For millennia, humanity has dreamed of freedom and fought for it, creating absurdities and sacrificing countless human lives. This book is for those who want to find true freedom: the freedom to be yourself. Here you will find pointers on the path to freedom. It is compiled from conversations in which, with compassion and humor, Osho reveals the secrets of this journey and leads the reader to the awakening of the soul. “Freedom is the culminating experience of life,” says Osho. - Love is the flowering of your freedom. Don't stay dwarfs. Try to reach the ultimate heights that you are only capable of. "
A series: Keys to a new life
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company liters.
Freedom means the ability to say "yes" when you need to "yes", to say "no" when you need to "no", and sometimes to remain silent when you do not need anything - to be silent, not to say anything. When all these ingredients are available, that is freedom.
OshoFreedom: The Courage to Be Yourself
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Foreword. Three Dimensions of Freedom
Freedom is a three-dimensional phenomenon. Its first dimension is physical. You can be physically enslaved, and for thousands of years a person has been sold in the market like any other commodity. Slavery existed all over the world. Human rights were not accorded to slaves; they were not accepted as human beings, they were not fully considered human. And some people are still not treated like people. India has sudras, untouchable. It is believed that even touching them makes a person unclean; one who touches must immediately take a bath. Even touching not the person himself, but his shadow - washing is required even then. A large part of India still lives in slavery; there are still parts of the country where people cannot receive education and have access only to those professions that were defined by tradition five thousand years ago.
Throughout the world, the body of a woman is not considered equal to that of a man. She is not as free as a man. In China, for many centuries, a husband had the right to kill his wife, with impunity, because the wife was his property. Just like you can break a chair or burn your house - because this is your chair, this is your home - and this was your wife. Chinese law did not provide for punishment for a husband who killed his wife because she was considered to be soulless. She was only a reproductive mechanism, a factory for the production of children.
So there is physical bondage. And there is physical freedom - your body is not chained, does not belong to the lowest category, and as far as the body is concerned, there is equality. But even today, such freedom does not exist everywhere. Slavery is becoming less and less, but it has not completely disappeared yet.
Freedom of the body means that there is no separation between blacks and whites, there is no separation between man and woman, there is no separation when it comes to the body. Nobody is clean, nobody is dirty; all bodies are the same.
This is the very foundation of freedom.
Then, the second dimension is psychological freedom. Very few individuals in the world are psychologically free ... because if you are a Muslim you are not psychologically free; if you are a Hindu, you are not free psychologically. Our whole way of raising children is aimed at making them slaves - slaves of political ideologies, social ideologies, religious ideologies. We do not give children the slightest chance to think for themselves, to seek their own vision. We forcibly cast their minds into prepared forms. We stuff their minds with junk - things that we ourselves have not experienced. Parents teach their children that there is God, without knowing anything about God themselves. They tell the children that there is heaven and hell, without knowing anything about heaven and hell.
You teach children things you don't know yourself. You are simply conditioning their minds because your own minds were conditioned by your parents. Thus, the disease continues to be transmitted from one generation to the next.
Psychological freedom will be possible when children are allowed to grow, when children are helped to grow to greater intelligence, to greater intelligence, to greater consciousness, to greater vigilance. No belief will be instilled in them. They will not be taught any kind of faith, but will be encouraged in every way to seek the truth. And they will be reminded from the start: “Your own truth, your own find will set you free; nothing else will do that for you. "
Truth cannot be borrowed. It cannot be learned from books. Nobody can tell you about it. You yourself will have to sharpen your mind so that you can look into existence and find it. If the child is left open, receptive, alert, and encouraged to seek, he will have psychological freedom. And with psychological freedom comes great responsibility. You don't need to teach your child responsibility; it comes as a shadow of psychological freedom. And he will be grateful to you. Usually, however, every child is angry with his parents, because they destroyed him: they destroyed his freedom, conditioned his mind. Before he even asked questions, his mind was filled with answers, each of which was fake - because it was not based on the parents' own experiences.
The whole world lives in psychological slavery.
And the third dimension of freedom is ultimate freedom - consisting in the knowledge that you are not the body, in the knowledge that you are not the mind, in the knowledge that you are only pure consciousness. Such knowledge comes through meditation. It separates you from the body, it separates you from the mind, and in the end you are only present as pure consciousness, as pure awareness. This is spiritual freedom.
There are three basic dimensions of individual freedom.
The collective has no soul, the collective has no mind. The collective does not even have a body; there is only a name. It's just a word. The collective has no need for freedom. When all individuals are free, the collective will also be free. But we are very impressed by the words, so impressive that we forget that there is nothing material in words. Collective, society, community, religion, church - all these are words. There is nothing real behind them.
It reminds me of one little story. In the fairy tale "Alice Through the Looking Glass", Alice finds herself in the king's palace. And the king asks her:
- Did you not meet a messenger on the way, heading for me?
And the little girl replies:
- Nobody met me.
And the king thinks that "Nobody" is someone, and he asks:
- But why then has Nobody got here yet?
The little girl says:
- Sir, nobody means nobody!
And the king says:
- Do not be silly! I understand: Nobody is Nobody, but he should have arrived before you. Nobody seems to walk slower than you.
And Alice says:
- This is absolutely wrong! Nobody walks faster than me!
And so this dialogue continues. Throughout the entire dialogue, “nobody” becomes someone, and it is impossible for Alice to convince the king that “nobody” is nobody.
Collective, society - all these are just words. What really exists is individuality; otherwise a problem arises. What is Freedom for a Rotary Club? What is freedom for the Lions Club? All these are just names.
The team is a very dangerous idea. In the name of the collective, individuality, living reality, is always sacrificed. I am absolutely against it.
Nations sacrifice individuality in the name of the nation; and "nation" is just a word. The lines you drew on the map are nowhere to be found on the ground. This is just your game. But fighting over these lines that you drew on the map, millions of people have died - real people die for unreal lines. And you make them heroes, national heroes!
The idea of a collective must be completely destroyed; otherwise, in one way or another, we will continue to sacrifice individuality. We sacrificed individuality in the name of religion in religious wars. A Muslim dying in a religious war knows that paradise is guaranteed to him. The priest told him: “If you die for Islam, paradise is reliably guaranteed to you, with all the pleasures that you can only imagine and of which you could only dream. And the person you killed will also go to heaven, because he was killed by a Muslim. It's a privilege for him, so you shouldn't feel guilty for killing a person. " Christians had crusades - jihads, religious wars, and they killed thousands of people, burned human beings alive. For what? For the sake of a kind of collectivity - for the sake of Christianity, for the sake of Buddhism, for the sake of Hinduism, for the sake of communism, for the sake of fascism; anything will do. Any word that represents a kind of collectivity is enough to sacrifice individuality for it.
Collectivity does not even have a reason to exist: individuality is enough. And if individuals have freedom, if they are psychologically free, spiritually free, then, naturally, the collective will also be spiritually free.
The team is made up of individuals, not the other way around. It has been said that individuality is only part of the collective; it is not true. Individuality is not part of the collective; collective is only a symbolic word meaning a collection of individuals. They are not part of anything; they remain independent. They remain organically independent; they do not become part of the collective.
If we really want to see the world free, we will have to understand that in the name of collectivity there have been so many massive atrocities that it’s time to stop. All collective names must lose the luster given to them in the past. Individuals should be of the greatest value.
freedom from something - not true freedom. The freedom to do what you want to do is also not the freedom I am talking about. My vision of freedom is for a person to be himself.
It's not about getting freedom from something. This freedom will not be freedom, because it is still given to you; she has a reason. What you felt addicted to is still present in your freedom. You owe it. Without this, you would not be free.
The freedom to do what you want to do is also not freedom, because the desire, the desire to "do" something arises from the mind - and the mind is your bondage.
True freedom comes from choiceless awareness, but when there is choiceless awareness, freedom does not depend on things or doing anything. The freedom that follows choiceless awareness is simply the freedom to be yourself. And you are already you, you are born with this; therefore freedom does not depend on anything. Nobody can give it to you, nobody can take it away from you. The sword can cut off your head, but it cannot cut off your freedom, your being.
This is another way of saying that you are centered, rooted in your natural, existential being. It has nothing to do with anything external.
Freedom from things depends on something external. The freedom to do something also depends on the outside. The freedom to be extremely pure does not have to depend on anything outside of you.
You are born free. The only trouble is that conditioning made you forget about it. The threads remain in someone else's hands. If you are a Christian, you remain a puppet. Your threads are in the hands of a God who does not exist, and therefore, just to give you the feeling that God exists, you need prophets, messiahs, representing God.
They represent no one, they are just selfish people - but even the ego wants to reduce you to a puppet. They will tell you what to do, give you the Ten Commandments. They will give you personality - and each of you will be Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim. They will give you so-called knowledge. And naturally, under the heavy burden that has been placed on you since childhood — under the weight of the Himalayas on your shoulders — under everything hidden and suppressed, your natural being remains. If you can get rid of all conditioning, if you can consider yourself neither a communist, nor a fascist, nor a Christian, nor a Muslim ...
You were not born a Christian or a Muslim; you were born with a pure, innocent consciousness. To be again in this purity, in this innocence, in this consciousness - that is what I call freedom.
Freedom is the culminating experience of life. There is nothing higher. And in freedom many flowers will bloom in you.
Love is the flowering of your freedom. Compassion is another blossom of your freedom.
Everything that is valuable in life blooms in you in an innocent, natural state of being.
Therefore, do not associate freedom with independence. Independence is, of course, independence from something from someone. Do not associate freedom with what you want to do, because this is your mind, not you. Wanting to do something, striving to do something, you remain in the shackles of your own desire and aspiration. In the freedom I'm talking about, you just there is- in complete silence, serenity, beauty, bliss.
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The given introductory fragment of the book Freedom. Courage to be yourself (B. Sh. Rajneesh (Osho)) provided by our book partner -
Freedom. Courage to be yourself
Keys to a new life
Freedom. The Courage to Be Yourself.
Insights for a new way of living. Osho.
Switzerland, www.osho.com
© Swami Dhyan Ishu, Publishing House "DeAn", 2004
© Potapova I.A. (Ma Prem Puja), translated from English, 2004
© Lisovskiy P. P., 2004
© Design. OJSC "Ves" Publishing Group ", 2004
ISBN 5-9573-0129-9
© OJSC "Ves" Publishing Group ", 2004
Foreword. Three Dimensions of Freedom
Freedom is a three-dimensional phenomenon. Its first dimension is physical. You can be physically enslaved, and for thousands of years a person has been sold in the market like any other commodity. Slavery existed all over the world. Human rights were not accorded to slaves; they were not accepted as human beings, they were not fully considered human. And some people are still not treated like people. There are sudras in India, untouchable. It is believed that even touching them makes a person unclean; one who touches must immediately take a bath. Even touching not the person himself, but his shadow - washing is required even then. A large part of India still lives in slavery; there are still parts of the country where people cannot receive education and have access only to those professions that were defined by tradition five thousand years ago.
Throughout the world, the body of a woman is not considered equal to that of a man. She is not as free as a man. In China, for many centuries, a husband had the right to kill his wife, with impunity, because the wife was his property. Just like you can break a chair or burn your house - because this is your chair, this is your home - and this was your wife. Chinese law did not provide for punishment for a husband who killed his wife because she was considered to be soulless. She was only a reproductive mechanism, a factory for the production of children.
So there is physical bondage. And there is physical freedom - your body is not chained, does not belong to the lowest category, and as far as the body is concerned, there is equality. But even today, such freedom does not exist everywhere. Slavery is becoming less and less, but it has not completely disappeared yet.
Freedom of the body means that there is no separation between blacks and whites, there is no separation between man and woman, there is no separation when it comes to the body. Nobody is clean, nobody is dirty; all bodies are the same.
This is the very foundation of freedom.
Then, the second dimension is psychological freedom. Very few individuals in the world are psychologically free ... because if you are a Muslim you are not psychologically free; if you are a Hindu, you are not free psychologically. Our whole way of raising children is aimed at making them slaves - slaves of political ideologies, social ideologies, religious ideologies. We do not give children the slightest chance to think for themselves, to seek their own vision. We forcibly cast their minds into prepared forms. We stuff their minds with junk - things that we ourselves have not experienced. Parents teach their children that there is God, without knowing anything about God themselves. They tell the children that there is heaven and hell, without knowing anything about heaven and hell.
You teach children things you don't know yourself. You are simply conditioning their minds because your own minds were conditioned by your parents. Thus, the disease continues to be transmitted from one generation to the next.
Psychological freedom will be possible when children are allowed to grow, when children are helped to grow to greater intelligence, to greater intelligence, to greater consciousness, to greater vigilance. No belief will be instilled in them. They will not be taught any kind of faith, but will be encouraged in every way to seek the truth. And they will be reminded from the start: “Your own truth, your own find will set you free; nothing else will do that for you. "
Truth cannot be borrowed. It cannot be learned from books. Nobody can tell you about it. You yourself will have to sharpen your mind so that you can look into existence and find it. If the child is left open, receptive, alert, and encouraged to seek, he will have psychological freedom. And with psychological freedom comes great responsibility. You don't need to teach your child responsibility; it comes as a shadow of psychological freedom. And he will be grateful to you. Usually, however, every child is angry with his parents, because they destroyed him: they destroyed his freedom, conditioned his mind. Before he even asked questions, his mind was filled with answers, each of which was fake - because it was not based on the parents' own experiences.
The whole world lives in psychological slavery.
And the third dimension of freedom is ultimate freedom - consisting in the knowledge that you are not the body, in the knowledge that you are not the mind, in the knowledge that you are only pure consciousness. Such knowledge comes through meditation. It separates you from the body, it separates you from the mind, and in the end you are only present as pure consciousness, as pure awareness. This is spiritual freedom.
There are three basic dimensions of individual freedom.
The collective has no soul, the collective has no mind. The collective does not even have a body; there is only a name. It's just a word. The collective has no need for freedom. When all individuals are free, the collective will also be free. But we are very impressed by the words, so impressive that we forget that there is nothing material in words. Collective, society, community, religion, church - all these are words. There is nothing real behind them.
It reminds me of one little story. In the fairy tale "Alice Through the Looking Glass", Alice finds herself in the king's palace. And the king asks her:
Have you not met a messenger on the way, heading for me?
And the little girl replies:
Nobody met me.
And the king thinks that "Nobody" is someone, and he asks:
But why then has Nobody got here yet?
The little girl says:
Sir, nobody means nobody!
And the king says:
Do not be silly! I understand: Nobody is Nobody, but he should have arrived before you. Nobody seems to walk slower than you.
And Alice says:
This is absolutely wrong! Nobody walks faster than me!
And so this dialogue continues. Throughout the entire dialogue, “nobody” becomes someone, and it is impossible for Alice to convince the king that “nobody” is nobody.
Collective, society - all these are just words. What really exists is individuality; otherwise a problem arises. What is Freedom for a Rotary Club? What is freedom for the Lions Club? All these are just names.
The team is a very dangerous idea. In the name of the collective, individuality, living reality, is always sacrificed. I am absolutely against it.
Nations sacrifice individuality in the name of the nation; and "nation" is just a word. The lines you drew on the map are nowhere to be found on the ground. This is just your game. But fighting over these lines that you drew on the map, millions of people have died - real people die for unreal lines. And you make them heroes, national heroes!
The idea of a collective must be completely destroyed; otherwise, in one way or another, we will continue to sacrifice individuality. We sacrificed individuality in the name of religion in religious wars. A Muslim dying in a religious war knows that paradise is guaranteed to him. The priest told him: “If you die for Islam, paradise is reliably guaranteed to you, with all the pleasures that you can only imagine and of which you could only dream. And the person you killed will also go to heaven, because he was killed by a Muslim. It's a privilege for him, so you shouldn't feel guilty for killing a person. " Christians had crusades - jihads, religious wars, and they killed thousands of people, burned human beings alive. For what? For the sake of a kind of collectivity - for the sake of Christianity, for the sake of Buddhism, for the sake of Hinduism, for the sake of communism, for the sake of fascism; anything will do. Any word that represents a kind of collectivity is enough to sacrifice individuality for it.
Osho - Freedom. The courage to be yourself - read book online for free
Foreword. Three Dimensions of Freedom
Freedom is a three-dimensional phenomenon. Its first dimension is physical. You can be physically enslaved, and for thousands of years a person has been sold in the market like any other commodity. Slavery existed all over the world. Human rights were not accorded to slaves; they were not accepted as human beings, they were not fully considered human. And some people are still not treated like people. There are sudras in India, untouchable. It is believed that even touching them makes a person unclean; one who touches must immediately take a bath. Even touching not the person himself, but his shadow - washing is required even then. A large part of India still lives in slavery; there are still parts of the country where people cannot receive education and have access only to those professions that were defined by tradition five thousand years ago.
Throughout the world, the body of a woman is not considered equal to that of a man. She is not as free as a man. In China, for many centuries, a husband had the right to kill his wife, with impunity, because the wife was his property. Just like you can break a chair or burn your house - because this is your chair, this is your home - and this was your wife. Chinese law did not provide for punishment for a husband who killed his wife because she was considered to be soulless. She was only a reproductive mechanism, a factory for the production of children.
So there is physical bondage. And there is physical freedom - your body is not chained, does not belong to the lowest category, and as far as the body is concerned, there is equality. But even today, such freedom does not exist everywhere. Slavery is becoming less and less, but it has not completely disappeared yet.
Freedom of the body means that there is no separation between blacks and whites, there is no separation between man and woman, there is no separation when it comes to the body. Nobody is clean, nobody is dirty; all bodies are the same.
This is the very foundation of freedom.
Then, the second dimension is psychological freedom. Very few individuals in the world are psychologically free ... because if you are a Muslim you are not psychologically free; if you are a Hindu, you are not free psychologically. Our whole way of raising children is aimed at making them slaves - slaves of political ideologies, social ideologies, religious ideologies. We do not give children the slightest chance to think for themselves, to seek their own vision. We forcibly cast their minds into prepared forms. We stuff their minds with junk - things that we ourselves have not experienced. Parents teach their children that there is God, without knowing anything about God themselves. They tell the children that there is heaven and hell, without knowing anything about heaven and hell.
Bhagavan Shri Rajneesh (Osho)
Freedom. Courage to be yourself
Authoritarianism belongs to someone else, not you; therefore he creates slavery, not freedom. And for me freedom is the ultimate value, because only in freedom can you bloom, and only in freedom can you bloom to the fullest of your potential.Is society a real fact, determined by the existence of a person, or is it a false concept, a conditionality that exists only because a person is asleep?
Society is not an existential reality. It was created by man because man is asleep, because man is in chaos, because man is not capable of possessing freedom without turning it into licentiousness. Man is incapable of possessing freedom and not abusing it. Thus, society is artificial - but necessary - the creation of man.
Since society is artificial, it can be scattered. Just because it was needed once, it does not become necessary forever. A person must change the conditions that made him necessary. And it's good that it is not existential, otherwise there would be no way to get rid of it.
This is our business own hands... We can destroy it on the day we wish.
How to evolve beyond collectivity, nations, without falling into the barbarism of disparate egos fighting each other?
All your questions are centered around one. I would like to give you one answer.
It reminds me of a parable ...
On the seashore, on the beach, a great master was sitting, and a man who was looking for truth came to him, touched his feet and said:
- Sorry if I bother you, but I would like to find the truth and I am ready to do whatever you say for this.
The master simply closed his eyes and remained silent.
The man shook his head. He said to himself:
“This man seems to be crazy. I ask him a question, and he closes his eyes.
He shook this man and said:
- What about my question?
The master said:
- I answered him. Just sitting in silence ... doing nothing, the grass grows by itself. You don't have to worry about it - it will just happen. Just sit in silence, enjoy the silence.
This person said:
- Can you give me a name - because people will ask me what I'm doing.
And the master wrote with his finger in the sand: meditation.
The man said:
- This is too short for an answer. Tell me a little more.
And the master wrote in big letters: MEDITATION.
The man said:
“But these are just big letters. You write the same thing.
The old master replied:
- If I say more, it will be wrong. If you can understand, just do what I told you and you will find out.
So is my answer.
Each individual must become a meditating, silent observer so that the individual of the individual can discover himself. And this discovery will change everything around. And if we can change many people through meditation, we can create a new world.
Many people in all ages hoped for a new world, but had no idea how to create it. I am giving you the exact science of how to create it. Meditation is the name of this science.
God's problem
Here is a prophetic statement by Friedrich Nietzsche: "God is dead and man is free." He looked into it immensely deeply. Very few people are able to understand the depth of this statement. It is a milestone in the history of consciousness.
If there is God, man will never be free - this is impossible. God and human freedom cannot coexist, because the very meaning of God is that he is a creator; then we are relegated to puppets. And if he can create us, then he can destroy us at any moment. He never asked us before he created — he doesn't have to ask before he wants to destroy us. To create or destroy is his sheer whim. How can you be free? You are not even free to be. Even in birth you are not free, even in death you are not free - and, between these two bondages, do you think that freedom can be your life?
To save human freedom, God must die.
The choice is clear; there is no question of any compromise. With God, man will remain a slave, and freedom will remain just an empty sound. Only without God does freedom begin to make sense.
But Friedrich Nietzsche's assertion is only half; no one has tried to complete this statement. It seems complete, but appearances do not always correspond to the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche did not realize that there are religions in the world in which there is no God - and even in these religions man is not free. He did not know about Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism - the deepest religions. For these three religions, there is no God.
For the same reason, Lao Tzu, Mahavira and Gautama Buddha denied God - they saw that in the presence of God, man remains only a puppet. Then all efforts towards enlightenment are pointless; you are not free, how can you be enlightened? And there is someone omnipotent, omnipotent - he can take away your enlightenment. He can destroy anything.
But Nietzsche did not realize that there are religions devoid of God. For many thousands of years there have been people who understood that the existence of God represented the greatest obstacle to human freedom - and they removed God. But man is still not free.
I am trying to bring you to the understanding that, simply by killing God, you cannot make a person free. You have to kill one more - and that is religion.
That is why I said that religion must die too; she must follow God. And we must create a religiosity that is devoid of both God and religion, in which there is no one "above" who has power over you, and no organized religion to create all kinds of cells - Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. Beautiful cells ...
If both God and religion are dead, another automatically dies - and that is the priesthood, the leader, the religious leader in all forms. Now it has no function. There is no organized religion in which he can be pope or shankaracharya or ayatollah. He has no God to represent; its function is over.
Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tzu threw away God in exactly the same way as Friedrich Nietzsche - not knowing, not realizing that even if religion remains without God, the priest will be able to keep a person in slavery. And he keeps a person in bondage.
Thus - complementing Friedrich Nietzsche's insight - religion must die. If there is no God, there is no point in organized religion. For whom will organized religion exist? Churches, temples, mosques, synagogues will have to disappear. And at the same time, rabbis, bishops and all kinds of religious leaders simply find themselves out of work, become useless. But a great revolution is taking place: a person becomes completely free.
Before I can talk about all the associated meanings of this freedom, you have to understand: if Friedrich Nietzsche's insight is complete, what kind of freedom is then available to human beings? God is dead, man is free ... free for what? His freedom will simply be the same freedom as the freedom of any other animal.
It would be wrong to call it freedom - it is permissiveness. This is not freedom, because it has no responsibility, no consciousness. It will not help a person to rise up, to become something higher in comparison with him in slavery. If freedom does not make you superior to you in bondage, it is meaningless. It is even possible that your freedom will make you lower than slavery, because slavery had a certain discipline, it had a certain morality, it had certain principles. It had a certain organized religion to watch over you, to keep you in fear of the punishment of hell, to keep you greedy and seeking rewards in paradise, to keep you a little higher than wild animals that have freedom, but that freedom did not make them higher beings. She did not give them any qualities that you could admire.
Nietzsche had no idea that just giving freedom was not enough ... and not only not enough, but also dangerous. This can reduce a person to an animal. Striving for freedom, he can go astray on the path to higher states of consciousness.
When I say that God is dead, religion as an organized entity has died ... then man is free to be himself. For the first time, man is free to explore his deepest inner being without any barriers. He is free to dive into the depths of his being, to rise to the heights of his consciousness. There is no one to block his path; his freedom is total. But this freedom is possible only with the departure from the existence of God, with the departure from the existence of religion, with the departure from the existence of the priesthood, with the departure from the existence of the institution of a religious leader - we will be able to preserve something that I call the quality of religiosity; so that only religiosity remains alive. Religiousness is entirely in harmony with human freedom; it enhances human growth.
By "religiosity" I mean that a person, as he is, is not sufficient. It can be big, it can be immensely big. Whoever he is, it is only a seed. He does not know what potential he carries in himself.
Religiousness simply means a challenge to grow, a challenge to the seed to climax to the peak of expression, blossom with a thousand flowers and exude the scent hidden in it. I call this scent religiosity. It has nothing to do with your so-called religions, it has nothing to do with God, it has nothing to do with the priesthood: it is related to you and your growth opportunities.
(Osho "God is dead, now it's Zen")
Freedom. The Courage to Be Yourself.
Insights for a new way of living. Osho.
Switzerland, www.osho.com
© Swami Dhyan Ishu, Publishing House "DeAn", 2004
© Potapova I.A. (Ma Prem Puja), translated from English, 2004
© Lisovskiy P. P., 2004
© Design. OJSC "Ves" Publishing Group ", 2004
ISBN 5-9573-0129-9
© OJSC "Ves" Publishing Group ", 2004
Foreword. Three Dimensions of Freedom
Freedom is a three-dimensional phenomenon. Its first dimension is physical. You can be physically enslaved, and for thousands of years a person has been sold in the market like any other commodity. Slavery existed all over the world. Human rights were not accorded to slaves; they were not accepted as human beings, they were not fully considered human. And some people are still not treated like people. There are sudras in India, untouchable. It is believed that even touching them makes a person unclean; one who touches must immediately take a bath. Even touching not the person himself, but his shadow - washing is required even then. A large part of India still lives in slavery; there are still parts of the country where people cannot receive education and have access only to those professions that were defined by tradition five thousand years ago.
Throughout the world, the body of a woman is not considered equal to that of a man. She is not as free as a man. In China, for many centuries, a husband had the right to kill his wife, with impunity, because the wife was his property. Just like you can break a chair or burn your house - because this is your chair, this is your home - and this was your wife. Chinese law did not provide for punishment for a husband who killed his wife because she was considered to be soulless. She was only a reproductive mechanism, a factory for the production of children.
So there is physical bondage. And there is physical freedom - your body is not chained, does not belong to the lowest category, and as far as the body is concerned, there is equality. But even today, such freedom does not exist everywhere. Slavery is becoming less and less, but it has not completely disappeared yet.
Freedom of the body means that there is no separation between blacks and whites, there is no separation between man and woman, there is no separation when it comes to the body. Nobody is clean, nobody is dirty; all bodies are the same.
This is the very foundation of freedom.
Then, the second dimension is psychological freedom. Very few individuals in the world are psychologically free ... because if you are a Muslim you are not psychologically free; if you are a Hindu, you are not free psychologically. Our whole way of raising children is aimed at making them slaves - slaves of political ideologies, social ideologies, religious ideologies. We do not give children the slightest chance to think for themselves, to seek their own vision. We forcibly cast their minds into prepared forms. We stuff their minds with junk - things that we ourselves have not experienced. Parents teach their children that there is God, without knowing anything about God themselves. They tell the children that there is heaven and hell, without knowing anything about heaven and hell.
You teach children things you don't know yourself. You are simply conditioning their minds because your own minds were conditioned by your parents. Thus, the disease continues to be transmitted from one generation to the next.
Psychological freedom will be possible when children are allowed to grow, when children are helped to grow to greater intelligence, to greater intelligence, to greater consciousness, to greater vigilance. No belief will be instilled in them. They will not be taught any kind of faith, but will be encouraged in every way to seek the truth. And they will be reminded from the start: “Your own truth, your own find will set you free; nothing else will do that for you. "
Truth cannot be borrowed. It cannot be learned from books. Nobody can tell you about it. You yourself will have to sharpen your mind so that you can look into existence and find it. If the child is left open, receptive, alert, and encouraged to seek, he will have psychological freedom. And with psychological freedom comes great responsibility. You don't need to teach your child responsibility; it comes as a shadow of psychological freedom. And he will be grateful to you. Usually, however, every child is angry with his parents, because they destroyed him: they destroyed his freedom, conditioned his mind. Before he even asked questions, his mind was filled with answers, each of which was fake - because it was not based on the parents' own experiences.
The whole world lives in psychological slavery.
And the third dimension of freedom is ultimate freedom - consisting in the knowledge that you are not the body, in the knowledge that you are not the mind, in the knowledge that you are only pure consciousness. Such knowledge comes through meditation. It separates you from the body, it separates you from the mind, and in the end you are only present as pure consciousness, as pure awareness. This is spiritual freedom.
There are three basic dimensions of individual freedom.
The collective has no soul, the collective has no mind. The collective does not even have a body; there is only a name. It's just a word. The collective has no need for freedom. When all individuals are free, the collective will also be free. But we are very impressed by the words, so impressive that we forget that there is nothing material in words. Collective, society, community, religion, church - all these are words. There is nothing real behind them.
It reminds me of one little story. In the fairy tale "Alice Through the Looking Glass", Alice finds herself in the king's palace. And the king asks her:
Have you not met a messenger on the way, heading for me?
And the little girl replies:
Nobody met me.
And the king thinks that "Nobody" is someone, and he asks:
But why then has Nobody got here yet?
The little girl says:
Sir, nobody means nobody!
And the king says:
Do not be silly! I understand: Nobody is Nobody, but he should have arrived before you. Nobody seems to walk slower than you.
And Alice says:
This is absolutely wrong! Nobody walks faster than me!
And so this dialogue continues. Throughout the entire dialogue, “nobody” becomes someone, and it is impossible for Alice to convince the king that “nobody” is nobody.
Collective, society - all these are just words. What really exists is individuality; otherwise a problem arises. What is Freedom for a Rotary Club? What is freedom for the Lions Club? All these are just names.
The team is a very dangerous idea. In the name of the collective, individuality, living reality, is always sacrificed. I am absolutely against it.
Nations sacrifice individuality in the name of the nation; and "nation" is just a word. The lines you drew on the map are nowhere to be found on the ground. This is just your game. But fighting over these lines that you drew on the map, millions of people have died - real people die for unreal lines. And you make them heroes, national heroes!
The idea of a collective must be completely destroyed; otherwise, in one way or another, we will continue to sacrifice individuality. We sacrificed individuality in the name of religion in religious wars. A Muslim dying in a religious war knows that paradise is guaranteed to him. The priest told him: “If you die for Islam, paradise is reliably guaranteed to you, with all the pleasures that you can only imagine and of which you could only dream. And the person you killed will also go to heaven, because he was killed by a Muslim. It's a privilege for him, so you shouldn't feel guilty for killing a person. " Christians had crusades - jihads, religious wars, and they killed thousands of people, burned human beings alive. For what? For the sake of a kind of collectivity - for the sake of Christianity, for the sake of Buddhism, for the sake of Hinduism, for the sake of communism, for the sake of fascism; anything will do. Any word that represents a kind of collectivity is enough to sacrifice individuality for it.
