Even your love is nothing but a power trip

And remember also: only dead things can be known. Life remains unknown and unknowable.

The moment you know, you have killed something. And people go on killing. They kill love – once they analyze it, it is killed. People are so violent that even in love their violence is dearly there, loudly there.

Sending flowers is a form of life sacrifice to show high esteem. When you send a beautiful roseflower to your girlfriend or boyfriend, what are you saying? This is not understanding. What are you saying when you say something with a flower? You give a rose flower to your girl – what are you saying? You are saying: “I will kill for ya, baby! – I am ready to kill, I can murder. Look, I have murdered this rose.”

Even your love is nothing but a power trip. Power always kills. Bacon has said knowledge is power – must be so, because knowledge also kills. When you can kill something, you feel great power.

I have heard that the most favourite pastime of people around Stalin was hunting. When Brezhnev took Kissinger on a hunting trip, he showed his power. It is said that whenever Tito wants to know that he is still in control, he kills stag and bear.

Whenever people want to show that they are powerful, they kill. Adolf Hitler had to kill to show his power. And killing goes on on many levels. Knowledge is also a subtle way of killing a thing.

Zen people are not interested in knowledge because they are not interested in power. They are interested in life as it is. They are interested in the breakfast, not in God – not in heaven, not in the soul, not in past lives, not in future lives. Simply the breakfast. They are utterly for the immediate.

We know only that which we have killed. So never be a seeker for knowledge, otherwise you will become a killer, you will be a murderer. That’s what science goes on doing. In all the scientific laboratories it is nothing but murder and murder – they have murdered nature, they go on murdering. It is a beautiful device to hide violence.

Just go and see in a scientific lab how many ways they have devised to torture simple, innocent animals – in the name of experiment! in the name of inquiry, in the name of truth. Unimaginable torture. But when it is for truth’s sake, it is allowed – nobody thinks of the scientist as violent.

Nobody thinks of the philosopher as violent, but he is also violent. He goes on analyzing everything.

Zen is not interested in killing – not even in killing a single word. It is not interested in knowing: it is interested in being.

Osho, Take It Easy, Vol 1, Ch 9