Accidents
Because life goes ahead and your mind is past-oriented, mind and life never meet. Mind goes backwards, lives backwards. Mind is a rear-view mirror. Use it when the occasion arises. Yes, the rear-view mirror in the car has some important function to fulfill. But if you become obsessed with the rear-view mirror, and you only look into the rear-view mirror and drive the car looking always into the rear-view mirror, then there is going to be danger. Then there are going to be accidents and accidents and nothing else.
And that's what has been happening to humanity. Look: three thousand years of history and you will find only accidents and accidents and accidents. In three thousand years we have fought five thousand wars. What more accidents do you want? And in these three thousand years, what have we done to the earth, to nature? We have destroyed the ecology. Now if something is not done immediately, the earth may become uninhabitable.
The earth has been poisoned by us, we are killing it. And we have to live on it, and we are turning it into a corpse! It has started stinking in many places. We have given nature and earth a cancer: nature has given us life, and we are giving death to nature in return. And the basic reason, the basic cause, is that we have been listening to the mind which moves backwards.
Mind means past. Mind has no idea of the present, cannot have any idea of the present. Mind only means that which has been lived, known, experienced -- the accumulated past. It cannot have any contact with the present; it will have that contact only when the present is no more present and has become past. And life moves ahead. We live in the present and we move in the future, and mind never lives in the present and always clings to the past. This is the dichotomy, the greatest calamity. This is the knot that has to be cut.
-Osho, “The Book of Wisdom, #21”