Air

Hypothetical

People are conditioned to live for hypothetical things. It is a strategy of all those people who want to exploit you.

The priest cannot exploit you if God is not the goal of life.

The politician cannot exploit you if the classless society is not the goal of life.

If democracy, freedom, if these are not the goals of life then how is the politician going to manipulate you? You simply say, “My goal is to live, and to live joyously, and to live today – because tomorrow is uncertain. It may come, it may not come; and I am not a gambler. And life is so valuable that I cannot postpone it.”

If the whole of humanity decides to live here now then the second thing will disappear: the desire to live forever.

Let me tell you the incident from Osho’s life: He explained why there is this second thing, to live forever. It is because you are missing life, you are not living it. You are thirsty for it, you are hungry for it, you are starved. Naturally, in this starving, hungry and thirsty state, life starts thinking of living forever – because for what is not happening today you have to create a tomorrow.

And you see that it is not happening. Even tomorrows come and go; tomorrows go on becoming yesterdays and it is not happening, not happening. Childhood becomes youth, youth becomes old age – and it has not happened.

When I was a small child, one of my father’s friends was very loving towards me. He was a very well-known scholar, and I used to ask him all kinds of questions because my father used to refer me to him: “You ask Pandit Dada.” Pandit means a great scholar, dada means big brother. He was older than my father so he used to call him dada; he was known all over the area as Pandit Dada.

So I would ask him all kinds of questions, and essentially his answer was always the same: “When you become a little older then you will know; you are too young.”

I said, “Remember, because one day I am going to become older. How long can you deceive me? I know that you don’t have the answer. If you have the answer, please give me the answer. Whether I understand or not, that is my problem, not your problem. Your problem is to give me the answer. Even if it takes years for me to understand it, I will wait, but please give me the answer.”

He would say, “You will not understand – you just wait. First you have to be at least mature.”

I said, “Okay.”

Every year I went on asking the same question. I went from the school to the college, but whenever I would come on the holidays to my home, I would repeat the questions; and now he started becoming shaky. I said, “Now how long do I have to wait?”

I graduated from the university; I won the gold medal for the whole state. I came to him and said, “Now what do you want? I have come first class – first in the whole state – in my post graduation. Is the time right?”

He said to me, “Please forgive me, I was lying all the time. But you are stubborn! I have done this to many people; they forget. They become so much involved in so many things – who bothers about childhood questions? You are strange – the same questions you go on persisting year after year, and I have been hoping that you will forget, but it doesn’t seem to happen.”

I said, “Now you tell me the truth: Do you have any answers? – Because now you are almost beyond eighty; death is not far away. Do you have the answers?”

He said, “I don’t have any answers. I have been deceiving myself by deceiving others. People believed in me, and because so many people believed in me I started believing in myself.”

It is a reciprocal thing. When so many people believe in you, it results in a very strange conclusion: you start believing in yourself, for the simple reason that if you are not right, then how can so many people believe in you?