TAKE WHOLE RESPONSIBILITY ON YOURSELF AND DOORS OF FREEDOM WILL BE OPENING TO YOU.

"God, fate, destiny – these are bogus words, mumbo jumbo, nothing more than that. Drop them completely, because dropping them will make you an individual, fully responsible for your acts. And unless you take the responsibility on yourself, you will never become strong, you will never become independent, you will never have the taste of freedom."

"You can have freedom. But the cost is to accept responsibility in its totality."

"I have felt such immense freedom that looking at you I feel sad. You have the same opportunity, the same potentiality to blossom into a free individual, but you go on remaining a slave. And the way you manage it is by never being responsible. You think not being responsible makes you free? Not feeling responsible for your actions, for your thoughts, for your being, do you think you are freed from all the consequences? No, absolutely no."

"It makes you a slave, it makes you something subhuman. It takes all glory away from you. You cannot walk straight, you become a hunchback. Your intelligence cannot grow because you have not accepted the challenge. You are waiting for fate, for destiny, for God. You are thinking, "When the time comes – the right time, God willing – I will be blissful too." There is no God who can will your blissfulness. You are alone in existence."

"You come alone, you die alone. Between birth and death, of course you can deceive yourself that someone is with you – your wife, your father, your mother, your husband, your friend – but this is just make-believe. You come alone, you go alone; you are alone between birth and death."

"And I am not saying that you cannot love a man or a woman. In fact, when two independent, free people, who take responsibility on their own shoulders, meet, there is immense beauty in it. Nobody is a burden to the other. Nobody is dumping anything onto the other' you have stopped the very idea of dumping anything. You can be together, but your aloneness remains untouched, pure, crystalclear, virgin. You never trespass each other's territories. You can enjoy each other just because you are separate."

"The more separate you are – the more clearly it is understood that you are alone, she is alone – the more there is a possibility of a great meeting of two alonenesses, two purities, two individuals."

"Forget words like destiny, fate, kismet, God. And don't allow yourself to be cheated by astrologers, mind readers, palmists, predictors of your future. There is no future if you don't create it! And whatsoever is going to be tomorrow is going to be your creation. And it has to be done today, now – because out of today, today's womb, tomorrow will be born."

"Take the responsibility totally on yourselves – that's my message to you. That's why I am continuously destroying the God in your mind. I have nothing against him. How can I have anything against him? – he does not exist! Do you think I am wasting my time fighting with something which does not exist? No, I am fighting with your conditionings; they exist. God does not exist, but an idea of God exists in you, and I am fighting with that idea, telling you to drop it, be clean, and take the whole responsibility."

"This is my experience: the day I took my whole responsibility on myself, I found the doors of freedom opening to me. They go together."

"Everybody wants freedom.
Nobody wants responsibility."
"You will never have freedom, you will remain a slave. Remember, remaining a slave is also your responsibility. You have chosen it, it has not been forced upon you."

"Take responsibility! And then even in utter poverty, suffering, imprisoned in a jail, you will remain completely a master of yourself. You will have a freedom which comes with responsibility."

"All these religions have been making you dependent on God, on fate, on destiny. Those are just different names of something non-existential. What is true is your slavery or your freedom. Choose. If you choose freedom, then you have to destroy all the strategies of religions which make you a slave. That's what I am doing here: cutting all your chains, making you free from everything, so that you can be yourself."

"And the moment you are yourself, you start growing, you become greener. Flowers start opening up, and there is great fragrance around you."

ANIMALS HAVE DESTINY BECAUSE THEY MOVE ON A CERTAIN RAILS, BUT MAN HAS NO DESTINY; IN THIS LIES HIS FREEDOM

"Man has no destiny – although you have been told for thousands of years that you have a destiny. This is what I call the way of the cunning, deceiving, exploiting people. Now when it is said to you that man has a destiny, you never think of a railway train. Only railway trains have destinations, stations."

"But beautiful words can go on hiding ugly realities. "Man has a destiny" – I have been hearing it from my childhood, and I have been saying each time it has been mentioned by somebody in some way, "Please don't insult me."

"When I said this to one of my professors, he was shocked. He said, "I am not insulting you. To have a destiny is not an insult, it is the most honorable thing in life." I said, "It may be for you because you don't understand what you are saying. Destiny means predetermined; my tomorrow is already predetermined by somebody. I have not even been consulted – as if it is none of my concern, I am nobody, just some playing cards in somebody's hands; whatsoever he wants he makes out of me. Whatever game he plays, that is my destiny. And this is thought to be respectful?"

"And the professor was not saying something crazy. That is what is thought all around the world. I said, "I can understand why you are shocked, because you have never thought about the word destiny. How can I have a destiny? I have not determined it. Then who is the guy who determines it? And what right has he got to determine it? He has not even asked me. I don't know him, we have not even been introduced. Just for courtesy's sake he could have asked me,'This is going to be your destiny – do you like it or not?' But nobody has even bothered that much."

"Man has no destiny.

And I say unto you that it is only man who has not any destiny. Dogs have; buffalos have; donkeys have. They move on certain rails. Each donkey throughout millions of years has lived the same routine life: the birth, the love affair, and the difficulties of marriage, children, old age, all hopes shattered, all dreams unfulfilled, and the darkness of death. All the donkeys have lived that way, they are still living that way – but not man.

"In fact, I want to say to you that all men are not behaving like men. A few are behaving like monkeys, a few are behaving like Yankees, but none even tries to assert, "I am a man." But that assertion contains so much, it is almost immeasurable."

"So first: man has no destiny. Once you understand it, almost all your problems disappear. I say "almost" – perhaps ninety-nine percent disappear; one percent remains. I want it to remain. Ninetynine percent of your problems are created by deviating you, by driving you into ways which are not for you. But whenever I said that this is an insult, the reaction was the same – a shock."

"Slowly I became aware that people don't use words consciously. What they are saying is almost like a parrot, perhaps worse than a parrot."

"Implication is a totally different thing. For example, "Man has a destiny"; the meaning is clear, but what about the implication? What is the implication of the word destiny? There are so many implications. One is, that man is not a man at all, that man is a thing, not a being, because a thing can have a destiny. A chair can have destiny; it is made for a certain function, it Will fulfill its function.
Man is not made to order. He is not furniture.
Man is consciousness.
Consciousness cannot have any destiny.
Consciousness has freedom."

"Destiny is just the opposite of freedom; that is its implication. Destiny means you are a born slave. Even before you were born your stamp of slavery was completely sealed; you were finished before you were born. That's the meaning of destiny as far as implication is concerned. In fact you were never born, because before birth death had happened; that is your destiny. You are programmed.'

"Because of this idea of destiny, astrologers, palmists, and all kinds of future predictors go on exploiting man. They would not have been able to exploit you if you were not carrying the idea that you have a destiny. If you have a destiny, then there may be some ways to find out what it is: perhaps in the lines of your hands, perhaps in the lines of your head, perhaps in the lines of your feet, or perhaps in your birth chart, in the combination and position of stars, planets. Some way must be there to read the program."

"And the strangest thing is that you feel happy with astrologers telling you about your future. You are really too curious to know about the future, without ever thinking that to have a future means you are dead. If the future is already settled, then how is freedom possible? If tomorrow something is going to happen, then it is going to happen; I am just a victim in the hands of some unknown force – I am not my own master."

"To have a destiny means you are not your own master.
You cannot do anything about your life.
These are the implications of that simple word, destiny. It leaves you dead. It leaves you a slave. It leaves you without any excitement because all is determined. It leaves you without any hope, because what can you hope? Whatever is going to happen is going to happen whether you hope or not. You are no longer significant in any way in your own life. Even to call it your own life is not right:
Destiny has taken all juice out of you.
This is what has made man into a problem."

"Once this is accepted, that "I am a determined being," then you are just driftwood, because you don't know what that destiny is. There is a subtle, unconscious feeling that there may be wise people who know it. Your parents may be knowing it, your teachers, your professors, your priests, your monks, your messiahs. These people must be knowing it because you don't know."

"You don't know because there is no destiny to know – but all these people have managed a totally different show. They say you don't know because you are ignorant, but there are wise people who know – incarnations of God, the people who have realized themselves, messengers of God. These are the people who know. Your only wise course will be to listen to them and to follow them and to believe in them because you don't know and they do."

"And certainly those people who pretend to know also pretend that they have all the authority of the past; all the scriptures, all the other prophets are behind them – they are not alone. They inherit the whole wisdom of the world, and they are the last word – perhaps the concluding word. They have weight."

"If man has a destiny then there is no possibility of turning off anywhere. And we have been told for millions of years, "You have a built-in program." Now from where are you going to know what this built-in program is? Somebody has to tell it to you. Those are the manipulators, all around you; like an octopus, they go on sucking your blood from every possible side. And they go on filling you with ideas that you have to become this, you have to become that, you have to become somebody who has nothing to do with your nature. This is what has made man a problem."

"In fact, man can be the solution, not only of himself, but of the whole existence, because he is the highest peak of consciousness."

"He is at the topmost peak of existence; but he is in so many knots, puzzles, that he cannot figure out himself what he is, what existence is."

THE LAW OF KARMA: A CONSPIRACY OF THE PRIESTS TO MANIPULATE YOUR MIND

"The law of karma is something psychological: neither legal, nor social, nor moral, but something psychological. It has not been worked out that way up to now."

"Certainly the law of karma is neither a scientific law nor part of any legal system. Then what kind of law is it? It is a hope. A man wandering in immense darkness, groping his way, clings to anything that gives a little hope, a little light – because what you observe in life itself is something totally different from the law of karma. A man who is a well-known criminal may succeed and become the president, the prime minister; or vice versa: he was not a criminal before, but when he becomes the president or prime minister of a country he becomes a criminal."

"And if you have the potential of being a blessing to people, then absolute power will be an absolute blessing in the world."

"But man's life has many strange things in it. Only the potentially corruptible person moves towards power. The potentially good person has no desire for power. The will-to-power is the need of a corrupted being, because he knows that without power he will not be able to do what he wants to do." "Adolf Hitler first wanted to be an architect, but all the schools of architecture refused him because he had no potential as an architect. He could not even draw a straight line. He wanted to become an artist – if not an architect, then an artist – but no school would accept him. If the school of architecture was not going to accept him, then.... Art, particularly painting, needs an even greater caliber, and he had no talent for art. Disappointed everywhere, rejected from everywhere, he started moving towards power."

"The moment Adolf Hitler became powerful, in his spare moments he was painting; and of course, then, everybody had to appreciate his paintings. And none of his paintings were worth calling a painting; they were just a wastage of canvas and color, without any significance. Not only that, they were ugly, nauseating. If you had kept his painting in your bedroom, in the night you would have suffered nightmares."

"Power brings into actuality what is hidden in you."
"But strangely, the good man has no need to be powerful, because good can manifest without power. There is no need for good to have power."
"Good has its own intrinsic power.
Evil needs some outside power to support it."

"The man who has a heart throbbing with goodness, with blessings, feels no need to be the president or the prime minister. He has no time to waste in this ugly game of power politics. He has enough energy. That, good brings with itself. He will create music, he will compose poetry, he will sculpt beauty in marble; he will do something for which power is not needed. All that is needed is already provided for him. That's the beauty of good, that it is intrinsically powerful."

"Let it be very clearly understood: You can be certain that anything that needs power from outside is not good. It is something intrinsically impotent; it will live on borrowed life."

"So in life this strange situation happens: bad people reach good positions, become respectable or honored, not only in their time but throughout history. It is full of their names."

"That's why you remember Gautam Buddha. Somewhere they have to mention his name because he was a king who renounced his kingdom. If he had been a poor man's son then nobody would have even heard about him. And there have been many whose names are not known at all. Even while they were alive only a few people came to feel that they had a different kind of presence. Goodness has its own intrinsic power, and it has its own benefit, blessing. It is not somewhere else in some other life – that if you do good now, in your other life you will get paid for it. That is a strange kind of law – and that's what the law of karma is."

"Now, the priesthood is in a difficulty to explain this situation which is occurring everywhere. Good people will be found in every corner of the earth – poor, starving, suffering. Bad people will be successful. The cunning – who are ready to cut anybody's throat, who have cut many people's throats, who have been stepping up on people's heads towards power and riches, who have used people as if they were things – they have all that should really belong to the good people."

"How is the priest going to explain it away? He has found a way: the law of karma. He cannot explain it herenow so he shifts the whole scene. He makes death come in between your actions and their results; results will be after death, in the next life. But why? You put your hand in the fire and you will be burned in the next life? If you put your hand in the fire now, you will be burned now."

"So any priest, any monk, anybody coming from the East talking about the law of karma – take him to the fireplace. Tell him, "Put your hand in the fire so we can see whether the law of karma works herenow. Or does it take so much time that it is necessary for death to happen first, and then the result will follow? Action – death – result? Death has to intervene absolutely?" I know he will not be ready to put his arm into the fire."
"That's why I said I don't have much to say about the law of karma, only very little, just two words: boo boo."

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