Question - Osho

Question - Osho, Is it important to have some kind of attitude towards Life?

Osho - Margrit, the best way to miss life is to have a certain attitude towards it. Attitudes originate in the mind, and life is beyond mind. Attitudes are our fabrications, our prejudices, our inventions. Life is not our fabrication; on the contrary, we are just ripples in the lake of life. What kind of attitude can a ripple in the ocean have towards the ocean? What kind of attitude can a grass leaf have towards the earth, the moon, the sun, the stars? All attitudes are egoistic, all attitudes are stupid.

Life is not a philosophy, it is not a problem; it is a mystery. You have to live it not
according to a certain pattern, not according to a conditioning -- what you have been told about it -- you have to start afresh, from the very scratch. Each human individual should think as if he is the first on the earth; he is the Adam or the Eve. Then you can open; you can open to infinite possibilities. Then you will be vulnerable, available; and the more vulnerable you are, the more available you are, the greater the possibility of life happening to you. Your attitudes function like barriers; then life never reaches to you as it is -- it has to fit your philosophy, religion, ideology, and in that very fitting, something dies in it. What you get out of it is a corpse: it may look like life but it is not.

Osho on Life

That's what people have been doing down the ages. The Hindus are living according to the Hindu attitude, the Mohammedans according to the Mohammedan attitude, and the
communists according to the communist attitude. But remember a basic, fundamental truth: the attitude does not allow you to come in contact with life as it is; it distorts, it interprets.

There is an old Greek story:
A fanatic king had a beautiful golden bed, very precious, studded with thousands of
diamonds, and whenever there was a guest in the palace he would offer the bed to the guest. But he had a certain attitude: the guest had to fit with the bed. If the guest was a little longer then the king would cut him down to size. Of course, the bed was so valuable it could not be changed, but the guest had to be put according to the bed -- as if the bed did not exist for the guest but the guest existed for the bed!

And it is very rare, almost impossible, to find a man to fit a ready-made bed. The average
person does not exist, remember; the average person is a fiction, and the bed was made for the average person. The king was a mathematician -- great calculation had gone into it. He had measured the height of all the citizens of his capital, and then the height was divided by the number of all the citizens; he had come to a fixed average. Now, there were small children in the capital, young people, old people, pygmies, giants, but the average was a totally different phenomenon. There was not a single person in his whole capital who was really average. I have never come across the average person -- the average person is a fiction.

So whosoever was going to be the guest was in trouble. If he was shorter than the bed,
then the king had great wrestlers who would pull the man to size. That must have been the beginning of Rolfing! Ida Rolf must have learnt it from that king. Of course, each guest died, but that was not the king's fault -- he was doing everything with the best intentions in the world!

When you have a certain attitude towards life, Margrit, you will miss life itself. Life is
vast, uncontainable by any attitude; it is impossible to put it into a certain definition. Yes, your attitude may cover a certain aspect, but it will be only an aspect. And the tendency of the mind is to proclaim its aspect as the whole, and the moment the aspect is claimed as the whole you have missed the very connection with life. Then you will live surrounded by your attitude in a kind of cocoon, encapsulated, and you will be miserable. Then all your so-called religions will be very happy because that's what they have been telling to you: that life is misery.

Buddha says birth is misery, youth is misery, old age is misery, death is misery -- the
whole of life is nothing but a long, long tragedy. If you start with attitudes you will find
Buddha absolutely correct; you will be a proof of it. But I want to tell you that life is not misery, and I don't agree with Buddha at all. Life becomes a misery, but that is your doing; otherwise life is eternal joy. But to know that eternal joy you have to come open-hearted, open-handed.

Don't approach life with your fists closed, clenched. Open your hands. Go into life with
immense innocence. Attitudes are cunning: you have already decided without tasting, without experiencing, without living. You have already arrived at certain conclusions, and of course if those conclusions are there already in you A PRIORI, you will find them confirmed by life. It is not that life confirms them, but your whole mind will try to find out ways and means, arguments, data to support them.

Mind is like a sponge: it goes on sucking. It is a parasite. Once there is the center of a
certain A PRIORI conclusion then that center starts becoming crystallized. A man came to me who had been working for years on a certain hypothesis in many countries of the world: particularly in the West, and more particularly in America, the number thirteen is not thought to be good. There are hotels in America where the thirteenth floor does not exist; from the twelfth floor you simply come to the fourteenth.

The number thirteen is avoided, no room has the number thirteen; from the twelfth you immediately reach the fourteenth, because nobody wants to live in the thirteenth room or on the thirteenth floor. A great fear -- the idea that the number thirteen has something evil in it. And this man was working and collecting all kinds of data, and he had collected a really huge, mountainous support how many accidents happen on the thirteenth of every month, how many people die on the thirteenth, how many people commit suicide, how many people murder, how many people go mad. And he was showing his great thesis to me, and he said, "What do you say?"

I said, "You do one thing more. You have put so much energy into it, now try one thing
more. Now find out what happens on the twelfth! And you will come to the same data,
because on the twelfth also people go mad, commit suicide, murder, rob. Everything happens every day, but if you have a certain fixed attitude then you will choose according to that attitude. And of course when you have so much information and argument you feel certain that your attitude is right."

Margrit, I teach you a life without any attitudes. This is one of the fundamentals of my
experience: if you really want to know that which is then drop all philosophy, all "ism". Then go open-handed, utterly naked into the sun, to see what it is.

In the past, it was thought that our senses are doors, that the reality reaches from our
senses to our innermost being. Now the latest research shows something else: our senses are not just doors, they are guards also. Only two percent of information is allowed to pass in, ninety-eight is prevented outside. Anything that goes against your idea of life is prevented and only two percent filters in. Now, to live a life of only two percent is not to live at all. When one can live a hundred percent, why decide to live for only two percent?

Margrit, you ask me:
IS IT IMPORTANT TO HAVE SOME KIND OF ATTITUDE TOWARDS LIFE?

Not only is it not important, it is dangerous to have any attitude towards life. Why not
allow life to have its dance, its song, without any expectations? Why can't we live without expectations? Why can't we see that which is in its purity? Why should we impose ourselves upon it? And nobody is going to be the loser. If you impose upon life you are the only loser.

From London comes the story of the three professors of literature who, while returning
from luncheon, encountered several ladies of pleasure who were patrolling the street -- en masse.
"What might one call such a congregation?" mused the first professor, a Shakespearean
specialist. "A flourish of strumpets?"
The second professor, being an authority on the novels of Anthony Trollope, naturally
contributed, "A chapter of trollops."
But the best description came from the youngest and the least specialized of the professors.
He called the ladies "an anthology of pros."

It is better not to label life, it is better not to give it a structure, it is better to leave it
open-ended, it is better not to categorize it, not to label it. You will have a more beautiful experience of things; you will have a more cosmic experience of things, because things are not really divided. Existence is one orgasmic whole; it is one organic unity. The smallest blade of grass, the smallest leaf in a poor tree is as significant as the biggest star. The smallest thing is also the biggest, because it is all oneness; it is one spectrum. The moment you start dividing you start creating arbitrary lines, definitions, and that's the way one goes on missing life and the mystery of it.

We all have attitudes; that is our anguish. We all look from a certain standpoint, hence our life becomes poor; because every aspect at the most can only be one-dimensional and life is multi-dimensional. You have to be more liquid, more fluid, more melting and merging; you are not to be an observer. There is nothing to be solved! Don't take life as a problem, it is a tremendously beautiful mystery. Drink of it -- it is pure wine! Be a drunkard with it!

A successful cloak-and-suiter had finally found the girl of his dreams and he made
preparations for a wedding the garment district would never forget. His designers prepared for the bride a wedding gown of the finest imported silks and satins, and his own marital raiment was truly a sight to behold.

The affair was nothing less than breathtaking; no expense had been spared. Then, as the
newly-weds were about to embark on their honeymoon trip to Canada, an urgent message arrived in the form of a telegram.

"It's from my partner," the groom explained. "Urgent business. I'll have to attend to it
immediately."
"But what about our honeymoon?" the bride asked tearfully.
"Business comes first," he said. "But you go ahead. I'll catch a later plane and be there by tonight."
"But what if you can't make it by tonight?" she moaned.
"Then," he blustered, "start without me."

A businessman has his own philosophy, his own attitudes. The scientist has his own
attitudes. Everybody is living in a small prison of his own attitudes.

My effort here is to bring you out of your imprisonment, hence I don't teach you any
doctrine, I don't give you any dogma, I don't give you any creed to live by. I am simply trying to help you to be unburdened of all the nonsense which has been imposed upon you for centuries. If you can put aside the mountainous weight of the past, if you can start living as if you are the first man, only then is there a possibility that you may come to know what godliness is, what freedom is, what joy is. Otherwise, misery is going to be your lot, and naturally, sooner or later, you will agree with the pessimistic attitude of Buddha: that all is suffering, all is pain.

I absolutely deny it, because my own experience is just the opposite: all is bliss, all is
benediction. But it depends on you, how you approach life: guarded, with certain spectacles on your eyes, or unguarded, in deep trust, in love.

Source - Osho Book "The Goose is Out"

Osho Discourses on: Empathy, Frustration, Greed, Hate, Imitation, Innocence, Patience, Pessimist, Prayer, Receptivity, Repentance, Surrender, Terrorism, Trust, Truth, Wisdom

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