Osho on Here NowBELOVED OSHO,HOW COME EVERYTHING IS GOING SO WELL?Gandharaj, the question is not a laughing matter. It touches something of tremendous value in human misery, in human anguish, in human reality. It creates laughter because it looks absurd to ask why things are going so well. We have become accustomed to things never going so well. We are well acquainted with the misery, the pain, the darkness, the meaninglessness, the whole tragedy of human existence. It has gone to our very bones, blood and marrow; we accept it as if it is our nature. If things are going wrong, it seems natural. If things are not going wrong, then something must be wrong — how come things are going so well? We have forgotten the language of well-being, we have forgotten the taste of blissfulness. We have forgotten our own nature. The natural thing is that things should go well; for their going well, no reason is needed.You are healthy — you don’t go to the doctor to ask him, “What is the matter with me? I amhealthy.” You go to the doctor when you are not healthy, when you are sick.When people are young, they don’t ask, “What is the meaning of life?” Their youth, their overflowing energy, is enough meaning, is enough significance. They are still capable of love. They are still capable of a dance, a song, a celebration. Death has not overshadowed their lives yet.The moment a person starts asking, “What is the meaning of life?” it means he has become old — it does not matter at what age. His question emphatically shows that he has lost touch with life, lost touch with love, lost touch with vitality, and wherever he looks it is all emptiness. The question has become significant to him — why is he living? In fact, he has died; his life is posthumous.<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow not-prose">The moment a person asks, “What is the meaning of life?” it is the question of a dead man — who still breathes, whose heart still beats, but it is all like a robot. All poetry, all rainbows have disappeared … no sunrises at all. It seems the night is eternal. It seems that he must have dreamt about the days when he had seen the light; they were not real. Old age, when death is just standing close to you, creates the question, “What is the meaning of life?” But when you are alive, when death is far away beyond the horizon of your vision, who cares about the meaning of life? — you live it, you have it, you sing it, you dance it. It is in every breath, it is in every beat of your heart. One thing has to be understood clearly: that the people who have asked so-called great questions about the meaning of life, about the meaning of the very existence, about the meaning of love, about the meaning of beauty, are thought to be great philosophers but they have one foot in the grave. Just before slipping into their graves, they are raising all these questions.</blockquote>One of the great aestheticians, a great philosopher of aesthetics, Croce, devoted his whole life to a single question: What is beauty? In this century he stands alone as a high peak, incomparable to anybody else. His dedication to the question of beauty is total. He wrote about it, he talked about it, he taught about it, he dreamt about it; his whole life was woven around the question: What is beauty? I have gone through his writings, and on each step I have felt that this man must have been blind — only a blind person can ask, “What is beauty?” And for almost one century, nobody has raised the question of whether Croce was blind or not. I say he was definitely blind. He may have had eyes, just as you have, but he had no perception, no sensitivity. He was asking the question what is beauty? and went on inquiring about it — and the whole existence is full of beauty. Even the smallest blade of grass is beautiful. All around there are flowers and stars, birds and trees and rivers and mountains, and beautiful human beings. Why could a man of the intelligence of Croce not see a simple thing — that beauty has to be felt, not thought about?You have to see it, you have to experience it. You are capable of creating it. But it is such a mystery that it is beyond explanation. You cannot confine it in a definition. But his whole lifelong effort shows only one thing: the poor man never experienced even a single moment of beauty; otherwise, his whole questioning would have changed. He would rather have devoted his life to creating beauty, to experiencing beauty, to rejoicing with the stars and with the moon and with the flowers and with the birds. But he wasted his whole life. And to what conclusion did he come in the end? — that beauty is indefinable. This could have been told to him by anybody in the very beginning. There was no need to waste a beautiful life, a precious gift of existence. And one cannot be certain that it will be given to you again; you cannot even be certain why it has been given to you this time. Do you deserve it? Have you earned it? Does the existence owe it to you? It seems to be a sheer gift, a gift of an abundant existence, not bothering about whether you deserve it or not. Not asking for your qualifications, not inquiring about your character, your morality … making no demands on you, just giving it without any conditions attached to it. Giving it not as a business, but without any expectations from you in return; giving it and allowing you total freedom to do whatever you want to do with it.Gandharaj, everything should go beautifully, easily, with a well-being. It is natural. If something is not going well that means something is sick, something is ill. But all the great moralists of the world, all the theologians, all the prophets and messengers of God have really messed you up. They have made such demands on you. They have taken away all your freedom. They have asked you to do impossible things, and naturally you have failed in doing them. It has left wounds in you — wounds of failure, inferiority, wounds of unworthiness — and you are living with all those wounds. Naturally, everything goes wrong.<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow not-prose">It is not nature, it is your great benefactors — the people who have been promising you that “We are the saviors.” In fact, they are the people who have created a sick humanity, a diseased human mind, a psychology that is not sane. Demanding anything unnatural is bound to create guilt. If you do not do it, you feel guilty that you are not really a human being, that you are behaving like subhuman beings, animals; that you are a sinner, that you are doing things against the prophets and the messengers who represent God.</blockquote>And if you try to follow them, you get into a trap. If you follow them you have to go against nature, and nature is all that you are. You cannot go against yourself, so on each step there is failure. On each step you become more and more schizophrenic: a small part becomes the priest, condemning your whole nature. Whatever you do is wrong. Life becomes a nightmare. And that’s how man has lived for thousands of years: a life which could have been a beautiful experience has been turned into an unbearable torture, a nightmare. Even if you want to wake up you cannot. The nightmare is heavy and long — it is not only yours, it is coming from your forefathers; generation after generation has cultivated it. It has roots as ancient as man; you cannot fight with it. You are torn apart. You cannot fight with your nature, you cannot fight with your sick heritage. And I say that on the whole earth every man is living under the burden of a sick heritage. It does not matter whether he is Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan — those are different names for the same sickness. If you follow your nature, you yourself condemn yourself. The whole society condemns you. The whole world is against you, and you are also against yourself. But you have to live your nature.Friedrich Nietzsche has a beautiful insight. He says that all the religions of the world have been against sex, but they have not been successful in destroying sex; otherwise, from where do these people go on coming? This whole population explosion … if your priests had succeeded, churches would be empty. But there are seven hundred million Catholics — certainly the Catholic priests have failed utterly. Nietzsche is right. The religions have not succeeded in destroying sex. But they have succeeded in one thing: they have made sex poison, poisonous. It is no more a joy, it is no more a thing of beauty, it is no more sacred. They have been able to create a great guilt out of it. And what is right about sex is right about all your natural instincts, but everything has been poisoned. So when things are not going right, you are perfectly at ease. When things are going right, you start feeling uneasy: “What is the matter?”If there are wars, it is perfectly right. If there are riots between Hindus and Mohammedans, if Mohammedans and Jews are killing each other, it is perfectly right. But if suddenly Jews and Mohammedans start dancing and singing and rejoicing together, the whole world will be shocked: “What is going on? Have these people gone mad?” We are suffering a wrong heritage, and unless we get ourselves free from the past we cannot live peacefully.<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow not-prose">Gandharaj, the people who are gathered here with me and the people around the earth who are with me have dropped the past. They are no more Hindus, no more Christians, no more Buddhists; they are simply human beings. And they are trying to live their nature fully, authentically, without any guilt and without any feeling of sin. Things are going beautifully well. They are living in freedom. The past is our slavery, and if the past is too much, then it is going to create our future. We are crushed between past and future, and the future is nothing but a reproduction of the past. And a small moment of present is almost powerless against two eternities pressing it from both sides. Once you are free of past a tremendous realization happens: you are free of future also. And your being free of future means that now you are free to make your future, it will not be made by the past. It will be made by your nature, by your intelligence, by your meditation, by your silence, by your love.Gandharaj, around my sannyasins things are bound to go easy, because there is no sin, no guilt, no imposed morality. I corrupt people so much that they become innocent. People are living innocently. They don’t have any moral codes, any ten commandments, any holy bibles. They have only their own insight and a freedom to create their future, to live according to their nature without any fear. Because there is no hell, and there is no God to decide whether you are right or wrong. If you are right, your life will be a life of joy; if you are wrong, your life will be a life of misery. There is no need for any God. Each act is decisive, intrinsically. So you can feel your way: if you are moving rightly, your life will go on growing more and more flowers, will go on growing bigger and bigger wings. Your reach towards the stars will become easier.</blockquote>And if you are doing something wrong, your very nature will say it is wrong because you will be suffering the consequences of your wrong acts here and now. You will not have to wait for the last judgment day.What a stupid kind of hypothesis, `the last judgment day’ — one day everybody will be awakened from his grave. Just visualize what will happen: all skeletons, and there is going to be such a crowd. At the place where you are sitting there are at least ten skeletons underneath you. When all the skeletons stand up there is not going to be elbow room, and there is going to be such shrieking, shouting, moaning. Even for poor God, it is going to be very difficult to recognize who is who — because there will only be skeletons. Then to judge who is going to heaven and who is going to hell … and do you think in just one day? Each person has millions of acts, good and bad, which have to be balanced, and there is only one God — and not very intelligent either.George Bernard Shaw used to say, “Just the very crowd makes me feel that it will be difficult to make judgments. Moreover, half of the crowd will be women … who will make it almost impossible!” Perhaps that’s why the last judgment day has not happened and is not going to happen. Because Jesus used to say to his disciples, “Soon, in your life, you will see the last judgment day happen” — in his disciples’ lives. That means, at the most, seventy years.Two thousand years have passed, and as the days go by the skeletons go on growing. I think God has changed his mind. Judgment is not possible anymore.As far as I am concerned each act brings its own judgment, and that is more scientific. Why go on collecting acts for a certain day and then deciding? And why decide from outside when there is a possibility to decide from inside? Each act has its intrinsic consequence. You can figure it out: if your life is miserable then you are doing something wrong; and if your life is a merry-go-round then you are doing everything else that should be done perfectly. So<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow not-prose">it is up to you whether you make your life a merry-go-round or a sorry-go-round; there is nobody to decide it. You are the act and you are the judge. And this seems to be more scientific, simple.</blockquote>Gandharaj,<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow not-prose">if everything is going well, be happy. And remember why things are going well so they can continue to go more and more well, because wellness also has depth. Just find out what it is that is making your life blissful, peaceful, silent, happy — simple arithmetic — and your life can become a holy life. According to me, if you are living joyously, you are a holy man.Only one thing you have to do: die to the past so that you can be reborn in a fresh present and a free future.</blockquote>Source:Listen to the complete Audio Discourse at link below…&nbsp;<a href="/beyond-enlightenment-01-32" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Discourse Series: Beyond Enlightenment – Chapter #3</a>Chapter title: No other path but life5 October 1986 pm inReferences:Osho has spoken on ‘Here now, innocence, intelligence, meditation, silence, love, nature, freedom, bliss’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:<ol type="1"><li>The Book of Wisdom</li><li>The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha</li><li>The Divine Melody</li><li>Nirvana: The Last Nightmare</li><li>Philosophia Perennis</li><li>The Secret</li><li>The Tantra Vision</li><li>The Secret of Secrets</li><li>Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind</li><li>Zen: The Path of Paradox</li></ol><style>.footer-ad{display: none !important;}</style><link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Quicksand:wght@300..700&amp;display=swap">