Osho on Ekido (Zen Master) – Only a Zen master beats his disciples

Be ready to die; only then can you be reborn into an altogether different dimension. That dimension is the dimension of the divine. Don’t protect yourself — your protection is your undoing; don’t try to safeguard. Near a master be insecure because he is your security. Be unsafe, leave everything to him and wait for his hit; any moment it can descend on you. But if you have not surrendered it will not descend, because no master is interested in hitting you, no master is interested in killing you. Masters are interested only in making you fully enlightened, and that can happen only when your death and your awareness meet — a very difficult, very rare combination.

A master can see when you are going to die. It is written, because your body has a fixed span; it can be read. An astrologer may miss it; a palmist may not be able to read it because you are such a liar that even your palm lies. You are so deceptive that even your forehead will not say the truth. And you are so afraid of death that unknowingly, unconsciously, you hide the knowledge of it in the innermost chamber. If you are a true person, authentic, you yourself will become aware of when you are going to die.

Zen masters have been forecasting their deaths. They can always tell when they are going to die, but even then people don’t believe them. How can we believe that you can know death? — we have hidden it so deep, and we never look at it.

Astrology may fail because it is an outer science, reading something from the outer towards the inner. Palmistry may fail because it cannot be very certain. Your hands cannot be believed, you cannot be believed; your whole body lies. And the lines on your palm can be changed very easily. For fifteen days think of suicide and your life line will be broken. Continuously, for fifteen days, don’t think of anything else, just think of suicide, of committing suicide, picturing, dreaming. Within fifteen days your life line will be broken.

The mind can create or change. If you go to a palmist and he says within three months you are going to die, he may have misinterpreted, but if this idea settles deep in you, you will die in three months. And within three months your life line will be finished. Your hand is not influencing your mind, your mind is continuously influencing your hand.

I have heard about one Egyptian king. He was very much afraid of death; he was very weak and ill and always on his death bed. He came to know about one astrologer who predicted the death of one of his minsters, and exactly on time, the minister died.

The king thought, “this man is dangerous.” The king thought, “This man has done something like black magic. He has killed, and to allow this man to be alive is dangerous — he can do the same to me.”
He called the astrologer and asked him, “Tell me something about my death. When am I going to die?”

The astrologer looked at the king’s face and felt something dangerous; the king was very ferocious. He suspected something, so he made the chart, studied it, and then said, “You will die after I have died, within one week.”
So the king called all his doctors to look after this man. A palace was created for him with the best of food and of everything. The greatest doctors were called, just in his service, and told, “Preserve him, because he says if he dies within seven days….” It is said that the king lived very long because that man was alive; he was a very healthy man. And the king died only when that man died; within a week the king was dead.

Your mind goes on changing, and if your mind is a liar, don’t go to any palmist; the palmist will be deceived. But you cannot deceive a master because he never reads your palm, he never looks at your forehead, he is not worried about your stars; he looks deep in you. He knows the exact moment of your death, and if you surrender the death can be used. This story is beautiful, meditate on it. The same can happen to you but much readiness is needed, ripeness is needed, and surrender.

Source – Osho Book “A Bird on the Wing”