When Alexander the Great died, millions of people came to pay homage. And they found, much against tradition, that his hands were visible. In almost every country it is customary to place the hands inside the coffin. When people asked about it they were told Alexander has expressly wished his hands be visible so that people could see that he too had left the world empty-handed. A great conqueror like Alexander also leaves the world with nothing is his hands! How nice it would be if every corpse’s empty hands were exposed so mankind could witness again and again the truth that worldly possessions have nothing to do with life at all.
Nothing outward can ever extinguish the inner fire. No outer happiness can ever cure inner pain. No amount of outer light can ever dispel the inner darkness. But up to now all attempts to remove this inner darkness have been made by outward approaches. And it is this very effort that has given birth to science.
I am not against science. On the contrary. I am a great friend of science. But I wish to assert that science can never bring peace, joy or anything of real value to mankind. It can provide comforts, however, but all these comforts do is help us forget our misery for a while. Within a very short time we get used to them. We soon take them for granted and then we are miserable once again. All they do is suppress mankind’s misery, not cure it. And then we seek new answers in even greater comforts. It is an endless merry-go-round. It causes neuroses, agony, misery, and ultimately culminates in madness.
Osho
The Long, the Short and the All
Truth And Science
