Terrorism Is in Your Unconscious

Osho, Beyond Psychology, Chapter 18

Osho,
I've heard that in Europe the threat of terrorism is striking fear in everyone. Airplanes are delayed by extraordinary security measures, many of the seats are empty, and some airports are closing. People are even thinking twice about going out in the evening. And all this is more prevalent since the recent bombing of Libya. Is the rise of terrorism over the last decade in some way symbolic of what is happening to society in general?

Everything is deeply related with everything else that happens.

The event of terrorism is certainly related with what is happening in the society. The society is falling apart. Its old order, discipline, morality, religion, everything has been found to be wrongly based. It has lost its power over people's conscience.

Terrorism simply symbolizes that to destroy human beings does not matter, that there is nothing in human beings which is indestructible, that it is all matter -- and you cannot kill matter, you can only change its form. Once man is taken to be only a combination of matter, and no place is given for a spiritual being inside him, then to kill becomes just play.

The nations are irrelevant because of nuclear weapons. If the whole world can be destroyed together within minutes the alternative can only be that the whole world should be together. Now it cannot remain divided; its division is dangerous, because division can become war any moment. The division cannot be tolerated. Only one war is enough to destroy everything, and there is not much time left for man to understand that we should create a world where the very possibility of war does not exist.

Terrorism has many undercurrents. One is that because of nuclear weapons, the nations are pouring their energy into that field, thinking that the old weapons are out of date. They are out of date, but individuals can start using them. And you cannot use nuclear weapons against individuals -- that would be simply stupid. One individual terrorist throws a bomb -- it does not justify that a nuclear missile should be sent.

What I want to emphasize is that the nuclear weapon has given individual people a certain freedom to use old weapons, a freedom which was not possible in the old days because the governments were also using the same weapons.

Now the governments are concentrated on destroying the old weapons, throwing them in the ocean, selling them to countries which are poor and cannot afford nuclear weapons. And all those terrorists are coming from these poor countries, with the same weapons that have been sold to their countries. And they have a strange protection: you cannot use nuclear weapons against them, you cannot throw atom bombs at them.

They can throw bombs at you and you are suddenly impotent.

You have a vast amount of atomic bombs, nuclear bombs in your hands -- but sometimes where a needle is useful, a sword may not be of any use. You may have the sword; that does not mean that you are necessarily in a superior position to the man who has a needle, because there are purposes in which only the needle will work -- the sword will not be of any use.

Those small weapons from the old times were piling up, and the big powers had to dispose of them -- either drown them in the ocean.... That meant so much money, so much manpower, so much energy had gone to waste; economically it was disastrous. But just to go on piling them up was also economically impossible. How many weapons can you gather? There is a limit. And when you get a new way of killing people more efficiently, then the old simply has to be got rid of.

It was thought that it would be better to sell them to poor countries. Poor countries cannot create nuclear weapons -- it costs too much. And these weapons were coming cheap -- as help; they accepted it, but these weapons cannot be used in a war. In a war these weapons are already useless. But nobody has seen the possibility that these weapons can be used individually, and a new phenomenon -- terrorism -- can come out of it.

Now, a terrorist has a strange power, even over the greatest powers. He can throw bombs at the White House without any fear, because what you have is too big and you cannot throw it at him. And these are the weapons sold by you! But the phenomenon was not conceived of, because human psychology is not understood.

My understanding is that the way he has lived, man needs every ten to twelve years -- a war. He accumulates so much anger, so much rage, so much violence, that nothing short of a war will give him release. So, war after war, there is a gap of only ten to fifteen years. That gap is a kind of relaxation. But again you start accumulating, because the same psychology is working -- the same jealousy, the same violence.

And man is basically a hunter; he is not by nature vegetarian. First he became a hunter, and for thousands of years he was just a meat-eater, and cannibalism was prevalent everywhere. To eat human beings caught from the opposing tribe you were fighting with was perfectly ethical. All that is carried in the unconscious of humanity.

Religions have imposed things on man very superficially; his unconscious is not in agreement. Every man is living in a disagreement with himself. So whenever he can find a chance -- for a beautiful cause; freedom, democracy, socialism -- any beautiful word can become an umbrella to hide his ugly unconscious, which simply wants to destroy and enjoys destruction.

Now the world war has become almost impossible; otherwise there would have been no terrorism. Enough time has passed since the second world war; the third world war should have happened nearabout 1960. It has not happened. This has been the routine for the whole of history, and man is programmed for it.

It has been observed by psychologists that in wartime people are more happy than in peacetime. In wartime their life has a thrill; in peacetime they look bored. In wartime, early in the morning they are searching for the newspaper, listening to the radio. Things may be happening far away, but they are excited. Something in them feels an affinity.

A war that should have happened somewhere between 1955 and 1960 has not happened, and man is burdened with the desire to kill, with the desire to destroy. It is just that he wants good names for it.

Terrorism is going to become bigger and bigger.

Because the third world war is almost impossible. And the stupid politicians have no other alternative. Terrorism simply means that what was being done on a social scale now has to be done individually. It will grow. It can only be prevented if we change the very base of human understanding -- which is a Himalayan task; more so because these same people whom you want to change will fight you; they won't allow you to change them easily.

In fact they love bloodshed; they don't have the courage to say so. In one of the existentialist's novels, there is a beautiful incident which can almost be said to be true. A man is presented before the court because he has killed a stranger who was sitting on the beach. He had never seen the stranger. He did not kill him for money. He does not yet know how that man looked, because he killed him from the back, just with a big knife.

They had never met -- there was no question of enmity. They were not even familiar; they had not even seen each other's faces.

The magistrate could not figure it out, and he asked the murderer, "Why did you do it?"

He said, "When I stabbed that man with a knife, and a fountain of blood came out of his back, that was one of the most beautiful moments I have ever known. I know that the price will be my death, but I am ready to pay for it; it was worth it. My whole life I have lived in boredom -- no excitement, no adventure. Finally I had to decide to do something. And this act has made me world famous; my picture is in every newspaper. And I am perfectly happy that I did it."

There was no need for any evidence. The man was not denying -- on the contrary, he was glorifying it. But the court has its own routine way -- witnesses still have to be produced; just his word cannot be accepted. He may have be lying, he may not have killed the man. Nobody saw him -- there was not a single eyewitness -- so circumstantial evidences had to be presented by the police.

One of them was that possibly this man has killed according to his past life and his background. When he was young, his mother died. And when he heard that his mother had died, he said, "Shit! That woman will not leave me even while dying! It is Sunday, and I have booked tickets for the theater with my girlfriend. But I knew she would do something to destroy my whole day -- and she has destroyed it."

His mother has died and he is saying that she has destroyed his Sunday! He was going to the theater with his girlfriend, and now he has to go to the funeral. And the people who heard his reaction were shocked. They said, "This is not right, what are you saying?"

He said, "What? What is right and what is wrong? Couldn't she die on any other day? There are seven days in the week -- from Monday to Saturday, she could have died any day. But you don't know my mother -- I know her. She is a bitch! She did it on purpose."

The second evidence was that he attended the funeral, and in the evening he was found dancing with his girlfriend in a disco. And somebody asked, "What! What are you doing? Your mother has just died."

He said, "So what? Do you mean now I can never dance again? My mother is never going to be alive, she will remain dead; so what does it matter whether I dance after six hours, eight hours, eight months, eight years? What does it matter? -- she is dead. And I have to dance and I have to live and I have to love, in spite of her death. If everybody stopped living with the death of their mother, with the death of their father, then there would be no dance in the world, no song in the world."

His logic is very right. He is saying, "Where do you draw the demarcation line? After how many hours can I dance? -- twelve hours, fourteen hours, six weeks? Where will you draw the line? on what grounds? What is the criterion? So it doesn't matter. One thing is certain: whenever I dance I will be dancing after the death of my mother, so I decided to dance today. Why wait for tomorrow?"

Such circumstantial evidences are presented to the court -- that this man is strange, he can do such an act. But if you look closely at this poor man, you will not feel angry at him; you will feel very compassionate. Now, it is not his fault that his mother has died; and anyway, he has to dance some day, so it makes no difference. You cannot blame this man for saying ugly things: "She deliberately died on Sunday to spoil my joy," because his whole experience of life must have been that she was again and again spoiling any possibility of joy. This was the last conclusion: "Even in death she will not leave me."

And you cannot condemn the man for killing a stranger... because he is not a thief; he did not take anything from him. He is not an enemy; he did not even see who was the man he was killing. He was simply bored with life and he wanted to do something that made him feel significant, important. He is happy that all the newspapers have his photo. If they had published his photo before, he would not have killed; but they waited -- until he kills they will not publish his photo. And he wanted to be a celebrity... just ordinary human desires. And he was ready to pay with his life to become, at least for one day, known to the whole world, recognized by everybody.

Until we change the basic grounds of humanity, terrorism is going to become more and more a normal, everyday affair.

It will happen in the airplanes, it will happen in the buses. It will start happening in the cars. It will start happening to strangers. Somebody will suddenly come and shoot you -- not that you have done anything to him, but just, the hunter is back.

The hunter was satisfied in the war. Now the war has stopped and perhaps there is no possibility for it.

The hunter is back; now we cannot fight collectively. Each individual has to do something to release his own steam.

Things are interconnected. The first thing that has to be changed is that man should be made more rejoicing -- which all the religions have killed. The real criminals are not caught. These are the victims, the terrorists and other criminals.

It is all the religions who are the real criminals, because they have destroyed all possibilities of rejoicing. They have destroyed the possibility of enjoying small things of life; they have condemned everything that nature provides you to make you happy, to make you feel excited, feel pleasant.

They have taken everything away; and if they have not been able to take a few things away because they are so ingrained in your biology -- like sex -- they have at least been able to poison them.

Friedrich Nietzsche, according to me, is one of the greatest seers of the Western world; his eyes really go penetrating to the very root of a problem. But because others could not see it -- their eyes were not so penetrating, nor was their intelligence so sharp -- the man lived alone, abandoned, isolated, unloved, unrespected.

He says in one of his statements that man has been taught by religions to condemn sex, to renounce sex. Religion has not been able to manage it; and man has tried hard but has failed, because it is so deeply rooted in his biology -- it constitutes his whole body. He is born out of sex -- how can he get rid of it except by committing suicide?

So man has tried, and religions have helped him to get rid of it -- thousands of disciplines and strategies have been used. The total result is that sex is there, but poisoned. That word poisoned is a tremendous insight. Religions have not been able to take it away, but they have been certainly successful in poisoning it.

And the same is the situation about other things: religions are condemning your living in comfort. Now, a man who is living in comfort and luxury cannot become a terrorist. Religions have condemned riches, praised poverty; now, a man who is rich cannot be a terrorist. Only the "blessed ones" who are poor can be terrorists -- because they have nothing to lose, and they are boiling up against the whole of society because others have things they don't have.

Religions have been trying to console them. But then came communism -- a materialist religion -- which provoked people and said to them, "Your old religions are all opium to the people, and it is not because of your evil actions in this life or in past lives that you are suffering poverty. It is because of the evil exploitation of the bourgeois, the super-rich that you are suffering."

The last sentence in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is: Proletariats of the whole world unite; you have nothing to lose and you have the whole world to gain.

"You are already poor, hungry, naked -- so what can you lose? Your death will not make you more miserable than your life is making you. So why not take a chance and destroy those people who have taken everything away from you. And take those things back, distribute them."

What religions have somehow been consoling people with -- although it was wrong and it was cunning and it was a lie, but it kept people in a state of being half asleep -- communism suddenly made them aware of. That means this world is now never going to be peaceful if we don't withdraw all the rotten ideas that have been implanted in man.

The first are the religions -- their values should be removed so that man can smile again, can laugh again, can rejoice again, can be natural again.

Second, what communism is saying has to be put clearly before the people -- that it is psychologically wrong. You are falling from one trap into another. No two men are equal; hence the idea of equality is nonsense. And if you decide to be equal then you have to accept a dictatorship of the proletariat. That means you have to lose your freedom.

First the church took away your freedom, the God took away your freedom. Now communism replaces your church, and it will take away your freedom.

And without freedom you cannot rejoice.

You live in fear, not in joy. If we can clean the basement of the human mind's unconscious... and that's what my work is. It can be cleaned away.

The terrorism is not in the bombs, in your hands; the terrorism is in your unconscious.

Otherwise, this state of affairs is going to grow more bitter. And it seems all kinds of blind people have bombs in their hands and are throwing them at random.

The third world war would have released people for ten or, fifteen years. But the third world war cannot happen because if it happens it won't relieve people, it will only destroy people.

So individual violence will increase -- it is increasing. And all your governments and all your religions will go on perpetuating the old strategies without understanding the new situation.

The new situation is that every human being needs to go through therapies, needs to understand his unconscious intentions, needs to go through meditations so that he can calm down, become cool -- and look towards the world with a new perspective, of silence.

Osho,
Whenever in life I've had a bout of feeling miserable, a point always comes when I just laugh at myself, feel freedom return, and see that all I had done was to stop loving myself. This insight in itself is perhaps not particularly profound but at the moment of its realization, I am always amazed to see how easily, for what, and for how long I am willing to forsake my own self-love. Is this at the roots of most people's suffering, or is it just my trip?

It is not just your trip. It is at the root of most people's suffering -- but not with the meaning you are giving to it.

It is not because you have stopped loving yourself that you fall in misery.

It is that you have created a self which does not exist at all, so sometimes this unreal self suffers misery in loving others, because out of unreality, love is not possible. And it is not on one side: two unrealities trying to love each other... sooner or later this arrangement is going to fail. When this arrangement fails, you fall upon yourself -- there is nowhere else to go. So you think, "I had forgotten to love myself."

In a way it is a small relief, at least instead of two unrealities now you have only one. But what will you do by loving yourself? And how long you can manage to remain loving yourself? It is unreal; it won't allow you to see it for a long time because that is dangerous: if you see it for a long time, this so-called self will disappear, and that will be a real freedom from misery.

Love will remain, unaddressed, to someone else or to yourself.

Love will remain unaddressed, because there is nobody to address, and when love is there unaddressed, there is great bliss.

But this unreal self won't allow you much time. Soon you will be falling in love with someone else again, because the unreal self needs the support of other unrealities. So people fall in love and fall out of love and fall in love and fall out of love -- and strange is the phenomenon, that dozens of times they do it and still they don't see the point. They are miserable when they are in love with someone else; they are miserable when they are alone and not in love, a bit relieved -- for the moment.

In India, when a person dies, people carry him on a stretcher-like construction on their shoulders. But they go on changing it on the way, on their shoulders -- from this shoulder they will put it on the right, and after a few minutes they will again change and put it on the left. It feels a relief when you put it from the left shoulder onto the right. Nothing is being changed -- the weight is there, and on you, but this left shoulder feels a kind of relief. It is momentary, because soon the right shoulder will start hurting so you will have to change it again.

And this is what your life is. You go on changing the other, thinking that perhaps this woman, this man, will bring you the paradise you have always been longing for. But everybody brings hell -- without fail! And nobody is to be condemned for it, because they are doing exactly the same as you are doing: they are carrying an unreal self out of which nothing can grow. It cannot blossom. It is empty -- decorated, but inside empty and hollow.

So when you see somebody from far away he or she is appealing. As you come closer the appeal becomes less. When you meet, it is not a meeting but a clash. And suddenly you see the other person is empty, and you have been deceived, cheated, because the other person has nothing which had been promised.

The same is the situation of the other person about you. All promises fail, and you become a burden to each other, a misery to each other, a sadness to each other, destructive to each other. You separate. For a little while there is relief, but your inner unreality cannot leave you in this state for long; soon you will be searching for another woman, another man, and you will get into the same trap. Only the faces are different; the inner reality is the same -- empty.

If you really want to get rid of misery and suffering then you will have to understand -- you don't have a self. Then it will be not just a small relief but a tremendous relief. And if you don't have a self, the need for the other disappears. It was the need of the unreal self to go on being nourished by the other. You don't need the other.

And listen carefully: when you don't need the other, you can love.

And that love will not bring misery.

Going beyond needs, demands, desires, love becomes a very soft sharing, a great understanding. When you understand yourself, that very day you have understood the whole of humanity. Then nobody can make you miserable. You know that they are suffering from an unreal self, and they are throwing their misery on anybody who is close by.

Your love will make you capable of helping the person you love to get rid of the self.

I know only of one present....

Love can present you only with one thing: That you are not, that your self is just imaginary. This realization between two persons suddenly makes them one, because two nothings cannot be two. Two somethings will be two, but two nothings cannot be two: Two nothings start melting and merging. They are bound to become one.

For example, if we are sitting here.... If everybody is an ego then there are so many people; they can be counted. But there are moments I can see -- perhaps many times you see them too -- when there is utter silence. Then you cannot count how many people are here. There is only one consciousness, one silence, one nothingness, one selflessness. And only in that state can two persons live in eternal joy, can any group live in tremendous beauty; the whole of humanity can live in great benediction.

But try to see the self, and you will not find it.

Not finding it is of great importance.

I have told many times the story of Bodhidharma and his meeting with the Chinese emperor Wu -- a very strange meeting, very fruitful. Emperor Wu perhaps was at that time the greatest emperor in the world; he ruled all over China, Mongolia, Korea, the whole of Asia, except India.

He became convinced of the truth of Gautam Buddha's teachings, but the people who had brought the message of Buddha were scholars. None of them were mystics. And then the news came that Bodhidharma was coming, and there was a great thrill all over the land. Because Emperor Wu had become influenced by Gautam Buddha, that had made his whole empire influenced by the same teaching. And now a real mystic, a buddha, was coming. It was such a great joy!

Emperor Wu had never before come to the boundaries where India and China meet to receive anyone. With great respect he welcomed Bodhidharma, and he asked , "I have been asking all the monks and the scholars who have been coming, but nobody has been of any help -- I have tried everything. But how to get rid of this self? And Buddha says, `Unless you become a no-self, your misery cannot end.'"

He was sincere. Bodhidharma looked into his eyes, and he said, "I will be staying by the side of the river near the mountain in the temple. Tomorrow morning, at four o'clock exactly, you come and I will finish this self forever. But remember, you are not to bring any arms with you, any guards with you; you have to come alone."

Wu was a little worried -- the man was strange! "How can he just destroy my self so quickly? It takes -- it has been told by the scholars -- lives and lives of meditation; then the self disappears. This man is weird! And he is wanting me in the darkness, early in the morning at four o'clock, alone, even without a sword, no guards, no other companion. This man seems to be strange -- he could do anything.

And what does he mean that he will kill the self forever? He can kill me, but how will he kill the self?"

The whole night he could not sleep. He changed his mind again and again -- to go or not to go? But there was something in the man's eyes, and there was something in his voice, and there was some aura of authority when he said, "Just come at four o'clock sharp, and I will finish this self forever! You need not be worried about it."

What he said looked absurd, but the way he said it, and the way he looked were so authoritative: he knows what he is saying. Finally Wu had to decide to go. He decided to risk, "At the most he can kill me -- what else? And I have tried everything. I cannot attain this no-self, and without attaining this no-self there is no end to misery."

He knocked on the temple door, and Bodhidharma said, "I knew you would come; I knew also that the whole night you would be changing your mind. But that does not matter -- you have come. Now sit down in the lotus posture, close your eyes, and I am going to sit in front of you.

"The moment you find, inside, your self, catch hold of it so I can kill it. Just catch hold of it tightly and tell me that you have caught it, and I will kill it and it will be finished. It is a question of minutes."

Wu was a little afraid. Bodhidharma looked like a madman; he is painted like a madman -- he was not like that, but the paintings are symbolic. That's the impression he must have left on people. It was not his real face, but that must be the face that people were remembering.

He was sitting with his big staff in front of Wu, and he said to him, "Don't miss a second. Just the moment you catch hold of it -- search inside every nook and corner -- open your eyes and then tell me that you have caught it, and I will finish it."

Then there was silence. One hour passed, two hours passed and the sun was rising, and Wu was a different man. In those two hours he looked inside himself, in every nook and corner. He had to look -- that man was sitting there; he could have hit him on his head with his staff.

You could expect anything; whatever.... He was not a man of etiquette, manner; he was not part of Wu's court, so he had to look intently, intensively. And as he looked, he became relaxed, because it was nowhere. And in looking for it, all thoughts disappeared. The search was so intense that his whole energy was involved in it; there was nothing left to think and desire, and this and that.

As the sun was rising Bodhidharma saw Wu's face; he was not the same man -- such silence, such depth. He had disappeared. Bodhidharma shook him and told him, "Open your eyes -- it is not there. I don't have to kill it. I am a nonviolent man, I don't kill anything! But this self does not exist. Because you never look at it, it goes on existing. It is in your not looking for it, in your unawareness, that it exists. Now it is gone."

Two hours had passed, and Wu was immensely glad. He had never tasted such sweetness, such freshness, such newness, such beauty. And he was not.

Bodhidharma had fulfilled his promise. Emperor Wu bowed down, touched his feet and said, "Please forgive me thinking that you are mad, thinking that you don't know manners, thinking that you you are weird, thinking that you you can be dangerous. I have never seen a more compassionate man than you... I am totally fulfilled. Now there is no question in me."

Emperor Wu said that when he died, on his grave, the memorial, Bodhidharma's statement should be engraved in gold, for the people in centuries to come to know..."There was a man who looked mad, but who was capable of doing miracles. Without doing anything he helped me to be a non-self. And since then everything has changed. Everything is the same but I am not the same, and life has become just a pure song of silence."

Osho, Beyond Psychology, Chapter 18