The Key to FREEDOM

Nobody can put you right except you yourself.

A real religious person is born the moment you accept your responsibility for yourself, the moment you say, “Whatsoever I am is my choice—not of the past but of the present. It is my choice of this moment, and if I want to change it I am absolutely free to change it. Nobody can hinder me—no social force, no state, no history, no economics, no unconscious, can hinder me. If I am determined to change it, I can change it.

The master simply teaches you to be a master of yourself – that is the true function of a master. He does not want you to depend on him. But the mind goes on playing these mischief. The mind wants you to depend. The mind is always in search of a father figure or a mother figure; you want somebody to hold your hand. You want somebody to guide, to lead.

The master can only indicate. He is a finger pointing to the moon. But the mind plays a mischief: it clings to the finger – you may even start sucking the finger.

Zen master, Nan Yin, used to say to his disciples, “Please don’t bite my finger – look at the moon!”

FROM YOUR VERY CHILDHOOD YOU HAVE BEEN TAUGHT NOT TO BE responsible. You have been taught to depend. You have been taught to be responsible to your father, to your mother, to your family, to your motherland, to all kinds of nonsense. But you have not been told that you have to be responsible for yourself, that there is nobody who is going to take your responsibility. . . .

I teach you not to be responsible to anybody —the father, the mother, the country, the religion, the party line, don’t be responsible to anybody. You are not!

Just be responsible to yourself. Do whatsoever you feel like doing. If it is wrong, the punishment will immediately follow. If it is right, the reward will follow immediately, instantly; there is no other way. In this way you will start finding what is wrong, what is right, on your own. You will grow a new sensitivity— Indians call it the third eye. You will start seeing with a new vision, a new eye. Instantly you will know what is wrong, because in the past so many times you have done it and always suffered in consequence. You will know what is right, because whenever you did existence showered great blessings on you. Cause and effect are together, they are not separated by years and lives. . . .

This is what I mean by being responsible to yourself. There is no God on whom you can dump your responsibility, but you are always searching to dump on somebody, even on a poor man like me, who is continuously telling you that I am not responsible for anything, for anybody. Still, somehow, deep down you go on carrying the illusion that I must be joking. I am not joking. “He is our master,” you must be thinking. “How can he say that he is not responsible?” But you don’t understand. Dumping your responsibility on me, you will remain retarded, childish. You will never grow.

The only way to grow is to accept all the good, the bad, the joyful, the sorrowful. Everything that happens to you, you are responsible for. That gives you great freedom.

If I am responsible for something, then the key to your actions is in my hands. Then you are a slave to me. Then you are a puppet and the strings are in my hand. I say dance, you dance; I say stop, you stop. Of course, the puppet cannot be responsible for anything. The puppeteer, who is behind the screen, is always responsible. God is the great puppeteer.

The moment I say there is no puppeteer, no God, no saint, it is all rubbish, I am trying to give you total freedom. I am making you absolutely responsible for everything that happens to you or does not happen. Rejoice in this freedom. Rejoice in this great understanding that you are responsible for everything in your life. This will make you what I call an individual. And to become an individual is to know all that is worth knowing, is to experience all that is worth experiencing. To be an individual is to be liberated, is to be enlightened.

By OSHO – Rajneesh (from his book – Autobiography of a spiritually incorrect mystic).

So here is the QUIZ for you “I WANT TO LIVE BY”