Maturity happens when you start living without hope. Hope is childish. You become mature when you don't project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don't have any future; you just live in the moment — because that is the only reality there is. In the past, religion used to talk about the hereafter. Those were the childish, immature days of religion. Now religion talks about herenow; religion has come of age.
In the Vedas, in the Koran, in the Bible, hereafter is the basic goal. But now man is no longer that childish. That sort of God and that sort of religion is dead. It was a religion of hope, it was a religion of future.
Now another sort of religion is asserting itself all over the world, and this religion is about herenow, the present. There is nowhere else to go and there is no other space and no other time to live, only this space and this time, here and now. Life has to become very intense in this moment. A man who lives in hope dissipates life. He spreads life; it becomes too thin. And when it becomes too thin, it is never happy. Happiness means intensity, tremendous depth. If you spread your hope into the future, life will become very thin. It will lose depth.
When I say drop all hope, I mean be so intense in the moment that there is no need for the future. Then there is a turning, a transformation. The very quality of time changes for you it becomes eternal. What can you do with hope?
In fact, what can you hope? You cannot hope for the new. You can only hope for the old, that which has happened before — maybe with a little modification here and there, a little more decorated. But hope is nothing but past: you have lived something, you have experienced something, and you again and again hope for it. It is a repetition; it is circular.
We remember only something which has remained incomplete. Mind tends to complete things. And you have so many incomplete experiences; they go on being projected into the future. The past is gone — now there is no way to complete them in the past; and the present is going out of your hands fast, slipping, so you don't see any point, any possibility to complete them in the present. The future is long: you can project — this life, another life, this world, another world — you can project eternity. Then you are at ease. You say, "I am not at a loss; tomorrow is there. There will be another life." But by and by, you are getting trapped in a wrong pattern.
No, hope is not the right thing. Live in the present so deeply, so completely, that nothing is left. Then there will be no projection. You will move very smoothly into the tomorrow without carrying any load from today. And when there is no yesterday haunting you, then there is no tomorrow. When the past is not hanging around you, there is no future.
Stop postponing. And who knows what the future is going to reveal to you? There is no way to know about it. It is an opening; all alternatives are open. What is really going to happen, nobody can predict. People have tried.
That's why people go to astrologers, to I CHING, and to other sorts of things. I CHING goes on fascinating people, astrologers go on influencing people. Astrology still seems to be a great force. Why? — because people are missing and they are hoping for the future. They want some clue to know what is going to happen so they can arrange it that way.
If you know something about tomorrow, I think you will not live today. You will say, "What is the need? Tomorrow we will live." Even without knowing anything about tomorrow you are doing that. And tomorrow never comes… and when it comes, it is always today. And you don't know how to live today.
OSHO
