Uselessness !

It happened to me. I am a useless man. In my childhood days I would be sitting down just next to my mother. She would look around her and say, "I would like to send someone to fetch vegetables from the market, but I cannot see anyone to send" -- and I would be sitting there just next to her! She would say, "I can't see anyone here!" And I would laugh inside myself -- she couldn't send me to the market, I was so useless that she was not aware that I was there.

Once, my aunt came to stay, and she was not aware of my uselessness. My mother was saying, "Nobody is in to go to the market. All the children have gone out and the servant is ill, so what can I do? Some-one has to be sent."

So my aunt said, "Why not send Raja? He is sitting there, not doing anything."

So I was sent. I asked the market vendor there, "Give me the best vegetables you have got, the best bananas, the best mangoes." Looking at me and the way I was talking he must have thought I was a fool, because nobody ever asks for the best. So he charged me double and gave me all the rotten things he had, and I came home very happy.

My mother threw them away and said, "Look! This is why I say nobody is here."

Chuang Tzu insists very much: Be alert and don't be very useful; otherwise people will exploit you. Then they will start managing you and then you will be in trouble. And if you can produce things, they will force you to produce all your life. If you can do a certain thing, if you are skillful, then you cannot be wasted.

He says that uselessness has its own intrinsic utility. If you can be useful for others, then you have to live for others. Useless, nobody looks at you, nobody pays any attention to you, nobody is bothered by your being. You are left alone. In the marketplace you live as if you are living in the Himalayas. In that solitude you grow. Your whole energy moves inwards.

-OSHO

(Chapter 8-The Useless, The Empty Boat)