An Interview With Carol Neiman, Editor-in-Chief of Osho International - Page 5
© Elizabeth Bissette
Q: There is a card in the deck that represents past lives and also one that represents clinging to the past. Are past lives an important concept in Zen?
A: I've never seen anywhere that past lives are a particularly important concept in Zen. And when Osho has spoken about it, he has emphasized very much that although past lives are a reality for him, and he remembers his own and can even see them in others, it's not useful to "believe" in them or to give them too much importance. It's a helpful concept primarily, in my personal experience, to make sense of certain phenomena that might happen to us along the way. That strong sense that we have known somebody or been somewhere before, even though we have not. Or that there is something operating in a situation or relationship that seems so utterly primal and shattering that we can't imagine what's behind it. So aha, maybe it's something from another lifetime, acknowledge that and move on.
In the Osho Zen Tarot it's a card to explore ancient patterns that we might be getting caught up in patterns that because of their very ancientness might be more deeply etched in the unconscious than others. And therefore might require a little more work to be able to see clearly and disperse.
Q: The Osho Zen is designed to reflect the now. Can you explain what the now is and why it is important?
A: I think you've just asked one of those ultimate questions! The sort that can't be answered in word; but I sense that most of us have experienced it, even if we can't describe it. Now is what happens when the mind stops, say coming suddenly upon something, or someone, incredibly beautiful. Sometimes making love, now happens. Osho says, very beautifully, that now is eternity penetrating time. Now is the only importance there is. The present is not part of time. Of course ordinarily in the schools, colleges and the universities you have been taught that time has three tenses: past, present and future. That is absolutely wrong -- wrong according to those who know. Past and future are time, but present is not time. The present belongs to eternity. Past and future belong to the world of the relative, the world of change. Between the two penetrates the beyond,the transcendental, and that is the present. Now is part of eternity.
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