Osho,
What is the responsibility of love?
The mind creates questions. They may look very relevant and rational, but they are against experience, against existence. And because the whole world is communicating with each other only through the mind, nobody raises his voice against such basically wrong questions. For example, this question is fundamentally wrong. It is out of total misunderstanding.
Love knows no responsibility because love itself is responsibility. To separate love and responsibility is simply stupid. But all moral systems of the world separate them. Their idea of responsibility does not correspond with existence, only with their logic. And it has to be understood that logic is man-manufactured. It does not grow in the fields. It is not like the mountains and the stars and babies. It is simply a mind projection.
It has dominated humanity for centuries. It has destroyed many valuable possibilities, potentialities. It has closed many doors to the mysteries of life. It has made man almost blind to light, to consciousness, to bliss, to truth. But it has been such a long domination that it isn’t easily apparent that it goes on committing mistakes against existence. I would like to dissect this question as minutely as possible. Only dissection of the question will make you aware that it does not need an answer.
Responsibility according to all moral codes is a kind of duty – and a duty is a burden. You have to do it in spite of yourself because you have been told to do it; it is a should. You feel guilty if you don’t do it. You feel you are escaping from your responsibility. But if you do it, you feel enslaved, destroyed as an individual, your freedom destroyed. So on both counts, you are in trouble. Morality makes man psychologically sick. It gives you ideas which are going to make you uneasy whatever you do. Whether you follow them or not makes no difference.
You are told, “This is your responsibility toward the nation.” Now, the nation is a fiction. There are no nations in the world as far as nature is concerned, existence is concerned. All your maps are just meaningless and a better humanity is going to burn all of them, because all the boundaries that discriminate against any part of humanity are ugly, insane.
I have told you a story…

When India was divided into two nations, India and Pakistan, a rumor was heard that there was a madhouse just on the boundary. Neither India nor Pakistan was interested in taking the madhouse. But something had to be done. It had to go somewhere. Finally, the chief superintendent of the madhouse called all the mad people and asked them, “Do you want to go to India?”
They said, “No, we are perfectly happy here.”
The superintendent said, “You will be here. Don’t be worried about that. Just tell me – do you want to go to India?”
They all looked at each other and they said, “People think we are mad! Something has gone wrong with our superintendent. If we are going to be here then the question does not arise of going to India. Why should we go to India?”
The superintendent was in a difficulty how to explain to these insane people. He said, “Then would you like to go to Pakistan?”
They said, “No, not at all. We are perfectly happy here. Why should we go anywhere?”
He again tried to explain to them, saying, “You will be here, whether you choose India or Pakistan. You are not going anywhere.”
Then they said, “It seems to be very strange. If we are not going anywhere, then why should we even be asked about it? We are here.”
It was impossible to convince them that it is not a question of physically moving to India or Pakistan. It was a political question: “Under which country, within which boundary do you want to remain?”
Finally it was decided by the officials that the madhouse should also be divided into two parts. One would be in India, one would be in Pakistan. They raised a huge wall, dividing the whole madhouse in two.
And I have heard that the mad people still climb up on the wall, talk to the people on the other side and say, “We cannot figure it out. We are here, you are here, but you have gone to Pakistan and we have gone to India – just because they have raised this wall. And the strangest thing of all is that they think we are mad.”

It is a mad world. All boundaries are absolute nonsense. Anything that divides man from man is inhuman, uncivilized, uncultured. But nobody asks whether nations are a fiction, and because you never ask, you start believing in the reality of nations. Then questions of responsibility toward the nation arise. You even have to sacrifice your life for a nation which is a fiction. No such thing exists anywhere, no India, no Germany, no Japan, no America. It is a single planet, one humanity. But because of the fiction, people go on killing each other. Real people are killed for an unreal idea.
Responsibility toward the nation has been the cause of all wars. If all those people who had gone to war had refused – “We are not going to kill anybody for a fiction and we are not going to be killed for a fiction” – there would have been no wars, no politicians. The world would have been a peaceful, beautiful place to live in. For centuries we have done nothing except fight, except kill. Our only profession seems to be war. Sometimes we fight, and sometimes we prepare for a future fight.
All the time we are engaged in a single profession – that of murderers – because we have been taught a stupid idea: responsibility toward your nation, responsibility toward your religion. All the religions have been teaching that your life is not more valuable than your religion. It is such a strange idea. All these things should be for man, not vice versa.
A religion exists to help man, not to destroy man. But all religions have been destroying man, none has been helping. They say: “It is your responsibility. If your religion is in trouble or if your religion is trying to conquer bigger territories, to acquire more people, sacrifice is your responsibility.”
It reminds me of the primitive religions because it is a relic of those days. In the ancient book of the Hindus, Rig Veda, they sacrificed to a fictitious God. Nobody has seen him, nobody has any idea what you mean by the very word. There exists no proof, no evidence, no witness. But for that unreal, fictitious God, which is just a hypothesis, men were even sacrificed before a stone statue – a statue that you have made.
There is mention in Rig Veda of narmedh yagna. Sacrificing men to God was the greatest ritual. And the man who was ready to be sacrificed was thought to be a saint. Those who could not do such a thing were thought to be cowards, not fulfilling their responsibility. Dying for God – what can be more valuable than that?
After men, they started sacrificing animals. Today all the Hindus of this country continuously try to stop cow slaughter. But they are not aware that their forefathers in the Rig Veda were themselves killing cows as a sacrifice to God. And they were eating the meat of the cows; stone statues don’t eat. You make an offering and then you can take it back as a divine gift. Everything is yours: you kill the cow, you offer it to a stone god, who cannot eat, and then you take it back and distribute it to all the worshippers. And those people are continuously trying to stop cow slaughter. They were killing horses, they were killing all kinds of animals. They are still killing.
In Kolkata, at one of the most famous temples of the mother goddess Kali, every day they still kill a few goats and then the goat meat is distributed as prasad, as God’s gift to the worshippers. And this is a vegetarian country. A strange kind of vegetarianism! When they stopped sacrificing men… It had been hammered more and more by people like Gautam Buddha and Vardhaman Mahavira that it was absolutely ugly and uncivilized, that eating man in the name of religion was just a strategy to hide their cannibalistic tendencies. Because it was criticized so much, finally they dropped killing men.
But something had to be found as a substitute. Even today, people who are using the substitute may not be aware what they are doing. They found a substitute in the coconut because it looks like the head of a man – two eyes, a little nose, a small beard, hair. In Hindi the head is called khopri and the coconut is called khopra, so there is not much difference. If you want to visit any temple, you will have to take coconuts. You don’t know what you are doing! The statues were once bathed in human blood. Now, that has become difficult. Coconuts are being used, so the statues are colored red. Why red? Blood red.
In the name of God, which is a fiction, your responsibility was to sacrifice yourself. In the name of religion, there have been crusades: Mohammedans killing Christians, Christians killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans killing Hindus, Hindus burning Buddhists alive. And the greatest problem is that what you are doing to man is in the name of something that you cannot provide any existential proof for.
But responsibility… Responsibility to your parents, responsibility to your wife, responsibility to your husband, responsibility to your children… Perhaps you have never thought about it: if you love your children, there is no question of responsibility. Because you love, you do things, you enjoy doing them. Nobody can enjoy responsibility. It is too big a word, too heavy. If you are educating your children, is it responsibility or your love? If it is love, then there is no question of any burden; you are not doing something reluctantly, in spite of yourself, just because it has to be done.
But you are concerned about respectability, what others will say. You will be condemned, so you have to take care of your old parents – out of responsibility, not out of love.
Love is completely forgotten, because love needs a revolution in your consciousness. It is not as cheap as responsibility. Responsibility can be taught to you by the priests, by the teachers, but nobody can teach you love. You have to find love yourself, within your being, by raising your consciousness to higher levels. And when love comes, there is no question of responsibility. You do things because you enjoy doing them for the person you love. You are not obliging the person, you don’t want anything in return, not even gratitude. On the contrary, you are grateful that the person has allowed you to do something for him. It was your joy, sheer joy.
Love knows nothing of responsibility. It does many things, it is very creative; it shares all that it has, but it is not a responsibility, remember. Responsibility is an ugly word in comparison to love. Love is natural, responsibility is created by the cunning priests, politicians who want to dominate you in the name of God, in the name of the nation, in the name of family, in the name of religion – any fiction will do.
But they don’t talk about love. On the contrary, because they are unable to control love, they are all against love. A man of love acts out of his own heart, not according to any moral code. A man of love will not join the army because it is his responsibility to fight for his nation. A man of love will say there are no nations, so there is no question of any fight.

When I was a student at the university, it was made compulsory for every student to join army training, otherwise they would not be given their postgraduate certificates. It was my last year in the university. I went to the vice-chancellor and told him, “It goes against my consciousness, it goes against my heart to learn anything destructive. And I refuse absolutely to join any training that you are providing for students. I don’t care whether you give me the certificate or not.”
He immediately said, “But don’t you feel any responsibility for your nation?”
I said, “Where is the nation? I have never come across it, except on the map.”
And I told him a story about two men sitting on the sea beach who suddenly began to beat each other. A crowd gathered and they were somehow separated. The police came, they were arrested and taken to the court.
The magistrate said, “I know you both. You are known in the city as the best of friends. What happened?”
They both felt very ashamed and they looked at each other. One said, “You tell him what happened,” and the other said, “Better you tell it.”
The magistrate said, “What can be such a secret that you are having so much difficulty in telling it?”
They said, “It is not a secret. It is simply so shameful that we don’t want to tell it, but if you insist, we will have to speak.
“We are great friends. We were just sitting on the beach, when this person – my friend – said that he was going to purchase a buffalo. I said, ‘Buffalo? But remember, she should not enter my field. I am going to purchase a farm and if she enters my farm… I will not tolerate your buffalo simply because you are my friend. I will kill your buffalo.’
“My friend said, ‘This is too much. Buffaloes are buffaloes. And I cannot follow my buffalo the whole day wherever she goes. She will go onto your farm and I will see then who kills my buffalo. I will kill anybody who kills my buffalo. I will not remember that you are my friend. You are my enemy if you kill my buffalo.’”
Things came to such a head that the man who had made it clear that he would not tolerate the buffalo, drew a square on the sand with his finger and said, “This is my farm. Now let us see where your buffalo is.”
He does not have a farm yet, nor does the other man have any buffalo. Both are thinking of purchasing.
The other asked, “This is your farm?” and he ran his finger across “the farm” saying, “This is my buffalo. Now do what you want to do.”
And the fight started.
The magistrate said, “This is too much. Neither does he have the farm, nor do you have a buffalo. You should at least have waited.”
They said, “It was a hypothetical question, but we forgot that it was hypothetical. We became so excited. Please forgive us.”

We have all forgotten that many hypotheses are asking us to do things which we would never do in our senses, in our intelligence, in our consciousness.
You are asking, “What is the responsibility of love?” You don’t understand those words. You don’t understand because you have not loved yet. That’s the only reason that you don’t understand. If you had loved, you would have experienced a responsibility arising out of it, with no sense of duty, with no sense of burden, but just a sheer joy, a dance, a song of the heart. You are doing something that is needed. You never think that you are obliged.
Love never obliges anybody. Love is always obliged that you allowed the heart to shower upon you its flowers, its joys, its songs. Love is obliged to you for your receptivity. Responsibility always thinks: “I have done well and everybody should know it. And everybody should feel obliged. I have sacrificed so much for the freedom of the country. I have done so much in the war in defending the country. I am working so hard so that my children can be educated, can be well-nourished, and so that I can provide facilities for my grandparents or my parents.” But you find this a burden. You are crushed under it. It is not a joy, it is not blissfulness, it is not ecstasy.

My grandfather loved very much. He was old, very old, but he remained active to his very last breath. He loved nature almost too much. He lived on a faraway farm. Once in a while he would come to the city, but he never liked it. He always liked the wild world, where he lived.
Sometimes I went to see him and he always liked somebody to massage his feet. He was becoming so old and he was working so hard, so I would massage his feet. But I told him, “Remember, I am not fulfilling any responsibility. I don’t have any responsibility toward anyone in the world. I love you, and I will massage your feet but only up to the point where it is not troublesome to me. So when I stop, never ask me to do a little more. I will not. I am doing it out of my joy, not because you are my grandfather. I could have done the same to any beggar, any stranger, just out of love.”
He understood the point. He said, “I never thought that responsibility and love are two things. But you are right. When I am working in the fields, I always feel I am doing it for my children and their children, as a duty. It is heavy on my heart. But I will try to change this attitude of responsibility. I may be too old to change – it has become a fixation in my mind – but I will try to change.”
I said to him, “There is no need. If you feel it is becoming a burden on you, you have done enough. You rest. There is no need to continue working unless you enjoy the open sky and the green fields and love these trees and the birds. If you are doing it out of joy and you love your children and you want to do something for them, only then continue. Otherwise stop.”
Although he was old, something synchronized between me and him. That never happened with any other member of my family. We were great friends. I was the youngest in the family and he was the oldest, just two polarities. And everybody in the house laughed. “What kind of friendship is this? You laugh together, you joke with each other, you play with each other, you run after each other. And he is so old and you are so young. And you don’t communicate the same way with anybody else, nor does he communicate the same way with anybody else.”
I said, “Something has happened between us. He loves me and I love him. Now it is no longer a question of any relationship; neither am I his grandchild nor is he my grandfather. We are just two friends: one is old, one is young.”

Once you taste love, you will drop the word responsibility completely. Hence your question “What is the responsibility of love?” is simply irrelevant. Love needs no responsibility, and responsibility knows no love. I don’t teach you any responsibility because I don’t want you to be sacrificed in any fictitious name. I want you to live as naturally, existentially as possible. Don’t live according to hypotheses. Don’t live according to moral codes. Don’t live according to Manu or Moses. Live according to your own heart and whatever you do will be right. Never ask anybody what is right. Only a man who has no heart asks that kind of question. Let your heart respond to your question. Your answer is not going to come by any scripture, any holy tradition.
I have heard…

When God made the world, he went to the Babylonians and asked them, “Would you like to have a commandment?”
They said, “First tell us what the commandment is.”
God said, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”
The Babylonians replied, “Then what shall we do? No, we don’t want any such commandment.”
He went to the Egyptians with the same result. He went to other people – the same. They all asked, “What is the commandment? Don’t trick us into some trouble. First be completely clear: What is your commandment?”
Finally he went to Moses and asked, “Would you like to have a commandment?”
Moses asked, “How much?”
God said, “It is free.”
Moses said, “Then I will have ten.”

Because of this Jewish mind, millions of Jews since that time have been living according to those ten commandments.
I was in Greece and one of my sannyasins, Amrito, told me that the Greek Orthodox Church is very old-fashioned, very traditional. It insists on every woman being a virgin until she gets married. She has been one of the most beautiful women herself. When she was young she was chosen to be the beauty queen of Greece and since then she has been a top model. She was telling me about this emphasis of the Greek church on virginity.
I asked her, “But is it followed?”
She said, “Don’t ask such a question. You will not find a single virgin in the whole of Greece.”
I remember she told me that in a church a priest was hammering hard on the fact. “If you are not a virgin, you will suffer eternal hellfire. So if any woman here is a virgin, stand up.” Nobody stood up, everybody was looking down. He said, “I give you another chance. Stand up! At least for God’s sake, one or two women should stand up.” Finally, one woman with a small baby stood up. And the priest said, “You think you are a virgin?”
She said, “No, I am not a virgin. This baby is a virgin. But she cannot stand on her own. She is the only virgin in the whole congregation. She is only six months old, so I have to stand up.”
People have been forced into all kinds of nonsense, and they have been made to feel guilty if they don’t follow the codes. If they follow them, they become unnatural. They start becoming miserable, they become unnecessarily tense. Because they are going against life, they lose all juice in life. Love is not a religious commandment. Love is your innermost longing, your very nature. Responsibility is imposed from outside and it is needed only by those who have not grown up in love. If you have grown up in love, you can throw away all responsibility. Love is enough unto itself.
Your question makes me feel sad that you have not yet experienced love. But this is the situation of the greater part of humanity. Forget all about responsibility, search deep in your being for the space which we call love. Once you have found that space within you, it expands. On its own, it starts growing. It goes spreading around you, radiating around you. It becomes your very aura, your very energy field, and whoever comes into that energy field is touched, deeply touched, by your joy, your celebrating realization, your love. But it is not a responsibility at all.

Little Ernie is playing with the girl next door. “Let us play Adam and Eve,” he says. “You tempt me to eat the apple and I will give in.”

Be Adam and Eve, as if you are the first people in the world. You don’t have any past, you don’t have any Moses and you don’t have any Manu and you don’t have any Confucius. There is no past.
Adam and Eve had a certain freedom which you don’t have: they had no past, only an open future. You don’t have any future because you are always looking at the past and the past is gone. You can see the dust a long way back on the road, but you cannot reach again to the same place. What is gone, is gone. And remember: existence has not given you eyes in your neck. If it was the intention of existence that you should look back, it would have given you eyes in the back of your head. What is the point of giving you eyes looking forward when you are not looking forward?
Responsibility is looking backward; love is looking forward. Be innocent like Adam and Eve, as if you have just arrived fresh and you don’t have anything to do with the past. You have to find your own way; there is no guide, there is no holy scripture, there is no prophet, no savior. You are left alone to find your path. You will not find responsibility, you will find spontaneity. You will not find duty, you will find love.
If your life is nothing but pure love, you don’t need any other spirituality. Love is the best name you can give to God because love is something which is not a hypothesis. It is your intrinsic reality – and it is the most precious thing in you.

A Jewish boy is courting a Catholic girl. “I’m sorry I could not see you last night,” she says, “but I had to go to confession.”
“I hope you don’t tell the old priest all about the things we do when your parents are out,” says the boy.
“Sure, I do,” she says. “But don’t worry. I just slip Father Murphy ten bucks and he makes things okay for me.”
The next evening the Jewish boy arrives at the Catholic church to see the priest. “Aha,” says Father Murphy. “My son, I suppose you have come for confession.”
“No Father, not likely,” says the boy. “I have come for my commission.”

In fact, all your religions are nothing but business. And the boy is right to ask for a commission!
Love is not a business and love is not a sin. Love is your greatest virtue. Love is your highest flowering. Sharing it is sheer joy. Don’t call it responsibility. That word has become too heavy due to continuous use by those people whose vested interests are served by it. Love serves nobody. It gives you individuality and a tremendous sense of freedom. Love makes you courageous enough to assert your uniqueness in a world where the crowd respects only those who belong to the crowd.
The unique person does not belong to the crowd. He stands alone and aloof like a very tall tree reaching toward the stars. The small bushes, naturally, feel jealous. Hence every great man in the world is going to be condemned by the pygmies. They will find all kinds of excuses to condemn anyone who has something unique in him. Any individual who is not surrendering his freedom to the crowd is going to be condemned. I want you to be individuals, not respectable people. They are the ugliest people in the world. Those who are thought to be respectable are the most condemnable because they have sold their souls for their respectability. They have become slaves of a crowd which knows nothing of the higher things of life, the higher values of life.
Just be yourself, silent, peaceful, meditative, and love will arise in tidal waves and will go on coming to you from unknown sources which are hidden inside you. Those sources are as oceanic as any great ocean in the world. And you can share that love without humiliating anyone and without feeding your ego. These two things are done by responsibility; it feeds your ego, makes it stronger and humiliates the other person.
You may not be aware that whenever you do something because of responsibility, the other person can never forgive you. You have insulted him. But when you do something out of love, nobody feels any humiliation because love is humble; it cannot humiliate. Responsibility is not the quality of a humble person, it is the quality of the egoist who wants to make everybody obliged to him, who wants everybody to be a beggar and he the giver. He always wants to keep the upper hand. Nobody can forgive such a man. They may give him respect in the crowd, but behind his back they all feel utterly insulted – and they take revenge.
Love never humiliates; hence there is no question of revenge. It simply rejoices in giving: it gives and it forgets. It does not even remember to whom it has given, what it has given. It does not keep an account of all that it has shared. It goes on, moment to moment, singing its song to whoever is capable of understanding it. Whoever is capable of receiving it, will receive it. The person who does something out of love is not doing any social service, he is not a public servant. He is a man who knows how to celebrate. He is celebrating himself.
In the three hundred years of America, there have not been many men who can be compared to the great mystics of the world. Only one man, a poet, comes very close to the mystics – Walt Whitman. One of his beautiful poems is, I Celebrate Myself. America has not paid much attention to Walt Whitman, but he is the only one in the three hundred years of America’s life who has reached the highest peak possible.
When he says “I celebrate myself” he is saying everything about love. “And if you can rejoice in my celebration, you are welcome. If you can be my guest, I invite you to celebrate.”
Love celebrates. It is not a responsibility at all.

Osho,
Why is it so hard to accept being a failure? I would rather sacrifice my well-being than admit that I have failed.
The question you have asked is the question of all those people who have been trained to be egoists, and unfortunately the whole of modern education, which is based on modern psychology, teaches everybody to be an egoist, strong, crystallized.
The idea is that you are being prepared by education for a world which is competitive. It is a constant battle. Everybody is your enemy because everybody is your competitor. And unless you have a very strong ego, you will not become a president, you will not become a prime minister, you will not succeed in becoming the richest man in the world. You will remain a nobody, left by the side of the road, and the whole caravan of competitors will move on ahead of you. You will be crushed under everybody. This fear has been created in every child from the very beginning: you have to be very strong, otherwise you will be crushed. Everybody is trying to be victorious in some way or other. Everybody is competing to get ahead, to become somebody special.
Your question has arisen because of this wrong teaching, this utterly inhuman teaching. You are a victim of a wrong world, of a wrong civilization, of a wrong educational system. You are asking, “Why is it so hard to accept being a failure?” Because it hurts the ego; otherwise there is no problem.
I have told you about one incident that I have never forgotten and will never forget.

In India, there is one day every year devoted to the worship of snakes. On that day, all over India, there are wrestling competitions. For many years my school used to be the champion of the whole district. This was due entirely to a single student who failed every year in matriculation. The school was happy about it because he was a good wrestler.
The principal and the teachers all said to him, “Don’t be worried. You can fail as much as you want, but every year you have to win the championship for the school. And when you are tired, we will give you some employment in the school. Don’t be worried about your employment, although you are not even a matriculate. We will make some arrangements, we can make you a peon: you do not need to be a matriculate.”
He was very happy that a job was guaranteed and every year he was the hero. But the year I reached my matric class, that man unfortunately passed the examination. The whole school was sad and sorry. The principal called me and said, “Now find somebody, for up to now we have always won.”
I said, “It is a difficult thing to find a wrestler of his quality.” He was doing nothing but exercises the whole day, morning till evening. The school was providing him with as much milk as he needed, because every year he won the championship. “It will be very difficult to find somebody, but I will try.”
In my class there was a man, a young man, not very strong and not in any way a wrestler, but a very beautiful person with a great sense of humor. I told him he would have to do this.
He said, “I have never fought anybody. I have never been in any competition. I have never done any exercise. And the people who will be coming from other schools are trained.”
I said, “Don’t be worried. Somebody has at least to participate. At the most you can be a failure.”
He said, “If that is all, then I am ready.” And what he did left an impact on everybody.
It was going to be decided in the semi-finals, and because my school was continuously the champion, every other school was afraid. They were still thinking that because of our man we would finally win. So they had brought a professional wrestler who was not a student. They could find no other way to defeat our man who had won continuously for ten years.
Naturally, they had to find some way. So they looked and found a wrestler who was not too old and they shaved him well and prepared him perfectly as if he were a student. But he was a trained wrestler and our candidate was not a wrestler at all. He asked me, “What am I supposed to do?”
I said, “Make it fun. Don’t be worried.”
I had once seen a wrestler… The village where I lived was famous throughout the area for wrestlers. There were so many gymnasiums in that small village and wrestlers from outside used to come to fight with the wrestlers of the village.
Once I had watched a wrestler and had become very friendly with him. His style was very new. First he would dance around. The other wrestler was standing in the middle, looking embarrassed, and he would dance. He had a very beautiful body. He would dance all over the place. His dance made the other man feel embarrassed and a little afraid also. “If this man is dancing with such joy, there must be some strategy that will defeat me.” Then the wrestler would suddenly jump to the ground. He was not a very strong man, but he had a very beautiful body, a very proportionate body.
By his dancing he had made the other man so afraid by this time. It was so out of the ordinary – nobody danced. There was no real need to dance because most of the time he would anyway win.
I liked the man very much. He used to stay in a temple nearby, so I went to visit him. I said, “This is very beautiful. This is how things should be. You have a great psychological insight.”
So I told the boy, “You do the same. First you dance around. Make the other fellow feel completely embarrassed. And we are here, because the competition is going to happen in our school. All the students, all the teachers will be there. We will clap when you dance. We will laugh and cheer you. So dance, and don’t be worried about that man. Let him stand in the middle, embarrassed, worried, ‘What is going to happen, what is happening?’”
Nothing happened. He danced and we clapped and shouted and cheered, and that man looked near defeat. But the boy that I had chosen was no match for him. He was a wrestler and this boy had no idea. He danced, and then he simply jumped into the middle and fell flat on the ground.
In Indian wrestling, the person who falls to the ground with his back touching the ground and the other person sitting on his chest is thought to be defeated; the man sitting on his chest is the winner. So that boy without fighting simply fell in front of him and we all cheered him and the man could not think what to do.
The boy said, “Sit on my chest. Sit down and be victorious!” The man could not bring himself to sit down on the chest of the boy who had fallen by himself. He looked all around and the boy was smiling.
The referee came over and said, “What do you want to do with your opponent?”
The man said, “I am simply puzzled. What kind of wrestling is going on? Sitting on this poor boy’s chest looks so ugly. I have not fought, how can I be victorious? And he is telling me to sit down. He is almost ordering me.”
They were declared to be equal. We took the boy on our shoulders and we danced around. And the principal called to me, “You managed at least to be equal. I had no hope that this was possible and when I saw that boy that you had chosen, I thought the trophy was gone. But you trained him well.”
I said, “I only trained him for dancing. What he did was absolutely spontaneous. Seeing the situation he said ‘I am going to be defeated. What is the point of fighting unnecessarily and being harassed. Just lie down, rest.’”
But he was a very humble person with a great sense of humor.

You feel unnecessarily worried that you cannot accept being a failure. You are saying, “I would rather sacrifice my well-being than admit that I have failed.” The very idea of being competitive is egoistic. It is sick. There is nothing wrong in being a failure. Just be a total failure! Do everything that you can do, and if failure comes out of it, accept it with dignity. Somebody has to fail, somebody has to win. You should not be so attached to your own ego that you always have to win.
Once in a while, just for a change, failing is not bad. As much can be learned by failure as can be learned by victory. You can learn egolessness, you can learn humbleness, you can learn accepting whatever life brings to you. And all these things will give you maturity. Then who is bothered who is the winner and who is the failure? People are unnecessarily concerned that the whole world is watching. Nobody has time. Everybody is interested in his own competition.

After being elected as President of America, Ronald Reagan returns to the small town where he grew up. “I suppose you folks here all know of the great honor that has been conferred on me?” he asks an old school friend.
“Yes,” comes the reply.
“And what do they all say about it?” Reagan asks.
“They don’t say anything,” replies the man. “They just laugh.”

Who cares? People simply laugh that this idiot has become the president. In fact, if you are a failure, you may have the sympathy of everybody. But if you are a winner, you won’t get anybody’s sympathy.
One should take life almost like a playground. One should learn gamesmanship. One should know that somebody has to be the winner and somebody has to be the loser. And if you are a humble man, you would rather be a failure than deprive somebody else of victory. Perhaps you have never thought about the possibility of enjoying failure because you have given somebody else the chance of enjoying victory. His victory depends on you. You could have deprived him of victory.
All that is needed is a deep awareness to think and to see that these are the only two possibilities. Fight with your total energy and intensity, but it is not necessary that you should be the winner. And when the other wins, rejoice in his victory too. It was a beautiful game. Don’t feel defeated. Your failure is a defeat only if you have not put your whole energy into it. If you do, you can make your failure more valuable than victory itself.
You seem to be a very serious person. Take life as a game, enjoy every side of it: the failure, the victory, going astray or finding the right path, the darkness of the night and the beautiful dawn. Enjoy both sides, all the possibilities, and learn from every experience something that brings you more maturity. And learn to be a little less serious and a little more understanding. Have a little more sense of humor.
Just for you, a small story…

Three women die and arrive at the Pearly Gates, where they are met by Saint Peter. “Did you avoid sex on the earth?” he asks the first lady.
“I absolutely avoided it,” she replies.
“Very good,” says Peter. “Here is a golden key. It will open the doors of paradise.”
Then he turns to the second woman and asks, “What about you?”
“Well,” she replies, “about half and half.”
“Okay,” says Peter. “Here is a silver key. It will open the doors of purgatory.”
Then he asks the third woman, “What about you?”
“Me?” she replies. “I did all the things you can imagine and also many things you can’t imagine.”
“Great!” says Peter. “Here is the key to my room. I’ll be coming there in a minute.”

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