Question – Beloved Osho, What is a Contemporary Mind?

Osho – Contemporary mind is a contradiction in terms. Mind is never contemporary, it is always old. Mind is past — past and past and nothing else; mind means memory. There can be no contemporary mind; to be contemporary is to be without mind.

If you are herenow, then you are contemporary with me. But then, don’t you see, your mind disappears; no thought moves, no desire arises: you become disconnected with the past and disconnected with the future.

Mind is never original, cannot be. No-mind is original, fresh, young; mind is always old, rotten, stale. But those words are used — they are used in a totally different sense. I can understand your question — in that sense, those words are meaningful. The mind of the nineteenth century was a different mind; the questions they were asking, you are not asking.

The questions that were very important in the eighteenth century are now stupid questions. “How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?” was one of the greatest theological questions in the middle ages. Now can you find such a stupid person who will think that this is an important question? And this was discussed by the greatest theologians; not small people, great professors were writing treatises on it, conferences were arranged. How many angels? Now who cares? It is simply irrelevant.

In Buddha’s time, a great question was: “Who created the world?” It has persisted for centuries, but now fewer and fewer people are worried about who created the world. Yes, there are some old-fashioned people, but very rarely such questions are asked of me. But Buddha was encountered every day. Not a single day must have passed when somebody did not ask the question, “Who created the world?”

Buddha had to say again and again that the world has always been there, nobody has created it; but people were not satisfied. Now nobody cares. Very rarely somebody asks me the question, “Who created the world?” In that sense, the mind goes on changing as time goes on changing. In that sense, the contemporary mind is a reality.

Husband to wife: “I said we are not going out tonight, and that is semi-final.”

Now this is a contemporary mind. No husband in the past would have said that. It was always final; the last word was his.

Two high-class English ladies met each other by accident while out shopping in London. One noticed the other was pregnant and asked, “Why, darling, what a surprise! You obviously got married since I last saw you! ”
The second said, “Yes. He’s a wonderful man; he’s an officer in the Ghurka rifles.”
The questioner was horrified. “A Ghurka! Darling, are not they all black?”
“Oh no,” she said. “Only the privates.”
The questioner exclaimed, “Darling, how contemporary!”

In that sense, there is a contemporary mind….

Have you heard about the latest family game? It is called incest.
Little sister to brother in bed: “Hey, you are better at this than Daddy.”
“Yes, Mummy says so too!”

Otherwise, there is no contemporary mind. Fashions come and go; if you think of fashions then there are changes. But basically all mind is old. Mind as such is old, and there can be no modern mind; the most modern mind is still of the past. The really alive person is a herenow person. He does not live out of the past, he does not live for the future; he lives only in the moment, for the moment. The moment is all. He is spontaneous; that spontaneity is the fragrance of no-mind.

Mind is repetitive, mind always moves in circles. Mind is a mechanism: you feed it with knowledge, it repeats the same knowledge, it goes on chewing the same knowledge again and again. No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence. No-mind is the real way to live, the real way to know, the real way to be.

Source – Osho Book “The Book of Wisdom”

We live in the mind. The mind can even become a saint, can pretend to be holy, but it will not be. It is impossible; it is not in the very nature of the mind to be holy. Just look at the history of religions — they are full of bloodshed. In fact more crimes have been committed in the name of religions than in the name of anything else.

More people have been killed, butchered in the name of religion, God, truth, Christianity, Islam, than in the name of political ideologies even. Religion tops the list. Religion has been far more mischievous; it has even defeated the politicians. It could defeat them for the simple reason that the politician cannot hide himself for very long; sooner or later he is exposed. But the religious person can hide himself for centuries and you will never know.

One is a Christian, another is a Hindu; this is a belief. A system of thought has been imposed on the child and he accepted it because he was not aware when it was imposed on him. He had to accept it because he was helpless; he had to accept whatsoever the parents were feeding him.

This is a social strategy so that the children always remain in the boundaries of the parental fold. It is a kind of slavery, mental slavery. It is a spiritual poisoning; it is harmful. In a better world there will be no Hindu, no Mohammedan, no Christian. In a more intelligent worldwe will not feed children any system of thought.

We will simply help them to become more and more alert and intelligent so that they can choose their own system of thought, whatsoever it is; we will leave it to them. We will give intelligence to them, we will help their intelligence to become sharpened so that they are not deceived. But right now the parents themselves are deceiving their children. They are doing just what their parents had done to them. Belief is an ugly phenomenon; it should disappear from the world.

Faith is a little better; faith is of feeling. Just as belief is of intellect, thought, faith is of feeling. It is a little better because it goes a little deeper, but it too is without any awareness. It is emotional, sentimental, but blind. It goes deeper and transforms your life a little more than belief. Belief simply remains a facade, because it never touches your heart; faith makes you more devoted. But that devotion is also based on a kind of blindness, and blindness in itself has to be dropped to knowtruth.

Trust is neither of the head nor of the heart: it is a transcendental phenomenon. It comes by becoming more aware of the mechanism of the mind and the heart. You watch how the mind functions, how thinking proceeds – the whole process of thought – and you watch the whole process of emotions. You remain aloof, you remain just a watcher. Then slowly slowly a third dimension opens in you: that is trust. It is existential, it comes only when you have known something on your own.

Belief is given by others and faith is also given by others. Trust arises out of one’s own experience. Then one falls in love with existence; that love is true religion. It is not a dogma, it is not a doctrine, it is not a church. That is the meaning of shraddho.

Source: from Osho Book “Turn On, Tune In and Drop the Lot”

Resolution means totality, commitment, involvement, a quantum leap into something, into something which is not yet clearly known. Taking a risk is resolution. But the mind is a coward. It avoids risks; it seeks security, safety. Resolution is one of the ways to go beyond misery, schizophrenia.

Ordinarily man is a crowd, a thousand and one desires dividing him. When all these desires become
a single pool of energy, that is resolution. Sannyas is resolution; it is a total effort to get out of the
mind. And if one really strives to get out of the mind – difficult thought it is, but not impossible…