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SINS - Spiritually Incorrect News Service: The Ten Non-Commandments

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Ten Non-Commandments for the 21st Century

If somebody wants to know about my philosophical standpoint.... It is not going to be that easy, because I see man as a multi-dimensional being. You will have to talk about ten non-commandments.

The first: freedom.
The second: uniqueness of individuality.
The third: love.
The fourth: meditation.
The fifth: non-seriousness.
The sixth: playfulness.
The seventh: creativity.
The eighth: sensitivity.
The ninth: gratefulness.
Tenth: a feeling of the mysterious.

These ten non-commandments constitute my basic attitude towards reality, towards man's freedom from all kinds of spiritual slavery.

Conscience and Consciousness

These two words have to be understood deeply: One is "conscience," and the other is "consciousness." Conscience represents morality, consciousness represents religion. Conscience is a social strategy. It is created by others, it is a trick to manipulate the person.

Conscience means others have told you what is right and what is wrong; they have not given an opportunity to you to explore, to know, to experiment. They have not given you freedom to judge on your own. They have given you fixed ideas, ready-made answers, ten commandments.

Morality is given by others from the outside. It is not an inner growth; because it is not an inner growth it remains like a plastic flower. You can hang the plastic flower on the rose bush -- maybe it can deceive a few fools, but it cannot deceive the rose bush. It cannot deceive the bees and the butterflies, and certainly it cannot deceive you, because you have planted those false, phony flowers on the rose bush.

Conscience is a plastic flower, planted by others -- the society, the church, the state.

Consciousness is your inner growth; it is a real rose, alive, unfolding, fragrant, each moment growing, breathing. It has a beauty, because it has life, and it is yours, authentically yours. It is not borrowed.

Everything borrowed is always ugly. The borrowed becomes a burden on your head; it cannot allow you freedom, it can only repress you, oppress you, exploit you.

Morality is being used for psychological slavery. Other kinds of slavery have disappeared from the world, but the psychological slavery still exists, in fact more so than before, because before there were many other kinds of slaveries available; now there is only one kind of slavery available and that is psychological. So the people who want to exploit -- all their efforts have become concentrated on a single point and that is psychological exploitation.

So every child is being programmed by the society, given fixed ideas, what is right, what is wrong, and this is utterly absurd. Something may be right today and may not be right tomorrow, something may be wrong this moment and may not be wrong the next moment. Life continuously goes on changing, it is a flux, it is a constant movement, nothing is static; hence no static answers can be of any help. All static answers will prevent you in seeing the reality and responding spontaneously to that which is.

Consciousness helps you to become responsible, and I am not using the word 'responsible' in the sense of dutiful, etcetera. I use the word 'responsible' in the literal sense: the capacity to respond. The man who is burdened with conscience has no capacity to respond, he only reacts. Before the question is there he already has an answer. His answer will never fit the question because the question is always new. Even if the question appears the same it cannot be the same because the context is different, the situation is different, the whole reference is different -- and you have to be very alive, unprejudiced, you have to be just like a mirror, reflecting whatsoever is the case and responding accordingly, not according to a preconceived idea.

Morality is a phony lie, because the ideas are given by others and you are living them -- you are just an imitator. I am against all morality -- that does not mean that I am for immorality. In fact it is morality that creates immorality too. I am for transcendence, transcendence of the very idea of morality -- and of course, this implies immorality too.

I am for consciousness, not for conscience. I don't want to give you any shoulds or should nots. I simply want you to become more aware, alert, watchful, clear, unclouded. When you are like a flame without smoke, whatsoever you do will be right. In a state of clarity the wrong is impossible, but then your character comes from your consciousness, not from your conscience, then it comes from yourself. Then it is a real rose, growing out of your being, and everything real has a beauty -- it has a fragrance.

Jesus was not moral, that's why he was crucified. He did not follow the old idea given by the society. He started living on his own, he was an individual, a rebel. Socrates was not moral, that was his crime. The society could not forgive him. No authentic person has ever been moral in that sense; although in another sense only those few authentic people have been really moral, but then you have to write the word 'moral' with quotation marks. It is a totally different thing, it is not the so-called morality. Authentic people's morality comes from their consciousness; hence they never feel the puritan's ego. You can never see in their eyes the holier-than-thou look, you can never see in them any condemnation for anybody. They have immense respect, even for those who are fast asleep and snoring, because they know that once, they too were sleeping and they too were snoring, and if they can awake, others also can awake.

The moment a person becomes awakened, becomes a buddha, he knows that everybody has the potential of being a buddha, and he becomes tremendously respectful to the buddhahood of everybody -- awake or asleep it doesn't matter -- buddhahood is buddhahood!

So I teach you buddhahood, awareness, awakening, but I don't give you any discipline. And that is my revolution. Religions have given only conscience, and that's how they all have cheated human beings. They have created hypocrites, and they have also created a very schizophrenic humanity, a mad world. The people who are responsible for all this insanity are your so-called saints, sages, mahatmas. I am against all this nonsense.

My approach is very simple and clear-cut. I give you a single key but it is a master key; it unlocks all the doors: Be aware! Be more and more aware. Bring that moment closer and closer when you can feel that your whole being is full of awareness. When there is not even a single spot inside you that is dark, unconscious -- then you have come home.

Osho


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