Subtle Music In Your Soul

     Only one who,lives life truly, one day comes to the point where a new desire for life beyond arises. see the difference between the two. You can be afraid of death; then your desire will be false. If you have lived life and loved life, and loved it so much that you would like to know the unknown life also -- it is not out of fear of death, it is out of love for life -- then you start recognizing immediately whenever you come across an enlightened person. It is impossible to miss. You will recognize it immediately. This recognition needs no knowledge. It will simply happen.

     How do you recognize when a beautiful woman passes by? Have you any criterion? But if you have desire, suddenly you recognize that the woman is beautiful. If somebody asks you and tries to force you to confess to exactly what beauty is, you will be in trouble. You will not be able to define. Nobody has yet been able to define. Centuries and centuries of philosophers have been working on it, trying to define what beauty is and ultimately they decide it is undefinable. But still you feel beauty. If you talk to a small child whose desire has not yet ripened and you say, "This woman is beautiful," he will look at you surprised, shrug his shoulders and go on his way -- "Gone mad. All women are alike." for a small child, it makes no difference. He cannot see why one woman should be thought beautiful and another not.

     In fact, he knows only one woman who is beautiful: she is his mother -- and that too, for some other reasons, not for beauty. She is his nourishment, his life, so she is beautiful. But one day when his desire arises and his love ripens, he will start looking with different eyes. Then all women are not alike. Then certainly there are women who are beautiful; then certainly men who are tremendously appealing and magnetic. But one day again, when one becomes very alert, understanding, again all men and women. Then again the beauty and ugliness does not matter. Then again duality is transcended.

OSHO "The Beloved" volume one