Osho,
I am seeing a certain helplessness arising in me. It is a feeling that I had feared and always tried to avoid in the past.
Yet, as it begins to overwhelm me, it brings a sense of freedom I have seldom, if ever, experienced before.
Beloved Master, does this helplessness have something to do with what you call “let-go”?
Man is helpless. His helplessness is existential. He has tried in thousands of ways to cover it up – by creating a God as a protector, by praying in temples and mosques and churches to some fictitious entity, just not to feel helpless… “There is somebody up there who will take care.” Man has tried to belong to different crowds, Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, just to avoid and escape his aloneness.
But whatever you do, sooner or later you realize you are alone. Neither your wife is yours, nor your husband; it is just an arbitrary arrangement to help each other to cover up helplessness. There is no friend who can help you, there is no political ideology which can help you, there is no theology, no religion.
What I am trying to say is that we have to accept the truth that we are alone and all our efforts to forget it are futile. Secondly, that we are helpless, there is no way to avoid the fact. All are simply imaginations and dreams.
Just to avoid one’s helplessness one tries so many ways…one starts drinking alcohol, taking drugs, so that one can forget this utter helplessness in this vast empty universe, this aloneness in this infinity.
There are people who are angry with me just for the simple reason that I want to make them aware of the fact, and not to live in fictions. There is no God whom you can depend on in times of trouble, in dark nights. There is nobody to hear your prayers. When I say this it creates in people antagonism against me. I am taking away their teddy bears.
Just try to take a teddy bear from a small child and see how he freaks out. The teddy bear is his solace, his consolation, his companion, his God, his friend; he is his everything. Just watch, on the platforms of railway stations, in airports, in waiting halls, small children carrying their teddy bears. Dirty, greasy, looking like Italians, but carrying them…a deep solace somewhere that they are not alone, the teddy bear is here. If any calamity happens the teddy bear is going to help.
But poor teddy bears at least are real. Your God is not even that real.
When I see somebody raising his eyes to the sky and praying, I feel like crying. This man is living in dreams. There is nobody there above the clouds, but his prayer gives him a certain solace, a consolation.
No prayer has ever been heard, except once: