You need a divine discontent

Question 1:

Maneesha, one very fundamental thing has always to be remembered: man is very clever in creating pseudo-values. The real values demand your totality, demand your whole being; the pseudo-values are very cheap. They look like the real, but they don't demand you in your totality -- just a superficial formality.

For example, in place of love, trust, we have created a false value: loyalty -- the loyal person is only superficially concerned with love. He goes through all the gestures of love, but he means nothing by them; his heart stays out of his formal gestures.

A slave is loyal, but do you think anybody who is a slave, who has been reduced in his humanity, whose whole pride and dignity has been taken away, can love the person who has harmed him so deeply? He hates him, and if the chance arises, he can kill him. But on the surface, he will remain loyal -- he has to. It is not out of his joy, it is out of fear; it is not out of love, it is out of a conditioned mind which says that you have to be loyal to your master. It is the loyalty of the dog to his master.

Love needs a more total response; it comes not out of duty, but out of your own heartbeats, out of your own experience of joy, out of the desire to share it.

Loyalty is something ugly, but for thousands of years it has been a very respectable value because society has enslaved people in different ways. The wife is supposed to be loyal to the husband, to the point that, in this country, millions of women have died with their husband's death, jumping in the funeral pyre alive, and burning themselves to death. It was so respectable that any woman who could not do it had to live a very condemned life.

She became almost an outcast; she was treated only as a servant in her own family. It was concluded that because she could not die with her husband, she was not loyal to him.

In fact, just think of it the other way around: not a single man has jumped into the funeral pyre of his wife. Nobody has raised the question, "Does it mean that no husband has ever been loyal to his wife?" But it is a society of double standards: one standard is for the master, the owner, the possessor, and the other standard is for the slave.

Love is a dangerous experience, because you are possessed by something which is bigger than you, and it is not controllable -- you cannot produce it on order. Once it is gone, there is no way to bring it back; all that you can do is to pretend, be a hypocrite.

Loyalty is a totally different matter; it is manufactured by your own mind, it is not something beyond you. It is a training in a particular culture -- just like any other training.

You start acting; and by and by, you start believing your own acting. Loyalty demands that you should be always, in life or in death, devoted to the person -- whether your heart is willing for it or not. It is a psychological way of enslavement.

Love brings freedom.

Loyalty brings slavery.

On the surface, they both look alike; deep down, they are just the very opposite -- diametrically opposite. Loyalty is acting, you have been educated for it. Love is wild, its whole beauty is in its wildness. It comes like a breeze with great fragrance, fills your heart, and suddenly where there was a desert there is a garden full of flowers. But you don't know from where it comes, and you don't know that there is no way to bring it; it comes on its own and remains as long as existence wills it. And just as it had come one day as a stranger, as a guest, suddenly one day it is gone. There is no way to cling to it, no way to hold it.

Society cannot depend on such unpredictable, unreliable experiences. It wants guarantees, securities; hence, it has removed love from life completely -- it has placed marriage in its place. Marriage knows loyalty, loyalty to the husband, and because it is formal, it is within your hands... but it is nothing compared to love, it is not even a dew drop of the ocean that love is.

But society is very happy with it because it is reliable. The husband can trust you, can trust that tomorrow also you will be as loyal as you are today. Love cannot be trusted.

And the strangest phenomenon is that love is the greatest trust -- but it cannot be trusted.

In the moment, it is total; but the next moment remains open. It may grow within you, it may evaporate from you. The husband wants a wife who is a slave for her whole life. He cannot depend on love; he has to create something looking like love, but manufactured by man's mind.

It is not only in the relationship of love, but in other fields of life, also. Loyalty has been given great respect because it destroys intelligence: the soldier has to be loyal to the nation.... The man who dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- you cannot call him responsible for it, he was simply fulfilling his duty. He was ordered, and he was loyal to his superiors; that is the whole training of armies.

For years they train you, so that you become almost incapable of revolt. Even if you see that what is being asked from you is absolutely wrong, still your training has gone so deep to say, "Yes, sir," that you will do it. I cannot conceive that the man who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a machine. He also had a heart just like you, he also had his wife and children, his old mother and father... he was as much a human being as you are -- with a difference. He was trained to follow orders without questioning, and when the order was given, he simply followed it.

I have thought again and again about his mind. Is it conceivable that he did not think that this bomb is going to destroy almost two hundred thousand people? Can't he say, "No"?

Is it not better to be shot by the general for not following the order, than to kill two hundred thousand people? Perhaps the idea never occured to him.

The army works in such a way as to create loyalty -- it starts with small things. One wonders why every soldier for years has to go for parades and follow stupid orders -- left turn, right turn, go backwards, go forwards -- for hours, for no purpose at all. There is a hidden purpose in it. His intelligence is being destroyed. He is being turned into an automaton, into a robot. So when the order comes, "Left turn," the mind does not ask, "Why?" If somebody else says to you, "Left turn," you are going to ask, "What nonsense is this? Why should I left turn? I'm going right!" But the soldier is not supposed to doubt, to enquire; he has simply to follow. This is his basic conditioning for loyalty.

It is good for the kings and for the generals that armies should be loyal to the point that they function like machines, not like men. It is comfortable for parents that their children are loyal, because a child who is a rebel is a problem. The parents may be wrong, and the child may be right, but he has to be obedient to the parents -- that is part of the training of the old man that has existed up to now.

I teach you the new man in whom loyalty has no place, but instead intelligence, enquiry, a capacity to say "No." To me, unless you are capable of saying "No" your "Yes;" is meaningless -- your "Yes" is just recorded on a gramophone record. You cannot do anything; you have to say, "Yes" the "No" simply does not arise in you.

Life and civilization would have been totally different if we had trained people to have more intelligence. So many wars would not have happened because people would have asked, "What is the reason? Why should we kill people -- people who are innocent?" But they are loyal to one country and you are loyal to another country, and both the countries'

politicians are fighting and sacrificing their people. If the politicians love to fight so much they can have a wrestling match, and people can enjoy it just like any football match.

But the kings and the politicians, the presidents and the prime ministers don't go to war.

The simple people, who have nothing to do with killing others, go to war to kill and to be killed. They are rewarded for their loyalty; they are given the Victoria Cross or other kinds of awards -- for being inhuman, for being unintelligent, for being mechanical.

Maneesha, you asked me, "To me, the concept of loyalty has overtones of duty, and honor, and belief."

It has not only overtones. It is nothing but the combination of all these diseases -- belief, duty, respectability. They all are nourishment for your ego. They are all against your spiritual growth, but they are in favor of the vested interests.

The priests don't want you to ask any question about their belief system because they know that they have no answers to give. All belief systems are so false that if questioned they will fall down. Unquestioned, they create great religions with millions of people in their folds.

Now the Catholic pope has fifty million people under him, and out of these fifty million people, not a single one enquires, "How can a virgin girl give birth to a child?" That would be sacrilegious! Out of fifty million people, not a single one asks, "What is the evidence that Jesus is the only begotten son of God?" -- anybody can claim it. "What is the evidence that Jesus has saved people from misery?" -- he could not save himself. But questions like this are embarrassing, and they are simply not raised. Even God is nothing but a hypothesis which religious people have been trying to prove for thousands of years, all kinds of proofs -- but all bogus, with no substance, no support from existence. But nobody asks the question.

From the very first day of life, people are being trained to be loyal to the belief system in which they were born. It is convenient for the priests to exploit you, it is convenient for the politicians to exploit you, it is convenient for husbands to exploit wives, for parents to exploit children, for teachers to exploit students. For every vested interest, loyalty is simply a necessity. But it reduces the whole of humanity into retardedness.

It does not allow questioning, it does not allow doubt, it does not allow people to be intelligent. And a man who is not capable of doubting, of questioning, of saying, "No," when he feels that the thing is wrong, has fallen below humanity -- he has become a subhuman animal.

"... all of which represent static, unquestioning attitudes that are rooted in outmoded sentimentality.

"I love and trust You as my Master, and I cannot imagine the rest of my life having any significance except that it be in the service of that love and trust."

If love is asked, then it becomes loyalty. If love is given without being asked, if it is your free gift. Then it raises your consciousness.

If trust is asked you are being enslaved but if a trust arises in you, something superhuman is growing within your heart.

The difference is very small, but of tremendous importance. Asked or ordered, love and trust both become false. When they arise on their own, they have immense intrinsic value. They do not make you a slave, they make you a master of yourself, because it is your love, it is your trust. You are following your own heart. You are not following somebody else, you are not being forced to follow. Out of your freedom is your love, out of your dignity is your trust, and they are both going to make you richer human beings.

That is my idea of the new man. He will love, but he will not allow love to be ordered.

He will trust, but he will trust according to himself -- not according to any scriptures, not according to any social structure, not according to any priest, not according to any politician.

To live your life according to your own heart, following its beat, going into the unknown just like an eagle flying across the sun in utter freedom, knowing no limits... it is not ordered. It is its own joy. It is the exercise of one's own spirituality.

"But that is not my being loyal."

Certainly. I would not like anybody to be loyal to me, because I cannot destroy you, and I cannot take away your dignity. I am here to crown you with dignity, to help you achieve your potential to its fullest, to make you a master of your own destiny. I cannot ask loyalty from you, I cannot ask anything -- neither love, nor trust, nor loyalty. But if love arises in you, trust grows in you, that is a totally different phenomenon. The whole credit goes to you; it has nothing.... As far as I am concerned you cannot disappoint me, for the simple reason that I am not asking any loyalty. If you fail in your love, if you fail in your trust, you are not disappointing me, you are disappointing yourself; you are not betraying me, you are betraying your own higher values.

This is a totally different approach, but this is the way of the new man. And the new man is the only hope for the future.

Question 2:

Sadhan, first it is possible to relax only when death is a certainty. Relaxing is difficult when things are uncertain. If you know that you are going to die today, all fear of death will disappear. What is the point of wasting time? You have one day to live: live as intensely as possible, live as totally as possible.

It actually happened in a man's life.... His doctor told him, "You have only six months more to live, not a single day more, so if you want to finish anything, finish it. If you have wanted to do anything, do it."

The man was very rich, and he always had an idea to go around the world to visit all the beautiful places, but there were so many problems that he was continuously postponing it. Now there was no time to postpone. He ordered beautiful clothes to be made for him....

People had never known him so extravagant: he was eating the best food, he purchased the best house in the town, he closed all his businesses. What was the need to keep them?

For six months he had more than enough -- he could live like a king.

He went around the world, visiting all the beautiful places, all the beautiful people of the world. In fact, he simply forgot to die. By the time he was back home, six months had passed a long time before. He went to the doctor to thank him.

The doctor said, "Are you still alive? How did you manage -- because the disease was such that you were going to die within six months."

The man said, "Once it became certain that I was going to die, death was no longer a problem but a certainty. I had six months to live, so I wanted to live as multidimensionally as possible. And by living so totally and so intensely, perhaps I forgot to die at the right time."

The doctor checked him -- his disease had disappeared. These six months had been of such relaxed, deep, joyful enjoyment that the disease had to disappear!

So the first thing, Sadhan: The certainty of death is one of the most fortunate things. And death has never been so certain -- so certain for the whole humanity. In fact, people should stop creating war materials. Instead of fighting with their neighbors, they should start singing and dancing with them. The time is so short, you cannot afford to fight.

People should forget all their differences of religion, and Communism, Socialism and Fascism. All these differences are good when you have enough time -- but time is very short. You cannot afford all these differences of being Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan.

Just the shortage of time and the certainty of a global death can bring a transformation.

Perhaps you may find yourself in the same position as this man, that the world stops being divided into nations, being divided into religions, continuously fighting and we start, for the first time, enjoying this beautiful planet together.

Death may not come. death cannot come to people who live very intensely and very totally. And even if it comes, those people who have lived totally, welcome it because it is a great relief. They are tired of living, they lived so totally, so intensely, so death comes like a friend. Just as night comes after the whole day's hard work as a great relaxation, as a beautiful sleep, so does death. Death has nothing ugly about it; you cannot find anything cleaner.

You are asking, "Lately I feel my life has come to a peak."

Remember, there are peaks beyond peaks -- just look ahead. Don't get satisfied with what you have achieved. You need a divine discontentment. Every achievement should become a deep longing for something more, and greater. And there are peaks beyond peaks, unending, skies beyond skies. It is just that you need strong wings.

It is good that you are feeling you have come to the highest peak, but don't make it the end of your journey. Make it the beginning of a new journey. Every peak has to be made the beginning of a new journey -- a search for a higher peak.

"Living in Your presence is such a precious and delicious gift. Every moment is becoming so joyful and contented, but then often the fear of death comes up."

That means your joy, your blissfulness, your contentedness is not total -- it leaves spaces, loopholes, from which the fear of death comes in. The fear of death simply shows....

Dance a little faster, live a little faster.

I have never forgotten... in Ahmedabad I used to stay at Jayantibhai's house. We had to cross a bridge, and as the bridge came near he would start driving faster, because there was a big board by the side of the bridge advertising Gold Spot. It said, "Live a little hot, sip a Gold Spot."

I asked Jayantibhai, "What is the matter? Suddenly, on this bridge, you start going fast."

He said, "Looking at that board, `Live a little hot,' I start going fast!"

If the fear of death comes in, that means there are a few loopholes which are not filled with living. So those fears of death are very indicative and helpful -- show you that your dance has to go a little faster, that you have to burn the torch of your life from both ends together.

Dance so fast that the dancer disappears, and only the dance remains.

Then it is not possible for any fear of death to visit you.

"And the fear of having to leave all this beauty, this friendship, and love."

If you are totally herenow, who cares about tomorrow? Tomorrow will take care of itself.

Jesus is right when he prays to God, "Lord, give me my daily bread." He is not even asking for tomorrow, just today is enough unto itself. And you have to learn that each moment has a completion.

The fear of having to leave it all comes only because you are not completely living in the moment; otherwise there is no time, and there is no mind, and there is no space.

For more than three decades I have never thought about tomorrow. And you cannot find a more simple life than mine. For my whole life I have been sleeping in the afternoon, and it happens often that Nirvano has to remind me when she wakes me up in the afternoon, because if nobody wakes me I am not going to wake up by myself -- why bother? She has to remind me, "This is afternoon, not morning," because I often forget.

It happens once in a while that she forgets to remind me... I have gone into the bathroom and started taking my shower, getting ready for the morning talk and only when the cold water shook me a little I remembered, "My God! What am I doing?"

But anyway, I enjoyed the shower!

Sadhan, you are also saying, "You keep on telling us lately that we don't have much time left before this world finishes. How is it possible to relax in this certainty of death?"

In fact, my continuous emphasis that there is a possibility of this whole world being destroyed is to help you to live intensely right now because there may not be any tomorrow.

You are in a very special position in the history of mankind. People have always had time to postpone -- you don't have. Your situation is unique. Use it -- not for worrying, because that is not going to stop the world from ending. Use whatever time is left to live so deeply that ten years become almost equivalent to one hundred years.

Once a merchant was asked, "How old are you?"

And he said, "Three hundred and sixty years old."

The man could not believe it. He said, "Please, repeat it. Perhaps I have not heard rightly."

The merchant shouted and said, "Three hundred and sixty years old."

The man said, "Forgive me, but I cannot believe it. You don't look more than sixty!"

The merchant said, "You are also right. As far as the calendar is concerned, I am sixty.

But as far as my life is concerned I have lived six times more than anybody else. In sixty years I have managed to live three hundred and sixty years."

It depends on intensity.

There are two ways of living. One is the way of the buffalo -- it lives horizontally, in a single line. The other way is of a buddha. He lives vertically, in height and in depth. Then each moment can become an eternity. And unless you learn the art of transforming each moment into an eternity, you have not been with me -- you missed me.

The world may end, may not end, that is not my concern. But I will go on insisting that it is going to end for a simple reason: to wake you up. And don't waste your time in trivia, but live, sing, dance, love as totally and overflowingly as you are capable of; and no fears will interfere, and you will not be worried what will happen tomorrow. Today is enough unto itself. Lived, it is so full; it leaves no space to think about anything else. Unlived, worries come, fears come.

It is not only me who is emphasizing the fact that the world is coming to an end. It is just a coincidence that alongside my insistence on it, the world situation is very supportive of what I am saying. But Jesus Christ, two thousand years ago, was saying the same thing, Gautam Buddha, twenty-five centuries ago, was saying the same thing.

It is an old device to wake you up. Unless you know that your house is on fire, you are not going to run out of it. And Jesus and Gautam Buddha were using it as a device, without any corresponding reality.

I am also using it as a device, but it is not only a device. For the first time, the world is really in a position to commit a global suicide. If Gautam Buddha managed to make two dozen people enlightened, then it should be very easy for me to make at least two hundred people enlightened -- very easy, because his device was only fictitious.

My device is not fictitious, it is a reality. The reality is supporting my device with totality.

Sadhan you just live, love, and make each moment a deep ecstasy. All fears may disappear. And if the whole humanity listens to me, perhaps the world may not end, perhaps we may continue. The old man may die and a totally new man with fresh values may arise to replace him.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.

The Golden Future