Shiksha Main Kranti #18
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Read in Original Hindi (मूल हिन्दी)
Questions in this Discourse
Many scholars of the East and the West have offered countless explanations, trying to draw the thin line between understanding and exaggeration. Even Kahlil Gibran went so far as to say that exaggeration is the dead body of understanding. Cruelty is the outcome of the antithesis of love—the coward’s escape. If I may say so, sir, it is non-vision—or non-understanding—that brings all the brutalities and chaos in society. Would you please shed light on this aspect of life?
In this regard, two things must be understood. It is true that all the chaos of life, all misery, all cruelty is the fruit of unknowing—of ignorance. And ignorance runs deep. The greatest reason why ignorance deepens, or knowledge arises, is the absence of a centered mind—standing at a point between two extremes. Exaggeration is an extreme. And truth is never at the extremes. Like a clock’s pendulum swings from one end to the other and does not pause in the center, our mind too keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. It never stops where there is no excess—where there is the middle. Only a mind that has come to rest in the middle attains knowledge. A mind swaying on the extremes never does.
First: the one who keeps oscillating from one extreme to the other can never be still, because it is impossible to stay at an extreme. You can touch an extreme, but the moment you touch it, the return begins. No one can abide on an extreme. And a mind that cannot become still cannot know truth. A mind tossing in incessant motion is like an ocean in storm. A quiet mind can become a mirror for truth. Hence all understanding arises in the mind that is quiet. And only the mind that avoids both extremes and stands in the middle can be quiet.
What Confucius called the golden mean, what Buddha called samyak-jnana, and Mahavira called samyakta—all mean the same: a point where we are not on an extreme. We are neither for nor against. The one who is for, full of insistence on the “pro,” is prejudiced; the one who is against, full of insistence on the “anti,” is equally prejudiced. And a prejudiced mind—laden with for or against—cannot be capable of knowing truth. What is needed is an impartial mind. And the mind will be impartial only when it stands on no extreme. Extremes blind. To be on an extreme is to be blind; and how can the blind know? So two or three things need to be understood.
First: ordinarily our mind lives in extremes. Either we love or we hate. Either we become a friend to someone in mad attachment, or in the same madness we become an enemy. The one who has become madly entangled in love, in attachment, will not be able to understand. The one who has become madly hostile, standing in opposition, filled with hate, will not be able to understand either.
To understand requires a mind with no insistence—neither of attachment nor of aversion. Only then will our seeing be clear, impartial, pristine. We are either friends or enemies; we are almost never in the middle. Therefore we fail to understand both our friends and our enemies. We take our friends to be as we would like them to be, and our enemies to be as we have assumed them to be.
But how a person actually is—we do not come to know. To know, we have to stand between friend and enemy. And the same applies to everything. In relation to all truths of life, if we carry an insistence—and insistence always lives at an extreme—then the stronger the insistence, the farther we drift to the extreme. To understand truth, a disposition of non-insistence is needed: a state that has no insistence, that simply wants to see. In such a state of seeing, the mind will have to stand in the middle. One has to drop friendship and enmity, attachment and aversion, and stand at a point where our mind is not influenced by anything.
And when the mind is not influenced, it becomes unmoving. Influences make the mind tremble. All the vibrations in the mind arise out of being affected. When a mind is utterly unaffected, it is vibrationless—neither leaning to the left nor to the right, neither leftist nor rightist; it simply is, with no ism at all. In that moment of stillness, understanding—knowing—is born.
Confucius once went to a village. The villagers said, “There lives here a very wise man; please meet him.” Confucius asked, “Why do you call him very wise? What have you found in him that makes you say so?” They replied, “He is so wise that before doing anything he thinks at least three times. Even to take a single step, he thinks three times before he lifts his foot.” Confucius said, “Then I will not meet him, because the one who thinks only once before acting is on one extreme, and the one who thinks three times before acting is on the other extreme. Thinking twice is enough; that is the middle.” Confucius said, “I call wise the one who abides in the middle, who stands where things are balanced—in between. Only in this in-between state is knowledge born.”
Raga means color. Whenever the mind gets dyed in a color—whether of friendship or of enmity—it can no longer see what is. To see what is, the mind must be without any color. All excess, all exaggeration, is a kind of coloring. A man who is a Hindu—that is an excess; a man who is a Muslim—that is an excess; a man who is a capitalist—that is an excess; a man who is a communist—that is an excess. None of these will be able to understand the situation of life as it is.
And there is a further amusing fact: as I said, the mind never rests; upon reaching an extreme it starts turning into its opposite. An extreme is such a limit-point that one cannot stay there. You only touch it and the return begins. Only in the middle can one remain. If a clock’s pendulum is to be held still, it must be at the center; if it is not to be still, it can swing on the extremes.
And note this strange law: when the pendulum reaches the farthest point on the left, it is the very energy gained in going left that carries it to the extreme on the right; and the energy that takes it to the right will bring it back to the left. Therefore, the person who goes to an extreme invariably turns into his opposite.
If someone loves a person madly, there is great likelihood that very soon he will become a mad enemy, because it is difficult to stay at that extreme; the pendulum will begin to return.
Food is life-giving. But if a man goes on eating and eating, that very life-giving food will soon turn into a poison that snatches life. Excess food will kill. Food gives life; excess food kills. And the one who overeats will feel, “Food killed me.” He will not feel that it was excess that killed him; he will think food did. So the glutton very quickly takes to fasting. Fasting is the other extreme—and fasting too will kill. What is needed is right food: the middle way, where there is neither fasting nor overeating. The one who eats too much will soon swing to fasting; the one who fasts will soon become eager to overeat.
This swing will run through every facet of our lives. And the more the mind lives in extremes, the more it will go on converting into its opposite, and therefore never be able to see what is. To see what is—that alone is understanding: in all circumstances, in relation to persons, situations, problems, to see what is, just as it is. But this is possible only when I am utterly quiet, steady, at rest—when there is no vibration in my mind, no attachment, no coloring, no burden of excess. When I am simply silent and still, then I can understand.
Yet this does not happen. Either a man is a sensualist—then he is at the extreme of indulgence—or the same man tomorrow becomes a renunciate and grabs the extreme of renunciation. But he never stands in the middle, where both indulgence and renunciation are absent, where things come to rest and grow quiet. Hence it often happens that poor societies become materialistic; poverty makes a society materialist. A rich society soon begins to turn spiritualist, religious. These extremes keep swinging.
Once this land was wealthy, so it was spiritualist; if not the whole land, at least those who were wealthy were spiritualist. Now the country is poor, so it will be materialist. In America, wealth has grown so much, reached such an extreme, that now it has become necessary to think of renunciation; now they are thinking of renunciation. Now religion has great appeal there; there is much reflection on religion. This too is an East–West swing of extremes.
Ordinarily an individual too never settles in the middle. And the one who does not remain in the middle will never give birth to understanding. And the one in whom understanding does not arise will be a source of all kinds of chaos, sorrows, hardnesses, cruelties—for his unawareness can do nothing else. Whatever is done in unawareness—even if done with thoughts of another’s welfare—will bring harm. Whether I act for benefit or harm is not the important question. Whether I act with understanding or in unawareness—that is the important question. A good deed done in unawareness also brings harm. And when there is understanding, harm cannot be done. Therefore, whatever is done becomes beneficial.
It is also true that all the cruelties, harshnesses, and violence we see in human life are the outcome of lack of understanding. And that is why we cannot change a man’s harshness directly. If we can bring understanding to him, his harshness will depart on its own. Telling a violent person to be nonviolent will not make him nonviolent. Yes, it may happen that the violent man begins to look nonviolent, but only this much will change: the violence he was inflicting on others he will start inflicting upon himself. From one extreme—hurting others—he will move to the other extreme—hurting himself. Yesterday he was cutting other people’s bodies; now he will cut and torture his own. But he will not become nonviolent. Hence I say: the violent do not need preaching about nonviolence; the violent need a state of mind from which they can look while standing in the middle; then they will become nonviolent on their own.
All the conflicts in the world, all sects and creeds, all isms—these are born of extremes. If human understanding were deep and clear, there would be no sects in the world, because there would be no extremes.
First: the one who keeps oscillating from one extreme to the other can never be still, because it is impossible to stay at an extreme. You can touch an extreme, but the moment you touch it, the return begins. No one can abide on an extreme. And a mind that cannot become still cannot know truth. A mind tossing in incessant motion is like an ocean in storm. A quiet mind can become a mirror for truth. Hence all understanding arises in the mind that is quiet. And only the mind that avoids both extremes and stands in the middle can be quiet.
What Confucius called the golden mean, what Buddha called samyak-jnana, and Mahavira called samyakta—all mean the same: a point where we are not on an extreme. We are neither for nor against. The one who is for, full of insistence on the “pro,” is prejudiced; the one who is against, full of insistence on the “anti,” is equally prejudiced. And a prejudiced mind—laden with for or against—cannot be capable of knowing truth. What is needed is an impartial mind. And the mind will be impartial only when it stands on no extreme. Extremes blind. To be on an extreme is to be blind; and how can the blind know? So two or three things need to be understood.
First: ordinarily our mind lives in extremes. Either we love or we hate. Either we become a friend to someone in mad attachment, or in the same madness we become an enemy. The one who has become madly entangled in love, in attachment, will not be able to understand. The one who has become madly hostile, standing in opposition, filled with hate, will not be able to understand either.
To understand requires a mind with no insistence—neither of attachment nor of aversion. Only then will our seeing be clear, impartial, pristine. We are either friends or enemies; we are almost never in the middle. Therefore we fail to understand both our friends and our enemies. We take our friends to be as we would like them to be, and our enemies to be as we have assumed them to be.
But how a person actually is—we do not come to know. To know, we have to stand between friend and enemy. And the same applies to everything. In relation to all truths of life, if we carry an insistence—and insistence always lives at an extreme—then the stronger the insistence, the farther we drift to the extreme. To understand truth, a disposition of non-insistence is needed: a state that has no insistence, that simply wants to see. In such a state of seeing, the mind will have to stand in the middle. One has to drop friendship and enmity, attachment and aversion, and stand at a point where our mind is not influenced by anything.
And when the mind is not influenced, it becomes unmoving. Influences make the mind tremble. All the vibrations in the mind arise out of being affected. When a mind is utterly unaffected, it is vibrationless—neither leaning to the left nor to the right, neither leftist nor rightist; it simply is, with no ism at all. In that moment of stillness, understanding—knowing—is born.
Confucius once went to a village. The villagers said, “There lives here a very wise man; please meet him.” Confucius asked, “Why do you call him very wise? What have you found in him that makes you say so?” They replied, “He is so wise that before doing anything he thinks at least three times. Even to take a single step, he thinks three times before he lifts his foot.” Confucius said, “Then I will not meet him, because the one who thinks only once before acting is on one extreme, and the one who thinks three times before acting is on the other extreme. Thinking twice is enough; that is the middle.” Confucius said, “I call wise the one who abides in the middle, who stands where things are balanced—in between. Only in this in-between state is knowledge born.”
Raga means color. Whenever the mind gets dyed in a color—whether of friendship or of enmity—it can no longer see what is. To see what is, the mind must be without any color. All excess, all exaggeration, is a kind of coloring. A man who is a Hindu—that is an excess; a man who is a Muslim—that is an excess; a man who is a capitalist—that is an excess; a man who is a communist—that is an excess. None of these will be able to understand the situation of life as it is.
And there is a further amusing fact: as I said, the mind never rests; upon reaching an extreme it starts turning into its opposite. An extreme is such a limit-point that one cannot stay there. You only touch it and the return begins. Only in the middle can one remain. If a clock’s pendulum is to be held still, it must be at the center; if it is not to be still, it can swing on the extremes.
And note this strange law: when the pendulum reaches the farthest point on the left, it is the very energy gained in going left that carries it to the extreme on the right; and the energy that takes it to the right will bring it back to the left. Therefore, the person who goes to an extreme invariably turns into his opposite.
If someone loves a person madly, there is great likelihood that very soon he will become a mad enemy, because it is difficult to stay at that extreme; the pendulum will begin to return.
Food is life-giving. But if a man goes on eating and eating, that very life-giving food will soon turn into a poison that snatches life. Excess food will kill. Food gives life; excess food kills. And the one who overeats will feel, “Food killed me.” He will not feel that it was excess that killed him; he will think food did. So the glutton very quickly takes to fasting. Fasting is the other extreme—and fasting too will kill. What is needed is right food: the middle way, where there is neither fasting nor overeating. The one who eats too much will soon swing to fasting; the one who fasts will soon become eager to overeat.
This swing will run through every facet of our lives. And the more the mind lives in extremes, the more it will go on converting into its opposite, and therefore never be able to see what is. To see what is—that alone is understanding: in all circumstances, in relation to persons, situations, problems, to see what is, just as it is. But this is possible only when I am utterly quiet, steady, at rest—when there is no vibration in my mind, no attachment, no coloring, no burden of excess. When I am simply silent and still, then I can understand.
Yet this does not happen. Either a man is a sensualist—then he is at the extreme of indulgence—or the same man tomorrow becomes a renunciate and grabs the extreme of renunciation. But he never stands in the middle, where both indulgence and renunciation are absent, where things come to rest and grow quiet. Hence it often happens that poor societies become materialistic; poverty makes a society materialist. A rich society soon begins to turn spiritualist, religious. These extremes keep swinging.
Once this land was wealthy, so it was spiritualist; if not the whole land, at least those who were wealthy were spiritualist. Now the country is poor, so it will be materialist. In America, wealth has grown so much, reached such an extreme, that now it has become necessary to think of renunciation; now they are thinking of renunciation. Now religion has great appeal there; there is much reflection on religion. This too is an East–West swing of extremes.
Ordinarily an individual too never settles in the middle. And the one who does not remain in the middle will never give birth to understanding. And the one in whom understanding does not arise will be a source of all kinds of chaos, sorrows, hardnesses, cruelties—for his unawareness can do nothing else. Whatever is done in unawareness—even if done with thoughts of another’s welfare—will bring harm. Whether I act for benefit or harm is not the important question. Whether I act with understanding or in unawareness—that is the important question. A good deed done in unawareness also brings harm. And when there is understanding, harm cannot be done. Therefore, whatever is done becomes beneficial.
It is also true that all the cruelties, harshnesses, and violence we see in human life are the outcome of lack of understanding. And that is why we cannot change a man’s harshness directly. If we can bring understanding to him, his harshness will depart on its own. Telling a violent person to be nonviolent will not make him nonviolent. Yes, it may happen that the violent man begins to look nonviolent, but only this much will change: the violence he was inflicting on others he will start inflicting upon himself. From one extreme—hurting others—he will move to the other extreme—hurting himself. Yesterday he was cutting other people’s bodies; now he will cut and torture his own. But he will not become nonviolent. Hence I say: the violent do not need preaching about nonviolence; the violent need a state of mind from which they can look while standing in the middle; then they will become nonviolent on their own.
All the conflicts in the world, all sects and creeds, all isms—these are born of extremes. If human understanding were deep and clear, there would be no sects in the world, because there would be no extremes.
Do you feel, Osho, that all leaders—whether political or religious—are caught in the same dilemma?
Yes. The essential point is that to stand in the middle and be a leader is very difficult. Leadership comes easily only when one stands at an extreme, because most people’s minds live at the extremes. From any extreme, leadership can be attained. The language of the middle is so humble, so generous, that from the middle it is very hard to assume leadership.
So for the person who stands in the middle, being a leader is difficult—whether in religion or in politics. Only on the extremes is leadership easy. “All capitalists are devils; capitalism is poison”—if someone stands at such an extreme, he can become a leader of workers. Without taking that extreme, becoming a leader of workers is very difficult, because that very extremity appeals to the worker’s mind; he too is standing at an extreme. There are hardly any people in the middle, so one who stands there even struggles to find companions and friends; the numbers simply aren’t there. Yes, on the opposite extreme you will again find people.
Say “All Muslims are demons” and you can lead Hindus. Say “All Hindus are infidels” and you can lead Muslims. Yet all this is false, because one Hindu is not like another Hindu; one Muslim is not like another Muslim. But only at such extremes do people’s minds get influenced, because people themselves live at the extremes. That is why all leaders end up causing harm.
In truth, the world does not need leaders. And in a healthy world there will be no leaders. Leaders are leaders only of the sick. The more peaceful and wholesome the world becomes, the fewer leaders there will be. There will be people who become sources of inspiration—sources of inspiration who will not even know that they are sources. Such quiet people will certainly be there. There have been people in the world who stood where the middle is. But as long as they stood in the middle, the world did not even look at them. Only when people gathered around them who threw away their middle-ness and stretched their words to the extremes did leadership come to them.
Mahavira, Buddha, Jesus, Socrates—none of them attained leadership in their lifetimes. Leadership came after their deaths, and because of those who dragged things to the extremes. Until something is pushed to an extreme—so that the feverish in their extremism can grasp it—no one attains leadership. Therefore leaders have proved harmful. Leaders are not needed. The world needs understanding people. Such wise ones will become sources of inspiration. They will not even know it, but waves of peace will begin to spread around them; light will begin to radiate. Many will find their lives inspired and wonder from what point they stood that such peace became available—and how they too might arrive at that point.
A person utterly still and standing in the middle will be so quiet that it takes great quiet to catch his influence. He will not come into our notice, because he has no fever, no agitation—and without fever, leadership is very difficult. The more feverish we can make people, the more we can drive them mad, the more mania we can create, the more danger we can conjure and the more we can frighten them, the easier leadership becomes.
People like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao can be leaders—and great leaders—because they speak from a great extreme. Even people like Gandhi can be leaders, because they too speak from a great extreme. If one side speaks from the extreme of violence, Gandhi speaks from the extreme of nonviolence. The extreme is seductive; it is flavorful. But the truly middle person falls outside our grasp. What he says will be so quiet, so true, so in-between that it becomes difficult for us to hold it.
If someone were to ask Buddha, “Is there God?” Buddha would say, “There may be.” And if someone were to ask, “Is there no God?” he would say, “There may not be.” How can such a person assume leadership? Buddha is so perfectly in the middle. It is like this: in a room a glass is kept half-filled with water. One man comes out and says the glass is half empty; another says it is half full. These two can argue; two parties can form. A third man, utterly in the middle, having seen the whole, returns and says, “The glass is both half empty and half full.” He will say, “You are right, and you are right—and you are wrong, and you are wrong. It both is and is not half. It is half empty and also not; half full and also not.”
Such a man makes such a humble proposition that leadership will be very hard to come to him, because this creates no fever. People will move away and say, “What sort of man is this? He says yes to everything—he calls this right and that right!” Until someone declares with intensity, at an extreme, and claims an absolute truth—“This is the ultimate truth”—leadership does not come. Therefore all leadership exploits people’s lack of understanding and creates a vicious circle: it exploits ignorance and also increases it.
Leaders have done no good in the world. Nor have followers done any good. Now we need a world where there are no leaders and no followers. We need people who are sources of peace, who stand in the middle where the extremes of life dissolve and where that which is becomes visible. And in this exceedingly delicate, supremely subtle experience of the middle, they will either call both extremes false, or they will call both true at once—for at that point these are the only two possibilities: either say both are right, or say both are wrong. Because what is, is different from both.
All the suffering, quarrel, and conflict in the world is because of leaders and followers. We need to cultivate such understanding that no one becomes anyone’s follower. And remember: the urge and effort to become a leader is itself a reprehensible sin, a crime. Because you must then say the sort of things required by the kind of people you want to lead. If they are insane, then among the insane only someone more insane can be their leader—someone who displays such madness that the mad become his followers. And the world is in ignorance and lack of understanding. Therefore the leader who speaks the most foolishness gains leadership the fastest.
In fact, it is mischievous and troublemaking types who assume leadership, because their minds are so full of disturbance that when people see someone even more disruptive than themselves, they begin to follow him. What the world needs now are sources of inspiration—such inspirers as are like a still lake, in whose presence our minds feel, “Let us also taste such stillness.” Who are like a quiet light, in whose presence we feel, “Such quiet is possible within us too.”
So for the person who stands in the middle, being a leader is difficult—whether in religion or in politics. Only on the extremes is leadership easy. “All capitalists are devils; capitalism is poison”—if someone stands at such an extreme, he can become a leader of workers. Without taking that extreme, becoming a leader of workers is very difficult, because that very extremity appeals to the worker’s mind; he too is standing at an extreme. There are hardly any people in the middle, so one who stands there even struggles to find companions and friends; the numbers simply aren’t there. Yes, on the opposite extreme you will again find people.
Say “All Muslims are demons” and you can lead Hindus. Say “All Hindus are infidels” and you can lead Muslims. Yet all this is false, because one Hindu is not like another Hindu; one Muslim is not like another Muslim. But only at such extremes do people’s minds get influenced, because people themselves live at the extremes. That is why all leaders end up causing harm.
In truth, the world does not need leaders. And in a healthy world there will be no leaders. Leaders are leaders only of the sick. The more peaceful and wholesome the world becomes, the fewer leaders there will be. There will be people who become sources of inspiration—sources of inspiration who will not even know that they are sources. Such quiet people will certainly be there. There have been people in the world who stood where the middle is. But as long as they stood in the middle, the world did not even look at them. Only when people gathered around them who threw away their middle-ness and stretched their words to the extremes did leadership come to them.
Mahavira, Buddha, Jesus, Socrates—none of them attained leadership in their lifetimes. Leadership came after their deaths, and because of those who dragged things to the extremes. Until something is pushed to an extreme—so that the feverish in their extremism can grasp it—no one attains leadership. Therefore leaders have proved harmful. Leaders are not needed. The world needs understanding people. Such wise ones will become sources of inspiration. They will not even know it, but waves of peace will begin to spread around them; light will begin to radiate. Many will find their lives inspired and wonder from what point they stood that such peace became available—and how they too might arrive at that point.
A person utterly still and standing in the middle will be so quiet that it takes great quiet to catch his influence. He will not come into our notice, because he has no fever, no agitation—and without fever, leadership is very difficult. The more feverish we can make people, the more we can drive them mad, the more mania we can create, the more danger we can conjure and the more we can frighten them, the easier leadership becomes.
People like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao can be leaders—and great leaders—because they speak from a great extreme. Even people like Gandhi can be leaders, because they too speak from a great extreme. If one side speaks from the extreme of violence, Gandhi speaks from the extreme of nonviolence. The extreme is seductive; it is flavorful. But the truly middle person falls outside our grasp. What he says will be so quiet, so true, so in-between that it becomes difficult for us to hold it.
If someone were to ask Buddha, “Is there God?” Buddha would say, “There may be.” And if someone were to ask, “Is there no God?” he would say, “There may not be.” How can such a person assume leadership? Buddha is so perfectly in the middle. It is like this: in a room a glass is kept half-filled with water. One man comes out and says the glass is half empty; another says it is half full. These two can argue; two parties can form. A third man, utterly in the middle, having seen the whole, returns and says, “The glass is both half empty and half full.” He will say, “You are right, and you are right—and you are wrong, and you are wrong. It both is and is not half. It is half empty and also not; half full and also not.”
Such a man makes such a humble proposition that leadership will be very hard to come to him, because this creates no fever. People will move away and say, “What sort of man is this? He says yes to everything—he calls this right and that right!” Until someone declares with intensity, at an extreme, and claims an absolute truth—“This is the ultimate truth”—leadership does not come. Therefore all leadership exploits people’s lack of understanding and creates a vicious circle: it exploits ignorance and also increases it.
Leaders have done no good in the world. Nor have followers done any good. Now we need a world where there are no leaders and no followers. We need people who are sources of peace, who stand in the middle where the extremes of life dissolve and where that which is becomes visible. And in this exceedingly delicate, supremely subtle experience of the middle, they will either call both extremes false, or they will call both true at once—for at that point these are the only two possibilities: either say both are right, or say both are wrong. Because what is, is different from both.
All the suffering, quarrel, and conflict in the world is because of leaders and followers. We need to cultivate such understanding that no one becomes anyone’s follower. And remember: the urge and effort to become a leader is itself a reprehensible sin, a crime. Because you must then say the sort of things required by the kind of people you want to lead. If they are insane, then among the insane only someone more insane can be their leader—someone who displays such madness that the mad become his followers. And the world is in ignorance and lack of understanding. Therefore the leader who speaks the most foolishness gains leadership the fastest.
In fact, it is mischievous and troublemaking types who assume leadership, because their minds are so full of disturbance that when people see someone even more disruptive than themselves, they begin to follow him. What the world needs now are sources of inspiration—such inspirers as are like a still lake, in whose presence our minds feel, “Let us also taste such stillness.” Who are like a quiet light, in whose presence we feel, “Such quiet is possible within us too.”
Don’t you feel, Osho, that when we live in society we require some kind of technical know‑how? As academic subjects we study economics or politics at college or university. There is also one kind of extremity. For example, was not Einstein an extremist, or Karl Marx? And how can we avoid this kind of extremity?
Osho’s Answer:
No. Studying a subject is specialization, not extremity. To devote one’s life to a single subject is essential, because life is vast. Life is indivisible; to split it is difficult. In the depths of life, mathematics and music are interconnected. But man is so small, so limited, that if he tries to grasp the indivisibility of life, he will end up knowing nothing, discovering nothing.
So we break life into pieces—because of the mind’s limitations—and then study one piece at a time. Life is so immense, so infinite, and man so small, that even if we fully understand one tiny leaf on one small branch of that vast tree, it is enough.
People like Einstein are not extreme. People like Einstein are deeply balanced. They study a narrow field, yes, but within it they maintain great even‑mindedness; otherwise they could not come close to truth. A scientist is, by necessity, extremely even‑minded; without that, the search for truth is impossible.
In my view, so‑called religious people are often less even‑minded than a truly scientific mind. A scientific mind must be even‑minded, or else it cannot discover truth—not even an inch of it. Granted, the field may be small, but even that small field is vast.
So people like Einstein are profoundly even‑minded. And I also hold that the even‑mindedness they cultivate in science brings to their consciousness the same benefits that meditation brings to a meditator. They arrive by another route at the same place. When Einstein is absorbed in solving a mathematical riddle, he is no less silent than any meditator in the world. If he were agitated, he could not solve it. He can penetrate such distant, deep entanglements of mathematics only because he is silent to that depth. He is that impartial. He takes no side.
The fundamental premise of science is that discovery is possible only for one who enters without taking sides; who goes in unprejudiced; who does not decide in advance what is right or wrong; who goes admitting, “I don’t know.” The first axiom of science is: “I don’t know.” Only then can inquiry begin.
So I do not call such people extreme. They are not at an extreme. They are practicing even‑mindedness—within a narrow direction. And narrowing the direction is necessary. Five or ten thousand years ago, one person could study everything because knowledge was scarce. The same person might be a physician, a poet, a religious teacher—everything—because knowledge was so little that one person could encompass it. As knowledge grew, difficulties increased. Each small thing proved so large that an entire science came to be built around it.
There was a time when “philosophy” meant all knowledge. That’s why, even today, whatever the field, we award a PhD—Doctor of Philosophy—merely out of habit. Someone researches in chemistry, and we give him a Doctor of Philosophy. It’s just an old habit from the days when philosophy was the only discipline. Even today at Oxford, outside the Physics Department the old signboard reads “Natural Philosophy.” It is a relic from when physics was called natural philosophy.
Once, philosophy was the single subject; in it everything was included. To know philosophy was to know all. Slowly, as our depth increased, it became clear there are infinite branches. We had to separate science. Then we realized science itself could not remain one; we had to split it into dozens of parts. Chemistry and physics became distinct. Later we had to split chemistry into organic and inorganic. Once we studied the whole body; now we see the whole body is far too big a phenomenon.
So now you have a doctor who studies only the eye.
I heard a joke: Five hundred years from now, in a great metropolis, a woman goes to an eye doctor and says, “I have terrible trouble with my eye.” He takes her inside and asks, “Which eye?” She says, “The left eye.” The doctor replies, “Sorry, I’m only a right‑eye specialist. For the left eye you’ll have to go to someone else.”
The eye is such a vast phenomenon that, though it’s a joke, the possibility is there that someday the right eye and the left eye will have different specialists. Even today there are so many books just on the eye that if one person worked a whole lifetime, he still could not read them all. So scientific specialization is not extremism. Knowledge has expanded; we must divide it and go deep into one small fragment.
But even one who goes deep into a small fragment must meet the same condition: he cannot be at an extreme. If he is extreme, he cannot inquire. He must be balanced, standing in the middle while he explores. He must allow for all possibilities—“It could be this, or it could be that”—without any inner insistence that “this must not be.” Anything may be!
I have heard that a young man worked with Einstein on experiments. They tried hundreds of times and failed each time. The young man grew tired and frustrated, but Einstein remained full of enthusiasm. One day the young man said, “We have failed so many times, and yet you continue with the same enthusiasm!” Einstein said, “Failed? There is no question of failure. We have explored so many alternatives and discovered they are not the way. We are succeeding every day.”
Do not connect specialized inquiry with extremism. Even in the smallest domain, the same prerequisites apply: to be even‑minded, to be centered, to be impartial, unprejudiced. In fact, I believe science has opened the greatest doorway to save man from extremes—more than anyone else ever has. What religion only talked about got lost in religious extremism. Science has demonstrated on the experimental plane that there is no place for the extremist. In truth, science says: if someone comes already believing that “this is the truth,” there is no place for him in science. The first condition is that one comes admitting, “I do not know what truth is.” There is not even the slightest leaning that “this should be the truth.”
A Dr. Banerjee, who researches reincarnation, once met me in Bombay. A curious event occurred. Some twenty‑five or thirty friends had arranged for us to converse for an hour. As soon as we began he said, “I want to prove scientifically that reincarnation is.” I told him, “The first condition for being scientific is that you don’t want to prove anything of your own. You should say, ‘I want to investigate scientifically whether reincarnation is or is not.’ If you say ‘I want to prove that it is,’ the inquiry will not be scientific. You are not a scientific man. Degrees do not make one scientific. What does a scientific mind mean? Withdraw that word ‘prove’ at once. A scientist does not go to prove. That is precisely the path of the unscientific: to assume beforehand that something is true and then set out to prove it.”
A man in America wrote a book after assuming that the number thirteen is unlucky. Then he went to courts, police stations, mental asylums, hospitals, and compiled statistics: how many people die on the 13th; how many admitted on the 13th die; how many go insane on the 13th; how many accidents befall those living on the 13th floor; how many airplanes crash on the 13th; how many cars break down—he assembled all disturbances related to thirteen and “proved” that the 13th is full of misfortune. Is this scientific? If he had chosen the 12th, people also die on the 12th, and the 11th too. But he first assumed and then searched within that frame.
Life is so vast that you can find support for anything. There is nothing for which life cannot provide examples. But that is not scientific because the conclusion was fixed in advance. That gentleman felt so cornered that he thought it best to end the discussion and abruptly got up saying he suddenly remembered an urgent errand; he would come again—while the twenty‑five or thirty friends sat astonished. He had agreed to one hour and left at once.
Our minds are full of insistences! And if there is insistence, the mind will be at an extreme in any direction. Only a mind free of insistence is not extreme. For a scientist that is the first condition. Therefore I maintain that a scientific mind is essential for the search for any truth whatsoever—even for religious truth. Mahavira did not set out assuming there is a soul; nor did Buddha set out assuming there is nirvana. They went to discover whether it is so or not. If we set out assuming, we can always “prove” what we assumed; it is not difficult. But to go and inquire—“Is it so or not?”—one must not decide anything in advance; one must not be fixed at any extreme. And when we go without deciding anything, we are inevitably in the middle, because there is no leaning to either side. So the scientist is not extreme.
Can we impart the education of understanding, or is understanding the spontaneous activity of the inquiring mind which alone can have it?
Only an inquiring mind attains understanding. But we can create an education that brings forth an inquiring mind. You cannot produce it directly; you must create the indirect environment. If in a classroom the teacher says to children, “Accept what I say,” that teacher will never allow an inquiring mind to arise. Rather, a teacher should say, “Here is a proposition about truth; some people accept it, it also seems right to me. Come, let us journey together and investigate whether it is right or not. It may be right; it may also be wrong. Let us inquire.” Such a teacher imposes no belief, no faith. He invites inquiry.
A school should be an invitation to search. The whole institution should call students into inquiry—into great inquiry—and impose nothing on them. Invite them to inquire, to doubt, to reflect, to contemplate, to think about what might be.
Until now every school teaches belief. And when belief and faith are taught, when what is taught is declared the ultimate truth, an inquiring mind cannot be born. Ultimately, only the inquiring mind attains knowledge. And how to bring about such a mind—we can arrange for that in society, education, and culture.
Finally, only a seed becomes a sprout; a stone never sprouts. Yet even a seed may fail to sprout if the conditions are wrong. A seed can become a sprout, but it needs soil, water, sunlight, and the care of a loving gardener. If you plant a pebble in the best soil with the best gardener, nothing will happen. Only the seed can sprout. But the reverse is possible: a seed can remain a pebble and never sprout if you throw it onto hard ground, or on rock, and never water it. Then even a seed will prove to be like a pebble.
Our present education arrests and closes the mind; it does not open it. Thus in most people the inner potential turns to stone. Explorers are exceptions—born only once in a while. They escape our education somehow—accidentally. It is purely accidental if someone leaves the university with the spirit of inquiry intact; almost certainly it will have been destroyed, because our entire arrangement is the opposite. We impose in every way.
Imposition is easy. For a teacher, producing believers is convenient. To produce an inquiring mind is to invite trouble, because once you create it, it does not restrict itself to one domain; it inquires into every facet of life.
Society is afraid of everything being questioned, because much of what it has imposed for the sake of order is simply untrue. If questioning children appear, those lies will be uprooted. Therefore the questioning child is unwelcome.
The state does not want everything asked; it has imposed much that is false. Neither the law, nor the courts, nor fathers, nor mothers want children to ask everything—because they have hidden much that would put them in difficulty if asked.
So a person who questions is not wanted. At best, questioning is welcomed only as long as our ready‑made answers suffice. The moment he touches places where there are no answers and where we would have to admit our ignorance, we want to stop the questioning. There are few who have the courage to say, “There is much I do not know.” Few fathers can say to their child, “I know nothing about God—who he is.” “I don’t know whether the Gita is right or the Quran is right.” No father is that humble. Ego hurts so much that even before a child he claims to know everything. Few teachers have the courage to say, “I don’t know. I am searching just as you are—only I began a little earlier; you began a little later; otherwise there is no difference.”
Until we create teachers, parents, and a social climate with the humility to accept ignorance, we cannot create inquiring minds. For inquiry quickly brings everyone close to their ignorance. Ask two or three questions, and it becomes apparent that we are stuck—that beyond this the matter does not go. We don’t allow things to reach that point. We stop you at the first question: “Accept what is being said, quietly.”
So far, education has not supported the development of an exploratory mind. It has arranged everything so that the mind does not explore—it closes. We are killing our children. Our schools, in a deep sense, are strange prisons. There we create a slavery of the mind so that children will never ask. And when we ask, we are terrified of the chaos that questioning might bring, because our order is built on foolishness. I say, change that order and bring it close to truth. Do not found it on lies, because no lie can ever be beneficial at any cost.
We can create an educational arrangement in which questions slowly come alive. There will be thousands of questions for which we have no answers. That is good. Let the children search. False answers only stop their inquiry—and then they pass those false answers on to their children. In truth, very few questions have answers at present; humanity has scarcely developed. Perhaps out of a thousand questions there is one we can answer, and nine hundred ninety‑nine for which we have no answer. Yet we provide answers to all thousand.
Einstein was asked, “What is the difference between a religiously superstitious person and a scientific person?” Einstein said, “This much: ask the superstitious person a hundred questions and he will be ready with a hundred and one answers; he will never say ‘I don’t know.’ He is omniscient—he knows everything. Ask the scientific person a hundred questions, and about ninety‑nine he will straightforwardly say, ‘I know absolutely nothing.’ About the hundredth he will say, ‘What is known is this—but it is not final; it may change tomorrow. The search continues, and the search is infinite. We will never arrive at a place where we can say, “The ultimate answer has been found.”’”
We should create that climate—and slowly bring the whole system into it. Then there can be an immense explosion of genius in the world. So many flowers could bloom. Today millions of seeds die; they never flower. It seems only by accident someone slips past the machinery of society—a Buddha, an Einstein—someone slips out somewhere, takes root in some soil, and flowers. Really it should be the reverse: rarely should a seed fail to flower. Today, rarely does a seed flower.
In this long history, if we list great names, we run out after twenty. In five thousand years of known history, name twenty and you are done. What were the rest of humanity doing? What, then, is the meaning of their being born? If, out of billions, we can name only twenty who seem truly human, what were the rest? They remained seeds. A great flowering of intelligence is possible—once we are ready for the inquiring mind and do not stop anyone from questioning, even if the questions put us in difficulty.
Just now I went to a village and a boy asked me, “I read in a swami’s book that there is no sin greater than masturbation; whoever does it loses his intelligence and will go to hell. What do you say?” I said, “This is sheer falsehood—utterly false.” An elder objected, “What are you saying? Then this boy will think there is no harm in masturbation. Even if it’s false, you should say he will die, be ruined, go mad if he does this.” I said, “Do you think any good can come by erecting a lie? Masturbation will not stop because of your lie; it will continue—and with it the fear your lie creates will also continue. Masturbation cannot harm him as much as the fear seated behind it—and that idea—can. That fear can drive him mad.”
We have amassed many lies—many kinds of lies. We must break through all these layers. Our morality, our religion, are built on such foolishness without any truth in them. Even those who teach the “great truths” put such things in their books. Perhaps they do not realize they are lying—perhaps the lies are so old we have forgotten they are lies. It is sheer falsehood and harmful, because a lie can never be beneficial. How can it bring good? Only truth can be beneficial—and only to the extent it is true.
On every question of life we must adopt truth; and where knowledge is absent, we must accept our ignorance. Then education will give birth to the inquiring mind. When a searching mind is born, truth is not far. In fact, as I understand it, there is no separate “truth” to be had—the searching mind itself becomes truth. The mind that sets out to inquire is refined—refined by thousands of questions, by problems, and becomes truth. Ultimately a day comes when that searching mind attains the experience we call truth, peace, liberation. Only those who inquire go that way. Most of us remain seated where society and education have made us sit. There is a great journey for the mind—a journey that can take you beyond the moon and stars. We never even come to know of it. Only those in whose life doubt arises, questions arise, and whose questions become so urgent that churning them becomes unavoidable—because ready answers don’t exist—only they come to know. In that churning, in that inquiry, in that constant asking, refinement begins, and the mind becomes clear.
Osho’s Answer:
No. Studying a subject is specialization, not extremity. To devote one’s life to a single subject is essential, because life is vast. Life is indivisible; to split it is difficult. In the depths of life, mathematics and music are interconnected. But man is so small, so limited, that if he tries to grasp the indivisibility of life, he will end up knowing nothing, discovering nothing.
So we break life into pieces—because of the mind’s limitations—and then study one piece at a time. Life is so immense, so infinite, and man so small, that even if we fully understand one tiny leaf on one small branch of that vast tree, it is enough.
People like Einstein are not extreme. People like Einstein are deeply balanced. They study a narrow field, yes, but within it they maintain great even‑mindedness; otherwise they could not come close to truth. A scientist is, by necessity, extremely even‑minded; without that, the search for truth is impossible.
In my view, so‑called religious people are often less even‑minded than a truly scientific mind. A scientific mind must be even‑minded, or else it cannot discover truth—not even an inch of it. Granted, the field may be small, but even that small field is vast.
So people like Einstein are profoundly even‑minded. And I also hold that the even‑mindedness they cultivate in science brings to their consciousness the same benefits that meditation brings to a meditator. They arrive by another route at the same place. When Einstein is absorbed in solving a mathematical riddle, he is no less silent than any meditator in the world. If he were agitated, he could not solve it. He can penetrate such distant, deep entanglements of mathematics only because he is silent to that depth. He is that impartial. He takes no side.
The fundamental premise of science is that discovery is possible only for one who enters without taking sides; who goes in unprejudiced; who does not decide in advance what is right or wrong; who goes admitting, “I don’t know.” The first axiom of science is: “I don’t know.” Only then can inquiry begin.
So I do not call such people extreme. They are not at an extreme. They are practicing even‑mindedness—within a narrow direction. And narrowing the direction is necessary. Five or ten thousand years ago, one person could study everything because knowledge was scarce. The same person might be a physician, a poet, a religious teacher—everything—because knowledge was so little that one person could encompass it. As knowledge grew, difficulties increased. Each small thing proved so large that an entire science came to be built around it.
There was a time when “philosophy” meant all knowledge. That’s why, even today, whatever the field, we award a PhD—Doctor of Philosophy—merely out of habit. Someone researches in chemistry, and we give him a Doctor of Philosophy. It’s just an old habit from the days when philosophy was the only discipline. Even today at Oxford, outside the Physics Department the old signboard reads “Natural Philosophy.” It is a relic from when physics was called natural philosophy.
Once, philosophy was the single subject; in it everything was included. To know philosophy was to know all. Slowly, as our depth increased, it became clear there are infinite branches. We had to separate science. Then we realized science itself could not remain one; we had to split it into dozens of parts. Chemistry and physics became distinct. Later we had to split chemistry into organic and inorganic. Once we studied the whole body; now we see the whole body is far too big a phenomenon.
So now you have a doctor who studies only the eye.
I heard a joke: Five hundred years from now, in a great metropolis, a woman goes to an eye doctor and says, “I have terrible trouble with my eye.” He takes her inside and asks, “Which eye?” She says, “The left eye.” The doctor replies, “Sorry, I’m only a right‑eye specialist. For the left eye you’ll have to go to someone else.”
The eye is such a vast phenomenon that, though it’s a joke, the possibility is there that someday the right eye and the left eye will have different specialists. Even today there are so many books just on the eye that if one person worked a whole lifetime, he still could not read them all. So scientific specialization is not extremism. Knowledge has expanded; we must divide it and go deep into one small fragment.
But even one who goes deep into a small fragment must meet the same condition: he cannot be at an extreme. If he is extreme, he cannot inquire. He must be balanced, standing in the middle while he explores. He must allow for all possibilities—“It could be this, or it could be that”—without any inner insistence that “this must not be.” Anything may be!
I have heard that a young man worked with Einstein on experiments. They tried hundreds of times and failed each time. The young man grew tired and frustrated, but Einstein remained full of enthusiasm. One day the young man said, “We have failed so many times, and yet you continue with the same enthusiasm!” Einstein said, “Failed? There is no question of failure. We have explored so many alternatives and discovered they are not the way. We are succeeding every day.”
Do not connect specialized inquiry with extremism. Even in the smallest domain, the same prerequisites apply: to be even‑minded, to be centered, to be impartial, unprejudiced. In fact, I believe science has opened the greatest doorway to save man from extremes—more than anyone else ever has. What religion only talked about got lost in religious extremism. Science has demonstrated on the experimental plane that there is no place for the extremist. In truth, science says: if someone comes already believing that “this is the truth,” there is no place for him in science. The first condition is that one comes admitting, “I do not know what truth is.” There is not even the slightest leaning that “this should be the truth.”
A Dr. Banerjee, who researches reincarnation, once met me in Bombay. A curious event occurred. Some twenty‑five or thirty friends had arranged for us to converse for an hour. As soon as we began he said, “I want to prove scientifically that reincarnation is.” I told him, “The first condition for being scientific is that you don’t want to prove anything of your own. You should say, ‘I want to investigate scientifically whether reincarnation is or is not.’ If you say ‘I want to prove that it is,’ the inquiry will not be scientific. You are not a scientific man. Degrees do not make one scientific. What does a scientific mind mean? Withdraw that word ‘prove’ at once. A scientist does not go to prove. That is precisely the path of the unscientific: to assume beforehand that something is true and then set out to prove it.”
A man in America wrote a book after assuming that the number thirteen is unlucky. Then he went to courts, police stations, mental asylums, hospitals, and compiled statistics: how many people die on the 13th; how many admitted on the 13th die; how many go insane on the 13th; how many accidents befall those living on the 13th floor; how many airplanes crash on the 13th; how many cars break down—he assembled all disturbances related to thirteen and “proved” that the 13th is full of misfortune. Is this scientific? If he had chosen the 12th, people also die on the 12th, and the 11th too. But he first assumed and then searched within that frame.
Life is so vast that you can find support for anything. There is nothing for which life cannot provide examples. But that is not scientific because the conclusion was fixed in advance. That gentleman felt so cornered that he thought it best to end the discussion and abruptly got up saying he suddenly remembered an urgent errand; he would come again—while the twenty‑five or thirty friends sat astonished. He had agreed to one hour and left at once.
Our minds are full of insistences! And if there is insistence, the mind will be at an extreme in any direction. Only a mind free of insistence is not extreme. For a scientist that is the first condition. Therefore I maintain that a scientific mind is essential for the search for any truth whatsoever—even for religious truth. Mahavira did not set out assuming there is a soul; nor did Buddha set out assuming there is nirvana. They went to discover whether it is so or not. If we set out assuming, we can always “prove” what we assumed; it is not difficult. But to go and inquire—“Is it so or not?”—one must not decide anything in advance; one must not be fixed at any extreme. And when we go without deciding anything, we are inevitably in the middle, because there is no leaning to either side. So the scientist is not extreme.
Can we impart the education of understanding, or is understanding the spontaneous activity of the inquiring mind which alone can have it?
Only an inquiring mind attains understanding. But we can create an education that brings forth an inquiring mind. You cannot produce it directly; you must create the indirect environment. If in a classroom the teacher says to children, “Accept what I say,” that teacher will never allow an inquiring mind to arise. Rather, a teacher should say, “Here is a proposition about truth; some people accept it, it also seems right to me. Come, let us journey together and investigate whether it is right or not. It may be right; it may also be wrong. Let us inquire.” Such a teacher imposes no belief, no faith. He invites inquiry.
A school should be an invitation to search. The whole institution should call students into inquiry—into great inquiry—and impose nothing on them. Invite them to inquire, to doubt, to reflect, to contemplate, to think about what might be.
Until now every school teaches belief. And when belief and faith are taught, when what is taught is declared the ultimate truth, an inquiring mind cannot be born. Ultimately, only the inquiring mind attains knowledge. And how to bring about such a mind—we can arrange for that in society, education, and culture.
Finally, only a seed becomes a sprout; a stone never sprouts. Yet even a seed may fail to sprout if the conditions are wrong. A seed can become a sprout, but it needs soil, water, sunlight, and the care of a loving gardener. If you plant a pebble in the best soil with the best gardener, nothing will happen. Only the seed can sprout. But the reverse is possible: a seed can remain a pebble and never sprout if you throw it onto hard ground, or on rock, and never water it. Then even a seed will prove to be like a pebble.
Our present education arrests and closes the mind; it does not open it. Thus in most people the inner potential turns to stone. Explorers are exceptions—born only once in a while. They escape our education somehow—accidentally. It is purely accidental if someone leaves the university with the spirit of inquiry intact; almost certainly it will have been destroyed, because our entire arrangement is the opposite. We impose in every way.
Imposition is easy. For a teacher, producing believers is convenient. To produce an inquiring mind is to invite trouble, because once you create it, it does not restrict itself to one domain; it inquires into every facet of life.
Society is afraid of everything being questioned, because much of what it has imposed for the sake of order is simply untrue. If questioning children appear, those lies will be uprooted. Therefore the questioning child is unwelcome.
The state does not want everything asked; it has imposed much that is false. Neither the law, nor the courts, nor fathers, nor mothers want children to ask everything—because they have hidden much that would put them in difficulty if asked.
So a person who questions is not wanted. At best, questioning is welcomed only as long as our ready‑made answers suffice. The moment he touches places where there are no answers and where we would have to admit our ignorance, we want to stop the questioning. There are few who have the courage to say, “There is much I do not know.” Few fathers can say to their child, “I know nothing about God—who he is.” “I don’t know whether the Gita is right or the Quran is right.” No father is that humble. Ego hurts so much that even before a child he claims to know everything. Few teachers have the courage to say, “I don’t know. I am searching just as you are—only I began a little earlier; you began a little later; otherwise there is no difference.”
Until we create teachers, parents, and a social climate with the humility to accept ignorance, we cannot create inquiring minds. For inquiry quickly brings everyone close to their ignorance. Ask two or three questions, and it becomes apparent that we are stuck—that beyond this the matter does not go. We don’t allow things to reach that point. We stop you at the first question: “Accept what is being said, quietly.”
So far, education has not supported the development of an exploratory mind. It has arranged everything so that the mind does not explore—it closes. We are killing our children. Our schools, in a deep sense, are strange prisons. There we create a slavery of the mind so that children will never ask. And when we ask, we are terrified of the chaos that questioning might bring, because our order is built on foolishness. I say, change that order and bring it close to truth. Do not found it on lies, because no lie can ever be beneficial at any cost.
We can create an educational arrangement in which questions slowly come alive. There will be thousands of questions for which we have no answers. That is good. Let the children search. False answers only stop their inquiry—and then they pass those false answers on to their children. In truth, very few questions have answers at present; humanity has scarcely developed. Perhaps out of a thousand questions there is one we can answer, and nine hundred ninety‑nine for which we have no answer. Yet we provide answers to all thousand.
Einstein was asked, “What is the difference between a religiously superstitious person and a scientific person?” Einstein said, “This much: ask the superstitious person a hundred questions and he will be ready with a hundred and one answers; he will never say ‘I don’t know.’ He is omniscient—he knows everything. Ask the scientific person a hundred questions, and about ninety‑nine he will straightforwardly say, ‘I know absolutely nothing.’ About the hundredth he will say, ‘What is known is this—but it is not final; it may change tomorrow. The search continues, and the search is infinite. We will never arrive at a place where we can say, “The ultimate answer has been found.”’”
We should create that climate—and slowly bring the whole system into it. Then there can be an immense explosion of genius in the world. So many flowers could bloom. Today millions of seeds die; they never flower. It seems only by accident someone slips past the machinery of society—a Buddha, an Einstein—someone slips out somewhere, takes root in some soil, and flowers. Really it should be the reverse: rarely should a seed fail to flower. Today, rarely does a seed flower.
In this long history, if we list great names, we run out after twenty. In five thousand years of known history, name twenty and you are done. What were the rest of humanity doing? What, then, is the meaning of their being born? If, out of billions, we can name only twenty who seem truly human, what were the rest? They remained seeds. A great flowering of intelligence is possible—once we are ready for the inquiring mind and do not stop anyone from questioning, even if the questions put us in difficulty.
Just now I went to a village and a boy asked me, “I read in a swami’s book that there is no sin greater than masturbation; whoever does it loses his intelligence and will go to hell. What do you say?” I said, “This is sheer falsehood—utterly false.” An elder objected, “What are you saying? Then this boy will think there is no harm in masturbation. Even if it’s false, you should say he will die, be ruined, go mad if he does this.” I said, “Do you think any good can come by erecting a lie? Masturbation will not stop because of your lie; it will continue—and with it the fear your lie creates will also continue. Masturbation cannot harm him as much as the fear seated behind it—and that idea—can. That fear can drive him mad.”
We have amassed many lies—many kinds of lies. We must break through all these layers. Our morality, our religion, are built on such foolishness without any truth in them. Even those who teach the “great truths” put such things in their books. Perhaps they do not realize they are lying—perhaps the lies are so old we have forgotten they are lies. It is sheer falsehood and harmful, because a lie can never be beneficial. How can it bring good? Only truth can be beneficial—and only to the extent it is true.
On every question of life we must adopt truth; and where knowledge is absent, we must accept our ignorance. Then education will give birth to the inquiring mind. When a searching mind is born, truth is not far. In fact, as I understand it, there is no separate “truth” to be had—the searching mind itself becomes truth. The mind that sets out to inquire is refined—refined by thousands of questions, by problems, and becomes truth. Ultimately a day comes when that searching mind attains the experience we call truth, peace, liberation. Only those who inquire go that way. Most of us remain seated where society and education have made us sit. There is a great journey for the mind—a journey that can take you beyond the moon and stars. We never even come to know of it. Only those in whose life doubt arises, questions arise, and whose questions become so urgent that churning them becomes unavoidable—because ready answers don’t exist—only they come to know. In that churning, in that inquiry, in that constant asking, refinement begins, and the mind becomes clear.
No. Studying a subject is specialization, not extremism. To devote one’s life to a subject is essential, because life is vast. Life is indivisible; at its depth mathematics and music are intertwined. But man is small, limited. If he tries to grasp life’s wholeness directly, he will end up knowing nothing, discovering nothing.
So, because of the limits of our intelligence, we break life into parts and study one part at a time. Life is so immense, so infinite—and man so small—that even if we come to know a single small leaf on that vast tree, it is significant.
People like Einstein are not at an extreme. People like Einstein are profoundly balanced. They choose a small field, yes, but within it they remain deeply even-minded; otherwise they could never come close to truth. A scientific mind is very even-minded; without that, there can be no search for truth.
In my view, so-called religious people are not as even-minded as a truly scientific mind. For the scientist it is a necessity; otherwise he would not discover even an inch. Granted he chooses a small territory, but even that small territory is vast.
So people like Einstein are supremely even-minded. And I also hold that the equanimity they bring to scientific work benefits their consciousness in the same way meditation benefits a meditator. They reach the same space from another direction. When Einstein is absorbed in solving a mathematical riddle, he is no less tranquil than any meditator in the world. If he were disturbed, he could not solve it. He can penetrate so far into the tangles of mathematics because he is that quiet—and that impartial. He takes no side.
The fundamental premise of science is that discovery is possible only for one who enters without taking sides; who goes in unprejudiced; who does not go in already deciding what is right or wrong; who goes in holding, “I don’t know.” The first axiom of science is: “I don’t know”—and then inquiry can begin.
So I would not call such people extremists. They are not at the extreme; they are practicing balance, in a focused direction. And narrowing the direction is necessary. Five or ten thousand years ago one person could study all knowledge, because there was very little. A person could be physician, poet, and spiritual guide all at once. As knowledge grew, the difficulty grew. Each small thing proved so vast that a whole science arose within it.
Once there was only philosophy—the sum of all knowledge. To this day we still give PhDs in other fields, yet call them Doctor of Philosophy—merely out of old habit. A person does research in chemistry, and we confer “Doctor of Philosophy.” It’s just the relic of a time when there was only one subject: philosophy. Even today at Oxford, the plaque outside the physics department still reads “Natural Philosophy.” The board is old. Physics was once called natural philosophy.
As our depth increased, we discovered so many branches that we had to separate sciences from philosophy, and then split the sciences again and again—chemistry and physics apart; then organic and inorganic chemistry apart. We used to study “the whole body”; now we see the whole body is too vast.
So today there are doctors who study only the eye. I heard a joke: five hundred years from now, in a great city, a woman goes to an eye specialist. “My eye troubles me.” The doctor takes her inside and asks, “Which eye?” “The left.” He says, “Forgive me. I treat only the right eye. For the left eye you’ll have to see someone else.” The eye is that vast. It’s a joke—but it could happen. Even today there are so many books just on the eye that a person could labor a lifetime and not know them all.
So scientific specialization is not extremism; it’s that knowledge is expansive and we must divide it—and then go deep into each small piece.
But even one who goes deep into a small piece must fulfill the same condition: he must not be at an extreme. If he is, he cannot inquire. He should stand in the middle, searching from there. He should keep all alternatives open—“This may be so; that may be so”—and harbor no inner insistence that “this must not be.” Anything may be!
I’ve heard: a young man working with Einstein tried an experiment hundreds of times, and each time it “failed.” The youth became tired and disheartened, but Einstein’s enthusiasm did not wane. One day the youth said, “We have failed so many times, and still you continue with the same zeal.” Einstein replied, “Failed? There is no question of failure. Out of so many options, we have already discovered that these do not lead to the goal. We are succeeding every day.”
We must not link specialization to extremism. Even in the smallest field the same condition applies for discovery: to be even, in the middle, impartial, unprejudiced. I believe science has opened the greatest door to save man from extremes—no one else has opened so wide a door. What religion talked about got lost in dogmatic extremism; science has demonstrated on the experimental plane that there is no place for the extremist. In fact science says: the person who arrives already believing “this is truth” has no place in science. The first condition is to come admitting, “I do not know what truth is”—not even a hair’s breadth of leaning that “this should be the truth.”
There is a Dr. Banerjee who researches reincarnation. He met me in Bombay. A curious incident occurred. Some twenty-five or thirty friends had arranged a one-hour meeting. As soon as we began he said, “I want to prove scientifically that reincarnation exists.” I told him, “The first condition of being scientific is that you do not want to prove anything. Say, ‘I want to inquire scientifically whether reincarnation exists or not.’ If you say, ‘I want to prove it exists,’ your inquiry will not be scientific. A person is not made scientific by degrees. What does a scientific mind mean? Please withdraw the words ‘I want to prove.’ A scientist does not set out to prove anything. That is precisely the path of the unscientific—beginning with a prior belief and then trying to prove it.”
A man in America wrote a book. He decided beforehand that the number thirteen is unlucky. After that he went to courts, police stations, asylums, hospitals, and compiled statistics: how many die on the thirteenth; how many admitted on the thirteenth die; how many go mad on the thirteenth; how many accidents befall those living on the thirteenth floor; how many planes that fly on the thirteenth crash; how many cars break down—and “proved” that the thirteenth is full of ill omen. Is this scientific? If he had chosen the twelfth, the same things happen on the twelfth—and the eleventh too. Life is so vast it can supply “evidence” for everything. But this is not scientific, because the side was predetermined. That gentleman became so uncomfortable that he abruptly ended the meeting: “I have urgent work; I’ll come again.” The friends who had arranged the hour were astonished.
Our minds harbor insistences. Any insistence pushes the mind to extremes. Only a noninsistent mind will not go to extremes. And for the scientist the first condition is precisely that.
Therefore I say the scientific mind—an inquiring mind—is necessary for the search for any truth. For the truths of religion as well, the mind must be scientific. Mahavira did not set out believing “there is a soul,” nor did Buddha set out believing “there is nirvana.” They went to find out: is it so or not? Whatever we set out already believing, we can “prove.” That is not difficult. But the one who goes to find out should not decide anything beforehand; no commitment to any extreme. When we go without deciding anything, we inevitably stand in the middle—there is nowhere to go to one side or the other. So the extremist is not the scientist.
Can we give an education of understanding, or is understanding a spontaneous activity of the inquiring mind?
Only the inquiring mind attains understanding. But we can create an education that fosters and gives birth to an inquiring mind. You cannot produce it directly; you must create an indirect climate around it. Imagine a classroom in which a teacher tells children, “Believe what I say.” Such a teacher will never allow an inquiring mind to be born. Another teacher says, “I will discuss a certain truth. Some accept it; I too feel it may be right. Come with me on the journey to find out whether it is so or not. It may be right; it may be wrong. Let’s inquire.” Such a teacher imposes no belief; he invites inquiry.
A school should be an invitation to inquiry—an invitation to seek, to doubt; an invitation to reflect, contemplate, think. But every school until now has taught belief. And where belief is taught—where what is said is declared to be “the ultimate truth”—an inquiring mind cannot be born. Ultimately, only the inquiring mind comes to knowledge. And we can create arrangements in society, education, and culture to foster that mind.
In the end, only a seed can sprout; a stone never sprouts. Yet even a seed may fail to sprout if we cast it where the climate is wrong. A seed needs soil, water, sunlight, the care of a loving gardener. Put a pebble into excellent soil with an excellent gardener—nothing will happen. Only a seed can become a sprout. But the reverse can happen: a seed can remain like a pebble if we cast it on hard ground, on stone, and never water it. Then the seed too behaves like a stone.
Our current education arrests and closes the mind; it does not open it. So, for most people, their potential ossifies into stone. That is why true explorers are exceptions—accidents. Somehow they slip past us—past our education—by some trick. It is accidental if a person emerges from university still inwardly an inquirer. Our whole arrangement is upside-down. We impose in every way.
Imposing is easy. For a teacher, producing believers is convenient; producing inquirers is a hassle, a disturbance. Because once you create an inquiring mind, it will not inquire only into one thing—it will inquire into every aspect of life. Society fears this. Many of its arrangements rest on outright lies. If questioning children arise, those lies will be uprooted. So the questioning child is unwelcome.
The state does not want everything questioned; it too imposes much that is simply wrong. No one wants it—the law, the courts, fathers, mothers. Because many things they have hidden would be exposed if asked about. So such a person—one who questions—is not wanted. Or he is welcomed only as far as our stock answers will serve. The moment he reaches the places where there are no answers and where we would have to admit, “I don’t know,” we want to stop the inquiry. Few have the courage to say, “There is much I do not know.” No father has the courage to say to his child, “I know nothing about God—who he is. I do not know whether the Gita is right or the Koran is right.” No teacher has the courage to say, “I do not know. I too am searching, just as you are. I began a little earlier; you a little later—that’s the only difference.”
Until we create teachers, parents, and a social air with the humility to accept ignorance, we cannot create inquiring minds. Inquiry brings everyone close to their own ignorance very quickly. After a question or two, we find ourselves stuck—the road goes no further. So we do not allow things to go that far. We stop at the first question: “Silently accept what is being said.”
Educational theory so far has not helped to make human talent exploratory. Education has arranged everything so that the mind will not search; it will close. Thus we harm children. What we call schools are, in a deep sense, strange prisons. There we create such slavery of the mind that those children will never question. And if we do allow questions, we fear great anarchy and disturbance—because our whole arrangement stands upon foolishness and lies. My view is: change the arrangement; bring it closer to truth. Do not base it on lies, because lies cannot be beneficial at any price.
We can create an education in which questions slowly become alive. There will be thousands of questions for which we have no answers—and that is good. Let children search. False answers stop their search; and later they will pass those false answers to their own children. I believe very few questions presently have answers available to humanity. In truth, maybe one in a thousand; nine hundred and ninety-nine have no answers yet. But we go on giving answers to all thousand.
Someone asked Einstein the difference between a superstitious religious man and a scientific man. Einstein said, “This is the difference: ask the superstitious man a hundred questions and he will be ready to give you a hundred and one answers—and never once say, ‘I don’t know.’ The superstitious man is omniscient; he knows everything. I call a man scientific who, if you ask him a hundred questions, will frankly say for ninety-nine, ‘I know nothing.’ As for the hundredth, he will say, ‘This much is known so far—but it is not final; it may change tomorrow. The search continues, and search is infinite.’”
We must create such an atmosphere, and gradually bring the entire system into harmony with it. Then an enormous explosion of human genius can happen—so many flowers can bloom. Today, millions of seeds die without ever flowering. It seems only by mistake—accidentally—that someone slips out of our society’s grip: a Buddha, an Einstein. Somewhere he finds soil and takes root, and flowers appear. It should be the opposite: that rarely a seed fails to flower. Today it is the reverse: rarely does a seed flower.
That is why, in such a long history, if you were asked to list humanity’s names, you would finish after twenty. In five thousand years of recorded history, name twenty and you are done. What was the rest of humanity doing? What was the point of their being? The seeds remained seeds. An immense flowering of talent is possible—once we are ready for the inquiring mind, and we do not stop anyone from asking—no matter how much it unsettles us.
Recently I went to a village. A boy asked me, “I read a swami’s book. It says masturbation is the greatest sin; whoever does it ruins his intelligence and goes to hell. What do you say?” I told him, “This is sheer falsehood.” An elder protested, “If you say that, this boy will think there is no harm in it. Even if it is false, you should say, ‘You will die, be destroyed, your intellect will be ruined, you will go mad if you do it.’” I said, “Do you think any good can ever come from erecting a lie? Masturbation will not harm him that much—but the fear planted by your lie may. The act itself cannot drive him mad; the fear lodged behind it can.”
We have collected many lies—layers upon layers. We must break through them. Our morality and religion stand on such foolishness, with no trace of truth. Even those who teach “great truths” write such things in their books. Perhaps they themselves do not realize they are writing lies. Perhaps the lies are so ancient we have forgotten they are lies. A lie is harmful—how could it be beneficial? Only truth can be beneficial—and only to the extent that it is true.
Therefore, on all the questions of life we must embrace truth—and where there is no knowledge yet, we must accept ignorance. Then education will produce the inquiring mind. Once the seeking mind is born, truth is not far. In fact, my understanding is that the seeking mind itself becomes truth. The mind that moves into inquiry is refined and refined—polished by a thousand questions and problems—until it becomes truth. One day it attains the experience we call truth, peace, liberation. Only seekers go that way. Most of us remain seated where we are put—by society, by education. Yet there is a vast journey of consciousness—one that can take us beyond moon and stars. We have no inkling of that journey. Only those in whom doubt and question arise come to know it. Questions arise that demand churning—for which there are no ready-made answers. In that churning, that inquiry, that ceaseless asking, a clarity dawns—and the mind becomes pure.
So, because of the limits of our intelligence, we break life into parts and study one part at a time. Life is so immense, so infinite—and man so small—that even if we come to know a single small leaf on that vast tree, it is significant.
People like Einstein are not at an extreme. People like Einstein are profoundly balanced. They choose a small field, yes, but within it they remain deeply even-minded; otherwise they could never come close to truth. A scientific mind is very even-minded; without that, there can be no search for truth.
In my view, so-called religious people are not as even-minded as a truly scientific mind. For the scientist it is a necessity; otherwise he would not discover even an inch. Granted he chooses a small territory, but even that small territory is vast.
So people like Einstein are supremely even-minded. And I also hold that the equanimity they bring to scientific work benefits their consciousness in the same way meditation benefits a meditator. They reach the same space from another direction. When Einstein is absorbed in solving a mathematical riddle, he is no less tranquil than any meditator in the world. If he were disturbed, he could not solve it. He can penetrate so far into the tangles of mathematics because he is that quiet—and that impartial. He takes no side.
The fundamental premise of science is that discovery is possible only for one who enters without taking sides; who goes in unprejudiced; who does not go in already deciding what is right or wrong; who goes in holding, “I don’t know.” The first axiom of science is: “I don’t know”—and then inquiry can begin.
So I would not call such people extremists. They are not at the extreme; they are practicing balance, in a focused direction. And narrowing the direction is necessary. Five or ten thousand years ago one person could study all knowledge, because there was very little. A person could be physician, poet, and spiritual guide all at once. As knowledge grew, the difficulty grew. Each small thing proved so vast that a whole science arose within it.
Once there was only philosophy—the sum of all knowledge. To this day we still give PhDs in other fields, yet call them Doctor of Philosophy—merely out of old habit. A person does research in chemistry, and we confer “Doctor of Philosophy.” It’s just the relic of a time when there was only one subject: philosophy. Even today at Oxford, the plaque outside the physics department still reads “Natural Philosophy.” The board is old. Physics was once called natural philosophy.
As our depth increased, we discovered so many branches that we had to separate sciences from philosophy, and then split the sciences again and again—chemistry and physics apart; then organic and inorganic chemistry apart. We used to study “the whole body”; now we see the whole body is too vast.
So today there are doctors who study only the eye. I heard a joke: five hundred years from now, in a great city, a woman goes to an eye specialist. “My eye troubles me.” The doctor takes her inside and asks, “Which eye?” “The left.” He says, “Forgive me. I treat only the right eye. For the left eye you’ll have to see someone else.” The eye is that vast. It’s a joke—but it could happen. Even today there are so many books just on the eye that a person could labor a lifetime and not know them all.
So scientific specialization is not extremism; it’s that knowledge is expansive and we must divide it—and then go deep into each small piece.
But even one who goes deep into a small piece must fulfill the same condition: he must not be at an extreme. If he is, he cannot inquire. He should stand in the middle, searching from there. He should keep all alternatives open—“This may be so; that may be so”—and harbor no inner insistence that “this must not be.” Anything may be!
I’ve heard: a young man working with Einstein tried an experiment hundreds of times, and each time it “failed.” The youth became tired and disheartened, but Einstein’s enthusiasm did not wane. One day the youth said, “We have failed so many times, and still you continue with the same zeal.” Einstein replied, “Failed? There is no question of failure. Out of so many options, we have already discovered that these do not lead to the goal. We are succeeding every day.”
We must not link specialization to extremism. Even in the smallest field the same condition applies for discovery: to be even, in the middle, impartial, unprejudiced. I believe science has opened the greatest door to save man from extremes—no one else has opened so wide a door. What religion talked about got lost in dogmatic extremism; science has demonstrated on the experimental plane that there is no place for the extremist. In fact science says: the person who arrives already believing “this is truth” has no place in science. The first condition is to come admitting, “I do not know what truth is”—not even a hair’s breadth of leaning that “this should be the truth.”
There is a Dr. Banerjee who researches reincarnation. He met me in Bombay. A curious incident occurred. Some twenty-five or thirty friends had arranged a one-hour meeting. As soon as we began he said, “I want to prove scientifically that reincarnation exists.” I told him, “The first condition of being scientific is that you do not want to prove anything. Say, ‘I want to inquire scientifically whether reincarnation exists or not.’ If you say, ‘I want to prove it exists,’ your inquiry will not be scientific. A person is not made scientific by degrees. What does a scientific mind mean? Please withdraw the words ‘I want to prove.’ A scientist does not set out to prove anything. That is precisely the path of the unscientific—beginning with a prior belief and then trying to prove it.”
A man in America wrote a book. He decided beforehand that the number thirteen is unlucky. After that he went to courts, police stations, asylums, hospitals, and compiled statistics: how many die on the thirteenth; how many admitted on the thirteenth die; how many go mad on the thirteenth; how many accidents befall those living on the thirteenth floor; how many planes that fly on the thirteenth crash; how many cars break down—and “proved” that the thirteenth is full of ill omen. Is this scientific? If he had chosen the twelfth, the same things happen on the twelfth—and the eleventh too. Life is so vast it can supply “evidence” for everything. But this is not scientific, because the side was predetermined. That gentleman became so uncomfortable that he abruptly ended the meeting: “I have urgent work; I’ll come again.” The friends who had arranged the hour were astonished.
Our minds harbor insistences. Any insistence pushes the mind to extremes. Only a noninsistent mind will not go to extremes. And for the scientist the first condition is precisely that.
Therefore I say the scientific mind—an inquiring mind—is necessary for the search for any truth. For the truths of religion as well, the mind must be scientific. Mahavira did not set out believing “there is a soul,” nor did Buddha set out believing “there is nirvana.” They went to find out: is it so or not? Whatever we set out already believing, we can “prove.” That is not difficult. But the one who goes to find out should not decide anything beforehand; no commitment to any extreme. When we go without deciding anything, we inevitably stand in the middle—there is nowhere to go to one side or the other. So the extremist is not the scientist.
Can we give an education of understanding, or is understanding a spontaneous activity of the inquiring mind?
Only the inquiring mind attains understanding. But we can create an education that fosters and gives birth to an inquiring mind. You cannot produce it directly; you must create an indirect climate around it. Imagine a classroom in which a teacher tells children, “Believe what I say.” Such a teacher will never allow an inquiring mind to be born. Another teacher says, “I will discuss a certain truth. Some accept it; I too feel it may be right. Come with me on the journey to find out whether it is so or not. It may be right; it may be wrong. Let’s inquire.” Such a teacher imposes no belief; he invites inquiry.
A school should be an invitation to inquiry—an invitation to seek, to doubt; an invitation to reflect, contemplate, think. But every school until now has taught belief. And where belief is taught—where what is said is declared to be “the ultimate truth”—an inquiring mind cannot be born. Ultimately, only the inquiring mind comes to knowledge. And we can create arrangements in society, education, and culture to foster that mind.
In the end, only a seed can sprout; a stone never sprouts. Yet even a seed may fail to sprout if we cast it where the climate is wrong. A seed needs soil, water, sunlight, the care of a loving gardener. Put a pebble into excellent soil with an excellent gardener—nothing will happen. Only a seed can become a sprout. But the reverse can happen: a seed can remain like a pebble if we cast it on hard ground, on stone, and never water it. Then the seed too behaves like a stone.
Our current education arrests and closes the mind; it does not open it. So, for most people, their potential ossifies into stone. That is why true explorers are exceptions—accidents. Somehow they slip past us—past our education—by some trick. It is accidental if a person emerges from university still inwardly an inquirer. Our whole arrangement is upside-down. We impose in every way.
Imposing is easy. For a teacher, producing believers is convenient; producing inquirers is a hassle, a disturbance. Because once you create an inquiring mind, it will not inquire only into one thing—it will inquire into every aspect of life. Society fears this. Many of its arrangements rest on outright lies. If questioning children arise, those lies will be uprooted. So the questioning child is unwelcome.
The state does not want everything questioned; it too imposes much that is simply wrong. No one wants it—the law, the courts, fathers, mothers. Because many things they have hidden would be exposed if asked about. So such a person—one who questions—is not wanted. Or he is welcomed only as far as our stock answers will serve. The moment he reaches the places where there are no answers and where we would have to admit, “I don’t know,” we want to stop the inquiry. Few have the courage to say, “There is much I do not know.” No father has the courage to say to his child, “I know nothing about God—who he is. I do not know whether the Gita is right or the Koran is right.” No teacher has the courage to say, “I do not know. I too am searching, just as you are. I began a little earlier; you a little later—that’s the only difference.”
Until we create teachers, parents, and a social air with the humility to accept ignorance, we cannot create inquiring minds. Inquiry brings everyone close to their own ignorance very quickly. After a question or two, we find ourselves stuck—the road goes no further. So we do not allow things to go that far. We stop at the first question: “Silently accept what is being said.”
Educational theory so far has not helped to make human talent exploratory. Education has arranged everything so that the mind will not search; it will close. Thus we harm children. What we call schools are, in a deep sense, strange prisons. There we create such slavery of the mind that those children will never question. And if we do allow questions, we fear great anarchy and disturbance—because our whole arrangement stands upon foolishness and lies. My view is: change the arrangement; bring it closer to truth. Do not base it on lies, because lies cannot be beneficial at any price.
We can create an education in which questions slowly become alive. There will be thousands of questions for which we have no answers—and that is good. Let children search. False answers stop their search; and later they will pass those false answers to their own children. I believe very few questions presently have answers available to humanity. In truth, maybe one in a thousand; nine hundred and ninety-nine have no answers yet. But we go on giving answers to all thousand.
Someone asked Einstein the difference between a superstitious religious man and a scientific man. Einstein said, “This is the difference: ask the superstitious man a hundred questions and he will be ready to give you a hundred and one answers—and never once say, ‘I don’t know.’ The superstitious man is omniscient; he knows everything. I call a man scientific who, if you ask him a hundred questions, will frankly say for ninety-nine, ‘I know nothing.’ As for the hundredth, he will say, ‘This much is known so far—but it is not final; it may change tomorrow. The search continues, and search is infinite.’”
We must create such an atmosphere, and gradually bring the entire system into harmony with it. Then an enormous explosion of human genius can happen—so many flowers can bloom. Today, millions of seeds die without ever flowering. It seems only by mistake—accidentally—that someone slips out of our society’s grip: a Buddha, an Einstein. Somewhere he finds soil and takes root, and flowers appear. It should be the opposite: that rarely a seed fails to flower. Today it is the reverse: rarely does a seed flower.
That is why, in such a long history, if you were asked to list humanity’s names, you would finish after twenty. In five thousand years of recorded history, name twenty and you are done. What was the rest of humanity doing? What was the point of their being? The seeds remained seeds. An immense flowering of talent is possible—once we are ready for the inquiring mind, and we do not stop anyone from asking—no matter how much it unsettles us.
Recently I went to a village. A boy asked me, “I read a swami’s book. It says masturbation is the greatest sin; whoever does it ruins his intelligence and goes to hell. What do you say?” I told him, “This is sheer falsehood.” An elder protested, “If you say that, this boy will think there is no harm in it. Even if it is false, you should say, ‘You will die, be destroyed, your intellect will be ruined, you will go mad if you do it.’” I said, “Do you think any good can ever come from erecting a lie? Masturbation will not harm him that much—but the fear planted by your lie may. The act itself cannot drive him mad; the fear lodged behind it can.”
We have collected many lies—layers upon layers. We must break through them. Our morality and religion stand on such foolishness, with no trace of truth. Even those who teach “great truths” write such things in their books. Perhaps they themselves do not realize they are writing lies. Perhaps the lies are so ancient we have forgotten they are lies. A lie is harmful—how could it be beneficial? Only truth can be beneficial—and only to the extent that it is true.
Therefore, on all the questions of life we must embrace truth—and where there is no knowledge yet, we must accept ignorance. Then education will produce the inquiring mind. Once the seeking mind is born, truth is not far. In fact, my understanding is that the seeking mind itself becomes truth. The mind that moves into inquiry is refined and refined—polished by a thousand questions and problems—until it becomes truth. One day it attains the experience we call truth, peace, liberation. Only seekers go that way. Most of us remain seated where we are put—by society, by education. Yet there is a vast journey of consciousness—one that can take us beyond moon and stars. We have no inkling of that journey. Only those in whom doubt and question arise come to know it. Questions arise that demand churning—for which there are no ready-made answers. In that churning, that inquiry, that ceaseless asking, a clarity dawns—and the mind becomes pure.
Osho, do you feel that a child should be given the freedom to inquire about the facts of his birth and about sex?
Absolutely. In truth, freedom is always unconditional. If we place a condition anywhere, it is not freedom. If we say, “We will give freedom in this matter but not in that,” then we are not giving freedom at all. It is like telling a prisoner, “You have complete freedom to walk about inside the prison, but not to go outside. You are free to look at the sky through the prison window—but to go outside… when the moon appears in the window, then you may look at it.”
Freedom has no boundary. Wherever there is a boundary, it becomes dependence. And limited freedom is even more dangerous than dependence, because the dependent person at least tries to be free from dependence, while the one with limited freedom falls into the illusion, “We are free; there is no problem. Why bother about freedom?”
I do not accept that there is even a single question that is wrong to raise. It is there because life is raising it—what can we do? And when life itself is prompting the inquiry, the child will ask; he will ask about sex. He will ask where babies come from. There is no fault in his asking. The fault lies with those who answer him with lies. They lie because they carry a foolish notion about sex. They should drop that notion. Things are very simple. In my view, if you tell a child plainly and directly, he probably will not even ask again; the matter is finished. But when we tell lies, and the child gradually senses that something sounds false, he asks more and more.
The bigger the lies we tell, the more the child’s questions pile up. Those questions make him very restless, and he will then pursue their answers along wrong paths. He will read trashy books that sell in the open and the underground market, he will meet the wrong people. What the parents could have completed themselves, he will now complete through others—and that completion will always be wrong. The greatest harm is this: sooner or later—if not today, then tomorrow—the child will discover what the truth is. Then his parents will appear to him as downright liars, and all his reverence for them will become impossible. Reverence itself will become impossible. For what meaning remains in parents who have told him blatant untruths?
Whether today or tomorrow, the child will find out. Then how will he understand the truths of life? In my view, when he asks it only means the question has arisen; an answer is needed. I am not willing to give false answers. When a child asks about anything, we should say what is true—as much as we know it, as we know it—without any hesitation, without any embarrassment, without any shock. Because answers given with hesitation, astonishment, or unease also put the child in difficulty: What is going on that there is so much hesitation? We are the ones troubled by our own hang-ups, and we project them on the child. When a child asks, “Where did this new baby come from?” we, being busy hiding all these matters, think the child is being naughty. The poor child is utterly innocent; it is an innocent question, with nothing blameworthy in it. There is not even imagination in it yet.
First, there is no question that may be asked to which we should refuse to give an answer. The refusal is born of fear, while the question is born of life. Life is precious; fear is of no worth. When life is asking, who are we to stop it? And when life asks, life will find out—whether we block it or not. If elders who know more do not tell, the child will try to find out by his own paths, his own sources. Those attempts can harm him greatly, because he lacks much that his elders know.
My view is that not telling children about sex has caused immense harm—disastrous harm. We are sexualizing the minds of all children: gradually their whole curiosity becomes bound to sex precisely because that is the one answer they are not getting, while we provide answers to everything else. What we answer, he is freed from. What we do not answer keeps circling insistently within him; he keeps asking and asking. Where should he go, from where should he learn? And whatever we hide becomes all the more attractive. Whatever we forbid, that door he wants to open with greater intensity. And a child is a child; he will open it in a wrong way, he will learn in a wrong way—which can damage his whole life.
About sex we should be as simple as we are about anything else. The child asks, “Where did this book come from?” and we say, “From the press.” He asks, “Where did this flower come from?” and we say, “It grew on a tree.” With the same simplicity we should answer about sex. Our answers will satisfy him, and his curiosity will end. And he will retain a respect for us: that we speak in straight, simple words; and if we do not know, we should say, “Up to here we know; beyond this we do not know. As you grow up, you can explore further. Beyond this we know nothing; this is all we know.”
Only if we can tell the whole truth about sex will the human mind be free of sex; otherwise it will not be freed.
Do you feel, sir, that ignorant parents are responsible when children go the wrong way?
Absolutely—absolutely. Whatever children are, they are the evidence of their parents. And whatever children are doing, society is making them do. If children go astray, it is the setup society has given them that leads them astray. In my view, when a child gets messed up, his parents should be held to account immediately. And when an entire generation is messed up, the older generation should be held responsible—because from it these children were nurtured and grew up; from it they thought, understood, and learned; and with what it gave them they set out. Children are always innocent, so you cannot lay direct responsibility on them. All responsibility should be placed on their elders, the previous generations. Whatever is going wrong today—if children are defiant, if they are obsessed with sex, if they are doing foolish things, creating destruction—the teachings we have given them are responsible for it, and the manner in which we taught them is responsible.
If it becomes difficult for a lone girl to walk down the street, and boys jostle her, hurl abuses, throw stones—then those boys are not the ones to blame. The blame lies with the parents who, regarding sex, spread a veil of fear, dread, lies, dishonesty, untruth, and who raised boys and girls at such a distance from each other—kept them so far apart—that it became “natural” for boys to throw stones. Stone-throwing is a trick to come close. Since it is not possible to touch a girl directly with the hand, they touch her symbolically by throwing stones—by throwing a stone they are “touching” the girl.
My view is that touching a girl with your hand can be a very sweet thing, while “touching” her by throwing stones becomes something utterly disgusting, utterly cruel. But we are responsible for this. If boys and girls grew up together—playing, running, falling, swimming, climbing hills and trees—if they grew up together, knew each other, recognized each other’s bodies, I say it would never be possible for a boy to throw a stone at a girl, because there would be no need for a symbolic way of touching. The girls would be familiar, already touched; there would be nothing unusual, nothing unknown that had to be found out. If boys and girls are raised in close proximity and their love is accepted, I do not believe boys would utter filthy abuses or scrawl them on walls. These are all tricks: what we have forbidden, they are trying to fulfill in wrong ways.
The ignorance of our society and the traditional foolishness of parents is what spoils children. It is not obvious to us on the surface, because when children create such messes we want to make our old rules even stricter: “Look, everything is going wrong—tighten the old rules.” And we do not see that it is because of those very rules that the mess is happening. Make them stricter and the disorder will only increase.
I want to give unconditional freedom to the whole of life. No one has the right to stop anyone. But freedom is not license. And the curious thing is: a free person is never licentious; only the dependent person becomes licentious. Dependence unnerves so much that dependence is one extreme. When the dependent man gets a chance, the other extreme is his licentiousness. He never pauses in the middle, where freedom is.
If you lock a man up for fifteen days, fasting him and bolting the door, and then after fifteen days let him out, he will break into the kitchen like a madman and eat so much he will fall ill—even die. Then we will say, “We made a great mistake opening the lock; we should have kept him confined—then he would have been all right, he wouldn’t have died.” And we do not see that it is precisely the reaction to those fifteen days of enforced hunger that made him overeat. Had we quietly allowed him to eat well and relish food, he would never have overeaten. That would have been freedom.
Dependence leads to licentiousness. Humanity has been kept dependent till now; its result is the flowering of licentiousness. The day we keep children free, licentiousness will be impossible; it simply cannot happen. It seems paradoxical: the more we bind children in discipline, the greater the possibility of indiscipline. The more imposed discipline, the more disorder can arise.
Therefore I say: there should be such freedom that from that very freedom an inner discipline is born, not imposed from above. Then children will never throw it away or break it; it will be part of their intelligence and dignity—so much disciplined. Right now the situation is that being disciplined is not honorable; breaking discipline is the badge of honor. Among boys, the one who breaks discipline is admired, because he appears free—although he is merely being licentious.
All the responsibility lies with our ignorance.
Freedom has no boundary. Wherever there is a boundary, it becomes dependence. And limited freedom is even more dangerous than dependence, because the dependent person at least tries to be free from dependence, while the one with limited freedom falls into the illusion, “We are free; there is no problem. Why bother about freedom?”
I do not accept that there is even a single question that is wrong to raise. It is there because life is raising it—what can we do? And when life itself is prompting the inquiry, the child will ask; he will ask about sex. He will ask where babies come from. There is no fault in his asking. The fault lies with those who answer him with lies. They lie because they carry a foolish notion about sex. They should drop that notion. Things are very simple. In my view, if you tell a child plainly and directly, he probably will not even ask again; the matter is finished. But when we tell lies, and the child gradually senses that something sounds false, he asks more and more.
The bigger the lies we tell, the more the child’s questions pile up. Those questions make him very restless, and he will then pursue their answers along wrong paths. He will read trashy books that sell in the open and the underground market, he will meet the wrong people. What the parents could have completed themselves, he will now complete through others—and that completion will always be wrong. The greatest harm is this: sooner or later—if not today, then tomorrow—the child will discover what the truth is. Then his parents will appear to him as downright liars, and all his reverence for them will become impossible. Reverence itself will become impossible. For what meaning remains in parents who have told him blatant untruths?
Whether today or tomorrow, the child will find out. Then how will he understand the truths of life? In my view, when he asks it only means the question has arisen; an answer is needed. I am not willing to give false answers. When a child asks about anything, we should say what is true—as much as we know it, as we know it—without any hesitation, without any embarrassment, without any shock. Because answers given with hesitation, astonishment, or unease also put the child in difficulty: What is going on that there is so much hesitation? We are the ones troubled by our own hang-ups, and we project them on the child. When a child asks, “Where did this new baby come from?” we, being busy hiding all these matters, think the child is being naughty. The poor child is utterly innocent; it is an innocent question, with nothing blameworthy in it. There is not even imagination in it yet.
First, there is no question that may be asked to which we should refuse to give an answer. The refusal is born of fear, while the question is born of life. Life is precious; fear is of no worth. When life is asking, who are we to stop it? And when life asks, life will find out—whether we block it or not. If elders who know more do not tell, the child will try to find out by his own paths, his own sources. Those attempts can harm him greatly, because he lacks much that his elders know.
My view is that not telling children about sex has caused immense harm—disastrous harm. We are sexualizing the minds of all children: gradually their whole curiosity becomes bound to sex precisely because that is the one answer they are not getting, while we provide answers to everything else. What we answer, he is freed from. What we do not answer keeps circling insistently within him; he keeps asking and asking. Where should he go, from where should he learn? And whatever we hide becomes all the more attractive. Whatever we forbid, that door he wants to open with greater intensity. And a child is a child; he will open it in a wrong way, he will learn in a wrong way—which can damage his whole life.
About sex we should be as simple as we are about anything else. The child asks, “Where did this book come from?” and we say, “From the press.” He asks, “Where did this flower come from?” and we say, “It grew on a tree.” With the same simplicity we should answer about sex. Our answers will satisfy him, and his curiosity will end. And he will retain a respect for us: that we speak in straight, simple words; and if we do not know, we should say, “Up to here we know; beyond this we do not know. As you grow up, you can explore further. Beyond this we know nothing; this is all we know.”
Only if we can tell the whole truth about sex will the human mind be free of sex; otherwise it will not be freed.
Do you feel, sir, that ignorant parents are responsible when children go the wrong way?
Absolutely—absolutely. Whatever children are, they are the evidence of their parents. And whatever children are doing, society is making them do. If children go astray, it is the setup society has given them that leads them astray. In my view, when a child gets messed up, his parents should be held to account immediately. And when an entire generation is messed up, the older generation should be held responsible—because from it these children were nurtured and grew up; from it they thought, understood, and learned; and with what it gave them they set out. Children are always innocent, so you cannot lay direct responsibility on them. All responsibility should be placed on their elders, the previous generations. Whatever is going wrong today—if children are defiant, if they are obsessed with sex, if they are doing foolish things, creating destruction—the teachings we have given them are responsible for it, and the manner in which we taught them is responsible.
If it becomes difficult for a lone girl to walk down the street, and boys jostle her, hurl abuses, throw stones—then those boys are not the ones to blame. The blame lies with the parents who, regarding sex, spread a veil of fear, dread, lies, dishonesty, untruth, and who raised boys and girls at such a distance from each other—kept them so far apart—that it became “natural” for boys to throw stones. Stone-throwing is a trick to come close. Since it is not possible to touch a girl directly with the hand, they touch her symbolically by throwing stones—by throwing a stone they are “touching” the girl.
My view is that touching a girl with your hand can be a very sweet thing, while “touching” her by throwing stones becomes something utterly disgusting, utterly cruel. But we are responsible for this. If boys and girls grew up together—playing, running, falling, swimming, climbing hills and trees—if they grew up together, knew each other, recognized each other’s bodies, I say it would never be possible for a boy to throw a stone at a girl, because there would be no need for a symbolic way of touching. The girls would be familiar, already touched; there would be nothing unusual, nothing unknown that had to be found out. If boys and girls are raised in close proximity and their love is accepted, I do not believe boys would utter filthy abuses or scrawl them on walls. These are all tricks: what we have forbidden, they are trying to fulfill in wrong ways.
The ignorance of our society and the traditional foolishness of parents is what spoils children. It is not obvious to us on the surface, because when children create such messes we want to make our old rules even stricter: “Look, everything is going wrong—tighten the old rules.” And we do not see that it is because of those very rules that the mess is happening. Make them stricter and the disorder will only increase.
I want to give unconditional freedom to the whole of life. No one has the right to stop anyone. But freedom is not license. And the curious thing is: a free person is never licentious; only the dependent person becomes licentious. Dependence unnerves so much that dependence is one extreme. When the dependent man gets a chance, the other extreme is his licentiousness. He never pauses in the middle, where freedom is.
If you lock a man up for fifteen days, fasting him and bolting the door, and then after fifteen days let him out, he will break into the kitchen like a madman and eat so much he will fall ill—even die. Then we will say, “We made a great mistake opening the lock; we should have kept him confined—then he would have been all right, he wouldn’t have died.” And we do not see that it is precisely the reaction to those fifteen days of enforced hunger that made him overeat. Had we quietly allowed him to eat well and relish food, he would never have overeaten. That would have been freedom.
Dependence leads to licentiousness. Humanity has been kept dependent till now; its result is the flowering of licentiousness. The day we keep children free, licentiousness will be impossible; it simply cannot happen. It seems paradoxical: the more we bind children in discipline, the greater the possibility of indiscipline. The more imposed discipline, the more disorder can arise.
Therefore I say: there should be such freedom that from that very freedom an inner discipline is born, not imposed from above. Then children will never throw it away or break it; it will be part of their intelligence and dignity—so much disciplined. Right now the situation is that being disciplined is not honorable; breaking discipline is the badge of honor. Among boys, the one who breaks discipline is admired, because he appears free—although he is merely being licentious.
All the responsibility lies with our ignorance.
Osho, are you in favor of hero-worship? Does hero-worship bring understanding or exaggeration?
No, absolutely not. I am not in favor of any kind of person-worship, any kind of hero-worship. Because, first of all, whenever we teach someone to worship another person, we inflict great harm on that person. Within him we create a sense of inferiority. Without inferiority, worship is impossible. Whenever someone worships another, deep down he has already decided that the other is great and he himself is inferior—otherwise worship cannot happen.
So the deepest sting, the real crime of worship, is that we create the feeling of inferiority in people. Are we inferior? People standing in temples keep saying, “We are fallen. O God, we are lowly, we are weak, we are nothing. We are at your feet, we seek your refuge.” People in temples say, “O Jinendra, O Mahavira, save us. We are nothing; we are sinners.” In fact, we cannot produce worship unless we first produce a sense of inferiority in someone. Worship is the outcome of inferiority. That is why I am not in favor of any kind of person-worship—because person-worship inevitably makes the worshiper’s mind inferior. The one being worshiped gains nothing. However much you worship Mahavira, what benefit accrues to Mahavira? None at all. But those who worship are harmed; they become inferior.
Second, another harm is that we unconsciously begin trying to become like the one we worship. Worshipers consider this the big advantage: they say that by worshiping Mahavira one gradually imbibes his qualities; by worshiping Rama, one tries to become like Rama. In my view this is an even more dangerous harm. No person can ever become another person; and in trying to do so one becomes crippled and lame.
Try as you may, you cannot become Mahavira. Do whatever you like, you cannot become Krishna, nor can you become Christ. In reality, identical human beings are never born. Each person is unique, incomparable. Therefore the final result of trying to become like someone else is merely a carbon-copy personality—a false, counterfeit self. Mahavira stands naked and thousands stand naked behind him. Mahavira’s nakedness is the result of a very deep innocence, a profound guilelessness. He reached a place where being naked and being clothed became the same. But the man who stands naked behind him is very calculated; there is a lot of arithmetic in it. He believes that without being naked, liberation will not happen—so being naked is necessary. He practices nakedness: slowly, he drops clothes one by one; he climbs step by step; then only a loincloth remains; then even that is dropped. After such practice, he becomes merely trained to be naked.
This nakedness is purely circus. It has no value. Mahavira may not even have noticed when one day his garment fell and he never thought of it again. It was not the result of any practice. So no one can become like Mahavira; in trying, you will only suffer and become fake. Each person must become what he himself can be.
Everyone has his own potentiality, his own seed. Become that—and nothing else is of any use. If Picasso were to become Mahavira, the world would be harmed. Picasso should be Picasso. If Mahavira were to become Picasso, that too would be a great loss. Mahavira should be Mahavira. Einstein should be Einstein, Raman should be Raman. The world is enriched by their being themselves—not by counterfeit men.
However many stand naked behind Mahavira, however many wear yellow robes behind Buddha—because of such imitation men the world does not grow richer.
So, secondly, I oppose worship because I do not want anyone to fall into the very idea of becoming like someone else—and worship plants precisely that idea.
Third, I oppose it because hidden within the feeling of worship is the notion that someone else will do something for me. That through worship, something will be done for me. If I worship Rama, Rama will do something for me. If I call out to Christ, Christ will do something for me. In this world, no one can do anything for anyone else. And those who get the idea that someone else will do something for them become deprived of what they themselves could have done. They fall into deep laziness and negligence. All devotees, all worshipers, ultimately fall into inertia; they themselves do nothing. They say, “There is God, there is the guru, there is the tirthankara, the avatar—when he does it, it will happen.” Unknowingly, what they could have done becomes impossible, because their mind clings to a prop: someone will do it.
Fourth and finally, I want to say that in this world no person is higher and no person is lower. The very feeling is wrong. And remember: if I consider someone higher, I will inevitably consider some others lower; that is its corollary.
I once went to see a sannyasin. He was seated on a large throne. Next to him, a smaller throne had been placed; on it sat another sannyasin; and then two or three sannyasins were seated below. The whole crowd sat on the ground. When I met him he said, “You probably don’t know who this person sitting beside me on the throne is!” I said, “I don’t know—and there is no need to know.” He said, “No, let me tell you: he is a High Court judge, not an ordinary man. He left everything, and he is so humble that he never sits with me on my throne; he sits on a smaller throne.” I said, “I understand very well that he is sitting on a smaller throne—but he is still sitting on a throne. And below him there are others he does not sit with.” I said, “I understand your point that he does not sit with you on your throne, but look—below that smaller throne there are two or three sannyasins. Does he sit with them or not?” The man became a little embarrassed. I said, “He doesn’t sit with them either—and he is waiting for your death so he can sit on your throne. And when he sits there, those below will move up to his throne. There is a hierarchy. They will move up, and they too will praise the next man as humble: ‘He never sat with me on my throne.’”
I said, “I understand that that man is humble because he doesn’t sit with you. But are you humble? Why does it occur to you that if he were to sit with you, he would be lacking humility? You are an egoistic man. Why are you enjoying the idea that he is humble? And he must be enjoying the idea that those below him are humble because they don’t sit with him on his throne.” I said, “This is a long net, a great chain.”
One who considers someone great will consider others low. One who worships, deep down, will demand to be worshiped. If you regard one as great, you will regard another as low. This tendency is very dangerous. So I say: neither worship anyone, nor ask to be worshiped. Both damage human beings. Do not worship anyone, and do not demand worship from anyone. Do not proclaim anyone great, and do not call anyone low. In truth, all are as they are. Truly, the flower that blooms in the grass is existence too; it is itself. The rose is wondrous too; it is itself.
There was a fakir in Japan. Someone asked him, “Why do some people become great and others small?” The fakir said, “You are absolutely mad. We have never yet seen anyone great or anyone small. We have seen each one as he is.” The man said, “I don’t understand.” The fakir took him outside and said, “Look—do you see those trees? Those tall ones touching the sky?” He said, “Yes, I see them.” “Do you see those small plants?” “Yes.” The fakir said, “Which of these is small and which is big? Small plants are small plants; big trees are big trees. Big are big; small are small. But how did anyone become small or big? One tree is fifty feet tall, another is one foot tall. What is the fuss? Being fifty feet is its nature; being one foot is this one’s nature.
“What is the point of measuring them? What has measuring got to do with it? What need is there to measure? They are entirely different things. And by being fifty feet tall, did it become higher? The flowers that bloom on this one-foot plant will never bloom on the fifty-foot tree. Granted, the fifty-foot tree seems to touch the sky, and the one-foot plant never seems to—but this is this, that is that. Things are like that. What is there to think about? What is there to compare?
“And if you remove man, which tree would be high and which low? If there were no human beings on earth, the blade of grass would be in the same bliss as the tree touching the sky. A small hill would be in the same joy as the greatest Himalaya. It is man who has created comparison. He says, ‘This is big and that is small.’ And in that comparison he will place himself somewhere: he will either consider himself small or consider himself big.”
I hold that this very habit of comparison is fatal. There is no need to compare. There is no need to produce hero-worship. What is needed is understanding. Understand Mahavira—understand as deeply as you can. Understand Buddha—understand as deeply as you can. The world has wondrous, wondrous people—understand them all. Understand a saint with as much love, and a sinner with as much love; because no one can say that a sinner does not carry possibilities that a saint may lack. It may be that the saint is utterly dull and the sinner very deep—nothing can be said.
Therefore the task is simply this: that I understand life in all its forms, and I see and recognize it in the many forms in which it manifests. And the only meaning of this seeing and recognizing is that I try to become what I can become. I do not fall into imitation. I make every effort to express and develop my own potential. And even when I am fully developed, I should still not become an object of anyone’s worship. The very urge to become that is wrong, because it can harm others.
No one is anyone’s guru; no one is anyone’s disciple. No one is worthy of worship, and no one is a worshiper. In this world we are all searching for our own individuality, our own soul. Around us others are searching too.
Let us look at them and understand them—not with the idea of how to become like them, but with the idea of how to discover our own. Therefore all hero-worship should disappear from the world.
So the deepest sting, the real crime of worship, is that we create the feeling of inferiority in people. Are we inferior? People standing in temples keep saying, “We are fallen. O God, we are lowly, we are weak, we are nothing. We are at your feet, we seek your refuge.” People in temples say, “O Jinendra, O Mahavira, save us. We are nothing; we are sinners.” In fact, we cannot produce worship unless we first produce a sense of inferiority in someone. Worship is the outcome of inferiority. That is why I am not in favor of any kind of person-worship—because person-worship inevitably makes the worshiper’s mind inferior. The one being worshiped gains nothing. However much you worship Mahavira, what benefit accrues to Mahavira? None at all. But those who worship are harmed; they become inferior.
Second, another harm is that we unconsciously begin trying to become like the one we worship. Worshipers consider this the big advantage: they say that by worshiping Mahavira one gradually imbibes his qualities; by worshiping Rama, one tries to become like Rama. In my view this is an even more dangerous harm. No person can ever become another person; and in trying to do so one becomes crippled and lame.
Try as you may, you cannot become Mahavira. Do whatever you like, you cannot become Krishna, nor can you become Christ. In reality, identical human beings are never born. Each person is unique, incomparable. Therefore the final result of trying to become like someone else is merely a carbon-copy personality—a false, counterfeit self. Mahavira stands naked and thousands stand naked behind him. Mahavira’s nakedness is the result of a very deep innocence, a profound guilelessness. He reached a place where being naked and being clothed became the same. But the man who stands naked behind him is very calculated; there is a lot of arithmetic in it. He believes that without being naked, liberation will not happen—so being naked is necessary. He practices nakedness: slowly, he drops clothes one by one; he climbs step by step; then only a loincloth remains; then even that is dropped. After such practice, he becomes merely trained to be naked.
This nakedness is purely circus. It has no value. Mahavira may not even have noticed when one day his garment fell and he never thought of it again. It was not the result of any practice. So no one can become like Mahavira; in trying, you will only suffer and become fake. Each person must become what he himself can be.
Everyone has his own potentiality, his own seed. Become that—and nothing else is of any use. If Picasso were to become Mahavira, the world would be harmed. Picasso should be Picasso. If Mahavira were to become Picasso, that too would be a great loss. Mahavira should be Mahavira. Einstein should be Einstein, Raman should be Raman. The world is enriched by their being themselves—not by counterfeit men.
However many stand naked behind Mahavira, however many wear yellow robes behind Buddha—because of such imitation men the world does not grow richer.
So, secondly, I oppose worship because I do not want anyone to fall into the very idea of becoming like someone else—and worship plants precisely that idea.
Third, I oppose it because hidden within the feeling of worship is the notion that someone else will do something for me. That through worship, something will be done for me. If I worship Rama, Rama will do something for me. If I call out to Christ, Christ will do something for me. In this world, no one can do anything for anyone else. And those who get the idea that someone else will do something for them become deprived of what they themselves could have done. They fall into deep laziness and negligence. All devotees, all worshipers, ultimately fall into inertia; they themselves do nothing. They say, “There is God, there is the guru, there is the tirthankara, the avatar—when he does it, it will happen.” Unknowingly, what they could have done becomes impossible, because their mind clings to a prop: someone will do it.
Fourth and finally, I want to say that in this world no person is higher and no person is lower. The very feeling is wrong. And remember: if I consider someone higher, I will inevitably consider some others lower; that is its corollary.
I once went to see a sannyasin. He was seated on a large throne. Next to him, a smaller throne had been placed; on it sat another sannyasin; and then two or three sannyasins were seated below. The whole crowd sat on the ground. When I met him he said, “You probably don’t know who this person sitting beside me on the throne is!” I said, “I don’t know—and there is no need to know.” He said, “No, let me tell you: he is a High Court judge, not an ordinary man. He left everything, and he is so humble that he never sits with me on my throne; he sits on a smaller throne.” I said, “I understand very well that he is sitting on a smaller throne—but he is still sitting on a throne. And below him there are others he does not sit with.” I said, “I understand your point that he does not sit with you on your throne, but look—below that smaller throne there are two or three sannyasins. Does he sit with them or not?” The man became a little embarrassed. I said, “He doesn’t sit with them either—and he is waiting for your death so he can sit on your throne. And when he sits there, those below will move up to his throne. There is a hierarchy. They will move up, and they too will praise the next man as humble: ‘He never sat with me on my throne.’”
I said, “I understand that that man is humble because he doesn’t sit with you. But are you humble? Why does it occur to you that if he were to sit with you, he would be lacking humility? You are an egoistic man. Why are you enjoying the idea that he is humble? And he must be enjoying the idea that those below him are humble because they don’t sit with him on his throne.” I said, “This is a long net, a great chain.”
One who considers someone great will consider others low. One who worships, deep down, will demand to be worshiped. If you regard one as great, you will regard another as low. This tendency is very dangerous. So I say: neither worship anyone, nor ask to be worshiped. Both damage human beings. Do not worship anyone, and do not demand worship from anyone. Do not proclaim anyone great, and do not call anyone low. In truth, all are as they are. Truly, the flower that blooms in the grass is existence too; it is itself. The rose is wondrous too; it is itself.
There was a fakir in Japan. Someone asked him, “Why do some people become great and others small?” The fakir said, “You are absolutely mad. We have never yet seen anyone great or anyone small. We have seen each one as he is.” The man said, “I don’t understand.” The fakir took him outside and said, “Look—do you see those trees? Those tall ones touching the sky?” He said, “Yes, I see them.” “Do you see those small plants?” “Yes.” The fakir said, “Which of these is small and which is big? Small plants are small plants; big trees are big trees. Big are big; small are small. But how did anyone become small or big? One tree is fifty feet tall, another is one foot tall. What is the fuss? Being fifty feet is its nature; being one foot is this one’s nature.
“What is the point of measuring them? What has measuring got to do with it? What need is there to measure? They are entirely different things. And by being fifty feet tall, did it become higher? The flowers that bloom on this one-foot plant will never bloom on the fifty-foot tree. Granted, the fifty-foot tree seems to touch the sky, and the one-foot plant never seems to—but this is this, that is that. Things are like that. What is there to think about? What is there to compare?
“And if you remove man, which tree would be high and which low? If there were no human beings on earth, the blade of grass would be in the same bliss as the tree touching the sky. A small hill would be in the same joy as the greatest Himalaya. It is man who has created comparison. He says, ‘This is big and that is small.’ And in that comparison he will place himself somewhere: he will either consider himself small or consider himself big.”
I hold that this very habit of comparison is fatal. There is no need to compare. There is no need to produce hero-worship. What is needed is understanding. Understand Mahavira—understand as deeply as you can. Understand Buddha—understand as deeply as you can. The world has wondrous, wondrous people—understand them all. Understand a saint with as much love, and a sinner with as much love; because no one can say that a sinner does not carry possibilities that a saint may lack. It may be that the saint is utterly dull and the sinner very deep—nothing can be said.
Therefore the task is simply this: that I understand life in all its forms, and I see and recognize it in the many forms in which it manifests. And the only meaning of this seeing and recognizing is that I try to become what I can become. I do not fall into imitation. I make every effort to express and develop my own potential. And even when I am fully developed, I should still not become an object of anyone’s worship. The very urge to become that is wrong, because it can harm others.
No one is anyone’s guru; no one is anyone’s disciple. No one is worthy of worship, and no one is a worshiper. In this world we are all searching for our own individuality, our own soul. Around us others are searching too.
Let us look at them and understand them—not with the idea of how to become like them, but with the idea of how to discover our own. Therefore all hero-worship should disappear from the world.