Category: on Zorba the Buddha/The New Man

The Decisive Moment is at Hand – Osho

The coming few years are going to be very significant years in man’s history. Now a handful of people will be of no help in matters spiritual. Unless a mighty spirituality is born, unless a mighty and massive spiritual movement sweeps the earth, making its impact on millions of people, it will be impossible to save the world from the mire of materialism. It will be a very, very momentous moment in man’s life; the coming fifty years are going to be fateful and decisive. Either religion will live, or stark irreligion, all that is against religion, will live.

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These fifty years will also decide about Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, Jesus, Mohammed, Rama and the rest of them. All these luminaries will be on one side of the scales while on the other side will be the large crowd of insane politicians, materialists and other ignorant people bent on deluding themselves and others too. They are in huge numbers, while only a handful of people will be on one side of the arraignment. And in fifty years’ time the decision will be made.

The struggle that has been going on from time immemorial has reached its moment of decision. And looking at the situation as it obtains at present, there is not much hope. But I am not disappointed because it seems to me that very soon a simple and natural and easy way can be found which will revolutionize the lives of millions of people spiritually.

A few individuals can be of no help in the present times. In olden times it was enough if only one person became enlightened. Now this won’t do. In view of the tremendous explosion of population taking place in the world, a few individuals cannot do a thing. Now something tangible can be possible only if, commensurate with the huge population, hundreds of thousands of people are influenced and involved in spiritualism. And it is possible as I see it. If a few people form a nucleus and begin the work, then India can play a significant role in that momentous fight. No matter how poor and miserable, how degraded and slavish, how misled and misguided this country has been, yet this land has some well-preserved treasures with it. Down the centuries such people have walked this land that their light, their fragrance, their longings have left their vibes in the air, have left their imprint on every blade of grass here. Man has of course gone wrong, but the dust of this land still remembers Buddha’s feet walking it. Man of this country has gone wrong, but the trees still cherish the memory that Mahavira had once stood in their shade. Man has really gone wrong, but the seas surrounding this country still know a different voice they had heard in the past. Man has no doubt gone astray, but the skies of this country are still full of hopes. Everything is there, only man has to come back home.

Of late, I have been constantly praying with the hope that collective explosion in the lives of millions of people may be possible. And you can be of great help in this endeavor. Such explosion in your own life will have immense value not only for you, but for all mankind. With this hope and prayer that you will not only light your own lamps, but that your light will help other extinguished lamps to be lighted, I bid you farewell. I am grateful to you for having listened to me in peace and with such love, and I bow down to God sitting within each one of you. Please accept my salutation.

-Osho

From In Search of the Miraculous, Discourse #8

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation 

You can read the entire book online at the Osho Library. 

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com. 

Both are Half Right, Half Wrong – Osho

I have just arrived from the West—Paris—where I had heard about you and read some of your books.  They touched me very deeply and one question arose in me:

How is your spiritual dimension and the work you do on a spiritual level capable of conducting and enlightening the behavior of a man involved in action on a materialistic level, for instance, urbanism, struggle against hunger, thirst and all other distresses?

Jacques Daumal, I do not divide existence into these old dichotomies, the materialistic plane and the spiritual plane. There is only one reality: matter is its visible form and spirit its invisible form. Just like your body and your soul— your body cannot be without your soul and your soul cannot be without your body.

In fact, the whole split of the past has been a heavy burden on the human heart — the split between body and soul. It has created a schizophrenic humanity. As I see it, schizophrenia is not a disease that happens once in a while to a person. The whole humanity up to now has been schizophrenic. It is very rarely, only once in a while, that a man like Jesus, or Buddha, or Mahavira, or Socrates, or Pythagoras, or Lao Tzu, has been able to escape from this schizophrenic pattern of our living.

To divide reality into antagonistic, inimical realism is dangerous because it is dividing man. Man is a miniature universe; if you divide the universe the man is divided, if you divide the man the universe is divided. And I believe in the undivided, organic unity of existence.

To me there is no distinction between the spiritual and the material. You can be spiritual and function on the materialistic plane—and your functioning will be more joyous, your functioning will be more aesthetic, more sensitive. Your functioning on the materialistic plane will not be tense, will not be full of anguish and anxiety.

Once a man came to Buddha and asked, “The world is in such a distress, people are in so much misery — how can you manage to sit silently and so joyously?”

Buddha said, “If somebody is suffering from fever, has the doctor also to lie down by his side and suffer? Has the doctor out of compassion to get the infection and lie down by the side of the patient and be feverish? Is that going to help the patient? In fact, whereas there was only one person ill, now there are two persons ill — the world is doubly ill! The doctor need not be ill to help the patient; the doctor has to be healthy to help the patient. The healthier he is, the better; the healthier he is, the more help is possible through him.”

I am not against working on the material plane. Whatsoever work you are doing — urbanism, struggle against hunger, struggle for ecological balance, struggle against poverty, exploitation, oppression, struggle for freedom — whatsoever your work on the material plane; it is going to be benefited, tremendously benefited, if you become more spiritually rooted, centered, calm, quiet, cool, because then the whole quality of your work will be changed. Then you will be able to think in a more cool manner, and you will be able to act more gracefully. Your understanding of your own inner being will be of tremendous help to help others.

I am not a spiritualist in the old sense and I am not a materialist either in the old sense. The Charvakas in India, Epicurus in Greece, Karl Marx and others, they are materialists. They say only matter is true and consciousness is only an epiphenomenon, a by-product; it has no reality of its own. And then there are people like Shankara, Nagarjuna, who say just the same thing in a reverse manner. They say the soul is real and the body is unreal, maya, illusion, an epiphenomenon, a by-product; it has no reality of its own.

To me, both are half right, half wrong. And a half-truth is far more dangerous than a whole lie — at least it is whole. A whole lie has a certain beauty, but a half-truth is ugly — ugly and dangerous too — ugly because it is half. It is like cutting a man into two parts.

Just the other day I was reading a story:

It was very hot, and a man with his young daughter was passing by the side of a swimming pool of an intercontinental hotel. It was so hot, the girl said, “I would like to go in the pool and cool myself.”

The father said, “Okay, I will sit underneath the tree, and you go ahead.”

But she was stopped immediately by the guard and he said, “This pool is restricted. It is not allowed here for Jews… and you look Jewish.”

The father said, “Listen: I am Jewish. My daughter’s mother is not Jewish, she is a Christian, so my daughter is half Jew, half Christian. Can you allow her to take a bath only up to the waist?”

Dividing man is dangerous, because man is an organic unity. But this is how down the ages it has been done, and now it has become almost a routine thinking, a conditioning.

Daumal, you are still thinking in the old categories. I don’t belong to any school — the school of the materialists or the school of the so-called spiritualists. My approach is total, it is holistic. I believe that man is both together, spiritual and material. In fact, I have to use the words ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ just because they have always been used. In fact man is psychosomatic, not material and spiritual, because that ‘and’ creates duality. There is no ‘and’ between the material and the spiritual, not even a hyphen. Man is material-spiritual — I use it as one word, material-spiritual. And both the sides….

Spiritual means the center of your being and the material means the circumference of your being. The circumference cannot be there if there is no center, and the center cannot be there if there is no circumference.

My work here is to help your center become a clarity, a purity. Then that purity will be reflected on the circumference too. If your center is beautiful your circumference is bound to become beautiful, and if your circumference is beautiful your center is bound to be affected by that beauty.

My sannyasin is a total man, he is a new man. The effort is that he will be beautiful from both the sides. […]

We are trying to create a harmony, a new synthesis.

-Osho

From The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, V.3, Discourse #2

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Your Responsibility is Great – Osho

You spoke the other day about the great responsibility we have to get your words out to the world. Can you say some more?

The most important need of humanity today is to be made aware that its past has betrayed it. There is no point in continuing the past, it will be suicidal.

A new humanity is absolutely and urgently needed.

The new humanity will not be a society in the old sense, where individuals are only parts of it. The new humanity will be a meeting of individuals, where individuals are the masters and society is to serve them. It will have many different aspects to it. It will not have so many religions; it will have only a religious consciousness. It will not have a despot God as a creator, because that implies the slavery of man. It will have godliness as a quality of ultimate achievement, a quality of enlightenment. God will be spread all over – in everything, in every being.

The individual, for the first time, will not be programmed; he will be helped to be himself. He will not be given any ideals, any discipline, any certain pattern. He will be given only a tremendous love for freedom, so that he can sacrifice everything, even his own life, but he cannot sacrifice freedom. The new individual will not be repressive; he will be natural, with no inhibitions, expressive of everything that he has. Just the way plants express themselves in different colors, in different fragrances, each individual will be doing the same.

The new individual will not have the false idea that all human beings are equal. They are not. They are unique, which is a far higher concept than equality. Although the new individuals will not be equal, they will have equal opportunity to develop their potential, whatever it is.

There will be no marriage; love will be the only law. Children will be part of the commune, and only the commune will decide who is capable of being a mother and who is capable of being a father. It cannot be at random and accidental. And it will be according to the needs of the earth. The new humanity will have an ecology in which nature is not to be conquered, but lived and loved.

We are part of it – how can we conquer it? It will not have any races, no distinctions between nations, between colors, castes. It will not have any nations, any states. It will have only a functional world government, and the world government will not be chosen by mediocre voters – because they necessarily chose people of their own category.

It will have a totally different pattern. Just as we don’t allow anybody to vote before he is twenty-one years old – he has to be adult – in exactly the same way, unless everybody is well-educated and has at least a bachelor’s degree, he will not be allowed to vote. And the people will vote, not for any party – because there will be no party at all, it will be a no-party system – people will vote directly for individuals.

An education minister, a foreign minister, an interior minister, a president – these people will stand on their individual merit. Just as no voter can have less than a bachelor’s degree, nobody can stand for any post who does not have a doctorate in that particular subject. So all those who will be standing for the post will be experts on the same subject, and the choice will be by the educated, by the intelligent.

And the government will not be in the old sense a government. It won’t have any power, it will be simply functional. It will be the servant of the society in the real sense, not only in words.

Life has so many dimensions, and politics has dominated them all. Looking at a newspaper, somebody on some other planet could not conceive what kind of people live on the earth – only politicians? Murderers? Suicides? Rapists? Criminals?  Because your newspapers are full of these people. And on top of everything is the politician.

Every creative dimension of life will be brought out into the light, and the ugly aspects don’t need to be advertised. If somebody has murdered, it should be brought to light – not to say that he was a criminal, but to show how the very psychology of the man, the upbringing of the man went wrong, and why he had to commit murder. In his place, with the same background, anybody would have done the same. So you are not condemning the person, you are condemning the training, the background, the upbringing; this is absolutely scientific.

Why does a man become a rapist? – Because his background was creating the energy to be a rapist… although he was trying to be a Baptist, he ended up being a rapist! So the negative part should be brought out, but the individual should never be condemned because no action is equal to the whole individual. The action is a small part of his whole life.

The newspapers should be full of creativity, positivity. Ninety percent of a newspaper should give coverage to musicians, poets, sculptors, dancers, actors, philosophers and only ten percent should be given to the politicians and the negative elements. The negative elements should be analyzed so the individual is not condemned. And the politicians should only be given space as information, not more than that. If they are doing something good it should be said, if they are doing something not good it should be said – but they should not be dominating our whole life.

The new humanity will have to change the whole structure of its education. It will not be ambitious; it will not create a desperate desire in everybody to become somebody powerful. On the contrary, it will create creators. It will create people who know how to rejoice. Its basic function should be to teach people the art of living, loving, laughing, the capacity to sing, dance, paint.

There will be people who have to be trained for technology, science, but even those who are being trained for technology and science or medicine should not be kept completely unconscious of the beautiful side of life. They should not become robots – because what you do, you become. If you are continuously researching about objects, soon you forget that you are a subject; you become an object.

And each individual who enters a school, college, or university should have hypnotic sessions in which he can be encouraged to meditate – so meditation comes from within him, it is not imposed from the outside. It is not compulsory to meditate, but it becomes compulsory to meditate because it is coming from the inside.

And that is the beauty of hypnosis, that it can put the seed in your very heart, and when things come from there you never feel that something has been forced on you. And things like meditation cannot be forced; then there is resentment. But hypnosis is a great art: it can help man drop all kinds of resentment, all kinds of jealousies, hatred, competition. It can clean man’s inner shrine so completely that everybody grows up and does not only grow old.

So when I said the word has to be spread, I meant that the new man is an absolute necessity. The old is dead or is dying… cannot survive long. And if we cannot produce a new human being, then humanity will disappear from the earth – and that will be ugly.

And I told you to spread the word because they are trying every hindrance to keep me from approaching people. But I will approach people. They are mediocre politicians: they cannot prevent me. They can delay me, but they cannot stop me unless some idiot goes absolutely mad and kills me.

In that case you have the word. And if I am not there, your responsibility becomes great. When I am here your responsibility is none; I can do it alone without any difficulty. But if I am not here, then your responsibilities tremendously increase. Then each of you has to represent me, and we have to see how many people they can crucify.

But the word has to go out because the word cannot be crucified. Ways and means have to be found for the word to reach to every corner of the earth, to every human being who can understand.

-Osho

From The Path of the Mystic, Discourse #34

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Beyond the Capacity of the Mind – Osho

For the past few weeks, I have been able to sit and allow my mind to be quiet –sometimes for only a second, but sometimes for longer. Since this has been happening, I have experienced many beautiful spaces, as if this quietness somehow invites the universe in. Inside these glimpses there is no doubt, no ‘me’ to doubt. Coming out, I doubt. I do not know whether this doubt comes from my mind or simply from an inner knowledge that there is yet so much more. 

Master, can I trust that I am moving into meditation, or is my mind cunning enough to make me believe that I am?

Antar Devopama, mind is capable of creating all kinds of illusions, hallucinations. But mind is not capable of creating the illusion of meditation, for the simple reason that meditation is an absence of mind. All other illusions and hallucinations need mind to be present; they are mind projections.

Only meditation is beyond the capacity of mind. Because it is beyond the mind, mind has no experience of meditation; it cannot delude you. If you are feeling meditative, silent, thoughtless, innocent, a pure space, you can trust that you have entered the temple of meditation.

Mind is certainly cunning, but there is a limit to that cunningness, and mind finds that limit in meditation. Meditation actually is the death of the mind; the mind cannot manage it. So if something of meditation is happening, you can trust it totally.

The questions arise only when you come back to the mind. Your meditation is only for a few moments, then you are back to the mind; and mind starts creating distrust. That is the nature of mind, to create distrust. It starts creating questions. But when you are in meditation – those few moments – mind cannot speak at all. For those few moments, mind virtually does not exist; its function stops.

A Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a Jewish rabbi met on a golf course and decided to bet on who would win their game. But first they had to decide what proportion of their winnings should be given back to God.

“Let us draw a small circle on the ground, throw our winnings up in the air, and what lands in the circle goes to God,” the Catholic priest suggested.

“No, let us draw a large circle,” said the Protestant minister, ”throw the money up, and what lands outside the circle will go to God.”

”Wait,” cried the rabbi. ”Forget all about circles. Let us throw the money up, and what stays up God can keep.”

Mind is very clever. But as far as meditation is concerned, mind is absolutely impotent.

Your question is, “For the past few weeks, I have been able to sit and allow my mind to be quiet – sometimes for only a second, but sometimes for longer. Since this has been happening, I have experienced many beautiful spaces, as if this quietness somehow invites the universe in. Inside these glimpses, there is no doubt, no ‘me’ to doubt. Coming out, I doubt. I do not know whether this doubt comes from my mind, or simply from an inner knowledge that there is yet so much more. Can I trust that I am moving into meditation, or is my mind cunning enough to make me believe that I am?”

Mind is not capable of that. But one thing more has to be remembered: that whatever beautiful experiences may be happening to you, your inner being knows perfectly well that there is yet so much more. Mind does not know that. In a way, mind is very poor. All its experiences are very mundane – about money, about power, about prestige, about borrowed knowledge, about a thousand and one things but they are all trivia.

Mind has no understanding, or even a suspicion that there exists a dreamland within you, a golden place. Mind cannot conceive what blissfulness is, what it is to be totally conscious, what constitutes ecstasy. Mind is not meant for that.

Make the division clear: mind is for the objective world – there it has tremendous capacity. The whole of science is a creation of the mind.

Meditation is for the inner world, the subjective. That’s why in the East science could not develop, and in the West, Gautam Buddhas could not be born. The West remained confined to the mind, reached to the deeper secrets of matter but could not manage even a single glimpse of the inner world. Rather than accepting its inability, the mind simply says there is no inner world. In that way, it can hide its impotence.

For centuries, the East worked only on meditation. Meditation cannot create technology. Meditation can give you tremendous experiences of your immortality, of the universal godliness, of an oceanic ecstasy. But meditation is incapable – in the same way as mind is incapable – of knowing anything about matter. That’s why, in the East, the mystics have denied the very existence of the outside world, saying it is maya, it is illusion.

It is the same logic. Mind denies the inner world – that there is no inner world, no spiritual world, no soul, nothing divine, all is solid matter. Meditation, on the other hand, in a similar way denies that there is anything real outside – the real is inside.

That’s why the East has remained poor – at least outwardly poor; its richness is of the inner. The West has become rich outwardly; its poverty has remained of the inner.

The man I conceive of in the future should not deny either; there is no need – there is no conflict, there is no contradiction. Mind is for matter, and matter is a reality not an illusion. Meditation is for consciousness, and consciousness is a higher reality – not a by-product of matter, or just a hypothesis; it is an experiential fact.

Without any exception, whoever has gone in has found consciousness.

I want the new man to rebel against the West and to rebel against the East, because they have divided man and they have divided man’s conception.

They both have created a certain kind of poverty, when man can be rich on both the sides. There is no conflict at all. You can meditate in a golden palace; the gold in the palace is not going to disturb your meditation.

There is no need to renounce the world; in fact, it is so surprising that the people who have called the world illusory have insisted on renouncing it. If it is illusory, what are you renouncing? If it does not exist, then where are you going? What is there to renounce? Your every sense says the world is real – it is just that your meditation is incapable of penetrating the objective reality.

If the world were really unreal, then renouncing the world would not have been considered something saintly, but something stupid. You don’t renounce your dreams in the morning – “I renounce all my dreams of the night, they were all unreal.” If they were unreal, what is there to renounce? I have never heard of anybody renouncing his dreams.

But all the mystics in the past have been calling the world unreal, and yet insisting on renouncing it, going to the mountains and to the deserts. There is some fear; there is some need to escape. And the fear is that their mind and all their senses insist on the reality of the world – which goes against their experience of meditation. They find themselves in a very great dilemma. Just to have a peaceful state, it is better to call one of the two illusory, and escape from it so that you are no longer split, in a dilemma, in any problem. They are trying to make life simple.

The scientist has been denying consciousness; he has been denying anything of the inner. It is so stupid because simple logic will say if there is something outer, the inner must exist. Without the inner, how can the outer exist? They are together, inevitable, inseparable.

But the scientist’s problem is the same, the same dilemma. His whole knowledge, experience, experiments and conclusions are about the objective world. He has to deny meditation because that becomes a distraction to him. If there is something like meditation, if there is something like a divine being within man, then all his great effort in physics, in chemistry and in biology becomes trivia. It is easier to say that there is no soul, no consciousness. This way, in the past, man has been solving his conflict. But in fact this has not solved anything, it has made him both in a way rich, and in a way poor.

My own perception for the new man is that he has to be rich on both sides, there is no need to be poor. He has to be rich in science, in technology, in whatever mind can do, and he has to be rich in meditation, in love, in ecstasy. And there is no need to create any contradiction. Mind’s function is limited, and meditation’s function is limited. Their spheres don’t overlap.

Devopama, there is certainly much more to experience, and this statement will remain true forever. Whatever you experience, you will find there is still much more ahead of you. The inner is as inexhaustible as the outer.

In the Middle Ages, religious people used to think that the earth was the center of the whole universe, and that all the stars were hanging around like lanterns to give light in the night when the sun sets – they were almost touchable, very close. As science grew more and more in its understanding, it was astounding to know that these stars are far away – the closest star is four light years away.

They had to invent a new measurement, the light year, because miles wouldn’t do. One light year is the measurement of a ray traveling in one year’s time, and the speed of light traveling is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. With that speed, the closest star can be reached in four years – and we have discovered almost four million stars. With the naked eye in the night, you see only about three hundred stars. You will be surprised, because you think you see thousands of stars… try to count!

Nobody has been able to count more than three hundred. Then he gets mixed up, then he starts forgetting whether he has taken this star into account or not. But scientists say the eyes cannot see more than three hundred stars, and there are four million.

And every day new stars are being discovered which are farther away, so far away that it becomes almost unimaginable. Stars have been found whose light started coming towards the earth when there was no earth… that means four billion years, and their light has not yet reached us – four billion years with that speed. And scientists say that there are stars which will never know that the earth ever existed, because by the time their light will reach it, the earth will be gone, the sun will be dead. They started the journey when the earth and the sun were not in existence, and they will reach when both are finished. They will never know that a planet like earth ever existed.

And scientists have been shocked and surprised because every day new stars go on bubbling up. As our instruments for measuring distance become more and more subtle and refined, new stars are discovered.

Albert Einstein, perhaps the only man in history who has devoted his whole life to the stars, finally said, “Their number is infinite, and above all they are running away with the same speed as light from some center which we don’t know about. They are all spreading farther and farther away.”

It seems perhaps the idea in the Middle Ages may have been an old, ancient idea, but stars were closer! In millions of years, they have run far away – and certainly the earth is not the center; it is so small that it is almost negligible. Even our great star, which is six thousand times bigger than the earth, is a mediocre star; there are stars thousands of times bigger than our sun. And science has not been able to find the center from which they are escaping in all directions.

Bertrand Russell has a beautiful story….

A Christian priest had a dream that he had died, and of course reached heaven. But he was very shocked because the doors of heaven were so big that he could not see where they ended. In all directions, as far as he could see, there was the door. And he himself, compared to the door, looked like an ant. He was very shocked: “This is very disrespectful. I was hoping that God would be here at the gate, and angels would be playing on their harps, ‘Allelujah!’”

The gate was closed. He knocked, but he himself wondered, “Who is going to hear?” The gate was so vast; his knock was such a small sound, almost inaudible. It took him three days continuously knocking.

Then Saint Peter opened a window and looked down. He had one thousand eyes. The priest immediately fell on his knees, and said, “God.”

Saint Peter said, “I’m not God, I’m just the gatekeeper. You must have heard, my name is Saint Peter. As far as God is concerned, I have not yet been able to see him. It is a very vast space. Although I have one thousand eyes, I have not yet been able, in two thousand years, to find him.”

The priest said, “This is unbelievable. What about Jesus Christ?”

Saint Peter said, “I have not found him either, the place is so big. I have been searching for two thousand years. And who are you?”

He said, “I am a Christian priest from the earth.”

Saint Peter said, “This won’t do. What is the index number of your earth, which earth? There are millions of earths; each star has its own solar system, has its own planets, its own moons, its own earths. So you give me the index number, and I will run to the library to find out from which earth you are coming.”

The priest said, “My God! I have never heard about any index number. I’m coming from the solar system.”

Saint Peter said, “Each star has its own solar system, and there are millions of solar systems. Again, you will have to give me the index number.”

It became a nightmare. There was no question of his getting a welcome. First, he had to give his identity; only then would the doors open. Saint Peter disappeared, telling him, “I’m going to the library. Perhaps the librarian can help me.”

Waiting, and waiting, and waiting… perhaps thousands of years passed… he woke up from this nightmare, and he said, “My God! It is better to be alive; I don’t want to go to such a heaven. I cancel all the prayers that I have made before. It is so humiliating.”

But this is the situation. To us, our earth looks so big; compared to the sun, it is nothing. To us, our sun looks so big; compared to the stars, it is nothing. And the stars compared to the universe are nothing – just soap bubbles.

Just as mind is getting more and more baffled as it is approaching into the deeper realms of objective reality, in the same way, meditation goes on and on – new spaces go on opening up. It is never that you come to a place at which you can say, “This is the dead end of the street.” There is no dead end of the street – neither inwards, nor outwards. Both are infinite.

Hence, the feeling coming to you that there is “yet so much more,” is absolutely correct – and it is going to remain relevant forever! It is not that one day you will say, “Now the journey is finished.”

There is no goal, there is only a beautiful pilgrimage. Make the most of it – outwardly and inwardly. Have all possible experiences, and move on.

Gautam Buddha used to end his sermons every day with the word charaiveti: move on, move on. Never stop and think that you have come to the end.

-Osho

From The Rebel, Discourse #2

The Rebel

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

You Become a Blessing – Osho

Western psychologists say that meditation is a subjective phenomenon and therefore much psychological research is not possible. Do you agree?

I do not agree, because no research is possible. You are saying, “Much psychological research is not possible.” That’s why I do not agree.

Man’s interiority, his subjectivity, cannot be trespassed. There is no way to make it an object of study. Research is absolutely impossible – even search has not been done, and you are thinking of research.

Man can experience his subjectivity on his own, but he cannot invite a researcher to go into him and to find out who he is. This is, by nature, impossible. And it is very fortunate that it is impossible – that your subjectivity, at least, is always private, always your freedom. No trespass is possible.

Yes, one can study one’s own interiority, and one can make an effort to explain in words what he has found within himself. Perhaps that may give you some idea of your own subjectivity – not exactly the same, but some glimpse, or at least the possibility that there is some inner essence in you which needs to be discovered; an encouragement that if somebody else can do it, why cannot you do it? Perhaps his methods of his own inner journey may help you to find methods suitable for yourself. Maybe a little bit modified, changed, but the same methods may be applicable.

But one hundred and twelve methods of going inwards are available, have been for ten thousand years. Not a single method more can be added. The science of inner search is complete. You can just look at those one hundred and twelve methods, and it is my experience and many of my sannyasins’ experience that when you come to the method that will be suitable for you, something immediately rejoices in you – as if something in your heart has been touched, some bell starts ringing within you.

So just going through those one hundred and twelve methods – and each method is described in two lines – you just go slowly and see which method synchronizes with you. Then give it a try. Most probably that will be the method. If by chance you don’t succeed in it, then look again. Some other method may be even more striking. But for the whole of humanity all the methods are there.

Symptoms can be told to you: when you come to the method that is going to be your journey, something immediately is lit up in your being. Your mind falls silent, you know – not from any outside authority, but by your own heartbeats – that “This is the method for me.”

And as you start working on the method you will see how relaxing it is, and how simple, smooth.

And on each step you will feel yourself more grounded, more rooted – no more phony, no more American, no more plastic. For the first time you will feel you are real, authentic. And as you go deeper with the method, the sense of joy, sensitivity, goes on increasing. Love, for no reason at all, unaddressed to anybody – just a lovingness surrounds you. And when you reach to the very center of your being there is an explosion of immense light, and a fragrance that you have never known.

Those who are a little receptive may even become aware that something great has happened to you, because your face will take on a certain quality which you can find in the statues of Gautam Buddha. Your eyes, for the first time, will have a magnetism; your gestures will have a grace. Your whole being will be a beauty and a benediction to you and to all. As this experience ripens, you become a blessing to the whole existence.

It is true that no objective research can be done on it, but that does not mean that this subjective world does not exist. That will be a stupid conclusion. It will be like a blind man who cannot see the light; hence he concludes that the light does not exist.

There are things which are objectively available to be studied, but they are always things – not life, not love, not consciousness. All that is great is subjective. And it is one of the greatest misfortunes of humanity that scientists go on insisting that unless you can study something objectively, it does not exist. That means that in the lab of Albert Einstein, everything exists except Albert Einstein.

Then who is doing all these experiments? Who is watching and researching, and who is finding electrons and protons and neutrons? They all exist because they are objective. Albert Einstein does not exist, because his consciousness is not available to objective study. This is sheer stupidity.

Your eyes cannot hear music; that does not mean that music does not exist. Your ears cannot see light. That does not mean light does not exist. It simply means you are using wrong means – ears to see, eyes to hear.

The method of objective study is for things, matter. And the inward journey – because it is not a research into matter but into consciousness – needs different methods. Those are the methods I am calling meditations.

For the objective world, observation, experiments – these are methods. For the subjective world, witnessing, experiencing – these are the methods.

And one of the fundamental rules of science is that everything exists with its polar opposite. The polar opposite is not contradictory, it is complementary. If love exists, hate exists; if beauty exists, ugliness exists. And if objective reality exists, you cannot deny subjective reality; otherwise, you will be going against the fundamental rule of science itself. Objective reality needs, as a polar opposite to it, a subjective reality. And certainly the same methods cannot be applied to both. Different methods are needed.

Meditation will not help you to find atomic energy, nuclear weapons; otherwise, the East would have discovered all this nonsense long ago. And objective methods will not allow you to discover man’s real being. And without knowing man’s real being you can have all the riches of the world, but deep inside you will remain a pauper, miserable. East and West – the objective approach and the subjective approach – both are half. My own effort is that they should become one. There is no need to divide.

Rudyard Kipling has stated, “West is West and East is East, and ne’er the twain shall meet.” He is dead, but sometimes I think to drag him out of his grave and ask him, ”Where is the line which divides East from West? They are meeting everywhere.” You are, in comparison to some place, East, in comparison to another place, West. And what nonsense is this, that ”ne’er the twain shall meet”? The twain are always meeting on each point, because the same point can be called West and the same point can be called East. Calcutta is East of Bombay, Bombay is West of Calcutta. But Calcutta itself is West of Rangoon, and Rangoon is East of Calcutta.

Rudyard Kipling was the poet laureate of the British Empire. To me, he is simply an idiot. East and West are meeting everywhere, except in man. Things become easier; it is only a question of man’s mind. In reality there is no division; the division is only mental.

And in my sannyasins that division has dropped. My sannyasins don’t belong to East or to West.

They claim the whole earth as their own.

They claim the objective reality as their own. They claim the subjective world as their own.

To represent this, I have called the new man Zorba the Buddha. Zorba represents the materialist, objective approach. Buddha represents the subjective, spiritual approach.

Divided, both are poor. Neither of them is a full circle. Joined, they become immensely rich. Joined together, they experience the greatest ecstasy that is available to humanity.

-Osho

From From Bondage to Freedom, Discourse #43

 

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Zorba and Zen – Osho

What is the relationship between Zorba and Zen? 

The whole past of humanity has tried to keep them separate, and this has been an unfortunate experiment. The Zorba has remained incomplete, just superficial. And Zen has remained incomplete; it has only the inner world, and the outer is missing.

My Manifesto of Zen is that Zorba and Zen are not antagonistic to each other. The Zorba can melt into Zen, and only then will both be complete.

The man who has lived outside has lived very superficially, and the man who does not know anything about the inner, knows nothing about the existential, about the eternal. And on the other hand, the man who knows something of the inner starts thinking that the outer is illusory.

Nothing is illusory.

The outer and the inner are part of one existence.

I want Zorbas to be buddhas and vice versa. And unless this becomes possible, there will not be many buddhas, and there will not be many Zorbas either. In the completion of Zorba and Zen, a tremendous quality comes to your life: you relish every moment of the outside world, every flower of the outside world. And you relish simultaneously the inner freedom, the inner joy, the inner drunkenness. There is no question of any division. But humanity has lived in a divided way, and that has been a catastrophe.

It is time for Zorba to start meditating, and it is time for the people who are meditators not to allow themselves to escape from the world. They have to come to the world with all their juice, with all their ecstasy… to share.

It seems very difficult to understand, because the whole tradition of the world goes against it. But I don’t see any difficulty.

In myself I have joined Zorba and Zen together; hence I don’t see any difficulty. I am in the world, and yet I am not of the world.

I rejoice in the birds, the flowers, the trees.

I rejoice in myself, in my silence, and I don’t see there is any difference. The inner and the outer slowly have become melted into one whole. And unless your inner and outer become one whole, you will remain incomplete – and incompletion is misery.

Only in completion is there bliss.

Only in completion have you come home.

You have come to existence without any conflict, in tremendous ease, relaxed.

The Zorba in the past has been tense and worried that perhaps he is not the right person. And the man of Zen has been with the tension that he has to avoid this, he has to avoid that – that he has to become a recluse far away in the mountains. But the very fear of the world shows your misunderstanding.

The world has not to be feared, it has to be loved.

We are the world.

There is no question of escaping from anything. Every moment everything has to be enjoyed without any guilt, without any inhibition. But all the religions have been against it.

I proclaim with this manifesto a totally new sky for religious consciousness: the sky of completion, the joining of the inner and the outer, of the material and the spiritual, of Zorba and the Buddha.

-Osho

From The Zen Manifesto, Discourse #5

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An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

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A New World and a New Man – Osho

Many people are ready to simply change their state of being, but they are terrified of the possibility of the end of the world. I, too, toyed around like a puppet until I searched in the scriptures. I found out that the ancient phrase is not “the end of the world” but “the end of time” or “the end of days.”  

Will the highest mystery be the destruction of the world, or will it be the salvation of human beings – A glorious change of the universal forces of movement and man’s measurement of time? 

It makes no difference whether you call it the end of the world or the end of time or the end of days; it is simply three ways of saying the same thing, the end of the world.

Don’t try to deceive yourself just by different phrases. If there is no time, how can the world exist? If there are no days, how can the world exist? The end of the world is terrifying – but the answer cannot be found in the old scriptures because in the old scriptures there is no answer for the contemporary man.

The old scriptures are all rotten. They had answers for their own contemporaries – but some are twenty centuries old, some are thirty centuries old, some are fifty centuries old; they don’t have any answer for you.

You have to find the answer within yourself.

The world can be saved not by changing phrases, but by changing man. And it is worth understanding this most important thing: man can change only when he is faced with ultimate death; otherwise he goes on postponing change. Change is troublesome. You are fixed with your own habits, you are accustomed to your old mind, your old ideas, your old prejudices. Change means you will have to go through almost a death of the old so the new can be born in you.

As far as I am concerned, it is good news that the end of the world is very close, because only then can man be persuaded to transform himself totally. Certainly this world will have to die. This world has come to its end, but we can create another world.

This man has lived enough, but we can give birth to a new man. All the old concepts, ideologies, religions, philosophies, have become absolutely empty. They no longer give any nutrition, any nourishment to human growth; on the contrary they all hinder. If you go on listening to them and if you go on searching for answers in the old scriptures, then the world is going to end and you are going to end. There will be no new man, no new world.

Forget the old.

I am reminded of a beautiful parable in Jesus’ life… One morning, a beautiful morning on Lake

Galilee, he came and put his hand on one of the men who was trying to catch fish. The man turned round, and there was something in the eyes of Jesus: whatever Jesus said the man followed it. Jesus said, “Drop that net. How long are you going to destroy your life just by catching fish? Come with me. I will tell you the way to catch men.”

He had never thought that he could be anything else than a fisherman. This man was so authoritative that he dropped the net and followed Jesus. Just as they were going out of the town a man came running and said to the man, “Where are you going? Your father who was ill for so many days has died. Come home.”

He asked Jesus, “Give me three days so I can go and bury my dead father and do all the rituals that are needed. I will be back soon.”

What Jesus said to that man I would like to say to you. Jesus said, “There are enough dead people in the town, you need not worry. Let the dead bury the dead. You come with me.”

Those words are tremendously significant: “Let the dead bury the dead.” The whole town is full of dead people. Although they are breathing and walking and talking and doing all kinds of things, they are not alive. There is no song in them, their heart has no dance in it, there is no ecstasy in their lives. Whether they are alive or dead does not matter; it is just the same. In fact, death will be better, it will be a great rest for them.

The world you are asking about is already dead. You cannot save it, no savior can save it – and there is no need to save it either. It is rotten. There are only corpses all around. They have forgotten to live, they have forgotten to love, they have forgotten to celebrate. They have forgotten everything that gives meaning to life, makes each moment a souvenir, a memory so golden to be kept alive forever. Their lives are just empty; inside they are hollow, there is nothing substantial in them. They don’t have a soul.

It is perfectly good that this world dies, this man dies, this society dies. But before it dies and before we take it to the graveyard, we have to bring out of it a new life, a new man, a new world – exactly in the same way as when a seed dies into the earth it sprouts into a new life, with two beautiful leaves, green, fresh. This is transformation. The seed was closed and almost dead, but it has died into the soil and has given place to a living thing. A beautiful tree will grow with many branches, great foliage, fruits, flowers. And those branches will dance in the sun, in the wind, under the stars, under the moon.

Before it dies, let us use this world as a seed for the new man; let us use this man as a seed for a new humanity. That’s my whole work – to prepare you for two things: to die as far as the past is concerned; and to start living in a totally new way, discontinuous with the past, so you can become the new man. It is absolutely urgent. You cannot postpone it.

The time is running short – because the old world has prepared for its own suicide. The nuclear weapons, a third world war… it has prepared everything for its own suicide. It has not taken any chances: just now on the earth there are so many nuclear weapons that we can kill seven hundred earths of this size, seven hundred human civilizations of this size. We are not taking any chance; the whole society has prepared its grave already.

Before it commits suicide, we have to save the essential life principle. And that can be done by each individual without being dependent on any organization; that is the old way. Without being dependent on any church – that is again of the past… For the first time the individual has to take all the responsibility for his life in his own hands. No God, no savior, no church is going to help; they are all part of the old structure which is going to die. They are all woven together so closely that you cannot save anything from them; they will all die together.

But each individual can free himself.

Just when I came to your beautiful island I was informed that Kazantzakis, one of the greatest artists of the contemporary world, was expelled, excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox church. The reason for his expulsion was the creation of Zorba the Buddha. He named it Zorba the Greek. Unconsciously he was creating the base of a new man; I call that new man Zorba the Buddha. It cannot be Greek, it cannot be Italian, it cannot be German, it cannot be Hindu, it cannot be Mohammedan….

The same was the situation with me. I was also born into a religion – perhaps the oldest religion in the world, Jainism. It is older than Hinduism, because the Hindus’ oldest book, Rigveda, mentions the first Jaina tirthankara, the founder of Jainism. That means Jainism was already in existence when Rigveda was written.

And about Rigveda there are problems. Contemporary scholarship thinks it must be at least five thousand years old; but one very great scholar of ancient scriptures, Lokmanya Tilak has decided Rigveda is ninety thousand years old. And his argument is such that there is no way to destroy it; his argument is very factual.

In Rigveda there is a description of a certain configuration of stars that happened ninety thousand years ago, and about which astronomers are scientifically agreed that it has happened only once. That kind of constellation only happened ninety thousand years ago, and Rigveda describes the constellations so minutely, in such detail that it is impossible that the people who were writing it were not aware of it. It could not be fiction; they could not create it out of their minds. If Rigveda is ninety thousand years old, then Jainism must be perhaps one hundred thousand years old.

I was born into a Jaina family, and what happened to Kazantzakis was going to happen to me – but I am a different kind of man. The supreme command of the Jaina religion was going to decide about my expulsion from the Jaina religion. I wrote them a letter saying, “You don’t have to make any trouble. I expel you all; now you cannot expel me. I do not belong to your gang, I am finished with it.” They could not expel me because I expelled them all.

It is up to every individual not to be part of any dead, rotten ideology. Try to find out within yourself whatsoever is old, dead, and drop out of it. Throw it away. Clean yourself completely and be again a child. Be again innocent, with no ideas, no prejudices, no conditionings.

You have already been born; a new man has come into being, and it has to go from individual to individual. The fire can take almost like a wildfire, and if millions of individuals drop out of all old heritages, there is no need for life to disappear from this beautiful earth.

But we have to create a new life based on totally different principles. The old life was based, very strangely, on antilife principles. It was against everything that is living in you; it was against your love, it was against your sex, it was against your joy, it was against your pleasure. It was against everything that you enjoyed. It wanted you to be a dead saint, not a living human being. Antilife principles have ruled for thousands of years.

The ultimate result of it is that we are coming close to the end of the world. Your religions have contributed to it, your saints have contributed to it, and your so-called philosophers have contributed to it… because they were all antilife. Anybody like Zorba who was for life was not allowed by the society to exist. He was condemned, he was discredited; in every way his dignity was taken away. He was reduced into an animal. Naturally, the crowd was powerful and managed to repress all rebellious individuals and forced them to follow the crowd.

I want the society to disappear. I want the crowd to have no power anymore. Each individual has a birthright to be free, to choose his life pattern and to move according to his nature, respectfully, with dignity. That is going to be the new way of life, where each individual is respected in his uniqueness, and there are no ready-made ideas that everybody has to fulfill in his life.

Everybody has to live according to his own heart, has to move according to his own inner being, wherever it leads. That is your destiny. Nobody else is going to decide it; you are the only one to decide for yourself. This decisiveness – freed from all crowds, mobs, organizations – will create a new earth and a new jubilant, celebrant life for each individual. There will be no need for anybody to think of paradise after death; paradise will be here-now.

It is good that the old world is coming to an end. Now you have to decide whether you want to die with the old world or to take a quantum leap out of the old, and create a new world and a new man.

-Osho

From Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, Discourse #23

Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries

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An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

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The New Man – Osho

What according to you is the most significant thing that is happening today in the world?

A new man is emerging. The image of the new man is not yet clear, but the horizon is becoming red and the sun will soon be there. The morning mist is there and the image of the new man is vague, but still a few things are very crystal clear about the new man.

And this is of tremendous importance because since the monkey became man, man has remained the same. A great revolution is on the way. It will be far more deep-going than the revolution that happened when monkeys started walking on the earth and became human beings. That change created mind that change brought psychology in. Now another far more significant change is going to happen that will bring the soul in, and man will not only be a psychological being but a spiritual being too.

You are living in one of the most alive times ever.

The new man has already arrived in fragments, but only in fragments. And the new man has been arriving for centuries, but only here and there. That’s how things happen. When the spring comes it starts with one flower. But when the one flower is there, then one can be certain: that spring is not faraway – it has come. The first flower has heralded its coming: Zarathustra, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus – these were the first flowers. Now the new man is going to be born on a greater scale.

According to me, this new consciousness is the most important thing that is happening today. I would like to tell you something about this new consciousness, its orientations, and its characteristics, because you are to help it come out of the womb – because you have to be it. The new man cannot come from nowhere; he has to come through you. The new man can only be born through your womb. You have to become the womb.

Sannyas is an experiment to clean the ground so that new seeds can fall in. If you understand the meaning of the new man, you will be able to understand the significance of sannyas too. And it is because sannyas is concerned with the new man that the old orthodoxies of all kinds are going to be against me and against sannyas, because this will be their end. If sannyas succeeds, if the new man succeeds, the old will have to go. The old can live only if the new man is prevented from coming.

It cannot be prevented now, because it is not only a question of the new man’s coming into existence, it is a question of the survival of the whole earth, of consciousness itself, of life itself. It is a question of life and death. The old man has come to utter destructiveness. The old man has reached the end of his tether. Now there is no life possible with the old concept of man but only death. The old man is preparing for a global suicide. The old man is piling up atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, in order to commit a collective suicide. This is a very unconscious desire. Rather than allowing the new man to be, the old man would like to destroy the whole thing.

You have to understand, you have to protect the new, because the new carries the whole future with it. And man has come to a stage where a great quantum leap is possible. The old man was other-worldly, the old man was against this world. The old man was always looking to the heavens. The old man was more concerned with life after death than life before death. The new man’s concern will be life before death. The new man’s concern will be this life, because if this life is taken care of, the other will follow of its own accord. One need not worry about it, one need not think about it.

The old man was too concerned with God. That concern was out of fear. The new man will not be concerned with God, but will live and love this world, and out of that love he will experience the existence of God. The old man was speculative; the new man is going to be existential.

The old man can be defined in the Upanishadic statement: neti-neti, not this, not this. The old man was negative – life-negative, life-denying. The new man will be life-affirming: iti-iti, this and this. The old man’s concern was THAT, the new man’s concern will be this, because out of this that is born, and if you become too concerned with that, you miss both.

Tomorrow is in the womb of today. Take care of today and you have taken care of tomorrow. There is no need to be in any way worried about tomorrow. If you become too worried about tomorrow you have missed today. And tomorrow will come as today – it always comes as today. If you have learned this suicidal habit of missing today, you will miss tomorrow also. You will go on missing. The old man was continuously missing, was miserable, sad. And because he was sad he was against the world, he blamed the world, he blamed samsara. He said, ‘It is because of the world that I am in misery.’ It is not so. The world is immensely beautiful, it is all beauty, bliss and benediction. There is nothing wrong with the world. Something was wrong with the old mind. The old mind was either past-oriented or future-oriented, which are not really different orientations.

The old mind was concerned with that which is not. The new man will be utterly in tune with that which is, because it is God, it is reality: iti-iti, this is it. This moment has to be lived in its totality. This moment has to be lived in its spontaneity, with no a priori ideas. The old man was carrying ready-made answers. He was stuffed with philosophy, religion and all kinds of nonsense.

The new man is going to live life without any a priori conclusion about it. Without any conclusion one has to face existence, and then one knows what it is. If you have already concluded, your conclusion will become a barrier. It will not allow you inquiry – your conclusion will become a blindfold. It will not allow you to see the truth – your investment will be in the conclusion. You will distort reality to fit your conclusion. That’s what has been done up to now.

The new man will not be Hindu, will not be Mohammedan, will not be Christian, will not be communist. The new man will not know all these ‘isms’. The new man will simply be an opening, a window to reality. He will allow reality as it is. He will not project his own mind upon it. He will not use reality as a screen. His eyes will be available; they will not be full of ideas.

The new man will not live out of belief, he will simply live. And remember, only those who can simply live, without belief, come to know what truth is. The believer or the disbeliever never comes to know what truth is. Their beliefs are too heavy on their minds. They are surrounded too much by their belief systems. The new man will not know any belief system. He will watch, he will observe, he will see, he will live, and he will allow all kinds of experiences. He will be available, he will be multi-dimensional. He will not carry scriptures in his head, he will carry only alertness awareness. He will be meditative.

The old man lived out of fear – even his God was nothing but a creation out of fear. His temples, mosques, gurudwaras, churches – they were all out of fear. He was trembling, he was afraid. The new man will live out of love, not out of fear, because fear serves death, love serves life. And if you live out of fear you will never know what life is, you will only know death again and again. And remember, the person who lives out of fear creates all kinds of situations in which he has to feel more and more fear. Yom fear creates situations, just as your love creates situations.

If you love, you will find so many occasions to be loving. If you are afraid, you will find so many occasions to be afraid. Love is going to be the taste of the new consciousness. Because fear was the taste of the old consciousness it created wars. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars – as if we have not been doing anything else – continuous fighting somewhere or other. This is a very mad state of affairs. Humanity’s past is insane.

The new man will become discontinuous with this insane past. He will believe in love, not in war.  He will believe in life, not in death. He will be creative, not destructive. His science, his art – all will serve creativity. He will not create bombs. He will not be political, because politics is out of hatred.

Politics is rooted in fear, hate, destructiveness. The new man will not be political. The new man will not be national; the new man will be global. He will not have any political ambition, because it is stupid to have political ambition. The new man is going to be very intelligent. The first signs of that intelligence are rising on the horizon. Those who have eyes – they can see it. The children are rebelling.

It is a great moment of rejoicing that all over the world young people are rebelling against all kinds of orthodoxies – whether the orthodoxy is that of church or state doesn’t matter. They are not ready to obey – not that they have determined to disobey, they are not determined to disobey either. They will meditate, and if they feel like obeying they will obey. If they feel like disobeying, they will disobey. They have no fixed ideology. ‘My country right or wrong’ – such stupid statements they cannot make. Sometimes it is wrong, sometimes it is right. When it is right, the new man will support it. When it is wrong… Whether it is one’s own country or not will not matter. It may be one’s own family, one’s own father, mother, but if it is wrong, it is wrong.

The new man will live not out of prejudices but out of spontaneous responsibility. The old man was a slave, the new man will be free, the new man will have freedom at the very core of his being. The old man was very serious, the old man was a ‘workaholic’. The new man will be playful – homo ludens. He will believe in enjoying life. He will drop words like ‘duty’, ‘sacrifice’. He will not sacrifice for anything. He will not be a victim to any altar – that of the state or of the religion, of the priest or of the politician. He will not allow anybody to exploit his life – ‘Go and die because your country is at war.’ His commitment is towards life, his commitment is not towards anything else. He wants to live in joy, he wants to rejoice in all the gifts of God, he wants to celebrate. Alleluia will be his only mantra. Jesus says, ’Rejoice, rejoice. I say unto you rejoice.’

Man has not rejoiced yet. Man has lived under a great burden of seriousness: Work for the country. Work for the family. Work for the wife. Work for the children. Work for your father and mother. Just go on working and working and then one day die and disappear into the grave. And then others will work. And it goes on and on. Nobody seems to have any time to enjoy life.

And I am not saying that the new man will not work. He will work, but that will not be his addiction.

He will not be a ‘workaholic’, it will not be a drug, he will work because he needs a few things, but he will not continuously work for more and more. He will not be accumulative. He will not believe in having a big bank balance, and he will not believe in having a very high post; rather, he will want to sing a song, to play on the flute, on the guitar, to dance. He will not want to become famous, he will want to live, authentically live. He will be ready to be a nobody.

And that is already happening. The first rays are already available. It is still hidden in the morning mist, but if you search you will find it. The new children, the new generation, are a totally different kind of generation, hence the generation gap. It is very real. It has never been so – never before has there been any generation gap. This is the first time in the whole of human history that there is a gap. The children are speaking a different language from their parents. The parents cannot understand because the parents want them to succeed. And the children say, ’But what is the point of success if you cannot sing a song, and you cannot dance, and you cannot enjoy, and you cannot love? What is the point of being successful? Why? What is going to happen through success? Even if the whole world knows my name, what is that going to give me?’

The old generation believes in money. And you will be surprised that the belief in money is so deep that even those who renounce money – they also believe in money; otherwise there is no need to renounce it. And those who praise renunciation – they also believe in money. The more money you renounce, the greater you are. So the measurement is of money. Money remains the criterion. In the world if you have more money you are great. And even in the world of the monks: ’How much have you renounced?’ If you have renounced more money, then you are more important. Money remains important even there.

The new generation is not going to be money-manic. And remember, I am not saying it is going to be against money, it will use money. In the past money has used man, in the past man has lived in such an unconscious way that he thought he possessed things, but things possessed him. The new man will be able to use things. The new man will use money, will use technology, but the new man will remain the master. He is not going to become a victim, an instrument. This, according to me, is the greatest thing that is happening.

A few characteristics. The new consciousness is going to be counter to all orthodoxies. Any kind of orthodoxy, Catholic or communist, Hindu or Jaina – any kind of orthodoxy – is a kind of paralysis of the mind. It paralyzes. You stop living. It becomes a rigidity around you. You become a fanatic, you become stubborn. You become rock-like. You don’t behave like a liquid human being, you start behaving like a mule. That’s why for Morarji Desai I have another name: Mulish-jibhai Desai. One starts behaving in a mulish way, stubborn, dead set, no possibility of changing, no flexibility, no fluidity. But in the past that has been praised very much: people call it consistency, certainty. It is not. It is neither consistency nor certainty; it is simply deadness.

An alive person has to remain flowing. He has to respond to the changing situations. And situations are continuously changing. How can you remain fixed in your attitudes when life itself is not fixed? When life is a river how can you remain stubborn? And if you remain stubborn you lose contact with life – you are already in your grave.

The new consciousness will be non-orthodox, non-fanatic; it will be fluid. It will not react, it will respond. And the difference between these two words is great. Reaction is always rigid. You have a fixed idea, you react out of it. Before the question is raised, the answer is ready. Response is totally different. You listen to the question, you absorb the question, you see the situation, you feel the situation, you live the situation, and out of that very living your response arises. A responsible man cannot be stubborn, cannot be certain, cannot be rigid. He will have to live moment to moment. He cannot decide beforehand, he will have to decide every day, each moment. And because he has to move continuously with life and its changing challenges, he cannot be consistent in the old sense. His consistency will be only one: that he will always be in tune with life. That will be his consistency – not that he has a certain idea and he remains consistent with that idea and goes on sacrificing life for it.

There was a case against Mulla Nasrudin in the court and the magistrate asked him, ‘Mulla, how old are you?’

He said, ‘Forty.’

The magistrate said, ‘But this is strange. You surprise me, because five years ago you were in court, and that time also you said forty.’

Mulla said, ‘Yes, I am a consistent man. Once I have said something, you can believe me. I will never say anything else.’

This is one type of consistency.

The new man will find it ridiculous. But the old man has been consistent in this way: in his character, in his statements, in his hypocrisy. The old man used to decide once and for all. Psychologists say that almost fifty percent of your life is decided by the time you are seven years old – fifty percent! – and then you remain consistent with it. And life goes on changing – no wonder that you are left behind, that you start dragging, that you lose joy, that you lose the quality of dance. How can you dance? you are so far behind life. You are dead wood, you don’t grow. An alive tree grows, changes; as the season changes, the tree changes. An alive person grows, and to the very moment of death he continuously goes on growing. He never knows any end to his growth.

Psychologists say the average mental age of man is thirteen. This is the situation. This is how the old man has lived up to now. A thirteen-year mental age means: at the age of thirteen people have stopped growing. Yes, they go on growing old, but they don’t grow up. Growing old is one thing, growing up is totally different. Growing old is a physiological phenomenon; growing up means maturity, wisdom. And only those who go on flowing with life grow up.

The new man will not be obedient to stupid ideas that have been given from the past. And they may not have been stupid when they were born, they may have been relevant in those circumstances; but as circumstances change, things become stupid. If you carry them, if you go on persisting in your old fixed routines, you start behaving in an absurd way.

Now, look. Some religion is five thousand years old. That means five thousand years ago its rituals were born and since then they have remained fixed. How dangerous it is! How crippling! How can man be alive if these five-thousand-year-old rituals surround his soul?

The new man will be creative. Each moment he will find his religion, each moment he will find his philosophy. And everything will remain growing. He will not be obedient to the past, he cannot be – to be obedient to the past is to be obedient to death, because the past is dead; he will be obedient to the present. And in being obedient to the present, he will be rebellious against the past. To be rebellious is going to be one of his most prominent characteristics. And because he will be rebellious he will not fit in with a dead society, he will not fit in with a dead church, he will not fit in with a dead army. He will not fit anywhere where obedience is a basic requirement.

The new man is bound to create a new society around himself.

First consciousness becomes new, then society becomes new. There is going to be a long period in which the old will resist the new, will fight with the new, will try to destroy the new. But the old cannot succeed – time, the spirit of time, will not be in its favour. The old has to die. Just as the old body dies and makes space for some new child, so old societies, old orthodoxies, have to die. They have already lived overtime. They have lived too long!

The new consciousness will not be moralistic, will not be puritan; not that it will not have any morality, but it will have a different kind of morality – a morality that arises out of one’s own feeling for life, one’s sensitivity, one’s own experiences – not a morality learned from others, borrowed. The new man will not be a man of character in the old sense, because all character is binding. It creates an armour around you. The new man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have any armour. The new man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have a prison cell around him. Not that he will not have character, but he will give a new definition to character. He will not be a hypocrite.

The old puritanism, the old moralistic attitudes have created hypocrisy in the world; they have made man schizophrenic: on the surface one thing, deep within something else – almost the opposite.

The old man lived a double life. The new man is going to live in a unitary way. He will live a single life. Whatsoever is inside him will also be his outside. He will be authentic. Remember this word ‘authenticity’ – that is going to be the new man’s religion. That is going to be the new man’s truth, his temple, his God – authenticity. And with authenticity neurosis disappears. The old man was neurotic because he was constantly in conflict: he wanted to do one thing and he was always doing something else, because something else was required. He was taught to do something against himself; he was repressive. His own authenticity was repressed, and on top of it a bogus character was imposed.

We have praised these phony people too long. Now the time has come – their phoniness should be exposed. We have praised these mahatmas and saints so long, now we have to see their neurosis.

They were all psychologically ill, they were pathological. A healthy person is a whole person. His inside and his outside are the same. If he loves, he loves passionately. If he is angry, he is angry passionately. His anger has truth in it as much as his love has truth in it. The old man boils within and smiles on the outside. He lives without passion, without energy. He lives without any flame. His whole life is an exercise in phoniness and, naturally, he suffers. A long futile story is all that his life is ‘… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’

The new man will not be a tale told by an idiot, but will be a poem sung out of wholeness, will be a dance of immense joy for God’s gift of life and being, for the flowers and the trees and the birds, and the sun and the sand and the sea.

The new man will not look somewhere faraway for God, he will look here, close-by. Now will be his only time, here will be his only space.

The new man will be earthly. And by ‘earthly’ I don’t mean materialistic. The new man will be a realist. He will love this earth. Because we have not loved this earth and our so-called religions have been teaching us to hate this earth, we have destroyed it. It is a beautiful planet, one of the most beautiful, because one of the most alive. This planet has to be loved, this planet has to be rejoiced in. It is a gift. This body has so many mysteries in it that even a Buddha is possible only because of this body. This body becomes the temple of the greatest possibility: Buddhahood, nirvana. This body has to be loved. This earth has to be loved.

The new man will find his religion in nature – not in dead stone statues, but in living dancing trees in the wind. He will find his religion surfing on the sea, climbing on the virgin mountain. He will find his prayer with the snow, with the moon, with the stars. He will be in dialogue with existence as it is. He will not live with abstract ideas, he will live with realities. His commitment will be to nature, and through that commitment he will come to know super-nature. God is hidden here in this earth, in this very body. This very body, the Buddha. This very earth, the paradise.

The new man will read the scripture of nature. This will be his Veda, his Koran, his Bible. Here he will find sermons in the stones. He will try to decipher the mysteries of life, he will not try to demystify life. He will try to love those mysteries, to enter in those mysteries. He will be a poet, he will not be a philosopher. He will be an artist; he will not be a theologian. His science will also have a different tone. His science will be that of Tao, not an effort to conquer nature, because that effort is just foolish. How can you conquer nature? – You are part of nature. His science will be of understanding nature, not of conquering nature. He will not rape nature, he will love and persuade nature to reveal its secrets.

The new man will not be ambitious, will not be political.

Politics has no future; politics has existed because of the neurosis of humankind. Once the neurosis disappears, politics will disappear.

Ambition simply means you are missing something and you are consoling yourself that you will get it in the future. Ambition is a consolation. Today it is all misery, tomorrow there will be joy. Looking at tomorrow you become capable of tolerating today and its misery: today is always hell, tomorrow is heaven. You keep on looking at heaven, you keep on hoping.

But that hope is not going to be fulfilled ever because tomorrow never comes. Ambition means you are incapable of transforming your today into a beatitude; you are impotent. Only impotent people are ambitious: they seek money, they seek power. Only impotent people seek power and money.

The potential person lives. If money comes his way, he lives the money too, but he does not seek it, he is not after it. He is not afraid of it either.

The old man was either after money or afraid of money, either after power or afraid of power; but in both ways his whole focus was on power and money. He was ambitious. The old man is pitiable. He was ambitious because he was unable to live, unable to love. The new man will be able to live and able to love. And his here-now is going to be so beautiful, why should he be worried about tomorrow? His concern will not be with having more, his concern will be with BEING more – another very important distinction to be remembered. His concern will be with being more, not having more.

Having more is just a substitute for being more. You have more money, so you think you are more.

You have more power, so you think you are more. Deep down you remain the same beggar.

Alexander dies as empty-handed as any beggar.

Being more is a totally different dimension. Being more means getting in touch with your reality, getting in tune with your being, and helping yourself to fall in harmony with the universe. To be in harmony with the universe you become more. The more you are in tune with existence, the more you are. If the harmony is total, you are a god. That’s why we call Buddha a god, Mahavira a god – utter total harmony with existence, no conflict at all. They have dissolved themselves into the whole, they have become the whole – just as a dewdrop disappears into the ocean and becomes the ocean. They have died in their egos, now they live as existence itself.

The new man will have no use for sham, facade or pretense, he will be true, because only through truth is there liberation. All lies create bondages. Tell a single lie and you will have to tell a thousand and one to defend it – you will have to tell lies ad nauseam. Then there is no end to it. A single lie sooner or later will spread all over your being. It is like cancer.

Be truthful and you need not hide, you can be open. Be truthful and you need not protect yourself against existence, you can be vulnerable. In that vulnerability existence penetrates you, God reaches your heart.

Tell a lie and you are afraid. You will be afraid of God too, you will be afraid of facing him. You will be afraid of facing yourself. You will be continuously escaping from yourself, from others, from God.

You will be constantly hiding behind your pretensions. Hypocrisy will become your life style, and that’s where hell exists. Hypocrisy creates hell. Authenticity is the only joy – the only joy, I say. And if you are not authentic you will never be joyous.

The new consciousness will not put up with double-talk. The new consciousness will hate this kind of thing with a passion. This hatred for phoniness is the deepest mark of the new man. The new man will be opposed to structured, inflexible and infallible systems, because life is a beautiful flow. It is not structured, it is freedom. It is not a prison, it is a temple. He will want organizations to be fluid, changing, adapting and human. Our states are inhuman, our armies are inhuman, our churches are inhuman. They dehumanize man. They reduce man into a thing because they don’t respect man’s freedom. The new man will respect his freedom and respect others’ freedom, too. The old man is constantly interfering, poking his nose into everybody’s affairs, trying to manipulate, criticizing, condemning, rewarding, punishing. The old man is continuously concerned with others: ‘What are you doing?’

I was staying in Bombay once. A Parsee woman came to me because just the day before I had criticized Satya Sai Baba and had called him a phony guru. She came to see me and she said, ‘I have come to tell you a few more things.’ She was thinking that I would be very happy because she had brought some information against Satya Sai Baba. She said, ‘He is a homosexual. And I know it from reliable sources.’ I said, ‘But why should you be concerned? Homosexual or heterosexual – that is his business. It is his life. Who are you? Why should you be bothered about it?’

She was very shocked when I said that. She had come feeling that I would be very grateful to her, because she was giving me such great information.

Why should you be concerned? Can’t you leave people to their own life? I criticize only when the other’s life is concerned; otherwise there is no question of criticism. What Satya Sai Baba is doing with his sexuality is his business, it is nobody else’s business.

But the old woman was constantly poking her nose into everybody’s affairs.

It happens here every day. The old kind of people come and they are very much in agony because some man is holding some woman’s hand. Why? – he is not holding your hand. And if those two persons have decided to hold hands, they have absolute freedom to do that. And if they are enjoying, who are you to interfere? If the man is holding some woman’s hand against her will, then maybe your help is needed; but if they both are willing then you should not be concerned at all. But this is the old consciousness. It is always trying to find ways and means to manipulate others, to be dominant over others.

The new consciousness will leave everyone to his own life. Unless somebody is harming others, he should not be prevented. Unless somebody is a danger to others, he should not be prevented.

Unless somebody is interfering in somebody else’s freedom, he should not be interfered with.

The old world remained without individuality. It hated individuality, it liked only sheep, crowds – people behaving in the same way with everybody following the same routine and the same structure.

The new man will allow all kinds of possibilities. The new man will love liquid structures. He will be human, he will respect human beings. His respect will be almost religious.

The new man will have to find new forms of community, of closeness, of intimacy, of shared purpose, because the old society is not going to disappear immediately. It will linger, it will put up all kinds of fight to the new society – as it always happens. It has so many vested interests, it cannot go easily.

It will go only when it becomes impossible for it to remain in existence.

Before it goes the new man will have to create new kinds of communes, new kinds of families, new communities of closeness, intimacy, shared purpose.

That’s why I am trying to create a small commune where you can be totally yourself – away from the structured and the rotten world – and you can be given absolute freedom. It will be an experiment, because the future is going to move on those lines. It will be a small experiment but of immense significance.

The new consciousness will not have anything to do with institutions like marriage. The new man will have a natural distrust of marriage as an institution. A man-woman relationship has deep value for him only when it is a mutually enhancing, growing, flowing relationship. He will have little regard for marriage as a ceremony or for vows of permanence which prove to be highly impermanent. He will love the moment and live it in its totality.

Marriage has no future. Love has a future.

In the past love was not a reality, marriage was a reality. In the future love is going to be the reality and marriage is going to become more and more unreal. In the past people were married to each other, hence by and by they started liking and loving. In the future people will love and like each other, only then will they live together. In the past to live together came first and, naturally, when you live together, a liking arises, a dependence arises. It was a need phenomenon. The husband needed the wife, the wife needed the husband, and then the children needed the parents to be together. It was, more or less, an economic phenomenon; but it was not out of love.

The future will know a different kind of relationship which is based purely on love and which will remain in existence only while love remains. And there will be no hankering for its permanence, because in life nothing is permanent; only plastic flowers are permanent.

Real roses are born in the morning and are gone by the evening. And that is their beauty: they are beautiful when they come, and they are beautiful when their petals start withering away. Their life is beautiful, their birth is beautiful, their death is beautiful, because there is aliveness. A plastic flower is never born, never lives, never dies.

Marriage has been a plastic flower in the past. The new consciousness can have no respect for marriage. It will have to create a new kind of intimacy – friendship. And it will have to learn to live with the impermanent phenomenon of love and of everything.

It needs guts to live with the impermanence of life, because each time something changes you have to change yourself again. One wants to remain fixed – it seems safer, more secure. That’s how the old man has lived. The old man was not adventurous; his whole concern was security. The new man will have the spirit of adventure; his concern will not be security, his concern will be ecstasy.

He will not believe, because belief is a search for security, he will explore. He may not have neat answers to every question, but he will accept every challenge to inquire, to explore. He will go as far as life can take him, he will try to reach to the stars; but he will remain open. He will not start with a belief, with a conclusion, he will start only with a quest, a question. To start with a belief is not to start at all. To start with a belief is just playing a game with yourself. You have already believed, how can you explore? To explore one has to be agnostic. And that is going to be the religion of the future: agnosticism.

One will be capable and courageous enough to say, ‘I don’t know, but I am interested in knowing.

And I am ready to go into any dimension, into any adventure.’ The new man will be ready to risk.

The old man was very businesslike, never ready to risk. Risk was anathema; security was his goal.

But with security you start dying. It is only in adventure, continuous adventure, that life grows to higher and higher plenitudes, that it reaches to the Himalayan peaks.

The new person will be a spontaneous person, unpredictable, willing to risk newness, often willing to risk saying or doing the wild, the far-out thing. He will believe that everything is possible and anything can be tried. He will not cling to the known, he will always remain available to the unknown, even to the unknowable. And he will not sacrifice for any future because he will not be an idealist.

He will not sacrifice for any abstract ideas, ideals, ideologies.

He will have a trust in his own experience and a profound distrust of all external authority. The new man will trust only his own experience. Unless he knows something he will not trust it. No external authority can help the new man. Nobody can say, ’I say so, so you have to believe. Because we have always believed, so you have to believe. Because our forefathers believed, so you have to believe. Because it is written in the Vedas and the Bible, you have to believe.’ The new man is not going to have anything to do with such nonsense, the new man will believe only if HE knows. This is real trust – trust in one’s own possibilities, one’s own potential. The new man will respect himself. To believe in external authorities is disrespectful towards one’s own being.

And, finally, the new man will like being close to elemental nature: to the sea, the sun, the snow; flowers, animals, birds; to life, growth, death.

This, according to me, is the most important phenomenon that is happening today. A new man is coming into existence. The first rays are already on the horizon. Prepare yourself to receive the new man. Get ready. Become a host to the guest who is just about to knock on your doors at any moment. And that’s what sannyas is all about: a preparation – getting ready to receive the new man.

It is going to be a great adventure to receive the new man. It is going to be risky, too, because the old will not like it.

Now you can understand why the orthodox mind is against me. I am preparing their graveyard, and I am preparing for something new. I am preparing a garden for the new. You are to open your hearts for the new. Uproot all the weeds of the old, drop all the conditionings that the old has given to you, so you can receive the new.

And remember, the days of the messiahs are over. Don’t wait for Christ’s coming again, and don’t wait for Buddha’s coming again. Nobody comes again, at least not Buddha and Christ. Those who come again are the people who live without learning anything from life. Buddha has learned the lesson; he will not be coming again. Christ has learned the lesson; he will not be coming again. Don’t wait for any messiah to come; wait for a new consciousness, not for a messiah to deliver you.

That is what the old man used to believe – somebody will come. Hindus think Krishna will come: ‘When things are really dark and difficult and dismal, Krishna will come and deliver us.’ All nonsense!

All holy cow dung! A new consciousness is going to deliver you, not some person – Buddha, Krishna, Christ. They were here and they could not deliver you. No single person can do it – it is impossible. Only a new consciousness can deliver man from his bondage. And the new consciousness can come only through you. You have to become the womb, you have to accept it, receive it, prepare yourself for it.

Sannyas is nothing but getting ready for something immensely valuable, so that when the gift comes you are not fast asleep, so that when the new consciousness knocks on your door you are ready to embrace it.

-Osho

From The Secret of Secrets, Discourse #14, Q1

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

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Buddha and the Beast – Osho

What exactly is man?

Man is a mere perhaps, a possibility, a potential, a becoming, a longing. Man is not yet. Man has to be. That’s the agony of man, and the ecstasy too. The beast is – there is no growth possible. It is a finished product. There is no possibility to seek and search and be. Hence, there is no freedom. The beast is in absolute bondage. The beast lives and dies without knowing that he lives and dies. The beast is, but knows not that he is.

Man is and knows that he is, but knows not who he is. Man is a constant process. Something is always happening, is always on the verge of happening. Man is an excitement, an adventure, a pilgrimage.

No beast can ever miss its destiny. It is always predetermined. The beast has an absolute fate.

Nothing is going to be otherwise. The beast is pre-programmed. Man has no pre-programme but is just an opening. A thousand and one things are possible. Hence the anxiety: “To be this or to be that? To go to the east or to the west? To live this way or to live that way? And what is right? And what is going to fulfill me?”

Each moment man has to decide. And, obviously, when you decide, there is trembling. You can always go wrong. In fact, the possibilities to go wrong are more. Out of one thousand and one ways, only one will be right. Hence great trepidation, anguish: “Am I going to make it? Am I going to succeed in being myself? Or is it just going to be a long futile effort, and in the end frustration and failure? Will I be able to know life abundant? Will THIS life become a foundation for a greater life to come? Or is there nothing but death? Is there only the grave in the end, or something more?”

Man is an open being. Everything is possible, but nothing is certain. The beast is absolutely certain. It has a definition. Man has no definition. So when you ask me: What exactly is man? You ask me a wrong question. Man is nothing exactly. He is just a vague longing, a very, very vague dream of things to be, of things which may be possible, may not be possible. Man is a hesitation. Each moment man is gripped by hesitation, because any single step gone wrong will destroy your whole life. Man can lose. No beast can ever lose. But because man can lose, man can gain too. They both come together. Man can grow – man is growth. The mere perhaps can become actual. The potential can be transformed into reality. The seed can become a flowering. That which is just unmanifest can be manifested, and then there will be great splendor, great benediction.

The Buddha is, knows that he is, and also knows who he is. These are the three states of growth: the beast, the man, the Buddha. The beast has only one dimension – he IS, he exists, utterly unaware that he exists. Hence he cannot think of death.

Death is not a problem for the beast. Death can only become a problem when you know that you are. With that very knowing the fear arises that someday you may not be – because there was a time when you were not, there will again be a time when you will not be. Your existence is momentary. You can disappear any moment. You will disappear someday. Death is bound to happen. It is only man who knows about death.

That’s why man creates religion. Religion is man’s response to the possibility of death. It’s man’s effort to conquer death. No animal is religious, cannot be. Without the awareness of death religion has no possibility. But before you can become aware of death, you will have to become aware that you are. That’s a basic requirement.

So man knows he is – and also becomes aware and apprehensive that any moment he will not be. Time is short. For the beast time is non-existential, time is not. The beast lives in a timeless world. Each moment. Neither thinking of the past, nor imagining about the future.

Man cannot live in the present. He thinks of the past and all the nostalgia, days that were golden and are no more and thinks, imagines, fantasizes about the future – days as they should be.

Man lives in the past and in the future. The beasts live only in the present. But they are not aware that this is the present. They cannot be aware of the present. Only one who is aware of past and future can be aware of the present, because the present is sandwiched between past and future.

The animals have no anxiety. The memory does not disturb them, and imaginations don’t stir their hearts. They are simple. Existence has no complexity for them. When they live, they live; when they die, they die. They are innocent. Time has not entered to corrupt their being.

But man lives in time, is aware that he is, but is not aware who he is. And that becomes a great problem: Who am l? This is the fundamental question that any man can ask. Out of this fundamental question is all philosophy, all religion, all poetry, all art – different ways of raising the question: Who am l? different ways of answering it. But the question is one: Who am l?

If you try to understand man’s life, you will see this single question persisting. Yes, the man who is mad after money is also trying to answer the question: Who am l? By having money, he thinks that he will know who he is – he will know he is a rich man. He will have a certain identity. The man who is searching for power is basically trying to answer the question: Who am I? By becoming a prime minister of a country he will know: I am the prime minister.

But these answers are superficial and are not going to satisfy really. They can satisfy only the mediocre. They cannot satisfy the really intelligent person. Even when you have become very rich, your intelligence will go on persisting, asking, “Who are you? Yes, you have money, but who are you? You are not the money – you cannot be that which you possess. Who is this possessor? Yes, you have become the prime minister of a country, but that is just a function, that is not your being. Who are you? Who is this person who was not a prime minister and is now a prime minister, and tomorrow may not be again? This prime-ministership is just an episode – in whose life?”

The question persists. It can’t be answered by these superficial efforts and endeavors. But basically man is trim to do that. He becomes a husband, he becomes a mother, father, this and that… but the basic urge is somehow to have a certain identity: “I am the wife, I am the husband, I am the father, I am the mother.” Still you have not answered the question. Your being a mother or your being a father is just accidental, on the surface. Your innermost core remains untouched.

This is not real identity. This is a pseudo identity. The child will die – then who are you? Then you are not the mother. The husband may leave – then who are you? Then you are no more a wife.

These identities are very fragile, and man lives constantly in the crisis of identity. He tries hard to fix some definition around himself, but they go on slipping out of his hands.

Only the religious person really asks the question, and asks in the right direction.

The Buddha exists just like the beast. The Buddha knows just like man that he is. But a third dimension has opened: he knows who he is – he has come to see his innermost being. He has not searched for the identity in the outside world, because there can’t be any identity. How can it be in the outside world? You ARE your inferiority, you ARE your inwardness, you ARE your subjectivity – how can you know it through objects?

You may have a beautiful house, but it is outside. You may have beautiful art, paintings, antique art works, but they are outside! They can’t define you. You remain undefined by them. One day the house is on fire and all your identity is burnt, and. you are standing on the road, again puzzled: “Who am I?”

That’s why people commit suicide. If their money is gone, if they become bankrupt, they commit suicide. Why do they commit suicide? One wonders – why? Money can be earned again…. Look deep into them – that was their identity. They had believed long that “This is me.” Now all that bank balance is gone. Again the problem arises: Who am l? And they wasted their whole life in creating that bank balance. Now they are not ready to go into that effort again. It is too much. They have utterly failed.

In fact, by being bankrupt the suicide has already happened! Their identity is gone. They no longer know now who they are. Their face has disappeared. How can they live without a face? Your woman dies whom you had loved… and you commit suicide, or you start thinking of committing suicide! Because that woman was your identity. Now you are left alone, empty. And to start from the very beginning, from scratch, seems to be too much. It is better to finish this whole thing.

These are the three stages. And when I say the beast, there are many men who are like the beast. They are – they are not even aware that they are. They live mechanically. There are many people who are men – they know they are, but they don’t know who they are. And there are only few and far between, those rare people, who know who they are. They become three dimensional.

Man is a bridge between the beast and the Buddha. Remember, man is a bridge. Don’t make your house on the bridge; the bridge is not meant for that. The bridge has to be crossed. Don’t remain a man, otherwise you will remain in anxiety and anguish – because man is not a place to stay and abide. It is a passage to be passed. It is a ladder! You cannot stay on the ladder. It is only a link from one point to another point.

The beast is, and is in a certain state of contentment. No anxiety, no fear, no death, no ambition, no longing; utterly calm and quiet, but unaware, unconscious. The Buddha is again contented, utterly at peace, at home; has arrived, the journey is finished. There is nowhere to go, he has attained. Between these two is man: half-beast, half-Buddha. Hence the tension: one part moving backwards, one part moving forwards.

Man is torn apart.

Let me repeat: Man is not a being yet. Man has lost one kind of being – the being of a beast. And man has not yet attained another kind of being – the being of a Buddha. And man is constantly moving between these two beings, between these two banks.

You cannot go back, because in existence there is no backward movement. You cannot go back in time; time has only one dimension: it flows forward. You can go only forward. Don’t waste your time in thinking that you can also be a beast and can live like a beast: eat, drink and be merry. It is not possible for a human being. He will have to think, he will have to contemplate. He cannot afford non-thinking. And it is very risky to do that, because then you will be stuck and you will become a pool of dirty water. Your freshness, your aliveness is possible only if you go on flowing and flowing till you reach the ocean. That ocean I am calling the Buddha – the Buddha state of consciousness.

Man HAS to become a Buddha. Create that intense desire, that intense longing, to become a

Buddha. Be in a passionate search for it. Put ALL the energy that you have! Become aflame with that longing… and you can become a Buddha. And the day you become a Buddha, you have become a being again – and a being on a higher level, on the highest Level. There is nothing higher than that.

You ask me: What exactly is man?

As man, man is nothing exact – just a vague phenomenon, cloudy, foggy. Man is not exact because he is a crowd. Man is many men; hence he is foggy. The unity is missing. You don’t have the center – the center arises only through consciousness. Man simply lives like a driftwood.

That’s why I say man is a mere perhaps, a bewildering paradox, an absurd being. He is and he is not. He is an in-between. He is the only animal that can make a fool of himself. No animals can make fools of themselves – only man, because man has the capacity to become wise.

If you don’t grow into wisdom, you will behave like a fool. That’s what the majority of the people in the world are doing. If you watch from a detached viewpoint, you will be surprised how people are living… in such a mess, in such confusion, in such madness. How are they moving? They are not moving at all – they are jogging on the same place.

And if you watch man, you will be surprised: it is very rare to come across a wise man. Fools and fools… fools abound. But remember: no other animal can behave like a fool. Have you seen a dog behaving like a fool? Never. Because they cannot be wise they cannot be took. Both the possibilities arise simultaneously.

Watch yourself. Watch your foolishnesses. Be constantly alert about what you are doing with your life. It is a precious life. It is of such value that you cannot measure, you cannot evaluate it. But because it is given to you as a gift, you don’t appreciate its value. Because it has been just a blessing from God, you have taken it for granted. This is foolish! Don’t take it for granted. This is an opportunity to grow.

And you have to answer to God for what you did with your life. Have you come the same as you had gone? Or even worse? Think of this, that man is answerable. And unless you are a Buddha you will not be able to answer. Because to be a Buddha is to be a God – and that is your intrinsic possibility. And unless you are a God, you will not feel contented.

And only then will you know what exactly you are. Right now, you are nothing, a mere perhaps.

-Osho

From The Perfect Master, Vol. 1, Discourse #10

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

The Door of Enlightenment – Osho

Enlightenment is only the beginning; there is infinity to go for.

Enlightenment is only a door, and then there is an unending existence, an unending evolution, expansion.

The people who are unconscious, for them enlightenment is the goal; they are not aware of the fact that enlightenment is only a door. Once you have reached it, then a new kind of pilgrimage starts. Up to this door, you were an entity. Beyond this door, you will not be an entity. You will be just pure consciousness without a body, without a mind; you will be just a fragrance which will go on spreading all over existence.

And the fragrance is luminous. It is full of awareness. It knows itself and it knows the whole existence around it — not as separate, but part, a kind of at-onement. It is the universe, and the universe is it; there is no division, no duality.

Now the observer becomes the observed; the seer becomes the seen. He is both. It is difficult to explain to people who have not even thought about the door, whose lives go on like sleepwalkers, somnambulists. They live, but at the very minimum level without any intensity, without any totality.

And this calamity has happened because of a few vested interests; the priest, the politician, all those who have been in power. They never wanted man to be awake, because if humanity consists of awakened individuals, there is not going to be any Christianity. There is not going to be any Hinduism. There is not going to be any American, and Russian, any German. There is not going to be the white man and the black man; there is not going to be man the superior and woman the inferior. All these stupidities will disappear.

For the awakened man, the whole existence is one. Not only this earth, but now he is joined with the stars, too. And in his vision the smallest blade of grass is as significant and important to existence as the biggest star millions of light years away.

The priest does not want people to be awake because they can be exploited only when they are asleep. The politician does not want people to be awake; otherwise, they will not be democrats, republicans, socialists and communists.

They will be individuals intelligent and conscious enough to decide for themselves. They will not need parties and religions and cults and all their struggles and squabbles.

The vested interests have kept man almost drugged. I don’t agree with Karl Marx on any other point, but on one point I absolutely agree with him — religion is the opium of the people. On that point also I have my reservations.

First, he was only aware of Western religions: Judaism — he was a Jew; Christianity — which is an offshoot of Judaism; and a little bit of Islam — that, too, is an offshoot of Judaism. He had no knowledge about the Eastern religions: Buddhism, Jainism, Tao, Zen. They were unknown dimensions to him.

Secondly, he was not aware he could not be aware, of me and my people – we were not yet there — and a totally new quality of religion which I call religiousness. Not religion, but religiousness; no God, but godliness. I change every noun, every pronoun into a verb because existence is a verb, it is not a noun. It is continuously growing, flowing, expanding.

Now physicists say that the stars you see in the night are continuously running farther away from the center. We don’t know where the center is; we don’t know where they are going, and the speed is immense — 186,000 miles per second. With that speed, although the stars are going farther and farther away, this continuous growth needs not static things but growing things.

That’s why you will find so many contradictions in me. I have never stopped anywhere. I have been going in absolute tune with existence, wherever it leads. And if it contradicts my yesterdays, it is perfectly okay. They are dead anyway.

I am happy that I am in tune in the present moment. I am happy that I know the secret of being in the present, because time has no other tense. It is always now. And once you know the secret of being in the now, you have known the greatest mystery of existence.

But the people who are in power would like human beings to remain involved and occupied with very stupid things — communism, socialism, this party, that party, Christianity, Hinduism. The people are burdened with their own problems. They, too, are mostly created.

For example, marriage is a problem created by the priests. It is unnatural, it has not happened naturally. Now the man is being nagged by the wife; the wife is being continuously put down by the man. Then there are children. And the Pope and Mother Teresa go on telling people that these children are sent by God, so don’t use any birth control methods — that’s sin.

So people have dozens of children, thousands of worries. How to bring them up? How to educate them? We have made a world for human beings so difficult, and on top of it there is hell. If you just slip a little bit, you fall into eternal hell, for small things. And there is paradise luring you with all those things every religion condemns here on earth. And the saints are enjoying all those things there.

I have heard a story of a Zen Master. He was always teaching his disciples that celibacy is categorical. Without it, you cannot enter into nirvana, the kingdom of God. The poor disciples were trying hard to be celibate. It is really doing something unnatural, almost impossible. They were all feeling guilty. And then the Master died. His last words were, “Remember celibacy is the foundation of religion.”

After a few days, one of the disciples died, and the moment he entered paradise he was so full of joy that now he would be meeting his Master. He had been with the Master for thirty, forty years.

He saw the Master sitting by the bank of a beautiful river under the shadow of a very huge and ancient tree, with a beautiful naked woman sitting in his lap. The disciple could not believe his eyes. Still just out of old habit, he fell in the Master’s feet and asked, “What is happening? What happened to celibacy?” The Master said, “You will always remain an idiot! This is the reward for all my celibacy. Now I can enjoy as many women as I want, and here no woman grows old, no woman perspires, no woman has menstrual periods. You cannot improve upon the women that are available here. Their very body is fragrant; they don’t use French perfumes.” But the poor disciple was at a loss. It was such a shock.

This is the situation of all the religions. All the things that they deny to people here, they will give a million times more as a reward in paradise. Naturally, the poor human being is pulled: To be, or not to be? To enjoy a woman here or to wait just a few years more and enjoy as many women as you want for eternity. No marriage happens in heaven; all marriages happen in the churches. And they say that marriage is made in heaven, but in heaven there are no couples, only individuals.

The poor man is pulled apart. His fear of hell represses him; his greed for heaven represses him. With so many problems of day to day living he has no time to think of enlightenment. He has no time to think that there is anything more than this miserable world.

And this is a created situation, because only in such a situation can you keep them enslaved. You can send them to Vietnam to kill innocent people without any hate. You can send your pilots to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki within seconds without any feeling. You have turned people into robots. Millions of people around the earth are in the armies, just functioning like robots. And those who are not in the armies are also imprisoned in some kind of social, political, religious ideology. It is so difficult to find an individual who is clean, completely clean.

And that’s my whole effort: to create a complete clean human being, unburdened of the past, unburdened of any guilt, unburdened of fear and greed, unburdened of politicians and priests. Just clean, so clean that he becomes a mirror. And in that mirror, you see for the first time where the door is. In that mirror, the door reflects.

Just as our eyes are mirrors in which things reflect — we find where the table is and where the chair is because our two eyes are mirroring things around us — when a man is completely clean, silent, serene, his inner being becomes a mirror and the inward door that was always there is reflected in it. And the magnetism of the door is such that once one has seen it, there is no way to escape from it.

You start moving toward that door the way a moth moves toward a flame knowing perfectly that coming closer to the flame he is going to be burned, he is going to die. But some strange attraction, the moth is ready to die.

The same is the situation when you see the door of enlightenment for the first time. You become the moth and the door becomes the flame. You know you are going to die; but at the same time you know that you are going to be reborn on the other side.

This is resurrection.

-Osho

From The Last Testament, Vol. 1, Chapter 20

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

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