Zorba the Buddha the New Man

Zorba is the foundation and Buddha is the palace. Buddha is the peak, but the foundation stones are laid by Zorba. It will be foolish to choose to be a Buddha without having the foundation stones.

“I am absolutely mathematical about it: Zorba should be there and the stronger a Zorba is there, the better a Buddha is possible. So I can become Buddha any moment, Zorba is absolutely needed as the basic energy out of which the Buddha is going to be carved. Zorba is the marble rock out of which the Buddha statue has to be carved. I choose the rock...and Buddha is easy. 

“It is just a question of opening your eyes. I don’t bother about Buddha; I am worried about people who are not Zorbas. How will they become Buddhas? They don’t have the basic material out of which a Buddha is made.

“And this poverty has been given to people by our religious leaders. They have been told not to be materialists. They have been told to be celibate. They have been told to live in poverty. They have been told that life is out of sin. All these things have destroyed their Zorbas. Otherwise, every man is a born Zorba the Greek.

“And if everything goes according to me, every man will die as Zorba the Buddha. Between the Greek and the Buddha there is not much distance, but first you must be the Greek.”

I Have Called That the New Man — Zorba the Buddha

“First I taught you about trust, the heart, feeling, love; and now I am teaching you about doubt, skepticism, reason, intellect, because I would like you to be a whole man. You can be completely satisfied with trusting, with the heart, but you will not be a whole man. I would not call Mira a whole person, I would not call Ramakrishna a whole person. They are beautiful, but the intellect is missing; it is all heart. It is too much sugar, it creates diabetes. I am diabetic. Too much of the heart, too much sweetness, and you suffer from diabetes — and I don’t want any of you to suffer from diabetes. Yes, just living by the heart you will have spiritual diabetes. Intellect is salty, spicy; it is not all sugar.

“I would like you to enjoy the wholeness of your being, when your body, your heart, your intellect all fall in tune. I have called that the new man — Zorba the Buddha.”

Nothing to Choose, Nothing to Discard

Koji wrote:

Nothing to choose, nothing to discard.

“That’s what I mean by Zorba the Buddha: nothing to choose.

“Buddha had chosen: he had chosen to escape from the world, he had chosen to leave his wife and child and old father, he had chosen to run away instead of encountering the world and facing the reality. It was a clear-cut choice against the world, against the material, in favor of the spiritual.

“A man of totality has nothing to choose. His life is a life of choicelessness. Nothing to choose, nothing to discard; they are two sides of the same coin. If you choose something, you will have to discard something.”

Zorba Is Only the Beginning

“I would like this man Zorba to be alive in everybody, because it is your natural inheritance.

But you should not stop at Zorba.

Zorba is only the beginning. Sooner or later, if you allow your Zorba full expression, you are bound to think of something better, higher, greater. It will not come out of thinking; it will come out of your experiences — because those small experiences will become boring.

Buddha himself had come to be Buddha because he had lived the life of a Zorba.”

Silence Will Become a Song

“The Zorba loves singing, playing on his musical instruments, dancing. Buddha will make it perfect, absolute. Even silence will become a song, even stones will become sermons, and whatever you touch will become a musical instrument because your hands will now have the magic of the whole existence; they will have the grace, the beauty, the poetry...”

Question - Beloved Master, How is your Rebel concerned with "Zorba The Buddha"?

Osho - Maneesha, my rebel, my new man, is Zorba the Buddha. Mankind has lived believing either in the reality of the soul and the illusoriness of matter, or in the reality of matter and the illusoriness of the soul. You can divide the humanity of the past into the spiritualists and the materialists. But nobody has bothered to look at the reality of man. He is both together. He is neither just spirituality -- he is not just consciousness -- nor is he just matter. He is a tremendous harmony between matter and consciousness.

Or perhaps matter and consciousness are not two things, but only two aspects of one reality: matter is the outside of consciousness, and consciousness is the interiority of matter. But there has not been a single philosopher, sage, or religious mystic in the past who has declared this unity; they were all in favor of dividing man, calling one side real and the other side unreal. This has created an atmosphere of schizophrenia all over the earth.

You cannot live just as a body. That's what Jesus means when he says, "Man cannot live by bread alone" -- but this is only half the truth. You cannot live just as consciousness alone, you cannot live without bread either. You have two dimensions of your being, and both the dimensions have to be fulfilled, given equal opportunity for growth. But the past has been either in favor of one and against the other, or in favor of the other and against the first one.

Man as a totality has not been accepted. This has created misery, anguish, and a tremendous darkness; a night that has lasted for thousands of years, that seems to have no end. If you listen to the body, you condemn yourself; if you don't listen to the body, you suffer -- you are hungry, you are poor, you are thirsty. If you listen to consciousness only, your growth will be lopsided: your consciousness will grow but your body will shrink, and the balance will be lost. And in the balance is your health, in the balance is your wholeness, in the balance is your joy, your song, your dance.

The West has chosen to listen to the body, and has become completely deaf as far as the reality of consciousness is concerned. The ultimate result is great science, great technology, an affluent society, a richness of things mundane, worldly. And amidst all this abundance, a poor man without a soul, completely lost -- not knowing who he is, not knowing why he is, feeling almost an accident or a freak of nature.

Unless consciousness grows with the richness of the material world, the body -- matter -- becomes too heavy and the soul becomes too weak. You are too much burdened by your own inventions, your own discoveries. Rather than creating a beautiful life for you, they create a life which is felt by all the intelligentsia of the West as not worth living.

The East has chosen consciousness and has condemned matter and everything material, the body included, as maya, as illusory, as a mirage in a desert which only appears but has no reality in itself. The East has created a Gautam Buddha, a Mahavira, a Patanjali, a Kabir, a Farid, a Raidas -- a long line of people with great consciousness, with great awareness. But it has also created millions of poor people, hungry, starving, dying like dogs -- with not enough food, no pure water to drink, not enough clothes, not enough shelters.

A strange situation.... In the West every six months they have to drown billions and billions of dollars' worth of milk products and other foodstuff in the ocean, because it is surplus. They don't want to overload their warehouses, they don't want to lower their prices and destroy their economic structure. On the one hand, in Ethiopia one thousand people were dying every day, and at the same time the European Common Market was destroying so much food that the cost of destroying it was millions of dollars. That is not the cost of the food; it is the cost of taking it to the ocean, and throwing it into the ocean. Who is responsible for this situation?

The richest man in the West is searching for his soul and finding himself hollow, without any love, only lust; without any prayer, only parrot-like words that he has been taught in the Sunday schools. He has no religiousness, no feeling for other human beings, no reverence for life, for birds, for trees, for animals -- destruction is so easy.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not have happened if man were not thought to be just matter. So many nuclear weapons would not have been piled up if man had been thought to be a hidden God, a hidden splendor; not to be destroyed but to be discovered, not to be destroyed but to be brought into the light -- a temple of God. But if man is just matter, just chemistry, physics, a skeleton covered with skin, then with death everything dies, nothing remains. That's why it becomes possible for the men to kill million people, without a hitch. If all people are just matter, there is no question of even thinking twice.

The West has lost its soul, its interiority. Surrounded by meaninglessness, boredom, anguish, it is not finding itself. All the success of science is proving of no use, because the house is full of everything, but the master of the house is missing. Here, in the East, the master is alive but the house is empty. It is difficult to rejoice with hungry stomachs, with sick bodies, with death surrounding you; it is impossible to meditate. So, unnecessarily, we have been losers. All our saints, and all our philosophers, spiritualists and materialists both, are responsible for this immense crime against man.

Zorba the Buddha is the answer. It is the synthesis of matter and soul. It is a declaration that there is no conflict between matter and consciousness, that we can be rich on both sides. We can have everything that the world can provide, that science and technology can produce, and we can still have everything that a Buddha, a Kabir, a Nanak finds in his inner being -- the flowers of ecstasy, the fragrance of godliness, the wings of ultimate freedom.

Zorba the Buddha is the new man, is the rebel. His rebellion consists of destroying the schizophrenia of man, destroying the dividedness -- destroying spirituality as against materialism, and destroying materialism as against spirituality. It is a manifesto that body and soul are together: that existence is full of spirituality, that even mountains are alive, that even trees are sensitive, that the whole existence is both -- or perhaps just one energy expressing itself in two ways, as matter and as consciousness. When energy is purified, it expresses itself as consciousness; when energy is crude, unpurified, dense, it appears as matter. But the whole existence is nothing but an energy field.

This is my experience, it is not my philosophy. And this is supported by modern physics and its researches: existence is energy. We can allow man to have both the worlds together. He need not renounce this world to get the other world, neither has he to deny the other world to enjoy this world. In fact, to have only one world while you are capable of having both is to be unnecessarily poor.

Zorba the Buddha is the richest possibility. He will live his nature to its utmost and he will sing songs of this earth. He will not betray the earth, and he will not betray the sky either. He will claim all that this earth has -- all the flowers, all the pleasures -- and he will also claim all the stars of the sky. He will claim the whole existence as his home.

The man of the past was poor because he divided existence. The new man, my rebel, Zorba the Buddha, claims the whole world as his home. All that it contains is for us, and we have to use it in every possible way -- without any guilt, without any conflict, without any choice. Choicelessly enjoy all that matter is capable of, and rejoice in all that consciousness is capable of.

Be a Zorba, but don't stop there.

Go on moving towards being a Buddha.

Zorba is half, Buddha is half.

There is an ancient story. In a forest nearby to a city there lived two beggars. Naturally they were enemies to each other, as all professionals are -- two doctors, two professors, two saints. One was blind and one was lame, and both were very competitive; the whole day they were competing with each other in the city.

But one night their huts caught fire, because the whole forest was on fire. The blind man could run out, but he could not see where to run, he could not see where the fire had not yet spread. The lame man could see that there are still possibilities of getting out of this fire, but he could not run out. The fire was too fast, wild, so the lame man could only see his death coming. They both realized that they needed each other. The lame man had a sudden realization, "The other man can run, the blind man can run, and I can see." They forgot all their competition. In such a critical moment, when both were facing death, each necessarily forgot all stupid enmities.

They created a great synthesis; they agreed that the blind man would carry the lame man on his shoulders, and they would function as one man -- the lame man could see, and the blind man could run. They saved their lives. And because they saved each other's lives they became friends; for the first time they dropped their antagonism.

Zorba is blind -- he cannot see, but he can dance, he can sing, he can rejoice. The Buddha can see, but he can only see. He is pure eyes, just clarity and perception, but he cannot dance; he is crippled, he cannot sing, he cannot rejoice.

It is time. The world is a wildfire; everybody's life is in danger. The meeting of Zorba and Buddha can save the whole humanity. Their meeting is the only hope. Buddha can contribute consciousness, clarity, eyes to see beyond, eyes to see that which is almost invisible. Zorba can give his whole being to Buddha's vision -- and let it not remain just a dry vision, but make it a dancing, rejoicing, ecstatic way of life.

The ambassador of Sri Lanka wrote a letter to me saying that I should stop using the words "Zorba the Buddha"... because Sri Lanka is a Buddhist country, and he said, "It hurts our religious feelings that you are mixing strange people, Zorba and Buddha."

I wrote to him, "Perhaps you don't understand that Buddha is nobody's personal property, and Buddha is not necessarily the Gautam Buddha who you have been worshipping for thousands of years in your temples. Buddha simply means `the awakened one.' It is an adjective; it is not a personal name. Jesus can be called the buddha; Mahavira was called, in Jaina scriptures, the buddha; Lao Tzu can be called a buddha -- anybody who is enlightened is a buddha. The word buddha simply means `the awakened one.'

"Now, awakening is nobody's property; everybody who can sleep can also awaken. It is just a natural, logical, corollary -- if you are capable of sleeping, you are capable of waking up. Zorba is asleep; hence he has the capacity to be awake. So please don't get unnecessarily enraged, angry. I am not talking about your Gautam Buddha; I am talking about the pure quality of awakening. I am using it only as a symbol. "Zorba the Buddha simply means a new name for a new human being, a new name for a new age, a new name for a new beginning."

He has not replied. Even people who are holding posts of ambassadors are so utterly ignorant, so stupid. He thought that he was writing a very significant letter to me, without even understanding the meaning of the Buddha. Buddha was not the name of Gautama. His name was Gautam Siddhartha. Buddha was not his name -- the name given by his parents was Gautam Siddharth. Siddharth was his name, Gautama was his family name. He is called Buddha because he became awakened; otherwise he was also a Zorba. Anybody who is not awakened is a Zorba.

Zorba is a fictitious character, a man who believed in the pleasures of the body, in the pleasures of the senses. He enjoyed life to the fullest, without bothering about what is going to happen to him in the next life, whether he will enter into heaven or be thrown into hell. He was a poor servant; his boss was very rich, but very serious, long faced -- very British.

One full-moon night... I have not been able to forget what he said to his boss. Zorba was in his cabin. He went outside, with his guitar -- he was going to dance on the beach -- and he invited the boss. He said, "Boss, only one thing is wrong with you -- you think too much. Just come on! This is not the time for thinking; the moon is full, and the whole ocean is dancing. Don't miss this challenge."

He dragged the boss by his arm. His boss tried not to go with him, because Zorba was absolutely mad, he used to dance on the beach every night! The boss was feeling embarrassed.... What if somebody comes and sees that he is also standing with Zorba? And Zorba was not only inviting his boss to stand by; he was inviting him to start dancing!

Seeing the full-moon night and the ocean dancing, and the waves, and Zorba singing with his guitar, suddenly the boss started feeling an energy in his legs that he had never felt before. Encouraged and persuaded, he finally joined the dance; at first reluctantly, glancing all around, but there was nobody on the beach in the middle of the night. Then he forgot all about the world, and started. He became one with Zorba the dancer, and the ocean the dancer, and the moon the dancer. Everything became lost. It all became a dance.

Zorba is a fictitious character, and Buddha is an adjective for anyone who drops his sleep and becomes awake. No Buddhist need feel hurt. I am giving Buddha energy to dance, and I am giving Zorba eyes to see beyond the skies to faraway destinies of existence and evolution. My rebel is nobody other than Zorba the Buddha.

Source - Osho Book "The Rebel"

A Quote by Osho on zorba, buddha, life, happiness, living, experience, monk, world, roots, and wings

That is the ultimate synthesis - when Zorba becomes a Buddha. I am trying to create here not Zorba the Greek but Zorba the Buddha.

Zorba is beautiful, but something is missing. The earth is his, but the heaven is missing. He is earthly, rooted, like a giant cedar, but he has no wings. He cannot fly into the sky. He has roots but no wings.

Eat, drink, and be merry is perfectly good in itself; nothing is wrong in it. But it is not enough. Soon you will get tired of it. One cannot just go on eating, drinking, and merrying. Soon the merry-go-round turns into a sorry-go-round - because it is repetitive. Only a very mediocre mind can go on being happy with it.

If you have a little inteligence, sooner or later the question is bound to arise: What is the point of it all? Why? It is impossible to avoid the question for long. And if you are very intelligent, it is always there, persistently there, hammering on your heart for the answer: Give me the answer! - Why?

And one thing to be remembered: it is not that the people who are poor, starving, become frustrated with life - no. They cannot become frustrated. They have not lived yet - how can they be frustrated? They have hopes. A poor man always has hopes that something is going to happen - if not today then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow; if not in this life then in the next life.

What do you think? Who are these people who have depicted heaven as a playboy Club - who are these people? Starved, poor, who have missed their life - they are projecting their desires in heaven. In heaven there are rivers of wine... who are these people who are imagining rivers of wine? They must have missed here. And there are wish-fulfilling trees. You sit underneath them, desire, and the moment you desire, immediately it is fulfilled.

It is only through experience that one comes to know the utter futility of it all. Only Zorbas come to know the utter futility of it all. Buddha himself was a Zorba. He had all the beautiful women available in his country. His father had arranged for all the beautiful girls to be around him. He had the most beautiful palaces - different paleces for different seasons. He had all the luxury that is possible, or that was possible in those days. Helived the life of a Zorba the Greek - hence, when he was only twenty-nine he become utterly frustrated. He was a very intelligent man. If he had been a medioce man, then he would have lived in it. But soon he saw the point: it is repatitive, it is the same. Every day you eat, every day you make love to a woman... and he had new women every day to make love to. But how long...? Soon he was fed up.

The experience of life is very bitter. it is sweet only in imagination. In its reality it is very bitter. He escaped from the palace and the women and the riches and the luxury and everything.

So, I am not against Zorba the Greek because Zorba the Greek is the very foundation of Zorba the Buddha. Buddha arises out of that experience. So I am all for this world, because I know the other world can only be experienced through this world. So I don't say escape from it, I will not say to you to become a monk. A monk is one who has moved against the Zorba; he is an escapist, a coward; he has done something in a hurry, out of unintelligence. He is not a mature person. A monk is immature, greedy - greedy for the other world, and wants it too early, and the season has not come, and he is not ripe yet.

Live in this world, because this world gives a ripening, maturity, integrity. The challenges of this world give you a centering, an awareness. And that awareness becomes the ladder. Then you can move from Zorba to Buddha.

Only Zorbas become Buddhas - and Buddha was never a monk, A monk is one who has never been a Zorba and has become enchanted by the words of Buddhas. A monk is an imitator, he is false, pseudo. He imitates Buddhas. He may be Christian, he may be Buddhist, he may be a Hindu - that doesn't make much difference - but he imitates Buddhas.

When a monk goes away from the world, he goes fighting with it. it is not a relaxed going. His whole being is pulled towards the world. He struggles against it. He becomes divided. Half of his being is for the world and half has become greedy for the other. He is torn apart. A monk is basically a schizophrenic, a split person, divided into the lower and the higher. And the lower goes on pulling him, and the lower becomes more and more attractive the more it is repressed. And because he has not lived the lower, he cannot get into the higher.

You can get into the higher only when you have lived through the lower. You can earn the higher only by going through all the agony and the ecstasy of the lower. Before a lotus becomes a lotus it has to move through the mud -- that mud is the world. The monk has escaped from the mud, he will never become a lotus. It is as if lotus seed is afraid of falling into mud -- maybe out of ego that, "I am lotus seed! And I cannot fall into the mud." But then it is going to remain a seed; it will never bloom as a lotus. If it wants to bloom like a lotus, it has to fall into the mud; it has to live this contradiction. Without this contradiction of living in the mud there is no going beyond.

I would like to you to become rooted into the earth. I am perfectly in agreement with Friedrich Nietzsche who says: "I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe in those who speak of other worldly hopes!" Learn your first lesson of trust by trusting the earth. It is your home right now!

Don't hanker for the other world. Live this world, and live it with intensity, with passion. Live it with totality, with your whole being. And out of that whole trust, out of that life of passion, love, and joy, you will become able to go beyond.

The other world is hidden in this world. The Buddha is asleep in the Zorba. It has to be awakened. And nobody can awaken you except life itself.

I am here to help you to be total wherever you are; in whatsoever state you are - live that state totally. It is only in living a thing totally that one transcends it.

First become a Zorba, a flower of this earth, and earn the capacity through it to become a Buddha - the flower of the other world. The other world is not away from this world; the other world is not against this world: the other world is hidden in this. This is only a manifestataion of the other, and the other is the unmanifest part of this.

Osho

                               

                               

               Zorba the Buddha - It is my whole philosophia; it is my whole vision in which the lowest meet with highest, in which materialism and spiritualism will not be two separate and antagonistic things.       

                               

               Zorba the Greek says to his boss, "Boss, everything is right in you , only one thing is missing -- a little bit of madness!"  

                               

               And I agree with Zorba. Sannyas gives you a little bit of madness, but that little bit of madness brings rainbows to your life...        

                               

               Sannyas is a rebellion against both the past and future. Man has either lived in the past or in the future, but never in the present. And the present is the only reality there is; nothing else exists. Existence knows only one time, that is now, and one space, that is here. But mind either lives in the past, which is no more, or in the future, which is not yet. Mind exists in the non-existential, hence mind never comes across reality; it cannot be its very functioning.          

                               

                               

               Sannyas is a rebellion against mind itself. It is a way of life in which mind is not the Master. No-Mind is the master and mind functions only as a servant. Mind is actually a mechanism, it is good as a beautiful device of nature, but the moment the servant becomes the master there is danger, great danger. Then your life is bound to be a mess, a chaos. The servant is blind, unintelligent, unaware. To live according to the mind is not to live at all, it is sheer stupidity. Mind is never original, never intelligent; it is always repetitive, it is always borrowed, it is always mechanical-- hence stupid, hence unintelligent.     

                               

               Sannyas is a tremendous jump into reality, an escape to reality from the unreal.       

                               

               Sannyas is to give you a seance of direction, a togetherness, a rootedness, an awareness of what you are and what you can be.          

                               

               My effort here is to make thousands of Buddhas. Less than that won't do.

                               

               Sannyas is just a beginning, a seed of a totally different kind of world where people are free to be themselves, where people are not constrained, crippled, paralyzed, where people are not repressed, made to feel guilty, where joy is accepted, where cheerfulness is the rule, where seriousness has disappeared, where a non-serious sincerity, a playfulness has entered. These can be the indications, the fingers pointing to the moon.

                               

               First: an openness to experience.              

                               

               The second quality is existential living. Existential living means each moment has to decide on its own.

                               

               The third quality of a sannyasin is a trust in one's own organism.   

                               

               The fourth is a sense of freedom. A sannyasin is immensely respectful about his own freedom, very careful about his own freedom, and so is he about others' freedom too.          

                               

              

The fifth is creativity. My conception of a sannyasin is that his energy will be creative, that he will bring a little more beauty into the world, that he will bring a little more joy into the world, that he will find new ways to get into dance, singing, music, that he will bring some beautiful poems. He will create something, he will not be uncreative. 

The sixth is a sense of humour, laughter, playfulness, no serious sincerity.

The seventh is meditativeness, aloneness, mystical peak experiences that happen when you are alone, when you are absolutely alone inside yourself.

              

                               

               Sannyas makes you alone; not lonely, but alone; not solitary, but it gives you a solitude. You can be happy alone, you are no longer dependent on others. You can sit alone in your room and you can be utterly happy.      

                               

               And the eighth is love, relatedness, relationship. Remember, you can relate only when you have learned how to be alone, never before it. Only two individuals can relate. Only two freedoms can come close and embrace each other. And only two nothingnesses can penetrate into each other and melt into each other.      

                               

               And the ninth is transcendence, Tao-- not ego: no-mind, nobodiness, nothingness, in tune with the whole.          

                               

                               

                               

                               

               ONE THING IS absolutely certain: The days of the politicians are over. They have done too well their job of being destructive, violent. Nothing is favorable to the politician; and as each day passes his death comes closer. He himself is responsible. He improved the weapons, which can bring death to the whole world, to such a point that there is no way to going back. Either there will be ultimate war -- which means death to all and everything -- or a total change of the whole structure in the human society. I am calling that change "meritocracy".   

                               

               One thing -- we have to drop the idea that every man, just because he is twenty-one, is capable of choosing who is the right person to decide the fate of nations. Age cannot be a decisive factor. We have to change the decisive factor, that is changing the very foundation.           

                               

               My suggestion is that only a person who is at least a matriculate, a high school graduate, will be able to vote. His age does not matter.                

                               

               For the local government, matriculation will be the qualification for the voters. And graduation from a university, at least a bachelor's degree, should be a necessary qualification for election, for the candidates. A master's degree should be a minimum qualification for the one who is running for mayor.          

                               

               For the state elections, graduation with a bachelor's degree should be the minimum qualification for the voters. A master's degree in science. the arts, commerce, should be the necessary degree for the candidates. For the cabinet ministers an M.A. with highest honors should be the minimum necessary qualification; more will be, of course. more appreciated. And anybody trying to become a cabinet minister will have to know something about the subject. His qualification should correspond to the subject matter that he is going to deal with in his term of office.              

                               

               So if somebody is going to be an education minister, then his qualification should make him capable of being an education minister. He should have at least a master's degree in education with highest honors; with less than highest honors nobody should be a minister on the state level. Yes if he has better degrees -- doctor of education, Ph. D. in education -- that is good, that will make him more qualified.            

                               

               The attorney general should have at least a doctorate in law, an LL.D. -- not less than that, because he is going to going to defend the law of the state, the right of the citizens. He should have the best degree possible so he knows everything about it.

                               

               The governor should have the best of all the degrees possible for him: M.A. with highest honors, Ph. D. -- his Ph. d. should be political science -- and at least one honorary degree, a D. Litt. or LL.D.     

                               

               For the federal government, a master's degree will be the voter's minimum qualification. A master's degree with highest honors and a Ph.D. should be the minimum for the candidates running for election. And the ministers should all have the highest degrees in the subjects for which they are going to be ministers. If it is education then the highest degrees in education available in the country; if it is going to be health, then the highest degrees in health available in the country.       

                               

               The president should have at least too Ph.D.s and one honorary D.Litt. or LL.D; and the same for the vice-president because he can become president any day. 

                               

               In this way mobocracy is destroyed.         

                               

               Then just because your are twenty-one it does not mean you are capable of choosing the government. Choosing the government should be very skillful, intelligent job. Just by being twenty-one you may be able to reproduce children - it needs no skill, no education, biology sends you well prepared. But to choose the government, to choose people who are going to have all the powers over you and everybody, and who are going to decide the destiny of the country and the world, just to be twenty- one is certainly not enough . . . the way we have been choosing them is simply idiotic.        

                               

               I would like all the universities - within each state - to call a convention of all the Vice chancellors and the eminent professors; of the eminent intelligentsia who may not be part of the university: painters, artists, poets, writers, novelists, dancers, actors, musicians. It would include all dimensions of talents, all kinds of people who have shown their caliber - excluding politicians completely.        

                               

               All the Nobel Prize winners should be invited - excluding the politicians again, because within these past few years a few politicians have been given Nobel Prizes, and this has degraded the value the Nobel Prize.

                               

               So from each state a delegation should be chosen for the national convention, which goes into details of how the meritocracy can work.        

                               

               From the national candidates there should be an international convention of all the universities of the world and the intelligentsia. This would be the first of its kind because never has be whole intelligentsia of the world come together to decide the fate of humanity.    

                               

               They should write the first constitution of the world. It will not be American, it will not be Indian, it will not be Chinese -- it is going to be simply be constitution of the whole of humanity. There is no need for different kinds of laws. There is no need - all human beings need the same kind of laws.                  

                               

               And a world constitution will be a declaration that nations are no longer significant. They can exist as functional units but they are no longer independent powers. And if the whole intelligentsia of the world is behind this convention it will not be very difficult to convince the generals of the world to move away from the politicians.

                               

               And what power do politicians have? All the power that they have we have given to them. We can take it back. It is not their power, it is our power. We just have to find a way to take it back -- because giving is very easy, taking is little difficult. They will not be so simple and innocent when you take the power back as they were when they were asking it from you. It is our power, but they will go on having it if the mob remains there to give it to them; the mob can be convinced about anything.

                               

               It is the function of the intelligentsia . . . I would like to say that now, if anything happens to humanity, the whole condemnation will go to the intelligentsia: "What were you doing? If those idiots were ready to kill humanity, what were you doing? You simply went on grumbling, being grumpy, but you did nothing else".     

                               

               And the time is running short. Once we decide that the voting power is not the birthright of every human being but is a right which you will have to earn by your intelligence . . . You have to see the distinction: Everybody is given the opportunity to earn it, there is equal opportunity for all to earn it, but it is nothing birth-given; you have to prove it.          

                               

               Once we move the power from the mob into the hands of intelligent people, people who know what they doing, we can create something beautiful.            

                               

               If a man who has devoted his whole life to think about education and its problems, has done all that was possible to do to find out every detail, every fundamental of education, all the possible philosophies of education -- if he becomes an education minister, there is a possibility that he will do something.         

                               

               I suggest to shift completely from the mob to the chosen few.      

                               

               I am not against the people. In fact, in the hands of these politicians, the people are against themselves. I am all for the people, and what I am saying can be said to be exactly what has been said about democracy: for the people, by the people, of the people -- just "by the people". I will have to change. This intelligentsia will be for the people, of the people. It will be serving the masses.           

                               

               It is so simple a thing. You don't elect a doctor, and just anybody can stand, because it is a birthright and people can vote . . . to persons fighting to be the doctor or to be the surgeon. What is wrong in it? The people choose for themselves: for the people, by the people, of the people. They choose one person -- to be surgeon -- because he speaks better, he looks good on the television and he makes great promises.            

                               

               But he is not even a butcher, and he is going to become a surgeon! A butcher would have been better; at least he would known how to cut -- but you don't choose a surgeon by election. 

                               

               How can you choose a president by election? How can you choose a governor by election? For one post so many people are hankering, desiring. Those who are more sick with ambitiousness will fight the most, they will kill -- they will do anything.             

                               

               You are giving so much power to power-hungry people; with your own hands you are helping them to hang you!          

                               

               This is not democracy.   

                               

               In the name of democracy these people have been exploiting the masses.

                               

               So politicians and priests both have to be dropped out of their long, long-standing establishment, and a totally new kind of management has to be developed.            

                               

               Just to make distinction I am calling my system "meritocracy". But merit for what? The merit is to serve and share. And once you have decided to shift the power from the politicians to the intelligentsia, everything is possible -- everything becomes simple.              

                               

               Meritocracy is a whole program of transforming the structure of society, the structure of the government, the structure of education. 

                               

               It is a difficult job, arduous but not impossible -- particularly in such a situation when death is the only alternative. 


 Zorba the Buddha the Creation of the New Man on Earth 

Osho the Zouddha  

MORE: http://delfeios.blogspot.gr/2014/03/blog-post_16.html