The Origin Story

Long ago, people had become very clever.

They knew how to conquer land.
They knew how to organize societies.
They knew how to discipline children, train soldiers, define morality, and build empires.

Everything was improving.
And yet, something essential was quietly dying.

Life had become tight.

People were constantly becoming something:
better citizens, better husbands, better saints, better rulers.
But they had forgotten how to be grass,
how to be water,
how to be ordinary and at ease.

Existence was flowing.
Humanity was pushing.

That is when Lao Tzu appeared.

Not as a teacher in the usual sense.
Not as a reformer.
But as a man who watched rivers more than crowds.

He noticed something simple and devastating:

Water never tries to rule the river, yet it reaches the ocean.

Trees do not hurry, yet they arrive at spring.

The sky does nothing, yet everything happens inside it.

And humans?
They were trying to improve the universe.

This mismatch was the wound.

When people came to Lao Tzu asking for guidance, they expected rules.

“How should we live?”
“How should we govern?”
“How should we become virtuous?”

Lao Tzu saw the trap immediately.

The moment you say should, violence enters.

So he did something almost irresponsible.

He refused to teach how.

Instead, he pointed to how things already are.

He spoke in riddles, paradoxes, and negations because direct instruction would only strengthen the will to control.

He said things like:

Act without acting
Know without knowing
Lead by not leading
Win by yielding

And people were confused.

Good.

Confusion was closer to truth than certainty.

This is why what later came to be known as the Tao Te Ching was created, and why Osho later called it The Tao Upanishad.

It was created because effort had become the problem.

People were doing too much:

too much morality
too much ambition
too much self-improvement
too much control

The Tao was offered as a counter-weight.

Not a path upward, but a return downward.
Not transcendence, but belonging.

The Tao Upanishad was not created to awaken you.

It was created to stop you from interfering.

It whispers:

“Existence is already intelligent.
Your struggle is the only disturbance.”

It was written for those who sensed that:

discipline had made them rigid
success had made them anxious
goodness had made them artificial

Lao Tzu was not interested in saints.

He was interested in natural human beings.

People who move like water.
Who respond without calculation.
Who trust life enough to stop managing it.

That is why the Tao Upanishad feels soft.

But softness here is not weakness.
It is unresisting strength.

A tree that bends survives the storm.
A mind that yields survives truth.

The Tao was created because humanity needed to hear one radical sentence:

“You don’t need to fix existence.
You need to stop fighting it.”

And when Osho spoke on the Tao, he recognized something immediately:

This teaching does not liberate by shock, like Ashtavakra.
It does not awaken through technique, like Vigyan Bhairav Tantra.

It liberates by relaxation.

By trust.
By unlearning.

That is why Tao Upanishad exists.

Not to make you extraordinary.

But to allow you to be so ordinary,
so natural,
so unforced,

that truth has no obstruction left to pass through you.

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