Osho and homesickness

Excerpts from “Above All, Don’t Wobble”- Osho (2007)

So there is nothing to be worried about. I am not saying repress those thoughts of homesickness, no. Just take note of them, that they are there. It is natural, don’t be worried about them. I can send you back home. When you have understood the homelessness of life, you can go back – but then there is no home where you can go back to!

The family, the friends, the son, they are all just conveniences, conventions, make-believes – because everybody is a stranger. Your son is a stranger to you. Just by being a son the strangeness is not lost. If you look into his eyes you will find a stranger you have never known before. We are all strangers. Wherever you move, you are moving with strangers – there is no homeland. Wherever you are, you are a foreigner; everybody everywhere is unfamiliar, unknown.

You don’t know yourself – how can you know others? You are not even familiar with yourself – how can you create a family? A family means those who are familiar – but nobody is familiar. We just go on believing that because it is easy. To create doubt, to enquire, to ask questions, creates difficulties.

So we simply go on believing: somebody is a mother, somebody is a father, somebody is a son, somebody is a wife, and we believe that everything is okay, everything is in its place. We have not only placed relations, things in the world, in categories, in pigeon-holes, we have even placed God somewhere there. (looking ceiling-wards) He is there and everything is okay. This is how we create a mental world – which exists nowhere except in your mind.

Destroy all these projections, because reality has to be encountered. Reality is beautiful and projections are just foolish. Reality has a tremendous beauty in it, and projections are only dreams – but they are working like screens.

My whole effort with you, and with everybody here, is to make you more and more aware so that you can live with reality as it is. You don’t demand that it should be like this or like that – you simply accept it as it is. You simply live in a let-go. You allow it and move with it – not thinking of the morrow, not thinking of the future, but living in this moment.

I will send you, but wait a little. When you are ripe and you understand the homelessness, the basic homelessness of man…. Man is a homeless animal. Jesus says, ‘Even foxes have holes to hide their head. The son of man has nowhere to put his head.’ Man is homelessness. Trees have their roots in the earth, birds have their nests, animals have their fixed way of life, a style, a character.

Only man is characterless, styleless, homeless. Only man is a stranger – but that is the beauty and the glory.

Nothing is wrong in it. It gives you a real life of challenge; a life of rebellion, a life which is mutating every moment. Every moment one dies, and every moment one is born again.

Just wait and relax, and watch these moments in the mind; don’t be concerned too much. Yes, memories will come: mind will have nostalgia and think of the past, will create golden auras around the past, and will think of the future. But these are the traps – that’s how the present is lost. Just this moment is true. The past is no more, the future is yet to be.

Don’t move in these dead and unbornthings. Be here, so one day wherever you are, you can be there. If you go right now… and you can go, because I never force anybody to do anything. If you feel like going, you go. But then you will start thinking of Poona, because this mind which keeps thinking of the past is bound to think of Poona. Then there you will feel uncomfortable, and you will start thinking of coming back.

I will send you when you have learned how to be wherever you are: in Poona, Italy, it doesn’t matter.