Osho on Cuban Revolutionary Fidel Castro
Born on 13 August 1926, Fidel Castro was a Cuban revolutionary and political leader with a reign of almost 50 years as Cuba’s prime minister (1959 to 1976) and president (1976 to 2008). He studied law at the University of Havana and acquired an interest in political science, more so in leftism and anti-imperialism. Castro was passionate to change the course of Cuba’s rule and thus began the Cuban Revolution through his group called the 26th of July Movement. He eventually overthrew president Fulgencio Batista and assumed political and military power.
Castro’s rule is often met with support and criticism at the same time. He led the country through an economic downturn, expanded accessible healthcare, eliminated illiteracy, formed global alliances, and caused the overall advancement of social and political justice. In a counter-argument, Castro played an infamous role in the Cuban Missile crisis, brutally repressed opposition to outer development, and was not above human rights abuse. He converted Cuba into a one-party communist state by adopting a Marxist-Leninist model, and the credibility of the same is divided on the decision.
Osho mentions Castro, “Ugliness has become an aesthetic value. Now the photographer goes and looks for something ugly. Not that beauty has stopped existing, it exists as much as before, but it is neglected. The cactus has replaced the rose. Not that the cactus is something new, it has existed always, but this century has come to know that thorns seem to be more real than a rose flower. A rose flower seems to be a dream; it does not fit with us, hence the rose flower has been expelled. The cactus has entered your drawing-room. Just one hundred years ago nobody would have ever thought to bring a cactus home. Now, if you are modern, your garden will be full of cactuses. The rose looks a little bourgeois; the rose looks a little out-of-date; the rose looks Tory, orthodox, traditional. The cactus looks revolutionary. Yes, the cactus is revolutionary — like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin and Mao Tsetung and Fidel Castro. Yes, the cactus seems to be closer to this century.
The photographer looks for some ugly thing — he will go and photograph a beggar. Not that the beggar has not existed before, he HAS existed before. He is REAL, certainly real, but nobody has been making art out of him. We are feeling humble before the beggar; we are feeling apologetic before the beggar; we are feeling that something which should not be is still there; we want the beggar not to be there. But this century goes on searching for the ugly. The sun still penetrates the pines on a certain morning. The rays penetrating the pines create such a web of beauty. It still exists, but no photographer is interested that no longer appeals. Ugliness appeals because we have become ugly. That which appeals to us shows something about us.”
Osho Says…..
OSHO, PLEASE TALK ABOUT THE FEAR OF GOING MAD, WALKING ON A RAZOR’S EDGE.
Anand Eti, Please don’t be afraid of madness — for the simple reason because you are already mad! This world is such a vast madhouse. Every child is born sane, but cannot live sane long; it is impossible. He is brought up by other mad people, taught by other mad people, conditioned by other mad people. He is bound to become mad; just to survive he has to become mad. Only once in a while there has been a sane person — a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Jesus. And the strangest thing is that these sane people look mad because the so-called mad are not really mad. The really mad are the so-called sane. The people who are put in the madhouses are simply very sensitive people, vulnerable people, delicate people, not so hard as the others who live in the marketplace. They are not so thick-skinned, that’s why they break down. The thick-skinned go on living amongst all kinds of madness; they go on adjusting.
Man has infinite capacity to adjust himself, and each child learns to adjust with all kinds of things. Just look in your own being, how many superstitions you have become adjusted to, how many stupid beliefs you are carrying. And it is not that there are not moments when you become aware of their stupidity, but those sane moments you put aside because they are dangerous moments. Yes, once in a while the window opens, but you immediately close it. You have to close it — you are afraid the neighbors may see that your window is open. You don’t want to show your sanity to anybody.
Jesus says: Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of God. What does he mean? He means: Unless you become again sane, as sane as every child is, you will not enter into my kingdom of God. Anand Eti, don’t be afraid of going mad — you cannot It has already happened! Now if you really want to be afraid of something it is of going sane. That’s what can happen here. If you can go on hanging around here long enough, then you can become sane. But that sanity will be looked by others as insanity.
Kahlil Gibran has a beautiful parable about it:
A witch entered into a village. She said some abracadabra, threw some magical potion in the well of the village, and told to the people who were there, “Whosoever drinks the water of this well will go mad!” Now in the village there were only two wells: one was for the public, for the common people, and the other was in the palace for the king and his queen and his vizier. The king was very happy: “It is good that we are saved.” But by the evening he became aware that it has not been a fortune. He asked the vizier, his old, wise counselor, “Something has to be done immediately,” because by evening the whole village had gone mad. They had to drink the water. How long can you remain thirsty? And there was no other water except that well. By evening the whole village became mad.
But by the evening a rumor started spreading in the village that the king, the vizier and the queen have become mad. The king’s army has also gone mad, his bodyguards had gone mad, so he was absolutely unprotected.
And as the sun set, the whole village gathered around the palace shouting, “We don’t want this mad king any more! We want to change him!”
The king asked his old, wise counselor, “What to do?”
He said, “Now there is only one thing that can be done. I will somehow keep them engaged — you run from the back door, drink the water from the well and come back.”
The king and the queen ran from the back door. The vizier kept the people talking, kept them engaged. And he was waiting that the king and queen will come from the back door, but they didn’t come from the back door. Why they should come from the back door? They had gone mad! They came from the front door — dancing! He saw them in the crowd; he could not believe his eyes. They were dancing with the people and the people said, “Look! Our king and our queen have become sane again!” And they celebrated the whole night. The vizier had to run and drink the water. The whole night was a great festival. Of course they were happy that their king, their queen, their vizier, they all had become sane again. Now the whole village was sane again.
Buddha looks mad, Jesus looks mad. Now mad people like Sigmund Freud think that Jesus is neurotic. And Freud is neurotic, but he thinks Jesus is neurotic and he tries to prove it and he convinces many people. He has convinced almost the whole contemporary mind.
You ask me, Eti:
PLEASE TALK ABOUT THE FEAR OF GOING MAD.
The whole fear is absolutely unbased. You have already gone mad, otherwise you would not have been able to exist in the society. Whatsoever society you belong to, you have already become distorted. You are no more innocent; you are already corrupted and poisoned — by the priests, by the politicians, by the pedagogues. They have done the work; my function here is to undo it. And there is no need to ask for proof. When I say the whole world is a madhouse, there is no need for me to prove it. You can just look around and you will find thousand and one proofs…
Dave and Mabel are sitting on the porch. Mabel says, “Jeez, you are a nice bloke, Dave. You love me? Do you really love me?”
“Yeh, I love you, Mabel.”
“Would you die for me, Dave?”
“No, Mabel, mine is an undying love!”
Mulla Nasruddin was trying to hang himself. A friend was watching. He said, “Look, Nasruddin, if you want to hang yourself you have to put the rope around your neck, not under your arms!”
“Well,” said Nasruddin, “I tried, but then I feel suffocating!”…
There were four blacks in a car going ninety miles an hour. The car careens out of control crashes into a brick wall. The auto’s four occupants are strewn about the ground. By some miracle none is hurt, but all are still in a daze.
A policeman approaches the group and shouts, “All right! Who the hell was driving?”
“Nobody,” said one of the men. “We was all in the back seat turning on!”
When Fidel Castro visited the United States, the security people were warned to only allow in people with Cuban credentials. When they asked what the Cuban credentials were they were told, “A beard and a cigar.”
So first came Fidel Castro and behind him the others followed. The man behind him was wearing a beard and smoking a cigar and said, “Public relations,” so they let him in.
Next came another man with a beard, smoking a cigar, who said, “Chief of Police.”
“Come in,” was the reply.
Next approached a man with no beard and no cigar. When he was stopped at the entrance, to identify himself he pulled at the front of his pants and said, “Secret Police!”
A Jewish army captain walks into a prostitute’s parlor, marches up to the Madam and says, “How much would you charge for the pleasure of my company?”
“Twenty dollars, sir,” she replies.
“Jolly good!” he says and walks across to the window, opens it and shouts, “Company, forward march!”
A man was badly injured in a car crash and had to be taken to hospital. When he opened his eyes, the doctor was standing by his side with a serious look on his face.
“Well,” stammered the doctor, “I have some good news and some bad news for you. What do you want to hear first?”
“Give me the bad news first,” replied the injured man.
“We had to remove one of your legs.”
“Well,” said the man, “I expected it. It was a bad accident.”
“Yes,” said the doctor, “but unfortunately we removed the wrong one!”
With tears rolling down his cheeks in a croaking voice the man asked, “So what is the good news?”
“Well,” the doctor said cheerfully, “there is a guy in the bed next to you who wants to buy your slippers!”
And, Anand Eti, you think you can go mad in this world?
You belong to this world, you are part of it! You are already mad! Hence all fear is unfounded. Drop all fear. Now try to understand the mechanism of your madness. Once you accept that you are already mad there is a possibility to go beyond it, but if you simply remain afraid of going mad then there is no possibility. That fear won’t help you; that fear will go on driving you more and more mad. Fear itself is part of madness, otherwise there is nothing to fear. Death is absolutely certain; if there is anything certain in life that is death. Everything else is uncertain, only death is certain, so nothing to be worried about death. Old age is bound to come. Everything in life changes.
The friends of today may be enemies tomorrow; the enemies of today may become friends tomorrow. The person you love most you may hate most; the person you hate today you may fall in love tomorrow.
Life is a flux and you cannot hold anything static. So what is the point of fearing anything? One should simply live moment-to-moment, enjoying whatsoever is available.
Fear does not allow you to live totally; it always holds back. It never allows you intensity, passion, totality, wholeness; it keeps you divided. You love a woman and you love half-heartedly because you are afraid. Who knows where the love will land you, where it will lead you? You are always partial, fragmentary, and because you are partial and fragmentary nothing gives you the joy that it can give. Fear is not going to help. Fear can drive you more and more crazy.
Rather than being afraid, become cool, calm. Drop this feverish state and become watchful. Once you accept a fundamental fact — that the society has already driven you mad — now the work to be done is how to get out of this unnatural state that society has forced upon you.
And it is not difficult then, it is very simple. It is as simple as the snake slipping out of its old skin. Once you understand the mechanism of madness…For example, these are the causes of madness; ambition is the root cause. Try to understand your ambitiousness; your effort to be somebody in the world will drive you mad. Just be nobody and then there is no problem. Drop ambitiousness and start living, because the ambitious person cannot live; he always postpones. His real life will always be tomorrow — and the tomorrow never comes. The ambitious person is bound to be aggressive and violent, and the violent person and aggressive person are bound to go mad.
The non-ambitious person is peaceful, loving, compassionate. The ambitious person is always in a hurry, running, rushing towards something which he vaguely feels is there, but he will never find it. It is like the horizon; it does not exist, it only appears. The non-ambitious person lives herenow, and to be herenow is to be sane. To be totally in this moment is to be sane. Sanity means a state of peace, harmony, joy, blissfulness, benediction.
Source:
This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Gautam Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune, India.
Discourse series: Zen : the Special Transmission
Chapter #2
Chapter title: Come and Get It
2 July 1980 am in Buddha Hall
References:
Osho has spoken on many politicians, rulers and revolutionaries like Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jefferson, Kennedy, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Alexander, Napoleon, Subhash Cahndra Bose, Fidel Castro, Tito and more in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:
- From Bondage to Freedom
- From Ignorance to Innocence
- The Path of the Mystic
- From False to Truth
- From Misery to Enlightenment
- Zen: Zest, Zip, Zap, Zing
- Beyond Psychology
- Live Zen
- The Invitation
- Communism and Zen Fire, Zen Wind
- The Book of Wisdom
- The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3
- Tao: The Golden Gate, Vol 2
