Viha magazine Nov/Dec 2013 | Page 31

Letting Go BYJAYADIP It’s a brilliantly clear morning on a steep Himalayan road. O u r Enfield motorbike just overtook some cars, too fast for the sharp bend ahead... The truck appears around the cor‑ ner, its width taking more than half of the road. We are n o t wearing helmets. The centrifugal force pulls us...no chance to escape! This is it! Suddenly time stops. I . ‘ 3;, realize this life is over ‐ and guess what, it feels derful! I can still recall this blissful m o m e n t of being at the end of physical life. "Let go,” i s a m a n t r a i n the Osho world. A t the m o m e n t of the accident I am encountering it for real. Letting go of the body and everything that made up Jayadip, I am thrown into the eternity of everlasting “Now I am free.” While flying the soul commands me, “You have to roll!” And the lights go off. "Jaya! Jaya!” The voice of my unharmed beloved calls me back into my body. This was n o t my first close encounter of looking into the eye of death. But it had by far the biggest impact. I had been holding the belief that I can control my life, but the idea was crushed and destroyed in the grill of that truck, while o u r bodies flew past the lorry. In that eternal five-meter flight, my automatic ego-pilot admitted an utter inability to cope with the situation. The system was taken over by the authen‑ tic driver of t r u e self. Instead of jamming my unprotected skull into the sharp rocks at the bank of the road, the body ‑ following the command from the beyond ‐‐ rolled and landed with all the force absorbed by the feet. That was a hard landing into the unity of spirit‑ matter. It has made me think that such fusion through experiential understanding might have been behind the violent acts of Zen Master Ma Tzu, when he threw disciples o u t of the window. While an angel, who miraculously appeared as a doctor in this remote mountain area, prevented me from bleeding to death, the space of letting go con‑ tinued. And what is "letting go” other than allow‑ ing? My damaged right hand forced me to accept help from others for months ‐‐ a hard lesson in, non-doing ‐ an experience radically different from just reading about it. My second life has never been the same as the one before. Ten years later I am still growing into it. I used to be an angry fight