Of old and new law-tables part 3

We are accustomed to dividing time into past, present, and future. But in reality these are not the divisions of time, these are divisions of our mind - because past does not exist anymore, except in our memories, and the future exists not yet, except in our imaginations. As far as time is concerned, it is always present; it is always now.

Zarathustra is giving you one of the golden keys that opens the mysteries of life. That is, get rid of the past. The moment you get rid of the past, your mind is unburdened of all that has happened; it is light. And the second thing is, the moment the past is abandoned you cannot imagine the future, because what is your future? - a refined past, a modified past, a better past. What can you think of the future? If there is no past, the future automatically disappears.

The insistence on getting rid of the past is of great importance, because it not only makes you free of the past, it makes you free of the future - and what is left is you and this moment, utterly pure, unpolluted. Your whole consciousness is unburdened from the past and future. It becomes such a great source of light and awareness that it transforms the present moment into a blissful experience.

This concentrated consciousness on the present is the golden key, because you can enter into existence only through the present. That is the only thing that exists. You can go on roaming and wandering in the past, in your memories, or you can go on dreaming about the future, but there is no place from where you can enter into existence.

Existence knows only one thing: the present moment.

And if you are also in the present moment, there happens a deep rapport with the trees, with the mountains, with the stars, with the flowers - with all that exists, with all that is. This deep rapport has been known as the greatest ecstasy.

But what we are doing is just the opposite. We are missing the present for the past which is dead, for the future which is not born. If we are miserable and in suffering, it is not a coincidence. We have made our lives miserable by our own efforts. Remember, blissfulness comes without any effort; misery needs great work. You have to drag all your past and all your future. You have to dig all the graves of the past - you have to become a gravedigger - and you have to wander into future tombs.

Certainly your life becomes an anguish. It is with great effort, arduous discipline that you maintain your suffering.

The simple is the way of being blissful.

Easy is right, and right is easy.

Zarathustra is saying, MY PITY FOR ALL THAT IS PAST IS THAT I SEE: IT HAS BEEN HANDED OVER. From where have you got your past? It has been handed over to you by your parents, by your educational system, by your religious leaders, by your scriptures. But it has been handed over to you; it is not your search, it is not your experience. And anything that is not your experience is simply a burden, and prevents you from flying into the open sky towards the stars.

HANDED OVER TO THE FAVOUR, THE SPIRIT, THE MADNESS OF EVERY GENERATION THAT COMES AND TRANSFORMS EVERYTHING THAT HAS BEEN INTO ITS OWN BRIDGE! Every generation goes on giving its madness to the new generation. It is a very simple arithmetic, why man has been continuously falling lower - because the madness goes on piling up. Every generation adds only one thing to the life of man; that is, its own madness. Thousands of generations have passed, and they all give their own madness. The next generation improves upon it, then hands it over to the coming generation.

For centuries we have been doing only one thing: improving upon the madness that has been handed over. And we have given beautiful names to this madness, just to hide the fact that it is madness. Not only have we been able to hide it, we have even persuaded ourselves to worship it.

One of the great poets of India was Surdas. His name literally means "in the service of music," but it has become synonymous with a blind man. He renounced the world, just the way the Hindus have been doing for centuries.

One day he went to beg, and a very beautiful woman opened the door. Seeing the woman, the repressed sexuality, the repressed sensuality uncoiled like a lion inside him. He became very much afraid. He went back to his cottage and took out both of his eyes, then went back to the woman.

She could not believe what had happened - there was blood all over his face, and he was holding on a plate, two eyes. He offered those two eyes to the woman, and he said, "They belong to you.

They are no longer parts of my body; they were destroying my whole reincarnation. Now they can be happy being with you, because they saw your beauty."

I will call it sheer madness, because it is not the eyes - eyes are simply doors; they allowed the woman's figure to enter into him. The sexuality was inside him, not in the eyes. Eyes are just mirrors. There is no sex center in the eyes. They don't have any judgment; they simply reflect whatever comes in front of them.

Sexuality was in him, and it was there because he had repressed it. But he took revenge with the eyes. And he became a very great saint because of this act; he was worshiped. His name became so famous that it has taken a new meaning. Whenever you want to address a blind man, you call him "Surdasji" - because to call him a blind man is crude, but to call him "Surdas" is to give him as much respect as possible.

But the original Surdas... that was simply an insane act. There is no need to prove that it was insane; it is so obvious. But it is not only one person. If you go in search, you will be surprised how many insanities have become spiritual attainments.

There was, before the Russian revolution, a Christian sect in Russia. At Christmas time they used to cut their genitals off. And thousands of people would gather together to see it. There were piles of genitals and blood, and people were worshiping those people who had cut off their genitals - as if by cutting off the genitals, you can cut off your sexuality.

The center of sexuality is in your head. The genitals are just controlled by the center in your mind - it is a biological remote control system.The person who has cut his genitals off will still dream about women - even more so. And the women were not going to remain behind. They don't have genitals to cut off; so they started cutting off their breasts. And they were also worshiped.

The sect was spreading far and wide in Russia. It was the revolution that stopped it; otherwise, the madness would have gone to many more millions of people. But their contemporaries never thought that it was madness.

There are people in Varanasi who are lying on thorn beds. All their spirituality is in lying on a bed of thorns. I don't see that lying on a bed of thorns... it may be good in a carnival, or in a circus but what has it to do with spirituality? But people are worshiping them - putting money at their feet, and food, and fruits, and flowers. And all their great act is, which any idiot can do... you can try it. Just tell your wife or your husband to take a needle and touch your back with the needle. You will both be surprised: there are only a few points where you will feel the touch.

There are blind spots on the back where there is no nerve, so even if you push the needle in you will not feel the touch. Those beds of nails are made with great art, and when the person lies on them, the nails are touching the places which have no nerves. He is not in any pain; he's cheating people.

But these people are worshiped as spiritual, great spiritual beings.

Century after century, madness has become more and more piled up on the human mind. And when it is your madness you are completely blind to it. When it is your conditioning you cannot see that it is mad.

Jaina monks, every year, pull their hair out with their own hands - the beard, the mustache, the hair.

And thousands of worshipers stand around them with tears in their eyes - they are doing something great. And, perhaps the first time they may have felt a little pain, but now they have become experts, doing it every year. It is simple expertise. What spirituality is in it?

The Jaina monks don't take a bath, they don't brush their teeth, they don't clean their mouth. Their breath is disgusting; their bodies are so smelly. It is natural, but no Jaina points out to them that it is stupid. On the contrary, they have reasons. First, that when you are using water you will kill many small germs in the water - and they are nonviolent; they cannot kill. Secondly, when you are taking a bath or brushing your teeth, you are decorating your body - and the body is the enemy; you have to torture it as much as possible. The more you torture it, the more spiritual you are. But Jainas will not see it - it is their madness.

There are many sects within the Jainas. One sect uses pieces of cloth to cover the nose and the mouth, tied to the ears. It is very difficult to hear them, what they are saying. And the reason is that when you speak or when you breathe, the air coming out of the mouth or the nose is hot, and it kills small germs in the air. So they are protecting the small germs. And their followers will never think that this is not intelligence.

There have been Christian monasteries where monks use shoes which have nails inside them, penetrating into their feet. And they walk on them. Those wounds remain always fresh, because the nails go on making them worse and worse. They also have belts with nails forcing themselves into their bodies.

There is still a Christian sect in which the greatest saint is the one who lashes himself the most - that is their early morning prayer, they lash themselves all over the body. Blood starts oozing...

somebody has lashed himself fifty times, somebody sixty times, but somebody has lashed himself two hundred times. It is a question of how many times you have lashed your body that makes you a greater saint.

I cannot conceive that there is any spirituality in it. These people are masochists, they enjoy torturing themselves. So they are profiting by lashing their bodies in two ways: they are enjoying torturing themselves, one thing, and they are getting great respect and honor.

The more you look at the so-called religious people, you will find so many things which only mad people can do. But because they are worshiped, deep down you are also hoping someday to be able to do the same things. One worships only when he feels that he is not strong enough to do what the other is doing. Naturally, he has to be respected. But he's your ideal.

THIS, HOWEVER, IS THE OTHER DANGER: HE WHO IS OF THE MOB REMEMBERS BACK TO HIS GRANDFATHER - WITH HIS GRANDFATHER, HOWEVER, TIME STOPS. The mob is always thinking of the golden past. Their golden age is always in the past. And what is the past? It stops with the grandfather - and on no account was the past golden.

In the ancient scriptures, it is said that it was a very rare accident, and thought to be very unfortunate, if a son died before his father. And the religious people, following those scriptures, brag about it very much. Neither do they understand, nor is their idea about it what the real reason was. The real reason was that we have not been able to find any skeleton of a human being, five thousand years old, which is of a man who died at more than the age of forty. It seems forty was the highest age. If forty was the highest age, then naturally no son would die before his father. Now things are different.

An old man of ninety-five years and a woman of ninety years reached the court; they wanted a divorce. The magistrate could not believe it. He said, "How long have you been married?" They said, "We have been married at least eighty years."

The magistrate said, "If you have managed to remain married for eighty years, what problem has arisen that now you are divorcing each other?" They said, "We always wanted to divorce, but we waited - we waited for all of our children to die, so that they would not be shocked. Now everybody is finished, and the great day has come that we can divorce."

Just at the beginning of this century, nine out of ten children in India used to die before six months of age. Out of ten, only one survived. Now the situation is reversed - out of ten only one dies, and nine survive. Looking at the past, you cannot find anything that you can call the golden age. But almost everybody thinks that the golden age has passed long before.

People were utterly poor. The Indian scriptures say that nobody used to have locks on their doors.

When I was a student, one of my professors of philosophy, Dr. S.N.L. Shrivastava mentioned it - he was a very past oriented, very orthodox and traditional Hindu - that there were no locks because there was no stealing. I said, "On that point, I disagree. I say that there were... it is a fact there were no locks, but not because there was no stealing. It was because there was nothing to steal; people were so poor. And secondly, locks were not yet discovered."

He was very angry. I said, "It does not make any argument; your anger is not an argument. I have a few more things to support what I am saying. Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, both continually teach people that stealing is sin. If there was no stealing at all, then I don't think that Buddha and Mahavira both would make non-stealing a foundation of their religion, or would continually preach it to people who don't steal."

I asked him, "You will have to prove to me that Buddha and Mahavira were mad - they were talking to people who were so religious, so spiritual - nobody was stealing, and still, continually... Buddha talked every day for forty-two years, and he was saying, 'Don't steal, don't lie, don't kill.' These sermons make sense only if people were killing, if people were stealing, if people were lying."

When was this golden age? In the days of Rama?Rama himself killed a sudra, an untouchable, because it was prohibited for the untouchables - the lowest of the low, the poorest of the poor, the most oppressed people on the earth - to read the VEDAS. Reading was out of question because they were not allowed to be educated, but they could not listen to somebody else reading the VEDAS, because that defiles the VEDAS. Strange, the VEDAS should purify the sudras, not vice versa.

A young man, just out of curiosity, when brahmins were chanting the VEDAS, was hiding behind the trees, listening; although he could not understand. He was caught and brought to Rama. And the man, Rama, who is thought to be the incarnation of God, ordered that lead should be melted and poured into both his ears. Now, melted lead poured into both the ears not only destroyed his hearing system, but the torture was so much that he died. This was your golden age?

In the most ancient scriptures which exist in India there are stories that even gods used to come, if they found a beautiful woman on the earth, to rape her. You will call these people gods?When was this golden age? - when even gods are rapists, when even the incarnation of God has no compassion in him and kills a young man just because he has heard the VEDAS. What is wrong in it? The VEDAS declare that everybody is divine - what about this sudra? A divine being hearing the VEDAS is being killed; it is against the VEDAS itself. But go back into any tradition of the world and you will be surprised how much madness has come to us as heritage.

Even today, every day, there are reports that a village of sudras has been burned, their women have been raped, the children and the old men have been forced into the burning houses. And all this goes on. Nobody ever rebels against it. And what have the sudras done? They do all the cleaning jobs. They should be highly respected. Without them, your society would be in absolute difficulty.

They should be paid better because they are doing your dirtiest jobs, but they are not even allowed to live in the town - they have to live outside. Even to touch their shadow defiles you.

Can you think of madness going any further? The shadow is nonexistential; it has no existence at all. But the shadow of a Sudra touching you means that you have to immediately take a bath, change clothes - you have been defiled.

And Manu wrote all these laws for the Hindu society five thousand years ago. For five thousand years, Hindu society has been torturing one-fourth of its population. When was the golden age? It has never been, except in the imagination of senile people.

THIS, HOWEVER, IS THE OTHER DANGER... HE WHO IS OF THE MOB REMEMBERS BACK TO HIS GRANDFATHER - WITH HIS GRANDFATHER, HOWEVER, TIME STOPS.

THUS ALL THAT IS PAST IS HANDED OVER: FOR THE MOB COULD ONE DAY BECOME MASTER, AND ALL TIME BE DROWNED IN SHALLOW WATERS.

THEREFORE, O MY BROTHERS, IS A new nobility NEEDED: TO OPPOSE ALL MOB-RULE AND ALL DESPOTISM AND TO WRITE ANEW UPON NEW LAW-TABLES THE WORD: 'NOBLE'.

Zarathustra is so beautiful, so human in his each statement.

He is saying, "A new nobility is needed. The mob has turned almost inhuman and we have to create a new nobility with new laws. And on the new law-tables the word 'Noble' should be written." Up to now we have lived in utter crudeness, primitiveness, ignobility.

FOR MANY NOBLEMEN ARE NEEDED, AND NOBLEMEN OF MANY KINDS, FOR NOBILITY TO EXIST! OR, AS I ONCE SAID IN A PARABLE: 'PRECISELY THIS IS GODLINESS, THAT THERE ARE GODS BUT NO GOD!' We need such noble people, such superhuman beings, which can be called a despot, a dictator-god - a diffused godliness. And you have to see how ignoble our acts have been.

The people who crucified Jesus - was that a noble act? It was the rule of the mob. Jesus had not done any crime; he had not harmed anybody. Certainly he said things which were revolutionary, but to follow him or not is up to you; to agree with him or not is up to you. It is one of the fundamental rights of man to have freedom of speech. All that he had done was to practice freedom of speech, and crucifixion was the reward.

O MY BROTHERS, I DIRECT AND CONSECRATE YOU TO A NEW NOBILITY: YOU SHALL BECOME BEGETTERS AND CULTIVATORS AND SOWERS OF THE FUTURE - TRULY, NOT TO A NOBILITY THAT YOU COULD BUY LIKE SHOPKEEPERS WITH SHOPKEEPERS' GOLD: FOR ALL THAT HAS A PRICE IS OF LITTLE VALUE. LET WHERE YOU ARE GOING, NOT WHERE YOU COME FROM, HENCEFORTH BE YOUR HONOUR!

I would like to repeat it again: LET WHERE YOU ARE GOING, NOT WHERE YOU COME FROM, HENCEFORTH BE YOUR HONOUR! Not your past, not your forefathers - they cannot give you any honor. The only honor should be in where you are going - to create a better future, to create a better humanity, to create a nobility, to create a godliness, a perfume that surrounds the whole existence.

And it is within your power.

But you have been suffocated by the past and its madness. You have not been allowed to grow your own flowers and release your own fragrance.

YOUR WILL AND YOUR FOOT THAT DESIRES TO STEP OUT BEYOND YOU - LET THEM BE YOUR NEW HONOUR!

Going beyond yourself - because you are just a bundle of past heritage; you will have to drop all this mad luggage that you are carrying with so much care. Step beyond yourself, and let this be your honor.

TRULY, NOT THAT YOU HAVE SERVED A PRINCE - OF WHAT ACCOUNT ARE PRINCES NOW!

- OR HAVE BECOME A BULWARK TO THAT WHICH STANDS, THAT IT MAY STAND MORE FIRMLY!

NOT THAT YOUR FAMILY HAVE GROWN COURTLY AT COURTS AND YOU HAVE LEARNED TO STAND FOR LONG HOURS IN SHALLOW POOLS, MOTLEY-COLORED LIKE A FLAMINGO:

FOR BEING ABLE TO STAND IS A MERIT WITH COURTIERS; AND ALL COURTIERS BELIEVE THAT PART OF THE BLISS AFTER DEATH IS - BEING ALLOWED TO SIT!

O MY BROTHERS, YOUR NOBILITY SHOULD NOT GAZE BACKWARDS, BUT OUTWARD!

- FORWARDS. YOU SHALL BE FUGITIVES FROM ALL FATHERLANDS AND FORE- FATHERLANDS!

YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR CHILDREN'S LAND:

He goes on throwing in new insights one after another. You have always respected the old - have you respected the child? You have always respected the past - have you ever respected your children's future?

YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR CHILDREN'S LAND: LET THIS LOVE BE YOUR NEW NOBILITY - THE UNDISCOVERED LAND IN THE FURTHEST SEA! I BID YOUR SAILS SEEK IT AND SEEK IT!

YOU SHALL MAKE AMENDS TO YOUR CHILDREN FOR BEING THE CHILDREN OF YOUR FATHERS: THUS YOU SHALL REDEEM ALL THAT IS PAST! THIS NEW LAW-TABLE DO I PUT OVER YOU!

Being redeemed from the past is a great spiritual freedom - as if you are absolutely new on the earth; you don't have any past. You are as fresh as a roseflower opening this morning, as fresh as the dewdrops on the lotus leaf, as fresh as the morning breeze, as fresh as the first ray of the sun early in the morning.

Get free of the past.

The past is the only barrier in your spiritual growth. And getting free of it is not a difficult thing, because it is only your memories.

It is just in your mind.

And to clean the mind of all the dust that the past has left over it will make your consciousness a mirror - so clean that you can reflect the whole future in it: the new nobility, the new values, the superman.

I was surprised to find the word godliness used by Zarathustra, because perhaps for twenty-five centuries nobody has used that word. I have been using it, destroying God as a person and reviving a new sense, a new sensitivity about godliness, as a quality.

God created man, and that is something to be hated and to be ashamed of; because to be created means to be nothing but puppets. Then you don't have your own soul. And if somebody can create you he can de-create you. You are just in the hands of a despot.

Godliness, on the other hand, is something that you are to create. God made you all slaves; godliness will make you all supermen, creators. That will be your greatest creation.

Godliness consists of innocence, of silence, of peace, of truth, of authenticity, of the experience of your own inner light, your own inner being - the experience of your eternity.

Godliness is going to be the future religion of man.

God has to be worshiped; godliness has not to be worshiped but to be created. And by creating godliness you reach to your highest peak of consciousness, to the most beautiful space and the greatest ecstasy.

... THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.

Okay, Maneesha?

Yes, Osho.