When the Shoe Fits - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 6. SYMPHONY FOR A SEABIRD
a great university professor, somewhere in some great university head of a department, or a dean
or a vice chancellor. He imagined these things and I always laughed and asked him: What will I
gain through this? What have you gained? You are a head of the department, a dean with so many
degrees – Honorary Doctor of Literature, and this and that – what have you gained? And he would
smile knowingly and say: You just wait and do whatsoever I am saying. Because at this question,
’What have you gained?’ he would always feel a little perplexed, confused.
What could he say? He had not gained anything and now he was nearing death. He would have
liked his ambition to move through me. He would have liked me to carry his ambition.
A father dies unfulfilled, but he hopes that at least his son will reach the goal. And this is how it goes
on and on, and nobody reaches. Love is not enough; awareness is needed. If love is there without
awareness it becomes an imprisonment and if love is there with awareness it becomes a freedom.
It helps you to be yourself.
BAD ENOUGH FOR A SEA BIRD TO BE SURROUNDED BY MEN AND FRIGHTENED BY THEIR
VOICES. THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH! THEY KILLED IT WITH MUSIC!
WATER IS FOR FISH AND AIR FOR MEN. NATURES DIFFER, AND NEEDS WITH THEM. HENCE
THE WISE MEN OF OLD DID NOT LAY DOWN ONE MEASURE FOR ALL.
You cannot be treated as things. Things can be similar; souls cannot be. You can have one million
Ford cars just the same. You can replace one Ford car with another Ford car and there will be no
trouble, but you cannot replace a human being. When a human being disappears, that place that he
occupied will always remain forever and forever unoccupied. Nobody can occupy it, it is impossible
to occupy it, because nobody can be exactly the same as that man was. Everybody is unique so no
rules can be laid down.
THE WISE MEN OF OLD... but if you go to the wise men of today you will find rules and regulations
and everything – a framework. They will make you a soldier but not a sannyasin. A soldier is a dead
man because his whole function is to bring death into the world. He cannot be allowed to be very
alive, otherwise how will he bring death? Death can only come through a dead man. He has to kill.
And before he kills others he has to be killed completely himself, through rules. So the whole army
training is to kill the aliveness of the person, the consciousness of the person – to make him an
automaton. So they go on saying to him, ’Right turn, left turn, right turn, left turn,’ for years together!
What nonsense is going on? Why right turn, why left turn? But there is a point to it – they want to
make you an automaton. Right turn – and every day for hours you are doing it. It becomes a bodily
phenomenon. When they say, ’Right turn!’ you need not think about it, the body simply moves.
When they say, ’Left turn!’ the body simply moves. Now you are a mechanism. And when they say,
’About!’ you shoot; the body moves, the consciousness does not interfere.
The whole point of army training all over the world is to cut consciousness from your actions so
that the actions become automatic, you become more efficient, skilled. Because consciousness is
always a trouble... If you are killing a person and you think – you will miss. If you think: Why kill this
man? He has not done anything to me. I don’t even know who he is, he is a stranger. If you think,
you will also have the feeling that you have a mother at home, a wife, a small child, who are waiting
for you, and the same is going to be the case with the other. A mother must be waiting somewhere,
When the Shoe Fits 89 Osho