UserHussein
Member
- Oct 14, 2023
- 51
Question: "Why do I continuously think of suicide?"
Question: "Osho, I always think of committing suicide, and wonder what you would say about my death?"
Answer:
YOU MUST BE INTELLIGENT. Only stupid people never think of suicide. Life is so ugly, life is such a hell. It is very difficult to find an intelligent person who never thinks of committing suicide. The more intelligent you are, the more the idea will be coming again and again: Why go on living? For what? For this same rut? - going to the office every day, doing the same files every day, coming back every day, talking about the same things, reading the same newspaper, listening to the same stupid radio station... going to sleep, just to get up early in the morning and catch the train to the office....
And so on and so forth, every day, year in and year out. Only a very very mediocre person can go on living. Otherwise, one day or other, the idea arises: "What am I doing here? If this is the way life goes, I have lived for forty years repeating the same thing, I may live forty years more, repeating the same things again - then what? Then why not stop this game? Why not return the ticket to God and say, "I am finished. Enough is enough!"
The idea of suicide comes to everybody. That's why it is only man who thinks of suicide - no other animal. It is only man who ponders over the idea of suicide, and sometimes commits suicide. It simply shows intelligence and nothing else.
And particularly in the modern society, man thinks more of suicide - because modern society has become more mature, more intelligent, more educated, more sophisticated. In the old days, people were not thinking of suicide so much, for many reasons. In the old days, people were not individuals.
They belonged to groups, castes, religions, countries. They had no individual existence as such - and only individuals can commit suicide, remember.
When you have the idea that you are an individual, then the possibility opens up: you can destroy yourself. In the past, man has lived as part of a collective mind. And a collective mind is not a very intelligent mind. The collective mind lives according to the lowest denominator - it cannot reach to the highest peaks of understanding, of vision, of seeing. The collective mind lives in a meaningless rut, thinking that this is meaningful - because everybody else is doing the same, so it must be meaningful.
The modern mind is at a loss, the meaning is lost. You have to decide your own meaning. In the old days, when a son was born to a carpenter then he was going to be a carpenter. It was decided, already decided. His parents, his parents' parents... as far back as one could remember, they have always been carpenters. So he is a carpenter - he knows his identity, who he is. He knows what he has to do. The society prescribes every rule, every regulation, he has simply to follow it. It is living below individuality - and nobody can think of suicide when you live below individuality.
When you start becoming an individual, when you start standing on your own, then suddenly you see the point: "What is the purpose of it all? What am I doing here?"
Secondly, in the modern world, everybody has to choose his own identity. That is a great effort. And when you choose your own identity it is always with a suspicion - it may be right, it may not be right.
In the old days, when a man was born to a brahmin family he knew that he was a brahmin. There was no need to think about it, it was predetermined. All was given to him as a blueprint - he had just to live it. The whole script was supplied by the society, he was just an actor in a drama.
Now the problem is more complicated. You have to write the drama, you have to create the stage, you have to find the actors. You are the director and the actor and the story-writer and the song- writer. You are the stage - and not only that, you are the audience too. How can you be absolutely certain who you are? Modern man is living continuously in what psychoanalysts call "the identity crisis".
In the old days, the authority was there to tell you what was right and what was wrong. You were not left on your own to decide. Things were clear-cut: "This is right and that is wrong." People followed the authorities.
Now authorities have disappeared, the world is living in a kind of freedom. The more a society is free, the more people will think of suicide. the more a society is free, the more people will COMMIT suicide.
In the East, particularly in India, the so-called religious saints feel very very enhanced by the idea that the suicide rate in India is very low compared to America. And they think America is committing suicide because it is materialist. They are utter fools - America is committing suicide more because America has more freedom. America is more tense, in anxiety, because America is creating individuality. India is not yet that free; India still lives in the past. America is trying to live in the present AND in the future - hence the problem: anguish.
America is paralyzed. Because when you have to decide on your own what is right and what is wrong, and there are no more absolute criterions left - no Vedas, no Manu, no Moses, no Mahavir, nobody saying to you "This is right" - you have to decide on your own. Hesitation arises, confusion arises.
Freedom is always confusing. A slave lives in a relaxed way; he need not worry - whatsoever the master says, he follows. He has no anxiety. If it is wrong, the master is responsible. If it is right, the master knows. He is just to follow. His is not to ask why - he has to do and die. He is a mechanical robot.
I have heard:
In the novel MOTHER NIGHT Kurt Vonnegut portrays the desperate woman Resi beseeching her lover thus:
"Then tell me what to live for - anything at all. It does not have to be love. Anything at all!" She gestured at objects around the shabby room, dramatizing exquisitely the sense of the world's being a junk shop. "I will live for that chair, that picture, that furnace pipe, that couch, that crack in the wall!
Tell me to live for it, and I will!" she cried. "Just tell me what it should be!"
There is nobody to tell you. In the old days, everything was told to you, nothing was left to you. Parents were telling you, "Marry this woman." Astrologers were deciding that this was the right woman for you, and you were marrying a certain woman because your parents decided, the astrologer decided, your birth chart decided. You were not deciding yourself. When you were not deciding, there was no anxiety.
Now you have to decide yourself. There are millions of women in the world - whom to choose? How to decide whether this woman is going to be a heaven or a hell? There is no way to predict. One is in a turmoil. The profession has to be decided - to which to belong? Religions have no more grip; a Christian does not really feel like belonging to the church. Now all the ground underneath your feet has disappeared.
Unless you are an absolutely mediocre person, it will be very difficult for you not to think of suicide.
Suicide seems to be a great release - a release from anxiety, a release from choosing, a release from alternatives.
In the novel CAT'S CRADLE one character holds that "We doodely do, what we muddily must, until we bodily bust."
If you are a person like that, then there is no question of suicide. Intelligence thinks about whether life is worth living; intelligence never takes anything for granted.
So the first thing I would like to tell you... you ask: WHY DO I CONTINUOUSLY THINK OF COMMITTING SUICIDE?... is that you are an intelligent person. DON'T feel guilty, every intelligent person thinks that way. This is the beginning of intelligence, although not the end. And by committing suicide, nothing is changed. You will be born again, and the whole nonsense will start, from ABC.
That is pointless. When you are thinking of suicide, that simply says you are thinking that this life that you have lived up to now is not worth living.
But there are possibilities in it which you have not tried yet. I say to you: This life can become a great joy. It became a great joy to Krishna, it became a great ecstasy to Christ, it became a jubilation to Buddha, it is a benediction to me - why can it not be so to you?
And all these people had been thinking of suicide, remember. To think of suicide is to grope for sannyas. To think of suicide simply means THIS life is finished - but there are other alternative lives possible. One need not destroy this beautiful gift of God. The life that you have lived is not the only alternative. It can be lived in a thousand and one ways - there are other ways to live it.
You may have lived a life without love. Why not try love? You may have lived a life obsessed with money. Why not live a life unobsessed with money? You may have lived a life which hankers to possess. Now live a life which is not worried about possessing anything. You may have lived a life of respectability - you may have always been considering what people think about you, what their opinion is. There is a life to live without bothering what others are thinking about you; there is a life to live individually and rebelliously.
There is a life to live which is of adventure and not of social conformity. There is a life of meditation, of God, of search, of going within. You may have lived an outside life, chasing this and chasing that.
I make available to you another life of not chasing anything, but sitting silently, disappearing within your being. A life of interiority.
And you will be surprised - the whole idea of suicide will disappear like dewdrops in the morning sun, and you will stumble upon a life which is eternal.
Albert Camus has said:
"What counts is not the best living, but the MOST living. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one's life, one's revolt, one's freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.
Become free of your so-called life that you have lived up to now. DON'T commit suicide! Let your past commit suicide. Start living afresh, moment to moment. DON'T live in desires, but live in a kind of desirelessness.
You have lived a life of strain, effort, struggle. Now start living a life of relaxation, calm and quiet.
And you will be surprised - you have been missing life, not because life is worthless. You have been missing life because you have been taught to live a worthless kind of life."
OSHO
(Take it Easy, Vol 2, chapter 9)
Question: "Osho, I always think of committing suicide, and wonder what you would say about my death?"
Answer: Prashant,
I AM REMINDED OF A BEAUTIFUL ANECDOTE:
The minister, who got himself a little mixed up now and again, was standing over the open casket of the dearly departed, Joe Hall.
"Our friend Joe Hall is not dead," he orated. "Only the shell is here to be buried; the nut has departed."
Why should you think of suicide? Are you a nut or something? If you have become a Sannyasin you have already committed suicide. Sannyas is a suicide — the real one. It is not destroying the body, because destroying the body is not going to help; you will be immediately born again somewhere in some other womb. It will only be renewing the body; it is not real suicide. Sannyas is real suicide, because it destroys the mind, it takes you beyond the mind. And if you are beyond the mind you will not be born again. Why be born again and again? Why go on in this vicious circle?
I know you are bored with life. If you are really bored, then meditation is the way, not suicide — because suicide will bring you to the SAME life, maybe an uglier life than you have right now, because suicide will create its own ugliness in you. To commit suicide is such an ungrateful act towards God. He gives you life as an opportunity to grow, and you throw away the opportunity. And unless you grow, unless you grow and become a Buddha, you will be thrown back into life again and again. Millions of times it has happened before: it is time now you should become aware. Don't miss this opportunity. Being here with me, learn the real art of suicide. The real art consists not in destroying the body…the body is beautiful, the body has not done any wrong. It is the ugly mind. The body is beautiful, the soul is beautiful, but between the body and the soul there is something which is neither body nor soul. This in-between phenomenon is the mind.
It is mind that goes on dragging you back into the womb. When you die, if you commit suicide you will be thinking of life. Committing suicide means you are thinking of life. You are bored, fed up with life; you would like a totally different kind of life, that's why you are committing suicide — not that you are really against life. THIS life you are against. Maybe you don't want to be the way you are: you would like to be an Alexander, a Napoleon, an Adolph Hitler; maybe you want to be the richest man in the world, and you are not. This life has failed, and you would like to be famous, successful — destroy it! People commit suicide not because they are really finished with life but because life is not fulfilling their demands. But no life ever fulfills anybody's demands. You will always go on missing something or other: if you have money, you may not be beautiful; if you are beautiful, you may not be intelligent; if you are intelligent, you may not have money.
Once a man stopped Andrew Carnegie, who had gone for a morning walk in the garden. Andrew Carnegie was the richest man in America; the man who stopped him was looking like the very incarnation of a beggar. And the man said, "Please don't be deceived by my appearance. I am an author, I have also written a book."
Andrew Carnegie asked, "What kind of book have you written?" The man said, "I have written a book entitled ONE HUNDRED WAYS TO BECOME RICH."
Andrew Carnegie could not stop himself laughing. He said, "ONE HUNDRED WAYS TO BECOME RICH? And you are a beggar! What kind of book is this?"
The beggar started laughing, and he said, "This is the hundredth way of becoming rich — it is included in my book." The beggar also thinks of becoming rich, writes books about how to become rich — even thinks that by begging he will become rich. But Andrew Carnegie is not happy either; he was one of the most unhappy men ever born on the earth. He lived in unhappiness, he died in unhappiness. The day he died somebody asked, "You must be dying fully contented — because you are leaving such a lot of money behind you. You are the richest man in the world."
Andrew Carnegie opened his eyes and said, very sadly said, "I am not fulfilled in my desires. My target was far higher — I have not been able to reach it. I could accumulate only ten percent of my target." But even if you achieve one hundred percent of your target, how is it going to help? One is going to remain unfulfilled. Each life you will find the same thing repeated; forms change, but the discontent remains.
People think that those who commit suicide are against life — they are not. They are too lusty for life, they have great lust for life; and because life is not fulfilling their lust, in anger, in despair, they destroy themselves. Prashant, I will teach you the right way to commit suicide. Not the destruction of the body; the body is a beautiful gift from God. The mind is not a gift from God; the mind is a conditioning by the society. The soul is a gift, the body is a gift, and sandwiched between the two, the society has played tricks with you: it has created your mind. It gives you ambition, it gives you jealousy, competition, violence, it gives you all kinds of ugly diseases. But this mind can be transcended, this mind can be put aside. This mind is not a must.
I am sitting before you and I say it through my own experience, I say it on my own authority: that mind can be put aside. It is so simple, you just have to know the knack of it. And remember, whenever I say that I say it on my own authority I am not saying that I am saying it AUTHORITATIVELY. Those two expressions are totally different. When something is said AUTHORITATIVELY it is a commandment; you have to believe in it. If you don't believe in it you will suffer, here or hereafter. The priest speaks with authoritativeness, the politician speaks with authoritativeness. A realized man speaks not with authoritativeness but on his own authority — because he KNOWS it. I am not saying follow me, I am not saying believe in me. I am simply stating a fact: that I have KNOWN it this way, it has happened to me…it can happen to you. Life is very precious and the greatest treasure is hidden in it — and that treasure is of becoming a witness…
Transform your life, Prashant, into a quest. Question the values that you have accepted. Question all that you have been brought up to believe in. Question the way you have lived up to now. Question your mechanicalness, question your robotlike existence. Yes, something drastic has to be done, but it is not suicide. It won't help, it won't change you; you will be back again in another womb somewhere. Millions of stupid couples are making love every moment. Beware! You will be caught in some net somewhere. And you will get only what you deserve, remember; you can't get more than you deserve. You get the womb that is right for you. And dying in suicide is dying in such anguish, because it is one of the most unnatural things to do, most abnormal things to do. No animal commits suicide, no tree ever commits suicide — only man. Only man can go that insane. Nature knows nothing of suicide; it is man's invention. It is the most ugly act. And when you do something ugly to yourself you cannot hope that you will get a better life. You will die in an ugly state of mind and you will enter an uglier womb.
But what is the need to commit suicide? Just question: you must have lived in a wrong way, that's why life has not become a song. You must have lived foolishly, stupidly, unintelligently; that's why life has not attained to celebration. You cannot dance with joy with the stars and with the flowers and with the wind and with the rain, because you have lived with wrong kinds of ideas imposed on you by the same kind of people as you are. It is a perpetual phenomenon; stupidity goes on perpetuating itself. Parents go on giving stupidity to their children and the children in their turn will hand over their stupidity to THEIR children. This is the heritage. This is called tradition, heritage, culture… great names! Question all that you have lived without questioning up to now, and your life will have a new intelligence arising in it. Your life will become more sharp…question your values. If you have been a Catholic, question it; if you have been a Protestant, question it; if you have been a Hindu, question it. Question all that you have lived up to now; something is basically wrong somewhere…
The birds singing, and the trees, and the flowers…this infinite universe — is it the place to commit suicide? It is the place to dance, to sing, to celebrate, to love and to be loved. And if you can love this existence, if you can feel blessed with this existence, I promise you that when you die you will not be coming back again…because you will have learnt the lesson. God never sends anybody back to the school if once they have learnt their lesson. If you can learn to rejoice, you will be accepted. Doors of higher mysteries will be opened to you. You will be welcomed into the innermost mysteries of life. That's what I call the true art of committing suicide: my name for it is Sannyas. OSHO (Be Still and Know, Chapter 10)
