There Is So Much To Explore And To Learn And To Make Available To Humanity - Osho

- OSHO, YOU HAVE SAID THAT YOU ARE THE BEGINNING, THAT THE BEGINNING IS MYSTERIOUS, AND THAT IT MAY TAKE THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO PROVE WHAT HAS BEEN BORN. PLEASE TALK TO US ABOUT THE POSSIBILITIES OF HUMANITY AT THIS CLOSING OF AN OLD CYCLE AND THE BEGINNING OF A NEW.

- The beginning is naturally mysterious because you can only see a seed changing into a sprout, but you cannot see what is going to happen later on -- that the sprout is going to become a big tree with great foliage, thousands of flowers, fruits. That is still in the future.

You can only remember later on that the beginning was just two small leaves, a sprout, and now you see a big, huge tree. There are trees which can live five thousand years, but in the beginning you cannot see all those possibilities. It is always retrospectively that things are understood.

The old man has a few characteristics which will be disappearing from the New Man.

The old man was attached to the crowd, different kinds of crowds -- religious crowds, political crowds -- and he wanted to be attached to more crowds. He created Rotary Clubs, Lion's Clubs, just to be part of as many crowds as possible, because alone he was nothing. The more crowds he belonged to, the more he felt he was.

Belonging to crowds was one of the basic characteristics of the old man. The New Man will have just the opposite characteristic: he will be alone.

He will not like to belong to crowds -- the family, the society, the church, the state, the nation, the race. He will hate to belong to any crowd; he will like to be just himself, alone. Because he will have a being, he need not collect a false being from crowds.
The old man was always past-oriented. His heroes were always of the past: his saints were always of the past, his holy books were always of the past -- the more ancient, the more valuable. The old man lived through the dead.

The New Man will not look backwards; he will look forwards, he will be able to encounter the vast emptiness of the future.

The old man was very afraid to look forwards because there is simply emptiness, nothingness; everything is in the past. The old man was very historically-minded.

The New Man will be more courageous to look into the future, to face nothingness, because there is no fear in facing nothingness. If you have a certain centering, a certain grounding of your being, you can encounter nothingness blissfully, peacefully. He will live in the present -- because you cannot live in the past, you cannot live in the future; you can only live in the present.

The past man, the old man, has not lived at all. He was only making gestures of living, but he never lived, because his mind was never in the present.

The New Man will be more grounded in the present, unconcerned with the past, more open to the future, to the adventure of the new. His whole ecstasy will be to discover the new, not to go on repeating the old... to be discovering something new each moment, creating something new, being something new.

So the New Man will always be an opening, always an adventure. And because he will not be concerned with the old, all the discriminations of the past will be dropped from his mind -- Hindu or Christian, black or white, man or woman. There will not be any evaluation that somebody is higher and somebody is lower. He will be more human than the old man has been.

The old man was more animal, less human. The New Man will be more human, less animal, and the best of the New Man will have lost all animality in them. That means their life will be full of trust, full of love, full of compassion, full of gratitude, and a thousand and one qualities which the old man has been preaching but not practicing.
The New Man will not be preaching these qualities, he will be practicing them. They will be simply his life.
The old man has lived with all kinds of divisions -- nations, races, religions.

The New Man will live an undivided humanity, with all the sources pooled into one. And that will enable him to explore the universe.
We have the capacity, but our whole energy is being wasted in fighting amongst ourselves on this small planet, earth. We have not explored this vast universe that surrounds us, which is such a challenge. And exploring it, the New Man is going to realize things which the old man could not even imagine.
For example, if the whole earth is one, there is no question of wars. And if all the energy that has always been wasted in wars is available for some creative purposes -- and it is immense energy... with that energy man can explore the whole universe.

There is a possibility.... The scientists guess that at least fifty thousand planets have life. Now, what kind of dead and dull men have lived on this earth up to now, that they have not been able to make any contact with other living beings in the universe? It is our universe, but we have not even called this earth ours... just small fragments. And so much is waiting to be revealed that once the new man starts exploring....

For example, if we can move with the speed of light... and I certainly think that there is a possibility. If light can move with a certain speed, why can't means and methods be found so that man can move with the same speed as light? That is the ultimate speed.

The greatest geniuses have been thinking that if man can move with that speed, then he will not become old. He can go searching, exploring in other solar systems, on other planets for a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years, and then can come back. All his contemporaries on the earth will be dead, their grandchildren will be almost near to death. But the adventurers who had gone on the journey will be just the same age as when they had left the earth. At that speed of light, aging does not happen.

Now, great adventures are there. It is not only that we have this earth, that we have explored it all and we are feeling bored, that there is nothing to explore, that there is no America for Columbus. This whole universe is there for millions of Columbuses. For millions of years we are not going to reach the boundary, because there is no boundary. And one never knows -- whatever scientific researchers have known is just a small fragment of the whole universe; they don't have the whole idea of the universe.

The New Man will be finding new ways in every dimension. The old man was always traditional, clinging to the trodden path. Now there are already thousands of inventions which are not being used because of the old man... because the old man is not ready to use anything new. While the old thing is working well, why bother? Why get into dangerous things?

For example, in Japan, it is now fully proved by experiments that at a certain speed, trains rise above the earth 0.4 inches. So they don't need rails -- just in the beginning, at the start, before they take off. And they can go up to four hundred miles an hour very easily. That is the minimum, four hundred -- we don't know the maximum. And if trains can move above the earth, it will be a totally different experience. It will be really comfortable, far cheaper, and so fast.
The trains are ready, but the old man is not willing to use them. It seems dangerous -- four hundred miles per hour. It is the same danger.... When the first railway trains were introduced... the first day on the London station nobody was ready to sit in the trains. They were invited free, meals were given, but nobody was going to sit in them. And it was only an eight-mile journey, but nobody was ready to sit in the trains because the churches were saying that God never made trains, so it must be the work of the devil.
This has been the way of the old man.

If we can have contact with living beings, perhaps we may come across beings who have more senses than we have... because why should five senses be the limit? We cannot conceive -- beyond the five senses -- what will be the sixth sense?

We cannot conceive beyond taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch. What could be the sixth or the seventh or the eighth or the tenth? Who knows? -- because if we had four senses, we would not have been able to think of the fifth. And on every planet life must have grown differently because the climate is different, the situation is different.

There is so much to explore and to learn and to make available to humanity, that the New Man will be basically adventurous in all dimensions. In medicine, in biology, in space travel, in meditations -- in every possible dimension the New Man will be an adventurer.
He will be very willing to go into it. He will be ready to risk all for the new. And then a vast world of experiences becomes available.

We are living on a small planet, fighting with each other, quarreling over small things, while the whole universe waits to be discovered. And it may change everything on the earth. It may be that these explorations of the universe, of other planets, will finally help life to survive, because there is a possibility that by the end of this century the earth will change its axis.

Now that will bring tremendous changes -- in the climate, in everything on the earth. If just the Himalayan snow starts melting, then all our great cities, which are ports, will be drowned. Just the Himalayan snow is enough to raise our seas forty feet higher, if it melts. It has never melted, it is eternally there -- but the change of the earth's axis can bring it closer to the sun: it can start melting. Then New York and Bombay and Calcutta and Tokyo and San Francisco -- all the big cities which are near the ocean will be simply drowned.

Scientists are worried that the sun may be burning itself out. It has been giving light for millions of years, its fuel may be finishing. We may not know exactly when, but they don't think it can last forever. A few million years is their estimate. But if the sun does not rise one morning, then everything dies as it is.

It will be necessary that we have other planets available for people to be moved to. If any danger to the earth arises, if there is any danger to the sun, then there is no need to be in this solar system. The whole humanity can be moved to other planets. There is no need for this whole evolution up to man to go down into the water or to die out simply because the sun's fuel is finished.
The old man has nothing to give to humanity in such emergencies.
The New Man will be capable.

OSHO,
Light on the Path
Chapter #29
Chapter title: Nietzsche: a great freedom or a great danger
3 February 1986 in Kathmandu, Nepal