Friday 8 February 2013

Man's Inhumanity

Why do people treat each other like they do? Is it all conditioning, or is there something in man that makes him willing to go astray?

It is both.

First, there is something in man that leads him astray. And secondly, there are people whose interest it is to lead human beings astray. Both together create a false, fake human being. His heart longs for love, but his conditioned mind prevents him from love.

This is the problem. The child is born with a heart that longs for love, but he is also born with a brain that can be conditioned.

Society has to condition it against the heart, because the heart will be always rebellious against the society, it will always follow its own way.

It cannot be made into a soldier. It can become a poet, it can become a singer, it can become a dancer, but it cannot become a soldier.

It can suffer for its individuality, it can die for its individuality and freedom, but it cannot be enslaved. That is the state of the heart. But the mind.... The child comes with an empty brain, just a mechanism, which you can arrange the way you want. It will learn the language you teach, it will learn the religion you teach, it will learn the morality you teach. It is simply a computer; you just feed it with information. And every society takes care to make the mind stronger and stronger so that if there is any conflict between heart and mind, the mind is going to win. But every victory of the mind over the heart is a misery. It is a victory over your nature, over your being — over you — by others. And they have cultivated your mind to serve their purposes.

So the mind is empty, it is brain; you can put anything in it. And with twenty-five years of education you can make it so strong that you forget your heart; you will always remain miserable. The misery is that your heart can only give you joy, can only give you happiness, can only make you dance.

The mind can do arithmetic, but it cannot sing a song. Those are just not the capacities of the mind. So you are torn apart between your nature, which is your heart, and the society that is in your head. And certainly you are born — everybody is born — with these two centers. That is the difficulty.

And one center is empty. In a better society it will be used in accordance with the heart, to serve the heart. Then it will be a great life, full of rejoicings. But up to now we have lived in an ugly society, with rotten ideas. They have used the mind. And that vulnerability is there — mind can be used.

Now communists are using it in one way; fascists used it in Germany in one way; all the other religions are using it in different ways. But that vulnerability is with every individual: that you have a mind which you bring empty. In fact it is a blessing of existence — but misused, exploited. It is given to you empty so that you can make it perfectly subservient to your heart, to your longings, to your potential. Nothing is wrong in it. But the vested interests all over the world have found it a beautiful opportunity for them — to use the mind against the heart. So you remain miserable and they can exploit you in whatever ways they want.

That’s why the whole world is miserable.

Everybody wants to be loved, everybody wants to love; but the mind is such a barrier that it neither allows you to love, nor does it allow you to be loved. In both cases the mind comes in the way and starts distorting everything.

And even if by chance you meet a person you feel love for and the person feels love for you, your minds are not going to settle. They have been trained by different systems, different religions, different societies.

It is everybody’s birthright to be happy, but unfortunately the society, the people with whom we have been living, who have brought us into the world, have not thought anything about it. They have just been reproducing human beings like animals — even worse because at least animals are not conditioned. This conditioning process should be completely changed. The mind should be trained to be a servant of the heart.

Logic should serve love. And then life can become a festival of lights.

Osho, Beyond Psychology







No comments:

Post a Comment