“The beauty of facing life unprepared is tremendous. Then life has a newness, a youth; then life has a flow and freshness. Then life has so many surprises. And when life has so many surprises boredom never settles in you.” Osho
The Coronavirus has brought the greatest surprise to the whole world–not just a surprise, but a rude shock also. This is mother Nature’s way of awakening the consciousness of the whole of humanity–to pause and ponder, look within, immediately and urgently. We need to observe within ourselves what we have been doing with the earth, exploiting it to the max; and what we have done with the sky and the whole ecology. We have been racing madly towards an undefined ambitious goal. This neurotic lifestyle has made a big mess in our life.
The enlightened mystic Osho has been reminding us again and again: The world is being poisoned very slowly. The rivers are being polluted, the oceans are being polluted, the lakes are dying. Nature is being destroyed. We are exploiting the earth so much that sooner or later we will not be able to live on it. We are not behaving well with nature. Our whole approach is wrong, it is destructive. We only take from the earth, and we never give anything back. We only exploit nature. The ecology is broken, the circulation is broken; we are not living in a perfect circle, and nature is a perfect circle: if you take from one hand and you give from another, you don’t destroy it. But we are doing it: we only go on taking, and all the resources are being spent. But this poisoning is happening slowly, slowly. You don’t see it happening because it takes a long time. And then there are politicians who go on gathering more and more atomic weapons – more atom bombs, more hydrogen bombs, super-hydrogen bombs – as if the man has decided to commit suicide.
This kind of human being and the whole of humanity has been a curse to itself. And what is needed urgently is some kind of re-birthing for the transformation of human beings and humanity at large. Osho wants a New Man, New Humanity: A New Man who will not hate life, as in the past it has been done; a New Man who will love life; a New Man who will not be negative in any way but will be affirmative; a New Man who will not desire life after death, but will live moment to moment in sheer joy – who will think of this life as a gift and not as a punishment; who will not be antagonistic to the body, who will respect the body as the temple of the soul; who will love, and who will not be afraid of love; who will move in all kinds of relationships and yet be able to remain himself.
Meditation and Observation of our own life at the individual level–why we are always bored and frustrated, why we are seeking all kinds of neurotic entertainment, and why we cannot live with ourselves with contentment–is what is needed. Meditation is powerful alchemy of transformation.
The other day, I was talking to a friend who was utterly depressed and bored. She had a love relationship with a man who was rarely available to her, as he was too busy with his work and travel. For several months she did not have any nourishment of being close to him. She was living in eternal hope and imagination. She did not know what to do in her aloneness which had become hell. Then there was another woman who told me that her man was always available to her but there was no communication between them. Her husband is very non-communicative. She felt she was wasting her youthful years by being with such a useless person who does not have any juiciness left in his life.
Both of these cases are sample cases of boredom and frustration.
After listening to the life-stories of both the women over and over again and several such stories of the misery of relationship, I conclude that behind this depression and frustration is the repetitive life of routine and boredom.
One may have the best of things in life, and after having all this one may still get bored. Actually everyone does get bored, and if the person is a little intelligent, he or she is bound to get bored. One cannot help. This is the way life is. And the shine of all the best of things gradually starts looking dull, even the things may remain the same forever. Certain things do remain the same forever, but they are not alive, they artificial.
Love is a very alive phenomenon, and it may start becoming dead as it turns into a permanent relationship of dependency, attachment and clinging. As an alive phenomenon, it could have blossomed into a beautiful flower, delicate and fragrant. As a relationship of fixation, it becomes solid like a rock but rocks don’t breathe.
One may not get or may get whatever one wants, but life offers no guarantee that one would be contented forever. Contentment is not just the availability of desired objects or persons outside us but our own capacity to respond. Look at your wife or husband today, tomorrow and day after tomorrow, a year later, and ten-twenty years later, your capacity of looking and feeling may change to become worse or become totally dead. And the same could be true about others who look at you or respond to you. Nothing remains the same forever and even if it remains the same, it still creates dullness and boredom.
What is the answer to this problem?
It is in the following words of Osho in his discourses on Atisha’s Seven Points of Mind Training–the Book of Wisdom: To be in a relationship and become dependent is the sign of weakness. And to escape to the Himalayas or to some Catholic monastery because of the fear of becoming dependent is again the sign of weakness; it is cowardly. To live in a relationship and yet remain independent, that is what courage is. The new man will be courageous. In the past, only two kinds of cowards have existed on the earth, the worldly kind and the otherworldly kind – but both are cowards. The really brave man will live in the world and yet not be of it. Either this is going to happen, or total destruction. Now there is no third alternative. Man cannot survive as he is. Either he has to change himself, transmute himself, or he has to die and vacate the earth.
