Philosophy

 

 

The old professor of philosophy who was retiring addressed his class: "Men, I have two confessions to make before I go," he said "The first is that half of what I have taught you is not true The second is that I have no idea which half it is!“

 

-Osho, "I Am That, #11, Q3“

 

 

⯎

 

 

Aristotle says that philosophy begins in wonder -- not so in the East. In the East, nobody has ever said that philosophy begins in wonder. In the East we know philosophy begins in the awareness of suffering, not in wonder. In the anguish of man, not in wonder. In the angst of man, in the meaninglessness of man's life, and in the awareness of it, philosophy begins.

 

So Western philosophy has remained a kind of entertainment. Eastern philosophy is not entertainment -- it is work, it is SADHANA. In fact there is no word in any language of the world to translate this Indian word SADHANA because nothing like that has ever existed anywhere else. SADHANA means: philosophy is not just to think but to be. One has to become it. One has to live it! It has to become your blood and bones and your marrow.

 

SADHANA means it is not only a kind of systematic thought but a way of life. It has to become your style of life. You have to prove it through your LIFE: whatsoever you think is right has to be lived -- that is the only proof that you think it is right. If you think that it is right and you live otherwise, you are be fooling others and you are be fooling yourself.

 

The Eastern approach is that life is anguish, anxiety, angst. And the awareness of it makes one search for means and methods how to go beyond it.

 

-Osho, "The Perfect Master, Vol 2, #1“

 

 

⯎

 

 

It is said philosophy is like a blind man searching on a dark night in a dark room for a black cat which is not there. But Germans find it! They have given the greatest philosophers to the world: Immanuel Kant and Hegel and Fichte and Marx and Feuerbach and so on and so forth. [....]

 

Love is not possible at all, because philosophy means logic and logic cannot be loving. Logic is the foundation of science but not the foundation of life. Logic is applicable to dead things, to objects, because the basic method of logic is dissection. The moment you dissect something you kill it, so if you want to find life through logic you will never find it; the very method prohibits it.

 

You can cut a rose flower, you can dissect it, you can put all the ingredients separately into different bottles methodically labelled, but one thing will be missing: there will be no beauty to be found and no life to be found, no joy to be found, no dance of the rose flower in the wind, in the rain, in the sun; they will all be gone. There will be a few chemicals, but those chemicals are not the rose flower, those chemicals were simply the situation in which the rose has appeared. They don't constitute the rose, they only constituted the situation for the appearance of the rose. If you take them away, the rose disappears into its invisible world.

 

It is like dissecting a dancer -- do you think you will find something like dance inside? You will find bones, you will find all kinds of nasty things, but you will not find a dance. You can cut the throat of a singer, but you will not find the song -- and you had always believed that the song came from the throat. The throat is only a vehicle; the song comes from the beyond. The throat can be a good vehicle or a bad vehicle, that is a different matter, but it is only a vehicle. By dissecting the vehicle you cannot find that which was descending on it from the world of the beyond.

 

Love and logic never meet, cannot meet. Logic means the outward journey, love means the inward journey. Logic means dissection, love means finding the organic unity. Logic thinks in terms of the many, the multiple.

 

In fact, scientists should stop calling the universe "universe," they should call it "multiverse." "Universe" is a poetic name given by lovers; universe means one, "uni." According to science it is not a universe, it is many, it is a multiverse. Only lovers know the unity, thinkers cannot know unity.

 

And in the unity of the whole one finds love and one finds wisdom. Wisdom is the shadow of love; wherever there is love there is wisdom. When love is alive there is dance, there is song, there is beauty; those are all the qualities of wisdom. If you think logic can give you wisdom then you will have to decide one thing very clearly, and that is that knowledge has to be taken as wisdom. Then logic can give you wisdom, but then knowledge becomes equivalent to, synonymous with, wisdom -- and knowledge is not synonymous with wisdom. Knowledge is all borrowed, rubbish; you have gathered it from others.

 

Wisdom is the explosion of your own consciousness. Wisdom is intrinsic; it does not come from the outside, it explodes within you and spreads towards the outer world. It is like light radiating: you share it, you don't accumulate it. Knowledge has to be begged for, wisdom has to be shared. They are totally different dimensions.

 

Philosophy cannot give you love or wisdom, but it can go on giving you hope. And if philosophy is the answer, it must have been a silly question.

 

Remember it, if you can find any answer through philosophy, that simply proves one thing: that your question was silly. If the question is really significant, philosophy has no answer. You will have to look in a different direction. That direction I call Zen, that direction I call awakening -- not theorizing, philosophizing, but becoming silent; not becoming more knowledgeable but dropping all knowledge, discarding it, so that you can be empty, utterly empty. In emptiness there is clarity, there is cleanliness, there is purity, there is innocence, a childlike wonder and awe. And those are the moments of love and wisdom growing in you; they grow together. Knowledge and logic grow together. Wisdom and love grow together. [....]

 

The philosophers are good at categorizing things, the scientists are good at categorizing things. Their whole effort is how to categorize, how to put everything in a particular category -- this is this, that is that -- and they go on and on. They are not in search of the organic unity of life, they are not in search of the ultimate principle of life that runs in the trees and the mountains and the stars and the animals and the birds and men and women. They are not in search of that unifying factor. That unifying factor is what religions have called the truth, what Buddha has called NIRVANA, what Jesus has called the kingdom of God.

 

You will not find any wisdom, any love in philosophy. Yes, you will find all kinds of beautiful answers, you will find all kinds of parrot-like information, facts, you will become very efficient in repeating them, in quoting them, but you will only be becoming a computer. That can be done better by a computer than by you.

 

-Osho, "The Goose is Out, #1, Q2“