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 alone.”

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 the man was 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. He wanted to be a celebrity…just ordinary human desires. And he was ready to pay with his life to become known to the whole world, recognized by everybody for at least one day.

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 – something which all the religions have killed. The real criminals are not caught. These terrorists and other criminals are the victims.


From Osho, Beyond Psychology, Chapter 18

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