Osho on Global Suicide, Why humanity is moving towards Global Suicide

Question - Beloved Master, Why is humanity so willing to walk the path towards global suicide?

Osho - The reason is clear. People have become clear that their life has no meaning, that except misery, nothing happens; except anxiety, anguish, life has nothing to offer.
Individuals have always committed suicide. And you will be surprised: the people who have committed suicide have always been a little more intelligent than the normal people. Psychologists commit suicide twice as much as any other profession. Painters, poets, philosophers either go mad or commit suicide. Idiots have never been known to commit suicide, nor do they go mad.

Just two or three days ago I was looking at a news tape. Somebody is talking to the attorney general of Oregon, Frohnmayer, about me, saying that I have said that Frohnmayer is trying to protect the criminals so that he can destroy the commune. And if he cannot protect the criminals, then the second step will be to kill them. Then he is free to put in jail anybody from the commune, someone who is absolutely innocent, for any crime.
His comment was, "This is lunacy."

And I laughed, because perhaps he does not know the meaning of the word "lunacy." It comes from the word "lunar," the moon. In the beginning, the word "lunatic" was used for poets -- moongazers -- who would stand for hours looking at the moon. This kind of situation was called lunacy, and slowly slowly it became equivalent to madness.

I would like Frohnmayer to know that he is fortunate he can never become a lunatic. Idiots cannot do that; they never go mad. To go mad, first you need to have some intelligence. Have you seen a buffalo going mad? And as far as I am concerned, my very name, Rajneesh, means lunatic. It means "the moongazer." And certainly I would rather belong to the category of the mad than to the category of the idiots.

Osho on global suicide

The idiots have never committed suicide because they cannot even think about meaning, significance, purpose. They don't think at all; they simply live, they vegetate. The higher the intelligence, the more dangerous, because it makes you aware that the life that you are living is just hollow, utterly empty. There is nothing to hold onto. You know tomorrow will be a repetition of today, so what is the point of continuing?

Individuals have committed suicide because only individuals have come to a certain stage of intelligence, of understanding whether life has any meaning or not. Now, for the first time, millions of people around the earth have reached to that maturity where they feel life is meaningless. That's why humanity is moving towards a global suicide. There seems to be no reason to continue -- for what? You have lived your life, and you have found nothing. Now your children will live and they will find nothing: generation after generation, only emptiness in your hands -- no fulfillment, no contentment.

But to me, this gives man a tremendous opportunity. Only very highly intelligent people have committed suicide or have become mad, because they could not live with this insane world. They could not adapt themselves to all kinds of insanities that are going around. They felt themselves fallen apart -- that was their madness. But only the same kind of people have also become enlightened.

So these are the three possibilities for intelligence. Either the intelligent person goes mad because he cannot figure out what is happening, why it is happening, why he is supposed to do this or that. Or, seeing the situation, that it is driving him mad, he commits suicide, he puts an end to life. This has been mostly the case in the West.

In the East the same kind of people have tried something else -- not madness, but meditation. The West is poor in that way. It does not know the richness of meditation. It does not know that meditation can transform your whole vision of life; it can give you tremendous meaningfulness, beauty, benediction. Then life is something sacred, you cannot destroy it.

You must look at it, that in the East the rate of suicide is very low compared to the West, the rate of people going mad is very low compared to the West. And one thing more: in the East, the people who go mad are really not very intelligent people. They are psychologically sick. It is not their intelligence that has led them to madness, it is something missing in their minds. Perhaps their food is not right, it is not enough to help their mind become mature. Their vegetarianism is lacking certain proteins which are absolutely needed for intelligence to grow.

So the madness in the West and in the East is totally different. The madness in the East is something psychological: they are missing certain things, their growth is retarded, their minds cannot grow the way they would have grown.

That's why in my commune I have allowed vegetarian eggs. All the vegetarians of the world should allow vegetarian eggs, because they supply the necessary proteins for intelligence; otherwise, just vegetarian food is not enough. They will be against me, because just the word "egg" is enough for them to be against me. But these eggs are simply pure vegetable, because they don't have the male sperm. They are not going to give birth to anything. They are not alive, so you are not killing anybody. For all vegetarians of the world, unfertilized eggs should become an essential part of the menu.

The people who commit suicide in the East are also different than the people who commit suicide in the West. In the East people commit suicide because of hunger, because of starvation, because they cannot manage to live -- and life becomes such a torture. So there is a qualitative difference.

But the intelligent people in the East have always turned towards meditation. Whenever they have felt that life has no meaning, they have tried to find the meaning within themselves; that's the way of meditation. They have tried to find out the very source of life, love, and they have found it. Anybody who looks inwards is bound to find it. It is not far away, it is just within you. You are carrying it all the time!

The Western intelligentsia is looking for meaning outside, and there is no meaning outside. They are looking for blissfulness outside. Remember, the beauty is in the eyes of the onlooker; it is not there outside. And the same is true about meaningfulness, blissfulness, benediction. It is within your vision, it is within you. When you have it, you can project it over the whole existence. But first you have to find it within yourself.

If Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, people like these, had been born in the East, they would all have become enlightened beings. But, in the West, they all became tremendously burdened with anguish, anxiety. They found that it is all accidental and meaningless, that there is no purpose in life, and joy is just a dream, just a hope; it does not exist in reality.

The West needs meditation. The East needs medicine; it is sick in the body. The West is sick in the soul. Once we understand the problem clearly.... Now it is not the East which is a danger to the world; at the most they can starve and die as they are dying in Ethiopia. But it is not a danger to the world. In fact, in a way the starving East is helping the world by dying. It is reducing the population of the world. It is making everybody richer, without your knowing. One thousand Ethiopians dying every day -- you may not see that somehow they are helping your comforts, but they are, because if the population of the world is reduced, people can live more comfortably, more easily, more joyously.

The problem is not coming from the East; the problem is coming from the West. The problem is the Western intelligentsia is fed up with life, so there is no real resistance from the intelligentsia against nuclear weapons, against a third world war. In fact, it seems deep down the Western mind is somehow hoping that it happens soon, because life is meaningless.

Rather than taking the risk of committing suicide yourself, if politicians can manage to destroy the whole world, that will be far easier. You will not be in the dilemma of to be or not to be. You will not have to think whether to destroy yourself or not, to wonder if perhaps tomorrow things may be different.

It is an individual responsibility to commit suicide, but a global war, a nuclear war -- all your personal responsibility disappears. It is not your doing, it is just happening.
Why is the Western intelligentsia not really fighting against nuclear weapons? Why are the scientists -- who are part of the intelligentsia -- still serving governments? The simplest way will be that all the scientists who are creating nuclear weapons should resign. They should say, "Enough is enough. We cannot create these weapons which are going to destroy life on the earth." And the poets, the philosophers, the painters -- they don't seem to protest. They have just become spectators. There is a reason behind it.

Western humanity has been turned by and by into spectators -- about everything.
You don't play football, but twenty-two persons who are professionals, this is their business, to play football. And millions of people are just spectators, and they are so excited... jumping in their seats, screaming, shouting. If they are not in the stadium, then they are sitting in their homes before the television screen and they are doing the same gestures there. Somebody else is playing; you are just a spectator.

The average American is looking at the television five to six hours a day: six hours of just being a spectator, not a participant. Then there are movies where you are spectators, and there are boxing matches where you are spectators. It seems you have lost contact with life. You simply see others living; your life is just to watch. Somebody is in a competition for a world championship in chess, and you are watching. Can't you play chess yourself? Can't you play football yourself?

It is not far away, it is already happening... you will not be making love to your wife, to your girlfriend -- somebody else will be doing it and you will be watching, jumping: "Aha! Great! Go on!"

You have left the whole of life for others to live on your behalf, and then you ask where the meaning has gone, why you don't feel alive, why there is not some significance in your life. Spectators cannot have significance -- only participants, totally involved, intensely involved in every action.

So perhaps the Western intelligentsia is just in the situation of spectators, watching when it is announced on the television that the third world war has begun. Listening to the radio, reading the newspaper.... But are you going to do something or not? It is doing that keeps your juices running. If you are simply watching, your own juices dry up. You become just a skeleton.

I am surprised that the West has a great, educated, intelligent majority in the world, but they do nothing, they don't take any action. AIDS is spreading -- you are simply watching. The Soviet Union and America are both piling up nuclear weapons, preparing your funeral pyre -- and you are just watching.

You have to be taken out of this hypnotic state of being a mere spectator. There are not many people who are making nuclear weapons. There are only twenty scientists in America who know -- just twenty scientists. Can't they simply say, "No, we are not going to be servants of death!"

And the same will be the situation in the Soviet Union. There cannot be more people than that who can create nuclear weapons. If it happens in America, I am certain it will happen in the Soviet Union too. The question is just that somebody has to begin.

And all the poets and all the painters and all the great Nobel Prize-winners, novelists, actors, musicians, dancers -- what are they doing? There should be a great protest -- that all the nuclear weapons should be drowned in the Pacific. Whoever named it the Pacific must have had great insight into the future. Now let that name become a reality.
But the trouble is, unless you start feeling some meaning in life, some joy arising in you, some fragrance surrounding you, you cannot fight for life. And life needs, for the first time in the history of man, to be fought for.

Meditation will create the necessary atmosphere. It will bring you back to action, back to love, back to meaning. And then, naturally, you will see that it is time something has to be done. This beautiful earth should not die.

This is a unique planet, very small. In this immense universe, which knows no limits, this small earth is unique -- unique because birds sing here, flowers blossom here, life has reached a new level: consciousness. And in a few people consciousness has touched its omega point: enlightenment.

Compared to this earth, the whole universe is dead. It is big, vast, but even a roseflower is far more valuable than the biggest stars. Anybody who wants to destroy this earth wants to destroy something unique that is evolving. And it has taken millennia to come to this state of consciousness. Even if only a few people have attained to ultimate bliss and ecstasy, that is enough to make this earth the greatest treasure.

It is very small -- the sun is sixty thousand times bigger than the earth. And this sun is a very mediocre one; there are very big suns that you see as stars. There are millions of solar systems, but no solar system can claim a Gautam Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Bodhidharma, a Kabir. This earth has done something immensely great, it has made the whole universe rich. It cannot be destroyed.

War should be stopped -- and it is within our hands to do so. Don't be only a spectator. Rather than just remaining in your misery, start finding sources of life and mystery within yourself.

This is the function of this mystery school: to make you acquainted with simple methods so that you can attain to the very center of your being. That is the only possibility for saving the whole world. If only two hundred people are enlightened, then there is no way the world can be destroyed. And two hundred people is not a big number. Just in this commune we can manage two hundred enlightened people!

Source - Osho Book "Fro Bondage to Freedom"

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