The fifth question:

Question 5

OSHO, HOW CAN I GET BACK THE WILL TO LIVE?

Wolfgang,

YOU are suffering from the ancient German disease, will to live, will to power, will and will and will.

You have fallen in wrong company here. Either escape or we are going to de-Germanize you, because here the message is surrender, not will.

Listening to me, you must have been misunderstanding. I am not teaching will to live. Will to live is already there, otherwise how would you be living? Wolfgang, you are alive! That's enough proof that the will to live is there. If the will to live leaves you, you will not breathe even a single breath more. Who will breathe? For what? If the will to live leaves, your breath will leave you immediately. You are still breathing; the will to live is there. The will to live is not something to be learned, it is inborn.

What has to be learned is will to surrender. That is not inborn, that has to be learned. Will to live is a natural phenomenon, instinctive. Will to die is not instinctive; one has to learn it with great effort. It needs tremendous courage to learn it, even to think of it.

Sannyas is will to die, so that God can live, so that you disappear, so that you are no more a hindrance, so that you are no more a rock in His way.

But you must be misunderstanding me. I am saying one thing, you are hearing something else. The German screen must be misinterpreting.

A fat man was seated on his front steps drinking a can of beer, when a busybody spinster from down the street began to berate him for his appearance.

"What a disgusting sight!" she said. "If that belly was on a woman, I'd swear she was pregnant!"

To which the man simply smiled and replied, "Madam it was and she is."

It is always possible to understand things in your own way. Words are very flexible. Words don't have any fixed meaning; they cannot have. The meaning is always provided by you.

When I say something, the moment it reaches you it changes its color. You immediately dye it in your own color.

But one thing I must make you aware of is that if you want to learn will to live, you are in a wrong place. Here, I am teaching how to die -- although one who is ready to die attains to life eternal, but that is another matter. That is something which happens as a consequence and cannot be used as a motive. You ARE in a wrong place.

The bank robbers arrived just before closing time and promptly ordered the few remaining depositors, tellers, clerks, and guards to disrobe and lie face down behind the counter. One nervous blonde pulled off her clothes and lay down on the floor, facing upward.

"Turn over, Maybelle," whispered the girl lying beside her. "This is a stick-up, not an office party!"

You have to be aware of where you are. You are not listening to Friedrich Nietzsche -- will to power. And you are not listening to Adolf Hitler either! You are in a totally different dimension.

I teach you how to die, because that is the only way that one attains to eternal life. When the seed dies in the soil, the sprout arrives. And when the drop disappears in the ocean, it becomes the ocean.

I teach you crucifixion, because resurrection follows; it inevitably follows. I cannot promise anything, because if you crucify yourself with the motive that you will be resurrected, then it will not happen.

One has to be unmotivated in the world of religion. One has to move for the sheer joy of it and for nothing else. One has not to be result-oriented, and that is the most difficult thing for the modern mind to do: not to be result-oriented. Whatsoever we do, we always do it for something else. Everything is a means and has to be used for some end. And what I am teaching here is the end in itself; it is not a means to anything else.

Each moment is an end unto itself. Enjoy it, die into it, disappear into it, and then something miraculous happens: great eternal life descends in you. You will be surprised, because that was not your motivation.

I don't talk about what is going to happen, because that can create a disturbance in your mind; you can become too much interested in it. I only talk about what you have to do and I leave the outcome to the future. It will happen, because I know it is bound to happen. I don't tell the seeds, "Die so that you can become trees," because if the seeds are too interested in becoming trees they will not be able to die at all. If the dewdrop is too interested in becoming the ocean, he will become very hesitant, afraid to risk dropping into the ocean... who knows?