I read a celebrated and not recommended author who proposed a kind of renewed hedonism. Indulgence, material abundance, and a life geared toward the full satisfaction of desires. What a joke! The fellow comments on various religions, and with each note shows himself to be supinely ignorant of them all. He says that in the East there were those who proposed religion as a way to blend in with a “universal consciousness,” since material accumulation is difficult in these regions of the globe, and therefore it is reasonable to provide these people with something that surpasses and does not depend on what they cannot attain. He also adds that reincarnation was conceived as a balm for those less fortunate in this life; therefore, feeding them with the hope of a better future life. Oh, Lord! And such a guy as a religious leader! Has he not taken the trouble to read a historical summary of the religions he comments on, to find out that in the East they flourished in the bosom of palaces, where material abundance and the satisfaction of desires led to unbearable boredom! where the idea of living this life over and over again ad infinitum, as reincarnation suggests, aroused nothing but absolute terror in them, leading them to take extreme measures to break this detestable cycle!
Category: Notes
Modern Man Works
Modern man works; when he is not working, he is in his “free time”, in his “leisure time”, when he is distracted and practices hobbies. This is what his philosophy of life boils down to. And that is why, one hour or another, his world collapses. The mediocrity of the life he leads exposes the emptiness of all his actions. It is as if he had accepted to live as a bifunctional machine; there is no sense in the way he lives, there are two buttons: in the first, the “work” mode is turned on; in the second, the “free time” mode is activated. It is ridiculous to think that this procedure is currently called “normality”, whose deviations already produce eccentrics and alienated people. To be normal, today, is to sell or kill the time one has available. “What is your hobby?”—and a man from a distant time would feel insulted.
Simple Roadmap
The first step for the one who does not want, at the end of his life, to feel it completely wasted is to find, as soon as possible, something that fills it with meaning, that motivates, that brings the desire to wake up the next day—this something is what is commonly called vocation. Having found it, he must then carry it out on a daily basis, regardless of the circumstances. If more urgent needs rob it of time, he must carry it out, however little it may be, but considering it as the unavoidable priority of the routine—to postpone it is to waste the scarce time. Thus, he should deliberate the current situation as temporary, and all the rest of his life should be aimed at creating the conditions that will allow him to exercise such a vocation full-time. No effort must be spared, and he must use everything at his disposal to achieve this goal and free himself from this routine that is inadequate. In this, he already achieves a previous satisfaction, he already experiences a feeling of time well used. Finally, there are two possible scenarios: for those who create for themselves the conditions to exercise their calling full time, all they have to do is exercise it; for the others, all they have to do is not give up, and then they will not close their eyes regretting wasting the opportunities they had.
I Go Through Several of Osho’s Speeches…
I go through several of Osho’s speeches and am gradually provoked by a funny irony. I, who have repeatedly pinned the “Western mind” and its formalism; I, as I go through these lines, question the author on each page: “Where did you get that from? Where is this and that other quote from the Buddha? And this sutra, where does it come from? Where are all these quotation marks coming from?”… It is as if a force is saying to me: “Isn’t this what you wanted? Weren’t you, even today, debauching the sterile referencing and lame reasoning of a guy?”. Yes, yes… The truth is that I am unbearably Western. I read Orientalists with pleasure, but it is possible that I would not even know how to behave in front of one of them. If I have learned and am learning anything from them, there is no doubt that there is a fundamental discrepancy between us that will never allow me to fully accept any of their doctrines, to see them fully impregnated in my thinking and acting, or, in other words, there is a limit to how much I can accept from them. So I enjoy a few hundred pages, but at some point my mind gets tired and demands a volume with bibliography and footnotes.