Be the master of your mind

Junaid, a famous mystic, was walking through the town market-place with his disciples. They saw a man dragging his cow by a rope. Junaid told the man to wait and turned to the disciples and said: “Surround this man and the cow. I am going to teach you something.”

The man with the cow was curious to know what Junaid had in mind. Junaid asked his disciples “Who is bound to whom? Is the cow bound to this man or is this man bound to this cow?” The disciples said without hesitation: “Of course, the cow is bound to the man. The man is the master, he is holding the rope. The cow has to follow him wherever he goes. He is the master and the cow is the slave.”

To this, Junaid said: “Now, watch me.” He took out a pair of scissors from his bag and cut the rope. The cow started to run away from its master.

The man ran after the cow, and Junaid said: “Now, look what is happening! Do you see who the master is? The cow is not interested at all in this man. The cow, in fact, is escaping from the master.” The master was very angry with these words of Junaid and said: “What kind of experiment is this?” But Junaid said to his disciples: “This is the case with your mind. All the nonsense that you are carrying inside is not interested in you. You are interested in it, you are keeping it together somehow — you are going mad keeping it all together.”

The moment you lose interest in all the nonsense filled in your head, the moment you understand the futility of it, it will start to disappear; like the cow it will escape, Osho wrote in The Sun Rises in the Evening.

There is no need to stop the mind from thinking nonsensical things. All one needs to do is to become disinterested in its mumbo jumbo. Then the rope will be cut. That is the real meaning of sanyas: to become disinterested in the mind. That is
the meaning of real vairagya, detachment. It has nothing to do with renouncing the world, and everything to do with cutting the rope to the mind.