The only courage that is worth calling courage is to get out of the fold of the mob psychology. We are born in a crowd; it cannot be avoided, it is natural. We grow up in a crowd, with the whole past of the crowd, and the crowd goes on loading every child with all its superstitions, stupidities. The crowd consists of blind people, because the buddhas are very few and far between. The crowd functions according to the tradition, because it has no insight of its own — it cannot have.

 

To grow one’s own insight, one needs to be deeply meditative, very alert and aware. The crowd lives a kind of sleepy, unconscious life; it makes no effort at awareness, it lives in a routine way — mechanical, robotlike. But unfortunately every child has to be in the hands of a certain crowd, and the crowd contaminates the mind of the child, it poisons his consciousness. By the time the child is old enough, strong enough, to stand on his own feet, it is too late. The poison has gone too deep. The crowd has become part of his inner world; it has penetrated as far as possible into his psyche. Hence I say the greatest courage in life is to throw the crowd out of your being.

 

If one lives according to the crowd one is bound to remain miserable, because the crowd is miserable. Its whole ideology is the root cause of its misery. Its past-orientation keeps it miserable. It has no passion, intensity, to live in the present. It lives in the nostalgia of the past which is no more. That is sheer foolishness, a waste of time. And the crowd thinks of a future according to its past, a future which is never going to be. Both are non-existential, the past is no more, the future not yet, and between these two non-existences the crowd is crushed. It remains empty, unfulfilled, hence the misery.

 

A sannyasin has to come out of the mob psychology and its grip. It makes you not a man. It deprives you of your humanity, it reduces you into a number — Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Buddhist — which are all replaceable. No individual is ever replaceable, but a Hindu can be replaced by another Hindu, a Christian can be replaced by another Christian. That’s why all these religions are interested that people should go on procreating as many children as possible. No religion is in favor of preventing the growing population of the world. The reason is simple, the people who are Christians today will soon be dead; if they stop reproducing children or they limit themselves, then who is going to replace them? Replacements are needed.

 

Now there are six hundred and fifty million Catholics in the world; if they all used contraceptives, birth control methods, abortion, then soon the Catholics would start disappearing — and numbers have power. It is a political game, they are interested in numbers.

 

Just the other day Mother Teresa said that every year one hundred and fifty million are killed through abortion, and she is ready to provide a home for one hundred and fifty million people — there is no need for abortion. Naturally, such a good opportunity, such a good business, one hundred and fifty million people every year becoming Catholics — immense joy! Even if the whole earth has to die for it, even if the whole humanity has to die for it, that’s okay.

 

And who is responsible for all these abortions? These same people. They don’t allow contraceptives — otherwise there would be no abortions. Then they condemn abortions. First they don’t allow contraceptives; then they condemn abortions as murder, violence; and then they create orphans and orphanages. Just see the whole trick, the whole business, the whole conspiracy — and then those orphans have to be served.

 

Just contraceptives alone could do all the work. There is no need to do all this nonsense. But then the number of Catholics will be reduced. Hindus are against contraception, Mohammedans are also against it. The Mohammedans are far more advanced than the Catholics because they allow four wives to every man. Now this is very simple arithmetic.

 

One man can make four or forty women pregnant. The vice versa is not true: if one woman is married to four men you will not get four children, you will get only one child; if four women are married to one man you will get four children — simple business!

 

Mohammed himself had nine wives, and of course, when the prophet has nine wives the disciples have to be allowed at least four — that becomes their birthright. And Mohammedans are not willing to stop this ugly institution of marrying four wives. Those wives are used like slaves, like factories to create children. But Mohammedans go on increasing their number.

 

The crowd is interested in numbers, it is not interested in individuals at all. It destroys the individual, reduces him into a commodity. A sannyasin has to assert his individuality, he has to pull himself out from all kinds of crowds. He has to assert that he is independent of all mob psychology, ideology, religion, church, state, nation.

 

Sannyas is a rebellion, and it needs courage; but the outcome is immense. Once you assert your individuality, once you are on your own, there is an explosion of bliss. Bliss is earned only by those who are courageous; cowards are bound to live in misery.

 

Man has to regain his childhood; only then can he be blissful. He has to deprogramme himself. Every society programmes you according to its own attitude towards life, according to its own structure. It does not care a bit about you. It has already made a certain dress: you have to fit with the dress. If the dress is too short, then your hands, your head, your feet have to be chopped. If the dress is too long then you have to be stretched by Rolfers! (laughter) But the dress cannot be changed. And one never knows for whom the dress was made; it was certainly made for you. Maybe it was perfectly okay for Jesus Christ...

It was not meant for you, but the Christians will try to cut you, to stretch you -- somehow they will manage to make you fit according to the ready-made dress. The dress is sacred, you cannot cut it, you cannot touch it.

This is what has been done up to now. The pattern is already there before you come into the world and you come not like anybody else; you come as a unique individuals so how can you really fit? With all their effort, still, the dress never fits perfectly. Sometimes it is too loose, sometimes it is too tight. If it is tight it makes you miserable, it makes you uptight, it makes you an Englishman (laughter). If it is too loose, it makes you lousy, it makes you an Indian! (laughter) And you always look silly! It is always somebody else's dress that you are wearing, you always become a laughing stock.

People are parading as buffoons, for the simple reason that they are trying to fit with a certain pattern which was not basically planned for then, for their uniqueness. And if they don't fit, naturally it creates guilt: 'Something is wrong with me.' Everybody is saying that you have to it -- 'These are the shoulds and these are the should nots' -- and when you don't fit you feel guilty you are simple you feel guilty and then you have to go and confess all your sins to the Catholic priest.

Just the other day I was reading about a nun in Africa, a mother superior. For forty years she has been Catholic nun; now she is sixty-five. For a few days a Man was coming continuously to confess his sins; she must have enjoyed those sins so much that they both eloped, got married! The man is seventy and the mother superior is sixty-five! (laughter)

If you are simple you will feel guilty; if you are cunning you will become mother superiors and fathers and ministers and priests. If you are cunning, if you can pretend, if you can be a great hypocrite, then you will be very successful, but at a great cost. You will have to repress your nature, your spontaneity.

Now what must this woman have been doing for forty years? Falling in love at the age of sixty-five looks a little bit odd! (laughter) For forty years she must have been repressing and repressing, and all those confessions that she was listening to, she must have been enjoying.

This is going on all over the world: either your conditionings make you feel guilty or they make you hypocrites. The cunning ones become hypocrites. They reach to the very heights of respectability; they become popes and ayatollas and imams and shankaracharyas. Or if you are a little less cunning, then you feel great guilt, always burdened that you are not doing that which should be done and you are doing that which should not be done. You are always torn apart, your life become miserable.

Both alternatives are wrong.

My sannyasins have to drop the whole nonsense of wearing somebody else's dresses, somebody else's programmes. You have to find your own life and you have to live according to your own light. For that you have to clean your slate. That's what I mean by innocence, childhood you have to become a child again so that you can erase all the writing that has been done on you by others; so you can undo whatsoever they have done to you.

If a man can undo whatsoever the society has done to him, he is capable of becoming awakened, he is capable of attaining to great ecstasies. His life will be a sheer joy! Otherwise you will either be guilty and burdened and afraid, knowing perfectly well that you will fall into hell, or you will be a hypocrite, continuously doing something that you don't want to do. You will have a double personality, one at the front door, another at the back door; and you will be continuously trying to hide things, you will become very secretive. All that is ugly, all that is inhuman.

How can one live joyously if one is divided, split? The phony person cannot live joyously. He is not cheating anybody else, he is simply cheating himself. And the guilty person, of course, cannot live joyously; there is no possibility. If he is making love to a woman he feels guilty, continuously thinking that on Sunday he has to go and confess. The mother superior is there. He is half-heartedly making love; hence he cannot go deeply into it, and unless you go deeply into it you cannot go beyond it. So he remains always discontented.

And when he is confessing his guilt he knows perfectly well that all this is nonsense -- he will be doing the same again. He knows this perfectly well. He has confessed every Sunday and he goes on making the same mistakes again and again; so it is going to happen.

This type of life is not life; it is rather, a caricature, a cartoon. It has no beauty.

Become a child again, be innocent, and start from ABC, start from scratch. I am not going to give you any programme. My work is negative: I only deprogramme people, then I leave them. Then whatsoever they want to do they can do. It is their life -- my work is finished. Once I have deprogrammed you my work is finished. Once I have cleaned your slate I hand it over to you. Now you can do whatsoever you want: you can write a poem or a love letter or blah, blah, blah, whatsoever you want (laughter) -- it is up to you. You can do some doodling (laughter) or whatsoever you want -- this is your life -- but whatsoever you do there will be joy in it!

A person will be joyous even if he has chosen to go to hell; and a person cannot be joyous if he is forced to live in heaven, because freedom is the very soul of bliss, the very centre of bliss. So once you are deprogrammed you are free to act according to your own spontaneity. I don't give you any ready-made answers. I simply hammer so that all your answers are destroyed, demolished, so that you have again a plain ground: the old building has disappeared and you can start making whatsoever you want to make. You can make a palace or a hut -- or if you want to live under the sky, perfectly beautiful!

A nan has a birthright to be himself. Sannyas means getting courage enough to live out of freedom, and then bliss follows like a shadow. It is the shadow of freedom.

The lotus is a very significant symbol in eastern mysticism. The lotus lives in water, it grows in water, but its petals are so velvety that the water cannot touch them. If you go in the early morning to a lotus pond you will see on the lotus leaves, on the lotus petals, dewdrops shining like pearls in the early morning sun -- it is a beauty to see dewdrops on lotus leaves or lotus petals. But the most miraculous thing is that they are on the leaves, on the petals, but they are not touching them. They don't make them wet. Just a slight breeze and the dewdrops slip into the lake; and they don't leave even a trace behind because the leaf or the petals remain totally untouched, absolutely untouched, as if there have been no dew-drops on them. And this is the symbol of a sannyasin.

The lotus has become the very metaphor for sannyas, live in the world but remain untouched by it. I don't teach escape, I don't teach renunciation. I am all for life, I am totally for life, because to me life is god and there is no other god than life. All the ideas of god other than life are simply fabrications Or the cunning minds, ways to exploit simple-minded human beings.

Life is the only god, so I cannot teach escape from life. One has to live in it and one has to live intensely, passionately, not half-heartedly, not in a lukewarm way. One has to burn one's life torch from both ends together; then even a single moment is more valuable than the whole of eternity. A single moment of intense, ecstatic living, is far deeper, far higher, than living for one hundred years, but living just so-so, half-heartedly, fragmentarily, unconsciously, somehow dragging from the cradle to the grave, sad, sombre, serious, with no dance, with no celebration, with no light in the eyes, with no song in the heart. That is not life; that is simply vegetating.

Millions of people are simply living like cabbages (laughter). A few live like cauliflowers (laughter): my definition of a cauliflower is a cabbage with a college education -- with a Ph.D or a D.Lit. The same cabbage having a certificate from a university becomes a cauliflower.

But whether one lives like a cabbage or a cauliflower makes no difference. Rarely, a very few people have lived really, authentically, totally -- and that's what I teach: live moment-to-moment, but live without holding anything back. And live like a lotus flower, untouched. Take life as a beautiful game and learn the art of sportsmanship -- that's what sannyas is: do whatsoever you want to do but be a sportsman. Whether you win or not does not matter, whether you succeed or fail is irrelevant. All that matters is that you played well, that you did your best, that you enjoyed while you did it. To me that is the real thing. Failure or success makes no difference.

 

In my childhood I used to go to see many wrestling competitions. My village was famous for wrestling; there were many good wrestlers in the village. It was one of the most significant things in that village, that it created many great wrestlers, and people used to come from far away to fight with the wrestlers there.

 

One wrestler I loved. I had seen many wrestling competitions, beautiful fighters, but one man I loved. He was defeated. After his defeat he danced! It was a shock to the crowd that had gathered to see, it was even a shock to the person who had defeated him. In fact the person who was the winner looked like a fool!

 

I followed that man – he was staying in a small hut by the river. I followed him and I asked him, “That was really beautiful of you, but why did you dance?” He said, “I danced because I had done whatsoever I could; I loved every moment of the fight, I was not holding anything back. I don’t care what happened. The result is not the thing, only the action.”

 

That man had some insight, some meditative insight.

 

Only the action, no question of the result – that means living it totally. If you are thinking of the result you are half-hearted already, you are not herenow. Your mind is hovering in the future.

 

To be herenow, as if this is the last moment. . .

 

Just the other day I received a letter from one of my sannyasins, Aruna. One night, just a few days before Vimalkirti died, she was at the gate sniffing people for strong perfume smells and she sniffed Vimalkirti out, because she felt a certain smell of shampoo or something and she said “You will not be able to go to darshan today.” And she writes, “Now I feel so sad. Vimalkirti started trembling, perspiring, as if this was going to be his last darshan. And preventing him looked so ugly to me,” she writes, “that I allowed him, but I told him, ‘You have to sit a little far away.’ He was so ecstatic, so happy.”

 

Now she remembers that preventing him from only one darshan… and he felt such a shock, a trembling, that recapitulating the whole scene she understands the meaning of it; that for him, it was as if that was the last – who knows whether tomorrow one will be here or not?

 

This is the way one has to live: each moment has to be the last moment, so why live half-heartedly? You may not be able to live another moment, so put all that you have got, risk all that you have got in the moment because who knows about the other moment?

 

This is the way to live! And when you don’t care about the result you become a lotus.

 

I have chosen the color for my sannyasins: this is the color of the lotus; and the lotus has to be remembered again and again so that you can go on getting deeper and deeper into the now and here – but unattached, unclinging, untouched. No future, so that you can live totally, and no past so that you remain untouched.

 

Once that happens life is bliss! Unbounded bliss, infinite bliss, eternal bliss.

 

- Osho, “The Old Pond… Plop, #26”