Tag: Zorba the Buddha

The End of Heroes – Osho

You have said that you are the new man that the world needs, and that this commune is a preparation for the arrival of the new man. Do you see that other people here are going to become, like you, the new man, or are you talking about a preparation for future generations?

I am never concerned about the future, neither about the past. My whole concern is the present. And when I say the New Man, I don’t mean a certain model, type, an ideal. By the New Man I mean a man without ideals, a man with his own individuality, not imitative, not a carbon copy of somebody else. So the New Man will not be like me or like anybody else. Everybody will be authentically himself One of the most fundamental psychological things has to be understood: equality is an illusion. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, and other communist thinkers of the world have created almost a conviction in millions of people’s minds — not only those who are communist but also those who are not communist — that equality should be the goal. Only machines can be equal; man cannot be. If you want man to be equal, then you will have to destroy his humanity and make him a robot.

It is very simple: just as two faces are not the same, in the whole world even two fingerprints are not the same — and you want two beings to be the same? You don’t value the being more than the fingerprint even? A very absurd idea of equality has become widespread.

Why it became so influential can be understood very easily. Everybody feels inferior to somebody, either intellectually, financially or physically. In some way everybody carries deep down an inferiority complex, because he is continuously comparing himself with others. Naturally, somebody has more intelligence, somebody has more physical strength, somebody can run faster than you, somebody can swim better. It is impossible for anybody not to feel inferior if he starts comparing.

Even a man like Napoleon . . . you would not think that he would ever feel inferior. For what? He was one of the greatest conquerors, one of the greatest fighters and warriors in the world. But on one point he was very touchy. His height was only five feet, five inches — even his bodyguards were taller — and that hurt. That gave him pain, and he could not even say it to anybody.

One day he was trying to fix a picture on his wall, and the nail was a little high up, beyond his hand’s reach. His bodyguard said, “Sir, I can do it. I am higher than you.” Napoleon became so angry. He said, “Take your words back, otherwise I will kill you right now, here.” But he said, “What have I said?”

Napoleon said, “You are taller than me but not higher than me. I can tolerate taller; but higher? — I cannot tolerate anybody.” He had touched his wound.

Even the people who have immense power in some way or other feel inferior when they start comparing. That leaves almost the whole of humanity feeling an inferiority complex. And this is the root cause why communism is so influential.

It has nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with capitalism. It simply fulfills a deep desire in every man that everybody be equal. He feels gratified even to think that everybody is equal. Then there will be no wound, no hurt feeling, there will be no question of comparison.

Nobody has looked at communism from a psychological viewpoint. People have been studying communism only as an economic theory. It is not. Basically, it is a psychological consolation to all those who are feeling inferior in any way. Hence more than half of humanity is already communist. Communism is the biggest religion right now and is growing fast and will take over the world if we cannot create a New Man who has no inferiority complex.

The New Man will not be a communist, because he does not want to be equal to others. The New Man wants to be unique in himself and wants everybody else also to be unique. A society of unique people — everybody unique in his own way — will be the richest society that has existed in the world.

Somebody is a painter, somebody is a poet, somebody is a scientist, somebody is a sculptor. They all have their own uniqueness. It does not matter what you do, all that matters is that everything you do has your fingerprint on it, and you have become a creator. There is no reason to compare. A painter is a painter and a poet is a poet. It is stupid that both start comparing. Then the painter becomes inferior because he is not a poet, and the poet becomes inferior because he is not a painter. And we have been living under this inferiority complex for thousands of years. So everybody is suffering — “Existence has not been compassionate towards me.”

Start looking at the uniqueness and drop the idea of equality, which is in every way impossible. Unless man is produced in a factory on an assembly line, there is no possibility of equality. And a man produced on an assembly line will not be a man; he will be just a machine.

The New Man will not be like me in the sense that he will not be my carbon copy. But in a way, in a very different way, he will be like me. I am independent; he will be independent. I am my own self; he will be his own self. I have never accepted anything just as a belief unless I have experienced it. Then there is no question of belief — I know it. So either I know something, or I don’t know, there is nothing in between.

The believer is in between. He does not know, yet he pretends to know. You will find all these hypocrites assembled in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, all over the world. They don’t know God and they are praying to him. They don’t know that any prayer has ever been heard, and still they are praying. They don’t know that any prayer has ever been answered, but still they are praying.

The New Man will be a seeker, not a believer. He will trust in inquiry, in doubt — and doubt is the only method that can lead you to the truth. Belief is a barrier, not a bridge. No believer has ever known the truth. His belief never allowed him to inquire. So in a very different sense, he will be like me.

I have doubted everything. I have never accepted anything because it is written in the Holy Scriptures, because the great founders of religions have said it, because great saints verify it. I have insisted my whole life that nothing else can prove it to me except my own experience. And when it comes as your own experience, it brings tremendous rejoicing, great blessings, flowering. Your being finds its home. The wandering is finished, you have arrived.

Now my wandering and your wandering will be different. The point where I started and the point where you will start will be different. I will arrive to my own innermost core; you will arrive to your innermost core. The ultimate experience of blossoming will be the same, but the path will be totally different.

Everybody has to search and seek in his own way.

The way to truth is just like the sky. The bird flies but leaves no footprints. You cannot follow. There are no footprints. The inner sky is exactly the same, and everybody has to find his own way. It will be better to say the New Man makes his way. He does not move on a ready-made way. Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, are ready-made ways, superhighways, comfortable — you need not bother — but they go nowhere. They go round and round the earth. You can go on moving on them for millions of lives and you will never reach to your own being, because that way is not connected to you. It is not yours.

The real seeker steps out from all these ready-made ways. He moves into the unknown. It is great excitement, great ecstasy. And every step that brings you closer to home also brings you peace that you have not known before, brings you love and compassion that are absolutely unknown to you. Closer and closer . . . and you start feeling a new music, a new poetry, a new song arising out of your own heart. Your every heartbeat becomes music.

These are the signs that home is coming closer. Your whole being becomes harmonious. You can feel in yourself a new coolness, freshness, aliveness — indications that the source of life is not far away. And when you are just coming, maybe a few more steps, suddenly your walk is no more a walk, it becomes a dance. Nobody has reached into his being in any other way except dancing. It is not up to you. Your feet start feeling the dance. The whole milieu around you makes you thrive, thrilled.

Yes, I am the New Man, and I am preparing the way for you to become the New Man. That’s why I go on insisting that you keep yourself intelligent, meditative, silent. Keep yourself alert, aware. Change every stone on the path into a stepping-stone. Don’t think, “Now the stone is blocking the way.” No stone blocks the way. You just have to know that every stone can be turned into a stepping-stone.

Just now you have passed through a fascist, poisonous time. Those who can make it a stepping-stone will be grateful for it. There is no need to be afraid, to be worried, to be frustrated that it happened. Rather than wasting time over why it happened, use the energy to make it a stepping-stone to go higher. As I see it, the commune looks purer. It looks fresh. People look unburdened. These are good signs. A few people look angry that they have been deceived; that is stupidity.

Now, what has happened has happened. Anger is wasting your energy; that is hitting your head against the stone. That is not going to help. A few people look as if they are lost, because they had become dependent on a fascist kind of order.

They needed the order, they needed moms, and they look like helpless children whose moms are lost.

This is a good opportunity. The moms have escaped. It is time that you become independent. Drop this childish helplessness. Take responsibility and prove that independently you can do better than under a repressive regime, that you can be more creative if you are not being humiliated, dragged, forced to do something.

But a few people are feeling helpless because unless somebody is on their neck, continuously nagging them, they cannot work. They have become addicted to nagging just as people become addicted to smoking.

I know people whose wives are nothing but a pain in the neck. They know, and they have been telling horrible stories to me about their wives, and when their wives go for a few days to their parents’ house, just within two or three days that man completely forgets all the horribleness of the woman’s nagging and everything, and he starts hankering that she should come back. I was puzzled. I have seen many friends in the same position, in the same vicious circle, and I have asked them, “What happens to you? You are left free, now enjoy! Before you were saying you could not enjoy because the wife was so horrible, it was impossible to enjoy. Now why are you looking sad?” And they will say, “We feel very much alone. Something is missing. Without the wife, the house seems to be horrible.”

I said, “This is great! With the wife it was horrible; without the wife it is horrible.

Then what do you want?”

They have become dependent. The wife was not only nagging them, she was taking care of them also. They don’t know where their shoes are, they don’t know . . . I know people who don’t know how to put on their necktie. Only the wife knows, because she has been doing it. Everything is in a mess. They have completely forgotten what pain she was giving them, and now they remember only the best part.

So there are people who have forgotten that they were not happy under a strict system where there was no question of independence, total surrender was asked.

They were unwilling to do it, but they were doing it. Now you are free, and you don’t know what to do. You will have to learn that you can work out of your own love, that there is no need for surrender. You need not become a slave; you can remain a master. But certainly, remember that the quality of the work of a master must be higher than the quality of the work of a slave. That’s the only criterion to prove whether you are a slave or a master.

The New Man will live out of his own love, creativity and joy, without depending on any father figure. He will not need a God. God is a projection of the sick minds of people who want a permanent father. These human fathers are not reliable; today they are alive, tomorrow they may die. You cannot trust them.

They need a father who is eternal. They need a father who is all-powerful. They need a father who knows everything, past, present, future. That gives them great consolation.

Now a few people are angry at me. Why did I not stop it? . . . But I am not omniscient; I didn’t know what was happening. I don’t know even what is happening in the other room. I can just hear the noise; what is cooking, I don’t know. Something must be cooking. But I don’t pretend to be an omniscient father; neither am I a peeping tom, that I should go on looking into everybody’s bathroom keyhole watching what is happening, who is doing what. I never go out of my own room.

They are angry. The reason is that they must have been unconsciously projecting the father figure on me. Please, don’t make me a curtain to project anything you want. I am nobody’s curtain. I am not a screen, that you can project any idea on me and then feel angry because I am not behaving according to you. When had I said to you that I will behave according to you? I don’t expect you to behave according to me, neither do I want you to expect me to behave according to you.

Here we are agreed only on one point, and that is the independence of everybody; there is no other agreement.

The New Man will have communes, but the agreement will be freedom. You can look into my eyes, and you can see my silence, my depth. You can feel my presence, my joy, my song. But you are not to repeat anything. I am simply indicating to you that what has happened to me can happen to you. There will be differences, there will be uniquenesses. I may be just a marigold flower, and you may be a lotus — so don’t imitate me. You may be a rose, and I am just a marigold, a very poor flower who has nothing. But whoever named it marigold must have had great insight; it is the poorest flower, but there is great merriness, great joy in it — and it is pure gold, twenty-four carat.

One never knows what is hidden in you. Something certainly is hidden — everybody is carrying a being — you have to search and bring it into light and let your fragrance take its wings into the air.

I am the New Man. You have to be the New Man. I am not ordering you; I am simply saying so loudly so you can hear. And we have to create more opportunities for the New Man for more people around the world.

The New Man will not be a politician. The New Man will have no desire for power. The New Man will not create people like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse-tung. The New Man will not create heroes as in the past, because everybody will be a hero. With the New Man, history is finished. You cannot write history with a New Man. Otherwise it will be such a big job, because every man will be a unique man, and he has to have as much space as anybody else. […]

The New Man will be the end of the world of heroes. Alexander the Great will not be possible anymore. Even if he comes riding on his horse, people will be simply entertained. He will look just like Don Quixote. Nobody is going to bother about Alexander the Great.

History ends with the old man. Heroes end with the old man. The New Man will write symbolically. He will write about the New Man and his qualities in a symbolic way — not about separate persons, which brings comparison, which makes someone big, high, holy, someone a sinner, inferior, a nobody. The old man was living vertically, in a hierarchy. The New Man will live horizontally, with no hierarchy. Everybody is doing his best and doing what he wants to do and doing it not just as work but as worship.

-Osho

From The Last Testament, V.1, Talk #14

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 inward 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 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 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, Q2

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.

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

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.

 

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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