What Now, Adam?: The Book of Men

Preface

You are fortunate to be alive today, because something immensely great is going to happen – and that is the meeting of science and religion, the meeting of West and East, the meeting of the extrovert mind and the introvert mind. It will create the new man who will be able to move easily to the outside or into the inside, who will be able to move easily into the extrovert world of science and into the introvert world of religion – just as you move outside your house into the garden and back into the house. It is not a problem, you don’t need any reconciliation. Each time you come out of your house onto the lawn you need not make great effort – you simply come out. It is feeling cold inside, and the sun is beautiful and warm outside, you come onto the lawn, you sit on the lawn. Later on when it becomes too hot you simply move in because there is coolness inside.

Just as easily as you come out of your house and go in, a total man will be able to move into science and religion; the inner and outer will both be his.

Carl Gustav Jung has divided human beings into two: the extroverts and the introverts. His categorization is relevant for the past but will be utterly useless for the future, because the future man will be both together. In the past, we have always been categorizing in this way, but the future man will not be a man and will not be a woman. I am not saying biologically – biologically the woman will be a woman, and the man will be a man. But spiritually, the future man will have as many feminine qualities as the woman, and the woman will have as many masculine qualities as the man. Spiritually, they will never be labeled as man or woman any more. And that will be the real liberation – not only the liberation of women, but the liberation of men too – liberation from straitjackets, liberation from imprisoning categories, liberation from all labels.

Man is not going to be Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian; man is not going to be Indian, German, English; man is not going to be white or black. Not that colors will disappear – the white man will be white and the black will be black – but these will become irrelevant, trivial, meaningless, they will not be decisive. The new man will have a universal consciousness, and the foundation will be laid by the meeting of science and religion.

Osho

Introduction

Men's liberation has not happened yet. Not only women, but men also need a great liberation movement – liberation from the past, from the slavery of life-negating values and social conditionings that have been imposed upon humankind by all the religions for thousands of years. Priests and politicians have created a guilt-ridden man who is alienated from himself, fighting a permanent inner war that pervades all areas of his life – a conflict between body and soul, matter and mind, materialism and spirituality, science and religion, man and woman, West and East.

Every man, from his early childhood, is being conditioned to function and survive in an efficiency-oriented, competitive world, and he is pressured from the moment he enters school to join the ambitious struggle and race for money, success, fame, power, respectability, and social status. As a small child already he learns to adopt the goals and values of his parents and teachers, his peers and those set up by the society as role models, without ever questioning them. Thus he becomes distracted from his true nature, his original being, and he loses the capacity for unmotivated joy, childlike innocence, and playful creativity. He is cut off from his creative potential, his ability to love, his laughter, his lust for life. Before long, his senses are deadened and his emotional life is repressed. He loses access to his own innate feminine qualities of feeling, gentleness, love, and intuition, and becomes a head-oriented, efficient, unfeeling robot.

Society teaches boys to grow up to become strong men, to suppress their feminine qualities of softness and receptivity, love and compassion. But, as Osho points out in this book, every man also has an inner woman within, just as every woman has an inner man inside. And only when these suppressed parts of ourselves are acknowledged, reclaimed, honored, can we finally become whole and fully alive.

The transforming power of meditation and awareness is an invaluable ally in this journey of becoming whole, a mature individual. Meditation is the catalyst that sets in motion and accelerates the process of inner growth. Meditation brings light to the darkness, makes us integrated, creates a balance between our male and female parts. It teaches us to live and enjoy our life in its multidimensionality – in a healthy balance of body, mind and soul, of the material and the spiritual, of the outer and inner world.

Man today is at a crossroads. In view of the multidimensional global crisis of our planet, in the beginning days of the third millennium, the question arises: What now, Adam? The limits of growth have long been reached, the belief in unlimited scientific and social progress, with its unending exploitation of the resources of Mother Earth, has been fundamentally shattered. All outer revolutions have failed. The time has come for an inner revolution.

Unless the individual man starts to come out of his robot-like, mechanical functioning and unawareness and begins to live his life with self-love, awareness, and deep respect for his real nature, there seems to be no chance that our world can escape global suicide.

Man needs a new psychology to understand himself, says Osho. And the basic understanding that needs to be deeply imbibed and experienced is that No man is just man, and no woman is just woman: each man is both man and woman, and so is each woman – woman and man. Adam has Eve in him, and Eve has Adam in her. In fact, nobody is just Adam and nobody is just Eve: we are Adam-Eves. This is one of the greatest insights ever attained.

He goes on to say:

My vision of the new man is of a rebel, of a man who is in search of his original self, of his original face. A man who is ready to drop all masks, all pretensions, all hypocrisies, and show to the world what he, in reality, is. Whether he is loved or condemned, respected, honored or dishonored, crowned or crucified, does not matter; because to be yourself is the greatest blessing in existence.

The editors

Part 1

Adam

Rebellion means dropping the whole past and living in the present without any tradition, without any mind, without any knowledge; living like a child, as if you are the first man, you are Adam. That is rebellion.

Adam really rebelled – even against God he rebelled. He must have been a beautiful man. He was the first man, but still, one thing that he did of tremendous importance was that he rebelled. He rebelled against an unjust order from God; it was unfair. He did not obey. And it is good: if he had obeyed, we would not be here at all. We are here because he disobeyed. We owe that much to Adam – and more particularly to Eve. That’s why I have so much respect for women: it is really my respect for Eve. And I have even more respect for the serpent. He was the first enlightened person, the serpent that persuaded Eve and triggered a great rebellion.

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The First Man

Adam is man, and every man is Adam-like. Every childhood is in the Garden of Eden. Every child is as happy as the animals, as happy as the primitive, as happy as the trees. Have you watched a child running in the trees, on the beach? – he is not yet human. His eyes are still clear, but unconscious. He will have to come out of the Garden of Eden. That is the meaning of Adam's expulsion from the Garden of Eden – he is no longer part of the unconscious bliss. He has become conscious by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He has become man.

It is not that Adam was once expelled; every Adam has to be expelled, again and again. Every child has to be thrown out of God's garden; it is part of growth. The pain is that of growth. One has to lose it to gain it again, to gain it consciously. That is man's burden and his destiny, his anguish and his freedom, man's problem and man's grandeur both.

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Until the Jews and Arabs and other tribes brought their racially exclusive and jealous God to the West, Toamy, Bacchus, Mithros and Apollo were the gods that man worshipped. Diana had her bow and arrow, Thor was in the north, the mother goddess was worshipped in the West. And then death and resurrection became the religion of the West. Guilt and sin were taught. Why is Adam a sinner? Why isn’t he like Theseus or Jason or Hermes? Is the concept of sin just a trick? To make men meditate?

I am a pagan. There is no God for me, except this existence. God is intrinsic to life. God is not outside life, God is this very life. To live this life totally is to live a divine life. To live this life partially is to live an undivine life. To be partial is to be irreligious. To be total and whole is to be holy.

The questioner asks about the past. In the past, all over the world, people were pagans, simple nature worshippers. There was no concept of sin, there was no question of guilt. Life was accepted as it is. There was no evaluation, no interpretation – reason had not interfered yet.

The moment reason starts interfering, condemnation comes. The moment reason enters, division, split starts, and man becomes schizophrenic. Then you start condemning something in your being – one part becomes higher, another part becomes lower, and you lose balance.

But this had to happen; reason had to come, this is part of growth. As it happens to every child, it had to happen to the whole of humanity, too. When the child is born he is a pagan; each child is a born pagan. He is happy the way he is. He has no idea what is right and what is wrong; he has no ideals. He has no criteria, he has no judgment. Hungry, he asks for food. Sleepy, he falls asleep. That’s what Zen masters say is the uttermost in religion – when hungry eat, when feeling sleepy go to sleep. Let life flow; don’t interfere.

Each child is born as a pagan, but sooner or later he will lose that simplicity. That is part of it; that has to happen, it is part of our growth, maturity, destiny. The child has to lose it and find it again. When the child loses it he becomes the ordinary man, the worldly man. When he regains it he becomes religious.

The child’s innocence is very cheap: it is a gift from God, he has not earned it. He will have to lose it – only by losing it will he become aware of what he has lost. Then he will start searching for it. And only when he searches for it, and earns it, achieves it, becomes it – then he will know the tremendous preciousness of it.

What happens to a sage? He becomes a child again; nothing else happens to a sage. He is again innocent. He went into the world of reason, division, ego, a thousand and one ideals; he went almost mad with evaluation. And then one day, finding it all just absurd, stupid, he drops it. But this second childhood is far more valuable than the first childhood. The first childhood was just given to you. You were not even asked, it was a pure gift. And we cannot value gifts; you value a thing only when you make effort for it, when you strive for it, and when it takes a long journey to come to it.

There is a Sufi story:

A man, a seeker, came to a Sufi mystic. And he asked, I am searching for my master. Sir, I have heard you are a wise man. Can you tell me the characteristics of a master? How am I to judge? Even if I find my master, how am I going to decide that he is my master? I am a blind man; I am ignorant, I don’t know anything about it. And without finding a master, it is said, no one can find God. So I am in search for a master. Help me.