|
|
|
|
Ten
Non-Commandments for the 21st Century
If somebody wants to
know about my philosophical standpoint.... It is not going
to be that easy, because I see man as a multi-dimensional
being. You will have to talk about ten non-commandments.
The first: freedom.
The second: uniqueness of individuality.
The third: love.
The fourth: meditation.
The fifth: non-seriousness.
The sixth: playfulness.
The seventh: creativity.
The eighth: sensitivity.
The ninth: gratefulness.
Tenth: a feeling of the mysterious.
These ten
non-commandments constitute my basic attitude towards
reality, towards man's freedom from all kinds of spiritual
slavery.
Conscience
and Consciousness
These two words have
to be understood deeply: One is "conscience," and
the other is "consciousness." Conscience
represents morality, consciousness represents religion.
Conscience is a social strategy. It is created by others, it
is a trick to manipulate the person.
Conscience means
others have told you what is right and what is wrong; they
have not given an opportunity to you to explore, to know, to
experiment. They have not given you freedom to judge on your
own. They have given you fixed ideas, ready-made answers,
ten commandments.
Morality is given by
others from the outside. It is not an inner growth; because
it is not an inner growth it remains like a plastic flower.
You can hang the plastic flower on the rose bush -- maybe it
can deceive a few fools, but it cannot deceive the rose
bush. It cannot deceive the bees and the butterflies, and
certainly it cannot deceive you, because you have planted
those false, phony flowers on the rose bush.
Conscience is a
plastic flower, planted by others -- the society, the
church, the state.
Consciousness is your
inner growth; it is a real rose, alive, unfolding, fragrant,
each moment growing, breathing. It has a beauty, because it
has life, and it is yours, authentically yours. It is not
borrowed.
Everything borrowed is
always ugly. The borrowed becomes a burden on your head; it
cannot allow you freedom, it can only repress you, oppress
you, exploit you.
Morality is being used
for psychological slavery. Other kinds of slavery have
disappeared from the world, but the psychological slavery
still exists, in fact more so than before, because before
there were many other kinds of slaveries available; now
there is only one kind of slavery available and that is
psychological. So the people who want to exploit -- all
their efforts have become concentrated on a single point and
that is psychological exploitation.
So every child is
being programmed by the society, given fixed ideas, what is
right, what is wrong, and this is utterly absurd. Something
may be right today and may not be right tomorrow, something
may be wrong this moment and may not be wrong the next
moment. Life continuously goes on changing, it is a flux, it
is a constant movement, nothing is static; hence no static
answers can be of any help. All static answers will prevent
you in seeing the reality and responding spontaneously to
that which is.
Consciousness helps
you to become responsible, and I am not using the word
'responsible' in the sense of dutiful, etcetera. I use the
word 'responsible' in the literal sense: the capacity to
respond. The man who is burdened with conscience has no
capacity to respond, he only reacts. Before the question is
there he already has an answer. His answer will never fit
the question because the question is always new. Even if the
question appears the same it cannot be the same because the
context is different, the situation is different, the whole
reference is different -- and you have to be very alive,
unprejudiced, you have to be just like a mirror, reflecting
whatsoever is the case and responding accordingly, not
according to a preconceived idea.
Morality is a phony
lie, because the ideas are given by others and you are
living them -- you are just an imitator. I am against all
morality -- that does not mean that I am for immorality. In
fact it is morality that creates immorality too. I am for
transcendence, transcendence of the very idea of morality --
and of course, this implies immorality too.
I am for
consciousness, not for conscience. I don't want to give you
any shoulds or should nots. I simply want you to become more
aware, alert, watchful, clear, unclouded. When you are like
a flame without smoke, whatsoever you do will be right. In a
state of clarity the wrong is impossible, but then your
character comes from your consciousness, not from your
conscience, then it comes from yourself. Then it is a real
rose, growing out of your being, and everything real has a
beauty -- it has a fragrance.
Jesus was not moral,
that's why he was crucified. He did not follow the old idea
given by the society. He started living on his own, he was
an individual, a rebel. Socrates was not moral, that was his
crime. The society could not forgive him. No authentic
person has ever been moral in that sense; although in
another sense only those few authentic people have been
really moral, but then you have to write the word 'moral'
with quotation marks. It is a totally different thing, it is
not the so-called morality. Authentic people's morality
comes from their consciousness; hence they never feel the
puritan's ego. You can never see in their eyes the
holier-than-thou look, you can never see in them any
condemnation for anybody. They have immense respect, even
for those who are fast asleep and snoring, because they know
that once, they too were sleeping and they too were snoring,
and if they can awake, others also can awake.
The moment a person
becomes awakened, becomes a buddha, he knows that everybody
has the potential of being a buddha, and he becomes
tremendously respectful to the buddhahood of everybody --
awake or asleep it doesn't matter -- buddhahood is
buddhahood!
So I teach you
buddhahood, awareness, awakening, but I don't give you any
discipline. And that is my revolution. Religions have given
only conscience, and that's how they all have cheated human
beings. They have created hypocrites, and they have also
created a very schizophrenic humanity, a mad world. The
people who are responsible for all this insanity are your
so-called saints, sages, mahatmas. I am against all this
nonsense.
My approach is very
simple and clear-cut. I give you a single key but it is a
master key; it unlocks all the doors: Be aware! Be more and
more aware. Bring that moment closer and closer when you can
feel that your whole being is full of awareness. When there
is not even a single spot inside you that is dark,
unconscious -- then you have come home.
Osho
Back to Previous Page
Back
to the Original Sin
|
|
|
|
