Experiment

 

 

One cannot experiment with truth. One can know it or one can not know it, but one cannot experiment with it.

 

The very word experiment belongs to the world of objective science. One cannot experiment with subjectivity, and that's the truth. Note that:

 

Subjectivity is irreducible to any object of experimentation, observation.

 

Subjectivity is the most mysterious phenomenon in existence, and its mystery is that it always goes back and back. Whatsoever you observe, it is not 'it'... it is not subjectivity. Subjectivity is always the observer and never the observed. You cannot experiment with truth, because experiment is possible only with things, objects, not with consciousness.

 

Mahatma Gandhi was a sincerely good man, but he was not a meditator. And if one is not a meditator, howsoever good one is it is all useless. He experimented his whole life and achieved nothing. He died as ignorant as ever. It is unfortunate, because it is very difficult to find a man of so much integrity, sincerity, honesty, and a tremendous desire to know the truth. But that very desire becomes a barrier.

 

Truth is known by people like me, who don't even bother about it, who are unconcerned even about truth itself. Even if God knocks on my door, I am not going to open it. He will have to find his own way to open it. Truth comes to such lazy people. Hence I have called myself The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment.

 

Now I can add one thing more so it can become complete: I am the lazy man's guide to enlightenment, and to non-enlightenment too! That is going beyond enlightenment.

 

I feel for the man, although I have always criticized him for his politics, his sociology, and his whole stupid idea of turning the wheel of time backwards -- you can call it the spinning wheel. He wanted man to become primitive again. He was against all technology, even against the poor railways, the telegraph, the postal system. Without science man will be a baboon. The baboon may be very strong... but a baboon is a baboon. Man has to go ahead.

 

I object even to the title of the book because it is not only a title, it summarizes his whole life. He thought because he had been educated in England, he was a perfect Indian Englishman -- utterly Victorian. These are the people who go to hell, the Victorians! He was full of etiquette, full of manners, full of all kinds of English stupidities. Now Chetana must be hurting. Chetana forgive me. It is just by chance that you are here, and you know me -- I always find something to hit people with.

 

But Chetana is fortunate: she is not an English lady, she is an Osho freak! And she comes from a poor English family, that's very good. Her father was a fisherman, simple. She is not snobbish; otherwise English ladies, more than gentlemen, always keep their noses up, as if they are always watching the stars. They really stink -- stink of snobbishness!

 

Mahatma Gandhi was educated in England; perhaps that messed him up. Perhaps he would have been better if he had remained uneducated, and then he would not have experimented with truth, he would have experienced truth.

 

Experimenting with truth? Absurd! Ridiculous! If one wants to know the truth one has to experience it.

 

-Osho, “Books I Have Loved, #15”