Robopathology
Osho on Robopathology
NAJRANI SAID, ‘IF YOU SAY THAT YOU CAN “NEARLY UNDERSTAND”, YOU ARE TALKING NONSENSE.’
A THEOLOGIAN WHO LIKED THIS PHRASE ASKED, ‘CAN YOU GIVE US AN EQUIVALENT OF THIS IN ORDINARY LIFE?’
‘CERTAINLY,’ SAID NAJRANI. ‘IT IS EQUIVALENT TO SAYING THAT SOMETHING IS “ALMOST A CIRCLE”.’
MAN is not yet man. He can be, but he is not. The potential is there but the potential has to be actualised. It is not yet a reality. By birth we are born only into an opportunity to grow. Birth itself is not life. And the person who thinks that by being born he has already become man is befooling himself. That is the original sin. That is the only sin there is — to think that you are already that which you can be. Life has to be discovered, created, realised. If you don’t realise it you remain more or less a machine. That is one of the basic principles of Sufism: that man as he exists is a machine. The machine has deceived itself into believing that it is conscious. Consciousness is a promise, but one has to explore it.
It is a task. Consciousness is a possibility but you can miss it. Don’t take it for granted. It is not yet a fact. You are a seed for it but you have to grow into it. A seed can remain a seed and may never become a tree, may never become capable of blooming, may never be able to release its fragrance to the world, may never be able to offer itself to the divine. That possibility also exists. And remember always that many miss; only a few arrive.
This creates an anxiety — that man is a promise, that man is an adventure, that man is not yet. It creates an anxiety in the wrong kind of person but it creates joy in the right kind of person.
Whom do I call the right kind of person and whom do I call the wrong kind? The coward is the wrong kind of person. In the coward it creates anxiety. At the very idea of going on an adventure, on a pilgrimage into the unknown, the coward shrinks. He stops breathing. His heart beats no more. He becomes stone deaf to this call, to this challenge. This challenge becomes an enemy. He becomes defensive against it. And the courageous I call the right kind of person. To him this is not an anxiety, this is thrill, this is challenge, this is adventure. God has called him forth. He starts moving, he starts seeking and searching.
If you seek, there is a possibility of finding if you don’t seek, there is no possibility. If you start moving then one day or other you will reach the ocean, as every river does. But if you have become very, very much afraid of movement, of dynamism, of life, of change, then you become a small pond. By and by you die. You become more and more dirty, dull, stale, stagnant. Then your whole life is ill. Then your whole life is a pathology. And many — the majority — live in a kind of pathology.
A modern thinker, Lewis Yablonsky, has coined the right word for this pathology — he calls it ‘robopathology’. The man who suffers from it he calls a ‘robopath’. ‘Robo’ means a machine, an automaton; one who lives a mechanical kind of life, a repetitive kind of life; one who has no adventure; one who simply goes on dragging himself. He fulfills the day-to-day demands but he never fulfils the eternal demand, the eternal challenge.
He will go to the office, to the factory, he will come home, he will look after the children and the wife, and he will do a thousand and one things — and do them very efficiently — but he will never be alive, you will not find aliveness in him. He will live as if he is already dead. ‘Robopath’ is a beautiful word. Sufis have always talked about this pathology. They have called it by many names. For example, they say that man is a machine. Gurdjieff introduced this Sufi idea into the Western consciousness. Sufis say that man is asleep. Sufis say that man is dead. Sufis say that man is not yet. Sufis say that man only believes that he is but that belief is a kind of dream.
You may remember sometimes dreaming that you are awake. Yes, it happens in dreams. You can dream yourself awake, you can think you are awake — and when you dream in a dream that you are awake you feel as if you are awake. Only in the morning when you are really awake will you be able to compare notes. Then you will laugh at the ridiculousness of it. The dream deceived you. Sufis say that people are not awake, they only believe they are awake. And their very belief is a hindrance to their awakening. If you already believe that you are awake then what is the need of doing anything about it? It is pointless. If a man feels he is healthy then what is the point of going to a physician? Then what is the point of taking any medicine or treatment? Then what is the point of having very, very painful surgery? He believes he is healthy already. Cowards believe they are healthy because they are afraid of the medicine, of the physician, of the operation, of the surgery. They are afraid of everything, they simply exist in fear, they go on trembling deep inside. They are just protecting themselves. Their whole life is a long story of protection, defending. They don’t have time to live and they don’t have energy to grow.
This robopathology has to be understood. It is one of the fundamentals of Sufism. A few things…. A robopath is a person whose pathology entails robot-like behaviour and existence. He is man only for the name’s sake. He could have been a computer. He may be. A robopath is a human who functions insensitively, mechanically — in short, in a dead way. A robopath is an automaton.
His existential state is not even inhuman. He is not human, certainly he is not even inhuman — because to be inhuman first you have to be human. His existential state can only be described as the Sufis describe it — they call it ‘ahuman’. It has no human value, neither this way nor that. He is neither human nor inhuman, he is ahuman.
These are the characteristics of this disease. Ponder over them — because they are your characteristics, everybody’s. Until you become enlightened these characteristics will follow you like a shadow.
We can define enlightenment as getting out of robopathology, becoming consciousness for the first time, dropping the mechanical, no longer being identified with the mechanical, becoming a witness, awareness, awakenedness.
The first characteristic is sleep. You will find the robopath always asleep. He walks but he walks in sleep. He talks but he talks in sleep. He does many things, he has become perfectly efficient in doing the ordinary things of life. But watch yourself and watch people. You go on doing the same thing again and again. By and by there is no need to be alert about those things, you can simply do them. You need not be there. When you first start learning to drive you have to be there for a few days. That’s why it is so troublesome to learn anything — because to learn anything you will have to come out of your sleep a little bit at least. Otherwise how will you learn? So Robopaths are never interested in new things. Once they have learned a few things they go on moving in that vicious circle. Their every morning is the same and their every evening is the same. Every time they eat or they talk or they make love, it is the same. They are not needed there at all. They don’t do anything through consciousness, they go on making empty gestures. That’s why there is so much boredom in life. How you can remain thrilled by constantly repeating the old? This is the first characteristic — sleep.
The second characteristic is dreaming — part of sleep. A robopath continuously dreams — not only in the night, even in the day. He has day-dreams, reveries. Even while he is doing something, deep inside he is dreaming. You can find that any time. Close your eyes any time and look inside and you will find a dream unfolding. It is constantly there. It is like the stars — in the day they don’t disappear, they only become invisible because the light of the sun is too bright. But the stars are there, the full sky is there as it is in the night — exactly as it is in the night. When the sun is gone you will see those stars appearing again. They have not gone anywhere, they were there just waiting for the sun to go. In the night you start seeing dreams. Those dreams don’t disappear in the day. Because you become involved in a thousand and one things in daily routine life, they go on lurking deep in the unconscious. You can find them any moment. Close your eyes, wait a single moment, and the dream is there. Sleep is constantly there. Your eyes are full of sleep and your mind is full of dreaming.
And the third characteristic is ritualism. A robopath remains in rituals, he never does anything through his heart. He will say ‘hello’ because he has to say it or because he has always been saying it. His ‘hello’ will not have any heart in it. He will kiss his wife but it will be just repeating an empty gesture. There is no kiss in his kiss. He will embrace somebody but only bones will touch and skin will touch — he will remain as far away as ever. He is not there. You can be certain about one thing — he is not there. But
robopaths are great ritualists. They depend on ritual. They do everything as it should be done. A ritual is by its very nature uncreative. A ritualistic person is never spontaneous, he cannot afford to be spontaneous. If you want to be spontaneous you will have to be alert. Spontaneity has one necessary ingredient, and that is alertness. If you are not alert you cannot be spontaneous.
And of course, how can you be creative? You are repetitive, how can you be creative?
Even great creators are rarely creative. Even great painters go on repeating their own painting, and great poets go on repeating the same poem again and again. Only very rarely does a person sometimes create some-thing — and those moments when creativity is there are moments of spiritual joy. That’s why creativity brings so much joy. A creative person is a happy person; an uncreative person is a miserable person.
Many people come to me and they ask how to be happy, where to find happiness. They cannot find it unless they become creative. Happiness cannot happen to them, it happens only to creative souls. Create something. Become more spontaneous. Drop repetitions. Let every morning be a new morning and let every experience be a new experience. Don’t think that all is old. Robopaths think there is nothing new under the sun — it is all the same so why bother? Rather than living life a robopath creates a ritual. For example, if he prays he prays as a ritual. He has learned a certain prayer, he goes and repeats it. He goes to the church, he has learned a ritual. There may be a temple by the side of the church but he will not go to the temple. And the temple may be more silent. Or there may be a mosque and the mosque may be more silent. It is Sunday, all the Christians are in the church — if you really want to pray, the church is the last place. If you want to pray you should find a temple or a mosque where there will be silence and more of God. But a Christian cannot go there. He is not interested in prayer and he is not interested in God, he is only interested in a certain kind of ritual. That makes him feel that he is a Christian. These ritualists create great problems in the world. They go on fighting, they go on debating whose ritual is the best.
All rituals are just rituals; there is no question of there being a good ritual or a bad ritual. A ritual as such is bad, ugly. Spontaneity is good, ritualism is bad.
Just the other day I was reading a story…. Sedgewick, the eldest son of a respectable Boston family, walked into his father’s study one evening and made a shocking announcement. He intended to live openly with his boyfriend on Beacon Hill.
‘Damn it!’ exclaimed the parent. ‘Our family came here with the pilgrims and we have never had a scandal such as this.’
‘I can’t help it,’ said Sedgewick, ‘I love him. ‘
‘But for God’s sake!’ shouted his father. ‘He’s a Catholic!’
Now that is the real problem. That is the scandal. That’s what is heavy for the parent. The ritualistic mind is always like that. It goes on missing the real problem. It never faces a real problem, it creates an unreal problem because it is easy to solve an unreal problem. Remember it. It gives you a good feeling that you have solved it. That’s why people love to solve puzzles, crossword puzzles, and things like that. Solving a crossword puzzle gives you a feeling that you are solving something. It is stupid. Nothing is solved by solving a crossword puzzle. Your life remains as unsolved and as complicated and confused as ever, but it gives you a feeling that at least you have been able to solve something. Otherwise there is no need. Life is such a great puzzle, if you want to solve it, solve it. Why create small, tiny, petty troubles and puzzles and then solve them? They give you a good feeling. They make you avoid life itself. Life is too big and dangerous. Solving a crossword puzzle has no danger in it. If you solve it, good, if you don’t solve it, nothing is wrong in it…
People worship the dead and avoid the alive — because with the alive you have to become alive, that is the problem. With the dead you are perfectly happy; you are also dead, there is a communion between the dead and the dead. With the alive you start feeling guilty, with the alive you start feeling you are missing, with the alive you start feeling jealous. With the alive you start feeling that you have to do something now — and you don’t want to do it. You want to somehow kill time, pass time. People are passing time. And people are very much interested in rituals. A real prayer is going inwards; a ritualistic prayer is just lip-service.
To face a real Master is to face death and to face life — they are both together, always together. To worship a dead Master — a Jesus, a Buddha — requires nothing from you. You can bow down at the feet of an image and you remain the same. Bowing down at the feet of a real Master your ego has to be put aside. Your ego will create a thousand and one difficulties for you to bow down and surrender. That’s why people become Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans — these are all rituals…
A robopath is very dogmatic. He is always pretending to be certain about everything. He cannot allow doubt. Doubt creates trembling. He believes, he never suspects — because if you doubt then you have to enquire. And who knows where your doubt will lead? That’s why you see so many believers on the earth and no religion at all. So many believers? Everybody seems to be a believer — believing in his Christianity, in his Mohammedanism, in his Hinduism. Everybody is a believer. And the world is so utterly irreligious — what is the matter? With so many believers the world should be blooming in religion. But this belief is not trust, not faith; it is pure dogmatism. It is just an effort to crush the doubt, it is just an effort to repress the doubt. If you talk to a robopath you have to be very alert; you must not touch his belief otherwise he gets mad. He is not getting mad at you. He simply becomes afraid — you are taking the ground from underneath his feet. He has been believing that he knows and now you are here to disturb him. People don’t like being disturbed. It creates anxiety. People are very fixed in their ideas. Life goes on changing but their ideas never change. Just look…. You are still carrying the ideas that were given to you in your childhood — and that life is no longer there. Life has moved, the Ganges has flowed, much water has passed, and you still go on believing in your childhood beliefs, childish, juvenile concepts. You carry them. That’s why people don’t grow.
A robopath is always past-oriented or future-oriented. He is never in the present. The past is good because you cannot do anything with the past. The past is finished and complete. The robopath feels very at ease with the past. The past is dead, things have happened, now there is no way to change and alter them. With the past the robopath feels in tune, with the future he can desire and hope — but with the present he is very uneasy, with the present he is very restless. The present brings problems.
The past is finished, there is no problem about it — it is settled. And with the future you can hope and you can settle according to the hopes in your mind. The future will not create any trouble for you. The future will not say that this is not possible. You can dream about it. But the present is the most dangerous space to be. You want one thing and life gives something else. There is always a clash. You wanted somebody to welcome you and he didn’t welcome you. If you had been hoping about the future there would have been no problem. The future cannot come and say no. The past is settled, you know it is settled. Everything has happened. It is no more relevant. The past can be classified easily, the future can be projected easily… the only problem arises with the present. The present does not listen to you. It has its own being. That’s why the robopath goes on avoiding the present. And the best way to avoid the present is either to remain past-oriented or to become future-oriented…
And life happens only when you start encountering the present. You become aware. Your life starts being new when you respond to the present. And the response has to be completely pure of past and future. The robopath lives out of the past. The present does not exist for him. There is nothing new. The response of the robopath is never adequate, cannot be. It is not a response to the present situation so how can it be adequate? It is always inadequate. He reacts on cue. He suffers a cultural lag. He is never contemporary. Remember well, if one thousand people are sitting here, don’t think they are all living in the same moment, don’t think they are contemporary. A few may be still struggling in the caves ten thousand years back — cultural lag. Or a few may be dreaming of the future. Either you lag behind or you jump ahead — and both are wrong.
The only way to be authentic and alive is to be herenow. This is the only moment and this is the only space. Reality is herenow. All else is mind. Mind lives in the memory or in the imagination. The robopath lives memory, lives imagination, but never lives reality.
The robopath is a conformist. Conformity is a virtue for the robopath, the highest value. His whole idea is how to conform with people, how to become part of the mob and the crowd. And whatsoever value the crowd gives, he follows it. He is a follower, he is an imitator. He never asserts his individuality, he is never a rebel. He is orthodox in his very blood. He trusts the crowd, he does not trust his consciousness. He has none. When you have consciousness you trust your consciousness, then you are not a blind follower of the crowd. The crowd is the lowest consciousness. To follow the crowd simply means a blind man following other blind men who are far more blind than you are. An individual has some possibility of awakening, the crowd has none. Sometimes an individual has become awakened — a Buddha, a Krishna, a Christ, a Mohammed, a Mansoor — have you ever heard of a crowd becoming enlightened? It has not happened and it is not going to happen. The crowd has no soul. The crowd is absolutely dead. Only individuals live, but the conformist puts his individuality below the crowd. The conformist has only one idea — how to convince people that he is living according to their ideas and ideals, how to have the good opinion of the people. The good opinion of others is his whole virtue, his whole morality.
New or different behaviour is viewed by the robopath as strange and bizarre. Freaks are feared; originality is suspect. Tradition is truth. Obeying is his religion. To be part of the crowd is his goal. He wants to be anonymous in the crowd. He does not want the responsibility of being an individual — because to have responsibility you will have to have consciousness. It is very easy to drop all responsibilities when you become part of a crowd. A Mohammedan crowd burning a temple, or a Hindu crowd killing Mohammedans or a Catholic crowd murdering…. If you become part of the crowd you don’t have any responsibility. You can always say, ‘I am not responsible. Hindus were going there to destroy the mosque and I followed them because I am a Hindu. But I have no individual responsibility. I did not decide to do it. It was already happening. I was just there and I became part of it.’ And when so many people are burning the mosque or murdering people, you can always say, ‘They are doing it. Even if I am not doing it, it is going to happen — so what. I can be with them.’ And you don’t feel any prick in your conscience.
Just think… can you do the same thing individually, all alone, on your own? You will think a thousand times before you decide to do such a stupid act as burning a mosque, or killing a person. But crowds are known to do any kind of thing. It has been one of the observations down the centuries that individuals only rarely go mad, crowds are always mad. For individuals madness is a rare phenomenon, it is accidental, but mobs — madness is the rule for mobs. The crimes that have been committed by the crowd are many; individuals have committed only a few crimes here and there. Remember it, a robopath lives through the crowd so that he cannot be bothered by any responsibility. He can always say ‘they’. He can drop his ‘I’ into the ‘they’. He can lose himself in the crowd, become faceless, anonymous. Nobody can catch hold of him. But you are responsible…
Robopaths are idealists, they are never realists. They avoid reality. They have great ideas in their mind about how man should be. They never listen to the fact of how man is; ‘should’ is far more important for them than ‘is’. And ‘is’ is real and ‘should’ is just imagination. They live in the ‘ought’ and they have impossible ideals in their minds which cannot be fulfilled, which are inhuman — but they try to fulfil them. And in that very effort they start becoming more and more hard, more and more dead. A robopath is always a perfectionist. He is never satisfied. He will always be finding faults . He will try to be as faultless as possible and he will look always at others’ faults. Now, if you want to be faultless you cannot be original. With the original comes the error. If you want to do something new you have to accept that sometimes you may commit mistakes. If you want to be faultless you have to have a very small routine repeated so many times that it has become absolutely rigid and you can do it perfectly. That’s why many people live at the minimum, they cannot go to the maximum. With the minimum they can remain perfect but the maximum is a danger — error may enter in. People live a very limited kind of life. They choose a small life and life has to be multi-dimensional, only then is it rich.
A robopath is really poor. He may have as much wealth as one can have, but he is poor. His life is one-dimensional. He always lives to the minimum, close to the minimum. Do as few things as possible because then you remain more perfect. If you do many more things, naturally you can’t be perfect.
A real man is rich. He commits many errors — of course, he never commits the same error twice — but he always goes on new adventures, seeking and searching for the new. He is ready to go astray. The perfectionist is not ready to go astray. He cannot learn because learning creates trouble — that’s why you see that children can learn very much, grown-ups cannot. Grown-ups become perfectionists, they become robopaths. Children are still not trained for it; they are ready to learn.
And children learn fast. Psychologists have come to observe that a child learns as much in seven years as he will learn in the rest of his life. Fifty per cent of his whole life is learned by the age of seven. If you are going to live for seventy years more, you will learn only fifty per cent more. This seems to be a sheer wastage of life. But why is the child so ready to learn? He is ready to commit mistakes, he is not worried about his image. He can try. If he fails he is ready to fail. A person who is not ready to fail will never try.
A robopath is necessarily anti-joy, anti-life. Not only is he anti-joy, he is a joy-killer. If somebody else is celebrating he will look with eyes of condemnation. If somebody is singing and dancing he will look as if somebody is committing a sin, a grave sin. He cannot accept laughter. Laughter looks to him like a sacrilege. He wants everybody to be serious and have long faces. He wants everybody to be miserably serious. That is his idea of a grown-up man. This is not the grown-up man, this is really the pathological state, ill. A real man has the capacity to laugh as much as the capacity to cry. The real man has the capacity to be happy and to be miserable. His misery also has a certain life. These robopaths are miserable but even their misery is dull and dead and mechanical. Even in their misery there is no throb. Remember this, and avoid any ideas that make you anti-life…
Robopaths are self-righteous, they always feel holier than thou. Their whole effort is how to look holier than others, how to be at the top. Their ego is very subtle. These people become saints, monks, mahatmas, and all kinds of neuroses are born in them. These people become politicians, puritans, moralists. They are ready to throw the whole world into hell. These are the people who have invented hell. And the last thing that a robopath is, is alienated. ‘The robopath is alienated from self, from other selves, and from nature. He is alienated from self in the sense that his ego is only a function of ritualistic demands. It has no intrinsic self-definition.’ He does not know who he is, he knows only what others say about him. So he is alienated from himself. He has never encountered himself. He has never looked into his own being. He has always been looking into other people’s eyes — looking for his image, for how he looks in other people’s eyes. He has never come home. He is alienated from himself…
And naturally, when you are not in tune with yourself and with other people, how can you be in tune with nature? These robopaths have been destroying nature. They are the enemies of ecology. They go on destroying nature. They have wiped almost half of nature off the earth. They are very destructive people. They are destructive of themselves, of others, of nature — how can they know God? How can they feel God? They have not even felt a rose flower, they have not even felt the cry of the cuckoo, they have not even felt the river passing by, they have not even felt a child smiling and they have not seen a woman’s tears. They have not even felt their own existence. This creates alienation. They are alienated from other people because their interaction is usually in terms of others as objects, not as human beings. They are role objects, like servants, bosses, employees, employers, doctors, patients etc. When a doctor comes to see a patient he is not interested in the patient as a person, just in his role as a patient. And the patient is not interested in the doctor as a person, just in his role as a doctor. The wife, the husband, the son, the father, the mother — they are all roles. People are not interested in each other’s person, in each other’s living reality.
This is the robopathology that man has lived up to now, and man can go on living in it. You can jump out of it. That jump makes you religious. That jump brings you to understanding, that jump makes you wise, that jump makes you enlightened.
Source:
This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune.
Discourse Series: Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol 1
Chapter #7
Chapter title: From Robopathology to Enlightenment
17 August 1977 am in Buddha Hall
References:
Osho has spoken on ‘awareness, aliveness, spontaneity, creativity, alertness, love, happiness, consciousness, authentic, herenow’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:
- Bodhidharma: The Greatest Zen Master
- Sermons in Stones
- The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha
- The Messiah
- The Invitation
- The Buddha: The Emptiness of the Heart
- The Razor’s Edge
- The Tantra Vision
- Tao: The Pathless Path
- The Ultimate Alchemy
- Vigyan Bhairav Tantra
- The Book of Wisdom
- Zen: The Path of Paradox
- The Beloved
- From Death to Deathlessness
- Walk Without Feet, Fly Without Wings and Think Without Mind
- The Hidden Splendor
