Question – Beloved Osho, Traveling with you over the past few months and seeing the hardness of the world, instead of being hardened in response I find myself only becoming softer and softer. Would you please comment?
Osho – The ordinary response will be to become even more hard, but you are not in an ordinary situation. Even a small touch of meditativeness, of silence, of love, of compassion, a small touch of the master’s presence, will mean you have totally different responses.
Seeing the hardness of the world, you will feel more compassionate towards them, you will feel softer. You will not react violently because that will be joining them in their same stupidity. Being with me, whether you know it or not you are learning thousands of things. One of them is that you cannot react.
The world may be hard — that hurts. It makes one sad that unfortunately man is still barbarous, but it does not give you the idea to curse them. On the contrary, it gives you the idea to help them, to be compassionate to them, so they can come out of their hard shells. Perhaps they are also suffering in their hardness, and there is nobody to tell them how to get out of this hardness. They are also miserable. It is out of their misery that they misbehave, because they have been mistreated. They know only that violence is power.
Seeing the world you will see that violence is not the real power. The real power is love, and that love will make you softer, forgiving, without any anger; in fact laughing at the whole hilarious situation that this world believes that it is civilized, that Charles Darwin thought that we have evolved from animals. But our behavior shows that we are still animalistic.
There has been no evolution at all. Perhaps we have lost the tail, but that is not evolution; perhaps we can stand on two feet, but that is not evolution. We are still behaving so crudely, so cruelly. And nobody is there to say it, because whoever is going to say it will be crushed, will be killed.
And you have chosen to be with a man who is saying it, and who is going to say it to the very last breath. But as far as you are concerned, this whole experience of world travel, and finding the politicians the same everywhere, finding the nations, governments, the police behaving in the same manner… it seems that we are living in a nightmare.
Only someone who is out of it can say, “This is a nightmare!” But when somebody in a nightmare is shouting and screaming, you don’t feel hard towards him; you feel soft, you want to help him. It has been a good experience. Later on when you will recapitulate, you will see it has given you a maturity which takes lives to gain.
Source – Osho Book “Beyond Psychology”