Blissfulness is your very nature. Sadness needs a certain cause. Bliss is free of all causality. Once you have understood it, you become a participant in a new way of life, a way so new that it is discontinuous with the past.
OSHO
My vision is so new, so revolutionary, that if you are all massacred for it, it will not be a surprise to me. I am fighting against the whole past of humanity.
Nobody has ever done that. Christians were fighting with the Jews, Mohammedans were fighting with the Hindus, Jainas were fighting with the Buddhists; but this is happening for the first time — one single man standing against the whole history of man.
And you are choosing to be with such a man. Your participation, your devotion, your love, are towards a very dangerous man. But I don't see that the whole past — it is vast and big — can destroy what I am saying.
The past is not in my favor. I don't want it to be in my favor, I want to destroy it from the very roots. But the future is mine, the future is yours, and the future is far greater than the whole past. The forces of the future are far bigger than all the forces of the past, because the past is dead. Life knows no past. It is in the present and always moving into the future.
People will be against you. People will condemn you, particularly those who are trying to materialize my vision. Don't care a bit about their criticism and their condemnation. They are just on the verge of their graves. They have failed. They have been promising man for thousands of years and all their promises have proved false. Man has remained poor, sick, starving, a slave to so many things, imprisoned, chained.
They have driven man almost to madness. They have completely failed.
Naturally, they will be offended by your small successes. They have not even been able to achieve small victories. Just your very presence is offensive to them for the simple reason that you are rejoicing, enjoying, loving, and they have never loved, they have never enjoyed. They have always been guilty, feeling the burden of so many sins. How can they dance? When you see their situation, you will be able to forgive them for their condemnation. They have missed their life, and you are not missing a single moment.
They are jealous of you. Their condemnation and criticism arise out of their jealousy. When everybody else is depressed, you are dancing. You are taking a risk. Those depressed people will not allow you to dance. They will try to prevent you. They will start telling others that you are mad.
I have heard a story about a faraway mountain land where a community of blind people lived. Nobody was born blind, but there was a certain fly whose bite made the person immediately blind. Every child was born with eyes, but those flies were there all around. It was impossible to escape from those flies. All the older people, the adults, the mothers and fathers, could not do anything — they were all blind. The whole community was blind.
The fly affected only a certain age-group, below five years of age. Five years is a long time for a child, and the fly was all around. Within those five years… any moment. In fact, within six months every child was blind; those flies were not waiting for five years.
For the first time, a stranger came into the community from faraway lands. He was an adventurer. Seeing from the hilltop thousands of blind people, he could not believe his own eyes. He felt immensely sorry for them. He forgot about his further exploration in the mountains and he remained with those people. He wanted to help them somehow.
He wanted to find what had happened. It is acceptable that in thousands of people there may be one man blind — that he knew — but in thousands of people not a single man with eyes? — it was a great challenge for him. He wanted to find out what was the matter, what had happened.
Soon he was able to find out that every child was born with eyes, and every child became blind within six months. He discovered the fly, too, which was a common fly. But while he was doing this research, why these poor people had all gone blind, he fell in love with a blind girl. She was immensely beautiful. He had seen beauty before, but this girl's beauty was a category in itself, incomparable. Although she was blind, she looked like a marble statue made not by any amateur, but by some Leonardo da Vinci.
The girl was still unmarried. A great problem arose in the community, because never before had it happened that anybody from their community had married somebody, particularly a stranger — and more emphatically, a man who is mad because he thinks he has eyes. But they were simple mountain people, they did not want to make these two young people miserable.
The community agreed that the man could marry the girl, but first he had to become blind. Then he would be one of them, no more a stranger. First he had to drop that madness that he had eyes — who had ever heard about eyes? — if he was not willing to drop that insane idea, then the marriage was not possible. He was not only a stranger, he was insane too. The man so loved the girl that he destroyed his eyes. In his life, for the first time, love became blind. For love he became blind.
Why could those people not accept that he had eyes? It was against the egos of the whole community. They were blind and he had eyes. He was somebody special, so either he was mad, imagining, hallucinating about eyes, or perhaps he had eyes. But then he could not be tolerated, allowed to continue to have eyes, because he would remain a stranger, an outsider, and the very idea that he had eyes made everyone feel inferior. The day he destroyed his eyes and said, "I have dropped that idea of being a man with eyes," there was great rejoicing, dancing, singing.
This is the situation. This is my situation. This is your situation. On your own accord you have become part of my caravan. I had started alone; then people went on coming, and the caravan went on becoming bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Now we are a reality the world cannot tolerate. They will condemn you, they will curse you, they will criticize you — but they cannot destroy you for the simple reason that they are mere ghosts of the past.
They are not living people. They can make much noise, but you just have to remember that they are dead and that the future does not belong to them. They can look backwards into the past. They can sing songs of glory about Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Mahavira, but they don't have any eyes for the future. They don't have even eyes for the present. And to have eyes for the past is absolutely meaningless, because the past is no more. It is dead, it is a long, long graveyard.
And suddenly you come and start dancing and singing and celebrating. It hurts their egos. It makes them feel inferior. When they have missed joy, how dare you dance and sing? And for what? They know only one thing, that you can be happy. But for happiness you need a certain cause… and I am teaching you that happiness is your nature. You don't need any cause.
It is not that when you win a lottery of one million dollars, you give a big party, wine and women and dance. This will be understood. I am saying you need not win any lottery, you need no cause to be blissful. Blissfulness is your very nature. Sadness needs a certain cause. Bliss is free of all causality. Once you have understood it, you become a participant in a new way of life, a way so new that it is discontinuous with the past.
But you have to understand that all those poor people who have missed are going to be angry with you. In their criticism, in their condemnation, there is nothing but jealousy, anger. They cannot believe that you can be right, because for millions of years they have lived the life of sadness and sorrow and suddenly a few strangers arrive on the earth as if from another planet and start doing things which have never been done. They would like to destroy you so they feel comfortable; they would like that you are not. They will feel a certain satisfaction that whatever they are is the only reality, that there is no other reality.
But they cannot destroy you for the simple reason that you are living. You are vital energy and they are spent cartridges. They can shoot you with their guns, but their guns are full of spent cartridges. They cannot destroy you. Life is so strong and death is so weak. Joy is so strong and sadness is just a shadow. You are undefeatable.
When they condemn you, enjoy that, too. When they criticize you, sing a song as a response to their criticism, and don't pay much attention to them. Ignore them. Anyway, they are going down, drowning. Don't waste your time arguing with drowning people. You continue your dance, and you go on spreading your dance. Religion, in the authentic, true sense, is here.
You may not be aware that you are participating in something which is so important that nothing like it has ever happened before. And because you are capable, intelligent, you can forgive them. Not to let them feel inferior, you can forgive them, knowing that they are on their deathbed and you are just starting to grow and live and flower. There is no comparison.
OSHO