Osho,
Is not spiritual guidance an absolute necessity for human growth?

There are no absolutes in real life – including this statement too. Life is full of exceptions; that’s one of its most beautiful things. Exceptions mean freedom. Exceptions mean you are not in a concentration camp. The absolute is nothing but complete bondage and slavery.

In the beginning days of scientific research scientists were thinking that in science there are no exceptions. That was one of the great prides of science, because that makes it absolutely certain. If there are exceptions you cannot be certain about the rules – and science needs certainty to be the base.

For the last three hundred years science went on proving that there were no exceptions, finding absolute rules. But Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity destroyed the whole three-hundred-year-long efforts of hundreds of scientists in a single blow. The theory of relativity means that nothing is absolute, everything is relative, and there are exceptions everywhere.

It is one thing that you may not be able to find the exception; that shows your limitation. Your instruments may not be yet refined enough to catch the exception. It does not prove anything about the absoluteness of any rule – only the limitations of human mind. The finer your instruments become, the finer your approach to reality, the more you are simply mystified: there are exceptions, and exceptions to everything. Nothing is absolute. After Albert Einstein nothing is absolute.

This is something to rejoice in, because science was creating a world of dead rules, mechanical. The whole concept of pre-Einsteinian science was that the world is a vast mechanism – that it is not an organism, but a mechanism.

A mechanism functions perfectly without any exceptions. It has no mind, how can it create exceptions? It simply goes on moving in the same rut. It never gets bored. It never feels to do something just for a change, something other than it has been doing always. There is no mind in it; hence, the machine can be absolute.

But an organism, a living being, cannot be absolute. It is a free agent. If it follows a certain rule, that is its decision. It can drop out, it can just go in the opposite direction. Hence, science never said that the world is an organism, but a vast mechanism.

But the theory of relativity disturbed the whole setup, and it has disturbed it forever. Never again will science be able to have the old certainty, because it has been found through the theory of relativity that as we go deeper into the inner world of the atom, a strange phenomenon is experienced.