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‌CHAPTER 17


Allow nothing to happen


19 June 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium


[Osho explains the meaning of deva vanya: a wild forest! Drop civilisation, drop culture, he says to her, and become more and more natural. That’s your religion... that has to be your religion.]

Start learning the language of nature again: talk to the trees and talk to the rivers and talk to the rocks. Start communing with natureand that can be done in a thousand and one ways. Every

moment there is a possibility to do it; one just has to be heartfully in it.


Just saying a hello to a tree is enough, but it should come from the heart. And sometimes even that is not needed, but just to stand by the side of the tree with closed eyes feeling the existence, the being of the tree. It has almost the same being as you have – a different form, but the essential is the same. Touching a rock you are touching a being.

Start opening these doors of perception. Don’t remain confined to human beings; that’s an unnecessary bondage. And the irony is that those who are not in tune with nature will not be in tune with man either. Those who are in tune with nature will be in tune with man too, because finally man is nothing but a fragment of nature, a kind of natural growth.

If you avoid nature, if you forget nature, if you are cut off from nature, if you are alienated from nature, naturally by and by you will be alienated from man himself and finally, ultimately, alienated from your own self. Mm? – that’s what has happened to the modern man: everybody has become a stranger in his own home!

This world is ours – it belongs to us and we belong to it – and we have become strangers. We don’t understand its language, we don’t understand its rhythm, we don’t understand its pulse. We have become minds too much.


By being natural I mean: start dropping out of the mind. Become more and more silent and more and more communicative in silence. Start growing into feelings, emotions, sentiments, sensitivities.


Yes, sometimes it is good to cry. When you see a rose flower it is good to cry out of joy, out of gratitude. It is good to sing a song or dance a dance, to give thanks to god that the rose exists and that you have been given an opportunity to see it, to dance around it and to have a little chit-chat with it.


[A sannyasin couple are leaving for the West. The man says: I see that the whole time I was here, I was waiting for something creative to come up, and nothing came.]


Then nothing is very creative!


It is really creative! I am trying to create nothing and you go on expecting something. Something will always be less than nothing, remember. How can something be more than nothing? You want to settle for very small, tiny things, but I will not allow you to settle for small things. Settle for the whole! Nothing is the right thing to settle for; less than that will never be satisfying. But people are looking for something.…


If they can paint a picture they think something creative has happened. Mm?even mad people do that perfectly well. Painting is not such a big thing; sometimes mad people do it far better! If someone puts a few words together and a poem comes up, they feel something great has happened. It is nothing: even computers will soon be writing poetry!


Don’t wait for something to happen; allow nothing to happen. Nothing is infinite! Something is bound to be finite, and anything finite will not satisfy you because your being is infinite: only the same can satisfy the same.


It is difficult, I understand, because there is a stigma in the western mind about nothingness: nothing carries a connotation of negativity.


In the East that is not the case. Nothing is the supermost, the highest good, the ‘summum bonum’, god himself. Nirvana means nothing. We have put nothing at the highest.


When a person is ready to go with nothing, then it has happened. Then he will never be worried, he will never be in anguish, he will never be miserable. You cannot create any hell for him; it is finished, finished forever. The man who lives in nothing, in tune with nothing, has arrived! What can you do to disturb his nothing? You cannot take nothing away.


Something can be taken away – remember. If you have money the robbers can take it, or if robbers miss, the government will take it or the communists will be coming. Something will happen, something is bound to happen.


If you have prestige it can be destroyed very easily because it stands on the very flimsy world of public opinion. If you have political power you can fall into the dust any moment. In fact all those who have political power finally fall down; their own power becomes destructive to them.


It is always possible to lose something: you cannot lose nothing because you don’t have anything to lose. So the man who has nothing is the richest man. He is the emperor among emperors a king of kings.


And nothing is creative. Of course its creativity is not that of a painting or a poem or this and that. Its creativity is such that each moment of your life becomes luminous. It creates you, it creates the man.… And then you love in a different way: you love creatively. Then you are angry in a different way: you are angry creatively.


Even if you go to sleep, you go to sleep in a different way: you go to sleep creatively. Your creativity surrounds you each moment; each step, each inch of your life becomes suffused with it. It creates you, it creates a buddha.


But I can understand: everybody is looking for something, and if that is not happening one starts feeling a little restless. Everybody is hoping for something... and my whole effort here is to destroy all hope, to snatch away everything that you can hope for, to take away all props that support your mind and keep it afloat, to take all the props away so that the mind falls and is destroyed, is shattered.


In that very moment – when the mind falls and is shattered – a great laughter arises in you. You will laugh your whole life. The laughter will never stop.


[The woman says: It feels like a coffee mill in my head with so many questions going around and around.


One question is: what is my investment in putting myself down and saying ‘I don’t deserve things and I’m not equal, I’m not mature, I’m...’?]


These are the ways of the ego... these are very subtle and cunning ways of the ego. You want to be very perfect, the ego wants to be very perfect. Then the by-product is that whatsoever you are, you will feel that you are not up to the mark, that you are below the mark. You put the mark high, very high: you want to be at the top; then this is the by-product of that. You start feeling you are not mature enough – because you have a very very high ideal of maturity that you cannot fulfill. In fact you will never fulfill it; nobody has ever been that mature – then you start feeling bad.…


And this is your investment: the investment is that you have a very subtle ego and the ego feels very good when you feel ‘I am not mature’. Now this is a very tricky way. Ordinarily a man who is an egoist declares, ‘I am the most perfect man’. Then it is very direct, gross; it is not very subtle. You are also declaring the same: you are declaring, ‘I want to be the most perfect woman; in fact that is my potentiality. I will become it one day, but right now I am not, so I have to suffer and I have to really suffer so that I become perfect’. This is your investment.


You cannot drop it unless you bring down that high ideal. That’s what I mean by: ‘When you see a buddha on your way, kill him’; this is what I mean. Kill him immediately, slay him! By buddha is meant all kinds of ideals.


Now you have impossible ideals in your mind – that you should be this and you should be that.… And you are not – nobody is for that matter – then you feel bad. When you feel bad you go on


decorating the ideal more and more so that one day you will reach to the ideal and you will show the world who you are. You see the trip? This is your investment.


It is an ego-game on both the sides: first it makes a great ideal, then it feels bad. The ego creates ego-trips and then it feels miserable!


Drop the ego and the goal disappears and the misery too; they go together. It is one game: they are not separate.


And start living life as you are. What can you do? – if you are not mature, you are not mature. How is an immature person expected to suddenly be mature? How? It is just as if you are asking a small baby to become old! How can the baby become old?


Yes, you can create misery for him. He may pretend sometimes: he will sit in the chair and take a newspaper and start reading the newspaper as old people doubt that’s all he can do; he will remain a child. Sooner or later he will throw the newspaper and will run outside into the garden and do the things that he really wanted to do. How long will that maturity be there?


A child has to be a child. When you are a child, be a child so that when you become old you don’t repent that you didn’t enjoy your childhood! Otherwise this is what happens: when you are a child you want to be old; when you are old you would like to become a child again.


Mm? – that’s why so many poets all over the world in all the languages, go on singing songs about childhood. They have missed! Now they have become old and now they are thinking, ‘What beautiful days those were – those days of childhood, that innocence, that freedom, that unworried state of mind, no responsibility.’ Now they are hankering for it; now it is a nostalgia.


When they were children they were thinking how to become grown-ups; now they are grown-ups they are thinking how to become children.


This is the moment: enjoy this ungrownupness, this immaturity, otherwise you will miss something. Immaturity has its own beauties just as childhood has its own beauties. Maturity too has its own beauties just as old age has its own beauties, but there is no need to hanker for the other when you are are away from it.


While you are young, enjoy your youth with all its immaturities, with all its flaws. Enjoy it with all its limitations because youth is flying! Soon it will be gone and you will become mature and then there will be no way back. You will be caught in maturity and then you will suffer and say, ‘Now I have become mature – I cannot fool around the way I used to like to.’ You would like to become immature again so you can forget all these things which wisdom brings.


While you are immature enjoy it; when you become mature enjoy that too. This is my philosophy: wherever you are at the moment, let that moment be your totality. Don’t create an ideal against it, above it, otherwise you start feeling that you are falling short.


All idealism is a kind of neurosis and all perfectionistic people tend to become mad. So drop this completely. Enjoy these foolish days; these are beautiful days! Soon they will be gone: before they


are gone drink their juice to the utmost so there is no need to look back. When maturity comes enjoy that.


And then a man can enjoy the whole life from the beginning to the very end. He can enjoy childhood, he can enjoy youth, he can enjoy old age, he can enjoy success, he can enjoy failure; he can enjoy everything t:hat happens! He will enjoy life and he will enjoy death too. And when the whole life is just a continuity of enjoyment it is sacred! This life I call holy because it is whole!


  

 

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