The Empty Boat - Osho.pdf - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 3. THE OWL AND THE PHOENIX
the ornaments, all belong to the ugly. The ugliness has somehow to be overcome and you have to
create the opposite to hide it, to escape from it. A really beautiful woman will not worry, she will not
even be conscious of her beauty. And only an unconscious beauty is beautiful. When you become
conscious, the ugliness has entered.
When you feel that you are inferior, when you compare yourself with others and see that they are
superior to you, what will you do? The ego feels hurt – you are inferior. You just cannot accept it, so
you have to deceive yourself and others.
How do you deceive? There are two ways. One is to go mad. Then you can declare that you are
Alexander, Hitler, Nixon. Then it comes easily because then you are not bothered by what others
say. Go to the madhouses all over the world and there you will find all the great characters of history,
still living!
While Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was alive, at least one dozen people in India believed that they were
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Once he went to a madhouse to inaugurate a new department. And
the madhouse authorities had arranged for a few people to be released by him, because now they
had become healthy and normal. The first person was brought to him and introduced, so Nehru
introduced himself to the madman who had become more normal and said, ”I am Pandit Jawaharlal
Nehru, prime minister of India. ”
The madman laughed and said, ”Don’t worry. Be here for three years and you will become as normal
as I have become. Three years ago when I first came to this madhouse that is who I believed I was
– Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India. But they have cured me completely, so don’t
worry.”
This has happened in many ways. Lloyd George was prime minister of England. In the war days, at
six o’clock in the evening there used to be a blackout and nobody could leave their homes. All traffic
stopped, lights were not allowed, and everyone had to be in a shelter of some kind. Lloyd George
was taking his usual evening walk, and he forgot.
Suddenly the siren went off. It was six o’clock and his house was at least a mile’s walk away. So
he knocked on the nearest door and said to the man who opened it, ”Let me rest here for the night;
otherwise the police will catch me. I am Lloyd George, the prime minister. ”
The man suddenly grabbed him and said, ”Come in. This is the right place for you. We have three
Lloyd Georges already!” It was a madhouse.
Lloyd George tried to convince the man that he was the real one. But the man said, ”They all argue,
so don’t bother to try, just come in or I will beat you.”
So Lloyd George had to keep quiet all night or he really would have been beaten. How could he
convince them? There were already three Lloyd Georges and they had all tried to prove it.
One way is to go mad – you suddenly declare that you are superior, the most superior. Another way
is to go politician. Either go mad or go politician. Through politics you cannot suddenly declare – you
have to prove that you really are the prime minister or the president. So it is the long way around.
Madness is a shortcut to importance; politics is the long way. But they reach the same goal.
The Empty Boat 49 Osho