Tao: The Pathless Path

"The Way has no map, the Way is not charted, the Way is not such that you can follow somebody and find it. The Way is not like a super highway, the Way is more like a bird flying in the sky - it leaves no marks behind. The bird has flown but no marks are left. So the Way is a pathless path. It is a path, but it is a pathless path. It is not ready made, available, you can not decide to walk on it, you will have to find it. And you will have to find it in your own way, nobody else's is going to function. Buddha has walked, Lao Tzu has walked, Jesus has walked, but those ways ar not going to help you because you are not Jesus, you are not Lao Tzu, you are not Lieh Tzu. You are you, a unique individual. Only by walking, only by living your life will you find the Way. This is something of great value.

That's why Taoism is not an organised religion. It can not be. It is an organic religion, but not an organised religion. You can be a taoist if you simply live your life authentically, spontaneously; if you have the courage to go into the unknown on your own, individual, not leaning on anybody, not following anybody, simply going into the dark night not knowing wether you will arrive anywhere or you will be lost. If you have courage, that risk is there - it is risky, it is adventurous.

Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism are super-highways: you need not to risk anything, you simply follow the crowd. you go with the mob. With tao you have to go alone, you have to be alone. Tao respects the individual and not the society. Tao respects the unique and not the crowd. Tao respects freedom and not conformity. Tao has no tradition. Tao is rebellion and the greatest rebellion possible.

That's why I call Tao the pathless path. It is a path, but not like other paths. It has a very different quality to it, the quality of freedom, the quality of anarchy, the quality of chaos. Tao says that if you impose a discipline on yourself you will be a slave. The discipline has to arise out of your awareness, then you will be a Master. If you impose an order on your life this will just be a pretension: the disorder will remain deep in the very core of your being; the order will be on the surface, at the center there will be disorder. This is not going to help. The real order arises not from the outside, but from the innermost core of your being. Allow disorder, don't repress it. Face it, take the challenge of disorder - and by taking the challenge of disorder and living it, living dangerously, an order arises in your being."





"Of course, freedom is dangerous because there is no security in it, no safety in it. There is great safety when you are following the crowd; the crowd protects you. There is great safety when you are fooling the crowd; because of the vey presence of so many people you feel that you are not alone - you can not be lost. Because of this security you are lost. Because of this security you never search and you never seek and you never enquire. And truth can not be found unless you have enquired, unless you have enquired on your own. If you take borrowed truths you become knowledgeable, but to be knowledgeable is not to know.

Tao is very much against knowledge. Tao says that even if you're ignorant and the ignorance is yours, it is good, at least is yours. And it has an innocence to it. But if you are burdened with accumulated knowledge, scripture, tradition, then you are living a false, pseudo life. Then you are not really living, you are just pretending that you are living. You are making impotente gestures, empty gestures. Your life has not the intensity, the passion - can not have the passion. That passion arises only when you move on your own, alone, into the vast sky of existence.

Why can't you move alone? Because you don't trust life. (...)

Man has created these ideologies just to hide the fact that he does not know, to hide the fact that he is ignorant. Man is cunning and he can create rationalisations, but these rationalisations are bogus - you can not move with them into the truth. You will have to drop them. Tao says that ignorance is not the barrier against truth - knowledge is the barrier."




"So the difference between the poet and the mystic is not much. The poet is coming closer, the mystic has arrived. For the poet, there are only glimpses of truth; for the mystic, truth has become his very life. The poet is only transported to the world of truth and then falls back again. For the mystic, truth has become his abode: he lives there, he lives as truth."



"Tao means to exist on the Way and to exist in such a way that the Way and you are not two. This existence is one - we are not separate from it. The separation, the idea of separation is very illusory. We are joined together, we are one whole. We are not islands, we are one continent. You are in me, I am in you. The trees are in you,  you are in the trees. It is an interconnected whole.

The whole is one - separation is not possible. The very idea of separation is the barrier. The idea of separation is what we call the ego. If you are with the ego, you are not on the path, you are not in Tao. When the ego is dropped, you are in Tao. Tao means an egoless existence, living as part of this infinite whole, not living as a separate entity."



Osho - Tao The Pathless Path Volume I