The greatest art in the world is to be a disciple. It cannot be compared to anything. It is unique and incomparable. Nothing like it exists in any other relationship, nothing like it can exist.
To be a disciple, to be with a master, is to move into the unknown. You cannot be very aggressive there. If you are aggressive, the unknown will never be revealed to you. It cannot be revealed to an aggressive mind. The very nature of it is such that you have to be receptive, not aggressive.
The search for truth is not an active search, it is a deep passivity – in your deep passivity you will receive. But if you become too active and concerned, you will miss. It is like being a womb, it is feminine; you receive the truth as a woman receives a pregnancy. Remember this… then many things will become easier to understand.
To be near a master is to be just a passivity, absorbing whatsoever the master gives or whatsoever the master is – not asking. The moment you start asking you have become aggressive, the receptivity is lost, you have become active. The passive, the feminine, is no longer there. Nobody has ever reached the truth as a male – aggressive, violent. That’s not possible. You reach very silently. In fact, you wait and truth reaches you. The truth seeks you, like water seeks some hollow ground, moves downwards, finds a place, and becomes a lake.
An active mind is too filled with itself; an active mind thinks that it knows what truth is. One has only to ask, at least the question is known; only for the answer does one have to seek and search.
But when you become passive, even the question is not known. How to ask? What to ask? For what to ask? There is no question, one cannot do anything else but wait. This is patience – and this is infinite patience – because it is not a question of time, it is not a question of you waiting for a few months, or a few years. If you have patience for a few years, that won’t help, because a mind that thinks that it has to wait for three years is not, in fact, waiting. He is looking actively, to when the three years are over, then he can jump, be aggressive, and ask; then he can demand that the period of waiting be over, that now he is entitled to know. There is nothing like that. Nobody is ever entitled to know the truth.
Suddenly the moment comes when you are ready, and your patience has become not of time, but of eternity; you are not waiting for something, but simply waiting, because the waiting is so beautiful; the waiting itself is such a deep meditation, the waiting itself is such a tremendous achievement – who bothers about anything else? When the waiting has become so total, so intense, so whole, that time disappears and the waiting takes the quality of eternity, then immediately you are ready. You are not entitled, remember – you cannot ask. You are simply ready and you are not even aware that you are ready. Because the very awareness will be a hindrance to your readiness; the very awareness will show that the ego is there, watching in the corner, hiding somewhere.
And the ego is always aggressive, whether hiding or not hiding, apparent or not apparent. Even hiding in the deepest corner of the unconscious, the ego is aggressive. And when I say that to become totally passive is the art of being a disciple, I mean – dissolve the ego. Then there is nobody who is asking, demanding, then there is simply nobody – you are a vacant house, a deep emptiness, simply waiting. And suddenly, all that you could have asked for is given to you, without you asking for it.
~ OSHO – The grass grows by itself