Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 21. CHOOSE THE FLUTE OR PERISH
That is why, from the beginning, he does everything to avoid the Mahabharat. He leaves no stone
unturned to avert war and save life and peace. But when all his efforts for peace fail, he realizes that
the recalcitrant forces of death and destruction – forces that are against righteousness and religion
– are not amenable to an honorable peace. He readies himself to fight on behalf of life and religion.
As I see it, life and religion are not two different things for Krishna. And therefore he can fight as
naturally as he can dance. It is remarkable that a man like Krishna, even when he goes to the
battlefield, is happy and joyful; he never loses his bliss. And men like Jesus are sad even as they
keep a distance from the battlefield. Krishna can be blissful even on the battlefield, because war
comes to him as part of life; it cannot be segregated from life.
As I said earlier, Krishna does not divide life into black and white, good and evil, as the moralists and
monks do. He does not subscribe to the view that war is purely evil. He says that nothing is good or
evil under all circumstances. There are occasions when poison can work like nectar and nectar can
work like poison. There are moments when blessings turn into curses and curses into blessings.
Nothing is certain for all time and space, under all circumstances. The same thing can be good
in one time and bad in another; it is really determined by the moment at hand. Nothing can be
predetermined and prejudged. If someone does so. he is in for troubles in life, because life is a
flux where everything changes from moment to moment. So Krishna lives in the moment; nothing is
predetermined for him.
For long, Krishna does his best to avert war, but when he finds that it is inescapable he accepts
it without hesitation. He does not want that one should go to war with a heavy heart, he does not
believe in doing anything reluctantly in fact. If war becomes inescapable he will go to it with all his
heart and mind.
With all his heart he tries to avert it, and when he fails, he goes to war whole-heartedly. In the
beginning of war, as you know, he has no mind to take any active part in it. He tells Arjuna that
he will not use his particular weapon – sudarshan – on the battlefield, he will only work as Arjuna’s
charioteer. But then a moment comes when he takes the sudarshan in his hand and becomes an
active participant in the war.
As I said, Krishna lives in the moment; he lives moment to moment. In fact, every blissful person
lives in the moment; that is, he lives in a timeless space.
But those who choose unhappiness and are pessimistic and miserable cannot afford to live in
the moment; they live in time, they have a time-continuum. They have a long span of time – not
chronological but psychological – which extends both to the past and the future. And it is this timecontinuum
that makes for their abiding misery and anguish. They carry with them the heavy load
of all the miseries of the dead past – which is no more, and all the imagi-nable miseries of the
endless future – which is yet to come. So of course they feel crushed under the dead weight of their
psychological pain and agony.
On the other hand, a man of bliss does not accept the existence of any other time except the present,
the living moment. He has no past and no future; for him the whole of existence is squeezed into
the moment, in the now. For him the moment is eternity itself, and he journeys from one moment
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 408 Osho