Birthday of Winston Churchill

Born on 18^th November, 1874, Churchill was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, during the Second World War, and again from 1951 to 1955. Best known for his wartime leadership as Prime Minister, Churchill was also Sand Hurst -educated soldier, a Nobel Prize-winning writer and historian, a prolific painter, and one of the longest-serving politicians in British history. Churchill is best remembered for successfully leading Britain through World War Two. He was famous for his inspiring speeches, and for his refusal to give in, even when things were going badly. Widely considered one of the 20th century’s most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the UK and Western world, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe’s liberal democracy against the spread of fascism. However, he has been criticised for some wartime events – notably the 1945 bombing of Dresden – and also for his imperialist views, including comments on race.

When Osho talks about Churchill, he recalls an anecdote and says, “When Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister for the first time — he was tired from the election campaign and all the politics that had gone before and all the struggle to reach the top — his wife thought it would be good to call a friend who knew many beautiful jokes so he could tell a few jokes to Winston Churchill, “That will relax him, help him to laugh a little. He has been so serious for so many days and he looks so tired.” The friend was called; he came with all the latest jokes. He asked Winston Churchill, “Would you like to know the latest jokes?” Churchill looked at him and said, “Please, no more — I have appointed them all in my cabinet!”

If you look around, if you are watchful enough, then you are bound to stumble again into something so beautiful and so ridiculous. The very idea of creating the world and creating you all is such a cosmic joke! God must have a sense of humor….Life is so full of hilarious moments that it is almost impossible to miss them. It is a miracle how people go on missing them; otherwise you will come across jokes everywhere.”

Osho say……

BELOVED OSHO,

WHY DO I JUDGE SO MUCH?

It is a great disease. And we carry the disease from generation to generation.

Everybody is brought up in a climate of continuous judgment, condemnation, criticism. This makes people hard, this makes people without compassion. And the society needs people who don’t have compassion, who are hard, and who are always putting everybody down. Your continuous habit of judging is nothing but an effort to put everybody lower than you. When you criticize something, when you judge someone, you have already taken a higher position.

You don’t know the other person. You don’t know his life story, you may have known a little fragment. On that fragment, you judge the whole life of a man — unashamedly. But the society wants you to be continuously struggling, competing; continuously putting others down, pulling on their legs and trying to raise yourself higher and higher in the world of power and position.

This world is almost a battlefield. And there is cold war going on continuously; everybody is everybody else’s enemy. Here there is no friend. I was reading THE BIBLE and a small child was sitting by my side. He was very curious and very cute. Whenever I used to sit in the garden, he would come and sit — and he was intelligent; he would ask questions. He would ask me to read something to him so he could also get some idea of what I was reading. He was the son of a principal who lived next door. I read him the sentence from Jesus: “Love your enemies as you love yourself.” And that little boy said, “This is very good. But I want to know… has he said anything about loving your friends?” This is what only an innocent child can ask. A knowledgeable person will feel that it doesn’t look right to ask such a question — why become a laughingstock? But he asked and I had to think it over. I told the boy: “Because there are no friends.” He said, “Right!” He said “This is the beauty of asking questions to you, because you say the truth. There are no friends, it is a friendless world. There are only enemies. That’s why Jesus says, `Love your enemies,’ because there is no other kind available.”

It is simple. Without becoming in any way superior… and

one becomes superior only by having superior values. If you have infinite love, if you have unlimited compassion, if you have absolute fearlessness — with these qualities, you never think yourself superior, you are. Only those people who are not superior think that they are superior. Superior people never think, they never even become aware of the fact that they are superior. They are simply superior and they enjoy it.

They really feel a deep pity for you, that you are capable of enjoying all these riches and you are missing — just collecting seashells and colored stones and wasting your life.

But to attain to superior qualities, to become a superman without any self-consciousness that “I am a superman….” The superman will know that “I am just an ordinary man.” That will be one of the basic and fundamental qualities of the superman: that he cannot even dream that he is superior to anybody.

One of the mystics of India, Kabir, has a beautiful song. He was uneducated; he could not write, he could not read. All his songs are spontaneous outpourings. They may not be grammatical — they are not; they may not be linguistically correct — they are not; but they are so beautiful that after Kabir, there have been thousands of poets in this country who know language, who know grammar, who know the whole art of poetics, but they are pygmies. Kabir is a superman. His songs are simple but so full of meaning. One of the songs says: “I used to think that I was a superior man, but then I went for a pilgrimage and came in contact with many, many people. When I returned home, the idea of being superior was dropped. Instead, I started feeling that I must be the most ordinary man in the world. My first idea was my ignorance about people. When I came to know so many people, I realized my utter ordinariness.”

But this is the quality of a superman. Only a superman can say that, can have the guts to say it. But to attain to this superiority, you will need superconsciousness. You will have to climb to the sunlit peaks of your own being. That is a little arduous. The cheaper way is — rather than making yourself superior; without any difficulty, the cheaper way is to judge others as inferior. Nobody can prevent you, it is just your inside idea. And because everybody is inferior, you are superior. Now this is the cheapest way. You don’t move anywhere, you are the same person, but in your mind you have put others…. That does not change anybody else, it does not change you — but it gives a great consolation.

Winston Churchill, a great orator, was asked once: “You are one of the most important, articulate, impressive orators in the world. Do you remember the first day, when you faced thousands of people looking at you and you were standing on the stage — do you remember the stage fright?” And you will be surprised at what Winston Churchill said. He said, “Don’t be worried about the first day, that was sixty years ago. But even today, it is the same. When I stand up on the stage, the same fear — and I have been speaking for sixty years!” He was the only person in the whole world who remained a member of the parliament for sixty years continuously without a gap. And he says that he feels afraid. Then the person asked, “How have you been managing?” He said, “I have my own strategy. My strategy is: before I stand up, I look all around and say to myself: All these are idiots; otherwise, why should they come to listen to me? And there is no need to be afraid of these idiots, because what can they do? Their opinion does not matter at all. Once I settle with the idea that all these people are idiots, then I start my speech without fear — what is the fear? who is there who can judge what I am saying?”

This is the cheapest way. But everybody’s doing it — ordinary people and the so-called heroes like Winston Churchill — they are all doing this nonsense. That’s why you judge.

Your judgment about others is really an effort to feel satisfied that you are better: “This man is a thief. That man is a rapist. This man is crazy.” And you can go on labeling anybody. Finally, only you are left. But judging is the quality of the inferior person. The superior person never judges. He feels compassion. If he sees something wrong in somebody, he feels compassion. He tries in his own way, without offending the person, to help him. But there is no judgment…

Judgment is an ugly phenomenon. Rise in your own being — higher. Don’t destroy that opportunity by judging people as lower. You are doing immense harm to yourself, not to anybody else.

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune. 

Discourse name: Sermons in Stones
Chapter title: Yes is the heartbeat of life
Chapter #25
24 December 1986 pm in

References:

Osho has spoken on many politicians and rulers like Abraham Lincoln, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Jawaharlal Nehru, Kennedy, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Alexander, Napoleon, Machiavelli and more in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. From Bondage to Freedom
2. From Ignorance to Innocence
3. The Path of the Mystic
4. From False to Truth
5. From Misery to Enlightenment
6. Zen: Zest, Zip, Zap, Zing
7. Beyond Psychology
8. Live Zen
9. The Invitation
10. Communism and Zen Fire, Zen Wind
11. The Book of Wisdom
12. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3
13. Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol 2