What Are You?

Yesterday I was reading someone's life story. When he first arrived to study at Oxford University, he was very shy and bashful. The clerk asked him, “what do you want to study?” So he said theology.

But the clerk understood geology. He was a shy man. The clerk wrote geology. He saw that it was geology, but he was so shy that he didn't say anything. He said “okay.” He studied geology.

After studying geology six years he graduated with a gold medal, then he revealed to people that it was a complete mishap:

“I had come to study theology and unfortunately became a geologist.”

And no trivial geologist — a gold-medalist. Now he was trapped for his whole life, now there was no remedy for it.

And then he said, “No one knows the troubles I passed through in those six years. In complete bashfulness and hesitation one year passed. Then I thought that telling it now would be even more idiotic. Why did you waste a year? Then two years passed, now if would be even more idiotic. And then I got one degree, and it was more difficult yet. Then I thought, what was to happen has happened. It was God's wish that I become a geologist, so I will die as a geologist.”

He became one of the world's renowned geologists. He went for devotional singing, but ended up ginning cotton!

What are you?

When I read this I remembered an accident in my life. When I went to be admitted to college I forgot to bring a pen. So I waited to get a pen from someone.

A young man was standing there with his pen, filling out his form, but he was thinking long and hard. I asked, “Brother, while you are thinking, lend me your pen.”

I filled out my form. He looked at my form, said okay and filled his out exactly the same way. I asked:

“You copied my form?”

He said, “I was thinking hard what to fill in? What subject should I study? You have been very kind by coming here. I found out which subject I should fill out.”

As I had filled in philosophy, he also filled in philosophy.

Now he has become a philosophy professor. And the whole cause was that he had a pen and I didn't.

This is why.

Now if you ask him, “who are you?” He will say “I am a professor, a professor of philosophy.”

This is accidental. You are not this, you are that which you were in your mother's womb, or even before that. You are that which you are in your deepest sleep — not a doctor, not an engineer, not a professor.

You are that which you will be even after death. You are being. This is your nature, your inner nature.

From Osho – Death is Divine