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The New Man- Zorba the Buddha -
"Zorba represents the materialist in its best form. Buddha represents the spiritualist in its best form. but you are both, spirit and body. Existence is both, matter and consciousness.
Therefore I say that spiritualists have been denying the very base of the temple. They accept the temple but they deny the foundation of the temple, and without the foundation, no temple can stand. That's why religions have failed.
Gautam the Buddha has failed, for the simple reason that he was trying to make a temple without any foundations going down into the earth. He was trying to grow roses, but he was not ready to accept the roots under the ground which life in darkness and, of course, are not as beautiful as the roses. But neither the roses can exist without the roots, nor the roots can afford to exist without the flowers.
The roots without the flowers will be barren, and the flowers without the roots can only be of plastic. so all the religions of the past have created a plastic humanity. Denying Zorba, they have denied all that is solid in you. And the materialists, communists, Marxists and other brands of materialism -- Epicurus in Greece, Charvaka in India -- they are eating, drinking, womanizing, but at the very end they find nothing but frustration. Something is missing. They may have all the money, all the power, everything that a man can ask for, but still inside they are empty, hollow. They may be dancing, but their dance has nothing of divinity in it. Their dance is just an exercise of the body. There is no soul to it.
These are the two ways humanity has lived up to now -- divided, split, schizophrenic, both have to repress something. Buddha has to repress Zorba. Zorba has to repress Buddha. As far as I'm concerned, both are sick because both are half of one whole, which can be healthy only if both the parts meet together and fill the gaps. Zorba can become the foundation, Buddha can become the temple."
-Osho, “The Last Testament, Vol 1, #22”
“A great meeting I teach: the meeting of Zorba and Buddha. I teach Zorba The Buddha – a new synthesis. The meeting of the earth and the sky, the meeting of the visible and the invisible, the meeting of all the polarities – of man and woman, of day and night, of summer and winter, of sex and samadhi. Only in that meeting will a new man arrive on the earth.”
- Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2, #2"
“I want you to be one, I want you to be integrated. I want you to be totally natural, accepting, affirming. I teach you a materialist-spiritualist approach to life.”
- Osho, "The Wild Geese and the Water, #9"
“Remember, to me there is no problem. I am not against materialism either. In fact, my whole effort is to create a synthesis between materialism and spiritualism. There is no need to divide them, because man is both body and soul. If man can be both body and soul, then religion should be both materialist and spiritual.”
- Osho, "Guida Spirituale, #16"
“I teach a new religion. This religion will not be Christianity and will not be Judaism and will not be Hinduism. This religion will not have any adjective to it. This religion will be purely a religious quality of being whole.”
- Osho, "Zorba The Buddha, #1"
“The New Man will not be Hindu, will not be Mohammedan, will not be Christian, will not be Communist. The New Man will not know all these ‘isms’. The New Man will be simply an opening, a window to reality. He will allow reality as it is. He will not project his own mind upon it, he will not use reality as a screen. His eyes will be available, they will not be full of ideas.”
- Osho, "The Secret of Secrets, Vol 1, #14"
“The New Man will be earthy, and by ‘earthly’ I don’t mean materialistic. The new man will be a realist. He will love this earth. Because we have not loved this earth and our so-called religions have been teaching us to hate this earth, we have destroyed it. It is a beautiful planet, one of the most beautiful, because one of the most alive. This planet has to be loved, this planet has to be rejoiced in. It is a gift. This body has so many mysteries in it that even a Buddha is possible only because of this body. This body becomes the temple of the greatest possibility: Buddhahood, nirvana. This body has to be loved. This earth has to be loved.”
- Osho, "The Secret of Secrets, Vol 1,, #14"
“The new man, the rebel, has a tremendous sense of humor. He can laugh in the face of death. While living, while fighting, while creating or destroying, he is never serious, he is giggling with joy. He is not a miserable person -- that's what he is revolting against. He wants the whole world to be filled with laughter, he wants to create religions based on laughter as the most fundamental doctrine. And what is there to be disturbed about - even if the whole world is against you? It really makes you stronger, gives you more nourishment, because it strengthens your conclusions that whatever you are doing is a rebellious act. Otherwise, the whole world would not be against you”
- Osho, "The Rebel, #16"
“In the West there is material affluence. People have much more money, better houses, bigger cars, better bank balances, that is true – but people are not materialistic. They have much material wealth, but that does not mean that they are materialistic. In the East, people are poor, but that does not mean that they are spiritual. Poverty has nothing to do with spirituality. In fact, you can become aware that material wealth has nothing in it only when you have it, not before it.”
- Osho, "I Say Unto You, Vol 2"
“My approach is total, it is holistic. I believe that man is both together: spiritual and material. In fact, I have to use the words spiritual and material just because they have always been used. In fact man is psychosomatic, not material and spiritual, because that and creates duality. There is no and between the material and the spiritual, not even a hyphen. Man is materialspiritual – I use it as one word, materialspiritual. And both the sides....
Spiritual means the center of your being and the material means the circumference of your being. The circumference cannot be there if there is no center, and the center cannot be there if there is no circumference.
My work is to help your center become a clarity, a purity. Then that purity will be reflected on the circumference too. If your center is beautiful your circumference is bound to become beautiful, and if your circumference is beautiful your center is bound to be affected by that beauty.
My sannyasin is a total man, he is a new man. The effort is so that he will be beautiful from both sides.”
- Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3, #2"
"My approach is that man is both together. This existence is not split into matter and spirit. This existence is one organic unity, just as your soul and your body are an organic unity. Your soul cannot exist without your body, and your body cannot be alive without the soul.
I am destroying the whole idea of the separation, of a split between matter and mind, body and soul, materialism and spiritualism. I call myself Zorba the Buddha. My restaurants, my discos are all named after me: Zorba the Buddha.“
- Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol 1, #18"
"I taught you about trust, the heart, feeling, love; and now I am teaching you about doubt, skepticism, reason, intellect, because I would like you to be a whole man. You can be completely satisfied with trusting, with the heart, but you will not be a whole man.
I would not call Mira a whole person, I would not call Ramakrishna a whole person. They are beautiful, but the intellect is missing; it is all heart. It is too much sugar, it creates diabetes. I am diabetic. Too much of the heart, too much sweetness, and you suffer from diabetes -- and I don't want any of you to suffer from diabetes. Yes, just living by the heart you will have spiritual diabetes. Intellect is salty, spicy; it is not all sugar.
I would like you to enjoy the wholeness of your being, when your body, your heart, your intellect all fall in tune. I have called that the new man -- Zorba the Buddha."
- Osho, "From Personality to Individuality, #13“
East & West
“The East has failed because it tried meditation without love. The West has failed because it tried love without meditation. My whole effort is to give you a synthesis, the whole - which means meditation plus love.”
- Osho, "Get Out of Your Own Way, #11"
“For the objective world: observation, experiments – these are methods. For the subjective world: witnessing, experiencing – these are the methods.
And one of the fundamental rules of science is that everything exists with its polar opposite. The polar opposite is not contradictory, it is complementary. If love exists, hate exists; if beauty exists, ugliness exists. And if objective reality exists, you cannot deny subjective reality; otherwise, you will be going against the fundamental rule of science itself. Objective reality needs, as a polar opposite to it, a subjective reality. And certainly the same methods cannot be applied to both. Different methods are needed. Meditation will not help you to find atomic energy, nuclear weapons; otherwise, the East would have discovered all this nonsense long ago. And objective methods will not allow you to discover man's real being. And without knowing man's real being you can have all the riches of the world, but deep inside you will remain a pauper, miserable.
East and West – the objective approach and the subjective approach – both are half. My own effort is that they should become one. There is no need to divide.
[....]
East and West are meeting everywhere, except in man. Things become easier; it is only a question of man’s mind. In reality there is no division; the division is only mental. And in my sannyasins that division has dropped. My sannyasins don’t belong to East or to West. They claim the whole earth as their own. They claim the objective reality as their own. They claim the subjective world as their own. To represent this, I have called the new man Zorba the Buddha. Zorba represents the materialist, objective approach. Buddha represents the subjective, spiritual approach. Divided, both are poor. Neither of them is a full circle. Joined, they become immensely rich. Joined together, they experience the greatest ecstasy that is available to humanity.
- Osho, "From Bondage to Freedom, #43"
“The West represents the male mind, aggressive intellect. The East represents the female mind, receptive intuition. East and West are not just arbitrary -- the division is very very significant and profound.
And you should not forget Rudyard Kipling: what he said has significance, has meaning. He says East and West shall never meet. There is a fragment of truth in it, because the meeting seems to be impossible; the ways of their working are so diametrically opposite.
The West is aggressive, scientific, ready to conquer nature. The East is non-aggressive, receptive -- ready to be conquered by nature. The West is eager to know. The East is patient. The West takes every initiative to reach into the mysteries of life and existence; it tries to unlock the doors. And the East simply waits in profound trust: "Whenever I am worthy, the truth will be revealed to me.
The West is concentration of the mind: the East is meditation of the mind. The West is thinking: the East is non-thinking. The West is mind: the East is no-mind. And Kipling seems to be logically right, that it seems impossible that East and West could ever meet.
And 'the East and the West' does not only represent the earth being divided in two hemispheres: it represents your mind too, your brain too. Your brain is also divided in two hemispheres just like the earth. Your brain has an East in it and a West in it. The left-side hemisphere of your brain is the West; it is connected with the right hand. And the right-side hemisphere of your brain is the East; it is connected with the left hand. The West is rightist. The East is leftist. And the processes of both are so different....”
- Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol 1, #1"
“I feel a very deep spiritual affinity with Pythagoras. I am also bringing you a synthesis of East and West, of science and religion, of intellect and intuition, of the male mind and the female mind, of the head and the heart, of the right and the left. I am also trying in every possible way to create a great harmony, because only that harmony can save. Only that harmony can give you a new birth.”
- Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol 1, #1"
“Science is a search for truth in the objective world and religion is a search for truth in the subjective world…so science and religion are like two hands or two wings. They are not opposites but complementaries. And the world would be better if we were reminded of it again.
The church, the temple and the lab need not be enemies. They should exist in a kind of friendship. Man will be far richer then. Now if he chooses science he becomes rich outside and goes on becoming poorer and poorer inside. If he chooses religion, he becomes rich inside, but goes on becoming poorer and poorer on the outside.
The West has chosen science; it has all the riches of the world, but the man is completely lost, feeling meaningless, suicidal. The man when he looks inside, finds nothing but hollowness, emptiness. The inner world has become very poor in the West.
In the East, just the opposite has happened: people have chosen religion against science. Their inner world is calmer, quieter, richer; but on the outside they are starving, dying – no food, no medicine, no facilities to live a human life, living almost like animals or even worse.
There is no need for the East to be East and the West to be West. There is no need for anybody to be just a materialist or just a spiritualist. If the body and soul can exist together – they ARE existing together in you, in everybody – then why can’t materialism and spiritualism exist together? They should!
A man must be materialist and spiritualist. To choose is fatal. There is no need to choose; you can have both the worlds – you should have both the worlds; that is your birthright.”
- Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol 2, #1"
“My rebel, my new man, is Zorba the Buddha. Mankind has lived believing either in the reality of the soul and the illusoriness of matter, or in the reality of matter and the illusoriness of the soul. You can divide the humanity of the past into those who are spiritual and those who are materialists. But nobody has bothered to look at the reality of the human being. We are both together. We are neither just spirituality--not just consciousness--nor are we just matter. We are a tremendous harmony between matter and consciousness. Or perhaps matter and consciousness are not two things but only two aspects of one reality: Matter is the outside of consciousness, and consciousness is the interiority of matter. But there has not been a single philosopher, sage, or religious mystic in the past who has declared this unity; they were all in favor of dividing the human being, calling one side real and the other side unreal. This has created an atmosphere of schizophrenia all over the earth.
You cannot live just as a body. That's what Jesus means when he says, "Man cannot live by bread alone"--but this is only half the truth. You need consciousness, you cannot live by bread alone, true--but you cannot live without bread, either. You have both dimensions to your being, and both dimensions have to be fulfilled, to be given equal opportunity for growth. But the past has been either in favor of one and against the other, or in favor of the other and against the first.
Man as a totality has not been accepted. This has created misery, anguish, and a tremendous darkness; a night that has lasted for thousands of years, that seems to have no end. If you listen to the body, you condemn yourself; if you don't listen to the body, you suffer -- you are hungry, you are poor, you are thirsty. If you listen to consciousness only, your growth will be lopsided: your consciousness will grow but your body will shrink, and the balance will be lost. And in the balance is your health, in the balance is your wholeness, in the balance is your joy, your song, your dance.
The West has chosen to listen to the body and has become completely deaf as far as the reality of consciousness is concerned. The ultimate result is great science, great technology--an affluent society, a richness of things that are mundane, worldly. And amidst all this abundance there is a poor human being without a soul, completely lost--not knowing who he is, not knowing why he is, feeling almost like an accident or a freak of nature.
Unless consciousness grows along with the richness of the material world, the body becomes too heavy and the soul becomes too weak. You are burdened by your own inventions, your own discoveries. Rather than creating a beautiful life for you, they create a life that is felt by intelligent people to be not worth living.
The East has chosen consciousness and has condemned matter and everything material, the body included, as maya. They have called it illusory, a mirage in a desert that only appears to exist but has no reality in itself. The East has created a Gautam Buddha, a Mahavira, a Patanjali, a Kabir, a Farid, a Raidas--a long line of people with great consciousness, with great awareness. But it has also created millions of poor people, hungry, starving, dying like dogs--with not enough food, no pure water to drink, not enough clothes, not enough shelter. [....]
The West has lost its soul, its interiority. Surrounded by meaninglessness, boredom, anguish, it is not finding itself. All the success of science is proving of no use, because the house is full of everything, but the master of the house is missing.
Here, in the East, the master is alive but the house is empty. It is difficult to rejoice with hungry stomachs, with sick bodies, with death surrounding you; it is impossible to meditate. So, unnecessarily, we have been losers.
All our saints, and all our philosophers, spiritualists and materialists both, are responsible for this immense crime against man.”
- Osho, "The Rebel, #8
Zorba Buddha - The Whole Man- Zorba the Buddha: A meeting of earth and sky -
“My concept of the new man is that he will be Zorba the Greek and he will also be Gautam the Buddha: the new man will be Zorba the Buddha. He will be sensuous and spiritual, physical, utterly physical, in the body, in the senses, enjoying the body and all that the body makes possible, and still a great consciousness, a great witnessing will be there. He will be Christ and Epicurus together.”
- Osho, "Zorba The Buddha, #1"
“That's what I call the meeting of the East and the West, the meeting of materialism and spiritualism. That's my idea of Zorba the Buddha: Heaven and earth are united in him.”
- Osho, "Tao: The Golden Gate, Vol 1, #9"
“Religion has failed. Science has failed. The East has failed, and the West has failed. Something of a higher synthesis is needed in which East and West can have a meeting, in which religion and science can have a meeting.”
- Osho, "Zorba The Buddha, #1"
“The West is suffering from too much science, and the East has suffered from too much religion. Now we need a new humanity in which religion and science become two aspects of one humanity. And once we have brought this new humanity into existence, the earth can become for the first time what it is meant to become. It can become a paradise: this very body the Buddha, this very earth the paradise.”
- Osho, "Zorba The Buddha, #1"
“Zorba the Buddha is the answer. It is the synthesis of matter and soul. It is a declaration that there is no conflict between matter and consciousness, that we can be rich on both sides. We can have everything that the world can provide, that science and technology can produce, and we can still have everything that a Buddha, a Kabir, a Nanak finds in his inner being – the flowers of ecstasy, the fragrance of godliness, the wings of ultimate freedom.
Zorba the Buddha is the new man, is the rebel. His rebellion consists of destroying the schizophrenia of man, destroying the dividedness -- destroying spirituality as against materialism, and destroying materialism as against spirituality. It is a manifesto that body and soul are together. Existence is full of spirituality--even mountains are alive, even trees are sensitive. It is a declaration that the whole of existence is both material and spiritual--or perhaps just one energy expressing itself in two ways, as matter and as consciousness. When energy is purified, it expresses itself as consciousness; when energy is crude, unpurified, dense, it appears as matter. But the whole of existence is nothing but an energy field. This is my experience, it is not my philosophy. And it is supported by modern physics and its research: Existence is energy.
We can allow man to have both the worlds together. He need not renounce this world to get the other world, neither has he to deny the other world to enjoy this world. In fact, to have only one world while you are capable of having both is to be unnecessarily poor.
Zorba the Buddha is the richest possibility. He will live his nature to its utmost and he will sing songs of this earth. He will not betray the earth, and he will not betrary the sky either. He will claim all that this earth has – all the flowers, all the pleasures – and he will also claim all the stars of the sky. He will claim the whole existence as his home”
- Osho, "The Rebel, #8"
“Live in this world, because this world gives a ripening, maturity, integrity. The challenges of this world give you a centering, an awareness. And that awareness becomes the ladder. Then you can move from Zorba to Buddha.
But let me repeat again: Only Zorbas become Buddhas - and Buddha was never a monk, A monk is one who has never been a Zorba and has become enchanted by the words of Buddhas. A monk is an imitator, he is false, pseudo. He imitates Buddhas. He may be Christian, he may be Buddhist, he may be a Hindu - that doesn't make much difference - but he imitates Buddhas.”
- Osho, "The Perfect Master, Vol 1, #4"
“The other world is hidden in this world. The Buddha is asleep in the Zorba. It has to be awakened. And nobody can awaken you except life itself.”
- Osho, "The Perfect Master, Vol 1, #4"
"That is the ultimate synthesis - when Zorba becomes a Buddha. I am trying to create here not Zorba the Greek but Zorba the Buddha.
Zorba is beautiful, but something is missing. The earth is his, but the heaven is missing. He is earthly, rooted, like a giant cedar, but he has no wings. He cannot fly into the sky. He has roots but no wings.
Eat, drink and be merry is perfectly good in itself: nothing is wrong in it. But it is not enough. Soon you will get tired of it. One cannot just go on eating, drinking and marrying. Soon the merry-go-round turns into a sorry-go-round -- because it is repetitive. Only a very mediocre mind can go on being happy with it. If you have a little intelligence, sooner or later you will find the utter futility of it all. How long can you go on eating, drinking and marrying? Sooner or later the question is bound to arise -- what is the point of it all? Why? It is impossible to avoid the question for long. And if you are very intelligent, it IS ALWAYS there, persistently there, hammering on your heart for the answer: Give me the answer! -- why?"
- Osho, "The Perfect Master, Vol 1, #4"
“There is no need to choose. Why not live choicelessly? Why not live all that life makes available to you? Don't be a spiritualist and don't be a materialist: be both. Don't be a Zorba and don't be a Buddha; be both: Zorba the Buddha. Enjoy all that God has showered on you. That’s my message to my sannyasins.”
- Osho, "The Book of Wisdom, #2"
“Unfortunately, man has lived for centuries divided. Zorbas think they are against buddhas, and buddhas think they are against zorbas. And because of this idea of antagonism, the Zorba is repressing his Buddha: he is beautiful in his love, in his song, in his dance – but his awareness is nil. The Buddha has repressed his Zorba: his awareness is very clear, but very dry. There is no juice in it; it is like a desert, where no roses blossom, where no greenery can be seen. A Buddha without a Zorba is only a desert.”
- Osho, "The Rebellious Spirit, #16"
My message to humanity is a new man
Question 2: Osho, What message do you have for the world symposium on humanity?
I TEACH A NEW MAN, a new humanity, a new concept of being in the world. I proclaim HOMO NOVUS. The old man is dying, and there is no need to help it survive any more. The old man is on the deathbed: don't mourn for it - help it to die. Because only with the death of the old can the new be born. The cessation of the old is the beginning of the new.
My message to humanity is a new man. Less than that won't do. Not something modified, not something continuous with the past, but utterly discontinuous.
Man has lived up to now not truly, not authentically; man has lived a very pseudo life.
Man has lived in great pathology, man has lived in great disease. And there is no need to live in this pathology - we can come out of the prison, because the prison is made by our own hands. We are in the prison because we have decided to be in the prison - because we have believed that the prison is not a prison but our home.
My message to humanity is: Enough is enough. Awake! See what man has done to man himself. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars. You cannot call this humanity healthy. And only once in a while has a Buddha bloomed. If in the garden only once in a while a plant brings a flower, and otherwise the whole garden remains without flowers, will you call it a garden? Something very basic has gone wrong. Each person is born to be a Buddha: less than that is not going to fulfill you.
I declare to you your Buddhahood.
But what has gone wrong? Why has man lived for thousands of years in a kind of hell?
For thousands of years we have lived with an either/or concept of man as a kind of battleground between the lower and the higher, the material and the spiritual, the worldly and the other-worldly, between good and evil, between God and the Devil. The consequences of such have severely limited human potential.
To destroy man, to destroy his power, a great strategy has been used - and that is to divide man in two. Man has lived with the concept of either/or: either be a materialist or be a spiritualist. You have been told you cannot be both. Either be the body or be the soul - you have been taught you cannot be both.
This has been the root cause of man's misery. A man divided against himself is going to remain in hell. Heaven is born when man is no more divided against himself. Man split means misery and man integrated means bliss.
Up to now, humanity has been schizophrenic - because you have been told to repress, to reject, to deny, many parts of your natural being. And by rejecting them, by denying them, you cannot destroy them - they simply go underground. They go on functioning from your unconsCious; they become really more dangerous.
Man is an organic whole. And all that God has given to man has to be used; nothing has to be denied. Man can become an orchestra; all that is needed is the art of creating a harmony within oneself.
But your so-called religions have been teaching you ways of disharmony, ways of discord, ways of conflict. And when you are fighting with yourself you go on dissipating your energy. You remain dull, unintelligent, stupid - because without great energy nobody is ever intelligent. When energy overflows there is intelligence. Energy overflowing is what causes intelligence to grow. And man has lived in an inward poverty.
My message to humanity is: Create a new man - unsplit, integrated, whole.
Buddha is not whole, neither is Zorba the Greek. Both are half and half. I love Zorba, I love Buddha. But when I look into the deepest core of Zorba something is missing: he has no soul. When I look into Buddha something again is missing: he has no body.
A great meeting I teach: the meeting of Zorba and Buddha. I teach ZORBA THE BUDDHA - a new synthesis. The meeting of the earth and the sky, the meeting of the visible and the invisible, the meeting of all the polarities - of man and woman, of day and night, of summer and winter, of sex and samadhi. Only in that meeting will a new man arrive on the earth.
My sannyasins, my people, are the first rays of that new man, of that HOMO NOVUS.
The inner division has led humanity into a state of suicide. It has created only slaves - and slaves CAN'T really live, they have nothing to live for. They are living for others.
They have been reduced to machines - skillful, efficient, but a machine is a machine.
And the machine cannot have the joy of living. It cannot celebrate, it can only suffer.
The old religions believed in renunciation. Renunciation has been a curse. I bring a blessing to you: I teach rejoicing, not renunciation. The world has not to be renounced, because God has not renounced it - why should you? God IS... why should you be out of it?
Live it in its totality - and living life in totality brings transcendence. Then the meeting of the earth and the sky is tremendously beautiful; there is nothing wrong. Then the polarities disappear into each other and the polar opposites become complementaries.
But the old man was not really human. He was a humanoid, a HOMO MECHANICUS - a man who is not really whole. And the man who is not whole can never be holy.
The new man is coming, arriving, every day. He is in a minority, it is natural - but the new mutants have arrived, the new seeds have arrived. And this century, the end of this century, is going to see either the death of all humanity or the birth of a new human being.
And it all depends on you. If you remain clinging to the old, then the old man has prepared in every way to commit a great suicide, a universal suicide. The old man is ready to die; the old man has lost the zest to live.
That's why all the countries are preparing for war. And the Third World War will be a total war. Nobody is going to be a winner, because nobody is going to survive it. Not only is man going to be destroyed but all life on earth.
Beware! Beware of your politicians - they are all suicidal. Beware of the old conditioning which divides you as Indians, as Germans, as Japanese, as Americans. The new man has to be universal. He will transcend all barriers of race, religion, sex, colour.
The new man will not be of the East or of the West; the new man will claim the whole earth as his home.
Only then can humanity survive - and not only survive - with the coming of a new concept of man.... The old is the concept of either/or: the new will be both/and. Man has to live a rich life outwards and a rich life inwards; there is no need to choose. The inner life is not against the outer life; they are part of one rhythm.
YOU need not be poor on the outside just to be rich in the inside. And you need not be rich on the outside and drop being rich in the inside. That's how it has been up to now - the West has chosen one way: Be rich on the outside! The East has chosen another: Be rich on the inside! Both are lopsided. Both have suffered, both are suffering.
I teach you total richness. Be rich on the outside through science, and be rich in your innermost core through religion. And that's what will make you one, organic, individuals.
The new man is no battle ground, no split personality, but an image of man unified, unique, fully synergic with life in its totality. The new man embodies a more viable, mutant image of man, a new way of being in the cosmos, a qualitatively different way of perceiving and experiencing reality. So please don't mourn the passing of the old. Rejoice that the old is dying, the night is dying, and the dawn is on the horizon.
I am glad, utterly glad, that the traditional man is disappearing - that the old churches are becoming ruins, that the old temples are deserted. I am IMMENSELY glad that the old morality is falling flat on the ground.
This is a very great crisis. If we take the challenge, this is an opportunity to create the new. It has never been so ripe at any time in the past. You are living in one of the MOST beautiful ages - because the old is disappearing, or has disappeared, and a chaos is created. And it is only out of chaos that great stars are born.
You have the opportunity to create a cosmos again. This is an opportunity that comes only once in a while - very rare. You are fortunate to be alive in these critical times. Use the opportunity to create the new man.
And to create the new man you have to begin with yourself.
The new man will be a mystic, a poet, a scientist, all together. He will not look at life through old rotten divisions. He will be a mystic, because he will feel the presence of God. He will be a poet, because he will celebrate the presence of God. And he will be a scientist, because he will search into this presence through scientific methodology. When a man is all these three together, the man is whole.
That is my concept of a holy man.
The old man was repressive, aggressive. The old man was bound to be aggressive because repression always brings aggression. The new man will be spontaneous, creative.
The old man lived through ideologies. The new man will live not through ideologies, not through moralities, but through consciousness. The new man will live through awareness.
The new man will be responsible - responsible to himself and to existence. The new man will not be moral in the old sense; he will be amoral.
The new man brings a new world with him. Right now the new man is bound to be a mutant minority - but he is the carrier of a new culture, the seed. Help him. Announce his arrival from the housetops: that is my message to you.
The new man is open and honest. He is transparently real, authentic and self-disclosing.
He will not be a hypocrite. He will not live through goals: he will live herenow. He will know only one time, now, and only one space, here. And through that presence he will know what God is.
Rejoice! The new man is coming, the old is going. The old is already on the cross, and the new is already on the horizon. Rejoice! I say again and again, Rejoice!
-Osho, "Philosophia Perennis, Vol. 2, #2"
He will not be my carbon copy.
Question : Osho, You have said that you are the new man that the world needs, and that this commune is a preparation for the arrival of the new man. do you see that other people here are going to become, like you, the new man, or are you talking about a preparation for future generations?
I am never concerned about the future, neither about the past. My whole concern is the present. And when I say the New Man, I don't mean a certain model, type, an ideal. By the New Man I mean a man without ideals, a man with his own individuality, not imitative, not a carbon copy of somebody else. So the New Man will not be like me or like anybody else. Everybody will be authentically himself One of the most fundamental psychological things has to be understood: equality is an illusion. Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin, and other communist thinkers of the world have created almost a conviction in millions of people's minds -- not only those who are communist but also those who are not communist -- that equality should be the goal. Only machines can be equal; man cannot be. If you want man to be equal, then you will have to destroy his humanity and make him a robot.
It is very simple: just as two faces are not the same, in the whole world even two fingerprints are not the same -- and you want two beings to be the same? You don't value the being more than the fingerprint even? A very absurd idea of equality has become widespread.
Why it became so influential can be understood very easily. Everybody feels inferior to somebody, either intellectually, financially or physically. In some way everybody carries deep down an inferiority complex, because he is continuously comparing himself with others. Naturally, somebody has more intelligence, somebody has more physical strength, somebody can run faster than you, somebody can swim better. It is impossible for anybody not to feel inferior if he starts comparing.
Even a man like Napoleon... you would not think that he would ever feel inferior. For what? He was one of the greatest conquerors, one of the greatest fighters and warriors in the world. But on one point he was very touchy. His height was only five feet, five inches -- even his bodyguards were taller -- and that hurt. That gave him pain, and he could not even say it to anybody.
One day he was trying to fix a picture on his wall, and the nail was a little high up, beyond his hand's reach. His bodyguard said, "Sir, I can do it. I am higher than you." Napoleon became so angry. He said, "Take your words back, otherwise I will kill you right now, here." But he said, "What have I said?"
Napoleon said, "You are taller than me but not higher than me. I can tolerate taller; but higher? -- I cannot tolerate anybody." He had touched his wound.
Even the people who have immense power in some way or other feel inferior when they start comparing. That leaves almost the whole of humanity feeling an inferiority complex. And this is the root cause why communism is so influential.
It has nothing to do with economics, nothing to do with capitalism. It simply fulfills a deep desire in every man that everybody be equal. He feels gratified even to think that everybody is equal. Then there will be no wound, no hurt feeling, there will be no question of comparison.
Nobody has looked at communism from a psychological viewpoint. People have been studying communism only as an economic theory. It is not. Basically it is a psychological consolation to all those who are feeling inferior in any way. Hence more than half of humanity is already communist. Communism is the biggest religion right now and is growing fast, and will take over the world if we cannot create a New Man who has no inferiority complex.
The New Man will not be a communist, because he does not want to be equal to others. The New Man wants to be unique in himself, and wants everybody else also to be unique. A society of unique people -- everybody unique in his own way -- will be the richest society that has existed in the world.
Somebody is a painter, somebody is a poet, somebody is a scientist, somebody is a sculptor. They all have their own uniqueness. It does not matter what you do, all that matters is that everything you do has your fingerprint on it, and you have become a creator. There is no reason to compare. A painter is a painter and a poet is a poet. It is stupid that both start comparing. Then the painter becomes inferior because he is not a poet, and the poet becomes inferior because he is not a painter. And we have been living under this inferiority complex for thousands of years. So everybody is suffering -- "Existence has not been compassionate towards me."
Start looking at the uniqueness and drop the idea of equality, which is in every way impossible. Unless man is produced in a factory on an assembly line, there is no possibility of equality. And a man produced on an assembly line will not be a man; he will be just a machine.
The New Man will not be like me in the sense that he will not be my carbon copy. But in a way, in a very different way, he will be like me. I am independent; he will be independent. I am my own self; he will be his own self. I have never accepted anything just as a belief unless I have experienced it. Then there is no question of belief -- I know it. So either I know something or I don't know, there is nothing in between.
The believer is in between. He does not know, yet he pretends to know. You will find all these hypocrites assembled in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, all over the world. They don't know God and they are praying to him. They don't know that any prayer has ever been heard, and still they are praying. They don't know that any prayer has ever been answered, but still they are praying.
The New Man will be a seeker, not a believer. He will trust in inquiry, in doubt -- and doubt is the only method that can lead you to the truth. Belief is a barrier, not a bridge. No believer has ever known the truth. His belief never allowed him to inquire. So in a very different sense, he will be like me.
I have doubted everything. I have never accepted anything because it is written in the holy scriptures, because the great founders of religions have said it, because great saints verify it. I have insisted my whole life that nothing else can prove it to me except my own experience. And when it comes as your own experience, it brings tremendous rejoicing, great blessings, flowering. Your being finds its home. The wandering is finished, you have arrived.
Now my wandering and your wandering will be different. The point where I started and the point where you will start will be different. I will arrive to my own innermost core; you will arrive to your innermost core. The ultimate experience of blossoming will be the same, but the path will be totally different.
Everybody has to search and seek in his own way.
The way to truth is just like the sky. The bird flies but leaves no footprints. You cannot follow. There are no footprints. The inner sky is exactly the same, and everybody has to find his own way. It will be better to say the New Man makes his way. He does not move on a ready-made way. Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, are ready-made ways, superhighways, comfortable -- you need not bother -- but they go nowhere. They go round and round the earth. You can go on moving on them for millions of lives and you will never reach to your own being, because that way is not connected to you. It is not yours.
The real seeker steps out from all these ready-made ways. He moves into the unknown. It is great excitement, great ecstasy. And every step that brings you closer to home also brings you peace that you have not known before, brings you love and compassion that are absolutely unknown to you. Closer and closer...
and you start feeling a new music, a new poetry, a new song arising out of your own heart. Your every heartbeat becomes music.
These are the signs that home is coming closer. Your whole being becomes harmonious. You can feel in yourself a new coolness, freshness, aliveness -- indications that the source of life is not far away. And when you are just coming, maybe a few more steps, suddenly your walk is no more a walk, it becomes a dance. Nobody has reached into his being in any other way except dancing. It is not up to you. Your feet start feeling the dance. The whole milieu around you makes you thrive, thrilled.
Yes, I am the New Man and I am preparing the way for you to become the New Man. That's why I go on insisting that you keep yourself intelligent, meditative, silent. Keep yourself alert, aware. Change every stone on the path into a stepping-stone. Don't think, "Now the stone is blocking the way." No stone blocks the way. You just have to know that every stone can be turned into a stepping-stone.
Just now you have passed through a fascist, poisonous time. Those who can make it a stepping-stone will be grateful for it. There is no need to be afraid, to be worried, to be frustrated that it happened. Rather than wasting time over why it happened, use the energy to make it a stepping-stone to go higher. As I see it, the commune looks purer. It looks fresh. People look unburdened. These are good signs. A few people look angry that they have been deceived; that is stupidity.
Now, what has happened has happened. Anger is wasting your energy; that is hitting your head against the stone. That is not going to help. A few people look as if they are lost, because they had become dependent on a fascist kind of order.
They needed the order, they needed moms, and they look like helpless children whose moms are lost.
This is a good opportunity. The moms have escaped. It is time that you become independent. Drop this childish helplessness. Take responsibility and prove that independently you can do better than under a repressive regime, that you can be more creative if you are not being humiliated, dragged, forced to do something.
But a few people are feeling helpless because unless somebody is on their neck, continuously nagging them, they cannot work. They have become addicted to nagging just as people become addicted to smoking.
I know people whose wives are nothing but a pain in the neck. They know, and they have been telling horrible stories to me about their wives, and when their wives go for a few days to their parents' house, just within two or three days that man completely forgets all the horribleness of the woman's nagging and everything, and he starts hankering that she should come back. I was puzzled. I have seen many friends in the same position, in the same vicious circle, and I have asked them, "What happens to you? You are left free, now enjoy! Before you were saying you could not enjoy because the wife was so horrible, it was impossible to enjoy. Now why are you looking sad?" And they will say, "We feel very much alone. Something is missing. Without the wife, the house seems to be horrible."
I said, "This is great! With the wife it was horrible; without the wife it is horrible.
Then what do you want?"
They have become dependent. The wife was not only nagging them, she was taking care of them also. They don't know where their shoes are, they don't know.... I know people who don't know how to put on their necktie. Only the wife knows, because she has been doing it. Everything is in a mess. They have completely forgotten what pain she was giving them, and now they remember only the best part.
So there are people who have forgotten that they were not happy under a strict system where there was no question of independence, total surrender was asked.
They were unwilling to do it, but they were doing it. Now you are free, and you don't know what to do. You will have to learn that you can work out of your own love, that there is no need for surrender. You need not become a slave; you can remain a master. But certainly remember that the quality of the work of a master must be higher than the quality of the work of a slave. That's the only criterion to prove whether you are a slave or a master.
The New Man will live out of his own love, creativity and joy, without depending on any father figure. He will not need a God. God is a projection of the sick minds of people who want a permanent father. These human fathers are not reliable; today they are alive, tomorrow they may die. You cannot trust them.
They need a father who is eternal. They need a father who is all-powerful. They need a father who knows everything, past, present, future. That gives them great consolation.
Now a few people are angry at me. Why did I not stop it?... But I am not omniscient; I didn't know what was happening. I don't know even what is happening in the other room. I can just hear the noise; what is cooking, I don't know. Something must be cooking. But I don't pretend to be an omniscient father; neither am I a peeping tom, that I should go on looking into everybody's bathroom keyhole watching what is happening, who is doing what. I never go out of my own room.
They are angry. The reason is that they must have been unconsciously projecting the father figure on me. Please, don't make me a curtain to project anything you want. I am nobody's curtain. I am not a screen, that you can project any idea on me and then feel angry because I am not behaving according to you. When had I said to you that I will behave according to you? I don't expect you to behave according to me, neither do I want you to expect me to behave according to you.
Here we are agreed only on one point, and that is the independence of everybody; there is no other agreement.
The New Man will have communes, but the agreement will be freedom. You can look into my eyes and you can see my silence, my depth. You can feel my presence, my joy, my song. But you are not to repeat anything. I am simply indicating to you that what has happened to me can happen to you. There will be differences, there will be uniquenesses. I may be just a marigold flower and you may be a lotus -- so don't imitate me. You may be a rose and I am just a marigold, a very poor flower who has nothing. But whoever named it marigold must have had great insight; it is the poorest flower, but there is great merriness, great joy in it -- and it is pure gold, twenty-four carat.
One never knows what is hidden in you. Something certainly is hidden -- everybody is carrying a being -- you have to search and bring it into light and let your fragrance take its wings into the air.
I am the New Man. You have to be the New Man. I am not ordering you, I am simply saying so loudly so you can hear. And we have to create more opportunities for the New Man for more people around the world.
The New Man will not be a politician. The New Man will have no desire for power. The New Man will not create people like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse-tung. The New Man will not create heroes as in the past, because everybody will be a hero. With the New Man, history is finished. You cannot write history with a New Man. Otherwise it will be such a big job, because every man will be a unique man and he has to have as much space as anybody else.
In the old world, history was possible. You will be surprised to know that before India became a slave country there was no such thing in India as history.
Mohammedans started writing history about Mohammedan kings, then Britishers started writing history about the British rule, but before India was independent there was no history. A country so ancient that they had discovered mathematics, astronomy. They had discovered the most scientific language in the world. They had written the best literature, the best poetry. They had created the best architecture -- temples, palaces, memorials, statues which have no comparison anywhere, so alive that it seems the stone statue is just going to breathe again, or perhaps is deceiving you by stopping its breath. So alive!
But they had no history, and nobody has bothered why. My own understanding is that there were so many unique people that to write about all of them would have been an impossible task. So they found a different way of writing history which was called PURANAS, the ancient tales. They don't write about twenty- four tirthankaras of the Jainas, they only write about Mahavira. But in Mahavira's life everything essential about all the twenty-four tirthankaras is represented. Nothing is missing, so what is the point of writing about twenty- four people? Because Adinatha must have been ten thousand years ago, they write about Mahavira, the best, the last, whom they knew more than any of the others.
If you go into a Jaina temple you will see twenty-four statues of twenty-four tirthankaras, but you will be puzzled: they are all alike, exactly the same. It is impossible, twenty-four persons exactly the same -- the same size of nose, the same eyes, the same long earlobes -- because a Jaina TIRTHANKARA'S lobes should touch the shoulders -- the same height, the same type of athletic body.
Strange.... Even Jaina scholars cannot see any difference, so they have made small symbols underneath every statue. Those symbols indicate whose statue it is. For example, under Mahavira is the symbol of the lion. So any statue with the symbol of the lion is Mahavira's. You just change the symbol, and no scholar....
In my neighborhood, in the same university where I was teaching, lived the best Jaina scholar of India, Doctor Hiralal Jain. I took him a statue of Mahavira which was presented to me, but I erased the symbol. He was an old man, and really wise, knowledgeable. I asked Doctor Hiralal, "Whose statue is this?" He said, "But where is the symbol?" I said, "I have erased the symbol. I want to know from you, is there any way to find out whose statue this is?" He said, "You are strange. There is no way. Scholarship cannot help at all in this matter, because all twenty-four statues are really exactly the same." I asked him why they are the same. He said, "That, too, is beyond me, because no Jaina scriptures give the answer why they are the same. Do you have any idea?"
I said, "I always have some idea. My idea is that these statues don't represent real people, they represent qualities. And all the twenty-four tirthankaras are bound to have similar qualities. For example, this earlobe. Everybody who is not a Jaina laughs -- why such a long earlobe? It is never seen anywhere...."
In my whole life I have come across only one man, but even his were not perfect.
They were not touching his shoulders, just almost.... I said, "You just massage your earlobe. Try, so it starts touching your shoulders." He said, "Why? Already people call me donkey, and you want me to make my earlobes longer!" I said, "If you can manage to make your earlobe touch your shoulder, then I can declare you the twenty-fifth tirthankara of the Jainas. You will be immensely respected."
He said, "I don't want to get into any trouble. Your suggestions always lead to trouble. You just forgive me and don't tell anybody." Otherwise I have not seen anything like that. But why do all Jaina tirthankaras have such long ears? "To me," I told Doctor Hiralal, "they are symbolic. It is symbolic art. These long ears show that the man was capable of listening. People are dead they don't listen.
And these people must have listened to the ultimate music of life. How to represent it in marble?
"This is a beautiful symbol. The eyes are closed. That means these people are not seeing anything, that all thoughts have disappeared, that there is nothing to see.
The closed eyes are symbolic that there is nothing to see. The long ears are symbolic that they have started hearing the ultimate music of existence."
He said, "Your explanation looks plausible and I cannot argue with you, but you don't have any support from the scriptures." I said, "I don't need it. What I am saying is self-explanatory, it needs no support from scriptures. And what I am saying is not a scholarly statement; what I am saying is my own experience. With closed eyes I have been in a state when you don't see anything, but in that moment you hear for the first time a very celestial music surrounding the whole existence. So I am saying it on my own authority."
Jainas never wrote the history of the twenty-four tirthankaras, but only about one. And they cannot call it history because in Mahavira's life they have included all twenty-four tirthankaras' lives too. All that was essential in twenty-four lives, all that was meaningful, they have combined. Mahavira is just a representative, a symbol. Just the way the statues are symbolic, Mahavira's life is symbolic. So they don't call it history, they call it ancient tales, old stories. But they are not fiction, they relate to reality.
The New Man will be the end of the world of heroes. Alexander the Great will not be possible any more. Even if he comes riding on his horse, people will be simply entertained. He will look just like Don Quixote. Nobody is going to bother about Alexander the Great.
History ends with the old man. Heroes end with the old man. The New Man will write symbolically. He will write about the New Man and his qualities in a symbolic way -- not about separate persons, which brings comparison, which makes someone big, high, holy, someone a sinner, inferior, a nobody. The old man was living vertically, in a hierarchy. The New Man will live horizontally, with no hierarchy. Everybody is doing his best and doing what he wants to do, and doing it not just as work but as worship.
-Osho “The Last Testament, #3, Q1”
A new man is emerging.
Question 1: Osho, What according to you is the most significant thing that is happening today in the world?
A new man is emerging. The image of the new man is not yet clear, but the horizon is becoming red and the sun will soon be there. The morning mist is there and the image of the new man is vague, but still a few things are very crystal clear about the new man.
And this is of tremendous importance because since the monkey became man, man has remained the same. A great revolution is on the way. It will be far more deep-going than the revolution that happened when monkeys started walking on the earth and became human beings. That change created mind, that change brought psychology in. Now another far more significant change is going to happen that will bring the soul in, and man will not only be a psychological being but a spiritual being too.
You are living in one of the most alive times ever.
The new man has already arrived in fragments, but only in fragments. And the new man has been arriving for centuries, but only here and there. That's how things happen. When the spring comes it starts with one flower. But when the one flower is there, then one can be certain: that spring is not faraway - it has come. The first flower has heralded its coming: Zarathustra, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus - these were the first flowers. Now the new man is going to be born on a greater scale.
According to me, this new consciousness is the most important thing that is happening today. I would like to tell you something about this new consciousness, its orientations, and its characteristics, because you are to help it come out of the womb - because you HAVE TO BE IT. The new man cannot come from nowhere, he has to come through you. The new man can only be born through your womb. You have to become the womb.
Sannyas is an experiment to clean the ground so that new seeds can fall in. If you understand the meaning of the new man, you will be able to understand the significance of sannyas too. And it is because sannyas is concerned with the new man that the old orthodoxies of all kinds are going to be against me and against sannyas, because this will be their end. If sannyas succeeds, if the new man succeeds, the old will have to go. The old can live only if the new man is prevented from coming.
It cannot be prevented now, because it is not only a question of the new man's coming into existence, it is a question of the survival of the whole earth, of consciousness itself, of life itself. It is a question of life and death. The old man has come to utter destructiveness. The old man has reached the end of his tether. Now there is no life possible with the old concept of man but only death. The old man is preparing for a global suicide. The old man is piling up atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, in order to commit a collective suicide. This is a very unconscious desire. Rather than allowing the new man to be, the old man would like to destroy the whole thing.
You have to understand, you have to protect the new, because the new carries the whole future with it. And man has come to a stage where a great quantum leap is possible.
The old man was other-worldly, the old man was against this world. The old man was always looking to the heavens. The old man was more concerned with life after death than life before death. The new man's concern will be life before death. The new man's concern will be THIS life, because if this life is taken care of, the other will follow of its own accord. One need not worry about it, one need not think about it.
The old man was too concerned with God. That concern was out of fear. The new man will not be concerned with God, but will live and love this world, and out of that love he will experience the existence of God. The old man was speculative, the new man is going to be existential.
The old man can be defined in the Upanishadic statement: NETI-NETI, not this, not this. The old man was negative - life-negative, life-denying. The new man will be life-affirming: ITI-ITI, this and this. The old man's concern was THAT, the new man's concern will be this, because out of this that is born, and if you become too concerned with that, you miss both.
Tomorrow is in the womb of today. Take care of today and you have taken care of tomorrow. There is no need to be in any way worried about tomorrow. If you become too worried about tomorrow you have missed today. And tomorrow will come as today - it always comes as today. If you have learned this suicidal habit of missing today, you will miss tomorrow also. You will go on missing. The old man was continuously missing, was miserable, sad. And because he was sad he was against the world, he blamed the world, he blamed SAMSARA. He said, 'It is because of the world that I am in misery.' It is not so. The world is immensely beautiful, it is all beauty, bliss and benediction. There is nothing wrong with the world. Something was wrong with the old mind. The old mind was either past-oriented or future-oriented, which are not really different orientations.
The old mind was concerned with that which is not. The new man will be utterly in tune with that which is, because it is God, it is reality: iti-iti, this is it. This moment has to be lived in its totality.
This moment has to be lived in its spontaneity, with no A PRIORI ideas. The old man was carrying ready-made answers. He was stuffed with philosophy, religion and all kinds of nonsense.
The new man is going to live life without any A PRIORI conclusion about it. Without any conclusion one has to face existence, and then one knows what it is. If you have already concluded, your conclusion will become a barrier. It will not allow you inquiry - your conclusion will become a blindfold. It will not allow you to see the truth - your investment will be in the conclusion. You will distort reality to fit your conclusion. That's what has been done up to now.
The new man will not be Hindu, will not be Mohammedan, will not be Christian, will not be communist. The new man will not know all these 'isms'. The new man will simply be an opening, a window to reality. He will allow reality as it is. He will not project his own mind upon it. He will not use reality as a screen. His eyes will be available; they will not be full of ideas.
The new man will not live out of belief, he will simply live. And remember, only those who can simply live, without belief, come to know what truth is. The believer or the disbeliever never come to know what truth is. Their beliefs are too heavy on their minds. They are surrounded too much by their belief systems. The new man will not know any belief system. He will watch, he will observe, he will see, he will live, and he will allow all kinds of experiences. He will be available, he will be multi dimensional. He will not carry scriptures in his head, he will carry only alertness awareness. He will be meditative.
The old man lived out of fear - even his God was nothing but a creation out of fear. His temples, mosques, GURUDWARAS, churches - they were all out of fear. He was trembling, he was afraid.
The new man will live out of love, not out of fear, because fear serves death, love serves life. And if you live out of fear you will never know what life is, you will only know death again and again. And remember, the person who lives out of fear creates all kinds of situations in which he has to feel more and more fear. Yom fear creates situations, just as your love creates situations.
If you love, you will find so many occasions to be loving. If you are afraid, you will find so many occasions to be afraid.
Love is going to be the taste of the new consciousness. Because fear was the taste of the old consciousness it created wars. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars - as if we have not been doing anything else - continuous fighting somewhere or other. This is a very mad state of affairs. Humanity's past is insane.
The new man will become discontinuous with this insane past. He will believe in love, not in war.
He will believe in life, not in death. He will be creative, not destructive. His science, his art - all will serve creativity. He will not create bombs. He will not be political, because politics is out of hatred.
Politics is rooted in fear, hate, destructiveness. The new man will not be political. The new man will not be national, the new man will be global. He will not have any political ambition, because it is stupid to have political ambition. The new man is going to be very intelligent. The first signs of that intelligence are rising on the horizon. Those who have eyes - they can see it. The children are rebelling.
It is a great moment of rejoicing that all over the world young people are rebelling against all kinds of orthodoxies - whether the orthodoxy is that of church or state doesn't matter. They are not ready to obey - not that they have determined to disobey, they are not determined to disobey either. They will meditate, and if they feel like obeying they will obey. If they feel like disobeying, they will disobey.
They have no fixed ideology. 'My country right or wrong' - such stupid statements they cannot make.
Sometimes it is wrong, sometimes it is right. When it is right, the new man will support it. When it is wrong... Whether it is one's own country or not will not matter. It may be one's own family, one's own father, mother, but if it is wrong, it is wrong.
The new man will live not out of prejudices but out of spontaneous responsibility. The old man was a slave, the new man will be free, the new man will have freedom at the very core of his being.
The old man was very serious, the old man was a 'workoholic'. The new man will be playful - HOMO LUDENS. He will believe in enjoying life. He will drop words like 'duty', 'sacrifice'. He will not sacrifice for anything. He will not be a victim to any altar - that of the state or of the religion, of the priest or of the politician. He will not allow anybody to exploit his life - 'Go and die because your country is at war.'
His commitment is towards life, his commitment is not towards anything else. He wants to live in joy, he wants to rejoice in all the gifts of God, he wants to celebrate. Alleluia will be his only mantra.
Jesus says, 'Rejoice, rejoice. I say unto you rejoice.'
Man has not rejoiced yet. Man has lived under a great burden of seriousness: Work for the country.
Work for the family. Work for the wife. Work for the children. Work for your father and mother. Just go on working and working and then one day die and disappear into the grave. And then others will work. And it goes on and on. Nobody seems to have any time to enjoy life.
And I am not saying that the new man will not work. He will work, but that will not be his addiction.
He will not be a 'workoholic', it will not be a drug, he will work because he needs a few things, but he will not continuously work for more and more. He will not be accumulative. He will not believe in having a big bank balance, and he will not believe in having a very high post; rather, he will want to sing a song, to play on the flute, on the guitar, to dance. He will not want to become famous, he will want to live, authentically live. He will be ready to be a nobody.
And that is already happening. The first rays are already available. It is still hidden in the morning mist, but if you search you will find it. The new children, the new generation, are a totally different kind of generation, hence the generation gap. It is very real. It has never been so - never before has there been any generation gap. This is the first time in the whole of human history that there is a gap. The children are speaking a different language from their parents. The parents cannot understand because the parents want them to succeed. And the children say, 'But what is the point of success if you cannot sing a song, and you cannot dance, and you cannot enjoy, and you cannot love? What is the point of being successful? Why? What is going to happen through success? Even if the whole world knows my name, what is that going to give me?'
The old generation believes in money. And you will be surprised that the belief in money is so deep that even those who renounce money - they also believe in money; otherwise there is no need to renounce it. And those who praise renunciation - they also believe in money. The more money you renounce, the greater you are. So the measurement is of money. Money remains the criterion. In the world if you have more money you are great. And even in the world of the monks: 'How much have you renounced?' If you have renounced more money, then you are more important. Money remains important even there.
The new generation is not going to be money-manic. And remember, I am not saying it is going to be against money, it WILL USE money. In the past money has used man, in the past man has lived in such an unconscious way that he thought he possessed things, but things possessed him. The new man will be able to use things. The new man will use money, will use technology, but the new man will remain the master. He is not going to become a victim, an instrument. This, according to me, is the greatest thing that is happening.
A few characteristics. The new consciousness is going to be Counter to all orthodoxies. Any kind of orthodoxy, Catholic or communist, Hindu or Jaina - any kind of orthodoxy - is a kind of paralysis of the mind. It paralyzes. You stop living. It becomes a rigidity around you. You become a fanatic, you become stubborn. You become rock-like. You don't behave like a liquid human being, you start behaving like a mule. That's why for Morarji Desai I have another name: Mulish-jibhai Desai. One starts behaving in a mulish way, stubborn, dead set, no possibility of changing, no flexibility, no fluidity. But in the past that has been praised very much: people call it consistency, certainty. It is not. It is neither consistency nor certainty; it is simply deadness.
An alive person has to remain flowing. He has to respond to the changing situations. And situations are continuously changing. How can you remain fixed in your attitudes when life itself is not fixed?
When life is a river how can you remain stubborn? And if you remain stubborn you lose contact with life - you are already in your grave.
The new consciousness will be non-orthodox, non-fanatic; it will be fluid. It will not react, it will respond. And the difference between these two words is great.
Reaction is always rigid. You have a fixed idea, you react out of it. Before the question is raised, the answer is ready. Response is totally different. You listen to the question, you absorb the question, you see the situation, you feel the situation, you live the situation, and out of that very living your response arises. A responsible man cannot be stubborn, cannot be certain, cannot be rigid. He will have to live moment to moment. He cannot decide beforehand, he will have to decide every day, each moment. And because he has to move continuously with life and its changing challenges, he cannot be consistent in the old sense. His consistency will be only one: that he will always be in tune with life. That will be his consistency - not that he has a certain idea and he remains consistent with that idea and goes on sacrificing life for it.
There was a case against Mulla Nasrudin in the court and the magistrate asked him, 'Mulla, how old are you?'
He said, 'Forty.'
The magistrate said, 'But this is strange. You surprise me, because five years ago you were in court, and that time also you said forty.'
Mulla said, 'Yes, I am a consistent man. Once I have said something, you can believe me. I will never say anything else.'
This is one type of consistency.
The new man will find it ridiculous. But the old man has been consistent in this way: in his character, in his statements, in his hypocrisy. The old man used to decide once and for all. Psychologists say that almost fifty percent of your life is decided by the time you are seven years old - fifty percent!
- and then you remain consistent with it. And life goes on changing - no wonder that you are left behind, that you start dragging, that you lose joy, that you lose the quality of dance. How can you dance? you are so far behind life. You are dead wood, you don't grow. An alive tree grows, changes; as the season changes, the tree changes. An alive person grows, and to the very moment of death he continuously goes on growing. He never knows any end to his growth.
Psychologists say the average mental age of man is thirteen. This is the situation. This is how the old man has lived up to now. A thirteen-year mental age means: at the age of thirteen people have stopped growing. Yes, they go on growing old, but they don't grow up. Growing old is one thing, growing up is totally different. Growing old is a physiological phenomenon; growing up means maturity, wisdom. And only those who go on flowing with life grow up.
The new man will not be obedient to stupid ideas that have been given from the past. And they may not have been stupid when they were born, they may have been relevant in those circumstances; but as circumstances change, things become stupid. If you carry them, if you go on persisting in your old fixed routines, you start behaving in an absurd way.
Now, look. Some religion is five thousand years old. That means five thousand years ago its rituals were born and since then they have remained fixed. How dangerous it is! How crippling! How can man be alive if these five-thousand-year-old rituals surround his soul?
The new man will be creative. Each moment he will find his religion, each moment he will find his philosophy. And everything will remain growing. He will not be obedient to the past, he cannot be - to be obedient to the past is to be obedient to death, because the past is dead; he will be obedient to the present. And in being obedient to the present, he will be rebellious against the past.
To be rebellious is going to be one of his most prominent characteristics. And because he will be rebellious he will not fit in with a dead society, he will not fit in with a dead church, he will not fit in with a dead army. He will not fit anywhere where obedience is a basic requirement.
The new man is bound to create a new society around himself.
First consciousness becomes new, then society becomes new. There is going to be a long period in which the old will resist the new, will fight with the new, will try to destroy the new. But the old cannot succeed - time, the spirit of time, will not be in its favour. The old has to die. Just as the old body dies and makes space for some new child, so old societies, old orthodoxies, have to die. They have already lived overtime. They have lived too long!
The new consciousness will not be moralistic, will not be puritan; not that it will not have any morality, but it will have a different kind of morality - a morality that arises out of one's own feeling for life, one's sensitivity, one's own experiences - not a morality learned from others, borrowed. The new man will not be a man of character in the old sense, because all character is binding. It creates an armour around you. The new man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have any armour. The new man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have a prison cell around him. Not that he will not have character, but he will give a new definition to character. He will not be a hypocrite.
The old puritanism, the old moralistic attitudes have created hypocrisy in the world; they have made man schizophrenic: on the surface one thing, deep within something else - almost the opposite.
The old man lived a double life. The new man is going to live in a unitary way. He will live a single life. Whatsoever is inside him will also be his outside. He will be authentic. Remember this word 'authenticity' - that is going to be the new man's religion. That is going to be the new man's truth, his temple, his God - authenticity. And with authenticity neurosis disappears. The old man was neurotic because he was constantly in conflict: he wanted to do one thing and he was always doing something else, because something else was required. He was taught to do something against himself; he was repressive. His own authenticity was repressed, and on top of it a bogus character was imposed.
We have praised these phony people too long. Now the time has come - their phoniness should be exposed. We have praised these mahatmas and saints so long, now we have to see their neurosis.
They were all psychologically ill, they were pathological. A healthy person is a whole person. His inside and his outside are the same. If he loves, he loves passionately. If he is angry, he is angry passionately. His anger has truth in it as much as his love has truth in it. The old man boils within and smiles on the outside. He lives without passion, without energy. He lives without any flame. His whole life is an exercise in phoniness and, naturally, he suffers. A long futile story is all that his life is '... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'
The new man will not be a tale told by an idiot, but will be a poem sung out of wholeness, will be a dance of immense joy for God's gift of life and being, for the flowers and the trees and the birds, and the sun and the sand and the sea.
The new man will not look somewhere faraway for God, he will look here, close-by. Now will be his only time, here will be his only space.
The new man will be earthly. And by 'earthly' I don't mean materialistic. The new man will be a realist. He will love this earth. Because we have not loved this earth and our so-called religions have been teaching us to hate this earth, we have destroyed it. It is a beautiful planet, one of the most beautiful, because one of the most alive. This planet has to be loved, this planet has to be rejoiced in. It is a gift. This body has so many mysteries in it that even a Buddha is possible only because of this body. This body becomes the temple of the greatest possibility: Buddhahood, nirvana. This body has to be loved. This earth has to be loved.
The new man will find his religion in nature - not in dead stone statues, but in living dancing trees in the wind. He will find his religion surfing on the sea, climbing on the virgin mountain. He will find his prayer with the snow, with the moon, with the stars. He will be in dialogue with existence as it is. He will not live with abstract ideas, he will live with realities. His commitment will be to nature, and through that commitment he will come to know super-nature. God is hidden here in this earth, in this very body. This very body, the Buddha. This very earth, the paradise.
The new man will read the scripture of nature. This will be his Veda, his Koran, his Bible. Here he will find sermons in the stones. He will try to decipher the mysteries of life, he will not try to demystify life. He will try to love those mysteries, to enter in those mysteries. He will be a poet, he will not be a philosopher. He will be an artist, he will not be a theologian. His science will also have a different tone. His science will be that of Tao, not an effort to conquer nature, because that effort is just foolish. How can you conquer nature? - you are part of nature. His science will be of understanding nature, not of conquering nature. He will not rape nature, he will love and persuade nature to reveal its secrets.
The new man will not be ambitious, will not be political.
Politics has no future; politics has existed because of the neurosis of humankind. Once the neurosis disappears, politics will disappear.
Ambition simply means you are missing something and you are consoling yourself that you will get it in the future. Ambition is a consolation. Today it is all misery, tomorrow there will be joy. Looking at tomorrow you become capable of tolerating today and its misery: today is always hell, tomorrow is heaven. You keep on looking at heaven, you keep on hoping.
But that hope is not going to be fulfilled ever because tomorrow never comes. Ambition means you are incapable of transforming your today into a beatitude; you are impotent. Only impotent people are ambitious: they seek money, they seek power. Only impotent people seek power and money.
The potential person lives. If money comes his way, he lives the money too, but he does not seek it, he is not after it. He is not afraid of it either.
The old man was either after money or afraid of money, either after power or afraid of power; but in both ways his whole focus was on power and money. He was ambitious. The old man is pitiable.
He was ambitious because he was unable to live, unable to love. The new man will be able to live and able to love. And his herenow is going to be so beautiful, why should he be worried about tomorrow? His concern will not be with having more, his concern will be with BEING more - another very important distinction to be remembered. His concern will be with being more, not having more.
Having more is just a substitute for being more. You have more money, so you think you are more.
You have more power, so you think you are more. Deep down you remain the same beggar.
Alexander dies as empty-handed as any beggar.
Being more is a totally different dimension. Being more means getting in touch with your reality, getting in tune with your being, and helping yourself to fall in harmony with the universe. To be in harmony with the universe you become more. The more you are in tune with existence, the more you are. If the harmony is total, you are a god. That's why we call Buddha a god, Mahavira a god - utter total harmony with existence, no conflict at all. They have dissolved themselves into the whole, they have become the whole - just as a dewdrop disappears into the ocean and becomes the ocean. They have died in their egos, now they live as existence itself.
The new man will have no use for sham, facade or pretense, he will be true, because only through truth is there liberation. All lies create bondages. Tell a single lie and you will have to tell a thousand and one to defend it - you will have to tell lies AD NAT(SEAM. Then there is no end to it. A single lie sooner or later will spread all over your being. It is like cancer.
Be truthful and you need not hide, you can be open. Be truthful and you need not protect yourself against existence, you can be vulnerable. In that vulnerability existence penetrates you, God reaches your heart.
Tell a lie and you are afraid. You will be afraid of God too, you will be afraid of facing him. You will be afraid of facing yourself. You will be continuously escaping from yourself, from others, from God.
You will be constantly hiding behind your pretensions. Hypocrisy will become your life style, and that's where hell exists. Hypocrisy creates hell. Authenticity is the only joy - the ONLY joy, I say. And if you are not authentic you will never be joyous.
The new consciousness will not put up with double-talk. The new consciousness will hate this kind of thing with a passion. This hatred for phoniness is the deepest mark of the new man. The new man will be opposed to structured, inflexible and infallible systems, because life is a beautiful flow. It is not structured, it is freedom. It is not a prison, it is a temple. He will want organizations to be fluid, changing, adapting and human. Our states are inhuman, our armies are inhuman, our churches are inhuman. They dehumanize man. They reduce man into a thing because they don't respect man's freedom. The new man will respect his freedom and respect others' freedom, too.
The old man is constantly interfering, poking his nose into everybody's affairs, trying to manipulate, criticizing, condemning, rewarding, punishing. The old man is continuously concerned with others:
'What are you doing?'
I was staying in Bombay once. A Parsee woman came to me because just the day before I had criticized Satya Sai Baba and had called him a phony guru. She came to see me and she said, 'I have come to tell you a few more things.' She was thinking that I would be very happy because she had brought some information against Satya Sai Baba. She said, 'He is a homosexual. And I know it from reliable sources.'
I said, 'But why should you be concerned? Homosexual or heterosexual - that is his business. It is his life. Who are you? Why should you be bothered about it?'
She was very shocked when I said that. She had come feeling that I would be very grateful to her, because she was giving me such great information.
Why should you be concerned? Can't you leave people to their own life? I criticize only when the other's life is concerned; otherwise there is no question of criticism. What Satya Sai Baba is doing with his sexuality is his business, it is nobody else's business.
But the old woman was constantly poking her nose into everybody's affairs.
It happens here every day. The old kind of people come and they are very much in agony because some man is holding some woman's hand. Why? - he is not holding your hand. And if those two persons have decided to hold hands, they have absolute freedom to do that. And if they are enjoying, who are you to interfere? If the man is holding some woman's hand against her will, then maybe your help is needed; but if they both are willing then you should not be concerned at all.
But this is the old consciousness. It is always trying to find ways and means to manipulate others, to be dominant over others.
The new consciousness will leave everyone to his own life. Unless somebody is harming others, he should not be prevented. Unless somebody is a danger to others, he should not be prevented.
Unless somebody is interfering in somebody else's freedom, he should not be interfered with.
The old world remained without individuality. It hated individuality, it liked only sheep, crowds - people behaving in the same way with everybody following the same routine and the same structure.
The new man will allow all kinds of possibilities. The new man will love liquid structures. He will be human, he will respect human beings. His respect will be almost religious.
The new man will have to find new forms of community, of closeness, of intimacy, of shared purpose, because the old society is not going to disappear immediately. It will linger, it will put up all kinds of fight to the new society - as it always happens. It has so many vested interests, it cannot go easily.
It will go only when it becomes impossible for it to remain in existence.
Before it goes the new man will have to create new kinds of communes, new kinds of families, new communities of closeness, intimacy, shared purpose.
That's why I am trying to create a small commune where you can be totally yourself - away from the structured and the rotten world - and you can be given absolute freedom. It will be an experiment, because the future is going to move on those lines. It will be a small experiment but of immense significance.
The new consciousness will not have anything to do with institutions like marriage. The new man will have a natural distrust of marriage as an institution. A man-woman relationship has deep value for him only when it is a mutually enhancing, growing, flowing relationship. He will have little regard for marriage as a ceremony or for vows of permanence which prove to be highly impermanent. He will love the moment and live it in its totality.
Marriage has no future. Love has a future.
In the past love was not a reality, marriage was a reality. In the future love is going to be the reality and marriage is going to become more and more unreal. In the past people were married to each other, hence by and by they started liking and loving. In the future people will love and like each other, only then will they live together. In the past to live together came first and, naturally, when you live together, a liking arises, a dependence arises. It was a need phenomenon. The husband needed the wife, the wife needed the husband, and then the children needed the parents to be together. It was, more or less, an economic phenomenon; but it was not out of love.
The future will know a different kind of relationship which is based purely on love and which will remain in existence only while love remains. And there will be no hankering for its permanence, because in life nothing is permanent; only plastic flowers are permanent.
Real roses are born in the morning and are gone by the evening. And that is their beauty: they are beautiful when they come, and they are beautiful when their petals start withering away. Their life is beautiful, their birth is beautiful, their death is beautiful, because there is aliveness. A plastic flower is never born, never lives, never dies.
Marriage has been a plastic flower in the past. The new consciousness can have no respect for marriage. It will have to create a new kind of intimacy - friendship. And it will have to learn to live with the impermanent phenomenon of love and of everything.
It needs guts to live with the impermanence of life, because each time something changes you have to change yourself again. One wants to remain fixed - it seems safer, more secure. That's how the old man has lived. The old man was not adventurous; his whole concern was security. The new man will have the spirit of adventure; his concern will not be security, his concern will be ecstasy.
He will not believe, because belief is a search for security, he will explore. He may not have neat answers to every question, but he will accept every challenge to inquire, to explore. He will go as far as life can take him, he will try to reach to the stars; but he will remain open. He will not start with a belief, with a conclusion, he will start only with a quest, a question. To start with a belief is not to start at all. To start with a belief is just playing a game with yourself. You have already believed, how can you explore? To explore one has to be agnostic. And that is going to be the religion of the future: agnosticism.
One will be capable and courageous enough to say, 'I don't know, but I am interested in knowing.
And I am ready to go into any dimension, into any adventure.' The new man will be ready to risk.
The old man was very businesslike, never ready to risk. Risk was anathema; security was his goal.
But with security you start dying. It is only in adventure, continuous adventure, that life grows to higher and higher plenitudes, that it reaches to the Himalayan peaks.
The new person will be a spontaneous person, unpredictable, willing to risk newness, often willing to risk saying or doing the wild, the far-out thing. He will believe that everything is possible and anything can be tried. He will not cling to the known, he will always remain available to the unknown, even to the unknowable. And he will not sacrifice for any future because he will not be an idealist.
He will not sacrifice for any abstract ideas, ideals, ideologies.
He will have a trust in his own experience and a profound distrust of all external authority. The new man will trust only his own experience. Unless he knows something he will not trust it. No external authority can help the new man. Nobody can say, 'I say so, so you have to believe. Because we have always believed, so you have to believe. Because our forefathers believed, so you have to believe. Because it is written in the Vedas and the Bible, you have to believe.' The new man is not going to have anything to do with such nonsense, the new man will believe only if HE knows.
This is real trust - trust in one's own possibilities, one's own potential. The new man will respect himself. To believe in external authorities is disrespectful towards one's own being.
And, finally, the new man will like being close to elemental nature: to the sea, the sun, the snow; flowers, animals, birds; to life, growth, death.
This, according to me, is the most important phenomenon that is happening today. A new man is coming into existence. The first rays are already on the horizon. Prepare yourself to receive the new man. Get ready. Become a host to the guest who is just about to knock on your doors at any moment. And that's what sannyas is all about: a preparation - getting ready to receive the new man.
It is going to be a great adventure to receive the new man. It is going to be risky, too, because the old will not like it.
Now you can understand why the orthodox mind is against me. I am preparing their graveyard, and I am preparing for something new. I am preparing a garden for the new. You are to open your hearts for the new. Uproot all the weeds of the old, drop all the conditionings that the old has given to you, so you can receive the new.
And remember, the days of the messiahs are over. Don't wait for Christ's coming again, and don't wait for Buddha's coming again. Nobody comes again, at least not Buddha and Christ. Those who come again are the people who live without learning anything from life. Buddha has learned the lesson; he will not be coming again. Christ has learned the lesson; he will not be coming again.
Don't wait for any messiah to come; wait for a new consciousness, not for a messiah to deliver you.
That is what the old man used to believe - somebody will come. Hindus think Krishna will come:
'When things are really dark and difficult and dismal, Krishna will come and deliver us.' All nonsense!
All holy cowdung!
A new consciousness is going to deliver you, not some person - Buddha, Krishna, Christ. They were here and they could not deliver you. No single person can do it - it is impossible. Only a new consciousness can deliver man from his bondage. And the new consciousness can come only through you. You have to become the womb, you have to accept it, receive it, prepare yourself for it.
Sannyas is nothing but getting ready for something immensely valuable, so that when the gift comes you are not fast asleep, so that when the new consciousness knocks on your door you are ready to embrace it.
-Osho, “The Secret of Secrets, Discourse #14, Q1”
The new man is a revolt against the whole past.
Question 1: Osho, It touches so much when you talk about the new man. when you first mentioned this concept to us many years ago, the new man was simply that to me: a concept that was intriguing, a fascinating possibility. but lately, i feel as if i know this new man -- this new race of people -- and really care about him. it sounds audacious to repeat the words i have heard you use:
"I am pregnant with the new man." but actually, that's how i feel; not only about myself, but about all of your people. What is our relationship to the new man?
The new man contains my whole philosophy about life and how it should be -- lived in totality, in intensity, in wholeness, so that we are not only dragging ourselves from the cradle to the grave, but we can make each moment a tremendous rejoicing -- a song, a dance, a celebration.
The old man that has existed up to now is on his death bed. He has suffered much; he needs all our compassion. He has been conditioned to live in misery, in suffering, in self- torture. He was given promises: promissory notes for great rewards after death -- the more he suffers, the more he tortures himself, the more he is masochistic, the more he is destructive of his own dignity, the more he will be rewarded.
That was a very convenient concept for all the vested interests because the man who is ready to suffer can easily be enslaved. The man who is ready to sacrifice today for an unknown tomorrow has already declared his inclination to be enslaved. The future becomes his bondage. And for thousands of years, man has lived only in hope, in imagination, in dreams, in utopias, but not in reality. And there is no other life than the life of reality, than the life that exists in this moment.
The new man is a rebellion, a revolt, a revolution against all the conditionings which can enslave him, oppress him, exploit him, just by giving him hopes of a fictitious heaven, frightening him, blackmailing him about another fictitious phenomenon: hell. All the old ways of life were strangely in agreement on one point: that man is a sacrificial animal at the feet of a fictitious God.
There were times when men were actually sacrificed alive, butchered before stone statues. Although nobody dares to do such a thing now, psychologically the situation has not changed. Man is still sacrificed either in the name of communism, or in the name of capitalism, or in the name of an Aryan race, in the name of Islam, in the name of Christianity, in the name of Hinduism. Instead of stone gods, now there are only phony words, meaningless. But man has accepted to live like this for the simple reason that every child finds himself born in a crowd which is already conditioned. The teachers are conditioned, the parents are conditioned, the neighbors are conditioned; and the small child is almost helpless -- he cannot envisage any other alternative than to be part of the crowd.
The old man was a crowd, a cog in the wheel; the old man had no individuality. The vested interests had taken all care to destroy self-respect, dignity, a joy and a gratefulness that you are a human being, that you are the highest creation in the long, long path of evolution... that you are the crowning glory.
These ideas were dangerous. If a man has some respect for himself, some dignity of being human, you cannot reduce him to a slave; you cannot destroy his soul and make him a robot. Up to now, man has only pretended to live -- his life has been only hypothetical.
The new man is a revolt against the whole past.
He is a declaration that we are going to create a new way of life, new values of life; that we are destined for new goals -- faraway stars are our targets. And we are not going to allow anybody to sacrifice us for any beautiful name. We are going to live our lives, not according to ideals, but according to our own longings, our own passionate intuitions.
And we are going to live moment to moment; we are no longer to be befooled by the tomorrow, and the promises for tomorrow.
The new man contains the whole future of humanity. The old man is bound to die. He has prepared his own grave -- he is digging it every moment, deeper and deeper. What do you think Ronald Reagan is doing? -- digging a grave for humanity as deep as possible. These people seem to be afraid even of dead people -- that if the grave is not deep enough, they may come back; they may come back alive.
Nuclear weapons and all destructive measures are a preparation for a global suicide. The old man has decided to die. It is up to the intelligent people in the world to disconnect from the old man before he destroys you too... to disconnect yourself from old traditions, old religions, old nations, old ideologies.
For the first time, the old is no longer gold. The old is the rotten corpse of an ugly past. It is a great responsibility for the new generation, for the young people to renounce the past.
In the past, religions used to renounce the world. I teach you to love the world so that it can be saved, and to renounce the past totally and irrevocably, to be discontinuous.
The new man is not an improvement upon the old; he is not a continuous phenomenon, not a refinement. The new man is the declaration of the death of the old, and the birth of an absolutely fresh man -- unconditioned, without any nation, without any religion, without any discriminations of men and women, of black and white, of East and West, or North and South.
The new man is a manifesto of one humanity. It is the greatest revolution the world has ever seen.
You have heard about the miracle that Moses parted the sea in two parts. That miracle is nothing. I want to part humanity, the whole ocean of humanity divided in two parts: the old and the new.
The new will love this life, this world. The new will learn the art of living and loving and dying.
The new will not be concerned about heaven and hell, sin and virtue. The new man will be concerned about how to increase the joys of life, the pleasures of life -- more flowers, more beauty, more humanity, more compassion. And we have the capacity and the potential to make this planet a paradise, and to make this moment the greatest ecstasy of your life.
Let the old die. Let the old be led by people like Ronald Reagan. Let the blind people follow the blind.
But those who have a younger spirit -- and when I say "a younger spirit," it includes even those old people who are not old in spirit; and it does not include even the young people who are old in spirit. The spiritually young are going to be the new man.
The new man is not a hope: You are already pregnant with it.
My work is just to make you aware that the new man has already arrived. My work is to help you to recognize him and to respect him.
You are asking, Maneesha: "What is our relationship to the new man?" There is no relationship between you and the new man because you are the new man. You just have to drop all the dust that has gathered down the ages on the mirror of your consciousness.
The new man is not someone coming from another planet. The new man is you in your freshness, in your silences of the heart, in your depth of meditation, in your beautiful spaces of love, in your songs of joy, in your dances of ecstasy, in your love of this earth.
No religion teaches you to love this earth -- and this earth is your mother, and these trees are your brothers, and these stars are your friends.
You are not going to have a relationship with the new man because that would be a separation; all relationships separate. You are going to be the new man. In my vision you are already on the path of the new man. You have started the journey, although you are not fully awake; but as you will see the old man moving more and more towards the graveyard, it will become easier for you to renounce him and his ways of life, his churches, his synagogues, his temples, his gods, his holy scriptures.
Your holy scripture is your whole life, and nobody else can write it -- you have to write it. You come with an empty book, and it depends on you what you make of it. Birth is not life; it is only an opportunity given to you to create life... to create a life as beautiful, as glorious, as loving as you can imagine, as you can dream.
The new man's dreams and his reality will be one because his dreams will be rooted here in this earth. They will bring flowers and fruits. They will not be just dreams -- they will make the world a dreamland.
Realize the responsibility... man has never faced a greater responsibility before: a responsibility to renounce the whole past, to erase it from your being.
Be Adam and Eve again, and let this earth be the Garden of Eden; and this time we will see who the God is who has the guts to drive man out of the Garden of Eden! It is going to be our garden, and if God wants to be in our garden, He will have to knock on our doors.
This earth can be a splendor, a magic, a miracle. Our hands have that touch -- it is just that we have never tried it. Man has never given a chance to his own potential to grow, to blossom, to bring fulfillment, contentment, to shower the whole earth with flowers, to fill the whole earth with fragrance. To me, that fragrance is godliness.
The new man will not worship a God as a creator of the world; the new man will create God as a fragrance, as beauty, as love, as truth. Up to now God has been the creator: for the new man, man will be the creator, and God is going to be the created. We can create godliness -- it is within our hands.
That's why I say the new man is the greatest revolution that has ever happened in the world. And there is no way to avoid it because the old man is determined to die, determined, committed to commit suicide. Let him die peacefully. Those who have a rebellious spirit should just disconnect themselves, and they will be the saviors, they will create a Noah's ark, they will be the beginning of a new world. And because we have known the old world and its miseries; we can avoid all those miseries; we can avoid all those jealousies, all those angers, all those wars, all those destructive tendencies....
We can go through a total transformation: we can create innocent people, loving people, people who breathe in freedom, people who help each other to be free. We can create nourishment for everybody to be dignified, to be respected -- not according to some ideals and values, but just as he is.
The new man is going to be the very salt of the earth.
-Osho, “The Golden Future, #32, Q1”
My people are the first peoplein the whole of history who are life-affirmative.
Question : Osho, i heard you say sometime ago that science is of the head and religion is of the heart. i understand that these qualities, being of a polarity, are mutually dependent. one cannot exist without the other, just as man cannot exist without both head and heart. Would not then a world scientific community bring with it, as a necessary by-product, a world religious community? Is not the vision of a world science and a world religion synthesized in your vision of the new man?
Man is not only head and heart. There is something more than both in him — his being. So you have to understand three things: the head, the heart and the being. I have said religion is of the heart, because religion is the bridge between head and being. The head cannot jump to the being directly unless it goes through the heart.
Science is confined to the head, reason, logic. The heart is confined to feelings, emotions, sensitivities. But the being is beyond both. It is pure silence — no thinking, no feeling. And only the man who knows his being is authentically religious. The heart is only a stopover.
But you have to understand my difficulty. You are in the head. I cannot talk about the being because the head will not be able to communicate with the being. For the head there is no being; that’s why scientists go on denying the soul. So I have to talk to you about the heart, which is midway.
It is possible for head to understand a little bit of heart, because even the greatest scientist falls in love. His head cannot conceive what is happening — falling in love? He cannot prove it rationally, he cannot find why it happened with a particular man or with a particular woman, what the chemistry is behind it, what the physics is behind it; it seems to be something out of nowhere. But he cannot deny it either; it is there, and it is possessing his whole life.
That’s why I say religion is of the heart. That is only a temporary statement. Once I can persuade you from thinking into feeling, then I can tell you that religion is of the being. Religion is neither thinking nor feeling, it is neither logic nor emotion. It is just pure silence: in one sense utterly empty, because there is no feeling, no thinking, and in another sense overflowing with bliss, with benediction.
Meditation is the way from the head to the heart, from the heart to the being. I would like all the scientists to listen to the heart. That will change the very character of science. It won’t be in the service of death, it won’t create more and more destructive weapons. It will be in the service of life. It will create better roses, more fragrant roses; it will create better plants, better animals, better birds, better human beings.
But the ultimate goal is to move from feeling to being. And if a scientist is capable of using his head as far as the objective world is concerned, using his heart as far as the interpersonal world is concerned, and using his being as far as existence itself is concerned, then he is a perfect man.
My vision of the new man is of a perfect man: perfect in the sense that all his three dimensions are functioning without contradicting each other, but on the contrary, complementing each other. The perfect man will create a perfect world. The perfect man will create a world of scientists, a world of poets, a world of meditators.
My approach is that all these three centers should be functioning in every person, because even a single individual is a world unto himself. And these centers are in the individual, not in the society; hence, my focus is on the individual. If I can change the individual, sooner or later the world is to follow. It will have to follow, because it will see the beauty of the new man.
The new man is not only clever in arithmetic, he can also enjoy and compose music. He can dance, he can play the guitar — which is a tremendous relaxation for his head, because the head is no longer functioning. And the new man is not only of the heart; there are moments when he drops even deeper and simply is.
That source of your is-ness is the very center of your life. To touch it, to be there is to be rejuvenated. All the energies of your heart, of your head, will be tremendously multiplied, because you will be getting newer energy every day, every moment.
Right now, even a great scientist like Albert Einstein uses only fifteen percent of his potential. What to say about ordinary people? They never go beyond five to seven percent. If all the three centers are functioning together, man will be able to function totally, one hundred percent. We can really create a paradise here, on this earth. It is within our hands. Just a little effort, a little courage, and nothing more is needed.
The world has to be scientific for all the technologies, for all the comforts. The world has to be poetic; otherwise man becomes just a robot. The head is a computer. Without poetry and music and dance and song, what your head does can be done by a computer far more efficiently and infallibly. Popes have been declaring they are infallible. They are not. But if they want to be infallible, their brains can be replaced by a computer; then they will be infallible.
The heart is a totally different dimension of experiencing beauty, love, and expressing it. But that is not all. Unless you reach to your very center, you will remain discontented. And a discontented man is dangerous, because he will do anything to get rid of his discontentment.
The person who knows himself and his center is the richest. In fact, that’s where the kingdom of God is. It is your kingdom, there you are a god. Deep down, centered in your being, you become an emperor. Therefore, I say to the whole world that my red empire consists only of emperors. And we have to expand the red empire as quickly and as fast as possible, because the forces of death are coming closer every moment. But I have every hope and certainty that life cannot be defeated by death.
My people are the first people in the whole of history who are life-affirmative. All other religions are life-negative. Their function is finished, they are no longer of any use. Life-affirmative people are needed. And if you are overflowing with life, it is contagious, it starts infecting other people. So wherever you are, rejoice, celebrate. Help your love, your life, your laughter to spread all over the world. It is possible. It has to be made possible. We can do it! And there is nobody else to take the responsibility. We are the only alternative. We are the answer to the questions that are surrounding humanity.
– Osho, “From Death to Deathlessness, #15”
My rebellion is life-affirmative.
The whole of nature wants comfort, the whole of nature wants all the luxury that is possible. But our religions have been teaching us against luxury, against comfort, against riches.
A man of enlightenment sees with clarity that it is unnatural to demand from people, "You should be content with your poverty, you should be content with your sicknesses, you should be content with all kinds of exploitation, you should be content and you should not try to rise higher, to reach to the sun and the rain and the wind." This is an absolutely unnatural conditioning that we are all carrying. Only a rebellion in your being can bring you to this clarity.
You say, Devageet, that in history all the rebellions were based on "no." Those were not rebellions; change the word. All the revolutions were based on "no." They were negative, they were against something, they were destructive, they were revengeful and violent.
Certainly, my rebellion is based on "yes" -- yes to existence, yes to nature, yes to yourself. Whatever the religions may be saying and whatever the ancient traditions may be saying, they are all saying no to yourself, no to nature, no to existence; they are all life-negative.
My rebellion is life-affirmative. I want you to dance and sing and love and live as intensely as possible and as totally as possible. In this total affirmation of life, in this absolute yes to nature we can bring a totally new earth and a totally new humanity into being.
The past was "no." The future has to be "yes."
We have lived enough with the no, we have suffered enough and there has been nothing but misery. I want people to be as joyful as birds singing in the morning, as colorful as flowers, as free as the bird on the wing with no bondages, with no conditioning, with no past -- just an open future, an open sky and you can fly to the stars.
Because I am saying yes to life, all the no-sayers are against me, all over the world. My yes-saying goes against all the religions and against all the ideologies that have been forced upon man. My yes is my rebellion. The day you will be able also to say yes it will be your rebellion.
We can have rebellious people functioning together, but each will be an independent individual, not belonging to a political party or to a religious organization. Just out of freedom and out of love and out of the same beautiful yes we will meet. Our meeting will not be a contract, our meeting will not be in any way a surrender; our meeting will make every individual more individual. Supported by everybody else, our meeting will not take away freedom, will not enslave you; our meeting will give you more freedom, more support so that you can be stronger in your freedom. Long has been the slavery, and long has been our burden. We have become weak because of the thousands of years of darkness that have been poured on us.
The people who love to say yes, who understand the meaning of rebellion, will not be alone; they will be individuals. But the people who are on the same path, fellow-travelers, friends, will be supporting each other in their meditativeness, in their joy, in their dance, in their music. They will become a spiritual orchestra, where so many people are playing instruments but creating one music. So many people can be together and yet they may be creating the same consciousness, the same light, the same joy, the same fragrance.
-Osho, “Satyam Shivam Sundram, #26, Q1“
Knowledge is useful in the outside world
Question : I have heard you say that knowledge is useless.
No, I have not said that. Knowledge is very useful -- wisdom is useless! Knowledge is needed in the marketplace, in business, in politics. Everywhere knowledge is needed -- in technology, in science -- everywhere knowledge is needed. Knowledge is very useful, utilitarian; wisdom is absolutely useless, but that's its beauty. It is not a commodity, you cannot use it in any way; you cannot sell it, you cannot purchase it. It does not belong to the utilitarian world; it is a flowering.
What use is a rose flower? What use is the song of a bird? What use is it? If you look around in existence -- the stars, the clouds, the mountains, the rivers -- what is the use of it all? It is all useless. Why are butterflies so beautiful? Why does God take so much care in painting their wings? What is the point of it all?
Remember, the outside world is the world of utility; the inside world is the world of significance, not of utility. The outside world has a totally different dimension -- there it is needed. You need bread, you need butter, you need a house, you need medicine, you need clothes, shelter; you need thousands of things. But the inner world is simply of luxury; it is not a need, it is a joy. It is a sheer rejoicing.
If somebody asks you, "What is the use of love?" the question is unanswerable, by the very fact of its use of the word "use." Love is not a commodity; the world can go on without love -- it is already going on without it. Everything is going perfectly well; in fact, it is only when love happens that some disturbance happens. Hence all the societies are against love.
The world is going perfectly well without musicians. Who needs musicians? They will not be able to drive a train, to pilot an airplane; they are not reliable people.
I used to travel in India. One of my friends who died just a few months ago was a lover of travelling. I used to go on the fastest trains possible, because I had to cover the whole country, and he loved to travel by passenger trains which stopped at every station, every small station.
The journey that could have been completed within ten hours would take four days, five days, sometimes seven days. And whenever he was with me he would insist...
One time I agreed and really it was a joy, because he knew every place where the tea was the best, where the milk was the purest, where you could get a good sweet, where you could get good apples, mangoes. In those five days of travelling with him I forgot all about where we were going -- there was no need to go anywhere! And everybody knew him -- the porters, the station-masters, the drivers -- because he was always travelling on these small trains. And at each station the train would stop for one hour, half an hour, two hours.
One small station was really a beautiful place. The whole station was surrounded by a big mango grove, hundreds of mango trees. He took me out of the station and he started climbing a tree. I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "The mangoes are ripe!" And I said, "If the train leaves we will be in difficulty!" He said, "Don't be worried. Come along with me." So I went along with him. I was constantly telling him, "It is time now, the train will leave." And he said, "Don't be worried. Do you see the man above us?" One man was there. He said, "He is the driver. Unless he gets down, the train cannot move!"
I enjoyed that moment!
Life can be lived either with utility as your very style or it can be lived as a playfulness.
Music, love, flowers, stars, poetry, painting, dancing, all belong to the inner world. I am not against knowledge; when you are doing something in the world use your knowledge. There, to use wisdom is foolish; there, sitting in a car and meditating is dangerous. There, you should use all your efficiency, all your knowledge, all your know-how; but you should not be confined to it. You should not become obsessed with it, you should be able to go inside. When the work is over you should be able to close the doors to the outside world and return to the inner. Then dance, sing, meditate, love, live. One should be flexible, liquid.
This misunderstanding, Geetam, is possible with me, but you can see my approach if you don't bring your own mind in. I am not telling you to renounce the world for the simple reason that you can always use your knowledge. Sitting in a cave in the Himalayas you will not be able to use your knowledge. And the outside world is as beautiful as the inside world -- if we can have both, why choose one?
My whole message is that you can eat the cake and have it too, so why go for half?
Knowledge is useful in the outside world, in the inside world it is a hindrance. And the same is true about the inner wisdom: it is of immense joy inside, but don't try to use it outside.
Both things have been done. The West has lived through knowledge only, hence it has lost the inner dimension, it has lost the inner flowering, it has lost contact with its own being. The East has done the reverse: thinking that knowledge is useless it has become non-scientific, non-utilitarian, so its outside world has become shrunken. It is poor, ugly, unscientific.
The West has lost contact with its own soul and the East has lost contact with its own body. And man is a dance of these two complementaries; these two are partners in the dance.
These two are like two wings: you cannot fly into the sky with one wing alone, with one wing you will fall. The West has fallen, the East has fallen; both have proved to be utter failures.
We need a new kind of human being who has both wings: the wings of knowledge, science, technology, and the wings of meditation, enlightenment, love, freedom. When both wings are functioning in a deep synchronicity, in a deep togetherness, in accord and harmony, then only man is complete, total.
Knowledge is not needed for the inner world. About the inner world, you ask:
THEN WHAT IS NEEDED TO GUIDE US TO THE ULTIMATE GOAL?
There is no ultimate goal -- let it be clear from the very beginning. There is no goal as such, hence there is no question of there being an ultimate goal. All that is, is immediate -- let me repeat, IMMEDIATE. There is nothing ultimate anywhere; the immediacy itself is the ultimate. And there is no goal; the pilgrimage itself is the goal. Each step is the goal, each moment is the goal.
For that, knowledge is not needed because knowledge is a guidance for goals, for achievements. For that, that goal-less immediate life, innocence is needed not knowledge.
Innocence, like a child, what Dionysius calls a "luminous ignorance" -- exactly that is needed; a luminous ignorance, an enlightened state of not-knowing.
You always think in terms of enlightenment as if it were the ultimate in knowing -- you are wrong. Enlightenment is the ultimate state of not-knowing; it is luminous ignorance, it is childlike. The sage again becomes a child. He starts collecting colored stones, pebbles, seashells on the sea beach. He starts collecting wildflowers, for no reason at all, just for the sheer joy of it.
-Osho, “The Goose is Out, #2”
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