Hope is childish. You become mature when you don’t project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don’t have any future; you just live in the moment—because that is the only reality there is. In the past, religion used to talk about the hereafter. Those were the childish, immature days of religion. Now religion talks about here-now; religion has come of age.
In the Vedas, in the Koran, in the Bible, hereafter is the basic goal. But now man is no longer that childish. That sort of God and that sort of religion is dead. It was a religion of hope; it was a religion of future.
Now another sort of religion is asserting itself all over the world, and this religion is about here-now, the present. There is nowhere else to go and there is no other space and no other time to live, only this space and this time, here and now. Life has to become very intense in this moment. A man who lives in hope dissipates life. He spreads life; it becomes too thin. And when it becomes too thin, it is never happy. Happiness means intensity, tremendous depth.
When I say drop all hope, I mean be so intense in the moment that there is no need for the future. Then there is a turning, a transformation. The very quality of time changes for you it becomes eternal.
What can you hope? You cannot hope for the new. You can only hope for the old, maybe with a little modification here and there, a little more decorated. Hope means simply projecting the past into the future: you loved a man yesterday, you want to love the man tomorrow also. And you know that yesterday was not a fulfilment, hence the hope. You missed something yesterday. Now that missed gap is torturing you; it is creating agony.
Osho is known for his revolutionary contribution to the science of inner transformation, with an approach to meditation that acknowledges the accelerated pace of contemporary life.
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