"All great discoveries are made by amateurs.

"It always happens that when you start new work, you are very creative, you are deeply involved, your whole being is in it. Then by and by, as you become acquainted with the territory, rather than being inventive and creative you start being repetitive. This is natural, because the more skilled you become in any work, the more repetitive you become. Skill is repetitive.

"So all great discoveries are made by amateurs, because a skilled person has too much at stake. If something new happens, what will happen to the old skill? The person has learned for years and now has become an expert. So experts never discover anything; they never go beyond the limit of their expertise. On the one hand, they become more and more skillful, and on the other hand they become more and more dull and the work seems to be a drag. Now there is nothing new that can be a thrill to them – they already know what is going to happen, they know what they are going to do; there is no surprise in it.

"So here is the lesson: It is good to attain to skill, but it is not good to settle with it forever. Whenever the feeling arises in you that now the thing is looking stale, change it. Invent something, add something new, delete something old. Again be free from the pattern – that means be free from the skill – again become an amateur. It needs courage and guts, to become an amateur again, but that’s how life becomes beautiful."


3. Choose Nature

"Wherever you find that society is in conflict with nature, choose nature – whatever the cost. You will never be a loser.

"The thinking up to now has been that the individual exists for the society, that the individual has to follow what the society dictates. The individual has to fit with the society. That has become the definition of the normal human being – one who fits with the society. Even if the society is insane, you have to fit with it; then you are normal.

"Now the problem for the individual is that nature demands one thing, and society demands something contrary. If the society were demanding the same as nature demands, there would be no conflict. We would have remained in the Garden of Eden. The problem arises because society has its own interests, which are not necessarily in tune with the interests of the individual. Society has its own investments, and the individual has to be sacrificed. This is a very topsy-turvy world. It should be just the other way round. The individual does not exist for the society, the society exists for the individual. Because society is just an institution, it has no soul. The individual has the soul, is the conscious center." Osho