The first question:
Osho,
All my life I have said yes and now that I am here with you and the yes seems really right, there comes only no. What is this no?
It is very natural. If all your life you have been saying yes, it must have been false, it must have been pseudo. You must have forced yourself to say yes, you must have repressed your no continuously. And I teach relaxation, and I teach expression, so the repressed no is coming up, surfacing. You allow it. Please don’t repress it anymore. If you repress it here, then where are you going to express it? Once it is expressed, you will be free of it, and then the real yes will come.
The yes that you have known up to now was not real. You have been cultivating this yes. It was just on the surface. Deep down the no has always existed in you. But this is how we are brought up, this is how we are conditioned. This is how people have become utterly false, hypocrites – split: their face says one thing, their being is saying just the opposite. This is how the whole of humanity has been turned into a kind of schizophrenia.
My approach is that yes and no are both absolutely necessary, part of inner rhythm. The man who cannot say no cannot say yes either; and if he says yes, his yes will be impotent. Only the man who can say “no” vitally can say “yes” vitally. They depend on each other – just as life and death depend on each other, just as darkness and light depend on each other, just as love and hate depend on each other. This is the intrinsic polarity of life.
In a better world, with more freedom, with more understanding, a child will not be taught to say yes when he feels like saying no. He will be taught courage. Whenever he feels like saying no, he has to say no, and then his yes will have meaning.
A child will not be taught religion, because religion is yes-saying. He will not be forced to become a theist – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. He will be encouraged by the parents, by the school, by the university, to be honest, to be sincere, and to wait for the real yes to come on its own.