What is the difference between being in control and being responsible in life?

Osho, can you talk about responsibility and what it means for us? I feel its importance more and more, but I am also confused about it. Am I avoiding something?

What I am saying is that if they had experienced it at its peak, its grip over them would have been lost. Then their whole life they would not be looking at PLAYBOY magazines; there would be no need. And they would not be dreaming about sex, having sexual fantasies. They would not be reading third-rate novels and looking at Hollywood movies. All this is possible because they have been denied their birthright. In the aboriginal society they live together in the night. One rule only is told to them: "Don't be with one girl more than three days, because she is not your property, you are not her property. You have to become acquainted with all the girls, and she has to become acquainted with all the boys before you choose your life partner." Now, this seems to be absolutely sane. Before choosing a life partner you should be…

... Good! This will be your name: Swami Deva Ashawa. Deva means divine and ashawa means wine. That's what I would like you to be -- a divine drunkard. And the possibility is there (laughter), so don't get scared! You are ready for many things, you just have to take courage. Your energy is very innocent and pure, but you have been avoiding. Now this becomes your first commitment, involvement. Now your bogie is hitched with my bogie (laughter). It is a sort of hitch-hiking, mm? And change to orange! [A sannyasin asks a question on behalf of Geetam Rajneesh Meditation Centre: They say that there's only one thing that's separating them from enlightenment. They want to know the difference between spontaneity and irresponsibility.] Mm, mm.... It is a significant question, and it has to be understood.

Beloved Osho, "living in the here and now, acting spontaneously," will I find that my actions will still be guided by experience and responsibility?

Only one thing is eternally true, and that is your consciousness. And if you can bring your consciousness to the present, you cannot go wrong. Whatever you do out of that consciousness is always going to be right, not according to any criterion, but just because it is coming out of a total awareness. Out of total awareness nobody has ever done anything wrong. According to me, right is what comes out of your spontaneity and out of your consciousness and out of your presence here and now. And what is not out of your spontaneity, consciousness and your being here and now is wrong. There is no other criterion than what I have just told you. All other criteria are dead. They may have been living at one time, but that time is past. Heraclitus is right, you cannot step in the same river twice. And he was stating…

On the one hand you are giving ultimate freedom to do whatsoever we want to do, and on the other hand you are giving responsibility. With responsibility, I cannot use the word 'freedom' as I want, hence I have to wait for the right meaning of freedom. The moment I get it, I get it with responsibility. Osho, when I understand I feel'thank you'. Otherwise, I would like to use, and I have already used it as a licence.

IT is one of the perennial questions of humanity: the question of freedom and responsibility. If you are free, you interpret it as if now there is no responsibility. Just a hundred years ago Friedrich Nietzsche declared, "God is dead, and man is free." And the next sentence he wrote is, "Now you can do whatsoever you want to do. There is no responsibility. God is dead, man is free, and there is no responsibility." There he was absolutely wrong; when there is no God, there is TREMENDOUS responsibility on your shoulders. If there is a God, he can share your responsibility. You can throw your responsibility on Him: you can say, "It is YOU who have made the world; it is YOU who have made me in this way; it is YOU who is finally, ultimately, responsible, not me. How can I be ultimately responsible? I am just a…

Osho, in an earlier discourse you said that each human being is himself responsible for his good and bad deeds. But in this morning’s talk you said that everything happens according to the laws of the Vast, the Brahman energy. Then how can a person himself be responsible for his actions?

There are two planes. One is the plane of the ignorant—there you must understand in the language of the ignorant. The other is the plane of the wise—there too you must understand in its own light. Great confusion often arises because the ignorant live on the ignorant’s plane but speak the language of the wise; then difficulties multiply. This happens every day. It has certainly happened in our country. Because there was so much talk of wisdom here that even the ignorant learned to repeat it. They too began to mouth the words of knowledge. They live as the ignorant, act as the ignorant, carry the ignorant’s load—yet at the convenient time they speak as the enlightened. A man in my neighborhood died; I went to their house. The neighbors had gathered. Everyone was consoling them: “The soul is immortal.” I thought, how many sages in this neighborhood! “The soul…