Osho - Walk
Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind
Chapter 5.
Playfulness is Heaven
Question 1:
I live in the land of seriousness,
imprisoned in its borders. Can you draw me a road-map to your land of leela?
Have I a defective gene? I cannot find my laughter or light-heartedness. I see
it around me, but do not feel it in me.
Sarjana, there cannot be any
map to the land of playfulness. All maps lead to seriousness. Playfulness is
when all maps have been burnt down. There is no way to playfulness, because
playfulness is not a goal and cannot be a goal. When you forget about goals,
when you are not going anywhere, when the very idea of going is dropped, then
herenow playfulness starts growing in you, happening in you.
Playfulness is not then and
there: it is herenow. So how can there be a road-map? You are not to go: you
are just to be.
Seriousness is goal-oriented.
And even when a serious person starts playing, he transforms the quality of the
play - it becomes a game; it is no more play.
That is the difference between
a game and a play. When a play becomes serious, it becomes a game.
People go to see wrestling,
people go to see bull-fights or American football - ugly, violent, inhuman.
The people who are going to see
these things are immature, a little perverted too. The spectators are as
ungrown as the gladiators. And both are in some way catharting; in the name of
the game, they are throwing their rubbish, they are simply vomiting their
violence.
This is a very violent, violent
world! That's why love cannot exist here. When human beings will really be
human beings, things like bullfighting and wrestling will be unheard of, they
will become part of history. Just to imagine that thousands of people have come
to see a bullfight looks so ugly, disgusting. But people are serious. They
change the play also into seriousness.
A play is something in which a
goal is not at all concerned. The very being together is beautiful!
for the sheer joy of it! In a
better world, with more understanding, games will disappear - there will only
be plays. There will be nobody as a winner, nobody as the defeated - because
the very idea of defeating and winning is inhuman. There is no need for it! Why
can't we enjoy the sheer togetherness? There should be no counting, no marking.
There should not be any result out of it.
If you are in love with playing
football, play football! Just play it! Don't look for the result. If the result
comes in, you become serious, the play is destroyed; it has become almost
businesslike. Enjoy the sheer outpour of energy. Enjoy the moment - don't
sacrifice it for anything else.
That's what leela is,
playfulness is. But you are in love and it becomes serious, and you start
thinking of marriage and you start thinking of having children and you start
thinking of having a family - and the whole thing has gone ugly! If these
things happen, let them happen as by-products, not as results. Yes, if you love
a woman, you would like to be with her - this is marriage! There should be no
other marriage. There should not even be the idea, because the very idea makes
things down-to-earth; the poetry is destroyed. It becomes mundane; the romance
is destroyed.
But the moment you are in love,
immediately your mind starts weaving and spinning... about family, how to have
a family of one's own. Why should you need 'a family of one's own'? People
possess things and people possess people too. If you possess things, it can be
forgiven, but how can it be forgiven when you start possessing people? You say
'my wife', 'my husband', 'my child' - what have you done to call this child
yours? Who are you? How do you come in? Can you create a child?
Can you create the child
according to your own desire?
A child comes from the unknown,
is a gift. You are not the creator, how can you be the possessor?
It is not according to you that
the child takes shape and form and being. You were longing for a beautiful
child and you are hit with a lulu and still you call it 'my child'. You have
been just a passage in the great play of existence.
Just as there are liberation
movements, women's lib movement, so a new movement should be mounted:
children's liberation movement. Nobody should be allowed to possess children.
Possessiveness should not be
allowed! Nobody should say 'my child'. All children are of God.
You can only be a caretaker,
not more than that. And you should be grateful that you have been chosen to be
a caretaker of a new life evolving. That is more than enough! Enjoy the game of
it! of being a caretaker of an evolving life, but don't start possessing.
But our mind is possessive. The
possessiveness has gone to the very roots, and that has been the greatest
hindrance in human growth.
When love is possessive it
becomes exclusive. Then 'this woman is mine, and exclusively mine!' - then she
cannot laugh with anybody else, then she cannot hold hands with anybody else,
then she cannot look into the eyes of somebody else. What nonsense! Why? Who am
I to possess? And how can love be possessive?
Love is always inclusive; it
can never be exclusive. If I love the woman, I will love to see her happy in a
thousand and one ways, with a thousand and one people. I would like her to be
happy. That will be my joy. If she is happy dancing with somebody, I should not
feel jealous - I love her! how can I feel jealous? I should be thrilled that
she is happy. But when you claim that she is your wife, then you cannot allow
this. You start crippling her. She starts paralyzing you in revenge. You both
become destructive to each other.
Love is the greatest creative
energy, but up to now it has been a misfortune, the greatest misfortune.
People have not been killed
because of hatred: people have been killed because of love. Life has become so
bitter, not because of anger: it has become so bitter because of love.
You fight for the love of a
woman or a man; you fight for the love of your family or clan. You fight for
the love of your ideology or religion; you fight for the love of your
mother-country or father-country, father-land, motherland. You go on fighting
for your love! All murders, all killings - all kinds of sufferings exist
because of your so-called love.
Something is basically wrong
with your love - your love is a fixated love; it is not a flowing play. It is
serious, it is exclusive, it is possessive. It is full of stupidity.
One should be able to see all
this - and just seeing it, you start relaxing. You see the point of it and you
start relaxing, and a new awareness arises in you.
Just... I am surprised when I
come across a man whose wife has died - and he is still crying and in anguish:
his beloved has died. Why be so monopolistic? There are so many beautiful women
still alive! This makes no sense. Your husband has died and for your whole life
you will remain in a nightmare - because you cannot love anybody else? Your
love is so tiny? so fixated? it was a kind of obsession? It was neurotic, it
was not healthy. Otherwise, when the husband is dead, yes, there will be
sadness, but you will say goodbye and you will move. You will not sacrifice
your life - because sacrificing your life is dangerous. If you sacrifice your
life and you become a martyr, you will take revenge on life; you will create
guilt in your children, you will create guilt all around. And you will suffer!
And when a person suffers, he creates vibes of suffering all around.
No, this makes no sense! The
world is full of so many people, why should you be so fixated? But the fixation
comes from the very beginning: the moment a child says 'my mother', and the
mother feels very happy, the fixation has started. Now the child will remain
obsessed his whole life.
And when the child is small, he
is naturally dependent on the mother - and mothers and fathers have exploited
that dependence immensely. He is helpless, he cannot survive on his or her own;
he HAS to look up to the mother and the father. His helplessness is exploited.
He knows if the mother is gone, he will be dead. If the mother is no more
available, he will be dead, he will not be able to survive. This idea goes on
and on getting deeper and deeper... And the mother helps it, because the mother
enjoys the ego trip that 'You cannot survive without me.' She threatens many
times, 'Listen to me, otherwise I will leave and go forever, or I will die -
and then you will know!'
And the child is shaken to the
very roots - he cannot survive without the mother.
This becomes, by and by, a
conditioning. Later on it will be reflected in all his relationships. He will
think the same about his wife: if the wife is no more, he will not be able to
survive. This will become unconscious. He will think the same again and again
about everything: 'If this job is gone, then I am finished. If this house is no
more with me, then where will I be? If this bank balance is no more with me,
then where will I be?' His whole life he will think in terms of fixation, and
his whole life will be a long long, unnecessary suffering. He is no more a
child, but he remains childish because of the conditioning.
Love, and immediately you turn
it into bitterness because you become serious about it. You start thinking of
the future. Think of the future - marriage, children, security - and you have
destroyed the play and it has become a game, and a very dangerous game. And you
will be a loser - nobody is ever a winner.
With play, everybody is a winner.
With seriousness, nobody is ever a winner - all are losers.
You come to meditate here and
you become serious about it. And I go on insisting: Don't become serious.
Meditation can happen only in playfulness, in utter playfulness, when you are
not searching and seeking for anything, when you are simply dancing or singing
or chanting; when you are not asking, when the activity is all and all in
itself, no future is provoked, no future is involved in it... then it happens.
Meditation is a happening. You cannot snatch it from God's hands. You cannot
desire it and you cannot have it. You can only do one thing: you can become an
empty receiving end - an;d that's what happens when you are playful.
Meditation is fun! Even the
word looks absurd with meditation - meditation and fun? Down the ages, you have
been taught that this is the seriousmost thing: go into the church and become
serious - even if you don't have one, create a long face, then you will look as
if you are in the church. Don't laugh, don't dance, don't be playful! - it is a
serious affair. You are facing God.
This God seems to be somehow
very strange! He cannot allow laughter, He cannot allow dance, He cannot allow
love, He cannot allow joy. The Gods of the past were very revengeful, jealous
Gods, violent Gods; ready to crush you and destroy you, ready to throw you into
hell-fire. Even the idea of God was ugly.
Here with me, you will have to
learn a new language: meditation is fun, prayer is love and laughter; and the
temple, the church, the mosque, is the place to enjoy, the place to be drunk
with life; the place to dance and hold hands, the place to share what God has
given to you, the place to be absorbed utterly into the moment. That is the
meaning of fun, that is the meaning of laughter, that is the meaning of joy: to
be utterly absorbed in the moment as if no other moment exists. So how can you
ask for a result? Result needs another moment in the future.
Become like small children -
dancing, singing, shouting - and God will come to you unawares.
Suddenly one moment, you will
find He is surrounding you; suddenly you will find you are not holding the
hands of a woman - God is holding your hands; you are not holding the hands of
a man - it is God. Looking into the eyes of the other, playfully, joyously,
suddenly you will fall into a depth unknown to you, unknown to your mind. You
will start disappearing into a deep abyss.
That's what God is! God is not
in the scriptures - it is in the eyes of people, and in the flowers and in the
rivers and in the moons. God is written all over the place! Don't go to the
scriptures. And if you cannot find God in alive trees, green and red and gold,
if you cannot find God there, you will not find Him in the Bible, the Koran and
the Vedas. How can you find Him there if you cannot find Him here? Once you
have found it here, you will find it anywhere... then He is everywhere.
Once found, God is everywhere -
but you will have to find Him in life, in playfulness.
Playfulness makes you alive to
the maximum. Seriousness cripples you. You become shrunken, frozen. You become
closed, you become isolated. You become egoistic. That's why seriousness has
been so much cherished by people because seriousness gives you the ego, and
playfulness takes the ego away.
You ask me, Sarjana: i live in the
land of seriousness, imprisoned in its borders.
You can exist only in the land
of seriousness - you as an 'I'; and you can exist only imprisoned in the
borders of seriousness - as an 'I'. If you want to be playful, you will have to
drop the idea of 'I'. The 'I' cannot be playful; it resists play, because play
is death to it. The 'I' is always serious.
Have you not watched it? When
you laugh, just have a look inside: the 'I' disappears. That's why egoistic
people cannot laugh - impossible! When you are dancing, a moment comes when the
'I' disappears. But egoistic people cannot dance; they cannot allow the 'I' to
disappear ever. Naturally, they will remain imprisoned, they will be prisoners.
But this is your choice!
If you want the ego, you will
have to accept the prison, you will have to accept the boundaries. If you want
a bigger and still bigger ego, the prison will become smaller and smaller, and
the walls of the prison will come closer and closer. If you want to become the
greatest ego in the world, you will be nothing but a prison, you will be
surrounded by China Walls from everywhere, you will live in a straitjacket,
behind iron walls.
But if you want to be alive,
then the ego has to be dropped. Ego is a distraction from life.
I live, you say, in the land of
seriousness, imprisoned in its borders. Can you draw me a road-map to your land
of leela?
And you are again asking about
a road-map - that is a serious thing. I have none. If you want road-maps you
will have to go to the churches and to the priests - they have. Actually! - in
Indian temples there are maps of heaven, hell, and how to reach there, and what
you will find... the whole geography! Who is who, and where God lives, and
where the great saints live - everything you will find.
They have charted all the maps
- all imaginary! because God cannot be caught in any map. And heaven is not a
map, neither is hell; they are not geographical at all - they are psychological
states.
When you are serious, you are
in hell; seriousness is hell, playfulness is heaven.
You ask me: can you draw me
a road-map to your land of leela? Have I a defective gene?
No - nobody has a defective
gene. And a defective gene does not create the problem: the problem comes from
the ego. And the ego has nothing to do with the body; the ego is a mind
attitude.
You have a mind and that is
your defect. I will not say that you have a defective mind - mind is the
defect. You will have to drop the mind. And dropping it, suddenly you will find
you have always been in the land of leela; not for a single moment had you left
it - nobody can leave it. We can just forget about it. We can become serious
and we can forget about it.
You are still the children
playing on the sea beach. You are still the children searching for sea-shells
on the beach. You are still the children collecting wild flowers. You are still
the children trying to catch hold of a butterfly. That purity of childhood is
still there; it has not been taken away from you - it has only been
superimposed by seriousness, ego, mind. It is there! The rock is blocking the
fountain, but the fountain has not disappeared. Remove the rock and the
fountain flows again in all its splendour.
You say: i cannot find my laughter or
light-heartedness.
Seeking, you will never find
it. Finding, or the effort to find it, is a serious thing. It is here! - you
need not find it. Start enjoying it! Start being cheerful this very moment!
Don't try to find it, because if you try to find it you will remain serious.
How can a seeker be non-serious?
You are searching for happiness
and laughter and joy - you have to be serious, otherwise how will you search?
Meanwhile you will remain serious, and the seriousness is getting stronger
every moment. Tomorrow again you will search; but one day has passed - twenty-four
hours' more conditioning of seriousness is on you. You will find less laughter
tomorrow; the day after tomorrow it will become even more difficult... and so
on and so forth. And you will always be searching and seeking and trying to
find.
Just be cheerful this moment!
Just see the point of it! Don't postpone it - these are tricks of postponing,
Sarjana. You don't want to be happy; you still want to remain unhappy. You
still want some new excuse to be unhappy. Now this is the excuse: 'I am
searching for happiness, I am searching for joy. Right now I am unhappy. I will
be happy when I have found - but how can I be happy right now? I will have to
find, and the journey is long and the path is arduous, an uphill task.'
So you can be happy with your
unhappiness right now, and tomorrow we will see... and tomorrow never comes.
Don't try to postpone - these
are tricks the mind goes on playing upon you. Be happy! Have a good laugh! Have
a good dance!
In the beginning it may look a
little awkward, because you have not laughed for so long. The lips may have
lost their elasticity. But it will come... just give a little opportunity for
the lips to learn it again. They cannot lose it. Maybe forgotten - it will be
revived again.
One can never forget how to
laugh. It is like swimming: you cannot forget it. Once you have known it, you
cannot forget. You may not go to the river for fifty years; after fifty years,
suddenly, you can swim. You will not even need to remember it.
And you have been laughing when
you were a child. Every child is born laughing, and there are very very few
fortunate people who die laughing. One who can die laughing has arrived. But if
you want to die laughing, you will have to live laughing.
Once an old Parsi came to see
me and he said, 'Do you know? We have a beautiful story about Zarathustra -
that he was born laughing.'
I said, 'That is nothing
special - every child is born laughing.'
Zarathustra is simply a symbol.
Every child is born alive, full of joy! great energy, great love for life,
great curiosity, infinite wonder, awe for small things. Every child is born an
adventurer, an explorer.
And every child is born with
great courage to go into the unknown. We cripple him. We stop him.
We prevent him. We start
cultivating - and whatsoever we call cultivation is nothing but destroying all
the possibilities, allowing only small holes for him to live in, taking his
whole sky away and giving him a very small corner in the world.
He was born as all men, all
women, all animals, all trees, all rivers, all mountains are. And what do we do
with the child? We take all that he has brought away from him; we make him a
doctor, an engineer, a businessman, a soldier, a politician - we confine him.
He was born as all, as infinity; all the alternatives were open. We close all
the alternatives and leave only one alternative open. We have killed him! We
allow only a minute part of him to live.
Just think of a businessman: he
simply lives as a businessman. Morning, afternoon, evening, night, he lives as
a businessman. He dreams of business, he talks of business, he reads of
business - his whole life has become business. What have you done to this man?
What misfortune has happened to this man? He cannot be anything else! He does
not know how to relax. He does not know how to slip out small hole in which he
has started living - he calls it businessman, doctor, engineer, professor.
A man should be liquid; he
should be able to be all. You should not live only as you - you should live as
all humanity, past, future, present. You should live as a totality;
multi-dimensional you should live, not one-dimensional, not linear. To live
like a line is to live a very poor life.
There is no need! But we have
all become focussed in small corners, tethered in small corners we call our
minds, egos, this and that. And we are so much obsessed with those small
places, caves - -dirty and dark, dismal and sad. But we have become accustomed
to those places and we are afraid of the open air and we are afraid of the open
sky and the sun and the sand, and we never go out of those small spaces. Hence,
laughter has disappeared.
Life has disappeared! - how can
laughter live without life? Your spirit is dead. And this is a miracle, that
your so-called spiritual people are the most spiritless people - and you call
them spiritual. My definition of the word 'spiritual' is: one who is spirited,
one who lives a passionate life, with intensity; who lives at the maximum, not
at the minimum; who does not live a lukewarm life.
Be courageous! and laughter
will follow. Be courageous and live intensely! and you will not need to ask how
to be playful. Out of the maximum, playfulness happens of its own accord -
because when you live at the maximum you start overflowing. That overflowing of
energies is what playfulness is - there is no map to it, there is no technique
to it. Just understanding.
Question 2:
The human civilization is collapsing all
around the world. What do you have to say about it?
Rejoice in its collapse!
Question 3:
Why is it that 'going with the flow' makes
me feel guilty? Please talk about guilt. It is the guilt factor that makes
floating so unattractive.
Padma, guilt is one of the
greatest problems everybody has to encounter. The whole past of humanity has
been guilt-ridden. And each generation goes on giving its diseases to the new
generation. And they go on becoming more and more. Naturally. They accumulate
with each generation. And each new generation is more burdened than the
previous one.
But guilt has been one of the
basic strategies of the priests to exploit people. The priest cannot exist
without guilt. When you feel guilty, remember, the priest is around you. When
you feel guilty, remember, the priest's hands are around your neck - he is
killing you. Guilt is a strategy to exploit people, to turn people into slaves.
Try to understand the mechanism
of it. Only that understanding will help you to get out of it. What exactly is
guilt?
First: it is a condemnation of
life; it is a life-negative attitude. You have been told something is basically
wrong with life; you have been told that you are born a sinner. You have been
told that nothing good can come out of life or out of you or out of anybody
else. Nothing good is possible on this earth! Good is with God. And you have to
find a saviour - a Christ, a Krishna - you have to find a saviour who can save
you from yourselves, who can take you to God.
Life is not worth living -
-avoid living! If you live, you will get deeper and deeper into sin - life is
sin.
Avoid life. Withdraw yourself
from life. And whenever you feel you are attracted towards life, guilt arises.
You start feeling you are going to do something wrong.
And life is immensely
beautiful. It has great attraction, gravitation to it. It is natural to be
attracted by life. It is natural to be in love. It is natural to enjoy, it is
natural to laugh, it is natural to dance. But ALL that is natural has been
condemned. You have to go against nature - that has been the teaching down the
ages.
The puritans have poisoned your
natural sources of life; they have made you against yourself! They have created
a split in you. They could not corrupt the body, but they have corrupted the
mind. So the mind exists according to the priests, and the body exists
according to nature - and there is no meeting.
The body desires the joys of
life - all joys. The body is life-affirmative and the mind is life-negative.
The mind represents the priests
- Christian, Hindu, Jain. The mind goes on talking in the language of the
priests; it goes on saying 'This is wrong!' If you are eating food and you
enjoy the taste, Mahatma Gandhi speaks from your mind: 'This is wrong - don't
enjoy the taste. To enjoy taste is sin.'
In Mahatma Gandhi's ashram one
of the basic disciplines was aswad -
no taste. You have to eat just to fulfill bodily needs, but you should not take
any taste, you should not enjoy the flavour of the food, the smell of the food.
You should destroy the food so it doesn't taste, and you should destroy your
tongue too so it loses sensitivity to taste. When you lose taste, you have
become a mahatma.
The same has been true about
other things: if you fall in love with a woman, you are falling in sin,
something wrong is happening. If you see the beautiful face of a woman or a
man, and you are thrilled, fascinated, great guilt arises what are you doing?
This is irreligious!
And if you are a married man,
then more so. You have a wife, you have committed yourself to her.
Now, even to appreciate the
beauty of another woman is impossible. You will go home feeling guilty.
You have not done anything! You
had just seen a beautiful woman pass by. Now, this is an ugly state of affairs.
You will feel guilty; you will feel defensive. When you go back home you will
try to hide yourself. You will not allow your wife to know that on the road you
saw a beautiful woman and it was a great joy to see her - because if you say
that, there will be trouble. And why create trouble?
You will lie. And when you lie
you will feel guilty again because you are lying, and one should not lie to
one's own wife. Now, so on and so forth... One guilt creates another, and so on
and so forth, ad nauseam. It goes on and on. There is no end to it. Then you
become guilt-ridden; you carry a Himalaya of guilt on your heart.
And each thing has been
condemned.
You will not get rid of the
guilt unless you understand the whole mechanism of it - how it is through guilt
that the priest has dominated humanity, how the priest has created a slavery,
and a subtle slavery. You don't have chains on your hands, you don't have
chains on your feet, but you have chains deep inside your soul.
To be free of guilt is to be
free of all priesthood. To be free of guilt is to be free of all past. And to
be free of guilt is to become one, because then the split disappears. To be
free of guilt is to drop schizophrenia. And then there is great joy, because
you are no longer fighting with yourself. You start living!
How can you live if you are
continuously fighting? You cannot live if you go on fighting with yourself.
You can live only when the
fight has been dropped. Then life has its own rhythm, its own melody.
And life is such a blessing.
And only in that harmony, when you are one, with NO guilt, with NO repression,
with no taboos, with no inhibitions, with no priest interfering in your life -
Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian - when you are on your own, uninterfered with,
your own master, then only can you contact God.
The priest has made it
impossible! If you cannot contact life, how can you contact life abundant?
If you cannot contact flowers,
how can you contact the one who has created them? If you Cannot contact beauty,
joy, love, how can you contact the one from where all beauty, love and joy
comes, flows? Impossible. The priest has made it impossible.
The priest is the cause why the
earth has become irreligious. Without destroying priesthoods and the old
churches and old religions, the world will remain irreligious.
I teach you a new religion! Not
Christianity, not Hinduism, not Jainism, not Buddhism. I teach you a new kind
of religiousness - guilt-free, tabooless, non-repressive. I teach you a
religion of joy, acceptance, naturalness, spontaneity.
Padma, you ask: why is it that
'going with the flow' makes me feel guilty?
Because going with the flow
makes you feel happy - that's why. And you cannot allow happiness. Happiness
has become associated' with guilt. Go back, Padma, to your childhood - you will
find causes there. Just remember, go backwards; try to find out when it
happened.
A small child knows nothing of
guilt; he is wild and primitive. That's why to see a small child is such a joy.
He is as yet uncrippled, he is as yet uncivilized. He has not been introduced
to the disease called civilization - that's why he has so much energy, so much
flow. The child is streaming, vibrating; he is a great dynamo; he is all dance.
He cannot contain himself - he has so much that he is overflowing.
You cannot make a child sit
silently. Why? Because the energy is so much, uncontainable.
The child wants to enjoy
everything, and the parents are guilt-ridden. The child wants to shout and he
enjoys shouting; that is his expression, that is his creativity. That shout, if
helped and not destroyed, will become his song - that is the beginning of the
song. But we stop him. We say, 'Don't shout! This is ugly, this is bad, this is
unmannerly. This is not done in the society. You belong to a famous family, you
belong to a great, respectable family - you should not do this. This is okay
for the urchins, but not for you. You represent us: look how serious we are. We
never shout - and you are shouting?'
And the child was enjoying the
shouting so much. In fact, when you stop him shouting you have condemned his
joy - that's what he will understand deep down, existentially. What will happen
to him? He cannot understand why shouting is wrong; he has as yet no mind to
understand that kind of rubbishness. He was enjoying - that he understands;
that shouting brings such joy, such flow.
He feels so high, he feels so
turned on. Just by shouting, his energy starts moving, he becomes a riverlike
flow, he becomes a roaring phenomenon, a tidal wave.
Now you say, 'Don't shout -
this is bad.' What are you saying actually? How will the child translate it?
The child will think, 'My joy is not accepted.'
The child does not want to go
to sleep; he is feeling so alive and you force him and you drag him to the bed.
He is trying to get away from you and he is saying, 'I am NOT feeling like
sleep. I DON'T want to go to sleep. I want to play a little more!' But you
don't listen. You say, 'It is time and you have to go to sleep.'
Now what are you doing to the
child? You are rejecting - you are rejecting his instinctive understandings. He
does not feel like going to sleep right now - how can he be made to sleep?
There is no way! You can force
him; he will lie there underneath the blanket and will weep and cry and will
feel rejected, will feel unaccepted by the family, will feel guilty about why
he cannot go to sleep when the mother wants him to. Now, what can he do? The
sleep is not coming. And in the morning when he is feeling sleepy, you drag him
out and you say, 'Get out! It is time to get up.' And he wants to sleep a
little more.
Now you interfere - wherever he
feels joy, you interfere. Naturally, you make him feel again and again that his
joy is wrong.
That gets deep into your
bloodstream. That's what has happened to you, Padma. So whenever you are going
with the flow it means something is wrong. You are feeling happy? you
immediately hear your mother's voice: 'Padma, what are you doing? Feeling
happy? Betraying me? Betraying your dad, betraying your family? Look how
serious we are - and is it good to betray your mother? Look at what long faces
we have - and what are you doing? flowing with the flow? going with the flow?
Never has it happened in our
family! And it should not happen. '
You start feeling guilty. Just
watch when you start feeling guilty, listen silently... you will find your
parental voices, your mother, your father, your teacher, saying, 'This is not
right.'
While you make love to a man,
you will feel guilty, because your mother has told you that this is wrong, this
is the greatest sin. When you start making love to a man, something in you
feels it is not right - the mother is standing there, the father is standing
there, and it looks so embarrassing with the parents standing... and you are
making love to a man?! What are you doing? Stop it! You may not stop, but you
will not go totally into it - which is far worse than stopping. It is better to
stop! You cannot stop either, because then your whole nature feels
discontented. And you cannot go totally in it because your mind says this is
wrong. So you go half-heartedly, half way, and you exist in a limbo.
You never go to the totality of
it - so you never feel satisfied. Out
of it you only gather more frustration; you again find you have failed once
more, that's all. It has not happened this time again.
And you start wondering whether
this orgasm is just an invention, whether some masochistic people have invented
it, or some sadistic people have invented it, just to make people feel tortured
- because it is not happening to me!
You will be surprised: this is
the first century after at least five thousand years that a few women are
feeling orgasm. For five thousand years, women have not felt orgasm. That too
is happening only in the Western hemisphere. I have not come across a single
Indian woman who feels orgasm - she has not even heard about the word. In
Indian languages we don't have any word for orgasm - because the thing has not
existed so the word was never needed. Even in the West, only ten, twelve
percent of women are feeling orgasm. This is ugly!
And what to say about men? Do
you think men feel orgasm? Ejaculation is not orgasm. Orgasm is a very very
different phenomenon. So man can deceive himself easily because he can feel
ejaculation, so he thinks he has orgasm - that is not so. Ejaculation is a very
local phenomenon, just the triggering of a physical mechanism - a release, a
relief, nothing more.
Orgasm is ecstasy. Orgasm is
getting lost into timelessness. Orgasm is when your whole body vibrates with
some unknown energy that you have never come across. Orgasm is when you are
very close to God.
The word orgasm comes from orgia - it was a religious ceremony, a
pagan ceremony, when people became ecstatic, so ecstatic, that their whole body
was full of divine energy, and they were bursting with energy, and they were
lost in that energy - that was called orgia.
It was a religious pagan ceremony; it was something like Tantra. It was
Dionysian. The word 'orgasm' comes from that cereony.
Men also rarely feel it. When
your whole body throbs, not only your sexual organ but your whole body throbs,
from toe to head you become a sexual orgasm, you become a sexual organ... That
is the symbol of Shiva; you must have seen in India the Shiva-linga. You may
sometimes be wondering, 'Where are the eyes and where is the nose and where is
the mouth and where are the legs? and what kind of image is this?'
This is the symbol of orgasm:
when the whole body turns into a sexual organ. From eyes, mouth, body, mind -
all disappear into sexuality, into sensuality, into a kind of immense
sensitivity. That is the meaning of Shiva-linga.
Orgasm has become impossible
because you cannot go totally with the flow. And with orgasm becoming
impossible, a thousand and one diseases have become prevalent in man. Wilhelm
Reich is right that if we can bring orgasm back to humanity, almost ninety
percent of mental diseases will immediately disappear - like dewdrops in the
morning when the sun comes.
Ninety percent of mental
diseases exist because man has forgotten how to be rejuvenated with God, how to
fall into divine energy, and come back again resurrected. Those blocked
energies are creating problems. But now... first the priest created the guilt,
now the psychoanalyst is against Wilhelm Reich - because, the psychoanalyst,
where will he go if ninety percent of mental diseases disappear? If Reich is
right, then what about the Freudians and the Adlerians and the Jungians and
others - what will happen to them? Reich was condemned as mad, was forced into
imprisonment - and he was one of the greatest geniuses of this age, who had a
real insight. But this is what we always do: we crucify! He died condemned as a
madman in a prison.
Man has not changed much Two
thousand years have passed, but we go on doing the same as w e did with Jesus.
Now, this man was releasing a very very significant truth - that man's mental
illnesses will continue and will go on becoming bigger and bigger, and soon it
will be impossible to treat man. Out of four, three persons are already
abnormal, and the fourth is just on the way, any moment... This is not a good
situation!
Reich is right that something
has to be done. First the priest was involved, now the modern priest is the
psychoanalyst. First the priest had the investment in making people feel
guilty; he created guilt.
Because of guilt, he stopped
people's being orgasmic. And now the psychoanalyst is enjoying the results -
his profession is flourishing like anything. His is the most needed profession,
and the most respected.
Physicians are no more needed
as much as the psychoanalyst is needed, because the body is getting better and
better every day and mind is getting worse and worse every day.
Guilt has created human
pathology.
In the future, the priest is
not needed, neither is the psychoanalyst needed. Both those professions are
anti-human; they should go. But they can go only if man is freed of guilt,
otherwise they cannot go.
So, Padma, even if you feel
guilty, go with the flow. Ignore the guilt. Let the guilt be there; in spite of
it, go with the flow! The more you go with the flow, the more you will become
able to catch yourself and avoid getting caught into the trap of guilt you will
be able to catch yourself in time. You will be able to slip out of that guilt
prison.
One has to get out of it,
otherwise life will be a long, sad, meaningless anguish.
Question 4:
Osho,
If one were to make only one new year's
resolution, what would you suggest?
Anurag, this and only this can
be the new year's resolution: I resolve never to make any resolutions because
all resolutions are restrictions for the future. All resolutions are
imprisonments. You decide today for tomorrow? You have destroyed tomorrow.
Allow the tomorrow to have its
own being. Let it come in its own way! Let it bring its own gifts.
Resolution means you will allow
only this and you will not allow that. Resolution means you would like the sun
to rise in the west and not in the east. If it rises in the east, you will not
open your windows; you will keep your windows open to the west.
What is resolution? Resolution
is struggle. Resolution is ego. Resolution is saying, 'I cannot live
spontaneously.' And if you cannot live spontaneously, you don't live at all -
you only pretend.
So let only one resolution be
there: I will never make any resolutions. Drop all resolutions! Let life be a
natural spontaneity. The only golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
