According to Osho,
“There are two ways to disassociate yourself from false identities.
You are not what you have been thinking, feeling, imagining, projecting.
What you are is simply the fact of being aware.
Whatsoever happens, you remain just the awareness. You are awareness – that identity cannot be broken. That identity cannot be negated. All else can be negated and thrown.
Awareness remains the ultimate substratum, the ultimate base. You cannot deny it, you cannot negate it, you cannot disassociate yourself from it.
So this is the process: That which cannot be thrown, that which cannot be made separate from you, is you; that which can be separated, you are not.
Pain is there; a moment later it may not be there – but you will be. Happiness has come, and it will go; it has been, and it will not be – but you will be. The body is young, then the body becomes old…all else comes and goes – guests come and go – but the host remains the same.
So the Zen mystics say: Do not be lost in the crowd of the guests.
Remember your host-ness. That host-ness is awareness. That host-ness is the witnessing consciousness. What is the basic element that remains always the same in you? Only be that, and disidentify yourself from all that comes and goes.
But we become identified with the guest. Really, the host is so occupied with the guest, he forgets.
Mulla Nasruddin has given a party for some friends and some strangers. The party is very boring, and half the night is just lost and it goes on. So one stranger, not knowing that Mulla is the host, says to him, “I have never seen such a party, such nonsense. It seems never-ending, and I am so bored that I would like to leave.”
Mulla says, “You have said what I was going to say to you. I myself have never seen such a boring and nonsense party before, but I was not so courageous as you are. I was also thinking to leave it and just run away.” So they both run away.
Then, in the street Mulla remembers and says, “Something has gone wrong, because now I remember: I am the host! So please excuse me, I have to go back.”
This is happening to us all: the host is lost, the host is forgotten every moment.
The host is your witnessing self. Pain comes and pleasure follows; there is happiness, and there is misery. And each moment, whatsoever comes you are identified with it, you become the guest. Remember the host. When the quest is there, remember the host.
There are so many types of guests: pleasurable, painful; guests you would like, guests you would not like to be your guests; guests you would like to live with, guests you would like to avoid – but all guests.
Remember the host. Constantly remember the host. Be centered in the host. Remain in your host-ness; then there is a separation. Then there is a gap, an interval – the bridge is broken. The moment this bridge is broken, the phenomenon of renunciation happens. Then you are in it, and not of it. Then you are there in the guest, and still a host. You need not escape from the guest – there is no need.
Osho, The Passion For the Impossible
The phrase “Always remember the host” is an excellent aid to remembrance. When we begin to sway between intense emotions, it reminds us to return to ourselves—to our innermost center, which is the conscious Self. And among the guests we host, there is one we speak about less often, because the suffering it brings lacks drama. Once a privilege of the wealthy in the past, it now increasingly visits the soul of the modern person in moments of saturation or monotony.
This guest is boredom.
I believe that precisely because of the lack of drama in the suffering associated with boredom, we tend to underestimate its important role as a driving force in human spiritual growth. And in fact, a great many of the changes in our lives occur precisely because we have reached the point of saturation—of having had enough. After that, we let go of the thing we have been clinging to, simply because we have overeaten that particular food. Obsessive thoughts begin to fall away naturally, simply because the mind has grown nauseated by them.
Absorbed in the tasks of everyday life, driven by fears of survival and by the desire for self-validation or for the experience of one or another earthly pleasure, we do not always succeed in recognizing the experience of boredom and tedium. Yet it is there. Like the other side of a coin, it inevitably complements its opposite—curiosity, inspiration, the sense of meaning and purpose. The two ends of the pendulum between which the energy of the mind inevitably moves are interest and boredom, stagnation and movement. Only when we become conscious of this fact are we able to remember the host.
And so, first comes immersion in the world of the sensory—in the pleasures of the earthly, the struggle for survival, and the battle for success. Later comes the feeling of meaninglessness and stagnation—a very painful experience, in fact. Only after this experience, too, reaches critical intensity do things reverse themselves, according to the principle of enantiodromia: the creative impulse and the sense of meaning return, but this time they arise from a deeper place.
David Gordon describes this as letting go of the ego’s strategy of escaping reality and embracing the basic existential fact—loneliness. To distinguish between these two, Osho speaks of the difference between action and activity: action comes from the host, activity comes from the guests.
“Remember the host” is a formula for alchemizing the boredom of everyday monotony into a spiritual means of awareness and presence. Then, even if the circumstances of life remain the same, the gaze that perceives them is no longer the same. It is no coincidence that many meditation techniques are based on performing a monotonous action (for example, the repetition of mantras), which creates the conditions for consciousness to move beyond the visible into another level of perception.
However, it is not necessary to chant mantras in order to do this. In life there are always enough situations from which we would like to escape because they are tedious and boring, yet we are nonetheless required to carry them out. Precisely these situations offer a wonderful opportunity for awareness through presence—something we might also describe in another way:
“The guests come and go, but remember the host.”
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
