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“An authentic person should live beyond good and evil,” states Osho.

Beloved Osho,

I love you so much, and still – how can it be that so many questions which come to my mind are reflecting the dark side of me? I am afraid to bore you, but somehow these questions often feel as if they are the most honest and authentic to me.

Please comment.

Osho 1986

Latifa, one thing to be constantly remembered is not to judge what is dark and what is light, what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil – because the moment you judge, you start repressing. You don’t want to show anything that you judge as dark, as evil, as bad. Then you have chosen only half of yourself; it is as if you have chosen only the day and you have denied the night.

But the night has its own beauties. Its darkness is also a beauty – it has a depth, a silence, a serenity, the stars. If the day has its beauty, the night has its own beauty; they are both unique – and they are complementary.

What you have been doing is to ask questions which look good – and you repress those questions which you feel and judge to be bad. Naturally, your so-called good side is exhausted by and by, and only the side which, according to you is bad, remains inside. Then you are boiling with all that is black. Days are finished; only nights remain, and now you feel very much afraid to open yourself because anybody will see simply darkness and nothing else. And at the same time, you feel that it is absolutely sincere, it is part of you.

It is not something insincere, but the whole problem begins in your judgment.

Judgment is one of the crimes.

We go on judging other people, and we do the same with ourselves. We go on judging our thoughts, our actions, what is good, what is bad, what should have been done, what should not have been done; and we are constantly creating conflict and duality.

Here with me you have to create a oneness, a beautiful harmony between day and night, between life and death. Between any things that seem to be polar opposites you have to create a wholeness. And then you will not feel, bringing out anything, that it will expose you; it will simply show your wholeness.

Just think of a rosebush. If the rosebush starts worrying about the thorns and starts suppressing them, the whole energy of the rosebush will be involved in suppressing the thorns. It may not be able to bring roses – or even if it does they may not be worth bringing; they may be crippled, almost dying from the very beginning.

But once you accept that thorns are part of the rosebush, as roses are…

From my very childhood I have seen thorns in the rosebushes as the bodyguards of the roses. And they are bodyguards – they protect them. They are coming from the same roots; they are part of the same bush, they live on the same juice. They are brothers and sisters; they live in deep harmony, there is no conflict. Have you seen the thorns and roses fighting with each other? Have you seen any rosebush being embarrassed that it has thorns?

Thorns have their own beauty.

The mind that continuously goes on judging creates anguish in you.

But we are taught to judge.

Even those with whom we have no concern, we go on judging: this man is good, that man is bad. What business is this, what concern is it of yours? And if you knew the whole story of the man, perhaps you would have said that this act you had thought was bad was absolutely inevitable. Without this act there would have remained something incomplete in the whole story.

You know only parts – as if you take out a page from a novel, and you judge the whole novel from the page. It is sheer stupidity. First, go through the whole novel.

And as far as human life is concerned, nobody can go through the whole of a single human life. It is so vast, compressed in such a small time… seventy or eighty years, with so many complexities, complications that if you could see it as a whole you would not say that something was bad; it fits perfectly in the whole pattern of the person’s life.

And anyway, who are we? Who has made us judges?

Once the mind learns the trick of judging, it goes on. Then you are continuously judging inside: This is good, this is bad. Then show the good side always, and keep the bad side to yourself. Slowly slowly, the good side is shown so much, everybody is bored with it. You are bored with it. And you cannot show the bad side, because it is bad.

Show your wholeness.

Just your good side is bound to be boring, too flat.

With your black parts, it becomes juicy, it becomes more interesting.

It is said that “a good man has no life” – and I agree with this statement, whoever made it. What can a good man have? A bad man has a life!

If you are whole, you will have more alive expressions… not flat, not boring, but always full of surprises. Not only surprising others but even surprising yourself – “My God, I was able to do this too?”

Life should be lived with as much wholeness as possible.

That’s the only way to live, to love, and to have a good laugh in the end.

And don’t be worried about what is right and what is wrong.

Just for example, God created the world. Of course, if there was no devil, there would have been nothing at all in the world. Although the whole credit goes to God, it should go to the devil who persuaded Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. He is the first revolutionary, the first rebel, the first man to bring some aliveness into the world; otherwise, Adam and Eve would be chewing grass, still. In the Garden of Eden what else will you do? God has said not to eat from the tree of knowledge, not to eat from the tree of eternal life – what is left? Knowing is prohibited, living is prohibited – just sit silently like buffaloes and chew grass.

It is by the mercy of the devil that you see this whole world.

God has not created it. God created a world which consisted of Adam and Eve just like animals. This whole humanity, these great people – Gautam the Buddha, Jesus Christ and Moses, Mohammed and Mahavira – you would never have heard of them; they’re all because of the devil.

It is significant to remember: ‘devil’ comes from a Sanskrit root which means divine. It comes from dev – from the same root comes ‘divine,’ from the same root comes ‘devil.’

The devil has done such a divine work. This whole creation is a deep partnership between God and the devil. Neither can God do it alone – because he can only create flat things – nor can the devil do it alone, because he can only revolt, he is a revolutionary. First something has to be there to be revolutionary against. God is needed for the devil to revolt against, and then the dynamics start turning, and the wheel of life and death, day and night, good and bad.

But life consists of opposites, remember.

And don’t try to judge; just live the whole, whatever it is.

I teach you wholeness, and you go on judging parts. Parts are not of any use. It is the whole, where parts lose their personalities and function in the way an orchestra functions.

I myself have never thought that anything is good or anything is bad. Not for a single moment have I thought that anything is bad or good; they are both together and they can exist only together. If you want to live, live them in their togetherness.

The people who are afraid of their togetherness started teaching, “Renounce life, escape from life, because here you cannot avoid the bad. Whatever you do, even if you do good, you cannot avoid the bad.”

You will be surprised to know that in India, Jainism has a sect called Terapanth. Bombay has many followers of the Terapanth. It is a very logical but very strange ideology.

It says that if somebody falls into a well you should not take him out. He may be shouting and you are by the side of the well and there is nobody else there – you simply go on as you are, unconcerned. It seems strange. A philosophy of non-violence… and a man is dying and they are saying that you go on, unconcerned. But their reasoning is worth noting: they say you can save the man but if tomorrow he murders somebody, then you will be responsible too. And what is the guarantee about his tomorrow? – it is better not to get involved.

In the first place he has fallen in the well. It must be because of some evil act in his past life; otherwise why should he fall into the well? Now, he is receiving the punishment for his action, and you interfere in it; you interfere in the great law of action. Secondly, if he murders somebody tomorrow, then you will share the evil act. It is better to move on silently, not to bother about what is happening to him.

These are the people who have been judging. Now, judgment has gone to the extreme. Somebody is thirsty; don’t give him water. Somebody is hungry; don’t give him food – because you don’t know what he is going to do. You get involved in his life by giving him water; otherwise he may have died. By giving him water you keep him alive. Now whatever he does, you are going to share in it. You have not done a bad act, but life is not so simple – it may turn into a bad act.

It looks very logical, but very inhuman; it looks very rational but very uncompassionate, without any love. But this is the logical end of judging things.

I want you to drop judgment and live a life without judgment, in its wholeness. And you will be surprised that wholeness is neither good nor bad.

Wholeness is transcendental; it is beyond good and evil.

There is only one man in the whole history of humanity, Friedrich Nietzsche, who has written a book, Beyond Good and Evil. And my insight and understanding is that he is the only man who has seen judgment to its logical end.

An authentic person should live beyond good and evil.

He does not care what is good, what is bad.

He lives with intensity and totality, and whatever the moment allows him and he feels to do, he does it.

But all the religions and all the theologians and all the saints are sitting and thinking about whether this is right or wrong. And if you listen to them, you will find it impossible to live; everything seems to be wrong.

I have looked into all the scriptures of the world just trying to find out – perhaps there may be one thing which is not condemned by somebody. But there is not, somebody or other is against everything. And there are things that somebody or other is for. There is no ultimate criterion to decide what is right and what is wrong.

As far as I am concerned and my people are concerned, they should live wholeheartedly – live the day and live the night too. Don’t miss anything.

Make your life such a complementary whole that everything fits together and makes it a piece of art, a beautiful phenomenon.

Osho, Beyond Enlightenment, Ch 12, Q 3

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