Total living has no regret
Beloved Osho,
Why is the lie of god so successful?
Because you are a failure. It is your failure that makes the lie of God so successful. In your life you have not loved totally, you have not lived totally. You have never done anything totally; this is your failure.
I don’t mean by failure what you understand. You understand you are a failure if you are not super-rich. You are a failure if you are not a great politician, a prime minister, a president. You are a failure if you are not world famous. That is not failure, that is simply the competitive, egoistic life.
And that kind of life is the most miserable, because you are continuously fighting, pulling others back by the legs, rising over people’s heads, making them as if they are steps for you to climb higher. Your life is violent, and a violent life cannot be beautiful. You are merciless; only then can you become super-rich. You don’t have any compassion; otherwise how can you exploit millions of people to such a stage that they are starving, and you are simply accumulating money which you cannot use? There is no point in accumulating more; it has just become a habit to go on accumulating.
The richest man in the world now is in Japan; he has twenty-six billion dollars. What are you going to do with twenty-six billion dollars? There is nothing that you can do with twenty-six billion dollars, but he is still running for more.
The people you think are successful are continuously running for more. Deep down they are not successful.
A man is successful if he follows his own natural way and lives it as totally and intensely as possible. If you want to be a musician, you will not be a super-rich man.If you want to be a flutist, you are not going to be a great politician, but you will be utterly happy. Maybe there is only just enough to eat, but playing on the flute who cares? You simply disappear in your music. Your flute becomes your meditation. Your song, your dance becomes your meditation.
Anything that is totally lived is equal to meditation. You don’t need meditation. And a man who is living moment-to-moment, absolutely naturally, according to himself, has nothing to regret, it is not a failure. Hence, a happy man, a blissful man, needs no God. It is your misery, your failure to be natural, that makes the life of God so successful.
If you understand, my approach is so clean and clear: just be natural, and God will not matter at all, nor heaven and hell, nor any priest. Every moment you will be so much in tune with existence that you will blossom like flowers, you will dance like peacocks, you will sing like cuckoos. Your life will have a totally different flavor. It will have a fragrance of a man who is utterly contented with himself and existence as it is, with no desire to change, no desire to make this existence better, no desire to bother about what will happen after death.
Who cares about death? Only people who have not lived are worried about death. People who have not lived, who have simply hoped to live someday, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, or maybe after death, in paradise—those who have been postponing life, they are the only people who are afraid of death because they don’t know the art of living. The art of living is simple. Be natural.
I know only of one success, and that is your life should be your life, your natural existence. But if you fail to be your authentic nature, then the lie of God is going to be successful.
Be authentic, be natural, be honest in every act you are doing. And this is possible only if you enter into your being and find out your center and then let the center guide you. The light will come from the center, radiating from you, and you will be a natural man. The natural man is buddha.
Osho, From the book ‘God is Dead, Now Zen is the only Living Truth’
