Question 3:
Osho,
You say that fear and freedom, like ambition and love, cannot co-exist. but it is existence that brings into being fear and love of freedom, together. please comment.
It is true that it is existence itself which brings fear and love of freedom together - and I have been telling you they cannot exist together. They cannot.
Existence gives you an alternative: to choose, so that your freedom is not interfered with. You can choose fear, or you can choose freedom. Freedom is not being imposed by nature on you, neither is fear imposed. Nature gives you alternatives. Now it is your own choice, out of your own intelligence that you have to choose.
You cannot choose both together - that is what I mean when I say they cannot exist together.
Existence makes them both available, but you have to choose one. Most people have chosen fear.
Out of fear they have created all kinds of gods, theologies, religions; out of fear they are being dominated by stupid politicians; out of fear they have been exploited for thousands of years; out of fear comes their whole spiritual slavery. But there must be some reason why they choose fear and why they don't choose freedom. Very few people have chosen freedom.
There is something which has to be understood: freedom brings responsibility. The moment you choose to be free, you are responsible for every one of your acts. You are responsible for your whole life; you are responsible for your misery or your blissfulness; you are responsible for remaining asleep or becoming awake.
Freedom opens the door of responsibility. Fear takes away all responsibilities - you are just a slave.
The responsibility is in the hands of somebody else, who dominates you. He will provide you with food, he will provide you with clothes, he will provide you with a shelter - you need not worry about it. If he wants a slave, he has to provide all these things.
Fear is a kind of security, safety - somebody else has taken the responsibility and the burden of responsibility - and this is the reason why millions of people have chosen fear. But the moment they choose fear, they also lose many things: not only responsibility - they lose their very souls. They are no longer themselves. They lose all possibility of growth - they are in the hands of somebody else. If your growth is going to be beneficial to those hands, the growth will be allowed; but if your growth, your intelligence, is going to be a disturbance, then your roots will be cut.
In Japan they have a strange kind of plant - three hundred years, four hundred years old, but only five or six inches tall. Many families of gardeners have taken care of those plants for centuries. You can see they are old, very old; every branch shows their age - but why have they remained only six inches high? They would have grown one hundred feet, one hundred and fifty feet high; they would have had such foliage that thousands of people could have sat under their shadow - and you can take them in your hand.
The strategy is simple and very symbolic for man too. They think it is an art; I think it is a crime. The method for keeping those trees growing old, yet not growing upwards - remaining small, pygmies - is that when they are four, five inches tall, they put them into earthen pots without bottoms. Whenever their roots grow, they go on cutting the roots - and if the roots cannot grow, the tree cannot grow.
There is a certain balance between the roots and the tree: the higher the tree goes, the deeper the roots go. You cannot have a one-hundred-foot-tall tree with six-inch-long roots - it will fall. By cutting the roots, they don't allow the tree to grow. People come from far away to see those plants; and those families brag about them - this tree is four hundred years old. And it looks so old... but it is very strange that it has remained only six inches high.
The same is true about man. The moment you allow somebody else to take responsibility for you, he starts cutting your roots - because a slave has to remain weak, has to remain retarded in the mind; otherwise he will be dangerous. If he is strong, intelligent, he may revolt. To avoid revolt, to avoid any kind of revolution, the slave has to be kept at the minimum of his growth, not at the maximum.
So they don't allow you to grow upwards as an individual; they don't allow you to become intelligent.
For example, in India, one fourth of the society consists of the sudras. They are untouchables; you cannot touch them - or if by chance you touch each other, you have to take a shower immediately and change your clothes. They are dirty people; they do all kinds of dirty jobs for the society. They should be respected - because a society can exist without painters, without poets, without singers, without mystics. It is beautiful to have them all, but a society can exist without them. But a society cannot exist without all those people who are doing all kinds of dirty jobs: cleaning your toilets, cleaning your streets. They are not allowed to live in the city; they have to live outside the city. They are the poorest of the poor in the world. They are not allowed any education; they are not allowed even to listen to religious scriptures; the question of their entry into the temple of God is impossible.
These are ways of cutting roots: no education, no possibility of moving from one profession to another; they look as if they are living without the walls of a prison, but the subtle bars of the prison are there. There is no movement in Hindu society: the sudra, whatever he can do, can never become a saint; however virtuous, however pure he may be, he cannot be accepted into the higher classes of society. And he cannot move from the profession that has been his for thousands of years, that his forefathers have been doing. He has to do the same kind of job.
You have taken their freedom, you have taken their responsibility. Yes, they are given food, they are given clothes, they are given small huts - and that is all. They have a certain security; but because of this small security, they have lost their spirituality.
Existence always gives alternatives in every dimension, because existence does not want anything to be imposed on its children. You have to choose.
I have been talking to these sudras, untouchables. At first they could not believe that anybody from a higher caste would come into their small village outside the city; but when I started visiting them, slowly, slowly they became accustomed to it - that this man seems to be strange.
And I told them, "Your slavery, your oppression, your exploitation, is because you are clinging to such small securities. When society cannot give you your individuality and your freedom, that society is not yours. Leave it! Declare that you do not belong to such an ugly society! Who is preventing you?
"And stop doing all these dirty jobs. Let the brahmins and the higher castes clean the toilets, and then they will know that just sitting and reading the scriptures is not virtue; it is not purity."
Brahmins have not done anything except be parasites on society; but they are the most respected people, because they are educated, they are well-versed in religious scriptures. Just to be born into a brahmin family is enough; no other quality is needed: people will touch your feet. Just being a brahmin by birth, you have all the qualifications to be worshiped. And this has continued for at least five thousand years.
Talking to the sudras, I became aware they have become so accustomed to a certain security that they have forgotten the alternative of freedom. And whenever I tried to convince them, sooner or later the question was asked, "What about responsibilities? If we are free, then we will be responsible.
Right now we are not responsible for anything. We live safe and secure, although in utter humiliation"
- but to that they have become accustomed and immune.
Anand Maitreya, existence gives you fear; existence gives you freedom. You cannot have both together.
Freedom will create in you an authentic individual, with great challenges and responsibilities, dangers, risks. But a life without dangers and without risks is not life; then the safest place is the grave, where no disease happens - no hepatitis, no AIDS, no homosexuality, no crime, no rape, no murder - nothing happens. You are absolutely secure... and you cannot even die. One death is enough; after that there is no question of death. But do you want to choose a grave? Those who have chosen fear have chosen a psychological grave.
My effort here is to bring you out of all kinds of graves. Jesus has brought only one man out of the grave, and that was Lazarus. I am trying to bring thousands of people out of greater graves - which are psychological - and give them the opportunity to be free, and to be responsible; to take the risk, to accept the adventure. Climbing in the mountains is dangerous, but unless you accept the danger, you will never reach to the peaks of your being.
Freedom brings you to the highest peaks of enlightenment.
-Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #10, Q3"