Osho Life Essentials
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Man is a bridge, says Osho, between the animal and the divine – and our awareness of this dual aspect of our nature is what makes us human. It is also what makes us restless, full of conflict, so often at the crossroads of selfishness and generosity, of love and hate, frailty and strength, hope and despair. He looks into how we might embrace and accept these apparent contradictions, rather than trying to choose between them, as the key to transforming each twist and turn of life’s journey into a new discovery of who we are meant to be.
Content:
Introduction
1 The Journey of Being Human
2 From Cradle to Grave
3 In Search of the Soul
4 Suffering in a Dream
5 Extraordinarily Ordinary
Epilogue: The Mine of your Treasures is within you
Exerpt from the epilogue:
What do you think about the sentence: "without utopias, nothing is going
to get better." is it bullshit?
It is not.
Without utopia, nothing is going to be better is a fundamental truth. Utopia
simply means that we are not satisfied with the society we are living in;
that we are utterly frustrated with the structure that has been imposed upon
us; that there is tremendous discontent about everything.
Utopia is simply a desire to find a better society, a better humanity, a
better educational system, a better togetherness, a better state of
relationship between man and woman, between parents and children.
Utopia is simply a disgust with the status quo.
All the vested interests would like to support the sentence that the idea of
utopia is bullshit, because they would like you just to be satisfied and
contented, like buffaloes, eating grass -- the same grass their whole life
-- as if they are born only to eat that grass, and then die.
You will be surprised to know a few things. Have you seen animals making
love? Then you must have noted that they don't seem happy while they are
making love. They don't seem to be euphoric. They seem to be in a despair,
sad, as if out of some necessity, a biological force, they have to make love.
That is the reason that when their season of love is passed they don't even
look at the female, they don't look at the male; all connections are
finished, there is not even friendship. Their love is something mechanical,
forced. It is not a joy, a pleasure. So for what are they living? -- just
eating grass, and then one day dying?
The vested interests in the human world would also like you to be like
buffaloes. Remain satisfied in your poverty, remain satisfied in your
sickness, remain satisfied in your death, remain satisfied in your misery,
suffering, anguish. There should be no trouble, no reward, no effort to make
things better, so they can go on exploiting you without any hindrance,
without even feeling guilt that they are exploiting you.
There are all kinds of parasites: the priests are there, the politicians are
there. Their whole interest is that you remain in a state of coma, you
remain in a state of sleepwalking... just sleepy and dozey, somehow doing
the work but never bothering that things can be better.
And they have convinced people for thousands of years that this is how life
is, nothing more is possible. Suffering is your fate; despair is your
destiny. It is all willed by God; you cannot change it. In India they say
that not even a leaf of a tree can move without the will of God. So what
else can you do?
It is not a coincidence that for ten thousand years India has never seen any
revolution. And India has the worst social system; one fourth of the Hindus
have lived almost like cattle. They are untouchable. They have been reduced
to being even worse than animals. Animals are not untouchable, but those
human beings are untouchable. Not only are those human beings untouchable,
their shadows are also untouchable. If a shadow of an untouchable person
falls over you, you have to take a bath to purify yourself.
And they have convinced these people for thousands of years that this is
their fate, nothing can be done about it. In India, nobody has ever written
a book like Sir Thomas More's UTOPIA. Not that Indians have not written
anything; they have written perhaps the most significant and voluminous
literature. But there is not a single book which gives hope of some kind, a
possibility of change, a revolution. No, these words are not used at all.
This is what they want all over the world. So whoever has said that utopia,
the very idea of utopia, is bullshit, is himself bullshitting. It is his own
bullshit.
Utopia is certainly an absolute necessity.
Once humanity gets free from all fetters and imprisonments, once we have
made utopia a reality, then perhaps utopia may not be necessary. But I don't
think so, because we can never make anything perfect. Perfection is not part
of existence; everything remains imperfect. It goes on becoming better and
better, it goes on coming closer and closer to perfection, but it never
becomes perfect. And there is a reason, a very significant reason, why it is
so: the moment anything becomes perfect, it dies.
Perfection is death.
The vice versa is not true. I am not saying that death is perfection;
otherwise everybody who dies will become perfect. Death is not perfection,
but perfection is certainly death, because once you bring anything to
perfection, then growth stops. Then there is nothing more, nowhere to go,
nothing else to do.
Human energy needs a constant flow to remain alive. It is like a river, not
like a pond. It needs to go on flowing, changing, in different plains and
mountains, until it reaches to the ocean.
A pond simply goes nowhere. That's how the vested interests want the society
to be -- a pond which goes nowhere, which simply evaporates and dies and
leaves dirty mud behind.
Life energies are a river, and a river that never reaches to the ocean, a
river that is always seeking and searching, that is always finding -- but
there is always more to find.