Beloved Osho,

In Europe today there is a disintegration of traditional values and an ideological void. The younger generation is called the “no-future generation.” Can you help?

I am certainly helping – helping the older generation to disappear as quickly as possible, helping the old generation to be finished fast.

And when they call, in an abusive way, the younger generation the “no-future generation,” to me it is not a condemnation. It is man coming of age.

To live without future is the greatest courage. Only cowards live in the future.

Mans past has been very cowardly. It was living, not in the present, but in the future: all that has to happen is to happen tomorrow. And in that hope they lived, and they died. And what they were waiting for never turned up. It proved to be waiting for Godot.

The younger generation will have to pass through a very painful experience, because for centuries man has lived either in the past or in the future – never in the present.

The present has remained unexplored, unlived.

And that is the only reality there is.

The younger generation will find it a little difficult to detach itself completely from the old hang-up, and not to be worried that there is no future. On the contrary, rejoice that now there is no future, and we can live in the present. Nobody can live in the future. Future is only a word to keep you going, dragging on. Future does not exist.

So it is a maturity. The disintegration of the past traditions and traditional values is a blessing. They need not be restored. And the younger generation facing a “no future” is a tremendous revolution in consciousness.

Individually we have been talking about meditation as living in the present and a few people have lived in the present and reached to the optimum consciousness. But it has happened to only very few individuals. And the greater humanity may have worshipped these people, but it has never believed in them, because it was not their experience – and they were millions against one man. He may be cheating them. He may be himself illusional, living in a hallucinatory world.

But because this type of man had certain beautiful qualities which were lacking in the ordinary man, it created a suspicion in their minds: “Perhaps he is not mad – perhaps he is right.” But there was no other proof except those few attributes of love and compassion, of no anger, of no greed.

If a whole generation faces “no future,” it is immensely important, because there is no other way for it to live other than meditatively – because to live in the present, meditation is the only way.

So first there will be pain and anguish. The old safety is gone, the old security is gone, the old hope is gone; the new generation is being uprooted from the past. But soon it will feel tremendous freedom, a great unburdening; and a realization that the future had never existed – it was just a mind game.

And we have been befooled by the mind for centuries.

Now the present is there – whatever you want to make of it you can. And the present is so fleeting. You dont get two points together; just one single point, one single second, and when it has gone, then the second second…. The time is very small. You have to be very intensive and very total to use it. When time is vast, you need not be total, you need not be intensive. You can spread yourself all over time. There is no urgency, there is always future.

But when there is no future, you have only one moment. You cannot afford to waste it in thinking, in planning, in memories, in imagination. You cannot afford it. You have such a small time that you would like to live it. And the smallness gives you intensity and totality.

So the “no future” generation is going to be the beginning of the new humanity I have been talking about.

The new man is not going to have any future – but the present is more than enough.

Osho, Light on the Path, Ch 25, Q 2