I am hoping against hope

I don’t have any hope, but I am hoping against hope.

There are many things to be considered.

First, perhaps it is good that it does not survive. It has become so rotten, so ugly, that if it survives and remains the same it will be worse than not surviving.

Our world is in almost the same situation as thousands of people… around the world they are just surviving because they can still breathe. In the hospitals, with all kinds of medical support, they can continue to breathe; even the breathing is not their own – they need some mechanical device to help them to continue to breathe.

Do you call that life? It is mere survival, not life – and mere survival is worse than death, because death at least opens up a new door, cleanses the old, rotten stuff. That’s really the function of death: it is a cleansing process.

Everything becomes old, rotten, dirty, and a time comes when to go on – continuing is not a joy; it is pure anguish, agony, for you and for all those who are related to you. You cannot be in any way creative – and without being creative you cannot feel any justification for your being a burden on so many people. Death will be a relief.

Perhaps our world has come to the point where surviving will be dangerous; it is better that the chapter is closed.

We have done enough stupidities.

We have done enough harm to nature, to ourselves. We have been a nuisance on the earth.
Our whole history is a history of crimes – man against man, man against nature.

What have we been doing here? Why should we be bothered to survive?

I do understand that there is a desire to continue to live, whether there is any reason or not. There is a lust for life. People go on living, knowing perfectly well that it is absolutely unnecessarily burdening the earth; that tomorrow is not going to bring any good news to you, that each day you will be deteriorating, each day you will become more rotten, each day will be more gloomy and dark. Still, there is a biological instinct to continue to live.

People live in any kinds of circumstances: they are blind, they are crippled, they are paralyzed – still they are afraid of death. I have been puzzled: what can death take from them? Life has taken almost everything, nothing is left except agony, suffering, pain. What are they going to lose? Death will be a friend, it will take away all this hell that they are living in. But no; blind, crippled, paralyzed, deaf, dumb… still somewhere some strange instinct goes on forcing them to long for life.

This question also comes from the same instinct. It exists in everybody; there is a collective will to survive. But what have you done in the thousands of years that you have been here? Can you justify that your being here on the earth has been a creative addition to existence? Has it made it more blissful, more peaceful, more loving? Has it changed nature for something better?

What have you done in thousands of years except killing, murdering, butchering, slaughtering? – and in beautiful, good names: in the name of God, in the name of truth, in the name of religion. It seems you want to kill and destroy, and any excuse is enough. […]

 

I was talking to Indira Gandhi, and I told her, “India is so poor, you cannot hope to become a world power; there is no possibility. You cannot compete with Russia or America. It will take you at least three hundred years to come to where America is now. But in these three hundred years America is not going to just sit and wait for you to pick up speed.

“In three hundred years America will be nine hundred years ahead of you. Can’t you see this simple thing?”

She said, “I can see it.”

I said, “If you can see it, then drop all your projects for an atomic energy commission, and atomic energy plants and nuclear weapons. What nonsense are you doing? You cannot compete with the nuclear powers. If there was any hope I would have said, okay, go ahead; let people starve – they have been starving for millions of years, they can starve a few hundred years more. And anyway, starving or not starving, everybody is going to die; let them die, forget about them. You go ahead and compete.

“But you have no power to compete. Then will it not be a wise course that India declares itself an international country? That we drop the boundaries, we drop the whole idea that you have to come with a permit into the country, that you need a passport? No, we just open the whole country for the whole world. Whoever wants to come is welcome. We are so poor that we cannot be more poor.

“But this will be a precedent and this will be a historical moment: one country declaring that it is no longer a nation, that it belongs to the whole world.

“Anyway you cannot win against China, you cannot win against Russia or America. When you cannot win why not take some other course? Declare, ‘We are defenseless, we dissolve our defense forces, we send our soldiers to the fields, to the factories. We are no longer in the game of war; we drop out of it.”‘

She said, “But then anybody can attack.”

I said, “Anybody can attack now – what difference does it make? In fact, then to attack India will become difficult because there will be a worldwide condemnation. A country who declares itself defenseless, drops its arms and goes to the fields and the factories, welcomes everybody who wants to come, to invest, to bring industries, to do anything…. It will be almost impossible for anybody to attack India because the whole world will be against that attacker.

“You will have so much sympathy and so many friends that nobody will dare. Right now anybody can attack you. And you have been attacked by China already; China already occupies thousands of miles of land and India has not even the guts to raise the question, ‘Please return that land.”‘

Indira’s father, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, said, “That land is useless, not even grass grows there.” I wrote him a letter, saying, “If not even grass grows there and it is useless, why did you go to war in the first place? You should have told the Chinese, ‘You can occupy as much as you can. Not even grass grows. If you can manage to grow something, good, because for us it is useless anyway. We give it to you as a gift.’

“That would have been more gentlemanly – to give it to them as a gift, rather than to be defeated. Why did you go to war? Did you come to know it later on – that no grass grows there, that it is wasteland?

“You can be attacked,” I told Indira. “You have been attacked, so your arms and your armies don’t help. Even the biggest powers have been attacked. We have seen even a powerful nation like Germany defeated, a powerful nation like Japan defeated. We know that for five years Germany went on defeating all big nations, so you don’t count.

“If you accept my suggestion you come out on top; you prove really wise in the true sense of the word. And you prove that it is not only a saying that India is a country of wisdom; you will prove by this act that you are certainly wise. Where you cannot win, the best way is to drop the whole idea of any fight.”

I told her one of the incidents that impressed me very much. In my high school, every year there was a wrestling competition. Other competitions were there, wrestling was one of them. It was a district competition, so from all over the district at least thirty high schools would send their wrestlers.

It so happened the wrestler that had been chosen from my school proved really a strange man. He went to wrestle with the opponent, and seeing him, that he was double his size, he, without touching the opponent, just lay down flat on the ground.

Everybody was shocked: What is this? What kind of wrestling is this? And he was all smiles, so people could not even laugh and smile because of his smile.

He said, “It is foolish to fight with this man – he will break my bones. There is no chance of winning, but at least I can back out gracefully. I am happy, everybody is happy, he is happy. And I am not defeated, he cannot claim that he has defeated me.”

I liked that young man; I became very friendly with him, and I said, “This is true intelligence.” The whole school condemned him, teachers condemned him.

The principal called him and condemned him as well: “This is… do you think it is a joke? You made the whole school the laughingstock of the whole district! And we have been winners for three years continuously.”

The wrestler came to me and said, “This is difficult. Everybody – except you, nobody is in support of me.”

I said, “You come with me to the principal.” And I told the principal, “You please repeat what you have told him.”

He said, “Why?”

I said, “Because this man seems to be wiser than any of your teachers – including you. What was the point of his fighting? His defeat was sure. He saved you from being a defeated school. You are not defeated; you are not victorious but you are not defeated either. And he made the whole situation hilarious, not something to weep and cry over.

“In fact he made the other man look silly, because standing there ready to fight he looked so silly that whenever I use the word silly, I see his picture immediately. He could not understand and figure out what was happening! This man was lying flat…” – because that’s the way in India: the man has to lie down flat, his whole back, both the shoulders touching the ground. Unless this happens the wrestling continues; one of the two wrestlers has to touch the ground.

“That man was standing there and this man was laughing, and he said, ‘Now, what do you want? – can I get up? Or if it pleases you I can lie down – there is no problem.’ And the whole crowd that had come to see the wrestling for a moment was stunned.”

I told the principal, “This boy did something spontaneous. He is a good wrestler, he has won the school competition; he has defeated all other wrestlers in the school. He is a good wrestler – you cannot say that he cannot wrestle – but this situation was so clear, that the other man was double his size. He looked like a professional wrestler, and I doubt” – and my doubt was proved right –”I believe that he is hired, that he does not really study in the school, because his age seems to be….”

And I told the principal, “This should be inquired into. I don’t think that man studies in the school.”

And that was the truth – he was hired; and the school had come from so far away that of course in our city nobody knew the man, nobody knew whether or not he studied. […]

Then I told my principal, “What do you want now? You have to apologize to that boy. What he did was absolutely right, and now you should go to court against that school. The trophy has to come back to our school” – because that was the final between this school and that school.

And we went to court; we won the case and got the trophy back. And I said, “This whole thing was done because of this young man’s spontaneous understanding, seeing the point that it was useless.”

I told Indira, “India is in such a condition, you can make it a historical moment, an unprecedented thing, that no country has ever dared…. And you are not going to lose anything because what have you got to lose? You are not going to be attacked by those who want to attack; they can attack right now.

“And once you do this, invite the U.N.O.; say that the U.N.O. can only be in India, nowhere else, because this is the only neutral country, the only country which has dropped all its claims of nationality, of being a different nation. This is the only country which belongs to the whole humanity. Let the U.N.O. be here. Surrender all your arms and all your forces to the U.N.O. and tell them to use them for world peace, world friendship.”

She said, “I understand you – you are always right, I am always wrong – but what to do? This is too much – I don’t have that much courage to do it. Only a man like you can do such a thing, but a man like you is not interested in politics at all.

“My father was telling you, ‘Come into politics.’ I have been telling you, ‘Come into politics,’ and you say that you don’t want to get into this dirty game. But without getting into this dirty game you cannot be in this position where I am. And to be in this position I have to consider a thousand and one things, because if I say such a thing, there are people just behind me who will not miss the opportunity, who will simply throw me out of office, saying, ‘This woman has gone mad!’

“And this will look like madness because nobody has done it before. They will immediately capture power; they will immediately capture power by saying, ‘This woman has to be medically treated,’ and nobody will listen to me.”

She wanted to come to me. So many times she made a time, and then at the last moment she would inform me, “It is difficult, because the people around me don’t allow me even to come to you, because they say, ‘Even going to this man will affect your political position in the country. Nobody will bother what transpired between you, what you talked about – nobody will bother about it – just your going to this man is enough to affect your position; even your prime-ministership will be gone.’ They are all against you – and I cannot go against them.”

The day she was assassinated I was thinking, Now, what about all those men? They could not save you from assassination. They prevented you from coming to me; they could not prevent you from going to death. Now what about position?

In fact if I was in her place I would have taken the risk even of being called mad. It is worth taking. I would have taken the risk even to be thrown out of office. At least it would have been on record that one person had tried his best to bring some sense to humanity.

But right now this humanity is so senseless that if it is destroyed perhaps it is the right time. But I am not at all a pessimist. I am an incurably optimistic man. I still hope against hope. The whole humanity perhaps may not be able to survive, but the few, a chosen few, can be saved. And that’s enough.

The whole world began with only one couple – Adam and Eve. If we can save just one couple, one swami, one ma, that will do! And that much we can manage.

So there is no need to be worried. Let the whole world go to hell. We will manage at least one ma and one swami, and they can start the whole game again!

Osho, From Misery to Enlightenment, Ch 27 (excerpt), Chapter title: One ma, one swami – and we can start the whole game again