Osho – All that is great, all that is beautiful, all that is true and real, is always spontaneous. You cannot plan it. The moment you plan it, everything goes wrong. The moment planning enters, everything becomes unreal.
But this has happened to humanity. Your love, your sincerity, your truth, everything, has gone wrong because you have planned it, be-cause you have been taught not to be spontaneous. You have been taught to manipulate yourself, to control, to manage, and not to be a natural flow. You have become rigid, frozen, dead.
Life knows no planning. It is itself enough. Do the trees plan how to grow, how to mature, how to come to flower? They simply grow without even being conscious of the growth. There is no self-consciousness, there is no separation.
Whenever you start planning you have divided yourself, you have become two; the one who is controlling and the one who is controlled. A conflict has arisen, now you will never be at peace. You may succeed in controlling but there will be no peace; you may not succeed in controlling, then too there will be no peace. Whether you succeed or fail, ultimately you will come to realize that you have failed. Your failure will be a failure, your success will also be a failure. Whatsoever you do, your life will be miserable.
This division creates ugliness, you are not one, and beauty belongs to oneness, beauty belongs to a harmonious whole. All culture, all civilization, all societies, make you ugly. All morality makes you ugly because it is based on division, on control.
I have heard that once Baal Shem was traveling in a beautiful coach with three horses. But he was wondering continuously, because for three days he had been traveling and not even once had any of the horses neighed. What had happened to the horses? Then suddenly on the fourth day, a passing peasant shouted at him to relax control of the reins. He relaxed control and suddenly all the three horses started neighing, they came alive. For three days continuously they were dead, dying.
This has happened to you all, to the whole of humanity. You cannot neigh, and unless a horse neighs, the horse is dead, because neighing means he is enjoying, there is an overflowing. But you cannot neigh, you are dead. Your life has not in any way an overflowing song, a dance that happens when the energy is too much.
Flowering is always a luxury, it is not a necessity. No tree needs flowers as a necessity, roots are enough. Flowering is always luxurious. Flowers come only when the tree has too much, it needs to give, it needs to share.
Whenever you have too much, life becomes a dance, a celebration. But society doesn’t allow you to dance, to celebrate, so society has to see that you never have more energy than necessary. You are only allowed to live at starvation level. You are not allowed to be too much, because once you are too much you cannot be controlled, and society wants to control you. It is a domination, very subtle. Every child is born overflowing. Then we have to cut the energy source, we have to prune the child from here and there so that he becomes controllable. And the basis of all control is to divide the child in two. Then you need not bother, he himself will do the controlling. Then you need not bother, he himself will be the enemy of his own self.
So they tell the child: This is wrong. Don’t do this. Suddenly the child is divided, now he knows what is wrong, now he knows what part of his being is wrong, and his head becomes the controller. Through division intellect has become the controller, the master. If you are undivided, you will not have any head. Not that the head will disappear or the head will fall off, but you will not be headoriented – your total being will be you.
Right now you are only the head, the rest of the body is just to sustain the head. The head has become the exploiter, the dictator. And this has come through conflict, the creation of conflict in you. You have been taught that this is good and that is bad. The intellect learns it and then the intellect keeps on condemning you.
Remember, if you condemn yourself you will condemn everybody – you will condemn the whole. And a person who condemns himself cannot love. A person who condemns himself cannot pray. A person who condemns himself, for him there is no God, there cannot be. A condemning mind can never enter the divine temple. Only when you dance, only when you are ecstatic, not condemning, only when you are overflowing with nobody sitting in control, nobody managing, does life become a let-go; it is not formal, it is natural. Then you enter, then everywhere is the door. Then you can reach the temple from anywhere.
But right now, as you are, you are schizophrenic. You are not only schizophrenic when a psychoanalyst says that you are. There is no need for any psychoanalyst to analyze you. Society creates schizophrenics; division is schizophrenia. You are not one. You are born one but immediately society starts working on you, major surgery is to be done, you are continuously operated upon to be divided. Then society is at ease because you are fighting with yourself, your energy is dissipated in the inner fight, it is never an overflowing. Then you are not dangerous. Overflowing energy becomes rebellion. Overflowing energy is always rebellious, overflowing energy is always in revolution. It is just like a river in flood – it doesn’t believe in the banks, in the rules, in
the laws, it simply goes on overflowing towards the sea. It knows only one goal – how to become the sea, how to become the infinite. Overflowing energy is always moving towards God. God is missing in our world, not because of science, not because of atheists, but because of the so-called religious. They have divided you so much that the river keeps fighting with itself. Nothing is left to move, no energy is left; you are so tired fighting with yourself, how can you move towards the sea?
One of the basic laws of Tao, of Lao Tzu, of Chuang Tzu, is that if you are spontaneous it is the highest prayer; you cannot miss God, whatsoever you do you will reach him. So Chuang Tzu never talks about God; talk is irrelevant, it isn’t needed. He talks only of how to bring out the wholeness in you. The holy is irrelevant. When you become whole, you become holy. When your fragments dissolve into one, your life has become a prayer. They never talk about prayer, it is not needed.
Spontaneity, living as a whole…. If you want to live as a whole, you cannot plan. Who will plan? You cannot decide for tomorrow, you can live only here and now. Who will decide? If you decide, division has entered, then you will have to manipulate. Who will plan? The future is unknown, and how can you plan for the unknown? If you plan for the unknown the planning will come from the past. That means that the dead will control the living. The past is dead, and the past goes on controlling the future, hence you are so bored. It is natural, it has to happen. Boredom comes from the past, because the past is dead and the past is trying to control the future.
The future is always an adventure, but you don’t allow it to be an adventure. You plan it. Once planned, your life is running on a track. It is not a river. When you run on a track you know where you are going, what is happening. Everything is just a repetition. Who will plan? If mind plans, mind is always of the past. Life cannot be planned, because through planning you are committing suicide.
Life can only be unplanned, moving moment to moment into the unknown. But what is your fear? You will be there to respond; whatsoever the situation you will be there to respond. What is your fear? Why plan it? The fear comes because you are not certain of whether you will be there or not. You are so unconscious, that is the uncertainty. You are not alert.
You are going to have an interview for a job, so you keep planning in your mind what to answer, how to answer, how to enter the office, how to stand, how to sit. But why? You will be there, you can respond. But you are not certain about yourself, you are so unalert, you are so unconscious, you don’t know – if you don’t plan, something may go wrong. If you are alert, then there is no problem. You will be there, so whatever the situation demands, you will respond.
And remember, this planning is not going to help, because if you cannot be conscious, cannot be aware in a situation when you are planning, then that planning is also being done in sleep. But you can repeat it so many times it becomes mechanical, then when the question is asked you can answer. The answer is readymade, you are not needed. It is a fixed pattern, you simply repeat it; you become a mechanical device, you need not be there at all. The answer can be given, it comes from the memory; if you have repeated it many times you know you can rely on it.
Through planning life becomes more and more unconscious, and the more unconscious you are, the more you need planning. Before really dying, you are dead. Alive means responding, sensitive. Alive means: whatsoever comes, I will be there to respond, and the response will come from me, not from the memory. I will not prepare it.
See the difference when a Christian missionary or a Christian minister, a priest, prepares his sermon. I once visited a theological college. There they prepare their ministers, their priests – five years’ training. So I asked them where Jesus was prepared and trained, who taught him how to speak.
Of course these Christian priests are dead, everything about them is planned. When you say this, a certain gesture is to be made; even the gesture is not allowed to be spontaneous. When you say that, you have to have a certain look; even the eyes are not allowed to be spontaneous. How you have to stand, when you have to shout, and when you have to whisper, when you have to hammer the table and when not – everything is planned.
I asked them where Jesus was trained. He was not a minister at all, he was not a priest. He never went to any theological college, he was the son of a carpenter.
For two thousand years Christian priests have been trained but they have not produced a single Jesus, and they will never produce one again because Jesus cannot be produced. You cannot produce Jesus in a factory. And these are factories, these theological colleges. There you produce priests, and if these priests are just boring, dead, a burden, it is obvious that it is going to be so.
There are two types of religion. One is of the mind – it is dead. That religion is known as theology. Then there is the other type of religion, the real, the spontaneous. It is not theological, it is mystical. And remember, Hindus have one theology, Mohammedans another, Christ-ians again another, but religion, the mystic religion, is the same; it cannot be different.
Buddha and Jesus and Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu, they are the same because they are not theologians. They are not talking from the head, they are simply pouring from their heart. They are not logicians, they are poets. They are not saying something from the scriptures, they are not trained for it, they are simply responding to a necessity in you. Their words are not readymade, their manners not fixed, their behavior not planned.
Source – Osho Book “The Empty Boat”