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It is your Responsibility.- You reap as you sow. -
"I am responsible for myself. Nobody else is responsible for me; it is absolutely and utterly my responsibility. Whatsoever I am, I am my own creation.“ -Osho, “The Book of Wisdom, #5”
"My act is my reward, and my act is my punishment, and I am totally responsible for whatever I am doing" - This is Maturity. -Osho, "Light on the Path, #37, Q1"
Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost. Risking all to be oneself, that's what maturity is all about. -Osho, "The First Principle, #10"
Nobody is responsible except you. Take the whole responsibility on yourself. That is one of the fundamentals of sannyas: responsibility, total responsibility. -Osho, "Dance Til the Stars Come Down From the Rafters, #13"
Don't be responsible to anybody. You are not. Just be responsible to yourself. -Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol 1, #6"
Whatsoever you feel, you become. It is your responsibility. -Osho, "The Cypress in the Courtyard, #1"
It is your decision. But then whatsoever happens is your responsibility -Osho, "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There, #1"
The meaning of the word responsibility.
You don´t understand even the meaning of the word responsibility. The society has been so cunning. It has destroyed our most beautiful words, given them distorted meanings. Ordinarily in your dictionaries "responsibility" means duty, doing things the way you are expected to do them by your parents, by your teachers, by your priests, by your politicians, by somebody else.
Your responsibility is to fulfill the demands made upon you by your elders and your society. If you act accordingly, you are a responsible person; if you act on your own ― individually ― then you are an irresponsible person. And your fear is: in acting spontaneously, here and now, there is a danger ― you may start acting individually. What will happen to your responsibility?
The fact is that "responsibility", the very word, has to be broken into two words. It means "response ability". And response is possible only if you are spontaneous, here and now. Response means that your attention, your awareness, your consciousness, is totally here and now, in the present. So whatever happens, you respond with your whole being. It is not a question of being in tune with somebody else, some holy scripture, or some holy idiot. It simply means to be in tune with the present moment.
This ability to respond is responsibility.
But without experience you will not be able to see the contradiction in your question. Yes, I say you will be able to act with absolute response-ability. But it will not be the responsibility that you have been taught and conditioned for. It will be a totally new phenomenon.
It will be just like a mirror. If you come in front of it, it responds, it reflects you. The moment you have gone out of its focus, it is again silent. It is not a photographic film that catches your reflection.
It remains always clean and available. Whoever comes in front of it - it will respond with totality and reflect the reality. The consciousness which is in the present is just like a mirror.
Any situation comes ... There are times when you are in the present in spite of yourself. For example, if walking on the path you suddenly come across a long snake, are you going to be guided by past experience? Are you going to be responsible? You will forget all that you have learned: all teachings, all scriptures, all teachers, parents. Suddenly you will find the here and now because this is not a time to think about what to do, what is right and what is wrong. You will simply jump out of the way.
This will be responsibility, spontaneity.
Or your house is on fire and you are taking a shower, naked. Are you going to dress before you get out of the house? Put your tie right? Polish your shoes? Have a look in the mirror? See whether all the buttons are in the right holes? No, there is no time. The house is on fire. You have to jump out of your bathroom window. And you will jump even without a towel around you. You will simply jump naked, just out of the shower through the window. This is spontaneous. It is not guided, because you have not been continuously experiencing your house catching fire. It has never happened before.
So there is no past experience to guide you. And nobody, your father or your mother or your teacher has ever told you that if you are under the shower naked, and the house catches fire, at least put the towel around yourself before you jump out of the window. Nobody has taught you. There is no book. I have looked into all the books about etiquette, not a single book is giving any guidance. If you are waiting for guidance you will be stuck in the bathroom. You will search in your mind and you will not find any guidance at all.
And if you think you cannot do anything without guidance, then you are finished. Then there is no more life for you, no more future. The window was open. You could have jumped. But it has to be a spontaneous action in the moment, here now. And I call it absolutely responsible, responsible to life, responsible to your own being. You are avoiding committing suicide.
But you have not lived a single moment here and now. And you have never acted spontaneously.
Hence the fear is natural, that if you act spontaneously, what about the guidance that you have been given - do this, don't do that? What about all those ten commandments? What about all the religious and moral teachings?
When you are acting according to past experience and teachings and conditionings, you are not a real person. You are absolutely phony, because you are not looking at the real situation. You are searching for the right answer in the memory. And the memory has never come across such a situation.
Every situation is so new, that you cannot be guided by experience. If you are guided by experience, it is going to be wrong action and that is the whole misery of the world. Everybody is acting wrongly, trying to be right - this is the trouble - trying to be in tune with past experience. But this situation has never happened before. This is so new. [....]
Life brings every day new situations. And if you are waiting to be guided by past experience, you will miss the opportunity to act responsibly, to act spontaneously. To me the greatest morality is to act spontaneously. And you will always be right, because your full awareness will be involved.
More than that you cannot do. More than that existence cannot demand from you. And if you are focused totally in the present, what more can you do? You are bringing your whole energy and consciousness to solve the question, to get out of the situation. More than that is not possible. So whatever happens is right.
This whole idea of responsibility and being guided by experience is told to you by people who don't want you to be here and now. They go on giving you advice on how to act, what to do, but they don't know that life does not go according to their guidelines. Their guidance becomes misguidance in any real moment. [....]
You have to respond to every kind of situation in the world. Past guidance is not of much help. Every moment you will be coming across something new. The world is very inventive. That's why all so- called religious people who are guided by the past look so sad. They are always missing the train.
They go on looking for guidance, but this is not the situation for which the guidance was given. It may have been right in a certain moment, in a certain situation, but it is nothing that can be eternally true.
Only one thing is eternally true, and that is your consciousness. And if you can bring your consciousness to the present, you cannot go wrong. Whatever you do out of that consciousness is always going to be right, not according to any criterion, but just because it is coming out of a total awareness. Out of total awareness nobody has ever done anything wrong. According to me, right is what comes out of your spontaneity and out of your consciousness and out of your presence here and now.
And what is not out of your spontaneity, consciousness and your being here and now is wrong.
There is no other criterion than what I have just told you. All other criteria are dead. They may have been living at one time, but that time is past. Heraclitus is right, you cannot step in the same river twice. And he was stating something about life and existence.
Hence there cannot be any guidance. All guidance will create trouble for you. You have to be kept absolutely clean of all guidance, so that you can respond with total awareness to the present situation without any hesitation, without any thinking. Just out of your silent awareness arises the response and it is the most beautiful, the most honest, most authentic answer that could have come to anybody.
Because humanity has been forced always to be guided by the past, there is so much misery. If what I am saying is listened to by humanity, there will be great joy all over the earth, immense laughter, immense rejoicing, no repentance, no guilt, no confessions.
-Osho, "Sat Chit Anand, #20"
Self-Respect and Freedom and Responsibility.
Question 2
-Osho, "Beyond Enlightenment, #9"
You live in your own creation.
Why am i always living in a kind of hell?
The only cause of hell, the only cause of misery is you and nothing else. Except you, nobody can cause it. And it is not the past; you are creating it each moment. [....]
Be a little more conscious, Sudhir. Watch how you create your hell. Watch carefully each step, and you will be able to find how you create it.
Whatsoever is happening, it is your choice.
If you are doing something wrong, take the responsibility on yourself, because that is the only way to transcend it one day. If you are doing it then the possibility is open: if you want not to, you may not do it. But if somebody else is forcing you to do it, then the possibility is lost, then freedom is impossible.
Freedom and responsibility go together; they are two aspects of the same coin. If you want freedom, you have to be responsible for whatsoever you are doing. If you don't want the responsibility, then you lose your freedom also.
Everybody likes to be free and nobody wants to be responsible. We go on shifting responsibility. And in shifting responsibility to others' shoulders, you are throwing all possibilities of freedom also. Become responsible! If you have been angry, you have been angry. Don't say: In spite of me. Don't bring in Judas Don't say: Somebody else, some other force, has possessed me. No, nobody is possessing you.
Whatsoever is happening, it is your choice. You have chosen it that way. You may be completely unaware how you have chosen it, because sometimes you want one thing and you choose another -- that creates the problem. You think you want one thing and you choose another. Or, you wanted something else, you have also chosen that same thing, but the result is different.
-Osho, "The Search, #5"
Just be responsible to yourself.- don't be responsible to anybody -
Question : Why are we afraid, and sometimes even resent taking responsibility for ourselves, and we expect either you or the commune to take the responsibility?
It is because from your very childhood you have been taught not to be responsible. You have been taught to depend. You have been taught to be responsible to your father, to your mother, to your family, to your motherland, to all kinds of nonsense. But you have not been told that you have to be responsible for yourself, that there is nobody who is going to take your responsibility.
No, on the contrary, your parents were taking your responsibility. Your family was taking your responsibility. The priest was taking your responsibility for your spiritual growth. You were just to follow all these people and do whatsoever they said. When you are grown up and you are no more a child, a great fear arises because you have to take responsibility and you have not been trained to take responsibility for yourself.
You go to confess your sin to the priest... what kind of stupidity are you doing? First, to think that you have committed sin; second, feeling guilty that you committed it; third, now you have to go to the priest to confess it, so that he can pray to God to forgive you. A simple thing has become so complex, so unnecessarily long and circuitous.
Whatever you have done, you wanted to do it, that's why you have done it. And who is there to decide what is sin and what is not sin? There is no criterion anywhere, no weighing scale that you can go and weigh how much sin you have committed -- one kilo, two kilos, three kilos. How long a sin have you committed? -- one yard, two yards, three yards? And what was this sin, and who is this priest you are going to confess to?
And this is his strategy: if you go on confessing to the priest, you are certainly afraid of him, because he knows all the ins and outs about you. The priest knows every gossip going in the town; he knows how many husbands are flirting with other people's wives, he knows who is doing what. They themselves go on confessing it. This is the priest's strategy to keep control of his congregation. You cannot leave the congregation because the priest can expose you. And also you are afraid that if you leave the congregation the priest may not ask God for you to be forgiven, and you have committed so many sins.... Now it is too late. You have to remain in the same herd, in the same crowd, for your whole life.
I teach you not to be responsible to anybody; the father, the mother, the country, the religion, the party line -- don't be responsible to anybody. You are not. Just be responsible to yourself. Do whatsoever you feel like doing. If it is wrong, the punishment will immediately follow. If it is right, the reward will follow immediately, instantly. There is no other way.
This way you will start finding what is wrong, what is right, on your own. You will grow a new sensitivity -- Indians call it the third eye. You will start seeing with a new vision, a new eye. Instantly you will know what is wrong, because in the past so many times you have done it and always suffered in consequence. You will know what is right, because whenever you did existence showered great blessings on you. Cause and effect are together, they are not separated by years and lives.
You are responsible then. If you want and enjoy a certain act, although it brings suffering, then do it. It is good, because you enjoy it. The suffering is not big enough to deter you from the enjoyment that your act brings. But it is up to you, wholly and solely up to you to decide. If the suffering is too much and the act brings nothing, no joy, and necessarily a long anguish follows it, then it is up to you if you are an absolute idiot, and what can anybody do about it?
This is what I mean by being responsible to yourself. There is no God on whom you can dump your responsibility, but you are always searching to dump on somebody, even on a poor man like me, who is continuously telling you that I am not responsible for anything, for anybody. Still, somehow, deep down you go on carrying the illusion that I must be joking.
I am not joking. He is our Master, you must be thinking, how can He say that He is not responsible? But you don't understand. Dumping your responsibility on me, you will remain retarded, childish. You will never grow. The only way to grow is to accept all good, bad, the joyful, the sorrowful. Everything that happens to you, you are responsible for. That gives you great freedom.
If I am responsible for something, then the key to your actions is in my hands. Then you are a slave to me. Then you are a puppet and the strings are in my hand. I say dance, you dance; I say stop, you stop. Of course, the puppet cannot be responsible for anything. The puppeteer, who is behind the screen, is always responsible.
God is the great puppeteer. And all these popes and saints and mahatmas are great puppets, just mediators between the big puppeteer and you. They are also puppets, but they are great puppets because they follow every single instruction from on high, absolutely. You are a little smaller puppet. Once in a while you dance on your own, too. Once in a while the puppeteer goes on pulling your strings and you don't dance.
The moment I say there is no puppeteer, no God, no saint, it is all rubbish, I am trying to give you total freedom. I am making you absolutely responsible for everything that happens to you or does not happen. Rejoice in this freedom. Rejoice in this great understanding that you are responsible for everything in your life. This will make you what I call the individual. And to become the individual is to know all that is worth knowing, is to experience all that is worth experiencing. To be an individual is to be liberated, is to be enlightened.
-Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol 1, #6"
Nobody is responsible for you.
I want your work also to be part of your spiritual growth; not against it, but for it. But that can come only from your own spontaneity. You have to take the responsibility on yourself.
I want individuals to be absolutely free, responsible, alert, aware, neither allowing anybody to dictate to them; nor allowing themselves to dictate to anybody. It has to be a beautiful communion. It is not based on any dictatorial ideology. It is based, basically, on ultimate freedom.
And if freedom is the ultimate goal then it should be your first step too, because only the first step will lead you to the last step. [....]
You will have to take all the responsibility for what you are doing. And you will have to grow in your consciousness and awareness so that only the right flows through your actions, so that whatever you do beautifies the commune, helps people. [....]
Mistakes are absolutely needed for learning, but one should not commit the same mistake again. And everybody has to be aware of it: nobody is responsible for you. And you don't have to ask anybody's permission.
-Osho, "The Invitation, #10"
Responsibility makes you feel strong
Christianity has made you feel responsible for two thousand years, has made you feel guilty, that you are the sinner. Now psychoanalysis goes to the other extreme: it simply says you are not the sinner, you are not to feel guilty — you are perfectly okay. You forget about all guilt and you forget all about sin. Others are responsible!
Christianity has done much harm by creating the idea of guilt — now psychoanalysis is doing harm from the other extreme, by creating the idea of irresponsibility.
You have to remember: the parents were doing something because they were taught to do those things — their parents had been teaching them. They were brought up by parents also; they had not come from heaven directly.
So what is the point of throwing the responsibility backwards? It doesn’t help; it will not help to solve any problem. It will help only to unburden you from guilt. That is good, the good part; the beneficial part of psychoanalysis is that it unburdens you from guilt. And the harmful part is that it leaves you there; it does not make you feel responsible.
To feel guilty is one thing: to feel responsible is another thing. I teach you responsibility. What do I mean by responsibility? You are not responsible to your parents, and you are not responsible to any God, and you are not responsible to any priest — you are responsible to your inner being. Responsibility is freedom!
Responsibility is the idea that “I have to take the reins of my life in my own hands. Enough is enough! My parents have been doing harm — whatsoever they could do they have done: good and bad, both they have done. Now I have become a mature person. I should take everything in my own hands and start living the way it arises in me. I should devote all my energies to my life now.”
And immediately you will feel a great strength coming to you. Guilt makes you feel weak: responsibility makes you feel strong. Responsibility gives you heart again, confidence, trust.
That is the meaning of sannyas. Sannyas wants you to be free from Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Mohammedanism, and sannyas wants you to be free from Freudian psychoanalysis and things like that too.
Sannyas wants you to live your life authentically, according to your innermost voice, not according to any other voice from anywhere. Not according to the Bible or according to the Koran. If God has spoken in a certain way in the Koran, it was specifically meant for Mohammed, not for you. It was God’s dialogue with Mohammed, not with you. You will have to find your own dialogue with God. You will have to find your own Koran!
If Jesus has spoken those beautiful words, they are out of the dialogue that happened between him and the totality. Now don’t go on repeating them. They are meaningless for you. They are not BORN in you, they are not PART of you! They are like a plastic flower: you can bring a plastic rose and hang it on the rosebush — yes, they are like that — it is not the same as when a roseflower comes out of the rosebush itself.
You can deceive people. Those who don’t know may be deceived. They may see so many beautiful flowers are blooming on the rosebush, and they are all plastic. But you cannot deceive the rosebush — you cannot deceive yourself. You can go on repeating Jesus, but those words have not been uttered in your cars by God; they are not addressed to you. You are reading a letter addressed to somebody else! It is illegal; you should not open that envelope. You should search and find your own relationship with the totality.
That relationship I call responsibility. Response means spontaneous capacity to relate. Response means capacity to respond to life situations according to your heart, not according to anybody else. When you start feeling that, you become an individual. Then you stand on your own feet.
And remember, if you stand on your own feet, then only one day will you be able to walk without feet and fly without wings. Otherwise not.
- Osho, “Walk Without Feet, Fly without Wings and Think Without Mind, #2, Q3”
Fully responsible for your acts.
Fully responsible for your acts. And unless you take the responsibility on yourself, you will never become strong, you will never become independent, you will never have the taste of freedom.
You can have freedom. But the cost is to accept responsibility in its totality.
I have felt such immense freedom that looking at you I feel sad. You have the same opportunity, the same potentiality to blossom into a free individual, but you go on remaining a slave. And the way you manage it is by never being responsible. You think not being responsible makes you free? Not feeling responsible for your actions, for your thoughts, for your being, do you think you are freed from all the consequences? No, absolutely no.
It makes you a slave, it makes you something subhuman. It takes all glory away from you. You cannot walk straight, you become a hunchback. Your intelligence cannot grow because you have not accepted the challenge. You are waiting for fate, for destiny, for God. You are thinking, "When the time comes -- the right time, God willing -- I will be blissful too." There is no God who can will your blissfulness. You are alone in existence.
You come alone, you die alone. Between birth and death, of course you can deceive yourself that someone is with you -- your wife, your father, your mother, your husband, your friend -- but this is just make-believe. You come alone, you go alone; you are alone between birth and death.
And I am not saying that you cannot love a man or a woman. In fact, when two independent, free people, who take responsibility on their own shoulders, meet, there is immense beauty in it. Nobody is a burden to the other. Nobody is dumping anything onto the other' you have stopped the very idea of dumping anything. You can be together, but your aloneness remains untouched, pure, crystal-clear, virgin. You never trespass each other's territories. You can enjoy each other just because you are separate.
The more separate you are -- the more clearly it is understood that you are alone, she is alone -- the more there is a possibility of a great meeting of two alonenesses, two purities, two individuals.
Forget words like destiny, fate, kismet, God. And don't allow yourself to be cheated by astrologers, mind readers, palmists, predictors of your future. There is no future if you don't create it! And whatsoever is going to be tomorrow is going to be your creation. And it has to be done today, now -- because out of today, today's womb, tomorrow will be born.
Take the responsibility totally on yourselves -- that's my message to you. That's why I am continuously destroying the God in your mind. I have nothing against him. How can I have anything against him? -- he does not exist! Do you think I am wasting my time fighting with something which does not exist? No, I am fighting with your conditionings; they exist. God does not exist, but an idea of God exists in you, and I am fighting with that idea, telling you to drop it, be clean, and take the whole responsibility.
This is my experience: the day I took my whole responsibility on myself, I found the doors of freedom opening to me. They go together.
Everybody wants freedom. Nobody wants responsibility.
You will never have freedom, you will remain a slave. Remember, remaining a slave is also your responsibility. You have chosen it, it has not been forced upon you. [....]
Take responsibility! And then even in utter poverty, suffering, imprisoned in a jail, you will remain completely a master of yourself. You will have a freedom which comes with responsibility.
All these religions have been making you dependent on God, on fate, on destiny. Those are just different names of something non-existential. What is true is your slavery or your freedom. Choose. If you choose freedom, then you have to destroy all the strategies of religions which make you a slave. That's what I am doing here: cutting all your chains, making you free from everything, so that you can be yourself.
And the moment you are yourself, you start growing, you become greener. Flowers start opening up, and there is great fragrance around you.
-Osho, "From the False to the Truth, #30"
To be responsible means to be alert, conscious
The first step towards buddhahood, towards the realization of your infinite potential, is to recognize that up to now you have been wasting your life, that up to now you have remained utterly unconscious.
Start becoming conscious; that is the only way to arrive. It is arduous, it is hard. To remain accidental is easy; it needs no intelligence, hence it is easy. Any idiot can do it – all the idiots are already doing it. It is easy to be accidental because you never feel responsible for anything that happens. You can always throw the responsibility onto something else: fate, God, society, economic structure, the state, the church, the mother, the father, the parents… You can go on throwing the responsibility onto somebody else; hence it is easy.
To be conscious means to take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders. To be responsible is the beginning of buddhahood.
When I use the word ‘responsible’ I am not using it in the ordinary connotation of being dutiful. I am using it in its real, essential meaning: the capacity to respond – that’s my meaning. And the capacity to respond is possible only if you are conscious. If you are fast asleep, how can you respond? If you are asleep, the birds will go on singing but you will not hear, and the flowers will go on blooming and you will never be able to sense the beauty, the fragrance, the joy, that they are showering on existence.
To be responsible means to be alert, conscious. To be responsible means to be mindful. Act with as much awareness as you can find possible. Even small things – walking on the street, eating your food, taking your bath – should not be done mechanically. Do them with full awareness.
Slowly slowly, small acts become luminous, and by and by those luminous acts go on gathering inside you, and finally the explosion. The seed has exploded, the potential has become actual. You are no longer a seed but a lotus flower, a golden lotus flower, a one-thousand-petaled lotus flower. And that is the moment of great benediction; Buddha calls it nirvana. One has arrived. Now there is no more to achieve, nowhere to go. You can rest, you can relax – the journey is over. Tremendous joy arises in that moment, great ecstasy is born.
But one has to begin from the beginning.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3 Ch 7"
You are responsible- Be grateful to everyone -
DRIVE ALL BLAME INTO ONE.
This is the meaning of the third sutra: DRIVE ALL BLAME INTO ONE. A man once came and spat on Buddha, on his face. Of course his disciples were enraged. His closest disciple, Ananda, said to him, "This is too much!" He was red-hot with anger. He said to Buddha, "Just give me permission so that I can show this man what he has done."
Responsibility is always the very first step of freedom.
Question 1: Osho, As i see it, the situation is as follows: you are, and we are not, or to be more precise, you aren't, and we still are. It seems that the master-disciple relationship is really a kindness on your part to describe, in flattering terms, what is essentially our failure to hear what you have said - more often, more clearly, and more lovingly than any disciples in history could have possibly been blessed with. If, in some way, there is a problem with the process, that problem can only be ours - irrefutably, undeniably and totally ours. Osho, isn't taking this responsibility unto ourselves, rather than projecting our expectations on you, the very first step?
Responsibility is always the very first step of freedom. Throwing the responsibility on somebody else's shoulders is throwing away the opportunity for freedom. You cannot divide the two, they are inseparably one.
It is true that the whole responsibility is of the disciple - the master is only a catalytic agent, an excuse. But to accept responsibility needs guts - everybody wants freedom, nobody wants responsibility. And the trouble is that they always go together. If you do not want responsibility, you will be enslaved in some way or other.
The slavery can be spiritual - which is the worst kind of slavery possible. The political slavery, the economic slavery, are superficial; you can revolt against them very easily. But the spiritual slavery is so deep that even the idea of revolting against it does not arise, for the simple reason that this slavery is there because you have asked for it. Other slaveries are imposed on you; you can throw them away, they are against you. This slavery, the spiritual slavery, appears to be not against you but a tremendous consolation - a consolation that your responsibility has been taken over by somebody who knows; now you need not worry. But along with the responsibility, you have lost freedom also.
And every expectation is a bondage; it leads to frustration sooner or later. It is destined to turn into frustration - no expectation can be fulfilled because nobody is obliged to fulfill your expectations; he has his own expectations.
The master-disciple relationship is not a relationship of expectations. Expectation is the poison that destroys all other relationships. Your love turns into hate the moment there is expectation. Friendship becomes enmity.
Just the magic of expectation turns everything beautiful into ugliness.
But your whole life is full of expectations. Your mind knows nothing but to expect. Hence, when you come to a master your mind brings its expectations, its habits, its old routine. And there are people who pretend to be masters. This has to be the criterion: If anybody is ready to fulfill your expectations, he is not a master, he is simply exploiting you.
No master can say, "I am going to fulfill your expectations." He can only say, "I am going to destroy all your expectations" - because unless your expectations are destroyed, your old, rotten mind cannot be destroyed. Your old habits which are hindering the growth of your being cannot be removed.
The authentic master does not take any responsibility. It is a very strange thing; you would have thought otherwise, that the compassionate master must accept your expectations and try to fulfill them.
In reality, only a charlatan - at the most a teacher - can enjoy the idea of being a savior, a prophet, a messenger. Only someone who is taking advantage of your weakness can say to you, "Just believe in me and you are saved" - be a Christian and you are saved, be a Hindu and you are saved; surrender all your responsibility to Krishna or to Christ, and you will be saved. It looks very cheap, very simple; you are not losing anything and gaining everything.
That's why a man like Jesus Christ could say to you, "I am the shepherd and you are my sheep."
And not a single man stood and opposed him - "What are you saying? You are insulting our humanity. You are the shepherd, and we are just the sheep!" But for two thousand years not a single Christian has raised his hand to say that "I am not ready to become a sheep" - for the simple reason that he is ready to be humiliated, because Jesus is saying, "If you are my sheep I will save you. You have nothing else to do but to be a sheep."
Nobody thinks about the fact that by reducing human beings to sheep you are not saving them, you are destroying them. You are destroying their integrity, you are destroying their self-respect and you are making them slaves.
And the bargain is a promised paradise after death.
Nobody comes back to say if these saviors are helping anybody or if they have just cheated, lied, exploited and destroyed human dignity. And you rejoiced, because all responsibility was taken by them. The bargain was not bad; you just have to be a sheep, a believer. You just have to be a follower. You are not to be yourself, you have to be just a shadow. You have not to walk a path on your own, alone; you have to follow the footprints. [....]
All your religious leaders have been giving you hope.
Karl Marx used to say that religions are the opium of the people, but he never went into a deep analysis of the fact. What is the opium? - hope is the opium. They give you hope. They are ready to give you everything for nothing. Just have faith; give all the responsibility to them. And you are unaware of the fact that the moment you give your responsibility to them, you have also given your freedom.
And they are interested in your freedom. They don't talk to you about freedom. They don't say, "Give your freedom," because nobody is going to give their freedom to them. It is a very cunning business; they ask, "Give your responsibility" - and responsibility seems to be a burden, so it is better if somebody else is ready to take it. But you are unaware of the fact that along with the responsibility your freedom disappears. You become a slave.
The whole of humanity is enslaved by different kinds of people, but the slavery is the same. An authentic master will not take any responsibility on himself.
That's why an authentic master will not have a great following - because who is going to follow a man who is not ready to take your responsibility, who does not give you any opium, any hope? On the contrary, he takes all your hopes, and all your drugs, and all your opium, and tries to make you as clean and pure and innocent and empty as possible.
The true master gives freedom. He insists that you should be free, totally free. You are afraid of freedom.
Just see the mechanism of mind. You don't want freedom. If you look deep inside it, you will see your fears. You are afraid of freedom because that means you have to stand alone, on your own feet. And people are very much afraid to be alone. They think that if there are two persons.... There are proverbs in India that two persons are better than one. Why? One is alone; aloneness creates all kinds of fears. You start facing existence directly.
You must have seen people who are walking alone on a street: they start talking to themselves, just to give an illusion that somebody is with them. [....]
Why are people afraid of being alone? And if you are with someone, there are only two alonenesses; it does not make any sense that you should be less afraid. You should be more afraid - aloneness has been doubled. Before, you used to sleep in your room alone. Now your wife is also sleeping there - two alonenesses, more dangerous! And then children start coming, and each is bringing another package of aloneness. But people feel very good that now they are no longer alone.
Just being in a crowd does not mean that your aloneness has disappeared. It is there.
The same is the situation when you give the responsibility to somebody: you think the responsibility has disappeared, it is in somebody else's hands. It is not possible. You have to be responsible.
Without responsibility you are not. Only dead people don't have any responsibility. Alive... the more alive you are the more responsible you are. The more alive you are the more freedom you need - to act, to create, to be.
Why are you afraid? You are afraid because it seems that you are too small, and things that have been projected as goals for centuries are too big.
Now, a small human being... and the goal is paradise. He does not know the way. He does not know anything about paradise, whether it exists or not. He has been made afraid of hell, he has to avoid hell. He does not know what is being asked. How can he avoid it? - because he does not know what hell is, where it is. If you know it, you can avoid it.
Naturally you have been burdened with such great goals, fictitious, that you have to give your responsibility to someone who is a pretender. [....]
This goes on happening in the twentieth century, with educated people. There have been saviors who are pretending that they are the only begotten son of God. There are prophets who have been pretending that they have brought the last message to the world; after them, there will not be any more messages coming - this is the last edition of God's message. And humanity seems to be in such a slavery - it goes on tolerating all these people, without questioning the basic, ordinary things.
It is reported that in Nanak's life he was in Hardwar, and it was the time when people worship their dead forefathers and give food to the crows - thousands of crows; forefathers come in the form of crows to take the food. I said, "This is a good idea, but no crow can create this idea."
But the worship and the food that the crow gets is secondary. There is a mediator, a priest, who is praying to God to send the ancestors. It is because of his prayers that crows are coming - and not ordinary crows; they look ordinary, but to the believers they are their forefathers. [....]
If you look around, there are pretenders who are ready to take all your responsibilities - of this life, of past lives, of future lives. All that you have to do is to believe in them, to follow them - blindly.
Blindness has been up to now the very foundation of religion. And that's why all the religions are against me - because I say blindness cannot be the foundation.
Eyes are needed. Better eyes, more insight is needed. And for that you have to take the whole responsibility for your life.
The master can help - and that help also, remember, is not like ordinary help. The help is something like when the sun rises in the morning and the flowers open. The sun rays don't come to each flower and knock on its doors - "Please get up, it is time." No alarm goes around that all the birds have to be awake and start singing. Nobody orders them... just a synchronicity.
As the sun rises, something starts happening in the birds - some joy, some life, some thrill; a song wants to burst. A peacock wants to dance, opening its tail with all the colors of the rainbow. The flowers suddenly wake up - night is over, it is time to open their petals and release their fragrance to the fresh morning winds. The sun is not doing anything directly. Its presence is enough, and something starts happening in its presence.
The master's help is exactly like that. He has not to do something directly, because that will be interference. That will be entering into your territorial imperative; that will be a crime against you.
Even though his intention is good, he cannot enter into your being; he can simply be present. And if you are open, if you are available - and that is your responsibility; to be open, to be available, to be receptive - then without any effort on the part of the master, things start happening within the disciple.
The master does nothing. His presence is a catalytic agent, a very indirect persuasion; something more like a whisper - not like a gong that wakes you up, but a whisper. Just like the winds passing through the pine trees, a very silent song, a message pregnant with immense significance but without words.
He makes it available to you. Now it is your responsibility - and your freedom - to take it or not to take it.
So, Amrito, you are right. All the responsibility is of the disciple, and no expectations should be projected on the master; otherwise there is going to be frustration - those expectations cannot be fulfilled. And when they are not fulfilled then you are angry at the master; then you turn against the master, then you betray the master. And he has not done anything. It was your expectation which has turned into frustration. Everything has been happening within you; the master becomes unnecessarily a target.
And when a disciple expects something....
For example, today I received a letter; one sannyasin wants recognition - I should pronounce his name and answer his question. Now, his question is not worth answering; it will be sheer wastage for so many people, and for the simple reason that the question is not important. He is not interested in the question, the question is secondary. What he wants is that his name be proclaimed by me so he gets recognition. Now, even if the question was right, significant, I would not answer it - because I cannot fulfill his ego. This recognition is nothing but the desire of what is wrong in you.
He writes that he is feeling very angry - because it is not the first time, this is the third question. In the other three questions he had not mentioned it that he wanted his name to be proclaimed, but the questions were rubbish. Now he says that he is feeling very angry and very frustrated. Strange...
it is your expectation; why should you feel angry at me? I have not done anything. I have not even named your name, and I will never do it.
And when a disciple feels frustrated, he is in a dilemma - because people start asking him, "Why have you left your master?" His ego has been the cause, his expectations have been the cause. He remained stubborn, closed, unreceiving. He behaved like a stone, not like a flower. But he cannot admit it to people - his ego will not allow it - that he was non-receptive. Then the only way is to find fault with the master. If he cannot find real faults, he has to invent. That's the only way he can save his ego - he has to invent fictions, that the master was wrong.
One man lived with me for almost ten years, and now he has written a book against me - and all lies, everything fictitious. But he has to do it just to save his ego; otherwise, people ask, "For ten years you lived with him - then why did you leave?" There can be only two reasons: either the disciple is wrong, or the master is wrong - and the disciple cannot be wrong.
But just think, a person who lives ten years with me... Ten years is a long time, one-seventh of your life - and the best part, your youth. It took ten years for this idiot to find out that he was with a wrong master. Now how many years will it take for him to find a right master? His youth is gone - with a wrong master - and he cannot live without a master either, because he is not ready to accept his responsibilities. He will again move in the same vicious circle.
A few people go on for their whole lives doing the same circular route, moving from one teacher to another teacher, from one philosophy to another philosophy, never seeing a single, simple point:
that if you come with expectations you cannot find the right master. To find the right master you have to be in a right attitude; that means you have to be without expectations.
Amrito, you say, "Osho, you are and we are not; or, in other words, you are not and we are." Both are true in different senses.
As far as egos are concerned, you are, I am not. As far as the universal self is concerned, I am, you are not.
And the whole problem is that the meeting is possible in two ways. If the master is a pretender, then he is just as you are. And there is a kind of communication between you, because he is an ego, you are also an ego. He fulfills your ego, you fulfill his ego; it is a mutual arrangement.
Or, the second possibility is that the master is not as an ego; you should also become a no-ego.
Then a communion happens. Then only has the master-discipleship come into existence. It is a rare flower, very rare... comes into being once in a while.
The other kind of communication is a marketplace thing, everywhere available. There are teachers in the thousands, every religion produces them. And there are students who go on thinking that they are disciples - they learn only knowledge. The disciple has to grow into being; it has nothing to do with knowledge.
Have you ever felt that there are people with whom you feel as if your energy is sucked? You don't want to meet them, they are parasites. And there are people whom you love to meet, because when you meet them you feel more alive, more fulfilled; your energy level is higher than it was before.
So there are people who have being - and if you come across a person who has being you will feel nourished. And there are people who don't have being - they are just black holes; to be with them you will feel sucked. The teacher and the student have a certain communication, but it is superficial because it is only of words. The master and the disciple have a communion. It is not of words, but of a transfer of being, an exchange of life energy.
-Osho, "The Osho Upanishad, #19, Q1"
The whole philosophy of karma is that you are responsible.
It is within you. Sometimes, suddenly sadness comes for no apparent reason at all, and sometimes one feels happy, sometimes one feels euphoric, ecstatic. A man deprived of all social relationships, isolated in total comfort, supplied with every need, moves through all the moods that you move through in relationship. That means that something comes from within and you hang it on somebody else. That is just a rationalization. You feel good, you feel bad, and these feelings are bubbling from your own unconsciousness, from your own past. Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy. You become happy on your own, you become angry on your own, and you become sad on your own. Unless you realize this, you will always remain a slave. -Osho, "Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 4, #7"
Feel responsible, accept responsibility for yourself,because only then will you become free.
Question 3 Is this difference -- the difference in their stages -- due to their own choice, or is it their destiny?
To us it seems important to ask about creation. But in existence, nothing is created; it is a continuous and endless beginning. The very concept of creation is childish and irrelevant as far as existence is concerned. Existence has always been: it has never been created and it can never be destroyed. "Creation" means out of nothing -- and out of nothing, nothing can come. The world, the creation, is in constant change, but nothing can be created or destroyed.
Change is the reality. By change I mean that only the form changes, never the substance. The basic remains always the same; only the mode of expression, the form, changes. And this change is continuous; it is eternal. So neither things nor souls are created. When not even things are created, the concept of the creation of souls becomes absurd. A created soul cannot be a soul; if a soul could be created then it would become just a thing.
But to the so-called religious mind creation seems significant, because we have conceived of God as the creator, and without creation where will the creator be? God is not the creator, God is existence itself. God is not something separate but the very substance of reality; he is not the creator of reality but the reality itself.
This duality -- God and the world, the creator and the created -- is due to our dualistic thinking. Our mind goes on creating dualities, but the reality is one. God is not the creator but the creation, the energy, the force, the basic substance of all.
Look at it in another way. No one asks, "Who created God?" because the question seems absurd. If you ask, "Who created God?" the question leads to an infinite regression; the same question can be asked again and again about the answer. If A created B then we can ask who created A. We can go on asking ad infinitum and no answer will be found. Every answer will only create another question, and the same question at that.
We cannot think of God as being created because if he is created then he is not God; he becomes a thing. The same is true of the soul: the soul is not a created phenomenon. And not only the soul -- even matter is not a created phenomenon.
Even science realizes now that nothing can be created and nothing can be destroyed. Even if matter is converted into energy and energy converted into matter, it is not destruction and it is not creation. The quantity remains the same. If matter is converted into energy we can say that it is destroyed, because the matter disappears. But it is not destroyed, because matter itself is a form of energy -- it is in a different form now, but the same energy remains. The total quantity of existence is always the same. Whether you change A to B or B to C makes no difference to the total; not a single particle can be added to the total and not a single particle can be subtracted. And this total quantity is God.
The first thing to be understood is that nothing has been created. Existence is. Existence exists with no beginning and no end, but with many changes.
Our mind has created a second duality: that of matter and mind, body and soul. This, again, is a mind-created difference; in reality, only one exists. The body is a form of it and the soul is also a form of it.
That is why, just as matter can be converted into energy and energy can be converted into matter, the body is constantly being converted into consciousness and consciousness is constantly being converted into the body. You cannot come to a point where you can say the body ends and consciousness begins; there is no demarcation. Body and soul are not two things but only two poles of one existence: at one pole you feel the body and at the other there is consciousness.
You have an existence: one pole of it is consciousness; the other, the body. If you become more and more conscious, you become a soul; if you become less and less conscious, you become only a body. If Buddha is sitting beside you, both of you have bodies, but only to outward appearances. Buddha has no body, he is just a soul. By soul I mean that every particle of his existence has become aware. On the other hand, when you are in deep sleep, you are just a body and not a soul.
You have no soul -- just a concept of the soul, just a thought, a theory, a philosophy of the soul [....]
I will not say that souls were created. Nothing has been created; everything has always been here. And when I say that souls are not created, then of course, there is no question of whether they were created equal or unequal. The question will take on an altogether different shape.
As I see it, all souls are potentially equal. They have always been potentially equal, but in actuality they are not equal. And they are responsible for it, no one else. No one else is there to be responsible for it. God is a very useful concept -- you can put all your responsibilities on him. It is a good device, a very cunning device: if there is a God, and if you are not equal, then he is responsible for it. He created you unequal so what can you do? There is no such God! The total existence is God. You participate in the total, so you participate in the responsibility.
You are potentially equal. That means you become equal when you flower totally. A Buddha flowering, a Mahavira, a Jesus, a Mohammed -- they become equal. There is no difference between them. But when the flowering was just a potential, they were unequal. On the path we are all unequal.
No one else is responsible because there is no one else. Only you exist. So it is your decision what to be or what not to be. Whatever you are is your decision. If you are not changing, it is your decision. If you want to change you can change this very moment. Time is not needed, only your decision to change.
If your decision is weak, more time is needed. But if your decision is total, then the change can happen this very moment. No time is needed -- the change can occur this very moment. Time is needed only because your will is not total, your decision is not total. The problem is created because basically you are not ready to change, and yet your mind has become obsessed with the concept of change.
We have seen Buddha, so the greed is with us. How to be a buddha? This is greed, this is lust, this is desire: how to be a buddha -- calm and collected, a light unto oneself, a deep silence with no disturbance, a flower not of this world. The greed has commenced, but the mind is not ready. We want to be like Buddha without being buddha-like, because the mind wants other things also. What Buddha renounces we are not ready to renounce, but what Buddha has achieved we are greedy to achieve. This is the problem. The major part of your mind is not ready for the change, not ready to be a soul, but the desire has come in.
No one else is responsible for this. Go inside and analyze why you are not a buddha. The potential is there, the energy is there. Why are you not a buddha?
Don't go on thinking, who created us unequal? Who created someone a buddha and someone not a buddha?
No one has created this; our minds are responsible. If I cling to the theory that God created us -- him like a buddha and me not like a buddha -- then what can I do? It is a destiny that has been forced on me. Then I can remain what I am, I can drift. This drifting will not do! The theory is just a saving device, a trick, so that you can continue as you are without bothering to change.
Religiousness is born in you only when you begin to feel total responsibility for yourself. Philosophy is one thing: philosophy can continue its meaningless, absurd theorizing. Religion is different: religion is a decision, it is to feel totally responsible for yourself. Whatever I am -- a violent, angry, greedy, lust-filled mind, a bundle of desires -- I am responsible.
The moment I feel that my ugliness is my responsibility, that my sin-centered mind is my responsibility, then the jump becomes possible. Because I am responsible for my ugliness, no one else can be responsible for my beauty. If I am responsible for all the darkness that is within me, then all the light that comes to a buddha can also come to me. By taking responsibility for the one, the other potential becomes open.
Responsibility means freedom, so don't go on complaining to God. There is no one to receive your complaints; you are only deceiving yourself. If I am not responsible for myself then I am not free. But if I am free, then I have to carry the whole responsibility.
If I am living in hell, it is my decision. I have used my energy and freedom in order to come to this hell; I have not been thrown there. Sartre speaks about man's being thrown into the world. No one has thrown you; it has been your choice to come.
Sartre feels that only in one dimension does man seem to be free, and that is suicide. You are not responsible for your birth, but you can be responsible for your death: you can commit suicide. This is illogical! If one pole is free, the opposite pole cannot be otherwise. If I can commit suicide -- if I can end my life by my own decision -- then, whether I remember it or not, my entry into life has also been my decision. The other pole must be consistent. If I am responsible for my suffering then no one else can be responsible for my bliss. If I can be responsible for my death then I am also responsible for my birth.
That is what religion says: It is your freedom to be born, to live, or to die. When someone is dying, to us he appears to be dying. But if you penetrate a dying man's mind you will see that he is desiring life and more life; he is constantly thinking of another life, of continuity. First he will try to cling to this life; then, if the clinging becomes impossible, he will desire a different body, a different form, a different shape, so that he can live again. But if a man is dying with no desires left unfulfilled, with no desire to continue living, then there will be no more births for him. If some desire is left unfulfilled, the mind will endeavor to fulfill it: that will become the choice for a new birth.
We know that when someone is born he has to die, but we do not know the other side of it -- that when someone dies he has to be born again. If birth leads to death, then death will lead to birth again unless you die totally. That total death is samadhi. That total death is the highest peak of being a soul -- the soul has been purified completely. There is no more desire for the future, because future means birth; no more desire for tomorrow, because tomorrow means birth; no more desire for the next moment, because the next moment means birth. In this moment, if you can die totally -- with no future, with no tomorrow, with no desire, with nothing remaining unfulfilled -- then there is no more birth.
It is your choice to be born again even though it is a very unconscious choice. If you become more conscious you will not choose, or you will choose differently.
Buddha was dying. Someone asked him, "Where will you be after death?"
Buddha said, "Nowhere. Enough! I have been in so many bodies for so many lives -- it is enough. This time I am going to be nowhere. I am dying totally."
To the questioner this seemed tragic -- Buddha, dying totally. He would not be born again. Now there was no hope left. The questioner began to weep.
Buddha said, "Don't weep. Dance! This is the moment of my fulfillment: I am dying totally. This is the last peak, the highest possibility. With no desire, with no hope, with no future, I am simply dissolving into the cosmos. I will be nowhere because I will be everywhere.
You will not be able to find me confined to any point, but I will be like the salt of the earth: you will be able to taste me everywhere. But it will only be a taste. I will have no body, no visible form; I will be cosmic energy."
This is what Buddha means by nirvana. Nirvana is a beautiful word. It is not moksha, not liberation; nirvana is a different word, with a different quality. It means cessation, like the cessation of a candle.
"Just as a candle ceases," Buddha says, "I will cease." When a candle ceases can you tell where the light has gone? You will not be able to find the flame, you will not be able to locate it, because now there is no new desire. But it will still be part of the cosmos, because nothing can disappear from the cosmos.
Everything is a choice. For us, this becomes difficult to conceive of, because then our whole suffering is our own choice: that is the problem. If someone else is responsible I can be at ease; then I am not suffering because of myself. If there is a destiny, if there is a God, then someone else is responsible and I am forced to be as I am. This is an escape. No one is there! You are alone.
Then how can we explain suffering? We think that we never choose suffering, but that is nonsense -- we choose everything. No one is ready to admit that he chooses suffering because when we choose, we only choose facades. But in the end the reality of what we have chosen is encountered.
Everyone chooses pleasure and, ultimately, everyone suffers, because pleasure is just a facade, a false screen. The closer you come to pleasure, the more the pleasure begins to evaporate. This happens every time, but we are still not aware that pleasure is just the false face of pain, of suffering, of anguish.
No one chooses suffering directly; everyone chooses it indirectly. But the choice is unconscious, unaware. You choose pleasure, and you have chosen suffering: every pleasure ends in pain, every pleasure creates a tense state of mind. Suffering is an inevitable part of pleasure, the tail end. You cannot escape it. The hankering for pleasure, the seeking of pleasure, is an illusion; what you achieve finally is never pleasure. Look at it from the outside. Someone chooses pleasure.
It is a positive effort: ambition, achievement.... Then suffering comes -- you choose heaven and you enter hell. Heaven is the gate of hell. Enter the gate, and you have entered hell. Pleasure is a positively sought thing; happiness is negative. It is not the presence of anything, it is the absence of something -- the absence of suffering. Don't choose pleasure, and suffering will be discarded automatically. And when there is neither pleasure nor suffering, there is happiness and bliss.
From the outside it looks negative -- it is an absence -- but from the inside it is a positive thing. Happiness is your nature. It is also a choice -- everything is your choice. If you don't choose pleasure then you have chosen happiness.
Any moment you can change. And when I say "any moment" I mean much by it. I mean that whatever you have chosen in the past is not a barrier. For millennia you may have continuously chosen pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, and perhaps got only suffering, suffering, suffering.
But that is not a barrier. Whatever you have chosen in the past you have suffered for -- nothing remains suspended in the balance. This very moment you can choose the opposite, and whatever karmas, whatever actions you have done in the past, will not be a barrier.
The mind can play tricks. If there is no destiny, if there is no God, then karma becomes your scapegoat. You say, "What can I do? -- I have been a sinner for lives and lives, and now my karma is standing in the way. How can I choose freely? I am bound by my karma."
You are not in any bondage. And if you are, if you still feel that there is an imprisonment around you, it is your own choice. There is no prison and no jailor.
You can come out this very moment. It is your choice to live in a prison, it is your choice to be there or not be there; no one is preventing you from leaving it.
If you want to be a prisoner you can create a philosophy around yourself in which you can be a prisoner. If you want to be a free man, if you want to be freedom itself, then you can choose a different type of thinking and you can be free. Both are your choices.
Whatever level you are on you are responsible because you are free; there is no bondage. There are many bondages, but there are no bondages outside you. They are all your creations; they are all because of you.
If you find difficulty in leaving the prison it is not the prison which is preventing you, it is your own habit, your own wrong choice. You have chosen it so many times that it has become a routine, a habit: it is easier to be in the prison than to be out of it.
You have become so well-acquainted with the prison, you have decorated it so much that it looks not like a prison but like a home. Inside there is every security, every defense, and outside you will be vulnerable and open -- with no defense, with no security. You will be in an unknown world, fear will grip you. It is new; it is not the prison of your own mind.
Whenever someone chooses, becomes conscious and remembers his freedom, he is free. It is this remembrance that makes him free. It is not an effort, it is coming to understand one's freedom and one's responsibility. Freedom and responsibility are two aspects of one coin, so don't throw your responsibility on anyone else or you will be throwing away your freedom also.
Feel responsible, accept responsibility for yourself, because only then will you become free. If you can say that this hell you are in is your choice, that no one else is responsible for it, then you have become free; you can go out of it, you can leave it. But if someone else has put you in this hell then only he can take you out. You are not involved in it at all.
The attitude that someone else has been the source of whatever you are will make you more of a body and less of a soul. I am saying that if you feel responsible for yourself, then a sudden freedom begins to appear in you. You are responsible for yourself; you become more of a soul.
A person like Buddha feels responsible for the whole world. Buddha goes to the other extreme: He says, "Whenever I choose misery I create vibrations of misery." A miserable person creates a certain type of vibration. A violent person creates violence, an angry person creates anger, a loving person creates love.
Ordinarily, we feel that God is responsible for us, the whole is responsible for us. Buddha goes to the other extreme and says, "I am responsible for the whole. If there is ugliness in the world I am responsible for it because I have created it. If there is hatred in the world I am responsible for it because I have created it. I have chosen hatred so many times when I could have chosen love. I have chosen hatred, I have chosen anger, I have chosen lust, and when I choose, I create a milieu in which others become vulnerable to choosing the same things."
If you feel that you are responsible for yourself then you become a soul. If you feel that you are responsible for the whole then you become a god. Then there are no barriers. You have become the whole -- the "other" has gone.
-Osho, "The Great Challenge, #10, Q3"
The decision has to be yours
There must be some deep fear in making a decision on your own. The fear is that if you decide on your own, who knows? -- it may be wrong. It is better to let others decide; they know more, they have more experience. Let tradition decide, let society decide, let the politicians decide, let the priests decide. One thing is certain: others have to decide so you are free of the responsibility of making a decision. Hence people go on following others, and everybody goes on missing his own individuality.
There are two ways to avoid decision. One is: let others decide. Another is: never decide, simply drift. Both are the same because the basic thing is not to take the responsibility of deciding. New generations have chosen the other alternative: drifting. The older generations have chosen the first alternative: to let others decide. You may not allow your father to decide, but that doesn't mean that you are going to decide yourself -- you may simply drift. You may do things, whatever happens... you may become a driftwood.
In both ways the search becomes impossible. The search means decisiveness. The search means taking risks. So remember this word 'decidophobia'. Don't be afraid, drop this fear. Who else can decide for you? Nobody can decide anything for you. Yes, others can help, others can show the path, but the decision has to be yours -- because through your decision your soul is going to be born.
The more decisive you become, the more integrated you become. The more you take the responsibility of commitment... of course, it is very dangerous, but life is dangerous. I know there are many possibilities of going astray, but that risk has to be taken. There are possibilities you may err, but one learns by erring. Life is trial and error. [....]
But life is not a matter of anybody's word. It is not a theorem, it is not a theory. You cannot accept it just because somebody else is authoritatively saying it is so. Authority is a trick. Behind it you hide your fear.
You have to decide. Decisions can be fatal but there is no other way. You may go astray, but nothing is wrong in it. Going astray, you will learn something, you will become richer. You can come back and you will be happy that you went astray, because there are many things which can be learnt only by going astray. There are millions of things which can be learnt only if you are courageous enough to make mistakes. Remember only one thing: don't make the same mistake again and again.
If religion is decided by others, then there is no need to search. Your father says: God is. Your mother believes in heaven and hell, so you believe. The authority, the priest, the politician, says something and you believe it. You are avoiding; through belief you are avoiding trust. Belief is the enemy of trust. Trust life! Don't believe beliefs -- avoid them! Avoid beliefs -- Hinduism, Islam, Christianity. Seek on your own. You may come to find the same truth. You will come, because the truth is one. Once you have found it you can say: Yes, The Bible is true -- but not before. Once you have found it you can say: Yes, the Vedas are true -- but not before. Unless you have experienced it, unless you become a witness to it personally, all vedas and all bibles are useless. They will burden you, they will not make you more free.
- Osho, “The Search, #1”
It is your decision.- But then whatsoever happens is your responsibility -
It is your decision
Be! That is your business!...[....] But there is no need to feel guilt and there is no need to feel that you are doing something wrong. It is perfectly right -- it is your decision. But then whatsoever happens is your responsibility; you have to bear it. I'm not concerned.
-Osho, "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There, #1"
It is your decision
So organizations have not been imposed by people. It is impossible for a single pope to impose his will on six hundred million people. Something is in those six hundred million people which needs a pope, so they can feel that they are no longer responsible; the whole responsibility is on the representative of God -- and, finally, on God. They created God just to get rid of responsibility, unaware of the fact that the moment you lose responsibility, you lose yourself; you become a cog in the wheel.
My insistence that there is no God is basically to give back responsibility to you. Without God there is no Jesus Christ as a savior, there is no pope to tell you what is right and what is wrong. There is nobody who decides on your behalf.
In the beginning it may feel like a tremendous burden, but to get out of retardedness and to become mature, one has to take that burden. It is not against you; under the pressure of responsibility your whole individuality is saved. But without denying God, organizations cannot be denied, because God is the beginning of all hierarchies. And God is not part of nature because nature knows no hierarchy.
So from every angle God does not exist. But man wants him to exist. It helps him to get rid of the whole burden and just be a retarded child. And for centuries he has lived in that state: there was God, and there were God's messiahs and their representatives -- and man was simply to listen, to follow. If he cannot follow, then he just has to go and confess the sin, and he is forgiven. So it was a very much easier way.
But growth is a little harder. To accept that you are alone, that nobody is above you who can decide for you, that you have to take decisions every moment of your life, that every inch you move is your decision.... If you commit a mistake, you have to correct it; nobody can forgive you, because there is nobody at all. If you do something good, nobody is going to reward you.
So basically and deeply the acceptance that "my act is my reward, and my act is my punishment, and I am totally responsible for whatever I am doing" -- this is maturity.
You are not in need of a father figure. You are not in need of being part of a crowd. You can be yourself.
-Osho, "Light on the Path, #37, Q1"
It is your decision
No one else is responsible because there is no one else. Only you exist. So it is your decision what to be or what not to be. Whatever you are is your decision. If you are not changing, it is your decision. If you want to change you can change this very moment. Time is not needed, only your decision to change.
If your decision is weak, more time is needed. But if your decision is total, then the change can happen this very moment. No time is needed -- the change can occur this very moment. Time is needed only because your will is not total, your decision is not total. The problem is created because basically you are not ready to change, and yet your mind has become obsessed with the concept of change.
-Osho, "The Great Challenge, #10, Q3"
It is your decision
This is the greatest thing in life: to know oneself. You cannot depend on somebody else. Nobody can enter in the very center of your being, except you. This is the dignity of consciousness, that there is no way to trespass it. And that's what Jesus is trying to say, that he is going to trespass everybody's consciousness. He is going to save the whole humanity.
I am not your savior. I am at the most your friend. It is just your kindness to call me your master. As far as I am concerned, I am not anybody's master. That word is connected with the slave, with the servant, with dependence. I am just a fellow traveler. Just a little bit of difference, of course -- that you go on walking with closed eyes and I go on walking with open eyes. Any moment you can open your eyes, nobody is preventing you. It is your decision to keep them shut. It is going to be your decision to open them.
Just two days ago, one beautiful person, a journalist, was asking me, "People in the outside world think that you are not truthful, that you are not honest, that you are deceptive, that you cheat." He was thinking I would be offended.
I said, "They are saying exactly the right things. I cheat people into enlightenment."
I am not honest, because if I am honest you are going to sleep forever. I am deceiving you. I am talking about glories, and blissfulness, and blessedness. Sooner or later you are bound at least to open one eye and see, just out of the corner, whether these things are there or not. My work is done!
You may not find the things that I have been talking to you about, but you will find far more glorious, far more blissful experiences. And I am not truthful because truth cannot be expressed in words. What can I do about it? At the most, I can use lies which will make your eyes open. One thing I am certain of: once your eyes are open, you will know why I was lying. You will be grateful that I lied to you, that I was not truthful, because you will know that truth cannot be expressed in words....
The journalist looked at me: he could not believe that I would accept all these condemnations. But they are not condemnations -- they are simply descriptions of a real master.
-Osho, "From Death to Deathlessness, #17, Q1"
It is your decision
Always remember that my suggestions are not commandments. The final decision has to be arrived at by you. If you still feel that you are not ready to be committed to any woman, just say to her that you are not ready. Then too don't think that you are not following me or my advice. This is simply advice. It was never meant to be followed. The decision has to be taken by you.
So my sannyasins remain absolutely free with me. Your relationship with me is of two free persons. I am not occupying your space. Whatsoever I say has to be pondered over by you, and the final decision has to be yours. Even if you decide to follow me, remember it is your decision. You can never blame me. I am not responsible.
You cannot ever blame me. That's the beauty of giving freedom to people -- they cannot blame you! So you think about it, mm? Good.
-Osho, "A Rose is a Rose is a Rose, #7"
It is your decision
In my vision, short-term sannyas is the right way. You can leave it any time you like, because it is you who take it. It is your decision, no one else can decide for you. Sannyas is entirely a personal, individual choice, others don't matter in any way. I am free to take sannyas today and leave it tomorrow, provided I don't expect any reward for it from others in the form of their praise and acclamation.
We have made sannyas a very serious affair, and that is why only serious people -- who are really sick people -- take to it. It is now necessary to turn sannyas into a non-serious thing, a play. It should be entirely for your joy that you enter sannyas for a while and then leave it or remain in it forever. Others should have no say in the matter. If the vision of short-term sannyas becomes prevalent, if people are allowed to enter sannyas even for a few months from time to time, millions of people can enjoy this blessing. It will really be a great thing.
-Osho, "Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy, #22"
It is your decision
You cannot give yourself. You can give only your mind because you can take away your mind. You are in That, but your mind is not. It can be! And you are free: the choice is yours. So you will be responsible -- no one else. The responsibility is yours, so to be religious or not is your decision. Don't go into unnecessary things -- whether God is or not. It is your decision! It is meaningless to go on discussing whether God is or is not: it is your choice. You can say He is not, but by saying that you are denying a greater Reality and the opening towards it. You can say he is, and, by saying that, you are open to a greater Reality.
This cannot be proven -- whether He is or not. This cannot be proven as a scientific fact, because if it is proven then there will be no freedom. Then offering will be impossible. If it becomes a fact, as secular as any, if it becomes a fact like the moon or the sun or the earth, if it becomes a common, objective fact, then you will not be free to choose. So God can never become a scientific fact, and it cannot be proven whether He is or not. Only this much can be said: if you choose Him you become different; if you don't choose Him you will be different again. If you don't choose Him you will create a hell for yourself; if you choose Him, then you can create an ecstatic existence.
He is irrelevant. It is your choice that counts. Whether God is or is not is meaningless. It is not even worth discussing. The basic, relevant thing is that if you choose you become different, if you don't choose you are again different. And it depends on you! It depends on you whether you want an existence which is just a trembling and a fear, just an anguish and death, just a long suffering -- or a bliss, a moment-to-moment opening into greater and greater bliss. So it is not a question of whether God is or not. It is a question whether you want to be transformed and transported into another Existence or not. And it will always be your choice.
-Osho, "The Ultimate Alchemy, Vol 1, #9"
It is your decision
You try it. Every morning when you get up, the first thing, decide. If you decide to be unhappy, nothing is wrong in it. It is your decision. But then stick to it: remain unhappy whatsoever happens. Even if you win a lottery, don't be worried -- remain unhappy. Even if you are chosen as the prime minister or the president, remain unhappy, stick to your choice. And then you will see -- you can remain unhappy if you choose. The same is true about happiness also. If you choose, you can remain happy.
The day you decide that it is your decision to be happy or unhappy, you have taken your life into your hands -- you have become a master. Now you will never say that somebody else is making you unhappy. That is a declaration of slavery.
Buddha was passing. A few people gathered and they insulted him very much. He listened to them very attentively, very lovingly. When they were finished, he said, 'If you have said all that you wanted to say, can I go now? -- because I have to reach the other village by the time the sun sets. If you have still something more to say I will be coming back again after a few days; you can tell me that time.' But he was absolutely undisturbed, his silence remained the same, his happiness the same, his vibration the same.
Those people were puzzled. They said, 'Are you not angry with us? We have been insulting you, we have been calling you names.'
Buddha said, 'You will have to remain puzzled. You came a little late. You should have come ten years before -- then you would have succeeded in disturbing me. Then I was not my own master. Now, it is your freedom to insult me, it is my freedom whether to take it or not. I don't take it. You insult me, true. That's your decision. I am free to take it or not to take it, and I say I don't take it. What will you do with it? I am also puzzled -- because in the last village people had come with sweets, and I said that I don't need them, so they had to take them away. I ask you, what must they have done with the sweets?'
Those people said, 'They must have distributed them in the village or they must have eaten them themselves.'
Buddha said, 'Now think about you. You come with these insults and I say, "Enough. I am finished with this. Nothing doing." What will you do? You will have to take them. I am so much sorry for you.'
It is your decision. Life is your decision, your freedom. That's why I call my sannyasins 'swamis'. 'Swami' means a master. It is just an indicator that from this moment you will try more to be a master than to be a slave.
-Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 2, #8, Q1"
It is your decision
I don't want anybody to be dependent on me because I don't want to become dependent on anybody. Wherever there is one slave there are two. So I don't want to be anybody's boss! At the most I am a friend. You have all the advice that you need and you need not even feel thankful. There is no need. You need not even feel obliged.
It is my joy to give you advice. Just in giving it. I am delighted; there is no need for any return. So remain independent and take out of your independence, not out of your dependence. You choose -- your surrender is also your will. It is your decision to become a disciple. It is your decision to listen to me. It is your decision to go according to my advice. In the final analysis you remain independent.
Sooner or later the day will come when you will not need to go anywhere because then you can be independent just here with me. That is the real meeting of the master and the disciple: when they disappear into each other. You are surrendering and there is nobody who is surrendering. Two nobodies meet, merge, and disappear. So you go -- nothing to be worried about!
-Osho, "Don't Just Do Something, Sit There, #15"
It is your decision
My struggle is against the retardedness of human mind. I want you to be intelligent, to decide for yourself.
I can explain something to you. I can put all my cards open before you. Now it is up to you to decide what to do. Action is going to be your decision. Explanation can be done by your parents, by your teachers, by the society, but explanation is not an order to act. They are simply making you aware of the whole situation. Making you aware of the whole situation makes you intelligent; you become more alert, you start seeing things which you were not seeing before. You become aware of new directions, new dimensions, new ways of looking at things.
But there is no order that you have to act according to the explanation given to you. Action has to come from your own intelligence, from your own understanding. It will not be obedience, it will not be disobedience.
Sometimes you may feel it perfectly right to do something, but that is your decision. Sometimes you may feel it is not right to do something; that too is your decision. The more decisions you are allowed to take, the more your intelligence is sharpened.
Obedience takes away the very base of growth, it simply orders you. You can see it happening in the army: the very psychology of obedience in its complete picture. The soldiers are for years trained for absolutely meaningless things... Turn to the left... there is no reason. Turn to the right... there is no reason. Go backwards, come forwards... there is no reason. For hours... It is an exercise in destroying their intelligence.
-Osho, "Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, #12"
It is your decision
It is always you. You can be hell, you can be heaven -- it is always you, it is your decision.
Sannyas moans a decision that 'Now I am going to create my own heaven.' And heaven is not somewhere else; you have to create it just as you create hell. It is a psychological state. And once you know that you are the creator there is great freedom; immediately you are free. If the other is responsible you are not free; you are always in bondage because the other can always create misery for you or can create happiness for you. In both ways you are dependent, and nobody likes dependence.
-Osho, "The Golden Wind, #23"
It is your decision
It is only once is a while that a buddha says, "Accept your act as your own and don't escape from the responsibility, because escaping from the responsibility means you will never be free of it." And you CAN be free of it. Be responsible, whatsoever is the case, good or bad. Remember, except you, no one else is deciding about it.
If you are living in misery it is your decision. It hurts, of course, to think that "I am living in misery out of my own decision." But if you observe a little more silently, this will give you great freedom. In the beginning it hurts; otherwise it is the harbinger of a new consciousness. If I am creating my hell it implies that I can create my heaven too. If I am the cause of my darkness I can be the cause of my light too. I can be a light unto myself. The very idea that "I am solely and wholly responsible for my actions" is a deliverance.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8, #9"
It is your decision
A sinner sometimes becomes a saint, a saint becomes a sinner. That is the beauty of man: that man has no character. Only rocks have character. The more alive you are, the less character -- absolutely alive, no character. Then you are absolute freedom.
Facing Christ, people ask about authority; they ask about character. They ask that Christ should fulfil the predictions of the scriptures. Why should Christ fulfil the predictions of the scriptures? He is not a rock. He is total freedom, absolute freedom -- that is his beauty and glory. But people believe in dead things, people believe in dead gods. They are dead; they feel comfortable with dead gods. If you are alive, only then can you feel comfortable with an alive God. An alive God means freedom.
Each moment one has to decide again and again who one is going to be; each moment is a decisive moment, and each moment you can change everything. You may not change; that too is your decision. But each moment one has to decide continuously, constantly. Character is not something which is there just like a dead rock. It has to be lived, acted, decided. Each moment you are born again and again. Each moment you die, and each moment you are born again and again.
But people go on asking. And the people of Jerusalem or Varanasi -- they are the deadest people there are. Jerusalem is one of the most ancient cities in the world. That means it carries a very long and dead past, and always thinks in terms of the past, never in terms of the future. They couldn't see the future. The Jews missed Christ.
With Christ was the destiny and the future; but they were asking questions about the past. They couldn't see; they had no eyes to perceive that a new beginning had started. God had taken a new step in this man, God had taken a new decision in this man. God had taken a very decisive and historical decision. The whole humanity would be different through this man. Man will no more be the same as he was before -- a turning point. But that is all in the future.
The Jews were standing there. Jesus was an opening towards the future, but they were looking at the past. They were looking at the clouds of dust that were left behind. They couldn't see the sun that was rising.
-Osho, "Come Follow To You, Vol 3, #9"
It is your decision
When I say to you that you are free, I mean that you are responsible. You cannot throw responsibility on anybody else, you are alone. And whatsoever you do, it is your doing. You cannot say that somebody else forced you to do it -- because you are free; nobody can force you! Because you are free, it is your decision to do something or not to do something. With freedom comes responsibility. Freedom IS responsibility. But the mind is very cunning, the mind interprets in its own way: it always goes on listening to that which it wants to listen to. It goes on interpreting things in its own way. The mind never tries to understand what really is the truth. It has taken that decision already.
-Osho, "The Beloved, Vol 2, #10"
It is your decision
Do not try to befool anybody. There is nothing like that; you are again deciding. If you are deciding, then it is okay. You can find a thousand and one ways to decide again. But remember always, it is your decision, yours and nobody else's; and you remain free. That's why it happens that nothing seems to disappear forever. It comes again and again -- because you again invoke it to come, you again call it to come.
-Osho, "Come Follow To You, Vol 4, #6, Q3"
It is your decision
You can postpone it as long as you want, but the postponement is yours -- that is your decision; you can postpone it forever -- that is your freedom; otherwise you are on the threshold. You have always been on the threshold -- any moment you could have become enlightened, any moment you can become enlightened. Nothing is barring the path except your own decision.
-Osho, "The Sun Rises in the Evening, #1"
Maturity- Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost -
Question What is maturity? how can i be mature?
You will have to understand first what immaturity is. That will give you the idea of what maturity is. Immaturity has a few ingredients in it. One, immaturity is a sort of dependence. A child depends on the parents; he is immature. If you are still depending, you are immature. You may depend on God or you may depend on me, but it is immaturity. You are still seeking your parents. Maybe your parents are gone and lost; now you are projecting your parents.
There are many people who come to me and I can see immediately in their eyes they are searching for their father. It is not accidental that the pope is called the pope. "Pope" means "papa". People are looking for a divine daddy, continuously. This is immaturity.
When are you going to stand on your own feet? How long are you going to remain a dependent on the mother, on the father, on this and that?
These dependent people are very dangerous people because they can be exploited easily. Anybody who pretends to be their father, they will become victims to him. They will follow Adolf Hitler; the fuhrer will become their father. The Germans used to call their country the "fatherland," others call their countries the "motherland," but it is all the same nonsense. We go on projecting. The country becomes the mother, the country becomes the father, or God the Father, or Kali the Mother. You go on projecting.
You want to remain a child; you don't want to grow. Growth is responsibility, and you don't want to take any responsibility.
People come to me and they say, "Osho, we surrender to you. Now you are responsible." How can I be responsible for you? Surrender can only mean that you have come to me to learn responsibility. Now you want to avoid responsibility. Surrendering to me can only be a way, a means, to learn to be responsible. But if you want surrender as a substitute for responsibility, your surrender is wrong, ill. It is not healthy, it is dangerous. And then you will start getting angry at me. If nothing is happening you will get angry. Because nothing is happening, you will think I am not doing anything.
Only you can do something. I can indicate, but the real thing is going to happen within you. Nobody else can do it. If I can do it, then I can undo it also. That will not be much of a gain.
If Buddha can deliver you from your ignorance, then one day if he gets angry with you he will release all your ignorance again, back to you. That will not be of much use. Freedom is possible only when you learn responsibility, when you start standing on your own feet.
Of course, one feels very helpless. So what? It is how life is. That helplessness is not bad. It teaches you that ego is wrong, that you have to be humble, helpless. And yet there is no other way to stand: you can stand only on your own feet. Nobody can take you on his shoulders to God. You will have to enter into divinity on your own.
So maturity has to be understood through understanding immaturity. First thing: we are taught to be dependent on the parents, on the leaders, on the priests. Nobody wants you to be free, because people are afraid, the society is afraid, of free people. Free people will be rebellious. Free people will start doing THEIR thing, and the society is very much afraid of such people. The society wants you to do things that the society wants. The society wants you to follow a certain pattern. The society has its own goals; they have to be fulfilled. The society does not want you to become a Buddha or a Christ, because they have always been dangerous people. The society wants just zombies. And an immature person can easily become a zombie because he is an imitator.
Have you watched small children imitating, and by imitation they think they are becoming grown-ups? Small children start smoking. Not that they feel very good about smoking, not that it is great or anything. When a child starts smoking he cannot even believe why people smoke, because his eyes start getting red, his throat feels irritated, and he starts coughing, tears come down his cheeks. It is really painful, but he will tolerate the pain because the cigarette gives a certain feeling that he is a grown-up. Only grown-ups are allowed to smoke, so the smoking becomes a symbol of grown-upness. [....]
There are symbols of grown-upness. You need to have a girlfriend, you have to smoke, you have to drink, and even small children start learning these tricks. And then they never grow up, They only imitate, They imitate other, false grownups. And their children will imitate them, and so on it goes.
This world is a world of imitators, monkeys all. And it does not make much difference -- you can be a chairman of the board of monkeys, that doesn't make much difference; or you can be a president of a monkey country, that doesn't make any difference -- all the same you remain the monkey. Maybe you are more monkeyish than others.
A grown-up person is one who does not imitate, who starts feeling his own way, who starts being in his own way, who starts looking into his nature: "Who am I? And what REALLY do I feel?“ [....]
Listen to your being. It is continuously giving you hints; it is a still, small voice. It does not shout at you, that is true. And if you are a little silent you will start feeling your way. Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost. Risking all to be oneself, that's what maturity is all about.
If you imitate you will again and again fall into a ditch because whatsoever you imitate never fits reality. Reality is continuously changing, it is a flux, nothing is ever the same. It is a river; it goes on flowing. [....]
Ordinarily man has lived with light, natural light. In a primitive society, the sun rises, people rise, and the sun sets and people set, people go to sleep. A natural rhythm with light. Now we are living too much with the light; the eyes are not made for that much light. The inner nervous system is disturbed; it becomes too loaded. [....]
If you are an imitator you will always be taking false moves. You have to learn to live in YOUR world; you have to respond to the reality that surrounds you. Things have changed dramatically. They have always been changing, but the change has been too fast in this century. And it will be faster and faster.
You have to become aware of the situation and respond accordingly. [....]
If you simply follow and you don't understand, you are immature. Never follow. Try to understand. Let understanding be your basic law of life. Let things come out of your understanding, not out of your memory.
The immature person functions through memory. Whenever there is a situation he looks into his memory, into his past, and finds a clue. The mature person looks into the situation, puts his past aside, because the past is irrelevant. He brings his total attention to the present situation and functions out of that totality. His action is in the present. The immature person is always living through his past; the immature person is always turning his future into his past. He is repetitive, he is parrotlike, he is a shadow, a reflection. He is not real. [....]
Many people have become just echoes. Watch yourself when something happens and you react. Are you reacting the same way as your father used to react in such a situation? Are you saying the same thing as your mother would have said if she were in this situation? Are your gestures the same as your teacher's in the school you loved so much? Just watch -- your gestures, your words, your actions -- and you will be surprised. Ninety-nine percent they are just echoes, they are not true.
How can you be fulfilled with such echoes?
Your father is living through you, not you. Your parents are living through you, not you. Your parents' parents are living through you, not you. The whole of humanity and its past is living through you, but not you. This is immaturity.
Maturity means you discontinue with your past. With one stroke of the sword you become discontinuous with your past and your heritage and the tradition, and you start living independently. The gesture is yours; then it is meaningful, then it is full of significance, then it is not an empty gesture. The words are yours, not borrowed, not somebody else's; then your life becomes more and more authentic and real.
To live in immaturity is to live in a kind of dream. It is a shadow world. Your eyes are so full of fog, you don't have clarity. [....]
People are living in their dreams. They are ready to break their real arms for their unreal dreams.
Watch! You will find many times the same happening in your life. You are ready to kill your reality for some unreal ideal, some utopia, some ideology, some scripture. Somebody insults the Bible. Are you ready to fight? Then you are a fool. Somebody says something against Ram, and you are Hindu and you are ready to be killed or kill. Then you are a fool. Then you are living in shadows and you have become too attached to shadows.
In fact, a really alert man will not feel offended even if somebody insults him personally. Even if somebody says something against his name, he will not feel offended, because he will know, "I am not my name. The name is just an appendage, a label -- useful, but not real, just a make-believe. Any other name would be the same." He will not feel offended.
A really alert man, even if you hit his body, will not feel offended, because he will know he is not the body. He will know he is not his mind. He will know that he is something transcendental, and he will remain in that transcendentalness. In that transcendence is his being.
Then life will have a totally new quality and it will become a new experience. That experience is divine. Maturity is the door to divinity. Immature, you remain asleep. Mature, you become awake.
The question is from Prem Anam. He has many things which are immature in him. His question is relevant, relevant to his being, and it is good that he has asked.
Now, Anam, watch, become more careful. Drop your childishness more and more.
I say again and again, I quote again and again, Jesus' saying that "Unless you are like a child, you will not enter into my kingdom of God." But remember, he does not mean childishness. Childishness is just the opposite of being LIKE a child. A childish person is never like a child. He pretends to be a grown-up; he is a pretender. A childlike person is one who has become so mature, so alive, so aware, that he drops all pretensions. He is nude and naked, he is true, he is innocent.
Drop childishness, and become a child; and you will be mature. And you will be ready, ready to take the jump into yourself.
-Osho, "The First Principle, #10"
Using your intelligence totally,means the beginning of maturity
Question 2 Osho, Is Maturation an ongoing process? How is maturation related to Awareness? Please explain.
Yes, maturation is an ongoing process. There is no limit to it -- not even the sky is the limit. Your consciousness is far bigger than the whole universe. It is infinitely infinite. You cannot come to a point where you can say, "Enough." There is always more and more. There is always a possibility to go on growing. And growing, maturing is such a beautiful experience, that who wants to stop it?
We are stopped in every way. Even a great scientist like Albert Einstein has used only fifteen percent of his intelligence. What to say about ordinary people? -- they never use more than five percent. Just think, if Einstein was capable of using one hundred percent of his intelligence he would have given the world unimaginable richness.
And if everybody is using his consciousness one hundred percent, then who would like to go to heaven and live with those dead saints, dodos, masochists, whose only qualification was self-torture? -- which is simply a psychological disease.
If everybody uses one hundred percent intelligence, we can create paradise here. There is no need to go anywhere. We can give man as long a life as he wants, as healthy a life as he wants. We can create so much wealth that it becomes just like air -- nobody needs to hoard it.
Using your intelligence totally, means the beginning of maturity. Awareness is only a methodology. First, become aware of how much intelligence you are using, or are you using it at all? Belief, faith, are not intelligent. It is taking a decision against your intelligence. Awareness is a methodology to watch how much intelligence you are using. And just in that watching you will see that you are not using much. There are many ways awareness will make you alert. You can use it.
Awareness will bring you to your one hundred percent intelligence, will make you almost divine. And awareness does not stop there. Awareness helps you to use your intelligence fully.
Intelligence is your outgoing road, connecting you to the world, to the objects. Intelligence will give you more science, more technology. In fact, there is no need for man to work anymore, if we can use our intelligence. Machines can do almost everything. And you need not go on carrying, according to Jesus, the cross on your shoulders. That is stupid.
Machines can do everything, and you are freed for the first time from slavery; otherwise, it is only in name that you feel you are free. But you have to earn the bread, you have to earn some money to make a shelter, a house, money for medicine, money for other things.
So it seems you are independent, but you are not. The old slavery is no more there; now you are not chained, but there are invisible chains -- your children, your old parents, your sick wife, your job.
Man is not yet free. He is working eight hours, and still carrying files home. Working late in the night at home, working on Sundays. Still the files go on growing on his table, and there seems to be no end to it. Enter any office and you will see these people, see these people's tables. Can you call them free? Just think about yourself: are you really free?
There is only one possibility: supertechnology, which can do all the work and man will be completely free to be creative. You can play your guitar, sing your song. You can paint, you can make sculptures. You can do thousands of things to beautify this earth. You can make beautiful gardens, ponds.
There is so much to be done to make this earth beautiful. Even if there is a God he may start feeling jealous, thinking that it was wrong to drive Adam and Eve out of heaven; those people are doing far better. And there will be no surprise -- if there is a God, one day he will knock on your doors and will say, "May I come in?"
Awareness will release your intelligence, will make you mature. And then maturity goes on growing.
Ordinarily you simply grow old, you don't grow up. Growing old is one thing, growing up is totally different. All animals grow old: no animal, except man, can grow up. Growing old simply means you are coming closer to your death -- not much of an achievement. Growing up means you are coming to realize the deathless, the eternal which has no beginning and no end. All fear disappears. All paranoia disappears. You are not mortals.
Growing old, you are mortals. Growing up, you become immortals. You know you will be changing many houses. You will be changing many forms, but each form will be better than the past one, because you are growing, you are maturing. You deserve better forms, better bodies. And, finally, there comes a moment when you don't need any body. You can remain just pure consciousness spread all over existence. It is not a loss, it is a gain.
A dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean.... You can think the poor drop is lost, has lost its identity. But just look from a different dimension: the drop has become the ocean. He has not lost anything, he has become vast. He has become oceanic.
Awareness is the method to first wake up your intelligence, then to wake up your being, then to help you become mature, give you the realization of immortality, and ultimately to make you one with the whole.
-Osho, "From Bondage to Freedom, #11, Q2"
I teach intelligence.- I want you to be intelligent, to decide for yourself. -
Question 1: Osho, Goethe once wrote in his 'Goetz Von Berlichingen', "Poverty, Chastity and Obedience - Unbearable are they all." What do you think about his statement?
It is absolutely correct. These are the three calamities that have ruined the very being of humanity.
Obedience means, in other words, slavery. We are very clever to use good words for ugly realities. I do not teach you disobedience; this has to be understood clearly. Obedience is ugly, and the human mind moves like a pendulum of a clock - it immediately goes to the opposite. Then it starts making disobedience the law of life.
Disobedience is only reaction. If there is no obedience imposed on you, disobedience will disappear automatically because there is nothing to disobey.
So I have to make it clear to you that I hate obedience, but in that obedience disobedience is included, because they are part of one reality.
I teach intelligence.
Obedience keeps you retarded. You have just to follow; you are not to doubt, you are not to question, you have just to be a robot. Naturally, sooner or later, particularly younger people start feeling that all this obedience is nothing but a strategy to impose slavery. They react, and move to the other extreme. Whatever is said, don't do it - that becomes their religion. In both the ways they remain retarded.
My struggle is against the retardedness of human mind. I want you to be intelligent, to decide for yourself.
I can explain something to you. I can put all my cards open before you. Now it is up to you to decide what to do. Action is going to be your decision. Explanation can be done by your parents, by your teachers, by the society, but explanation is not an order to act. They are simply making you aware of the whole situation. Making you aware of the whole situation makes you intelligent; you become more alert, you start seeing things which you were not seeing before. You become aware of new directions, new dimensions, new ways of looking at things.
But there is no order that you have to act according to the explanation given to you. Action has to come from your own intelligence, from your own understanding. It will not be obedience, it will not be disobedience.
Sometimes you may feel it perfectly right to do something, but that is your decision. Sometimes you may feel it is not right to do something; that too is your decision. The more decisions you are allowed to take, the more your intelligence is sharpened.
Obedience takes away the very base of growth, it simply orders you. You can see it happening in the army: the very psychology of obedience in its complete picture. The soldiers are for years trained for absolutely meaningless things... Turn to the left... there is no reason. Turn to the right... there is no reason. Go backwards, come forwards... there is no reason. For hours... It is an exercise in destroying their intelligence. [....]
Obedience is basically used by religions, politicians, educationalists, parents. They are all destroying your intelligence, and they are making a great value of obedience. It is a disease far more dangerous than any cancer, because cancer can be cured, can be operated on. But once you get caught into the net of obedience, there is no cure for you.
God was angry with Eve and Adam because they disobeyed; that was their only sin. Obedience is virtue. And the disobedience of Adam and Eve was so great that even now every Christian is born in sin, because your original forefathers - Adam and Eve - sinned against God. Obedience seems to be the very base of all your religions. In different ways they support it: belief, faith, no questioning, simply following THE HOLY BIBLE or the holy KORAN.
You are not taken into account at all. You are just a slave.
Certainly obedience makes you more efficient. That's why everybody wants you to be obedient - your father, your mother, everybody wants you to be obedient. [....]
So Goethe is correct: obedience is one of the greatest sins. All the religions have perpetuated it, and all the generations have perpetuated it.
He is absolutely right when he says about chastity that it is unbearable. It is not only unbearable - he is not being absolutely correct - it is impossible. Chastity is against nature, and in anything against nature you are going to be a loser. You can be victorious with nature; against it, your defeat is sure and certain.
But that's what for centuries we have been told, to be chaste - and at a time when it is naturally and absolutely impossible. At the age of fourteen the boy becomes sexually mature, nature is ready, the boy is capable of reproducing. At thirteen the girl is ready to reproduce. But all the societies prolong... There is education, the university...
The scientific fact is that between fourteen and twenty-one, somewhere near eighteen and a half, the boy comes to the very highest peak of sexual energy, which he will never attain again. And the same is true with the girl: somewhere near seventeen and a half she comes to the greatest peak of attaining orgasmic experience.
The whole of humanity has been deprived of orgasmic experience. By the time somebody returns from the university he is twenty-five, and if he goes back there for a Ph.D. then he is twenty-seven or twenty-eight. His peak of sexual energy is gone... down the drain! And now he gets married. Both are declining, and now they are no longer capable of having that vigor, that natural force which could have produced the orgasmic experience - which is one of the foundations of religious experience.
A person who has known orgasmic blissfulness, only for a few moments, has touched the boundary line that divides ordinary life from the divine life.
And with the orgasmic experience the desire naturally arises, "Is it all or is there much more?" The experience is so tremendously thrilling that one wants to have something more, something better, something more refined. The first person who became religious must have become religious only because of orgasmic experience - because there is no other experience which can give you an insight into religion.
Millions of people on the earth live their whole lives without the orgasmic experience. You want these people to pray in churches, in the temples, in mosques? You have destroyed the very energy in them which would have taken them to the beyond without any priest.
In the orgasmic experience a few things become very clear to the person: one, mind stops... for a few seconds there are no thoughts. Time stops... for a few moments there is no past, no future, but only the present. Of course the experience is very fleeting and very momentary. And the only drawback in it is that it depends on the other person; it happens between two persons - a man and a woman who are deep in love, who want to merge into each other so totally that they are not two entities but one organic whole.
It is a very simple, intelligent understanding that if we can stop thinking and stop time, perhaps the same experience will happen without the other partner. And that's how the whole spiritual phenomenon developed. People tried; they succeeded.
Mind stops and time stops - simultaneously. Mind and time are not two different things. Reality is only in the present; past and future are part of the mind.
The present is the stoppage of time. When there are no thoughts, how can you think of the past and how can you think of the future? There is no way to think about the present, you are already in it.
There is no need to think about it, you are experiencing it.
People tried, explorers of the interior world - we don't know their names, who were the first explorers of the greatest discovery in human existence, who tried and succeeded in stopping time and mind - and they were surprised that when there is not the other, then this state of orgasmic blissfulness can last as long as you want. It is no longer physiology; it is no longer biology; it is no longer genetics - you have come beyond. It can spread over all your twenty-four hours. Slowly, slowly you will start living in it.
You don't have to produce it; it becomes just like breathing - you don't even have to think about it.
This state of your consciousness is the greatest experience that life makes available to you. But before it becomes available you should have some taste, some experience that helps you to go in search for the ultimate. This is the ultimate state.
Enlightenment is nothing but an orgasmic state which has become natural to you, just like the heartbeat.
And then there are many discoveries which happen in this state. In this state it was discovered that each man is both a man and a woman, and each woman is both a man and a woman. In the contemporary world Carl Gustav Jung was the first to come across it. He thought he had discovered something great - it is something great, but it is not his discovery. In the East for at least ten thousand years we have known the fact: there are scriptures... there were statues made in which one half is male and the other half is female.
When you are in an orgasmic state, you discover for the first time that no outside woman is needed, no outside man is needed; your own inner woman is meeting with your inner man. And because both are inside you, the meeting can last forever.
Only this kind of man transcends sex. Repression is not chastity; repression is not celibacy. Repression is perversion.
Using sex at the right moment, when it is at its peak... We are prohibiting our children from having anything to do with sex at the time when they are at the highest peak to which they will never attain again. Now it will be completely going down and down the hill... And when your energies are shrinking, orgasmic experience becomes more and more difficult, almost impossible.
Goethe is absolutely right. Poverty is the third thing he says is unbearable. It is unbearable, but religions have made it bearable. They function as opium - opium can make anything bearable. [....]
All the religions have been doing the same to make poverty bearable. The opium is very subtle.
First, they all teach that whatever state you are in - in the East it is because of your past life, and if you don't make any trouble, if you don't make any revolt against your present state, in the future life you will enjoy all the riches possible.
Now, this is psychological opium. Those people are waiting for a future life to have all the pleasures, and somehow carrying their poverty - which is unbearable.
In the West, where past life and future life are not part of the mythologies, they have other consolations. Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the kingdom of God." What is this? - simple opium. To call the poor blessed... And to console them he says, "A camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but a rich man cannot enter into paradise." So the poor man is in a better condition than the rich man. It is only a question of a few years - because there is only one life in Christianity, in Judaism, in Mohammedanism.
This is a test of your trust: if you trust in God, if you trust in Jesus Christ, you will go through this very easily. And the whole paradise for eternity is specially made for you; all rich men will be thrown into hell. It gives great consolation. One starts thinking, "That's perfect. We may be for seventy years poor, but these rich people are going to suffer for eternity and we are going to enjoy all the pleasures for eternity. It is not a bad bargain."
If these religions were not giving people such poisonous ideas, the world would have destroyed poverty long, long ago. Man is capable of reaching to the moon, and he cannot destroy poverty. He is capable of creating nuclear weapons which can destroy the earth seven hundred times, and he's not capable of destroying poverty. It's simply illogical, absurd.
Poverty can be destroyed, but nobody wants to destroy it. Religions want to keep it, because otherwise all the blessed people of the earth will disappear and there will only be cursed people enjoying. That will be unbearable for the bishops and the cardinals and the pope - the cursed people are enjoying everything and all the blessed people have disappeared. And these blessed people who have disappeared - these blessed people are the people who come to the church; these blessed people are the people who support all kinds of idiots who pretend to be mediators between them and God. [....]
All these religions are living on poverty. The poor go there because they are suffering; it is unbearable, they need some kind of consolation. The rich don't go there; they are not suffering.
And if they are in a certain anguish, these priests are not capable of helping them. The rich people, feeling frustrated, have to search for somebody who can help them out of their anguish. They don't want opium.
The politicians don't want everybody to become rich, because it is more difficult to enslave rich people than poor. It is easier to purchase the votes of the poor than to convince the rich people to vote for them. The richer a person becomes, the more out of hand he is as far as politicians are concerned. A richer person, if he has any psychological problem, will go to a psychoanalyst, not to a priest. He will go the East to find some meditator to help him realize himself so that he can go beyond the mind, but he will not go to these ordinary priests who don't know anything. [....]
Goethe is right, but nobody has criticized him for the simple reason that he does not elaborate. He simply says, "Chastity, obedience, poverty are unbearable" - in a very mild tone, so nobody has criticized him. He is criticizing your whole church, your whole religion, your whole civilization. But he is being clever, he is not straightforward; he should have defined everything that he meant by it.
I have been told by many sympathetic people - Indira Gandhi was prime minister of India; she told me, "If you say the same things without making them too elaborate and in a mild tone, nobody will take any objection. But you make everything so fiery..."
I said, "Then what will be the point? Why should I waste my time making mild, liberal statements if it does not create thinking in people? I am going to put more and more fire into my words."
She said, "I know you. Because of your words I want to come to see you at your commune. I cannot come; I am afraid of my voters, that there will be great trouble. Just coming to meet you in your commune I will lose many voters, many sympathizers."
This is from a very courageous woman. And from many sources people have been telling me, "Why don't you say things in such a way that nobody is hurt?" The point is not that nobody is hurt; if nobody is hurt then nobody wakes up.
I am ready to risk my life if I can wake people.
Those three words he has chosen are perfectly right. Goethe was a man of insight, tremendous insight, but not courageous. So that great statement has never been taken any note of by the people - nobody has bothered about it. But now that I have explained what he really means, you can understand that there are many people in the world who have said right things, but in such a lousy way that they don't make any impact.
Humanity needs people who are real fire and who can make them aflame. Certainly many enemies will be created, but that does not count. What counts is the friends. Do you know how many enemies Gautam Buddha created? - you cannot name even a few of them. They disappeared, but his friends took over the whole of Asia. How many enemies did Jesus create? - almost the whole of the Jewish community. But where are the enemies? What is their position? What is their situation? Christianity has become the greatest religion in the world, and Jesus had very few friends. To begin with, he had only twelve disciples, a few sympathizers.
I am far more fortunate. I have millions of friends. I don't care about the enemies because enemies disappear; they don't make any impact on history.
The impact that is made, is made by friends. The friends of truth are the people who revolutionize, who change human beings for the better.
-Osho, "Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries, #12, Q1"
Osho on Maturity- Maturity means gaining your lost innocence again -
To grow old is not to grow up; to become old is not to become mature. Maturity has nothing to do with old age, nothing to do with age at all. Maturity has something to do with becoming more and more conscious, becoming more and more silent and aware, becoming more and more watchful of what you are doing and why, where you are going and why.
-Osho, "Unio Mystico Volume 2, #6"
If you can function right now, here in this moment, through your consciousness, through your being aware, putting aside all that you have known — this is what I call functioning through no-knowledge, this is functioning through innocence. And this is maturity. [....]
Maturity has nothing to do with age because it has nothing to do with experience; maturity has something to do with responsiveness, freshness, virginity, innocence. So when I use the word 'mature' I don't mean that when you become more experienced you will be more mature. That's what people usually mean when they use the word -- I don't mean that. The more you gather knowledge, the more your mind will become immature; and by the time you are seventy or eighty, you will be completely immature because you will have a stale past to function through. Watch a small child...knowing nothing, having no experience, he functions here and now. That's why children can learn more than aged people.
-Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines, #2, Q1"
Maturity happens when you start living without hope. Hope is childish. You become mature when you don’t project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don’t have any future; you just live in the moment — because that is the only reality there is.
-Osho, "The Beloved Volume 2, #9, Q3"
Lose the mind and gain consciousness and you are mature. Die to the past and be born to the present and you are mature. Maturity is living in the present, fully alert and aware of all the beauty and the splendour of existence.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha Volume 12, #4, Q4"
To me, maturity is another name for realization: you have come to the fulfillment of your potential, it has become actual. The seed has come on a long journey, and has blossomed. Maturity has a fragrance. It gives a tremendous beauty to the individual. It gives intelligence, the sharpest possible intelligence. It makes him nothing but love. His action is love, his inaction is love; his life is love, his death is love. He is just a flower of love.
-Osho, "Beyond Psychology, #37, Q2"
When man attains to maturity, he becomes wise; when man comes to fulfillment, then wisdom arises. Wisdom is the essence of man, the fragrance of the lotus flower.
-Osho, "Dang Dang Doko Dang, #9"
Maturity is of consciousness, not of intellectuality. It is not of knowledge, it is of innocence.
-Osho, "Ah This!, #5"
Awareness is the method; maturation is the result. Become more aware and you will have more maturity; hence, I teach you awareness and don’t talk about maturity. It is going to happen if you are aware.
-Osho, "From Bondage to Freedom, #3"
Zen is not concerned with your childish state of mind. Its concern is maturity; it wants you to become mature, it wants you to become ripe. Hence it has no idea of God — no father in the sky. It leaves you totally alone because only in aloneness is maturity possible. It leaves you totally in insecurity. It gives you no security, no guarantee. It gives you all kinds of insecurities to move into. Maturity is freedom, maturity is liberation.
-Osho, "Ah This!, #5"
Maturity is deep trust in your own consciousness; immaturity is distrust in your own consciousness. When you distrust your consciousness you trust your knowledge, but that is a substitute and a very poor substitute at that.
-Osho, "Ancient Music in the Pines, #2, Q1"
What is immaturity? Whatsoever you are doing, you are doing almost unconsciously. Yes, I say be spontaneous, but I don’t mean be unconscious. I mean be alert and spontaneous. By ‘being spontaneous’ you immediately understand to become a driftwood; so whatsoever happens, whatsoever and wheresoever the mind leads you, you are led by it. You become accidental. Immaturity makes a man accidental; maturity gives man a direction.
-Osho, "Beloved of My Heart, #9"
Maturity comes from a Latin root, ‘maturas,’ which means: to be ripe. A fruit is mature when the fruit is ripe, when it has become sweet and is ready to be digested, can be eaten, can become part of anybody’s life. A mature person is one who has come to know what love is, and love has made him sweet.
-Osho, "The Beloved Volume 2, #2"
A mature person should disconnect himself from anything that is connected with fear. That’s how maturity comes. Just watch all your acts, all your beliefs, and find out whether they are based in reality, in experience, or based in fear. And anything based in fear has to be dropped immediately, without a second thought. It is your armour. I cannot melt it. I can simply show you how you can drop it.
-Osho, "Beyond Psychology"
Remember the difference between childlike and childish: to be childlike is to be a sage; to be childish is not to be a sage. To be childish means to be immature; it needs much improvement, growth, maturity.
-Osho, "Come, Come, Yet Again Come, #14"
Maturity means gaining your lost innocence again, reclaiming your paradise, becoming a child again. Maturity is a rebirth, a spiritual birth. You are born anew, you are a child again. With fresh eyes you start looking at existence. With love in the heart you approach life. With silence and innocence you penetrate your own innermost core. Going beyond thoughts and feelings and becoming a pure isness is maturity. Maturity is the ultimate flowering of meditation.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha Volume 12"
You should learn how to be free from all father figures. You should learn how to be yourself. You should learn how to be aware and responsible. Then only you start growing. Maturity is always maturity towards freedom. Immaturity is always a sort of dependence and a fear of freedom.
-Osho, "The Discipline of Transcendence Volume 2, #9"
Every child is born innocent, but every child is made knowledgeable by the society. Hence schools, colleges, universities exist; their function is to destroy you, to corrupt you.
Maturity means gaining your lost innocence again, reclaiming your paradise, becoming a child again. Of course it has a difference, because the ordinary child is bound to be corrupted, but when you reclaim your childhood you become incorruptible. Nobody can corrupt you, you become intelligent enough. Now you know what the society has done to you and you are alert and aware, and you will not allow it to happen again.
Maturity is a rebirth, a spiritual birth. You are born anew, you are a child again. With fresh eyes you start looking at existence. With love in the heart you approach life. With silence and innocence you penetrate your own innermost core. You are no more just the head. Now you use the head, but it is your servant. First you become the heart, and then you transcend even the heart....
Going beyond thoughts and feelings and becoming a pure isness is maturity. Maturity is the ultimate flowering of meditation. [....]
If you can lose your ego you will gain yourself -- what Buddha calls no-self. He calls it no-self for the simple reason that it is not your old ego anymore. It has no shadow of the ego at all; hence he calls it no-self. Lose the ego and gain the self or no-self, and suddenly you are mature. Lose the mind and gain consciousness and you are mature. Die to the past and be born to the present and you are mature.
Maturity is living in the present, fully alert and aware of all the beauty and the splendor of existence.
-Osho, “The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 12, #4”
The basic problem of love is to first become mature, then you will find a mature partner; then immature people will not attract you at all. It is just like that. If you are twenty-five years of age, you don't fall in love with a baby two years old, you don't fall. Exactly like that. When you are a mature person psychologically, spiritually, you don't fall in love with a baby. It does not happen, it CANNOT happen. You can see that it is going to be meaningless.
In fact a mature person does not fall in love, he rises in love. The word 'fall' is not right. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. They cannot manage and they cannot stand -- they find a woman and they are gone, they find a man and they are gone. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don't have the backbone, the spine; they don't have that integrity to stand alone.
A mature person has the integrity to be alone. And when a mature person gives love, he gives without any strings attached to it: he simply gives. And when a mature person gives love, he feels grateful that you have accepted his love, not vice versa. He does not expect you to be thankful for it -- no, not at all, he does not even need your thanks. He thanks you for accepting his love. And when two mature persons are in love, one of the greatest paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone; they are together so much so that they are almost one. But their oneness does not destroy their individuality, in fact, it enhances it: they become more individual. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. How can you dominate the person you love?
Just think over it. Domination is a sort of hatred, anger, enmity. How can you think of dominating a person you love? You would love to see the person totally free, independent; you will give him more individuality. That's why I call it the greatest paradox: they are together so much so that they are almost one, but still in that oneness they are individuals. Their individualities are not effaced -- they have become more enhanced. The other has enriched them as far as their freedom is concerned.
Immature people falling in love destroy each other's freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness.
Remember, freedom is a higher value than love. That's why in India, the ultimate we call MOKSHA; MOKSHA means freedom. Freedom is a higher value than love. So if love is destroying freedom, it is not of worth. Love can be dropped; freedom has to be saved: freedom is a higher value. And without freedom you can never be happy -- that is not possible. Freedom is the intrinsic desire of each man, each woman -- utter freedom, absolute freedom. So anything that becomes destructive to freedom -- one starts hating it.
-Osho, “The Tantra Vision, Vol 2, #2”
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