Tarot in the Spirit of Zen

by Osho

  The fear comes because the mind knows that if you look at the life, you will be proved wrong. So better remain with closed eyes, don’t look at life. Interpret life always according to the mind. Don’t listen to life! That’s how you have become deaf.

  Life is a constant resurrection. Every moment it dies, every moment it is born anew. But you go on carrying the old mind; you will never fit anywhere. And you know it! You never fit anywhere; you never fit with anybody. Wherever you are, there is some trouble.

  Something is always missing, lacking. Harmony never comes out of your relationships—because the harmony is possible only if you are a fluxlike phenomenon, changing, moving, merging into the new.

  If you become a formless river of consciousness, then everything fits. Then you fit with life, and life fits with you—suddenly everything is absolutely okay.

  7 of Clouds: Politics

  Our culture, our education, our religion—they all teach us to be hypocrites in such subtle ways that unless you go deep in search, you will never find out what you have been doing.

  As you grow up, society goes on teaching you to be this way, to behave this way. You start becoming a hypocrite and you become identified with your hypocrisy.

  The man who first made up the maxim, “Honesty is the best policy,” must have been a very cunning man. Honesty is not policy; and if it is policy, then it is not honesty. Then you are honest because it pays—you will be dishonest if that pays. Honesty is the best policy if it is paying, but if sometimes it is not paying, then dishonesty of course is the best policy. The question is, which one is going to pay?

  There are three words deeply related to one another: policy, politeness, and politics. What is politeness? It is a kind of politics. Both words are derived from the same root. All three words—policy, politeness, politics—have the same root, they all mean the same thing. But politeness you think is a nice quality. You would never think of it in terms of politics, but it is politics. To be polite is a defense measure.

  In Europe you shake hands. Why do you shake the right hand? Why not the left? It is really part of politics. To shake hands is nothing friendly. It is just a gesture to demonstrate that “My right hand is empty so don’t be worried. And let me see that your right hand also is empty, that there is not a knife or something in it.” And when you are shaking right hands you cannot pull your sword out because with the left hand … unless you happen to be a leftist! It is just a way of giving certainty to the other person that you are not going to harm him, and he is giving certainty to you that he is not going to harm you. Slowly, it became a gesture of greeting.

  In India, you greet the other person with both hands, but that too is simply showing that both your hands are empty. It is far better than shaking hands, because who knows about the left hand? Sometimes even the right hand does not know about the left hand, so it is better to show that both hands are empty. That is far better and far more polite also. But you are saying, “I am completely defenseless. You need not be wary about me or worried about me. You can relax.” These are symbols that people have learned.

  Our culture, our education, our religion—they all teach us to be hypocrites in such subtle ways that unless you go deeply in search, you will never find out what you have been doing.

  Why do you smile when you meet a friend? What is the need? If you are not feeling like smiling, why do you smile? You have to do it. This is a policy that is paying, because some day you may need this man’s help, and if you have always been smiling at him, he cannot refuse. If you have never smiled at him and never even said “Hi,” then you need not bother even to approach him; he will throw you out of his house with a “Go to hell!”

  One has to understand all these layers and detach oneself from all of them.

  Become a watcher so that you cannot become identified with any dream.

  It is difficult not to abuse one’s authority. Very difficult—because in the first place people seek authority just to abuse it.

  You have heard Lord Acton’s famous dictum that power corrupts. It is not true. His observation is right in a way, but not true. Power never corrupts anybody, but still Lord Acton is right—because we always see people being corrupted by power. How can power corrupt people? But in fact, it is corrupted people who seek power. Of course, when they don’t have power, they cannot express their corruption. When they have power, then they are free. Then they can move with the power, then they are not worried. Then they come out in their true light, then they show their real face.

  Power never corrupts anybody, but corrupted people are attracted to power. And when they have power, then of course they use it for all their desires and passions.

  It happens. A person may be very humble. When he is seeking a political post he may be very humble, and you may know him—you may have known that for his whole life he was a simple and humble person, and you vote for him. The moment he is in power, there is a metamorphosis; he is no longer the same person. People are surprised—how does power corrupt?

  In fact, that humbleness was false, bogus. He was humble because he was weak. He was humble because he had no power. He was afraid the powerful people would crush him. His humbleness was his politics, his policy. Now he need not be afraid, now nobody can crush him. Now he can express his own reality. Now he looks corrupted.

  In every human encounter you will see it happening—people are throwing their authority all around; either bullying people or being bullied by others. And if somebody bullies you, you will immediately find some weaker person somewhere to take the revenge.

  If your boss bullies you in the office, you will come home and bully your wife. And if she is not a feminist, then she will wait for the child to come home from the school, and she will bully the child. And if the child is old-fashioned, not American, then the child will go to his room and crush his toys, because that is the only thing he can bully. He can show his power on the toy. But this goes on and on. This seems to be the whole game. This is what real politics is.

  So whenever you have some authority … . And everybody has some authority or other. You cannot find a person, you cannot find the last person who has no authority; even he has some authority, even he has a dog he can kick. Everybody has some authority somewhere. So, everybody lives in politics. You may not be a member of any political party; that doesn’t mean that you are not political. If you abuse your authority, you are political. If you don’t abuse your authority, then you are non-political.

  Become more aware not to abuse your authority. It will give a new light to how you function and it will make you so calm and centered. It will give you tranquility and serenity.

  8 of Clouds: Guilt

  The word guilt should never be used.The very word has wrong associations; and once you use it you are caught in it.

  The concept of sin is a technique of creating guilt in people.

  You will have to understand the whole strategy of sin and guilt. Unless you make a person feel guilty, you cannot enslave him psychologically. It is impossible to imprison him in a certain ideology, a certain belief system. But once you have created guilt in his mind, you have taken all that is courageous in him. You have destroyed all that is adventurous in him. You have repressed all possibility of his ever being an individual in his own right. With the idea of guilt, you have almost murdered the human potential in him. He can never be independent. The guilt will force him to be dependent on a messiah, on a religious teaching, on God, on the concepts of heaven and hell and the whole lot.

  To create guilt, all that you need is a very simple thing: start calling mistakes and errors “sins.” They are simply mistakes, human. Now, if somebody commits a mistake in mathematics—two plus two, and he concludes it makes five—you don’t say he has committed a sin. He is unalert, he is not paying attention to what he is doing. He is unprepared, he has not done his homework. He is certainly committing a mistake, but a mistake is not a sin. It can be corrected. A mistake does not make him feel guilty. At the most
it makes him feel foolish.

  Guilt is an idea accepted by you. You can reject it, and it can be rejected because it is not part of existence.

  Guilt is not a natural phenomenon, it is created by the priests. Through guilt they have exploited humanity. The whole history of pseudo-religion is contained in the word guilt—it is the most poisoned word. Beware of it; never use it, because in your unconscious mind it also has deep roots. You cannot find guilt in any animal; the animal simply is. It has no ideals, it has no arts; it exists, and simply exists. It has no perfections to be attained and hence the animal is beautiful, innocent.

  Ideals corrupt. Once you have an ideal to fulfill you will never be at ease, and you will never be at home, and you can never be contented. Dissatisfaction follows ideals like a shadow, and the more dissatisfied you are with yourself, the more it becomes impossible to reach the ideal: this is the vicious circle. If you are not dissatisfied with yourself, if you accept yourself as you are, the ideal can be fulfilled immediately. And I emphasize the word immediately—with no time gap, right this moment, here and now, you can realize that you are perfect; it is not something to be attained in the future, it is something that you have always been carrying within you. Perfection is your nature—perfect you are.

  I am against guilt—the guilt that has been created by the priests—but there is a different type of guilt which is not created by the priest. And that guilt is very meaningful. That guilt arises if you feel there is something more in life and you are not working hard to get to it. Then you feel guilt. Then you feel that somehow you are creating barriers to your own growth—that you are lazy, lethargic, unconscious, asleep; that you don’t have any integration, that you cannot move towards your destiny. Then a kind of guilt arises. When you feel that you have the possibility and you are not turning it into actuality, then guilt arises. That guilt is totally different.

  There is a real spiritual guilt, which has nothing to do with any politics, with any priesthood, with any religion or church. That guilt feeling is very natural. When you see that you can do something and you are not doing it, when you see your potential but you are not changing that potential into actuality … when you see that you are carrying tremendous treasures as seeds which could bloom, and you are not doing anything about it and you are just remaining in misery—then you feel a great responsibility towards yourself. And if you are not fulfilling that responsibility, you feel guilty. This guilt is of tremendous import.

  9 of Clouds: Sorrow

  Bliss has not to be found outside, against sorrow. Bliss has to be found deep, hidden behind the sorrow itself. You have to dig into your sorrowful states and you will find a wellspring of joy.

  You are sad. Go into your sadness rather than escaping into some activity, into some occupation. Rather than going to see a friend or to a movie or turning on the radio or the TV, rather than escaping from it, turning your back to it, drop all activity. Close your eyes, go into it, see what it is, why it is—and see without condemning it, because if you condemn you will not be able to see the totality of it. See without judging. If you judge, you will not be able to see the whole of it. Without judgment, without condemnation, without evaluation, just watch it, watch what it is. Look at it as if it is a flower, sad; a cloud, dark; but look at it with no judgment so that you can see all the facets of it.

  And you will be surprised: the deeper you go into it, the more it starts dispersing. If a person can go into his sorrow deeply he will find all sorrow has evaporated. In that evaporation of sorrow is joy, is bliss.

  There are two types of sadness. One is causal: you have lost a friend and you are sorrowful, somebody has died and you are sorrowful—but time will heal that. It has a cause, and anything caused cannot be permanent. You will find another friend, you will have another lover, and you will forget about it. Only time is needed and it will be healed. But there is existential sorrow that has no cause. It persists, there is no reason for it; it is simply there as part of your growth.

  You have become aware of the meaninglessness of life. You go on doing things but you have become capable of seeing through them. You know that it is pointless, hence the sorrow. You know that it’s okay, it keeps one occupied, but it is just okay, nothing much; it is an occupation. You are no longer in deep illusion; hence the sorrow.

  You are disillusioned. You have seen through things about which you had hopes, but now you can see that all hopes are baseless, that nothing is going to happen, that one can go on hoping and one day one dies. And everything fails—money fails, relationship fails, friendship fails, everything, sooner or later. Everything comes to a dead end, to a cul-de-sac, and then one is stuck. Just somehow, to go on, one drags oneself and starts doing something else. One has to do something, otherwise life will be too much of a burden, so one keeps oneself occupied. But one knows deep down that all is futile, that it is a tale told by an idiot.

  When this happens it is beautiful. It is the beginning of transformation. You are a disillusioned being, and only a disillusioned being can search. When the world has no hope for you, you can go inward—when the outside has failed utterly … and I say utterly! Even if a slight hope is there, you will go on searching; then some illusion remains.

  When you are utterly disillusioned, when the outer has no more attraction, when you have seen it and found it lacking and now you have come to the point of realizing that there is nothing—then the quantum leap into the inner.

  10 of Clouds: Rebirth

  The real sage again becomes a child.The circle is complete—from the child back to the child.

  But the difference is great … . The first birth is of the body and the second birth is of the consciousness.

  Zarathustra divides the evolution of consciousness into three symbols: the camel, the lion, and the child. The camel is a beast of burden, ready to be enslaved, never rebellious. He cannot ever say no. He is a believer, a follower, a faithful slave. That is the lowest in human consciousness.

  The lion is a revolution. The beginning of the revolution is a sacred no. In the consciousness of the camel there is always a need for someone to lead and someone to say to him, “Thou shalt do this.” He needs the Ten Commandments. He needs all the religions, all the priests, and all the holy scriptures because he cannot trust himself. He has no courage and no soul and no longing for freedom. He’s obedient.

  The lion is a longing for freedom, a desire to destroy all imprisonments. The lion is not in need of any leader; he is enough unto himself. He will not allow anybody else to say to him, “Thou shalt.” That is insulting to his pride. He can only say, “I will.” The lion is responsibility and a tremendous effort to get out of all chains.

  But even the lion is not the highest peak of human growth. The highest peak is when the lion also goes through a metamorphosis and becomes a child. The child is innocence. It is not obedience, it is not disobedience; it is not belief, it is not disbelief—it is pure trust, it is a sacred yes to existence and to life and to all that it contains. The child is the very peak of purity, sincerity, authenticity, receptivity, and openness to existence. These symbols are very beautiful.

  Zarathustra is not in favor of the weak, in favor of the so-called humble. He is not in agreement with Jesus that “Blessed are the meek,” that “Blessed are the poor,” that “Blessed are the humble for they shall inherit the kingdom of God.” Zarathustra is absolutely in favor of a strong spirit. He is against the ego, but he is not against pride. Pride is the dignity of man. Ego is a false entity and one should never think of them as synonymous.

  The ego is something that deprives you of your dignity, that deprives you of your pride, because the ego has to depend on others, on the opinion of others, on what people say. The ego is very fragile. The opinion of people can change and the ego will disappear into the air.

  Ego is a by-product of public opinion. They give it to you; they can take it away. Pride is a totally different phenomenon. The lion has pride. The deer in the forest—just look—has a pr
ide, a dignity, grace. A peacock dancing or an eagle flying far away in the sky—they don’t have egos, they don’t depend on your opinion—they are simply dignified as they are. Their dignity arises from their own being. This has to be understood, because all the religions have been teaching people not to be proud—be humble. They have created a misunderstanding all over the world, as if being proud and being an egoist are synonymous.

  Zarathustra is absolutely clear that he is in favor of the strong, of the courageous, of the adventurer who goes into the unknown on the untrodden path without any fear; he is in favor of fearlessness. And it is a miracle that a person of pride, and only a person of pride, can become a child.

  The so-called Christian humbleness is just ego standing on its head. The ego has gone upside-down but it is there, and you can see in your saints that they are more egoistic than ordinary people are. They are egoists because of their piousness, their austerities, their spirituality, their holiness, even because of their humbleness. Nobody is more humble than they are. The ego has a very subtle way of coming in from the back door. You may throw it out from the front door—it knows that there is a back door too.

  To choose the camel as the lowest consciousness is perfectly right.

  The lowest consciousness in man is crippled; it wants to be enslaved. It is afraid of freedom because it is afraid of responsibility. It is ready to be loaded with as much burden as possible. It rejoices in being loaded; so does the lowest consciousness—being loaded with knowledge, which is borrowed. No man of dignity will allow himself to be loaded with borrowed knowledge. It is loaded with morality that has been handed over by the dead to the living; it is a domination of the dead over the living. No man of dignity will allow the dead to rule him.