“The king said, ‘I certainly have made a mistake. God knows what he is doing.'”
The very framework of science is to conquer nature. That is the very terminology of science – conquest of nature. We have to overpower nature and we have to destroy all mysteries of nature, and we have to find all the keys of power, wherever it is. But the very idea takes you away from nature, makes you antagonistic to it and becomes destructive. The ecology of the earth has been destroyed by this power seeking. In the outside, in the inside – both – the natural rhythm of life is disturbed.
I have heard:
A very unusual idea occurred one day to Frederick of Prussia. He was in the country when he saw some sparrows eating some grains of wheat. He started to think and reached the conclusion that these small birds consumed a million pecks of wheat a year in his kingdom. This cannot be allowed. They have to be either conquered or destroyed.
Since it was difficult to exterminate them, he promised a price for each dead sparrow. All Prussians became hunters and soon there were no more sparrows in the country. What a great victory.
Frederick of Prussia was very happy. He celebrated the event as a great conquest over nature. The king was very happy until the following year when he was told that caterpillars and locusts had eaten the crops because without sparrows the whole rhythm of life was destroyed. Sparrows go on eating caterpillars and locusts. There being no sparrows, the whole crop was destroyed by caterpillars. Then it was necessary to bring in sparrows from abroad. And the king said, ‘I certainly have made a mistake. God knows what he is doing.’
The great scientific minds of this century are coming, by and by, slowly, reluctantly, to recognize that a great mistake has been done.
The very desire to be powerful is against nature, because the very desire to be powerful is antagonistic. Why do you need to be powerful? You must be thinking in terms of destroying somebody. Power is needed to destroy. Power is needed to dominate. Power is needed to conquer.
Osho, The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 2, Ch 5
P.S. The tree sparrow horror story repeated itself on December 13, 1958 in China. The Communist Party leader Mao Zedong had labeled the harmless bird one of the Four Pests. The state scientists had calculated that a single sparrow ate 4.5 kilograms of grain annually. So, for every million sparrows killed, 60,000 mouths could be fed.
The population went out en masse to chase the birds away with hellish noise, and to shoot them. The tired sparrows, with nowhere to hide on the ground, were trampled. Millions of people participated in the mass murder. This resulted in a failure of the following year’s harvest, because the tree sparrow not only pecked grain, but especially fed on harmful insects which, now given free reign, destroyed the harvest.
That’s how Mao and the Party’s poor agricultural techniques in their Great Leap Forward policies brought down the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 and 1961 on his people.
Series compiled by Shanti
All excerpts of this series can be found in: 1001 Tales
Photo by Andrea Lightfoot on Unsplash
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