Wild Wisdom
Question :
Are you trying to destroy all of our previous ideas about religion?
Everybody thinks that he already knows what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is evil. You can see it within yourself, and you can see it without you. You can move around in the world and you will find that everybody is a knower, with no suspicion at all - because those old values have been given to him as a heritage.
Each generation goes on giving its diseases to the new generation. They call it wisdom. But what was wisdom yesterday, today is simply nonsense. If you want your children to be wise, never give them wisdom. If you want your children to have a clarity about life and a spontaneous responsibility towards situations and people, don't load them with ideas of good and evil, because they will not be living in your time - and you cannot conceive in what time they will be living, what will be their situations.
All that you can do is make them more intelligent, make them more alert, make them more conscious, make them more loving, make them more silent. So wherever they are their response will come out of their silence and out of their love and out of their alertness; it is going to be good. Don't tell them what is good, but give them the right means to discover what is good in a different situation. But up to now just the opposite has been the case. We are told, "This is good and this is wrong," as if time is standing still and our values will remain values for our coming generations too.
Because of this conditioning from the past everybody lives with his self-conceit - that he knows already. And this is one of the most dangerous situations. When you don't know and you have the conceit that you know it already, then all doors of exploration and enquiry are closed. You never ask; there is no need. You already know the answer. Every child is being fed with the milk of the mother's answers. He has not even asked the question and you are giving him answers.
Know perfectly well that he will have to face different questions - not the same questions that you had to face or your forefathers faced. And because he will be loaded with dead and out-of-date answers, you have messed up his life from the very beginning. When a question will be there he will not respond to the question, he will simply repeat his old answer - which is not going to solve the problem.
A small boy was asking his father, "Dad, tell me one thing, where did I come from?"
The father felt a little embarrassed, because now he will have to tell the whole story of sexual reproduction. But he gathered courage - because now that is what the educationalists say: children should be told; all the psychologists are in agreement that children should be told when they ask. So he tried, and he told the boy about the whole gymnastics that he had done with his mother, and that after nine months of living in her womb he was born.
The child looked strangely at the father and said, "Dad, what nonsense are you talking? My question was very simple. Johnny, my friend, says he came from New Jersey. I wanted to know where I came from. You are wasting your time and my time, and what you are telling me looks so stupid."
We are in such a hurry to give answers to children that we never enquire deeply what their questions are. Are there any questions or not? A patient mother or a father should wait. But no, the child is born and immediately he has to be baptized as a Christian. That means you have given him all the answers that Christianity has. Or he has to be circumcised, and you have given him all the answers that Judaism has. Or he has to be initiated into Hinduism, Buddhism or Mohammedanism, and they all have their rituals. But that is the beginning of answers.
Nobody is asking the child. And it is not even time to ask, because the child cannot answer anything - he is such a new arrival. He does not know the language; he does not know anything about the world. He is not concerned about who created the world. He has no idea what you mean by God.
This world is full of answers. Everybody's head is full of answers for which you don't have an authentic question. That's why I call your knowledge rubbish. First a question should arise in you. And the question cannot be answered by anybody else; you will have to find the answer yourself. Only then, when the answer is yours, it has a truth. If it is given to you by somebody else it is old, rotten, disgusting. Your own search will bring you to a fresh answer.
Of course the search is not going to be so cheap as accepting from the older generation their knowledge; forgetting completely that it is not your knowing. But you cannot see from somebody else's eyes, and you cannot hear from somebody else's ears, and you cannot feel from somebody else's heart. Do you think you can know truth from somebody else's words? No, your own being has to encounter truth - just as your ears have to listen to the music themselves, your eyes have to see the light and the flowers and the rainbows and the stars by themselves.
But with truth, with good, with morality, with religion, we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned by others. The most important things in life are all borrowed. And anything borrowed becomes untrue, because truth has a basic condition intrinsic to it. That is: it has to be experienced first. Nobody wants to be disturbed in his sleep. It is good to accept the old and go to sleep. Searching and seeking and enquiring can be disturbing to your sleep. Certainly they are going to be disturbing to your sleep because they are going to bring more consciousness to you; not more sleep.
As man is, he is almost in a coma about all great things of life. He has simply accepted - it was so easy and so cheap; no effort was needed on his part. Unless you are a creative soul you will not know what is good and what is evil. Why is a creative soul needed to know? - because whatever helps your creativity is good; it is divine. And whatever hinders your creativity is evil. There is no other criterion. Whatever brings your genius to actualization is good, and whatever keeps you retarded and pygmies is evil.
However small a man may be, a giant is asleep within him. Creativity wakes up the giant. In creating something - it may be anything: music, poetry, dance - in creating anything you become part of the universe, which is constantly creative. There is no other bridge with the universe except creativity. If you are simply vegetating, not creating anything - and there millions of people who live their whole life without creating anything, they are not in tune with the universe. To be in tune with the universe is good, is healthy; to be out of tune with the existence is evil, is sick.
Things are not good and evil in themselves. It all depends on you - how you use them. You can create a goal for mankind only by creating a goal for yourself. You can become an arrow moving towards the goal - a faraway distant star. Seeing you move, many who had never thought that they are arrows may get the idea. Have you given the earth its meaning? Have you made the earth a little more beautiful than you found it? Have you given life a little more grace? Have you given to the trees, to the mountains, to the rivers a little more love? Have you been in some way contributing to the earth's riches - its glamor, its dignity? Are you destructive or creative?
Adolf Hitler is evil because he has taken from the earth something meaningful and destroyed it. He destroyed six million Jews in gas chambers, and millions of other people. Millions of people in the gas chambers just became smoke within seconds. And fifty million people, in all, died in the second world war - for which a single man, Adolf Hitler, is responsible. A man who was the cause of fifty million people's deaths must have created millions of widows, millions of orphans, millions of prostitutes and millions of beggars. This is what evil is.
But even a small man - who will not be known by anybody or by history - creating a beautiful garden where roses blossom, and the winds come and take the fragrance to unknown nostrils, is adding beauty to the earth, is giving meaning to the earth. A solitary man playing on his guitar makes the earth more musical. A dancer gives the earth the dignity of his dance.
Zarathustra is giving a totally new criterion for good and evil, and a far greater criterion than has ever been given: give meaning to life, give meaning to the earth, give meaning to the future. You are the creators. It depends on you. And I don't think anybody would like to be evil. And the word "evil" is just a metaphor - nobody would like to be destructive. But unknowingly we are all destroying many things.
One of my gardeners wrote a letter to me. He was immensely sorry. He thought one tree was dead and he cut the tree. And when he cut it, he saw that it was not dead. The innermost core of the tree was still alive. Perhaps it was waiting for the new leaves; old leaves may have fallen. He wrote a letter to me saying, "I have been a gardener and I have cut thousands of trees, but I have never felt so disturbed. I never felt that I have done anything evil, but today I'm crying because I have destroyed something alive; although there was no intention - but that does not matter.
"The tree that was going to have new foliage, new flowers, the tree that would have danced in the air and in the wind and in the rain and in the sun; I destroyed it. And I owe an apology to you, because the only thing I have learned here is reverence for life. And for the first time I'm hurting that I have destroyed something living."
It is only a question of your awareness. Be creative and you are religious. It does not matter that you are Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan. Those are all junk labels; you should have dropped them long ago. You need not be a Christian, you need not be a Hindu; you only have to be a creator: a man who makes life more meaningful, who gives the planet more beauty, who has a reverence for life, who spreads more vibes of love around himself. This is true religiousness.
Man's past has been almost a nightmare. The greatest good will be that we can change the future, not into a nightmare, but transform the most beautiful longings of the human heart into reality. If we can make the future a dreamland, a paradise - in trying to create the future we will be immensely rewarded - not in some after-life, but in the very act of creation, in the very act of making the planet meaningful and beautiful.
I bade them laugh at their gloomy sages, and whoever had sat as a black scarecrow, cautioning, on the tree of life.
What have your saints been? - gloomy, sad, and making you also gloomy and sad. They have forgotten to sing and they hate you because you can still sing. They condemn you as sinners. They have renounced life and they are jealous that you are still living and still loving. They take revenge by not only calling you sinners, but throwing you into hell for eternity - you will suffer forever. And these have been your saints.
Zarathustra is right, these saints have sat like a black scarecrow, cautioning, on the tree of life, saying, "Don't live, don't love, don't sing, don't enjoy, don't dance." The best thing for you will be, if you want to be really religious, to be dead. Even if you want to continue breathing, breathe, but be dead. No sign of life should be there. No sign of joy in your eyes. The best thing is: dig your own grave and get into it and you will be worshipped for centuries as a great saint. Here suicidal people are worshipped as saints, and the people who are the glory of the earth are condemned.
But this has been in the past. This need not be in the present and this certainly has to change in the future. Have you ever wondered what is great in your saints? Somebody knows how to fast for thirty days continuously - do you think it is something creative? Somebody is standing on his head - do you think it is something beautiful? Somebody is lying on a bed of thorns - do you think this man is giving more meaning to life?
People have escaped from the world into the caves, deep in the mountains. These escapists - do you think they are creators? They are cowards. They could not encounter life; they were afraid of failure, they were afraid of being defeated. They have escaped, in faraway mountains. And the strangest thing is: you worship them; you worship the escapists.
And the people who are fighting to make life better are not to be worshipped at all. Nobody is going to be even grateful to them. Your so-called saints of all religions, in the past, have been just an unnecessary burden on the earth, and they have been parasites on humanity. This should not be the case anymore. Wisdom is always wild. It is not born in the universities. I have lived long in the universities and I have never seen anybody becoming wise in the universities. Yes, people become knowledgeable. They become computers - they memorize all kinds of nonsense - but as far as wisdom is concerned, if you are looking in the universities you are looking in the wrong places.
Wisdom is wild, knowledge is tamed. Unless you are completely free from the society and its fetters, completely unafraid of its condemnation - because it will take away all your respectability; it will do every kind of harm to you; it will make your life impossible. If you want to be wise, if you want to be intelligent, you are bound to be a rebel because you will have to fight against so many superstitions, so many stupid ideas which people think of as ultimate truth, that you will irritate everybody.
You will have to allow yourself to be completely free from the past, from the whole heritage of humanity. That's what will make you wild. You will be on your own - without any support from anywhere. You will be alone, but it has a great blissfulness, and it has a great insight into things. It not only frees you from the fetters of the society; it frees you for a greater life, for a more universal life, for a more eternal life.
-Osho, "Zarathustra: The Laughing Prophet, #17"