply relax in the new light that you have found within yourself, perfectly at ease, cool and calm, not a single worry in the world, at ease with the trees and the birds and the ocean and the stars.
You love to laugh, you have a great sense of humor, and according to me all the religions in the past have missed the great religious quality of the sense of humor. The reason was that they were all against life, they could not be for laughter; they were all against love, how they could be in favor of laughter? They were life-denying, not life-affirming ideologies.
Hence you don’t see a single instance in the life of Jesus when he would have laughed. Even before he was crucified he lived like he was continuously being crucified. The crucifixion of Jesus seems to be the ultimate outcome: this guy will never be satisfied unless he is crucified.

„Why were you kissing my young daughter in that dark corner last night?“ said the angry father.
„Now that I have seen her in the daylight,“ said Ernie, „I sort of wonder myself.“

In the darkness you have been curious and you have been many more things, but in the light you start sort of wondering, „What have I been doing?“

It was the couple’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and the wife said, „Darling, you have been a very good husband over the years and I would like to show you my appreciation. Is there anything that you would like on this special day?“
The husband thought for a while and then said, „Yes, actually there is. You have always forbidden me to look into the top drawer of your cupboard. I would really like to see what is in there.“
His wife agreed and he opened it. Inside there were two eggs and about ten thousand dollars in cash.
„What are the eggs for?“ he inquired.
„Well,“ said his wife, „I guess it’s time you should know. Every time I was unfaithful to you, I put an egg in the drawer.“
„Twice in twenty-five years,“ smiled the husband, „that’s understandable. But what is all that money?“
„Well, darling,“ she replied, „Each time I had a dozen eggs, I sold them.“

Devageet, it is very good not to be curious about unnecessary things, because one never knows….