< Previous | Contents | Next >
CHAPTER 16
Helplessness: another name of let-go
4 April 1988 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium
Question 1 BELOVED OSHO,
I AM SEEING A CERTAIN HELPLESSNESS ARISING IN ME. IT IS A FEELING THAT I HAD FEARED AND ALWAYS TRIED TO AVOID IN THE PAST.
YET, AS IT BEGINS TO OVERWHELM ME, IT BRINGS A SENSE OF FREEDOM I HAVE SELDOM, IF EVER, EXPERIENCED BEFORE.
BELOVED MASTER, DOES THIS HELPLESSNESS HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH WHAT YOU CALL “LET-GO”?
Anand Rakesh, man is helpless. His helplessness is existential. He has tried in thousands of ways to cover it up – by creating a God as a protector, by praying in temples and mosques and churches to some fictitious entity, just not to feel helpless... “There is somebody up there who will take care.” Man has tried to belong to different crowds, Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, just to avoid and escape his aloneness.
But whatever you do, sooner or later you realize you are alone. Neither your wife is yours, nor your husband; it is just an arbitrary arrangement to help each other to cover up helplessness. There is no friend who can help you, there is no political ideology which can help you, there is no theology, no religion.
What I am trying to say is that we have to accept the truth that we are alone and all our efforts to forget it are futile. Secondly, that we are helpless, there is no way to avoid the fact. All are simply imaginations and dreams.
Just to avoid one’s helplessness one tries so many ways... one starts drinking alcohol, taking drugs, so that one can forget this utter helplessness in this vast empty universe, this aloneness in this infinity.
There are people who are angry with me just for the simple reason that I want to make them aware of the fact, and not to live in fictions. There is no God whom you can depend on in times of trouble, in dark nights. There is nobody to hear your prayers. When I say this it creates in people antagonism against me. I am taking away their teddy bears.
Just try to take a teddy bear from a small child and see how he freaks out. The teddy bear is his solace, his consolation, his companion, his God, his friend; he is his everything. Just watch, on the platforms of railway stations, in airports, in waiting halls, small children carrying their teddy bears. Dirty, greasy, looking like Italians, but carrying them... a deep solace somewhere that they are not alone, the teddy bear is here. If any calamity happens the teddy bear is going to help.
But poor teddy bears at least are real. Your God is not even that real.
When I see somebody raising his eyes to the sky and praying, I feel like crying. This man is living in dreams. There is nobody there above the clouds, but his prayer gives him a certain solace, a consolation.
No prayer has ever been heard, except once:
You can see Maneesha here. This is the prayer of Vimal – he prayed twenty-four hours to all kinds of gods, Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, any kind of god, just come and help to take Maneesha’s migraine – because he had started having a migraine! Every day he would have to be hammered – “It is you, because of you, that poor Maneesha is having a migraine. And you are enjoying!”
He started feeling guilty and shaky. Now today he is looking very happy, his prayer has been heard. Now nobody can raise a finger at him.
One other time also a prayer was heard. A man in deep desperation, finding no way to get a small sum of money to purchase medicines or to call a physician for his dying wife, prayed to God: “I don’t want paradise, and I don’t want to be a great saint. I am a small man, very ordinary and mundane – forgive me for bringing such a mundane thing into prayer, but I am helpless; I need fifty dollars. Send it immediately! It is not a metaphysical question, my wife is dying and if the prayer is not heard, to me you will be dead also. I will not pray again.”
But he was a clever man, a little educated too. He thought, “God is so far away that although I am shouting from the roof of my house, I don’t see any possibility that he will hear it, because I cannot see him anywhere. It is better to write a letter, which is more dependable.”
He wrote a letter with his prayer and sent it, but when he started writing the address he was at a loss; he did not know the address of God. Nobody knows his address. Naturally he thought that
the postmaster general must know his address, so he wrote, “God the Father, care of Postmaster General.” And to his surprise, just the next day a money order came. But it was not fifty dollars, it was only forty-five dollars. He was very angry. He shouted again from the top of his house: “It seems this Postmaster General has cut his commission! I had asked for fifty – five dollars are missing!”
And what had happened? When the letter reached the post office, they opened it and they felt that the man must be in a desperate situation. Otherwise nobody writes letters to God; nobody has ever heard of writing letters to God. Nobody really knows his address – nobody is in fact certain whether he exists or not. “It will be good that we collect contributions from the office, just a few dollars each, and send this poor man a great surprise, that God has heard.”
But they could collect only forty-five dollars. They said, “It is better than nothing. Send it immediately, because his wife is sick and if we wait for five dollars more, he may not be able to bring the physician and the medicine.” So they quickly sent the express telegram for forty-five dollars to be delivered to this man.
Except these two times, no prayer has ever been heard. And the fact is, in both these cases it is just a belief. The post office people collected the money, it was not God. And it is not God that has taken away the migraine of poor Maneesha. It comes every month to her. It is not in the hands of any God to change it – otherwise no woman would have any periodical troubles, stomach aches, headaches, migraine. Vimal has not been heard by God, it is just coincidence that it was the last day of her period.
So don’t feel too proud, feel humble. Don’t think that you have a direct relationship with God, that your prayers have started being heard.
There is no God, but people are so helpless.
I don’t agree with anything in Karl Marx’s philosophy except one point, where he says that the religion is the opium of the poor people. He is saying that God, religion and all its theological tenets are to help the poor to be patient, to help the poor believe that “Your poverty has also a meaning. You will be the only ones who will be received in God’s paradise, with all the joys and pleasures which are available to the rich people.”
And Jesus’ statement is very significant when he says, “A camel can pass through the eye of a needle, but the rich man cannot pass through the gates of heaven.”
And as far as I know, only rich people can enter anywhere! If the camel is rich, even he can enter the eye of a needle – he can make a very big needle. The question is, do you have money? Even Saint Peter, waiting there before the gates of paradise, first will ask, “Have you got some present for me? If not, just go to the other gate.” That seems to be more logical, more existential, based on sheer experience.
But poor men for thousands of years have been told, “Your poverty is a fire test of your trust.”
This is a great deception. The priests and the popes have been the greatest con men. Because of them the world remains poor; because of them people don’t learn to stand on their own feet; because of them people don’t learn how to enjoy the freedom that a godless world provides for you.
A world with God simply means Adolf Hitler with a loaded gun – or Ronald Reagan, names don’t matter, but somebody is there with a loaded gun forcing you to do things which you don’t want to do, and not to do things which you always wanted to do.
What have all the churches and the scriptures and the religions been doing except forcing people to do things they don’t have any desire to do? And forcing them to stop doing things which are very natural, and they want with their whole heart to move in those directions.
All religions are against nature.
It is very strange. God created the world, according to these religions, and all these religions are against nature. And God created nature – the conclusion is clear, that all religions are against God.
But why do people accept them? They accept them because membership in a big crowd, six hundred million Catholics, one feels that so many people cannot be wrong. Left alone, you start feeling worried. There is no way to find out whether you are right or wrong – where are you going? Is this the right way?
But when you see six hundred million Catholics going, a deep relief comes to your mind that six hundred million Catholics headed by the representative of Jesus Christ, the only begotten son of God, cannot be wrong. It is better to become a member of the crowd. It helps you to drop the worry about whether you are really living rightly or wrongly; whether what you are doing is sin or virtue. The whole responsibility is taken by the crowd and the leaders of the crowd, and they decide what is right.
It is certainly true that when responsibility is taken by somebody else, you feel a certain relief. When the doctor says to you, “Don’t be worried, your wife will be okay”... That does not mean that your wife is not going to die. That does not mean that the doctor knows that your wife is not going to die. The doctor does not know even about himself, but because he has an authoritative status, all the degrees, it helps you. He takes the responsibility. You feel unburdened.
But one thing you forget: that with the responsibility gone, your freedom is also gone. They exist together.
If God is responsible for creating the world, then we cannot be free, ever. Then we are going to remain slaves in the hands of an unknown stranger whom we have never met, who never even sends a telegram on New Year’s Day, who does not seem to be bothered by our existence. What happens to us seems to be none of his concern.
But we become enslaved to the priest in the name of an unknown fictitious entity. Just a few months ago, the pope created a new sin. All sins are created by popes and priests – this is the latest. The sin is that if you confess to God directly, it is a sin. You have to confess through the right channel, the medium, the priest.
Naturally, it is a question of business. If you start talking directly to God, who cares about the pope? Who is going to pay his bills? Millions of dollars – every trip six million, eight million dollars. Who is going to pay every year for three trips, for absolutely unnecessary reasons? Kissing the earth,
which you can kiss anywhere. There is a little bit of difference – the taste. In India, you will taste cow dung; that will be your taste of Hinduism. But you could have managed it in the Vatican itself. You have cows, there is no problem. For that eight million dollars, an unnecessary harassment to yourself and to others.
If everybody starts talking to God directly, then the priests are out of their profession.
When you confess to the priest, he says, “Put ten dollars into the charity box and your sin will be forgiven. I will pray for you.” Everything has a price. You commit a sin and you go to confess to a Catholic priest and you will know how much it costs.
It happened... a bishop became very friendly with a rabbi because both were very deeply interested in the game of golf. They had decided that on the coming Sunday they will finish their services in the church, in the synagogue, and they will both go together to the golf course.
The rabbi finished quickly – rabbis are very efficient people – and he came in his Cadillac, but the bishop was still in the confession booth. It has a small window, and the bishop or the pope or anybody who is representing God is on one side, and on the other side, the person who confesses. A device that the person does not feel awkward, embarrassed; he is not seen by the priest.
But there was a long queue. So from the other side, the rabbi entered the cabin and said to the bishop, “It is getting late, and I don’t see that you will be able to finish till Judgment Day! Because the queue is so long... and you don’t seem to be very efficient. You don’t know business.”
The bishop said, “I am doing it as quickly as possible, but these idiots are such that they don’t confess in a summarized form. They go on in such detail! Nobody is interested in their detail – how the woman looked, on what street they found her, and they raped her and she was screaming but deep down, she loved to be raped... Simply say that ‘I have raped’ and be finished! But unless they go into details... They torture me, but they have a right because they pay money.”
The rabbi said, “You get ready. How much is a rape?” He said, “Ten dollars.”
He said, “That’s okay. You just go and get ready and I will finish your queue.”
And another man came to confess and said, “Father, I am very, very sorry. It has again happened.” And the rabbi said, “My son, don’t be worried. Let it happen and let it happen again and again.”
The man thought, “This is strange. What has happened to Father? Has he drunk too much? The voice also seems to be different. But what else to do?”
He said, “I have again raped a woman.”
The rabbi said, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry about the details. I know all the details. It will be thirty dollars.”
The man said, “That is too much, because I have raped many times – it has always been ten dollars. Suddenly the price has gone up so much? In fact it should go down, because the dollar is going down. You are not taking into account the simple fact that the dollar is reduced to half of what it used to be.”
The rabbi said, “Don’t be worried, my son. You just put thirty dollars there – one minute more and the price will rise! As far as the extra twenty dollars, they are in advance. You can commit two rapes more and there is no need to come to confession, unnecessarily creating trouble. I will pray for all three – in advance.”
The bishop could not believe: by the time he got dressed, took a shower and came out, the queue was finished. And the rabbi said, “You people don’t know how to do business. Although we don’t do such third-rate business... but within five minutes, I finished all of them. I warned them that ’If you go into details, the punishment will be more. God does not want details because he knows everything, he is omniscient. He knows how many rapes you have committed, he knows how many you are going to commit. So I have even charged for advance rapes.”
The bishop said, “What are you saying? And if the pope comes to know about it, that I am taking advances... Do you think I am a pimp? I am a bishop, respectable. You Jews don’t know any etiquette, just money. Even ten dollars is a lot of money nowadays.” The rabbi said, “I never thought you would be angry, I thought you would learn! I taught every one of them – ‘No details, quick business.’ And God is omniscient, he knows the past, the present, the future. So why not the advance?”
The rabbi said, “It is useless to argue. We don’t do such dirty business at all. Instead of thanking me... because your charity box is five times more full than you have ever seen it. Now there is no need for you – just look at my Cadillac – no need to go on dragging in that old dirty Ford car. God is loving, compassionate. How can he not see that his own rabbi should have a Cadillac?”
These people are doing their business, but in a way they are cheap. Now, psychoanalysts have come. They are doing the same kind of business, just their strategy is different. But their charges are very high, they are the highest-paid profession in the whole world. In fact, it has become a fashion in countries like America that rich ladies talk about – “Who is your psychoanalyst?” because to have a very costly psychoanalyst is just like having the Kohinoor. Who can you afford? Sigmund Freud himself!
And the whole thing the psychoanalyst does is that he does not do anything. He simply sits. He has changed the strategy – instead of making a confession booth, he has made a more comfortable couch for the patient. He sits behind so the patient cannot see whether the psychoanalyst is listening to him, whether he is there or not. And the patient goes on talking and he has to tell all his dreams. Most often it happens that there are four or five couches and one psychoanalyst managing them all! Sometimes here, sometimes there... just giving them the sense that “I am here.”
And his whole business is to listen to you, so that you can be unburdened. Just by listening – that is the old Catholic idea – just by listening to you telling everything... you are no longer repressing. You are throwing out, vomiting everything. It feels good. Whether the person is listening or not does not matter. In fact the experienced psychoanalysts never listen because if they go on listening they will go mad, the whole day listening to all kinds of idiots.
But why are people always trying to find some help from somewhere? A deep helplessness – the psychoanalyst is a great man of insight, he knows the unconscious, the collective unconscious. Just his presence by your side twice a week is enough to keep you running, knowing perfectly well that you have the greatest psychoanalyst in the world, so what is the fear? There is no fear: any problem and you can talk to the psychoanalyst. And the psychoanalyst has not to answer you, but just to listen to you.
I have heard, a great psychoanalyst was tortured by a very rich man – because he was able to pay as much as you want, but you will have to listen as long as he wants. So two hours, three hours, sometimes the whole day, one patient. And he was a very cunning man – naturally, the richest man cannot be a very innocent man – he used to look to see whether the psychoanalyst was present or not. So he could not even go to the bathroom, and many times he was coming to the state of EST! The bladder is full and the great man goes on and you cannot go to the bathroom.
That was the whole secret of EST: You could not go to the bathroom. And there is a time limit: three hours, four hours, five hours... and then things go beyond control. And in EST, when somebody moves towards going beyond control – naturally, if you have been for five hours repressing your bladders, then they forget all about control and just in the middle of the crowd of the EST followers you start pissing. It brings such a great relief!
And seeing that one man is courageous enough, others start, and when everybody is pissing, that is called great enlightenment! It is certainly a beautiful experience. Such unburdening, such a freedom, no worry in the world at all!
That psychoanalyst finally managed to convince the rich man that “I am a poor psychoanalyst. If I give my whole day to you then what will happen to my other customers? So I have made a device: I will put a tape recorder here. You talk to it as much as you want, in as much detail as you want, and in the deep silence of night in my bed I will listen to it. This way I can take care of other patients also.”
The rich man said, “That’s perfectly right!”
The next day, when the psychoanalyst was entering his office, he saw the rich man coming out. He said, “What is the matter, where are you going?”
He said, “If you can find a device, I can also find a device. I have told everything to my tape recorder. Now my tape recorder is telling everything to your tape recorder; in the deep silence you should listen. I also have my businesses to look after – why should I waste my time?”
Now two tape recorders, and psychotherapy is happening! But people are ready for any stupid thing, just it should give you a feeling that you are not alone, that you are not helpless, that there are sources that can support you, that you have friends, that you have a family. But all this is fiction. The family is fiction. A woman, a stranger that you have never seen before – suddenly you see and you fall in love with a stranger and you don’t know whether she will cut your pocket or not. Falling in love, at least you should inquire who she is. But love is blind.
And I am not saying it, the whole world for centuries has condensed its wisdom: “love is blind.” It has to be, otherwise who can fall in love with a stranger? In the night the woman may cut your head,
take your bank account and fall in love with somebody else. Love has to be blind, otherwise love cannot be! But people take every risk for the simple reason that at least you have a wife.
Two men used to sit in a bar to the very end, when all customers have gone and the bartender is telling them, “Now it is closing time, you should go.”
And they will say, “Just a little longer.”
The bartender said, “What is...? Nonsense, the time is over. I have also to go home, and the law has to be followed. At a certain time the bar has to be closed.”
One day, one man asked the other, “Why do you go on sitting here?”
The other man said, “It is strange, why do you go on sitting here? You should be the last person to ask me this question. I have a wife and she is such a bitch, such a horrible bitch, that to avoid her I go on sitting in the bar, wasting my money, my time, my health, my respectability. But why do you go on sitting here?”
He said, “I don’t have a wife, that’s why! That empty house... just to think of it and a trembling arises in me, again a dark night alone in the house, nobody even to talk to.”
And the situation is, whether you have a wife or you don’t, in every case you are alone and helpless. How can two helpless persons be less helpless together? Just sheer mathematics: two helpless persons together will be twice as helpless, and you can see it in every marriage. Ask the married man or the married woman and they will all say, “What golden days were those, when we were bachelors. Now all is lost. Now we are stuck, glued together, nothing to say, nothing to talk about, because everything that we wanted to say we have said long before, many times.”
How many times can you say “Sweetheart” when there is no feeling at all? The desire arises to kill the woman, but you have to say, “Darling, I cannot live without you.”
This insane world is insane for a certain reason: because you cannot stand alone and accept it as a reality that helplessness is natural, that aloneness is natural.
A man, the moment he recognizes the fact that to be alone and helpless is natural, suddenly becomes free from all fear. He suddenly becomes free from all kinds of fictitious relationships, suddenly becomes independent, individual. This is the only spiritual freedom and I call such a man the only religious man.
Rakesh, you say, “I am seeing a certain helplessness arising within me.”
You are fortunate. But there are millions who don’t see it. It is there, you are born with it. Don’t repress it, because that is what people do. In what ways they do, they may be different, but the basic thing is they immediately repress it. They immediately start the television, they immediately take out of the pocket a cigarette, start smoking. What has happened? Why have they suddenly started smoking? Smoking gives them an occupation, so they can forget the helplessness that was arising; rather than helplessness arising they start smoke arising! And they make rings and enjoy that they are doing something artistic. And the world is full of such idiots.
If helplessness is arising, it is a good sign. It means you are coming closer to the reality of your being. Look at it as a blessing, not as a curse.
You say, “It is a feeling that I had feared.”
Everybody fears it, nobody wants to be helpless, but it is not a question of your wanting or not wanting. It is simply the fact that you are helpless. Now it is up to you to feel fear, or to sing a song, or to do anything – or not to do anything, just simply sit and look at this helplessness which is your being. What is the problem, what fear is there? Helplessness cannot destroy you.
Helplessness certainly makes you aware and alert that you are surrounded by all kinds of dangers, and that unless you are alert and aware you are going to fall into some ditch somewhere. This ditch or that does not matter. What you call it, that too does not matter. You fall in a ditch and you say, “I have fallen in love.” And it was only a ditch!
And sometimes you get bored just being in the same ditch – how long can you go on? So you start crawling out of it just to find another ditch, because these ditches are all over! And you become more and more accustomed to falling: the moment you see a ditch, you immediately start moving towards it. It is not the ditch that comes to you, you go towards the ditch.
Mulla Nasruddin used to tell people and his friends that his wife was like a mousetrap – not in front of his wife, of course, but one day she heard. In the sitting room he was telling somebody, “My wife is just like a mousetrap.”
The wife came in and she said, “Yes, I’m a mousetrap, but who are you? And why did you enter? Mousetraps don’t run behind the mouse, the mice themselves enter into mousetraps! So remember, if again you state that ‘My wife is a mousetrap,’ remember who you are. I have not invited you, you have been after me. Remember all those ice creams and all those roses. I have not asked; in fact I was very reluctant.”
It is true: no ditch follows you. Neither does the ditch welcome you. But people go on falling, and naturally when you fall in a ditch you are in trouble: your own freedom is gone, your whole sky is gone, you are in a trap. And whenever you are in a trap you become a mouse, you lose all dignity of being a man.
It is perfectly good – there is no reason to be afraid. If you fear you will fall immediately into something to find slavery.
There are only two possibilities: one is to stand alone, aloof, helpless, and the other is to fall down into some slavery, into some trap. That will give you a little relief but it will take away all your dignity, all your grandeur, all your splendor, all your beauty. You will feel ashamed of yourself.
You are saying, Rakesh, “It is a feeling that I had feared and always tried to avoid in the past. Yet, as it begins to overwhelm me, it brings with it a lot of energy and a sense of freedom I have seldom, if ever, experienced before.
“Beloved Master, does this helplessness have something to do with what you call ‘let-go’?”
Yes. In fact it is another name of let-go:
Accepting totally the reality as it is. If it is helplessness, so what?
If it is death, so what?
If it is aloneness, so what?
Once you accept all these things that create fear... and fear brings slaveries of many kinds. The very acceptance is a let-go of all slaveries. Then you stand alone like a Cedar of Lebanon, high in the sky. The beauty of a peak like Everest – standing alone in the vast sky, without a friend, without a companion – is the same experience of the person who stands alone, rooted in his own self. Knowing perfectly well he is helpless and there is nothing that he can do – there is no question of fighting against it, it is fighting against existence. It is better and wiser to relax and just be.
Suddenly you will feel great energy released. The same energy was becoming fear, the same energy was becoming helplessness, the same energy was taking you into hundreds of bondages. Now that you have dropped all that, the whole energy is available to you.
Then you are only pure energy, pure consciousness: sachchidanand. Then you are truth, then you are consciousness, and then you are blissfulness.
And this state of truth, consciousness and bliss is immortal; there is no death to it. There is no beginning and there is no end to it. Once a person even has a small glimpse of it, his whole life is transformed.
Yes, Rakesh, it is what I call let-go.
Before we do our everyday let-go, a few serious thoughts to be contemplated:
A Bible-bashing Baptist is preaching to a Texas businessman, who doubts the miracle of divine punishment.
“Let me tell you,” says the preacher, “about a remarkable occurrence. On the TV news last night there was a story about a politician who was struck by lightning while he was telling a lie. A miraculous incident, was it not?”
“Well, I don’t know,” drawls the Texan. “It would be more of a miracle if lightning struck a politician when he wasn’t lying.”
Little Ernie is trying to get his grandfather to make a noise like a frog. But Grandpa refuses and goes on digging the garden.
After an hour of constant pestering, Grandpa throws down his shovel and turns around. “All right, Ernie,” he snaps, “but why all the fuss?”
“Well,” replies little Ernie, “Grandma says when you croak we will all go to Hawaii.”
Hymie Goldberg returns home early one day, to find a strange man making love to Becky, his wife. His head is buried between her ample breasts. “Hey!” demands Hymie, “just what do you think you are doing?”
“Well... I am listening to music,” says the stranger.
“Music?” cries Hymie, and putting his head between Becky’s breasts, declares, “I don’t hear any music!”
“Of course you don’t!” replies the stranger, “you are not plugged in!” Okay, Maneesha?
Yes, Osho.
Now, before we do our let-go, two things have to be understood.
To make the let-go really a deep and meaningful experience we will remain for two minutes completely frozen, as if dead – as you are sitting. You don’t have to fall, you don’t have to do anything.
When, after two minutes, absolutely frozen – nobody is wanted or welcome to laugh; that will destroy the whole thing. You have to remain frozen and then I will tell you, “Let go.”
These two minutes will be gathering of the energy. These two minutes you will be almost dead. And after these two minutes, when I say, “Let go” then you can relax and then there is no limitation for you. Then you can laugh, you can enjoy; just don’t harm anybody and just don’t do anything to anybody. Whatever you want to do, do to yourself. If you want to tickle, tickle yourself, but not anybody else.
Of course Niskriya is out. (TO NISKRIYA) You are not part of the meditation. So first be frozen for two minutes...
Now... let go.
(AN OCEANIC WHISPER OF THOUSANDS OF BODIES FALLING GENTLY TO THE FLOOR, AND THEN – JUST MORE SILENCE.)
Come back to life...
< Previous | Contents | Next >