Osho,
A very revealing incident occurred recently. In the wake of the so-called “giant step for mankind,” when the first astronaut set foot on the moon, the Americans have continued their space exploration, now with the reusable shuttle.
Suddenly, a little while ago, this 2.3-billion-dollar spacecraft blew up in the sky, killing all seven passengers.
It created an enormous reaction in the US – sorrow, anger, hurt national pride, etc. It turned out that behind the tragedy lay the usual human forces: egotism, prejudice, dishonesty, competition, arrogance, fear, ambition, and so on.
An official investigation concentrated on “flawed management procedures,” and “reorganizing the chain of command,” but nowhere felt it relevant to investigate egotism, prejudice, dishonesty, and all the rest.
Isn’t the real “giant step for mankind” yet to come – the realization that it is man himself who lies at the root of his own catastrophe?
It is man himself who lies at the root of all the catastrophes, but the trouble is, it goes against man’s ego to accept it.
The way of the ego is very simple: always throw responsibility on somebody else. It is always the other who is hell. One never looks at oneself. The other cannot be hell for me, unless I in some way support the other to create the hell for me. It must be somewhere in the unconscious, my own need.
Just today I came to know, that all over the world man wastes enough energy, money, technological power and human genius in three days to support the whole earth for a year with food, clothing, shelter, everything that a human being needs to survive. And this figure is five years old, so I guess that now man must be wasting perhaps every day as much energy as is needed to support the whole of mankind for one year.
And who is at the root of it, who is forcing you to do all this nonsense? All this is being done to prepare more efficiently for war, to kill more, to destroy more.
It seems man is insane.
Everywhere you can see his insanity, and if it were only a few people who were insane, it would be easy to do something for them, but if the whole humanity is functioning in an insane way, then a tremendous effort is needed to stop this idiotic behavior.
The people who are responsible for the basic catastrophe – that is, the insanity of humanity – are the people who are in power. They want more and more power. The desire for more and more is unending, and everybody is competing without thinking of the whole humanity – that all this competition for destructiveness is suicidal.
The rocket that was carrying seven passengers was not a big catastrophe, but this earth which is carrying six billion people is in the same danger. And there seems to be no thinking about what is needed first. If you have more than enough, then it is worthwhile to explore space. But right now even America does not have more than enough. Millions of people are on the streets: no food, no clothes, no shelter.
But Ronald Reagan is not interested in those millions of people, he is interested in the national ego, “We are the first to take passengers into space.”
It is hilarious. As far as is known, no planet around the earth is habitable. In this solar system, except for the earth, no planet is habitable – all efforts are useless, because there is no oxygen, no water, and life cannot exist. Perhaps in other solar systems, there may be planets where life can exist, but to reach to those planets is an impossible job right now. They are too far away.