Time Changing

 

 

The times of confusion and chaos are the greatest times to live in. When the society is static there is not much to live for, to live with. When a society is secure and there is no confusion and there is no chaos, then people live a dull, drab, dragging life – comfortable, convenient, stable, but not alive.

 

It is only in the times of chaos and confusion that great things happen, because people are loose. They are loose, uprooted: they can search for new soils, they can search for new lands, they can search for new countries, they can search for new continents of being.

 

This is one of the greatest moments in the history of human consciousness. It has never been so; this is a crescendo.

 

Buddha said – and he seems to have detected it richly – that after each twenty- five centuries there comes a moment of great turmoil and chaos. And that is the time when the greatest number of people become enlightened.

 

Now twenty-five centuries have passed since Buddha. Again you are coming closer and closer to a moment where the past will lose all meaning. When the past loses all meaning, you are free, you are untethered from the past: you can

use this freedom to grow tremendously, to grow to undreamed-of heights.

 

But you can destroy yourself too. If you are not intelligent, the confusion, the chaos, will destroy you. Millions will be destroyed – because of their unintelligence, not because of the chaos. They will be destroyed because they will not be able to find a secure and comfortable and convenient life, as was possible in the past. They will not be able to find where they belong. They will have to live from their own sources; they will have to be individuals, they will have to be rebels.

 

The society is disappearing, the family is disappearing; now it is very difficult. Unless you are capable of being an individual it is going to be difficult to live. Only individuals will survive.

 

Now people who have become too accustomed to slavery, accustomed to being commanded, accustomed to being ordered by somebody else – people who have become too much accustomed to father-figures – they will be in a state of insanity. But that is their fault, it is not the fault of the times. The times are beautiful, because the times of chaos are the times of revolution.

 

It is possible now to get out of the wheel of life and death more easily than it has been possible for twenty-five centuries since Buddha. In Buddha’s time, many people became enlightened; the society was in a turmoil. Again it is happening. Great times are ahead – prepare for them.

 

And that's what I am trying to do here. Orthodox people cannot understand what is happening here; they have no eyes to see it and no heart to feel it. They only have old rotten values, and they go on judging me according to hose values. Those values are out of date. I am creating new people, I am creating new values, I am creating a new future. They live in the past; they cannot understand the future that I am trying to bring here to the earth.

 

My sannyasins don't belong to the past, they don't represent any tradition. They belong to the future: they belong to something that is going to happen and has not yet happened. Hence there are no criteria -- they cannot be judged easily, and they will be misunderstood.

 

I am going to be misunderstood, because people have their values, and those values come from the past. And I am trying to create a space for the future to happen.

 

-Osho, "Unio Mystica, Vol 2, #2, Q2“