The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death. Osho

This is a pompous, ridiculous and redundant thing to say. And, despite its opening differentiation from religious concepts of life and death, its posture is inherently religious — because it is inherently valuative. This is an aesthetic judgement on my part.

All religious orders (exoteric or esoteric) gain power from three things:

  1. Positing the existence of a consumer: the ego/nafs/soul (to be saved or to be obliterated or to be enlightened, it doesn’t matter — the religious order cannot operate without consumers)
  2. A supplier: the God that supplies something to the consumer (Love, judgement, knowledge, salvation, obliteration etc).
  3. Constructing a capitalism of forms that regulate supply from 2 to 1 : states of being (life and afterlife) or states of knowledge (ignorance/blindness and understanding/sight) or states of awareness (intellectual/unemotional and empathic/connected to the Love).

That is, a religious order takes the Flesh of the Real, and cuts it, regulates it: so that there are consumers and there are Gods and there are forms of supply.

It’s the projection of the dialectic, of this capitalism onto the flesh of the human body. Both supplier and consumer are constructed after the image of the physical body. The consumer can, for example, be “awakened” or remain “asleep” — can be really “alive” or remain “in the grave” — can be “resurrected” and “burnt” or “taste fruits of paradise”. And that these states (forms of supply) can be obtained through engagement with the supplier. (The engagement may take any number of contractual permutations, from 1-1 prayer to indirect mirroring via a teacher/prophet/text.)

I am uninterested in the statement. This is for reasons of aesthetics and personal psychological experience. Who cares about the consumer/supplier configuration? You are free to believe you are a consumer and that there is no supplier but the supplier. But why limit yourself in such a way?

I’m more interested in freeing the exchange (the forms of supply) from the consumer-supplier complex. That is, ignoring the referents and so ensuring the exchange is purely derivative. It is a shift from religion to poetry.

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