This whole world is a cosmic joke. If you try to understand it you will miss…that is how philosophers have always been missing. They have been trying to solve it, they have been trying to look for clues. It has no clues. It is a sheer mystery. It has no keys and no locks.
It is available if you are available. But a mind which wants to understand it becomes tense and becomes unavailable.
Don’t try to understand life. Live it! Don’t try to understand love. Move into love. Then you will know — and that knowing will come out of your experiencing. That knowing will never destroy the mystery: the more you know, the more you know that much remains to be known. Life is not a problem. To look at it as a problem is to take a wrong step. It is a mystery to be lived, loved. experienced.
In fact, the mind which is always after explanations is an afraid mind. Because of great fear he wants everything to be explained. He cannot go into anything before it is explained to him. With explanation he feels that now the territory is familiar, now he knows the geography, now he can move with the map and the guidebook and the timetable. He is never ready to move in an unknown territory, uncharted, without a map, without a guide.
But life is like that. And no map is possible, because life goes on changing. Every moment it is now. There is nothing old under the sun, I say to you. Everything is new. It is a tremendous dynamism, an absolute movement. Only change is permanent, only change never changes — everything else goes on changing.
So you cannot have a map; by the time the map is ready it is already out of date. By the time the map is available it is useless. Life has changed its tracks. Life has started playing a new game. You cannot cope with life with maps because it is not measurable. And you cannot cope with life with guidebooks because guidebooks are possible only if things are stagnant. Life is not stagnant, it is a dynamism, it is a process. You cannot have a map of it. It is not measurable, it is an unmeasurable mystery. Don’t ask for explanations.
That’s why although I answer when you ask questions — because this is part of the agreement of this mad game: you will ask and I will answer — you should never take my answers as explanations. They are not. They are simply introductions to the mystery, prefaces to the mystery, seductions to the mystery. They are not really answers.
My answers are not answers; my answers are simply to help you to come out of your questions and to start living. An answer is an answer when it simply explains your question and you are satisfied that you have now got some information which you were needing and your question is no longer there. Now the place that the question was occupying is occupied by the answer. My answers are not answers in that way. They will help you to drop the question but they are not going to answer the question. And once the question is dropped you will find no answer occupying its place. There will be no answer.
My whole way of answering is such that I answer and yet I never answer. I answer so that you don’t feel offended — your question has to be respected so I respect it — but I cannot answer it because life has no answers.
And this I call maturity of mind: when somebody comes to the point of looking at life without any questions, and simply dives into it with courage and fearlessness.
OSHO
