The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 8. THE USELESS
So Nasruddin said, ”What arrangement do you suggest?”
His friend said, ”We should play a game of cards, and let the wife be the stake. If I win, you simply
leave; if you win, I will never see your wife again.”
Nasruddin said, ”All right, it’s settled.” But then he said, ”Let’s have some cash stakes, one rupee for
each point, otherwise the whole thing is useless. Just for a wife the whole thing is useless. Don’t
waste my time, have some money stakes too.”
Then the thing becomes useful. Money seems to be the only useful thing. All those who are
utilitarians will be money-mad, because money can purchase. Money is the essence of all utility.
So if Buddha and people like Buddha renounced, it was not because they were against money, it
was because they were against utility, against the useful. So they said: Keep all your money. I am
moving into the forest. This garden is no more for me. I will move in the vast, in the uncharted,
where one can be lost. This neat, clean pebbled path, everything known, mapped out, is not for me.
When you move into the vastness of uselessness your soul becomes vast. When you go into the
sea with no map you become like the ocean. Then the very challenge of the unknown creates your
soul.
When you are secure, when there is no problem, when everything is mathematically planned,
settled, your soul shrinks. There is no challenge for it. The useless gives the challenge.
”NOW SUPPOSE YOU SUDDENLY TAKE AWAY
ALL THAT HE IS NOT ACTUALLY USING,
SO THAT ALL AROUND HIS FEET A GULF YAWNS,
AND HE STANDS IN THE VOID
WITH NOWHERE SOLID EXCEPT UNDER EACH FOOT,
HOW LONG WILL HE BE ABLE TO USE WHAT HE IS USING?”
Without God the world cannot continue any more. Nietzsche declared just a hundred years ago that
God was dead. He did not realize it, but at the same time he was declaring that we also cannot live
any more. He never thought about that, he thought just the contrary. He said: God is dead and man
is now free to live. But I say to you: If God is dead, man is dead already. The news may not have
reached him yet, but he is dead – because God is the vast uselessness.
Man’s world is the utilitarian world, the useful; without the useless the useful cannot exist. God is
the play and man is the work; without God, work will become meaningless, a burden to be carried
somehow. God is the fun, man is serious; without the fun the seriousness will be too much, it
will be like a disease. Don’t destroy the temples, don’t destroy the mosques, don’t transform them
into hospitals; you can build other hospitals, you can create other buildings for schools, but let the
useless remain there at the very center of life. That is why the temple has been placed in the very
The Empty Boat 147 Osho