Anguish

 

 

Man is in anguish, great anguish. We go on hiding it, because what is the point of bringing it to others? Nobody can help. We go on carrying dark nights in our beings, great turmoil, great pain, great wounds. We go on hiding! It is pointless to tell anybody; nobody can help. It is better not to talk about the wounds that you are carrying in your soul; it is better to forget about all those wounds.

 

That’s why intoxicants have been so important down the ages. There has never been a time when something or other was not used by man to forget the inner wounds, to forget this whole nonsense that we have made out of life. People go on talking against alcohol, against drugs, but they don’t understand the psychology behind it. Just talking against them is not going to prevent people. You can legalize, you can prohibit, but still intoxicants will be used.

 

Unless man becomes blissful, they cannot be prevented. If man lives in misery, he will need something or other to forget the misery. Otherwise, it will be too much! In fact, my own insight is this: if all the drugs and all the intoxicants could be simply removed from the world, man would immediately go mad. The whole world would be a madhouse.

 

People are somehow keeping themselves together. They can drink alcohol, and for a few hours they can forget the world and the misery that the world brings to them; they can forget their own selves. They can be lost into oblivion. They know perfectly well it is not going to change anything. But then nothing seems to change anything. At least for a few hours one can forget all about it.

 

Intoxicants will disappear from the world only when meditation has become a world-wide phenomenon, when each single individual has created some meditativeness in his being; when each single individual has become aware, “There is no need to be miserable. Misery is created by me. Life is not misery: life’s nature is bliss. It is my stupidity that I am creating misery out of it.”

 

Misery needs great efforts, bliss is natural — you cannot create bliss, you can only create misery. And if you don’t create misery, bliss comes of its own accord. Bliss comes effortlessly — you cannot practise it. But for misery you have to make great efforts — and you are making great efforts to remain miserable. You have invested much in your misery.

 

Kabir is right; he says, “I laugh…” It looks a little hard, looks a little cruel, that a man like Kabir should say:

 

I laugh when I hear the the fish in the water is thristy.

 

It is not cruel, it is not hard. It’s simply how it should be. All the Buddhas have been laughing; they may have said so, they may not have said so. Hotei laughed publicly; Gautam Buddha must have laughed privately, but laughter is bound to be there.

 

I am saying it because this is my own experience too. When you come with all your miseries to me, I listen very sympathetically — I don’t laugh. But deep down there is laughter. I listen, very patiently and very attentively… I don’t want to hurt you, I don’t want to be impolite to you. But if you want to know the truth, then the reality is that you are simply showing how ridiculous you are, how stupid you are.

 

And God is not responsible for your stupidity. It is your own work. God creates every human being with great intelligence. You can see in children’s eyes: all children are intelligent. It is very difficult to find a stupid child. If you can find a stupid child, that simply means he is already old.

 

Children are so overflowing with intelligence. Where does all this intelligence disappear to? What happens to this intelligence? The society is against intelligence; the society does not want intelligent people to be around. Intelligent people seem to he dangerous to the society.

 

The society wants stupid people because stupid people are easy to manage, easy to dominate, easy to manipulate, easy to order. Stupid people are obedient — even where obedience is sin they are obedient. Stupid people can be forced to become machines, and the society needs machines, not men. The society is not interested in you; it is interested in your efficiency. And machines certainly are more efficient than men. The machine is the model, and man has to follow the model. Make man more and more stupid and he will come closer and closer to the machine. He will be a good clerk, a good station master, a good teacher in a school, a good collector… but unintelligent.

 

If he is intelligent, he may not be a clerk at all; he may not waste his life in writing stupid documents, collecting garbage in files. He may be more respectful towards his own being. He may choose some other way to live. He will not be just a deputy collector. How can you ask an intelligent man to be just a policeman? Impossible! And where will you find the thousands and thousands for your armies? Intelligent people are not cattle; intelligent people cannot be told to do stupid things. They will say, “No!”

 

Just think: the man who dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, if he had been intelligent he would have simply said “No!” Even at the risk of his own life he would have said no.

 

He would have said, “If you want to kill me, kill me, but I am not going to kill one hundred thousand people. They have not committed any sin. They are innocent civilians — small children, old people…. They have no responsibility for the war! They have not caused it. Why should I drop the atom bomb? It is better to die than to kill one hundred thousand people.”

 

If the man had been intelligent, he would have immediately said no. But he must have been utterly stupid: he dropped the atom bomb, and had a good night’s sleep. His sleep was not disturbed. […]

 

In my philosophy of life, only two things are valuable: one is meditation, the other is love. And both are complementary. Meditation means the joy of being alone, and love means the joy of being together with somebody. These are the two wings of a true education. Meditation means independence, freedom — freedom from all, even from the beloved, because even the presence of the beloved encroaches on your space. It is good for the time being, it is good to overlap your space with somebody, it is good to meet and merge, but ultimately, and fundamentally, you are alone. And you have to learn how to be alone, and not only how to be alone, but joyously alone, ecstatically alone.

 

Meditation means sitting silently, doing nothing… just being! The world is too full of doing. The society teaches you to do this, to do that — why? Because if you do this, you will have that; if you don’t do this, you will not have that. Doing is a way of having more, and we are conditioned to have more and more and more — as if by having more we will really be satisfied, contented; as if by having more we will really become rich.

 

The truth is just the opposite: the more you have, the more you feel your inner poverty — in contrast. The richer you become in the outside world, the emptier you feel inside, and no outer richness can fill the inner gap. Nothing from the outside can be taken in. You can have as much wealth as possible, but it will go on piling up outside you; and the bigger the heap, the more you will see your inner emptiness, nothingness, hollowness — the more miserable you will become.

 

-Osho, "The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty, #1"