From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 6. RENUNCIATION: MORTGAGE TODAY FOR A TOMORROW THAT NEVER COMES
He looked at me, shocked. For a moment there was silence, and then he said, ”Perhaps you are
right. I really enjoy touching the notes. I count them again and again. Although I have counted them,
even in the night I count them again. Just touching them gives some strange satisfaction to me –
even the notes of other people.
For example, sometimes he would come into my room and if there was some money on the table –
because that was the only place for me to keep it – the first thing he would do was count it, and I
would tell him, ”This is simply foolish. That is not your money, why are you counting it?”
He said, ”I simply enjoy it... it is not so important to whom it belongs.”
Can you see the point? If you become interested in somebody else’s wife, do you think of who she
belongs to? There is no question of whom she belongs to – she looks beautiful, that’s all, so you are
interested. Whomsoever she belongs to is not your business. Exactly this was the case with him:
money is money, it is nobody’s really. And just to touch it, to count it, to play with it....
I told him, ”If you want to get rid of this infatuation with money, which is absolutely idiotic....” I am not
against money, I am against the infatuation. The man who is infatuated with money cannot use it.
He is really destroying the money, its very purpose. In every language, in all the languages of the
world money’s other name is currency – that is significant. Money needs to be a current, river-like,
flowing, moving fast. The faster it moves, the richer is the society.
If I have a one-hundred-dollar note with me and I simply keep it in my pocket and never use it, then
whether I have it or not, does it make any difference? I could have kept any piece of paper; that
would have served the same purpose. But if I use this one-hundred-dollar note and it circulates in
here, and everybody who gets it immediately uses it – so it passes through one hundred hands –
then it is one hundred dollars multiplied by one hundred; then that much money is here in this room.
The miser is really anti-money. He is destroying its utility because he is stopping it being a ”currency”.
I told him, ”You do one thing: become interested in a woman.”
He said, ”What!”
I said, ”Just try. I can arrange for a few women to be introduced to you” – because so many women
used to come from the university. There were many women professors from the colleges who came
to visit me, to ask about meditation and things. I said, ”There is no problem. You just indicate in
whom you are interested, I will introduce you; and any woman is going to be interested in you.”
He said, ”Why?”
I said, ”Because of all the money! She is not going to be interested in you, she is going to be
interested in your money. And once you become interested in the woman, you will start spending
money; you will relax. The energy that has become perverted will start moving in the natural way.
And you can’t find anybody better than a woman to finish your money. You will not need to live two
thousand years; long before that the money will be gone. And once you become interested in a
woman, your infatuation with money will drop to its natural state.”
From Ignorance to Innocence 72 Osho