Of old and new law tables part 1

Zarathustra believes in only one religion: the religion of evolution. Naturally, if evolution is the religion of life then change has to be its principle - a constant change. All the religions have depended on permanent values; they have fixed their values once and for all.

Life goes on changing; their values remain static and lose contact with existence. That creates immense tension in man's mind. If he follows those values he is no longer contemporary; he is no longer in touch with the living sources of life. If he does not follow them he feels guilty, he feels immoral, he feels irreligious. And then fear grips him.

So man goes on wavering between life and the so-called permanent values. Wherever he is, he is halfhearted. Wherever he is, he is miserable - because joy arises only when you are wholehearted.

Joy is nothing but the fragrance of a whole heart, and misery the outcome of a heart which has been dissected into parts, into fragments.

As far as Zarathustra is concerned there is only one thing unchanging and that is change itself.

Except change, everything goes on changing. And the man of consciousness will respond to every change - not according to any fixed values but according to his alertness, consciousness, according to his spontaneity.

In the vision of Zarathustra, spontaneity has a very fundamental role to play. If values are not fixed then the only source you can get your values from is going to be your spontaneous response to the reality in which you are. It will be fresh and new; and there is no need for feeling any guilt. You have to live now. The people who lived five thousand years ago had no idea what life is going to be in the future. They decided their values according to their time.

For example, fourteen hundred years ago Islam was born, and it was born in the great desert of Arabia. In Arabia it was a problem that there were four times more women than men, because men were continually warring with each other, fighting with each other, killing each other. The ultimate result was that there were four times more women and it was creating a great problem for the society. It was their situation, and Mohammed responded very spontaneously. He decided that every Mohammedan could have four wives. But the Mohammedans are still insisting in the world that they should have four wives. Now the situation has changed: men and women are of equal numbers. Now, to insist that, "Because in our religious scriptures four wives are allowed...." To make it a law forever is sheer stupidity.

But that is the situation of all the religions. They have responded to their own time correctly, but time is not a fixed thing. Life is a moving river. It is entering into new areas, new territories, new potentialities, and it has to be alert about it.

Life cannot be lived according to the past.

That is one of the basic teachings of Zarathustra: one has to live according to the present, aware of the future. And one has to remember: what is true for me is not true for all, and what is true for me today is not going to be necessarily true for me tomorrow. Our values have to be according to life - not vice versa.

The moment you try to make life be according to your values you become life-destructive, life- negative. And to destroy life is to destroy yourself. Then misery is going to be your lot.

Zarathustra is saying, HERE I SIT AND WAIT, OLD SHATTERED LAW-TABLES AROUND ME AND ALSO NEW, HALF-WRITTEN LAW-TABLES.

Life changes so fast that by the time you have written your laws they are already out of date. That's why Zarathustra says, "I am sitting here, waiting, old shattered law-tables around me and also new, half-written lawtables."

Why half-written? - because by the time you write them they may not be relevant anymore. One has to live spontaneously, not according to any written law. One has to take the responsibility totally on one's own shoulders.

He cannot say... because it was written by Manu five thousand years ago, or written by Moses four thousand years ago, or said by Jesus two thousand years ago. It may have been right at the time it was asserted, but now all those law-tables are shattered. And the new ones are half-written. The new ones will never be fully written. By the time they are fully written they will be old, and they will be shattered and thrown onto the same heap as the old tables of law.

WHEN WILL MY HOUR COME? He is saying, "I am waiting." Waiting for what? - waiting for my hour... THE HOUR OF MY DOWN-GOING, MY DESCENT: FOR I WANT TO GO TO MEN ONCE MORE.

Now, living in the mountains, in the solitude, he is more clear about his vision and he is also more clear about man's ignorance. He feels that now there is a possibility; perhaps he can bring some light into the dark night of humanity.

FOR THAT I NOW WAIT: FOR FIRST THE SIGN THAT IT IS MY HOUR MUST COME TO ME. He is a very sensitive man. He would like to wait for exactly the right time when he can be heard, when he can be understood. How will he know that the right hour has come?

He has a symbol that will indicate his hour: NAMELY, THE LAUGHING LION WITH THE FLOCK OF DOVES.

When the lion can laugh with the innocent doves my time has come. When the lion can play with innocent children my time has come. In other words, according to his categories, the camel becomes the lion when he revolts against slavery, and the lion becomes a child when he grows into his innocence.

And unless humanity has become this innocent, it is not possible for Zarathustra to be understood.

MEANWHILE, I TALK TO MYSELF, AS ONE WHO HAS PLENTY OF TIME. NO ONE TELLS ME ANYTHING NEW; SO I TELL MYSELF TO MY MYSELF. He is alone; there is nobody else there in the mountains. He tells things to himself - perhaps just to hear them clearly, because soon he will be saying those things to human beings. He is polishing them, sharpening them, making them more rational, understandable, more human.

WHEN I VISITED MEN, I FOUND THEM SITTING UPON AN OLD SELF-CONCEIT. EACH ONE THOUGHT HE HAD LONG SINCE KNOWN WHAT WAS GOOD AND EVIL FOR MAN. This is his first attack on human ideas of morality, of good and evil - that man is... SITTING UPON AN OLD SELF-CONCEIT. Everybody thinks that he already knows what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is evil. You can see it within yourself, and you can see it without you.

You can move around in the world and you will find that everybody is a knower, with no suspicion at all - because those old values have been given to him as a heritage. Each generation goes on giving its diseases to the new generation. They call it wisdom. But what was wisdom yesterday, today is simply nonsense.

If you want your children to be wise, never give them wisdom. If you want your children to have a clarity about life and a spontaneous responsibility towards situations and people, don't load them with ideas of good and evil, because they will not be living in your time - and you cannot conceive in what time they will be living, what will be their situations.

All that you can do is make them more intelligent, make them more alert, make them more conscious, make them more loving, make them more silent. So wherever they are their response will come out of their silence and out of their love and out of their alertness; it is going to be good. Don't tell them what is good, but give them the right means to discover what is good in a different situation.

But up to now just the opposite has been the case. We are told, "This is good and this is wrong," as if time is standing still and our values will remain values for our coming generations too.

Because of this conditioning from the past everybody lives with his self-conceit - that he knows already. And this is one of the most dangerous situations. When you don't know and you have the conceit that you know it already, then all doors of exploration and enquiry are closed. You never ask; there is no need. You already know the answer.

Every child is being fed with the milk of the mother's answers. He has not even asked the question and you are giving him answers. Know perfectly well that he will have to face different questions - not the same questions that you had to face or your forefathers faced. And because he will be loaded with dead and out-of-date answers, you have messed up his life from the very beginning. When a question will be there he will not respond to the question, he will simply repeat his old answer - which is not going to solve the problem.

I am reminded of a great woman, Gertrude Stein. If she had been in the East she would have become enlightened. This can be said with absolute certainty. Her poetry flies so high that the whole is not far away from there. Her insights are so clear that just a step more and she would have become a Gautam Buddha or a Zarathustra.

Gertrude Stein was dying. All her friends had gathered around; suddenly she opened her eyes and looked all around. It was evening and it was becoming dark and already they were all sad. And she asked, "What is the answer? Before I die I want to know the answer."

They were shocked, because they didn't know what the question was. How can you say what the answer is?

There was a silence for few moments, then one person who was very close to her asked, "Stein, you are asking us, 'What is the answer?' And you have not asked, 'What is the question?' First tell us what the question is."

The dying woman's last words were - with closed eyes she said, "Okay, I don't have much time. So tell me: what is the question?" And she died.

No one knows what was her question; no one knows how to find the answer for a question that you don't know. But the situation is very significant. Perhaps... and this happens most often to people who die consciously, that at the moment of death they remember their very childhood. They are going out of life and they remember the time when they had come into life.

I have been looking into this strange dialogue between Gertrude Stein and her friends. To me it makes some sense. She asked, "What is the answer?" - because to every child the answer is given. That is every child's first experience. Nobody asks him, "What is the question?" Nobody even bothers that he has not asked it. But people go on dumping answers on the child, and he is so innocent and so trusting that he accepts those answers.

Perhaps she was remembering those first moments, when somebody had given her an answer and she had not asked the question. And since then she has carried the answer. But at the moment of death you have to leave all that you have known in life; you have to become again, a child.

But when the friends insisted, "We must know what the question is; only then can we answer," she said, "Okay. Then tell me what the question is" - because a child has no questions. And we are in such a hurry to condition children that we never bother whether he has any question or not.

A small boy was asking his father, "Dad, tell me one thing, where did I come from?"

The father felt a little embarrassed, because now he will have to tell the whole story of sexual reproduction. But he gathered courage - because now that is what the educationalists say: children should be told; all the psychologists are in agreement that children should be told when they ask.

So he tried, and he told the boy about the whole gymnastics that he had done with his mother, and that after nine months of living in her womb he was born.

The child looked strangely at the father and said, "Dad, what nonsense are you talking? My question was very simple. Johnny, my friend, says he came from New Jersey. I wanted to know where I came from. You are wasting your time and my time, and what you are telling me looks so stupid."

We are in such a hurry to give answers to children that we never enquire deeply what their questions are. Are there any questions or not? A patient mother or a father should wait. But no, the child is born and immediately he has to be baptized as a Christian. That means you have given him all the answers that Christianity has. Or he has to be circumcised, and you have given him all the answers that Judaism has. Or he has to be initiated into Hinduism, Buddhism or Mohammedanism, and they all have their rituals. But that is the beginning of answers.

Nobody is asking the child. And it is not even time to ask, because the child cannot answer anything - he is such a new arrival. He does not know the language; he does not know anything about the world. He is not concerned about who created the world. He has no idea, "What do you mean by God?"

This world is full of answers. Everybody's head is full of answers for which you don't have an authentic question. That's why I call your knowledge rubbish. First a question should arise in you.

And the question cannot be answered by anybody else; you will have to find the answer yourself.

Only then, when the answer is yours, it has a truth. If it is given to you by somebody else it is old, rotten, disgusting. Your own search will bring you to a fresh answer. But the people are sitting upon an old conceit.

EACH ONE THOUGHT HE HAD LONG SINCE KNOWN WHAT WAS GOOD AND EVIL FOR MAN.

ALL TALK OF VIRTUE SEEMED TO THEM AN ANCIENT WEARIED AFFAIR; AND HE WHO WISHED TO SLEEP WELL SPOKE OF 'GOOD' AND 'EVIL' BEFORE RETIRING.

All talk of virtue seemed to them an unnecessarily troublesome affair. Of course the search is not going to be so cheap as accepting from the older generation their knowledge; forgetting completely that it is not your knowing.

But you cannot see from somebody else's eyes, and you cannot hear from somebody else's ears, and you cannot feel from somebody else's heart.

Do you think you can know truth from somebody else's words? No, your own being has to encounter truth - just as your ears have to listen to the music themselves, your eyes have to see the light and the flowers and the rainbows and the stars by themselves.

But with truth, with good, with morality, with religion, we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned by others. The most important things in life are all borrowed. And anything borrowed becomes untrue, because truth has a basic condition intrinsic to it. That is: it has to be experienced first.

Nobody wants to be disturbed in his sleep. It is good to accept the old and go to sleep.

Searching and seeking and enquiring can be disturbing to your sleep. Certainly they are going to be disturbing to your sleep because they are going to bring more consciousness to you; not more sleep. As man is, he is almost in a coma about all great things of life. He has simply accepted - it was so easy and so cheap; no effort was needed on his part.

I DISTURBED THIS SOMNOLENCE WHEN I TAUGHT THAT NOBODY YET KNOWS WHAT IS GOOD AND EVIL - UNLESS IT BE THE CREATOR!

Zarathustra says, "I have disturbed people and their sleep, their somnolence, because I have told them that nobody yet knows what is good and evil unless it be the creator."

Unless you are a creative soul you will not know what is good and what is evil. Why is a creative soul needed to know? - because whatever helps your creativity is good; it is divine. And whatever hinders your creativity is evil. There is no other criterion. Whatever brings your genius to actualization is good, and whatever keeps you retarded and pygmies is evil.

However small a man may be, a giant is asleep within him. Creativity wakes up the giant. In creating something - it may be anything: music, poetry, dance - in creating anything you become part of the universe, which is constantly creative.

There is no other bridge with the universe except creativity. If you are simply vegetating, not creating anything... and there millions of people who live their whole life without creating anything, they are not in tune with the universe. To be in tune with the universe is good, is healthy; to be out of tune with the existence is evil, is sick.

BUT HE IT IS WHO CREATES A GOAL FOR MANKIND AND GIVES THE EARTH ITS MEANING AND ITS FUTURE: HE IT IS WHO CREATES THE QUALITY OF GOOD AND EVIL IN THINGS.

Things are not good and evil in themselves. It all depends on you - how you use them. Zarathustra is making it very clear: HE IT IS WHO CREATES A GOAL FOR MANKIND. And you can create a goal for mankind only by creating a goal for yourself. You can become an arrow moving towards the goal - a faraway distant star. Seeing you move, many who had never thought that they are arrows may get the idea.

IT IS HE WHO GIVES THE EARTH ITS MEANING. Have you given the earth its meaning? Have you made the earth a little more beautiful than you found it? Have you given life a little more grace?

Have you given to the trees, to the mountains, to the rivers a little more love? Have you been in some way contributing to the earth's riches - its glamor, its dignity? Are you destructive or creative?

Adolf Hitler is evil, because he has taken from the earth something meaningful and destroyed it.

He destroyed six million Jews in gas chambers, and millions of other people. Millions of people in the gas chambers just became smoke within seconds. And fifty million people, in all, died in the second world war - for which a single man, Adolf Hitler, is responsible. A man who was the cause of fifty million people's deaths must have created millions of widows, millions of orphans, millions of prostitutes and millions of beggars. This is what evil is.

But even a small man - who will not be known by anybody or by history - creating a beautiful garden where roses blossom, and the winds come and take the fragrance to unknown nostrils, is adding beauty to the earth, is giving meaning to the earth. A solitary man playing on his guitar makes the earth more musical. A dancer gives the earth the dignity of his dance.

Zarathustra is giving a totally new criterion for good and evil, and a far greater criterion than has ever been given: give meaning to life, give meaning to the earth, give meaning to the future.

... HE IT IS WHO CREATES THE QUALITY OF GOOD AND EVIL. You are the creators. It depends on you. And I don't think anybody would like to be evil. And the word evil is just a metaphor - nobody would like to be destructive. But unknowingly we are all destroying many things.

One of my gardeners wrote a letter to me. He was immensely sorry. He thought one tree was dead and he cut the tree. And when he cut it, he saw that it was not dead. The innermost core of the tree was still alive. Perhaps it was waiting for the new leaves; old leaves may have fallen.

He wrote a letter to me saying, "I have been a gardener and I have cut thousands of trees, but I have never felt so disturbed. I never felt that I have done anything evil, but today I'm crying because I have destroyed something alive; although there was no intention - but that does not matter. The tree that was going to have new foliage, new flowers, the tree that would have danced in the air and in the wind and in the rain and in the sun; I destroyed it. And I owe an apology to you, because the only thing I have learned here is reverence for life. And for the first time I'm hurting that I have destroyed something living."

It is only a question of your awareness. Be creative and you are religious. It does not matter that you are Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan. Those are all junk labels; you should have dropped them long ago. You need not be a Christian, you need not be a Hindu; you only have to be a creator: a man who makes life more meaningful, who gives the planet more beauty, who has a reverence for life, who spreads more vibes of love around himself. This is true religiousness.

AND I BADE THEM OVERTURN THEIR OLD PROFESSORIAL CHAIRS, AND WHEREVER THAT OLD SELF-CONCEIT HAD SAT. I BADE THEM LAUGH AT THEIR GREAT MASTERS OF VIRTUE AND SAINTS AND POETS AND WORLD-REDEEMERS.

Man's past has been almost a nightmare. The greatest good will be that we can change the future, not into a nightmare, but transform the most beautiful longings of the human heart into reality. If we can make the future a dreamland, a paradise... in trying to create the future we will be immensely rewarded - not in some after-life, but in the very act of creation, in the very act of making the planet meaningful and beautiful.

I BADE THEM LAUGH AT THEIR GLOOMY SAGES, AND WHOEVER HAD SAT AS A BLACK SCARECROW, CAUTIONING, ON THE TREE OF LIFE. What have your saints been? - gloomy, sad, and making you also gloomy and sad. They have forgotten to sing and they hate you because you can still sing. They condemn you as sinners. They have renounced life and they are jealous that you are still living and still loving. They take revenge by not only calling you sinners, but throwing you into hell for eternity - you will suffer forever. And these have been your saints.

Zarathustra is right, these saints have sat like a black scarecrow, cautioning, on the tree of life, saying, "Don't live, don't love, don't sing, don't enjoy, don't dance." The best thing for you will be, if you want to be really religious, to be dead. Even if you want to continue breathing, breathe, but be dead. No sign of life should be there. No sign of joy in your eyes. The best thing is: dig your own grave and get into it and you will be worshiped for centuries as a great saint.

Here suicidal people are worshiped as saints, and the people who are the glory of the earth are condemned. But this has been in the past. This need not be in the present and this certainly has to change in the future.

AND I LAUGHED OVER ALL THEIR 'PAST' AND ITS DECAYED EXPIRING GLORY.

TRULY, LIKE LENTEN PREACHERS AND FOOLS DID I CRY ANGER AND SHAME OVER ALL THEIR GREAT AND SMALL THINGS - THEIR BEST IS SO VERY SMALL! THEIR WORST IS SO VERY SMALL!

Have you ever wondered what is great in your saints? Somebody knows how to fast for thirty days continuously - do you think it is something creative? Somebody is standing on his head - do you think it is something beautiful? Somebody is lying on a bed of thorns - do you think this man is giving more meaning to life? People have escaped from the world into the caves, deep in the mountains.

These escapists - do you think they are creators? They are cowards. They could not encounter life; they were afraid of failure, they were afraid of being defeated. They have escaped, in faraway mountains. And the strangest thing is: you worship them; you worship the escapists.

And the people who are fighting to make life better are not to be worshiped at all. Nobody is going to be even grateful to them. Your so-called saints of all religions, in the past, have been just an unnecessary burden on the earth, and they have been parasites on humanity. This should not be the case anymore.

THUS FROM OUT OF ME CRIED AND LAUGHED MY WISE DESIRE, WHICH WAS BORN ON THE MOUNTAINS, A WILD WISDOM, IN TRUTH! - MY GREAT DESIRE WITH RUSHING WINGS.

Wisdom is always wild. It is not born in the universities. I have lived long in the universities and I have never seen anybody becoming wise in the universities. Yes, people become knowledgeable. They become computers - they memorize all kinds of nonsense - but as far as wisdom is concerned, if you are looking in the universities you are looking in the wrong places.

Wisdom is wild, knowledge is tamed.

And what does Zarathustra mean when he says, wisdom is wild? He means that unless you are completely free from the society and its fetters, completely unafraid of its condemnation... because it will take away all your respectability; it will do every kind of harm to you; it will make your life impossible.

Just the other day I received a letter from a friend from Delhi saying that the American government is still insisting that my voice should be silenced. But while I am alive nobody can silence my voice.

And of course, crucifixion is a little out of date. But they are trying in every way: my books should not reach the people, whatever I say should not be printed by the news media.

The speaker of the upper house of parliament in India told the parliament, "I am surprised why newspapers publish his views." And this is a democracy where freedom of expression is accepted as one of the fundamental rights. America is a great democracy. One democracy is telling to the other democracy that my voice should be silenced.

My friend was afraid. He enquired: "What does it mean? Does it mean that he should be killed? Is it a code - 'His voice should be silenced'?"

And the officer said, "It is not possible for me to give you the exact meaning of it."

If you want to be wise, if you want to be intelligent, you are bound to be a rebel, because you will have to fight against so many superstitions, so many stupid ideas which people think of as ultimate truth, that you will irritate everybody. You will have to allow yourself to be completely free from the past, from the whole heritage of humanity. That's what will make you wild.

You will be on your own - without any support from anywhere. You will be alone, but it has a great blissfulness, and it has a great insight into things. It not only frees you from the fetters of the society; it frees you for a greater life, for a more universal life, for a more eternal life.

.... A WILD WISDOM, IN TRUTH! - MY GREAT DESIRE WITH RUSHING WINGS. Knowledge is heavy; it follows the law of gravitation. Wisdom makes you light. So light that you can fly in the open sky.

AND OFTEN IT TORE ME FORTH AND UP AND AWAY AND IN THE MIDST OF LAUGHTER:

AND THEN INDEED I FLEW, AN ARROW, QUIVERING WITH SUN-INTOXICATED RAPTURE.

Only the wild, only the absolutely free intelligence knows the joy of an arrow... QUIVERING WITH SUN-INTOXICATED RAPTURE:

OUT INTO THE DISTANT FUTURE, WHICH NO DREAM HAS YET SEEN, INTO WARMER SOUTHS THAN ARTISTS HAVE EVER DREAMED OF, THERE WHERE GODS, DANCING, ARE ASHAMED OF ALL CLOTHES.

A truly intelligent human race will be ashamed of hiding anything. Every human being will be an open book. There is no need to hide.

Your clothes are not only for the protection of the body; at least in the beginning they were not - because all the animals, all the birds, all the trees can live without clothes, and man lived for thousands of years without clothes. Perhaps now it would be difficult to drop them, because the body has become accustomed and the clothes have weakened it. They have given it a protection, and anything protected becomes weak. They have defended it against the seasons and they have made the body dependent on them.

But there should be a possibility, in the future, that whenever you can be without clothes - on the sea beaches, in the mountains, in the beautiful forests or in the beautiful garden of your own house.... If he can dance, an authentic man will be ashamed of clothes.

Zarathustra is saying, "A time is bound to come when gods, dancing, are ashamed of all clothes."

Certainly that time will not come to Poona! Poona is excluded. It is going to remain the graveyard of the past; it is not going to be a garden of the future.

SO THAT I MIGHT SPEAK IN PARABLES, AND HOBBLE AND STUTTER LIKE POETS: AND TRULY, I AM ASHAMED THAT I STILL HAVE TO BE A POET!

Why does Zarathustra say he is ashamed that he has still to be a poet? - because poetry says things more beautifully than any prose. But its beauty depends on lies.

The poets lie too much. In fact, poetry without lies will become prose. And why does he have to be still a poet? - because truth cannot be said in the way prose expresses things. Prose is too mundane. It is good for the marketplace. Buying vegetables in the market you don't have to talk in poetry; otherwise they will think you are mad.

But talking about truth, talking about beauty, talking about ecstasy, talking about anything that is sacred, poetry seems to be the only possibility. Prose is too mundane, and other than prose only poetry is left.

There is no third alternative. People have tried the third alternative also, but it is not really a third alternative: people have remained silent; they have tried to communicate through silence. But unfortunately it is very difficult to find someone who will be able to understand silence. And someone who can understand silence does not need you. He will have found his own wild wisdom.

So poetry is something between silence and prose; it is a mixture of silence and prose.

He is ashamed because he cannot say the truth in its absolute purity. It has to be polluted by poetic forms.

WHERE ALL BECOMING SEEMED TO ME THE DANCING OF GODS AND THE WANTONNESS OF GODS, AND THE WORLD UNRESTRAINED AND ABANDONED AND FLEEING BACK TO ITSELF.

WHERE ALL TIME SEEMED TO ME A BLISSFUL MOCKERY OF MOMENTS, WHERE NECESSITY WAS FREEDOM ITSELF, WHICH BLISSFULLY PLAYED WITH THE GOAD OF FREEDOM - WHERE I FOUND AGAIN MY OLD DEVIL AND ARCH-ENEMY, THE SPIRIT OF GRAVITY, AND ALL THAT HE CREATED: COMPULSION, DOGMA, NEED AND CONSEQUENCE AND PURPOSE AND WILL AND GOOD AND EVIL.

These are the by-products of the Spirit of Gravity.

I WANT TO GO TO MAN ONCE MORE. Knowing perfectly well that man lives under the Spirit of Gravity - clinging to the lowest values, clinging to the corpses, clinging to the past - still: I WANT TO GO TO MAN ONCE MORE: I WANT TO GO UNDER AMONG THEM, I WANT TO GIVE THEM, DYING, MY RICHEST GIFT! Before I die I want to give them my richest gift: my wild wisdom.

Those who have known feel a certain compulsion that it should be shared with those who are not so fortunate. And those who have found the inner treasures want to share them with those who are still begging outside and not looking inwards.

Before death, Zarathustra wants to give his richest gift, his wisdom, to humanity.

... THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.