Spontaneity

 

 

FIRST, IN TANTRA, spontaneity is the greatest value -- to be just natural, to allow nature to happen. Not to obstruct it, not to hinder it; not to distract it, not to take it in some other direction where it was not going on its own. To surrender to nature, to flow with it. Not pushing the river, but going with it -- ALL the way, wherever it leads. This trust is Tantra. Spontaneity is its mantra, its greatest foundation.

 

Spontaneity means: you don't interfere, you are in a let-go. Whatsoever happens, you watch, you are a witness to it. You know it is happening, but you don't jump into it, and you don't try to change its course. Spontaneity means you don't have any direction. Spontaneity means you don't have any goal to attain; if you have some goal to attain you cannot be spontaneous. How can you be spontaneous if suddenly your nature is going one way and your goal is not? How can you be spontaneous? You will drag yourself towards the goal.

 

That's what millions of people are doing -- dragging themselves towards some imaginary goal. And because they are dragging themselves towards some imaginary goal, they are missing the natural destiny -- which is the only goal! And that's why there is so much frustration, and so much misery and so much hell -- because whatsoever you do will never satisfy your nature.

 

That's why people are dull and dead. They live, and yet they live not. They are moving like prisoners, chained. Their movement is not that of freedom, their movement is not that of dance -- it cannot be because they are fighting, they are continuously in a fight with themselves. There is a conflict, each moment: you want to eat this, and your religion does not prescribe it; you want to move with this woman, but that will not be respectable. You want to live this way, but the society prohibits it. You want to be in one way, you feel that that is how you can flower, but everybody else is against it.

 

So do you listen to your being? or do you listen to everybody else's advice? If you listen to everybody's advice, your life will be an empty life of nothing but frustration. You will finish without ever being alive; you will die without ever knowing what life is.

 

But the society has created such conditioning in you that it is not only outside -- it is sitting inside you. That's what conscience is all about. Whatsoever you want to do, your conscience says, "Don't do it!" The conscience is your parental voice; the priest and the politician speak through it. It is a great trick. They have made a conscience in you -- from the very childhood when you were not aware at all of what was being done to you, they have put a conscience in you.

 

So whenever you go against the conscience, you feel guilt

 

Guilt means you have done something which others don't want you to do. So whenever you are natural you are guilty, and whenever you are not guilty you are unnatural: this is the dilemma, this is the dichotomy, this is the problem.

 

If you listen to your own naturalness, you feel guilty; then there is misery. You start feeling you have done something wrong. You start hiding; you start defending yourself; you start continuously pretending that you have not done it, and you are afraid -- somebody is bound to catch you sooner or later. You will be caught... and anxiety, and guilt, and fear. And you lose all love with life.

 

Whenever you do something against others, you feel guilty. And whenever you do something that others say, you never feel happy doing it -- because it has never been your own thing to do. Between these two is man caught.

 

-Osho, “The Tantra Vision, Vol 1, #3”