(My copy is 124 pages long.)
Osho used to be this disembodied voice for me. The name at the end of quotes many like to share around, with peaceful nature in the background. Then I heard a clip of him talking in Blinkers Removed album by No Man's Ego. And intonation and accent conveys a lot of information, but he was still not a real person to me. It was knowing that he led a failed, confused (let's put it bluntly: fucked up) commune & movement that has actually connected me much more to him.
So it's interesting to read the lines, "The rebel can do only one thing.… He is not going to organize, because the moment you organize you have to follow the same patterns as the society you are going to oppose" (pg. 10), and then paragraphs later, "There are moments when encouragement is needed, because to change—and to change totally—is not an easy job. Many times the mind wants to fall back into its old patterns, old habits; therefore, the commune. [...] And if five thousand people are trying, there is hope." (pg. 11). It reads to me like, he's hopeful. That if he doesn't figure it out, doesn't live true to rebellion, then at least he can share these thoughts, pass along the torch and others will pick it up, somewhere, somehow.
I do think he's level in his thinking here... Otherwise he would not have picked these to be his examples, "Socrates is not a revolutionary, he is a rebel. Gautam Buddha is not a revolutionary, he is a rebel. Heraclitus is not a revolutionary, he is a rebel.", nor said "This is the only respect expected of sannyasins: Do not destroy the dignity of the other person. That person is as valuable in existence as you are. There is no need to impose your ideas on anybody. Who are you? What authority have you got to impose your ideas on others? You can share, you can tell, you can expose your heart." (pg. 13) Also, I can't seem to find when he wrote this? Did he write it, or was this transcribed as QnA from the audience? What's the context? The book's published in 2013, but he died two decades earlier, so it's not obvious to me yet.
Also -- this reminds of Finite and Infinite Games :)
"I am not saying become an escapist. I am not saying don’t contribute to existence. But your contribution to existence should not be a means to reach God—that’s what I am saying. Your contribution to existence should be in gratefulness that you are already in God." (pg. 16)
"The ordinary rebel starts enjoying destruction and he forgets completely what he is destroying for; destruction becomes a goal unto itself. Disobedience becomes his ego, his stubbornness, his adamant attitude toward life. I don’t want political rebels; I want spiritual rebels whose concern is not with destruction at all. They will not destroy even a small thing unless it is absolutely needed for the new creation, for the new world." (pg. 29)
"Yes remains your highest value, and no becomes a servant—then there is not a problem with no. No has a beauty of its own. When it is just a shadow of yes, it is immensely beautiful. And a person who cannot say no—his yes has no meaning at all." (pg. 29)
"[If you are] capable of coming out in the cold and dropping the coziness of the crowd and the mob. Just in the beginning it feels cold; soon your body has its own system of creating warmth. Your being soon starts creating its own aroma." (pg. 49)
"Your society, your insane society, only leaves two alternatives for you: Either go crazy trying to improve upon yourself, pulling yourself up by your shoestrings; or, if you are a little more intelligent, be a hypocrite. Pretend and say one thing, and do just the opposite—keep a back door to
your life. At the front door have a beautiful facade—paint the should, the ideal, the ought—and live from the back door, live really naturally from the back door.
But that too creates a split: You can never be at ease. You are constantly lying, and you will be caught again and again. How long can you pretend? And you cannot succeed in your pretensions because your neighbors are also pretending, so everybody knows what everybody else is doing. They know they have back doors, so they know that you must also have them." (pg. 51)
"It is so simple if you see it: the only way to live life is to live on your own. It is an individual phenomenon, it is an independence, it is freedom. It is a constant unburdening of all that is dead, so that life can go on growing and is not crushed under the weight of the dead." (pg. 62)
"The past has destroyed the beauty of the word responsibility. They have made it almost equivalent to duty; it is not really so. A duty is something done reluctantly, as part of your spiritual slavery. [...] To understand the word responsibility is very significant. You have to break it in two: /response/ and /ability/.
You can act in two ways—one is reaction, another is response. Reaction comes out of your past conditionings; it is mechanical. Response comes out of your presence, awareness, consciousness; it is nonmechanical. And the ability to respond is one of the greatest principles of growth. You are not following any order, any commandment; you are simply following your awareness. [...] Renouncing the world, escaping to the forest and the mountains, you are simply escaping from a learning situation." (pgs. 62-63)
"Between two moments there is a gap; in that gap, Buddha disappears. I say a word to you, then I disappear. Then I say another word and I am there, and then I disappear again. I respond to you and then I am no more. The response is again there and I am no more. Those intervals, those emptinesses keep one utterly fresh, because only death can keep you absolutely alive.
You die once, after seventy years. Naturally you accumulate seventy years’ garbage. A Buddha dies every moment—no garbage is accumulated, nothing is accumulated, nothing is ever possessed." (pg. 71)
"That is the real meaning of resurrection. If you understand this you will be free from memory, psychological memory that is. Memory is a dead thing. Memory is not truth and cannot ever be, because truth is always alive, truth is life; memory is persistence of that which is no more. It is living in a ghost world, but it contains us, it is our prison. In fact, it is us. Memory creates the knot, the complex called 'I,' the ego. And naturally this false entity called 'I' is continuously afraid of death. That’s why you are afraid of the new." (pg. 71)
"Naturally, authority and discipline become associated with each other. So whenever authority is removed, you think now there is no need of discipline. The reality is, when authority is removed then there is a real need of discipline. Now there is nobody to impose any order on you; it is your responsibility to live a life of order, discipline. Why? Because one who lives without order starts falling into pieces, falling apart. His life starts losing harmony. A man who does not know
discipline lives a life that cannot be called really human; he falls back into the world of the animal kingdom.
Discipline makes you integrated, gives you a certain crystallization. And without that crystallization you cannot be more conscious. Authority is slavery for you. Discipline is living an organic, harmonious life." (pgs. 77-78)
"Discipline means you remain open. It comes from the same root as disciple. A disciple means one who is ready to learn." (pg. 82)
"Now when I say this world is a very beautiful world but it is in the wrong hands, I don’t mean that you start fighting those wrong hands. What I mean is: Please don’t you be those wrong hands, that’s all." (pg. 83)
"Man has not even yet learned that parenthood is not something such that you have to cling to it forever. When the child is a grown-up person, your parenthood is finished. The child needed it—he was helpless. He needed the mother, the father, their protection; but when the child can stand on his own, the parents have to learn how to withdraw from the life of the child. And because parents
never withdraw from the life of the child they remain a constant anxiety to themselves and to the children. They destroy, they create guilt; they don’t help beyond a certain limit.
To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing—any animal can do it; it is a natural, biological, instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents. And the criterion is that the real parents will give freedom." (pg. 86)
"The religious person is one who understands that 'I am very tiny, I am very limited. If with this limited energy, even if I can change myself, that will be a miracle.' And if you can change yourself, if you are a totally different being with new life shining in your eyes and a new song in your heart, then maybe you can be helpful to others also, because then you will have something to share." (pg. 100)
"Your own light is not burning and you start helping others. Your own inner being is in total darkness and you start helping others. You yourself are suffering and you become a 'servant of the people.' You have not passed through the inner rebellion and you become a revolutionary. This is simply absurd, but this idea arises in everybody’s mind. It seems so simple to help others. In fact, people who really need to change themselves always become interested in changing others." (pg. 100)
"In existence there is no inferiority complex anywhere, and as a corollary there is no superiority complex either. The marigold is happy being a marigold—even the idea is stupid, 'Why am I not a rose?' It will be a very poor existence where there are only roses and roses and roses, and no other flowers. Roses will lose all their beauty. The variety of millions of flowers makes existence rich beyond all our dreams." (pg. 104)
"The Sufi wrote in his diary, 'What I saw today was a real problem. Up to now I have seen people wondering how to drop this, how to drop that.… Those were all unreal because the problems were not clinging to them, they were clinging to their problems. It was not a question of any help; if they wanted to drop it, they could drop it.' The Sufi wrote, 'But today it was totally different; it was a real problem! It was beyond that poor man’s ability to drop it, because he was not clinging to it; now the wolf was clinging to him, and the wolf took him down to his grave.'
It is good that wolves are not clinging to you. Whatever you are clinging to, all are just false ideas given by others to you. And the reason why you are clinging to them is that you are afraid that without them you will be almost naked, you will be empty, and you will be moving in an unknown space." (pg. 110)