:: OSHO SPEAKS ::

LIFE IS A DEEP INTERDEPENDENCE

Life is INTERDEPENDENCE. Nobody is independent and nobody is dependent, everybody is interdependent. Osho says, “These three words have to be remembered: dependence, independence, and interdependence. Dependent you are; independence you seek; interdependence I teach. Dependent you are, because everywhere you will feel you are dependent, everywhere a limitation comes in. If you love somebody you become dependent on him or on her. Everywhere life brings dependence. Then the idea arises that in the world you can never be independent. Escape from the world. You can escape, but independent you can never be: you can only be deceived. Even in the Himalayas you are not independent; you are still dependent on the sun. If the sun does not rise, you will be dead immediately. You will be dependent on the oxygen and air: if the oxygen disappears, you will be dead. You will be dependent on water; you will be dependent on a thousand and one things.”

Osho says, dependence has to be understood, not avoided. If one can understand dependence, he will understand immediately that hidden behind it is interdependence. Dependence is just a misinterpretation. “Those who have known have also known that you are not dependent on the sun; the sun is also dependent on you. Without you the sun cannot be, as you cannot be without the sun. Even a small blade of grass will be missed from existence; the existence will never be complete without it. A gap, something missing, will be there. So don't think that the stars are great, and a blade of grass is very small and tiny. In existence, nothing is great and nothing is small, because existence is one.

This is what is meant by ecology: interdependence. And ecology is not only of this earth, it is of the totality. Ecology is a spiritual phenomenon.”

Read on……

“Man has lived in dependence, and man has desired and fought for independence, but nobody looks into the reality -- that dependence and independence both are extremes.

Reality is exactly in the middle; it is interdependence. Everything is interdependent. The smallest blade of grass and the biggest star both are interdependent. This is the whole foundation of ecology. Because man has behaved without understanding the reality of interdependence. He has destroyed so much of the organic unity of life. He has been cutting his own hands, his own legs, without knowing.

Forests have disappeared, millions of trees are being cut every day. Just now scientists are giving warnings -- but nobody is ready to listen -- that if all trees disappear from the earth, man cannot live. We are in a deep inter-exchange. Man goes on breathing in oxygen, and throwing out carbon dioxide; trees go on inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. Neither you can exist without the trees, nor can the trees exist without you.

This is a simple example; otherwise life is interwoven in a thousand and one ways.... Because many trees have disappeared, so much carbon dioxide has gathered in the atmosphere, that it has raised the temperature on the whole earth by four degrees. To you it may seem insignificant -- four degrees -- but it is not insignificant. By the end of this century, this temperature will be enough to melt so much ice that every ocean will rise four feet higher. One degree of temperature more means the ocean rises one foot higher. So the cities which are on the coast of the oceans -- and all the great cities are there -- will be flooded with water.

If the temperature goes on increasing, as is the possibility, because nobody is listening.... Trees are being cut, without any understanding, for useless things; for third rate newspapers you need newsprint, and you are destroying life. There is a possibility that if the eternal ice of the Himalayas starts melting, which has never happened in the whole past, then all the oceans will rise twenty feet higher, and will drown almost the whole earth. They will destroy all your cities -- Bombay and Calcutta, New York, London, and San Francisco. Perhaps a few primitive people who live high in the mountains may survive.

Such is the interdependence that when your first astronauts reached to the moon, we became aware for the first time that the whole earth is surrounded by a thick sheet of ozone, which is a form of oxygen. That layer of ozone surrounds the whole earth, like a blanket. It has been because of this ozone blanket that life has become possible on this planet, because ozone does not allow in the death rays that come from the sun. It allows in only the life rays and prevents the death rays; it returns them.

But in our stupidity to reach to the moon, we have made holes in the blanket. And the efforts continue. Now we are trying to reach Mars! Each time a rocket goes beyond the atmosphere of the earth, that is two hundred miles beyond, it creates great holes. Through those holes, death rays have started entering in. Now scientists are saying that these death rays will increase the rate of cancer by almost thirty percent; and other diseases are not counted, small diseases are not counted.

The stupid politicians are not listening. And if you call them stupid, then you are jailed, you are punished; false allegations are made against you. But I don't see what else to call them. Stupid seems to be the most gentle and the most cultured word for them. They don't deserve it; they deserve something worse.

Life is a deep interdependence.

The Golden Future

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