From Ignorance to Innocence

Answers to the Seekers on the Path

Talks given from 29/11/84 pm to 29/12/84 pm

English Discourse series

CHAPTER 1

Pseudo-religion: the stick-on soul

29 November 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHY IS HUMANITY TODAY BECOMING MORE AND MORE MISERABLE?

THE cause is very simple, perhaps too simple. It is very close, very obvious, and this is the reason why most of the people go on missing seeing it. When something is very obvious you start taking it for granted. When something is too close to your eyes you cannot see it. For seeing, some distance is needed.

So the first thing I would like you to remember is that it is not only today that humanity is miserable.

It has always been miserable.

Misery has almost become our second nature. We have lived in it for thousands of years. That closeness does not allow us to see it; otherwise it is so obvious.

But to see the obvious you need a child’s vision.

And we are all carrying thousands of years in our eyes. Our eyes are old; they cannot see afresh.

They have already accepted things, and forgotten that those things are the very cause of misery.

The religious prophets, the political leaders, the moral lawgivers – you have respected them, not even suspecting that they are the cause of your misery. How can you suspect them? Those people 2

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have served humanity, sacrificed themselves for humanity. You worship them; you cannot relate them to your misery.

The causes of misery are camouflaged behind beautiful words, holy scriptures, spiritual sermons.

It happened when I was a student, the first prime minister of India came to visit the city. In Jabalpur, just in the middle of the city flows all the dirt of the city. The city is very big – ten times bigger than Portland – and just in the middle of the city, the whole dirt flows like a river. There is a bridge over it, and to pass that bridge is to know something about hell. I have never seen any place so stinking.

The day Jawaharlal, the prime minister, came to visit the city the bridge was one of the greatest problems. He had to cross it, that was the only way to get to the other part of the city. So they covered the bridge with mogra flowers. It was summertime, and the mogra is so fragrant a flower....

The whole bridge on both sides had garlands of mogra hanging. You could pass across the bridge and you would not be at all aware that just behind those mogras, the wall of flowers, was the most dirty place possible.

I was just going to the university. Seeing people decorating the Naudra bridge – that was the name of the bridge; it was called Naudra because it had nine pillars, nine doors through which the dirt used to flow – seeing the people putting those flowers up, I stopped there. I started working with those people who were decorating, and nobody made any objection because many people were working, and it had to be done quickly – soon Jawaharlal was going to pass. So I got mixed in with the workers, the volunteers.

When Jawaharlal’s procession came and he was standing in an open jeep, I stood in front of the jeep and stopped it. It would not have been possible in any other place because everywhere there were military police, guards, security. On Naudra bridge these volunteers were on both sides, and there was no crowd because nobody wanted to stand there. And the crowd was not aware of what had happened – that those mogra flowers had completely covered the smell. The place was smelling of paradise! The people were not aware of it because nobody was near there.

I told Jawaharlal, ”Please get down. You have to look behind these flowers – that is the reality of this city. You are being befooled; these flowers are not decorations for your welcome, they are put here to deceive you.”

He said, ”What do you mean?”

I said, ”Get down, and just come close to the flowers and look beyond them.” He was a very sensitive and intelligent man. Others tried to prevent him – the local leaders.

I said, ”Don’t listen to these fools. These are the people who have arranged these flowers here.

Have you seen in the city, anywhere, thousands of flowers arranged for your decoration? And here you don’t see any crowd. The arithmetic is simple. Just come down.” He got down and went with me to look beyond the flowers: he could not believe it. He told the people, the local leaders, the mayor, the members of the corporation and the president of the congress, ”If this young man was not so stubborn, I would have missed seeing the reality of your city. Is this what you have been doing here?”

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He said to me, ”If you come to New Delhi sometime, come and visit me.” I said, ”Not sometime – I will come simply to visit you. But tell the idiots surrounding you that I am allowed in.”

He told his secretary, ”You have to take care that nobody prevents him.” That’s how that secretary became one of my followers. And whenever I needed, he was immediately ready to arrange it: the doors of Jawaharlal’s house were open for me.

I remembered this incident because that’s what has happened with the whole of humanity.

You see the misery, but you don’t see the cause. The cause is covered with flowers. You see the flowers, and because flowers cannot cause the misery you turn back.

The second thing to remember is that it is not only now that humanity is miserable; it has always been so.

Yes, one thing new has happened – it is a little difference, but a difference that really makes a difference – and that is: a certain percentage of humanity has now become more aware than it has ever been before.

Misery has always been there; but to be aware of the misery, that is a new factor. And that is the beginning of transformation.

If you become aware of something, then there is a possibility that something can be done to change it.

People have lived in misery, accepting it as part of life, as their destiny. Nobody has questioned it.

Nobody has asked why.

And before anybody could ask why, the religious prophets, messiahs and priests were ready with the answer.

Christianity is ready with the answer: because Adam and Eve committed the original sin; hence you are suffering. Now, can you see any connection?

Even according to Christianity, the world was created four thousand and four years before Jesus’

birth – which is not at all accurate, which is absolutely stupid. The world is millions of years old. And by world, I mean only our world, this earth; I don’t mean the sun, the solar system, because that is far more ancient. And I don’t mean the world of the stars... because they are not as small as you see them. They are bigger than your sun – they are all suns – and they all have their own solar systems. And they are far more ancient than our solar system.

In fact, when you come to calculate about existence, years cannot be used as a measurement, they are too small. A million years does not mean anything. When you start thinking about how old the solar system is, you have to use a new measurement which is not used ordinarily because we never come across such a big thing. And that new measurement is invented by physics: the light year.

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You have to understand what a light year means, because our galaxy is millions of light years old.

Light travels with a tremendous speed, the greatest speed there is. Anything traveling at that speed will turn into light. The heat of that speed is such that anything at that speed will become light. So there can be no speed greater than the speed of light. We cannot invent any rocket which moves faster than light, because then it will turn into light itself, immediately it reaches the speed of light.

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second: per second, one hundred and eighty six thousand miles. In one minute, sixty times more; in one hour, again sixty times more; in one day, again twenty-four times more; in one month, again thirty times more; in one year, again twelve times more – that is the meaning of one light year. And our sun is millions of light years old.

Even if the Christians are right – Adam still must have committed the original sin at least five thousand years ago. Somebody committing a sin five thousand years ago – how many generations have passed since then? – and you are still miserable for his sin? That seems to be absolutely unjust! If he did commit the sin, God made him suffer. Why should you be suffering? You were never a part of it. If anybody has to suffer, it should be God Himself, because in the first place what was the need of creating those two trees? If man was not allowed to eat from them, it was so simple

– God should not have created those two trees. He was committing the original sin – if anybody was.

Then, even if He had created them, what was the need to tell Adam not to eat from those two trees?because I don’t think that Adam, on his own, even by now would have found those two trees.

Among the millions of trees, it would have been just a coincidence if Adam had found them. But God showed him the trees, saying, ”These are the two trees, and you are not to eat from them.” And this God is Jewish. Sigmund Freud understands it more – he is also Jewish, born out of the original sin – he understands far better than this Jewish God. To tell somebody not to do something is to provoke them, is to give them a challenge, is to make the person fascinated. It is not the snake who really persuades Adam and Eve, it is God’s ”don’t” that hits hard; and they become curious why.

And the trees are not poisonous. One tree is the tree of wisdom. There seems to be no logic in why the tree of wisdom should be prohibited to man. And the other tree is of eternal life. Both trees are the best in the whole garden of Eden. God should have told him, ”Don’t miss these two trees!

Anything else you can miss, but these two trees you should not miss.” On the contrary, He says to Adam and Eve, ”Don’t do this.”

That ”don’t” is the real cause of their disobeying; the serpent is just an excuse.

But even if they did commit the sin, whether through God or through the serpent, it is absolutely certain that you are not part of it – in no way. You were not there to support them.

The Christians have been befooling the whole world, the Jews have been befooling the whole world, saying that it is because of the original sin that man is suffering, he is in misery. He has to turn back, he has to undo what Adam and Eve did. They disobeyed; you have to obey God. Just as they disobeyed and were thrown out of heaven, if you obey totally, without any doubt, without any questioning, you will be allowed back into the world of bliss, paradise.

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Misery exists because of the original sin, according to these Judaic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism. These three religions have come from the same source; they all believe in the same original sin, and that we are suffering because we are the progeny of those same people who committed it. Even human justice cannot punish a criminal’s son because he is a criminal’s son. His father may have murdered somebody, a major crime, but then you cannot punish the son too. The son has nothing to do with it.

Adam and Eve did not commit any major crime – they just had a little curiosity. And I think anybody who had any sense would have done the same. It was absolutely certain to happen – because there is a deep need in man to know. It is intrinsic, it is not sin.

It is in the very nature of man to know. And God is prohibiting him. He is saying, ”Remain ignorant.” There is, in the same way, an intrinsic, intense desire for eternal life. Nobody wants to die.

Even the person who commits suicide is not against life. Perhaps he is hoping the next life will be better. He is so tired of all this suffering and anguish that he thinks, ”In this life there is no chance, so why not take a chance? This life is not giving you anything and is not going to give you anything –

take the chance. If you survive and enter into another life, perhaps....” That ”perhaps”, that lingering desire, is still in the man who is committing suicide. He may be committing suicide against anything, but he is not committing suicide against life itself.

These two are the basic and the deepest – rooted desires in man – and yet he is prohibited from fulfilling his own nature and his nature is condemned as criminal, as a nature which is rooted in sin.

If he fulfills it he feels guilty; if he does not fulfill it he will remain miserable.

These people have created the background of your misery.

Let me summarize it: if you are natural you will feel guilty. Then that will be your misery, your anxiety, your anguish – what punishment there is going to be for you! You are disobeying God, because all your scriptures and their commandments are against your nature. So if you fulfill your nature there is misery.

If you don’t fulfill your nature, there is bound to be misery because then you will be empty, unfulfilled, discontented; you will feel futile, utterly meaningless.

So there are two types of miserable people in the world: one who follows the religious prophets and one who does not follow them.

And it is very difficult to find a third category, a man like me, who does not care a bit. I neither follow them nor am I against them. I do not even hate them – there is no question of loving them. To me they are absolutely absurd and meaningless, irrelevant to our existence. Take either side and you will be in trouble. Don’t take sides, either for or against; just tell those guys, ”Go to hell! And take all your scriptures with you.” Only then can you be free of misery.

In the East they have a different explanation. Explanations can be different, but the purpose is the same. In the East, the three religions – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism – all teach that your misery is From Ignorance to Innocence

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because of bad actions in past lives. And you have lived millions of past lives, in different shapes, different bodies, animals, birds.... In that way Hindus have a vast perspective. Eight hundred and forty million species of life exist. At least their perspective is vast, not small like the Christian... only six thousand years.

Their perspective is certainly great: eight hundred and forty million species, and you have passed through them all; then you have become man. In all these long – you will have to use the word ”light years” with Hindus and Jainas and Buddhists – you have committed so many things, good and bad, and everything is recorded with you. If you are suffering, that simply means your bad actions are heavy on you. You have to suffer, that is the only way to get rid of them. You have to pay for your actions. Who else is going to pay? You murdered somebody in your last life, now who is going to pay?

Their explanation seems more mathematical, more logical, than Adam committing sin and you suffering six thousand years afterwards. So many generations have passed, and still the sin is fresh. So many generations have suffered and been punished for it, and you are still being punished for it. Can you punish so many people for one man’s sin? And this is going to go on forever and forever. At least the eastern vision seems to be more logical: that in your past life you have committed some bad actions and of course you have to suffer for them. I say it looks more logical, but it is not existentially true.

What do I mean when I say it is not existentially true? I mean that whenever you act, the result of the act is intrinsic in the act itself, it does not wait for the next life. Why should it wait? If you drink poison now, will you die in the next life? I have been arguing with Hindu shankaracharyas, Jaina monks, Buddhist bhikkus, saying ”Tell me, if somebody hits his hand with a hammer, will he suffer in the next life or here, right now?” Action brings its reaction immediately. It does not wait. Why should it wait, and why for the next life particularly?

They have been befooling people, of course more logically than Christians and Jews and Mohammedans. Hence no sophisticated Hindu can be converted to Mohammedanism, Judaism, Christianity – impossible, because all your ideas look very childish.

He has far more logical

explanations. But those logical explanations are only significant on the surface; deep down there is nothing much in them.

I have argued with all these people. Not a single one has been able to answer my question. If you put your arm in the fire, will you be burned in the next life? The action is here, the reaction has to be here. They are joined together, they cannot be separated. The moment you love, you are happy.

It is not that in this moment you love and you are in deep misery now, and in the next life whether there you love or not, suddenly one day you will feel happy – the good karma of your last life!

You are disconnecting things which are not, in the nature of things, in any way possible to disconnect.

You hate somebody and in that very hatred you are burning in fire. You are angry and in that very anger, not out of it, you suffer. My approach is, that each moment, whatsoever you are doing you are getting the immediate reaction.

These people are befooling you because they cannot say many things which go against the vested interest. They cannot say that you are poor because the rich are exploiting you – because they are From Ignorance to Innocence

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hired by the rich people. Now, for example, a Jaina monk, Acharya Tulsi.... Jaina monks don’t travel in the rainy season. And in India, it is not like here, the seasons are well cut: the rainy season is four months, the summer season is four months, the winter is four months. Lately they have been disturbed because of atomic experiments going on everywhere; otherwise, exactly on the expected date and day, the rains will begin, and exactly on the expected date and day the rains will stop.

The Jaina monk does not travel for the four months of the rainy season. He travels for eight months, and for four months he does not travel because the earth is wet, the grass has grown and many small insects, ants, are there in the grass. He cannot walk on the grass because the grass is alive.

And he cannot walk on the wet ground because there may be some insects which the wetness encourages. He has to walk only on dry ground where he is absolutely certain that no life can be killed by his walking. So the rainy season is out of the question. He cannot even carry an umbrella: that will be a possession. So in the rainy season it will be most difficult. He does not have more than three clothes – and all three clothes will be wet, so he will not have even clothes to change into.

Acharya Tulsi stays in one place. He has seven hundred monks, and for eight months those monks move around the country and for four months they come to live with the master in one place. But it is a very difficult problem: only very rich people can invite Acharya Tulsi to spend the rainy season in their city, because those seven hundred monks will come. That is nothing. When the seven hundred monks are there and the head of the monks – who is like a pope in that sect – is there, then thousands of followers will come to listen. Because in the rainy season in India, everything is closed, you cannot do anything – the shops are empty – so people start playing cards and chess. All kinds of festivals happen in the rainy season because everybody is free. People visit their relatives, there is nothing at risk in their business.

People visit their religious leaders. And it is a tradition that whosoever comes to see the head is a guest of the city, just as the head is a guest of the city. So to invite Acharya Tulsi means spending millions of rupees, and only very rich people can afford it. And if they can afford it, they must be businessmen. A businessman is never a loser. He is not a gambler. He counts everything, with interest. If he is going to invest – that’s the right word – millions of rupees in Acharya Tulsi, then he is going to take as much juice out of Acharya Tulsi as possible, with interest, and he will not leave. And both the parties understand it. It is understood, not said. Acharya Tulsi has to protect the rich person because it is the rich person who protects Acharya Tulsi and his monks. It is a simple arrangement.

The same is true about other religions in India. It is a very costly phenomenon. For example another Jaina sect whose monks live naked cannot stay in any household or family, because to be so close to a family may create attachment. Some trouble may arise, they may be distracted. They can only stay in a temple. And Jaina temples are the costliest and the best temples in India. It is difficult now to make that kind of temple. In Mount Abu – a few of you may have seen them, because I used to have my camps there – they are such masterpieces of art. And so much money has been poured into those temples: they are all marble. And a single temple may take hundreds of years to be made. The grandfather may start, and the third or fourth or fifth generation may inaugurate the temple when it is complete. And thousands of workers will be working on it, artists, craftsmen.

To invite a naked Jaina monk.... Because the naked Jaina monk is thought to be of the highest order of monks. Acharya Tulsi is not a naked Jaina monk. He is thought to be of a lower degree. Yes, he is From Ignorance to Innocence

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a jaina, but if you ask the followers of the naked monks, they will say, ”There is not much difference between us and Acharya Tulsi. Perhaps he keeps three clothes, we keep six clothes, that is all the difference there is. The real difference is between our monks.” And certainly the naked Jaina monk tortures himself more than any in the whole world. Nobody can compete with him, he is the best masochist possible.

To invite a naked Jaina monk means you need a temple which can do justice to his prestige, otherwise you are insulting him. So every big town, big city, goes on wasting money in raising temples because the naked monk can stay only in a temple. You will be surprised that Jainas are not many but they have so many temples all over the country. Even in places where not a single Jaina family lives, you will find Jaina temples, because the Jaina monks pass by there and, they need some place to stay.

You will be surprised – it looks very funny to see the whole thing – a Jaina monk is not supposed to beg from anybody other than a Jaina. Now, Jainas are very few, only three hundred thousand all over India – just like a teaspoon full of salt in the ocean. There are thousands of towns and villages where there is not a single Jaina. But the Jaina monk has to move for eight months continually; he has to pass through villages where no Jaina lives.

So what do Jainas do? A procession of twenty families – twenty buses, fifty buses – will follow the monk. The reason is.... You will be surprised, why fifty buses? Just one bus or one car would be enough if one Jaina family were needed. No, the Jaina monk has to go begging and he is not allowed to beg from just one family. That is against his scripture. And when the scripture was made it was perfectly right, because there were so many monks, they were becoming a burden on society.

So if a monk comes to one family, finds good food and starts coming there every day, he will become a torture to the family. And if other monks come to know, they will also start coming to the same family.

So the law was made that no monk begs from just one family – not even a single whole meal. Even for a single whole meal, he has to beg from a few families: little pieces from here, little pieces from there. And he is not supposed to beg from the same people again tomorrow. No other monk is supposed to beg from the same place where some monk has already begged. Now this creates trouble: the monk has to beg from many families.

So fifty families, sixty families, with all kinds of foods... and for themselves also everything is needed

– tents and everything.

In fact there are only twenty-two naked Jaina monks left because the whole thing is so arduous that when one naked monk dies, he is not replaced. It is very difficult. So fifty, sixty buses, a whole procession.... Then the tents, and a whole city will be put together in the night because in the morning the monk will come. And they have to make temples in places where, strange to know, they cannot even find a Jaina worshipper. They have to hire a brahmin to worship in the temple.

Now, brahmins and Jainas are enemies – Jainism is a revolt against brahminism – but brahmins are the only people who know how to worship, so they will be paid to do it. They are not really worshipping; you can see, how can they worship the enemy? This man Mahavira, whose statue is there, has been continually criticizing brahmins. Now, a brahmin worships for a salary. Perhaps deep From Ignorance to Innocence

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inside he is cursing, but on the surface he is praising and showering flowers and doing whatsoever Jainism prescribes for use in worship.

Then the whole city will be ready by the morning. The monk comes, and the monk knows about all these buses and that this whole city of tents has been raised in the night. When he came the previous day there was not a single tent. And all these people he knows, because they have been following him for four months continuously. Now, these people have to be rich to drop all their businesses, to take their whole family around. And the season is really difficult. In some places there are two hundred inches of rain, and in some places, perhaps the worst, five hundred inches of rain – and they have to follow even on the mountains, because Jainas make their sacred places on the mountains.

Hindus make their sacred places by the side of rivers. Because Hindus have already monopolized the rivers, Jainas had to do something to defeat them – the same competitive mind is everywhere.

So they thought that the best thing would be to choose the highest peaks of the mountains and to show these fools that the rivers are dirty. And people in India even throw dead bodies, half – burned bodies, dead animals into the rivers. These are your sacred places! So the Jainas made their sacred places on high mountains.

These buses follow them on those mountains and tent cities will arise there just in the night when the monk is sleeping, but not before his eyes. I have asked these naked monks, ”Do you really not know that these people are following you – the same faces, the same tents, the same buses – for four months? They are befooling themselves, but whom are you befooling? And what is the purpose of all this circus?”

In private they would say to me, ”You are right, but what can we say about it? You always hit wherever it hurts most. You have a knack,” they would say to me, ”of hitting people at their weakest point. Now this is clear, four months.... I know, but I cannot say it in public, because how am I to survive?” He depends on these people. These people are businessmen, they are investing money. They want him to say to the poor, ”You are suffering from your past bad karmas, and these rich people are enjoying their good karmas of a past life. If you want to enjoy yourself, then do good karmas, obey the scriptures, follow the principles handed over by the great masters, and in your next life you will be rich.”

I was trying to explain why the priests have to bring in the next life: because about this life they cannot do anything. And about the next life, one thing is good: that nobody knows what will happen

– whether anything will happen or not, whether anybody will survive or not. This strategy was invented so that the explanation would remain rational. Otherwise, there are people who are doing all that the scriptures say, and yet they are suffering, they are poor, they are sick. They ask, ”We are doing everything that you say – then why are we suffering?” Leaving them aside, even these Jaina monks – one dies with cancer, now what is he suffering for? In his whole life he never did a single thing which can be said to be wrong. You have to find the explanation somewhere in his past lives.

Man is in misery because religions have not helped him to destroy the causes of misery.

On the contrary, they have consoled him so that he remains as he is.

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Revolt, revolution, they are of the same order as disobedience, disorder, creating chaos: you will suffer tremendously in the coming life. You are suffering now, and you are preparing the ground for more suffering. So they created this gap between this life and the coming life, the past life and this life. And it is a beautiful strategy, because neither have you any evidence of your past life – that you committed any bad actions or good actions – nor have you any way to know what is going to happen to you in the next life, the coming life.

They have given beautiful explanations and camouflaged the whole stinking reality behind beautiful flowers. So you smell the flower and you forget the stinking river just flowing underneath, an undercurrent. Throw away these flowers and immediately you will be able to see why humanity is in so much suffering.

The new thing that has happened is, as I said before, that one percent of humanity has come to a point where it can become a little alert, awake. And that one percent of humanity, becoming aware of the misery, seeing the whole of humanity already in hell, is asking, ”What other hell are you talking about? There cannot be anything worse than what is happening on the earth.” This one percent of humanity has created such questions. Those questions have also reached those people who are not alert – but the questions have reached them anyway. They have also heard and started feeling some little stirring of consciousness: ”Yes, there is misery, and immense misery.” Politicians have been deceiving you. They say, ”If there is democracy, there will be no suffering. If there is independence, there will be no suffering. If there is socialism, there will be no suffering. If there is communism, suffering disappears.” But there is democracy, and suffering goes on growing, accumulating. Countries are independent – all countries are not in slavery – but even in the countries that are independent, the misery is not less. Perhaps it is even more, because they cannot dump their misery on anybody else – they are independent. A slave country at least has a consolation.

That is my experience.

Before India became independent there was such a feeling all over India. My house was a place of conspiracy. My two uncles had been in jail many times, and every week they had to go to the police station to report that they were not doing anything against the government, and that they were still there. They were not allowed to move out of the town but people were coming to them – and they all had so much hope.

I was a small child but I always wondered, ”These people are saying that just by becoming independent, all misery will disappear. How can it happen? I don’t see any connection.” But there was hope. There was the promised land, very close by; just a little struggle and you would reach it. There was suffering but you were not responsible for it: the Britishers were responsible. It was a great consolation to dump everything on the Britishers.

In fact, I used to ask these revolutionaries who used to visit my house secretly, or sometimes stay in my house for months.... One of them, a very famous revolutionary, Bhavani Prasad Tiwari, was the national leader of the socialist party. Whenever he had to go underground he used to come to my village and just live in my house, hidden. For the whole day he would not come out – and nobody knew him in the village anyway. But I was after him. He told me again and again, ”You bring such inconvenient questions that sometimes I think it would be better to be in a British jail than in your house! At least there I would get first class treatment.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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He was a famous leader so he would have got first class treatment – political prisoners’ special class

– with all the facilities, good food, good library. And at least he would get freedom, because first class prisoners were not forced to do any labor. They would write their autobiographies and other books: all the great books these great Indian leaders have written were written in jails. And they would go for walks – they were put in beautiful places that were not even jails; they were created especially for them.

For example in Poona there was a palace just opposite us, on the other side of the river: the Aga Khan palace. It was a palace. Gandhi was kept prisoner there and his wife too. His wife died there, her grave is still there in the Aga Khan’s palace. You must have seen it in Poona – when you pass the bridge, just on top of the hill above there is a beautiful house.

I had asked the owner, because the owner lived in Bombay and used to come to me, ”Whatsoever you want you can take, but give that house to me before I move to Poona. I want that house,” because in the whole of Poona, that was the highest point from where you could see the whole city, and it was really a beautiful palace.

He said, ”It is difficult because it belongs to my mother. She is the owner of the house and she will not sell it because Gandhi was kept prisoner there, and she is a follower of Gandhi. So she wants to make it a national museum in the memory of Gandhi. It is impossible to persuade her – and particularly for you. Even your name is unmentionable in my family. When I come here I have to say I am going somewhere else. Your name is unmentionable.” Gandhians will not mention my name because I have been speaking against Gandhi continually.

So these special palaces were turned into prisons. They had acres of greenery, beautiful views. So Bhavani Prasad Tiwari used to say to me, ”It would be better if I stop going underground – because you ask inconvenient questions.”

I said, ”If you cannot answer them, what is going to happen to the country when the country becomes independent? These will be the questions which you will have to solve. You cannot even answer them verbally, and then you will have to actually solve them. I asked him, ”Just by the Britishers leaving the country” – and there were not many Britishers – how is poverty going to disappear? And do you want me to believe that before the Britishers came to India, India was not poor?

”It was as poor as it is now, perhaps even poorer, because the Britishers brought industry, technology, and that helped the country to become a little better. They brought education, schools, colleges, universities. Before that, there was no way to be educated: the only educated people were the brahmins, because the father would teach the son. They kept everybody else uneducated because that was the best way to keep them enslaved. Education can become dangerous.

”How are you going to destroy poverty? How are you going to destroy the hundreds of kinds of anxieties and miseries which have nothing to do with the British? Now, a husband is suffering because of his wife – how is it going to help? The Britishers have gone, okay; but the wife will still be there, the husband will still be there – how is it going to change anything?” He said, ”I know it is very difficult, but let us first get independence.” I said, ”I know after independence the problems will be the same, perhaps worse.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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CHAPTER 1. PSEUDO-RELIGION: THE STICK-ON SOUL

They are worse. In three hundred years not a single British governor general was assassinated.

Now you can assassinate the prime minister. Your independence has given you great intelligence!

In three hundred years the Punjabi Sikhas have never said that they want a separate nation. Now they want a separate nation. This is what independence has given to people.

And I would be perfectly willing to give them a separate nation, but the question is about the Hindu minority who live in the Punjab. They will all be killed. Either they will have to become Sikhas, or they will have to be slaughtered. So it is not only a question of giving independence to a particular state. That is perfectly okay: if they want to become independent, let them be independent. But the problem is about the Hindu minority. Where to take them? They will all be killed.

That’s what happened in Pakistan. When Pakistan was created, all the Hindus in Pakistan were slaughtered. And Pakistan was not enriched by that. These are not the ways to become rich.

Pakistan is far poorer than India. The poverty has become greater because the population has grown. Now, the Britishers are not responsible for the growing population. You go on producing children.

Political leaders have kept humanity hoping – always somewhere far away, the great hope....

For the classless society Russia has suffered everything for sixty years: ”The classless society is going to happen soon!” When will those days of waiting be finished? This is an old strategy. Jesus used to say to his followers, ”Very soon you will be with me in the kingdom of God. Very soon you will see that those who follow me are saved, and those who don’t follow me fall into eternal hell.” It has not happened yet, and we don’t even know whether Jesus is with God or not.

He even promised that he would be coming back. I think he must have lost courage – once crucified is enough! Now again he will be crucified, this time in the Vatican, because this time he will be coming as a Christian. And the pope will be the person who will decide: ”This man has to be crucified – he is a pretender, an anti-Christ. He is not our lord, because when our lord comes he will come with glory, sitting on a cloud. That’s how the lord has to come. And this man is born out of a woman, and not even out of a virgin.”

They are looking for the cloud the lord will be coming on, and the lord has escaped!

But the hope.... Politicians go on giving hope and nothing materializes.

One thing has to be understood clearly: no hope is going to help, no false explanation is going to help.

You have to put aside all this crap and see into reality as it is.

The reality is that this earth cannot tolerate so great a population; the population has to become almost half the size that it is now. But the way it is moving, it will be doubled by the end of this century. Misery will also be doubled.

I would like the population to be half of what it is – but for that you need intelligence, understanding.

You have to understand that children are not sent by God. There is no God who is sending children.

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CHAPTER 1. PSEUDO-RELIGION: THE STICK-ON SOUL

In fact, a single man has enough seeds, in his forty or fifty years’ lifetime while he is capable of producing children, to produce the whole population of the earth – a single man! In each sexual orgasm, millions of potential human beings are lost. This is not something that God is doing, otherwise He is a very stupid God. What is the point of giving so many seeds to a man when the woman normally can only have one egg fertilized in one year? This is what created the trouble: man started having many wives. But a woman cannot start having many husbands, because a man can make many women pregnant, but if a woman has many husbands, what will they be doing?

One woman, one man makes her pregnant, so the remaining ones go to Oregon – where else?

This has nothing to do with God, this is simple biology. People have to be told to understand biology and to use all the methods which are available to reduce the population completely to half of what it is.

Stop bothering to go to the synagogue, to the temple, to the church, because they have befooled you enough.

Stop asking these people – the rabbis, the monks, the priests – because all that they know they have been giving as consolations for thousands of years and all their consolations have proved impotent.

You have to turn from politicians, from religious people, to the scientist.

The whole humanity has to focus on science if it wants to get rid of misery.

And my religion I call the science of the inner soul. It is not religion; it is exactly a science.

Just as science functions in the objective world, this science functions in the subjective world.

Remember, the outer science can help immensely to reduce your suffering and misery by almost ninety percent. And once you remove ninety percent of your suffering and miseries – which are physical, biological, science can very easily remove them – then the remaining ten percent of misery will be for the first time clear to you. Right now it is lost in the mess of this ninety percent of misery.

Then you will be able to see that all that misery was nothing compared to this ten percent; this ten percent is the real anguish.

And that can be transformed only through inward movement: call it meditation, awareness, watchfulness.

But that ten percent misery is of tremendous weight. The ninety percent is nothing, it is just hunger...

food you need, shelter you need, employment you need and all these things can be tackled by science.

Remove the priest completely. He has no function for the future. He has already done enough mischief

Focus on science, and then immediately you will see a new dimension arising in you, of which you were not aware.

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CHAPTER 1. PSEUDO-RELIGION: THE STICK-ON SOUL

It was there – but a hungry man, how can he think whether life has meaning or not? A hungry man cannot think whether the flower is beautiful or not: he is hungry. You cannot talk about music and poetry and painting to him. That will be humiliating him; it will be just an insult, an outright insult.

But once these problems disappear then he will start, for the first time, to enquire about real existential questions which can be answered only by a subjective science.

So there is no future for religion.

There is a future for an objective science to deal with objective matters, and a subjective science to deal with your inward matters.

One will take care of your physiology, biology. The other will take care of your psychology and your ultimate center: the soul.

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CHAPTER 2

The other cheek: the masochist’s slap-up feast

30 November 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE PHILOSOPHY OF NONVIOLENCE AND PARTICULARLY

ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN DOGMA OF TURNING THE OTHER CHEEK?

I am not a philosopher. The philosopher thinks about things. It is a mind approach.

My approach is a no-mind approach. It is just the very opposite of philosophizing.

It is not thinking about things, ideas, but seeing with a clarity which comes when you put your mind aside, when you see through silence, not through logic.

Seeing is not thinking.

The sun rises there; if you think about it you miss it, because while you are thinking about it, you are going away from it. In thinking you can move miles away; and thoughts go faster than anything possible.

If you are seeing the sunrise then one thing has to be certain, that you are not thinking about it. Only then can you see it.

Thinking becomes a veil on the eyes. It gives its own color, its own idea to the reality. It does not allow reality to reach you, it imposes itself upon reality; it is a deviation from reality.

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CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST

Hence no philosopher has ever been able to know the truth.

All the philosophers have been thinking about the truth.

But thinking about the truth is an

impossibility. Either you know it, or you don’t. If you know it, there is no need to think about it.

If you don’t, then how can you think about it?

A philosopher thinking about truth is just like a blind man thinking about light. If you have eyes, you don’t think about light, you see it.

Seeing is a totally different process; it is a byproduct of meditation.

Hence I would not like my way of life to be ever called a philosophy, because it has nothing to do with philosophy. You can call it philosia. The world ”philo” means love; ”sophy” means wisdom, knowledge – love for knowledge. In philosia, ”philo” means the same love, and ”sia” means seeing: love, not for knowledge but for being – not for wisdom, but for experiencing.

So that is the first thing to be remembered. Nonviolence is a philosophy to Mahatma Gandhi; it is not a philosophy to me, it is a philosia. That’s where I have been constantly struggling with Gandhian philosophers, thinkers. Gandhi wrote his autobiography entitled EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH.

Now that is an utter absurdity; you cannot experiment with truth.

When you are silent, truth is there in its fullness, in its absolute glory. And when you are not silent, truth is absent.

When you are silent, truth does not appear like an object before you. When you are silent, suddenly you recognize you are the truth.

There is nothing to see.

The seer is the seen, the observer is the observed; that duality no more exists.

And there is no question of thinking. There is no doubt, there is no belief, there is no idea.

Gandhi was trying to experiment with truth. The simple implication is: you know what truth is; otherwise how are you going to experiment with it? And for a man who knows truth, what is the need to experiment? He lives it For him there is no alternative. To Gandhi everything is philosophy, to me everything is philosia. Gandhi is a thinker, I am not a thinker. My approach is existential, not mental. Non-violence – the very word is not appealing to me, it is not my taste, because it is negative. Violence is positive, non-violence is negative. Nobody has paid any attention to the simple fact that you are making violence positive, solid – and non-violence is simply negating it.

I call it reverence for life, I don’t use the word non-violence. Reverence for life – it is positive; the nonviolence happens just of its own accord.

If you feel reverence for life, how can you be violent? But it is possible you can be non-violent and still you may not have any reverence for life.

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CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST

I know these so-called non-violent people.... You will be amazed to know that in Calcutta, Jainas have a very important place. In all the big cities – Bombay, Calcutta – they are the super-rich people. In Calcutta I came to know of a strange phenomenon; when I saw it for the first time I could not believe my eyes. I used to stay in the house of a very unique man, Sohanlal Dugar. He was unique in many ways. I loved the man – he was very colorful. He was old – he died seven years ago. When he met me first, at that time he was seventy years old, but he lived to ninety.

He met me in Jaipur, that was his home town, and he invited me to Calcutta because that was his business place; from there he controlled the whole silver market, not only of India but of the whole of Asia. He was called the Silver King. I had heard about him, but I had no idea who the person was. When he came to me for the first time in Jaipur, he touched my feet – an old man dressed in the Rajasthani way with a yellow turban, very ancient-looking in every way – and took out bundles of notes from the pockets of his coat and wanted to give them to me.

I said, ”But right now I don’t need them. You just give me your address; whenever I need I will enquire and if you are still in possession of wealth and in the mood to give, you can give. But right now I don’t have any need, so why unnecessarily give me trouble? I am going now to travel for thirty-six hours, and I will have to take care of these notes. I cannot even sleep, anybody may take them. So please keep them.” He just started crying, tears pouring from his eyes. I said, ”But I have not said anything that hurts you so much.”

He said, ”Nothing else hurts me more. I am a poor man because I have only money and nothing else. I want to do something for you – I feel so much for you – but I am a poor man; except money, I have nothing. And if you refuse my money, then you refuse me because I don’t have anything else.

So you take this money. If you want to burn it, burn it here right now. If you want to throw it away, throw it away right now – that is your business. But remember: never again refuse money from me, because that means you are refusing me. And I have nothing else to offer.” His tears were so sincere and authentic, and what he said was so meaningful, that I said, ”Okay. You give me this money, and take out... you have more in your pockets.”

He said, ”That’s right. That’s the man I have been in search of” And he took it all out. He showed me his pockets, inside out, and said, ”Now, right now, I don’t have anything else, but this is the man I have been in search of” And he invited me to Calcutta.

Where he lived was a Jaina colony. Jainas tend to live together in one place because they don’t want to associate with lower human beings. They are the highest, the purest, the most religious.

There, he told me, ”I will show you something which will surprise you.” He took me to one of his rooms, opened the window, and said, ”Look outside.” Outside I saw... I could not figure out what it was. There were at least one hundred cots, without any mattresses on them, and one hundred people on those naked cots trying to sleep. I said, ”But what is the matter? Why are their mattresses missing, and why don’t they have any pillows? They are certainly in discomfort; you can see they are tossing and turning.” He said, ”You don’t know the reality of what you are seeing. There is something more to it; these people are hired by Jainas.”

I said, ”Hired? For what?”

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CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST

He said, ”To sleep on these cots.”

I said, ”But what is the purpose of it all?”

He said, ”The purpose is that in cots....” In India, in hot countries, insects of all kinds grow very easily.

A certain insect – I don’t know what you call it in English – KHATMAL...?

”It means ’bedbug’, Osho.”

Bedbug – that is a parasite. Jainas cannot kill them because of their philosophy of non-violence.

They cannot kill them, but if nobody sleeps on those cots, the bedbugs will die – so they hire people. They will give you five rupees per night: you sleep in a cot full of bedbugs and they will suck your blood the whole night. Non-violent people are not necessarily life-reverent. Now what kind of business is going on? They are saving the bedbugs – but what about these poor men? But they don’t think about that. They are paying them so there is no problem about it. They have agreed to sleep on the cots; and they are paying them.

But just to think of the idea... that you will put a man in such a situation. And the man must be in trouble because why should he be ready, for five rupees, to destroy his whole life? Maybe his mother is dying, maybe his wife is in the hospital, maybe his father had an accident and those five rupees are very essential for medicine, for food, for something. And every day there is a line; all the people don’t get in. Only one hundred cots are there; those who get in are fortunate. And these people who are paying them are earning virtue. Their bank balance in the other world is growing: they have saved so many bedbugs from dying. A strange love affair – with bedbugs. And they don’t think about this man, the whole night being tortured. No, for him they have paid, so there is no guilt about that.

I want you to remember: a man believing in nonviolence need not be necessarily life-reverent. But one who reveres life is bound to be non-violent – that is just its necessary corollary. But his nonviolence will have a totally different flavor. It will not be Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence.

For example: Gandhi is continually trying to teach non-violence to his disciples – and following it himself He is not a fraud; whatsoever he believes may be wrong, but he does it with his totality. His intention is always sincere, you cannot doubt his sincerity, but his intelligence is not so indubitable.

And a man with strong intentions, but not a high quality of intelligence, is more dangerous than anybody – because the intention is blind. Gandhi thought that he was teaching nonviolence, but in fact he was teaching people to be violent to themselves.

This cannot happen to my way of life. Reverence for life does not exclude me: if I am full of reverence for life that is all around, how can I be irreverent towards my own life?

In deep silence there is no mine and no thine.

Life is simply life; it is one flow.

We are joined together with invisible threads. If I hurt you, I hurt myself If I hurt myself. I am hurting you all.

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CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST

I want the distinction to be clear. It is delicate. The man who believes in non-violence will be very careful not to be violent to anybody – too careful! But because he has not experienced reverence for life – it is only an ideology; rationally he has concluded that this is good, that this is the right path

– he is going to be very violent to himself In fact his violence towards others will turn upon himself The proportion will remain the same.

I have experienced it in people, for example hunters, who are violent people, killers. Just near my university, two hundred miles away, was a forest reserve – one of the most beautiful forests in India, Kanha Keshali. For hundreds of miles, all kinds of wild life – you could find every kind possible, imaginable. Hunting was prohibited except for special guests of the viceroy, of the governor, and later on, of the prime minister, the president, and the chief minister. For special guests hunting was allowed, otherwise it was completely prohibited.

Whenever I had time I used to drive to Kanha Keshali; the rest house in Kanha Keshali was in such a beautiful place, on a vast lake, surrounded by greenery as far as you could see. And for days you would not come across or see a man, but you would see thousands of deer passing in the night.

And in the night the deer’s eyes become almost flames. A thousand or two thousand deer passing in the night... if it was a full moon night you could see thousands of small lights moving in line. And they had to come to the lake in the night to drink water. All the animals would come in the night; you had just to sit in the rest house and you would be able to see lions and tigers....

Once in a while I would meet a group of hunters, special people. I was surprised to know one thing, that these hunters were violent people, but very loving, very friendly. I have lived with non-violent people who are never loving, never friendly. The contrast was such that I started to look more deeply into it: what was the matter? I made friends with great hunters of India, kings, princes – and in India there were so many maharajas and so many princes, and they were all hunters. If you go into a maharaja’s palace you will find out how many lions he has killed; they are all on exhibition. The whole house is full of dead animals, preserved, stuffed. And that is their pride.

I started making friends with these people and what I found was that they were all very nice, very loving, very simple and very innocent people. The man may have killed one hundred lions, but he himself is very childlike. He has not that arrogant, egoistic attitude of a non-violent Jaina or a non-violent Gandhian. He is a simple man, a simple human being. He knows he is not a saint.

But these people who believe in nonviolence automatically start believing they are saints, superior beings, higher than everybody else. In their egoistic attitude there is more violence than there may be in the whole life of a hunter who has killed many animals.

The non-violent believer does no violence to you physically, but psychologically he is very violent.

Psychologically he will try to prove his superiority in every possible way. And one thing more: whatsoever violence he has prevented reaching others has not simply disappeared; things don’t disappear like that. The violent mind is inside. If you don’t allow it to express its violence on others, it is going to turn upon itself

So non-violent people have been torturing themselves in every possible way. They are very inventive in finding new methods of torturing themselves. The violence has not disappeared, it has only taken a roundabout turn. Gandhi was very violent to himself – just any excuse and he would go on a fast. Fasting is violence. If you keep somebody else starving it is violence. And if you keep yourself starving, isn’t it violence? Do you have double standards?

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CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST

Whether I keep you starving or I keep myself starving, it is the same; the same principle and the same standard should be applied: I am a violent man, if not to your body, then to my own body.

And in being violent with you, there was a possibility that you may have retaliated – you may have stopped me being violent to you. But to be violent with your own body is the easiest thing in the world. What can your body do? It cannot retaliate, it cannot prevent you. It has no defense against you. So the person who is violent to others, at least is violent to someone who has the right to defend himself and can be violent in return. But the person who is violent with himself is really cunning, very cunning. He has found the most innocent victim in the world, defenseless. You can do anything you want to your own body.

There have been monks who have been beating their body every morning, till the blood starts oozing all over the body. And they were thought to be great saints! There was one Christian saint in Alexandria who remained on a sixty-foot-high pillar – on top of it there was space enough just to sit.

For thirty years he remained sitting on that pillar. He was sleeping there; people were sending food and he was pulling the food up by rope. He was defecating, urinating from the pillar... but this was thought to be great austerity. And from hundreds of miles people would come to pay respect to this madman. He had no other quality, but even kings came to pay respect to him. What was he doing?

Just torturing himself.

I have seen in India so many people torturing themselves in so many ways that it became absolutely clear to me that all the religions up to now have been dominated by sado-masochists.

There is no question about it. These religions give enough evidence that the people who founded the religions and the people who followed the religions were sado-masochists.

I came across a man who was standing for many years. Now, you cannot stand very long; he was standing for many years. All his body had shrunk. His whole weight had gone into the legs; the legs had become elephant legs. Now even if he wanted to sit, it was impossible. He had to sleep standing. Just in front of him there was a wooden support hanging from the ceiling. He would put his hands on the support and sleep that way, and the whole day also he was standing that way. And thousands of people were worshipping him.

I asked them, ”What quality is there that you are worshipping? Is it just because he is standing?

Just because he is an idiot? What has he gained by standing? lust look at his face! Has he ever said a single thing which has any meaning?” He was a very ordinary man. But he managed, just by standing, to become a great sage. Now, this man is non-violent to everybody but himself This is sheer violence. And I cannot conceive, if you have reverence for life, how you can destroy your own life in this way.

Jainism is the only religion which allows a monk, if he wills it, to fast unto death. They don’t call it suicide, they have a very beautiful name for it: santhara. Santhara means one who has dropped the lust for life, who has gone beyond the lust for living. Many Jaina monks die every year by santhara.

The government cannot do anything because it is their religious practice. The secular government is not supposed to interfere in anybody’s religion. And they don’t commit suicide by taking poison or killing themselves with a sword – no, they have a very torturous method. An electric chair would be far more non-violent – you just sit on it and you are gone, you may not even feel it. Or you can be put under chloroform, so you don’t even feel when you are and when you are not.

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CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST

But the Jaina monk will fast for two months, three months. There have been cases which have lasted up to ninety days – three months of not eating. He goes on becoming a skeleton; as more and more days pass, more crowds go on coming and he cannot even open his eyes. People are singing and chanting in his praise, and I don’t think he can hear anything – for two months he has been on the fast; he is just bones. You can say he is alive because he is still breathing, but except for the breathing and the pulse and the heartbeat, there is no sign of life. For three months he may hang on in this limbo, between death and life. And these people are non-violent people!

Gandhi learned his non-violence from these idiots. He recognized as one of his gurus, his masters, a Jaina monk, Shrimad Rajchandra, who tortured himself and taught people the same.... Because what are you going to teach people? Whatever you are doing, you are going to teach people the same. Hence I call them sado-masochists; these people are both. Ordinarily, in psychiatric hospitals you will find somebody is a sadist, somebody is a masochist; it is very rarely you find one man having both diseases, the sado-masochist.

The sadist enjoys torturing others. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung, Tamerlane, Alexander, Napoleon – these are the people who are sadists, who enjoy others being tortured.

And there are masochists who enjoy torturing themselves. The masochists offer themselves to be tortured. They are in search of a sadist.

Somebody was asking me what kind of a man and woman would be the best couple. I said, ”One should be a sadist and one should be a masochist. That will be the best fitting couple in the world.

They are never going to divorce. One enjoys torturing; the other enjoys being tortured. They are immensely fulfilled.” And there are couples who you may think are ideal couples, for the simple reason that one is a sadist and the other is a masochist. They fit.

The masochist finds strange ways, philosophies, rationalizations.

Veena is here. When she first came to see me, fifteen years ago, she brought a young man; she had come with that young man. The young man was in search of a master who could teach him to live only on water. Veena had brought that masochist. But he did not think he was a masochist.

He thought he was in search of the most natural way of living. Of course he could not stay with me.

Veena had brought him; he escaped. Veena was left with me. That kind of man you will find in many places. Somebody becomes a naturalist, and he lives according to the ideals naturopathy gives him.

One of my aunts was a naturopathy freak. I told her many times, ”You will simply kill yourself doing these stupid things.” And that’s what happened. She was perfectly okay, but the naturopath goes on finding something wrong. And if you search you will find; the body is a complex phenomenon.

Just a slight headache, and that’s enough to go on a fast; you are just feeling tired, that’s enough to take an enema. Anything... and you know what to do because you go on reading. Books are available with simple treatments, and there are not many of them, so every patient becomes a doctor in naturopathy. Just any small book you can read, and that’s all, it is not much.

I told her again and again – I was living with her for four years, and I was preventing her in every possible way. I would throw out her enemas, and throw away her bath tub – she had many sizes...

sitz bath, and I don’t know what. She had such a collection of strange instruments, and I would simply throw them out. The moment I found anything I would throw it away. And she was continually From Ignorance to Innocence

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CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST

putting mud packs on her stomach, on her head, on her back. I said,’ What is going on? Continually

– twenty-four hours a day? Millions of people are moving around but nobody is doing these things that you go on doing.” So while I was in the house I would take away her mud packs, ice cold packs, hot packs – but the moment I would leave the house, because I had to go to the university she would immediately try to do her thing.

For two years I had to go out of Jabalpur for my M.A. degree. In those two years she killed herself –

not even two years, just one year it took. I had not even completed my course there: after just nine or ten months I was informed that she had gone mad and that now she was hospitalized. I went to see her; she could not even recognize me. And it was her doing I told her husband, ”You see now.

You were also supporting her. And you were all against me, saying that I was taking her instruments and things, and she was trying to find them in different places....” She had different kinds of mud from different mines. She would go miles to find a special kind of mud. ”You would tell me,’You throw them all out, and this is not good.’ For just nine months I was away, and she went mad. The doctors said that she couldn’t survive; she had destroyed her whole system.” In India naturopathy became associated with yoga, naturally, because that is a traditional thing. So to clean yourself... now what uncleanliness is there? And if you are really going to clean yourself, you are going to die because then everything is unclean. Inside there is blood and mucus and meat, flesh, this and that; everything is unclean – so clean yourself!

She was continually cleaning herself. You can clean your lower intestines with an enema, but you cannot clean the upper part with an enema. Yoga has a method for it: you swallow a thirty-foot-long cloth just like a thin rope. You go on swallowing it so it goes inside you – it is thirty foot long so it is going to go right inside – and then leave it as long as you can. Then take it out so it brings all the mucus and anything that is impure inside. I was preventing her from doing this, but once I was gone she was completely free, so she cleaned herself... and died. Then I told her husband, ”Now you clean yourself and follow her.”

Other people will find macrobiotics.... You just eat rice; that rice is the only right thing. These people are basically finding some way that they can convince themselves that they are not torturing themselves but that they are doing something good to themselves.

I told you that these people like Adolf Hitler – these are sadists. Then there are masochists.

Masochists don’t do much harm, they only do harm to themselves. Sadists do tremendous harm because their joy is in torturing others. But the greatest harm is done by sado-masochists.

Mahatma Gandhi is a sado-masochist. First he tortures himself; that torturing himself gives him the authority to torture you. He knows the path, he knows the way: he has done it all. He was also a faddist about naturopathy and mud packs and enemas, and only eating this and not eating that....

And the same fads had to be followed by everybody. Of course he was far ahead of the disciples, so he had the authority. The disciples knew that they had limitations, but they would do the best they could. The master of course is the master.

I have no philosophy of non-violence, but I have a way of life which you can call reverence for life.

And this is a totally different perspective.

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CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST

Non-violence simply says don’t kill others. Do you think that is enough? It is only a negative statement: don’t kill others, don’t harm others. Is that enough?

Reverence for life says share, give your joy, your love, your peace, your bliss. Whatsoever you can share, share.

If you are reverent towards life then it becomes a worship.

Then everywhere you feel God alive.

Then watching a tree becomes worship. Then feeding a guest becomes worship.

And you are not obliging anybody, you are not doing a service; you are simply enjoying yourself.

The same way those people are enjoying torturing, you are enjoying sharing.

So I want it to be remembered by you once and for all that reverence for life is my approach.

Non-violence comes automatically, there is no need to bother about it. And when it comes of its own accord it is never ugly.

And you ask me: What do I say about the Christian philosophy, the Christian attitude of turning the other cheek? Jesus has learned that idea from India. There was no other way for him to learn it, because Jewish scriptures have no ideas about non-violence. Even the Jewish God is not nonviolent. He clearly declares, ”I am an angry God. And those who are not with me are against me. I am not nice,” he says, ”I am not your uncle.”

Certainly he is your father, not your uncle. With an uncle you can have some nice relationship, friendship. Mostly uncles are nice. But father... so he makes it clear, ”Don’t try to make me your uncle. I am not your uncle.” Actually declaring this: ”I am not your uncle, remember it, and I am not nice; I am a very angry and jealous God....” When Adolf Hitler said, ”Those who are not with me are against me,” perhaps he was not aware that he was being very Jewish! That is the attitude of the Jewish God.

Somewhere Jesus got the idea of non-violence. It had never existed anywhere except India. And particularly at the time when Jesus moved from Egypt to India, it was very much in the air because Mahavira had just passed away five hundred years before, Buddha had just passed away five hundred years before. Sanjay Viletthiputta who was a very significant Master, Ajit Keshkambal who was also a very charismatic figure, Makhkhali Gosal – all these people had turned the whole climate of India into non-violence. Everybody was talking about non-violence.

Brahmins became ashamed of their scriptures; they started changing the commentaries on their scriptures. They started changing their rituals. You will be surprised. Now if you go in a Hindu temple, you are supposed to offer a coconut. This coconut was originally not a coconut but the head of a man. But a coconut resembles the head of a man: it has two eyes, beard, skull. They started interpreting their scriptures to say that it was not actually a man’s head, it was only a coconut you had to offer. You will see in India the statues of Hanumana covered with a red color. Once it was blood, but they had to change it, otherwise they would look very foolish.

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The whole country was impressed by these great teachers; they were all of tremendous importance, and they were logically mostly on solid ground. They stopped all kinds of sacrifice. But what will you do without blood? Some red-color substitute will do. A few very orthodox places continued in their old ways. For example in Calcutta, in the temple of Kali, still animals are killed every year and the blood is poured over Kali. In very orthodox places it remained; otherwise it disappeared and substitutes came in.

When Jesus reached India, he must have reached at the time when the whole country was agog with the philosophy of non-violence. He got the idea from India, and that is one of the reasons why the Jews could not accept him. He had got many ideas from India, from Egypt, and then when he came back he was thirty. From thirteen to thirty – seventeen years are completely missing from all Christian accounts. Those seventeen years he spent in Egypt, in India, in Kashmir, in Ladakh, and perhaps in Tibet too. And the vibe of Buddha and Mahavira was still very alive, so it was not his own vision either.

But he became tremendously impressed by the idea of non-violence. And the idea was rational: to harm somebody must be against God, because it is God’s creation – you should not be destructive.

But the question was, if others harm you, then...? That’s where turning the other cheek comes in; that was his invention. It is mentioned nowhere in Indian scriptures that you turn the other cheek.

The question was not raised, it seems. Non-violence was preached so rationally that nobody asked,

”If somebody harms you, then what?”

Mahavira and Buddha would be perfectly ready: ”Let him harm you, he will be punished by his karmas. Do not bother about it; you go on your way.” Yes, once Buddha was asked, ”If somebody hits me,” a bhikku, a monk asked him, ”What am I supposed to do?”

Buddha said, ”You are walking and a branch of a tree falls on you, hits you. What are you going to do?”

The man said, ”What can I do? It was just an accident, a mere coincidence that I was under the tree and the branch fell down.”

Buddha said, ”So do the same. Somebody was crazy, mad, angry; he hit you. It is just like a branch falling on you. Don’t be disturbed by this, don’t be distracted by this. Just go on your way as if nothing has happened.”

But when Jesus came back to Jerusalem and started saying this, people must have been asking him again and again... because it was so new to the Jewish tradition. It was bringing in a very foreign idea which did not fit with the Jewish structure at all.

Jesus said that if somebody hits you on one cheek, turn the other cheek. You are asking me what I have to say about it. This will be the attitude of a man who believes in the idea of non-violence, the philosopher of non-violence. But when you are hit by somebody and you give him the other cheek, you are encouraging violence in the world. It is not non-violence. And you are assuming something which is absolutely your imagination. If somebody hits me, according to Jesus I have to give him my From Ignorance to Innocence

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other cheek. But his tastes may be different. He may have enjoyed the first hit, he may enjoy the second even more; he may be a sadist. Then you are encouraging a sadist to torture people; you are encouraging violence. Even to allow your own body to be tortured by somebody is to encourage violence.

No, this stupid ideology has been the downfall of the whole of India.

After Buddha and Mahavira, India never again became the same golden bird it was.

After Buddha and Mahavira begins the downfall. Buddha and Mahavira are absolutely responsible for twenty-five centuries of slavery in India, because they taught people to be non-violent. They completely forgot that the other people surrounding the country are not non-violent.

You are

encouraging those people, inviting them: ”Come and be violent to us.” That’s actually what has happened in Indian history for twenty-five centuries. Anybody who wanted riches, women, slaves, invaded India. There was no trouble, India was non-violent. Most probably they would pass through kingdoms and there would be no fight at all, no resistance even.

If you look at your non-violence and it has provoked violence, then what kind of non-violence is this?

It has brought more violence in the world than there was before. Before Buddha and Mahavira, India was never invaded. There had never been any violence because people knew that to invade India was to just invite your death. But after Buddha and Mahavira’s teachings people became just like butter – you just cut into them with your knife, and there would be no noise at all. And millions of people were killed, burned without any resistance, because resistance would be violence.

But you go on missing seeing the point that you are provoking the violence in the other person. Who is responsible for it? Now turning the other cheek means you are telling the other person, ”Please hit me a little more, it is not enough; I am not satisfied. Hit me a little more so that I can become a little more saintly.” And you have only two cheeks. What are you going to do when he has hit you on your second cheek? What Jesus is saying looks a beautiful statement but it is not at all practical, pragmatic, scientific.

Reverence for life approaches the whole problem from a different angle.

I will say respect life, yours included.

In fact, you are first to be respectful towards yourself, then only can you be respectful towards anybody else.

Be loving towards yourself, then you will be able to love others too.

Reverence for life will not allow any provocation to violence. It will not start violence, but if anybody starts it, it will stop it immediately.

Jesus says, ”If somebody hits you on one of your cheeks, turn the other cheek.” I say, ”Okay, turn his other cheek – and hit him harder. Give him a lesson! Make it clear to him that it is not so easy to hit somebody on the cheek – that it comes back, and comes back harder. And if you are capable, hit both his cheeks at the same time. Why give him the chance to turn the other cheek and become From Ignorance to Innocence

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a saint? Hit him and tell him simultaneously,’I do not believe in violence, hence I have to stop it at the first chance. And remember that you cannot just be violent without being prevented.’” You have to prevent violence if you respect life. And in another way too, it is respectful to hit the man, not to give him your other cheek, because that is very disrespectful. This may seem a little difficult for you: you hit me, and I don’t hit you but show my other cheek to you, and say, ”Please be kind enough to hit me.” I am trying to be superhuman and reduce you below humanity.

I am humiliating you far more than I can humiliate you by hitting you. By hitting you I simply declare you are human, I am human, and I speak the same language that you speak. We are both on the same ground. This is more respectful because you are not raising yourself higher; you are keeping yourself on the same ground as the other man. You are telling him, ”You are my brother; if you hit me you are going to get a bigger hit. Be watchful and be careful, because somewhere you may get into real trouble.”

I am not in favor of your being superior to the other man. That’s what Jesus is saying: ”Be meek, be humble, turn the other cheek, because then you will inherit the kingdom of God.” I am not promising you any kingdom of God.

You are not going to inherit anything. You have already inherited it – that is your life.

Be loving and respectful to it.

Be loving and respectful to others. But don’t try to be superior and higher and above others. Don’t put the other man down.

In that sentence of Jesus you don’t find it, but it is there – that you are humiliating the other. You are creating guilt in the other. He will think it over at home, ”What did I do? What kind of man was he?

I hit him, and he gave me the other cheek. How cruel and how animal I am that I again hit him on the other cheek.” He will not be able to sleep the whole night. He will come back tomorrow. The first thing he will want is to be forgiven. But to forgive him is again to put him down. No, I will say if he hits you, just be a sportsman. Don’t try to be a superman, just a sportsman. Hit him really hard and tell him, ”Whenever you need a good hit, you can always depend on me.” Never do any harm to anybody, but never allow anybody to do any harm to you either; only then can we create a human world.

We have tried the other way in India, and the experiment has completely failed. Twenty-five centuries of slavery, slaughter, rape, and still nobody raises a finger and says that Buddha and Mahavira are responsible for it. They created this impotence in the whole country, this weakness in the whole country. No, I am not in favor of creating impotence, slavery, and provoking people to do violence to you.

Never do violence of your own accord, but never allow anybody else to do it to you either.

Only then is there a possibility of creating a human world.

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CHAPTER 3

The nuclear family – the imminent meltdown

1 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

SENATOR BOB SMITH HAS QUOTED YOU AS SAYING THAT ALL OREGONIANS ARE IDIOTS.

PLEASE COMMENT.

I am not disappointed. He has proved my point. I have never said what he is telling people that I have said. What I have said is so clear that even an idiot would be able to understand it, but poor Bob Smith has missed even that.

I had said, ”I have seen all kinds of idiots, and I was thinking that this was all: there are no other kinds of idiots. But after coming to Oregon I came to know that I was mistaken. The Oregonian idiot is a class unto itself”

In this statement, where am I saying that all the Oregonians are idiots? I am only talking about the Oregonian idiot as a special class. I am a generous man, but not too generous either. I cannot make the whole of Oregon so special in the world. It will become a unique place if all the Oregonians are idiots. Then there will be no other place comparable to it, it will be simply extraordinary.

Bob Smith has simply proved my point. I was waiting... somebody is going to prove my point. Now Senator Bob Smith is the first of that special class of idiots in Oregon. He should be happy that he tops them all. Now anybody else doing anything will be second. Bob Smith has won the Nobel prize.

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He should change his name, it does not suit such a great personality... Senator Bob Smith? No, Senator Don Quixote of Oregon, Soviet Union. That will be the right place for him to belong.

He has also said, ”Rajneeshees should not be allowed to remain here.” We have not committed any crime. We have not been in any way harmful to anybody. We are minding our own business. But why are these politicians so shaken, worried? And just one and a half years back the same man had said, ”Rajneeshees are absolutely legal and I have nothing to say against them.” Now, within one and a half years everything has changed.

We are the same people; but his political situation has changed, and now anybody who wants to make his political status solid can cash in on us. All the politicians are doing that. We are doing such a great favor for them; they should be obliged to us for it. Any politician wanting to win an election has only to do one thing: he has to talk nonsense against us – that’s enough, and he is going to win.

And all the politicians are doing that.

Now his political situation is not so solid – shaky. We can help him, there is no problem in it. He can condemn us, he can make the threat that we should be thrown out; he can do anything if it will make his position solid. We will be happy. We supported one drowning man, we saved his drowning status. He may not be thankful to us, but we don’t wait for anybody’s thankfulness, we simply do anything that seems to be humanitarian.

Just now we have been collecting the street people. These senators can become street people any day. Politicians are either in power or on the streets; there is no midway. Even a powerful politician like Indira Gandhi sent me a message: ”I am persuading Rajiv to come to you because he is not willing to leave, to resign from his service as a pilot in the Indian airlines.” And Rajiv’s argument is solid. He says, ”The day you are not in power, then how are we going to run the family? We don’t have our own house to live in. I am the only earning member – and in your old age, have I to see you on the streets?” She could not persuade him to resign. And his argument was absolutely clear, ”Where will you be?” In the three years when she was not in power and Morarji became the prime minister, it was Rajiv who pulled her through. At least she did not have to beg.

Politics is a strange career. A few things are worth understanding about it, because they will throw light on the human mind. First: only a certain type of man becomes attracted towards politics, just as a certain kind of man becomes attracted towards science, poetry, painting, music, dance. You cannot think of Winston Churchill dancing; that would be simply unimaginable. Nor can you think of Nijinsky as a prime minister. Nijinsky was a dancer, and perhaps the best dancer the world has ever known; his dance was almost magic. He was born to dance.

It was not some talent that he learned, it was some instinct in him, a born quality. The magic was such that no other dancer has been able to imitate it. Once in a while, dancing, he would jump so high that it was against gravitation. Physics cannot explain it. It is not possible with that weight to jump that high. And the most miraculous thing was his coming down: he came so slowly, just like a dry leaf falling in the fall, slowly, with no hurry to reach the ground. That is absolutely against gravitation.

Gravitation is such a pull, it is a magnet. It simply pulls you forcibly; you are not able to manage, or do anything about it. It is not in your hands to come down slowly or to come down fast. Everything From Ignorance to Innocence

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falling towards the earth is absolutely helpless – the earth’s gravitation will decide its rate of fall. And the earth is so vast, its power of gravitation is so vast, and we are not even light like a leaf. Even Nijinsky was surprised, always surprised. He could see himself coming down slowly, not falling – as if gliding.

People asked him again and again, ”What is the technique, the strategy, the method?” He said, ”I am as much surprised as you are. I don’t know. And whenever I try to do it, it never happens. It happens only once in a while, when I have completely forgotten about it. When the dancer disappears, when there is no Nijinsky – it happens. I am just a watcher, just as you are a watcher. I see my body falling down. I have tried it in private, tried it in every possible way. Neither can I jump that high, nor can I fall that slow. I have tried in front of friends, my lovers, but whenever I have tried, it has simply escaped from my hands.

”So I have learned one thing: there are things which you cannot try. There are things which are not possible through any method, any technique, any strategy. There are things which happen; you only have to allow them to happen. And the way to allow them is not to interfere; so much so that you are not even present, because your presence will also be an interference.

You know it. Now physics has come to discover a strange fact.... We have known it about human beings. You are in your bathroom making faces in your mirror, knowing perfectly well that there is nobody watching you. But suddenly you become aware that somebody is watching through the keyhole. Everything changes. You stop making your faces, you start arranging things and start doing something relevant, rational. You have been caught red-handed. You start looking busy – and just a moment before you were not busy at all.

Modern physics has come to discover that it is very difficult in the first place to observe the behavior of electrons, how they behave. But now we have instruments through which you can observe the behavior of the electron. But the trouble is, the moment you watch, the behavior changes – exactly the same keyhole story. The electron starts behaving in a different way. Just now when you were not observing, it was behaving differently. Physics has not come to any conclusion – what to conclude about it? But the fact is so clear that the electron is as conscious as you are conscious. There is no other way; otherwise, how can the electron become aware of your being aware of it?

Nijinsky said, ”The moment I am not – not present at all – suddenly it happens. And while it is happening I am only a watcher. At that moment if I even start looking around to see how it is happening, things get disturbed. I have fallen in the middle of a jump so fast that I have broken my legs. Because I came in, the happening disappeared, and the gravitational pull was so much that I fell with a thump on the ground.” Otherwise he used to come down like a feather. He would not even make a sound when he came to the ground.

There are born poets, there are born dancers. In fact, everybody is born to be something. Those who somehow happen to find what they are born to are the most blissful people on the earth. Those who start moving into directions which are not for them, they are the most miserable.

The politician is a certain type. It is the same type as the criminal. The criminal is one who could not succeed in being a politician. Both are power-seekers, both are dominated by the will-to-power.

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CHAPTER 3. THE NUCLEAR FAMILY – THE IMMINENT MELTDOWN

The politician moves legally, constitutionally towards power, and once he has the power in his hands, then he can manipulate the law, the constitution and everything, in a thousand and one ways. He can corrupt and prostitute everything once he has power. But until he has power he moves very legally, constitutionally, morally.

The criminal is also after power, but he does not know how to move legally, constitutionally, morally.

He is more wild, not so tamed as the politician. He is less cultured, not so cultured as the politician who uses culture as a steppingstone. He is not so articulate as the politician. The politician’s basic art is to be articulate, to be able to express your hopes, transforming them into his promises. He is so articulate that he goes on finding your conscious, your unconscious dreams and hopes, and translates them into promises for the future: that if you give him power, he is going to fulfill all these things.... It is a bargain: you give him power, and he will give you the promised land.

Once you have given him power, who cares about you? The man who had promised you was powerless. This is a totally different man; he is powerful. Lord Acton’s saying I have been quoting again and again in my life: ”Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And Lord Acton is saying it through his own experience; he is not just philosophizing. He has known power, he has known its corruption, and because of its corrupting influence he dropped out of it.

Once you have power then all the corrupting forces that have been hidden in your unconscious start raising their heads. Who cares about others? Those promises were not given with an honest mind, they were given by you knowing perfectly well that they are not going to be fulfilled. It was just a policy to gain power, and you have gained power. Now you have your own unconscious desires to be fulfilled.

The politician can turn at any time into a criminal. We see it happening throughout history, and still we don’t become aware. Joseph Stalin before he came to power was not a criminal. He had not killed a single human being, he was not a murderer. But what happened when he came to power?

The first thing he did was to destroy the whole twelve-member committee, the communist presidium which ruled over the whole communist party – the topmost leaders. He started killing them one by one.

He killed Kamenev, then he killed Zinovyev, then he killed Trotsky. He went on killing them one by one, and while he was killing one, he took the support of all the others. And they all were happy that there was one less; the power was coming into fewer and fewer hands, and that was better.

From twelve, there were only nine people, then there were only six people. He poisoned Lenin who was the topmost man of the revolution. The second man was Trotsky. Once he succeeded in killing Trotsky – Trotsky was killed here in America, in Mexico, because he had escaped. Seeing Zinovyev and Kamenev being killed, he escaped.

You will not believe that when he escaped in disguise... and he was a minister, the defense minister of the Soviet Union. All the military, all the forces were under him, and he had to escape in disguise, and in such a hurry because Stalin was just getting ready to finish him. It was a question of two or three days, not more than that. The moment he became aware of it, the same night he escaped.

And he could not bring his dog, whom he loved very much. Stalin killed even the dog – it was Trotsky’s dog... such criminal minds! And he sent a hired murderer to kill Trotsky in Mexico.

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Trotsky was writing Joseph Stalin’s biography, which is one of the most profound biographies ever written because he knew Stalin as nobody else knew him – Trotsky was the second topmost man in the revolution. Stalin was nowhere; he was somewhere around eleventh or twelfth. But Trotsky was alert that this man was dangerous... because he never spoke, he was always keeping quiet, everything about him was secret. His friends, who are his friends? His enemies, who are his enemies? Nothing was ever revealed. Trotsky was concerned about this man – he seemed to be a dangerous type. So he started collecting facts about him.

And when Stalin started murdering, the procedure that was adopted was a beautiful conspiracy: Lenin was given daily poison in the name of medicine. The doctor was a hired man of Stalin. The poison was to be given in such small doses that it would kill him over a long period of time. While he remains alive, he remains the leader because the masses still know him. He should not die right now, because if he dies right now then Trotsky will be the man to control the country. Before Lenin dies Stalin should make his base solid, and all others should be removed, so after Lenin, Stalin will be the second man. So he had to be kept alive but almost in a coma. He became paralyzed and slowly, slowly was dying. He was confined to his bed; his eyesight was disappearing, and whatsoever Stalin was bringing him, he was signing it – he could not read it. Stalin killed everybody necessary, and then he killed Lenin, then the last dose was given to Lenin.

The time that Trotsky remained in Mexico he devoted to writing the biography of Stalin. It is a rare book because never has an enemy written a biography with such great insight, with such profundity, with no hatred – just factual, no fiction. He was killed when he was completing the last page. It remains incomplete – the last page. It is a big biography, nearabout twelve hundred pages. He was writing the last page when he was killed with a hammer from the back. The hammer was hit on his head many times. His head fell on the book and splashed the blood onto the last page. In a way, that made the book an absolutely authoritative biography of what he had been saying all along about how people had been killed. He was killed on the last page; he died on the book, and the first edition was printed with the blood marks.

Stalin had never killed a single man before; he had never committed a single crime. In fact, his education had happened in a Catholic monastery – he was a Christian, and the monks had raised him. He lived in the monastery because his village was far away in the Caucasus, and the monastery was the only place where education was possible, so his father had left him there; he was a poor man. The monks at the monastery, out of compassion, accepted the boy, trained him, educated him

– and this is what he turned out to be. After gaining power he must have killed millions of people.

There is no way to count them; he simply went on killing. Anybody who was not for him was to be killed. There was no other punishment. He made it very simple: ”Either you are for me, or you are no more.”

The politician is basically a criminal. He is trying to find power through legal methods, that is the difference. The criminal does not bother about the legal methods, and gets caught. The politician never gets caught – or only once in a while like Nixon got caught in Watergate. And do you know what Mao Tse-tung said when Nixon was caught? ”What is this? So much fuss about nothing. Every politician is doing it!” In fact every politician is doing it. Watergate was not something exceptional that Nixon was doing. All over the world, all the politicians who are in power are doing the same kinds of things; they are just not getting caught. It was a misfortune that he got caught, and couldn’t manage....

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In fact I have a certain respect for Nixon. A man like Stalin in Nixon’s place, or Mao Tse-tung, or Adolf Hitler, or Mussolini in Nixon’s place would have done something that you cannot imagine –

and that idea must have crossed Nixon’s mind too. That is a simple method: when things were getting so hot, the best way would have been to drag the world into a war. Then Watergate would have gone down the drain. Then who would have cared about Watergate? All that was needed was that people’s attention just had to be diverted. And that’s what these leaders would have done –

immediately started a world war. Nixon would have remained the president and would have become the greatest president of America. If he had passed through the war and proved himself victorious, he would have proved the greatest man in the whole of history.

I have a certain respect for the man: that he avoided the criminal idea which was bound to have come to his mind – I can guarantee it. It is so simple. I don’t know much politics; although I have been a student of politics I know nothing about active politics. But just being a student of politics, I know with absolute certainty that this idea was bound to have crossed his mind: just put the world into such a chaos that Watergate becomes a small thing compared to the chaos that arises out of a world war. And everybody would have forgotten about Watergate.

But the man seems to be much more moral than people have thought him. That’s why I say I have a certain respect for him. He decided rather to descend and be the first president in American history to come out of the White House with such condemnation. But he accepted the condemnation, the worldwide notoriety, and did not drag the world into a war. He proved more a man than a politician, more human than any other politician would have proved.

The criminal mind wants power because without power you cannot do anything. Just as the painter needs paints, and the poet needs a great vocabulary, language, the feel of different words and their nuances, the subtle undercurrents that run through words, so the politician knows perfectly well, deep inside, why he is after power. If you are not going to paint and you go on collecting paints, then you are crazy. If you are not going to play music and you go on collecting all kinds of musical instruments, you are mad.

Why power?

Just the other day I told you that Jawaharlal had invited me to come to him, and I went. He listened to me. I was very young, and he was a great statesman, but he listened to me as silently, as intensively as if I knew much about politics and what had to be done in the country. And he told me, ”Why don’t you join politics? – because whatsoever you are saying, if you really want to do these things, then you will have to come into politics. Nobody else is going to do it for you, only you can do it. I can understand your ideas, but who is going to implement them? Join!” I said, ”No, because I don’t have any interest in gaining power. Whatever I have said to you was just exposing my heart because you have the capacity, the power to do things, the understanding to do things. I simply exposed my heart. I am finished! I am not going to run after power. And I am not asking anybody else, I am asking you. If you feel I am right, then prove it by doing something.” He said, ”You are right, but I cannot do these things, because the people on whose support I am standing will not support any of the ideas which you are giving to me. If they come to know that I am going to implement these ideas, I will be simply thrown out. Politics is a pyramid. It goes on From Ignorance to Innocence

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becoming thinner and thinner: at the top there is one man. So you see that one man at the top, but that man, underneath him, has three men; those three men have nine men; those nine men have ninety.... And they are all depending on those who are lower than themselves. They are standing on their shoulders. They can throw them off any moment.” And in politics, once you have the power which you have got from so many people’s support you have to fulfill all those people’s desires. Somebody has supported you in order to get licenses, somebody has supported you to have an industry started, somebody has supported you for something else –

now you have to fulfill their desires. Otherwise, as you are standing on their shoulders, they can move away. The topmost man is a very weak person in a way; he has nothing above him to hold on to. Underneath are people who would not miss a single chance to throw this man out, because if they can throw out this man, then one of those three who are under him will come to the top. So he has to fulfill all kinds of criminal things.

I know, because that’s how Indira came to power: because she was living with her father. She was a born politician; her husband was not. While studying in England they fell in love. The husband was not even a Hindu, not a brahmin. Indira was a brahmin, a very high-caste brahmin, a Kashmiri brahmin. The man she fell in love with, Feroz Gandhi, was a Parsee. The whole family was against it – nobody had ever heard of a brahmin girl marrying a Parsee, a man who was not even a Hindu.

It is a totally different religion.

But she was the only daughter of Jawaharlal, and after Jawaharlal’s wife died – she died very early –

Indira was the only person close to him. He stood by her and told her, ”Don’t be worried about your grandfather and your grandmother. I will manage them. First you get married. If you wait for their permission, it will be impossible; even I cannot manage to persuade them. And they will be hurt. It is better that you first get married, and when you come home, married, I will persuade them:’Because nothing can be done now; the marriage has happened.”’ That’s how they got married in the court.

But Feroz Gandhi had no interest in politics. Just because he was the son-in-law of Jawaharlal he became a member of parliament, but he had no interest at all; that was not his thing. And for Indira that was the only thing. They started quarreling immediately, and fighting... and soon Indira moved to Jawaharlal’s, the prime minister’s house, and left Feroz Gandhi. They lived separated, not divorced; but for years they were not seeing each other. All these years she was a watcher of all the politicians, and she was collecting information about each politician: his weakness, his crimes against the society, his exploitation of others, his corruption... and yet on the outside he would go on keeping a pure white Gandhian face.

She was collecting a file – she showed me the file – against every leader, and that was her power.

When Jawaharlal died all these politicians were afraid of Indira because she had the key. She could expose anybody before the public, before the court. She had all the evidence, she had all the letters.

They were afraid of her for the simple reason that only she could save them; otherwise they would be exposed. That file was her power.

I have looked into the file. All these people have been exploiting that poor country. They all have bank balances in foreign countries, in Switzerland, in America. They all have connections outside India, from where they get bribes and money and everything, for giving secrets. They are all connected to one country or other; they are agents. They have one face before the masses, the poor masses, and From Ignorance to Innocence

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their reality is something totally different. And they were also afraid because Indira was absolutely incorruptible. That was one thing she had learned from Jawaharlal. He was incorruptible because he was not a politician; he was more a poet. He would have loved to have been a painter or a sculptor, or any art would have been closer to his nature.

Politics was just accidental to him, it was almost forced on him – sometimes it happens....

Because he was interested in the independence of India, he fought against the British government, but with no idea that he was going to become the prime minister when the country became free. He had never thought about it. He was just a soldier of the freedom movement, as were many thousands of others. He may have been shot, he may have been killed, he may have been sentenced to death

– anything could have happened. There was no question of power.

When the fight for freedom was over, then the question arose of who is to be in power? Till then there was no question of power at all. The question was how to remove the invaders. He became interested because he was so sensitive a man that he loved the idea of freedom. It had nothing to do with politics; he loved the idea of freedom as a poet. But when freedom came there was a great struggle for who should be the prime minister. There were people like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who was a real politician, a solid politician who could commit any crime. He did commit them when he became deputy prime minister. Even Jawaharlal could not stop him.

And there were others, because in the freedom fight there were thousands of people of caliber.

Jawaharlal was the only one who was not interested in politics, not interested in power. That’s why Gandhi chose him, because to choose those people who were really interested in power.... In fact their fight for freedom was not a fight for freedom but just a step to reach power. It was a shock to all the politicians because none of them had been chosen by Gandhi to be the prime minister; and Gandhi had total control of the Indian mind.

Sardar Patel was shocked because he was very close to Gandhi and he was also a Gujarati –

Gandhi was a Gujarati – and he had served Gandhi his whole life with total trust. And at the last moment Gandhi simply said to Sardar, ”You step down. Don’t fight with Jawaharlal. I will make you deputy prime minister but let Jawaharlal be the prime minister.

”Why?” Patel asked.

And the reason that Gandhi gave was right. He said, ”He is the only one who is not interested in power. You will all be fighting with each other; he is the only one who is above all of you.” Because Gandhi said, ”Be the prime minister,” Jawaharlal said okay. When Gandhi had said, in 1942, ”You be the second soldier in the freedom fight” – the first was Vinoba Bhave – he said okay.

Vinoba Bhave was not known at all in India up to that time. He was just an inmate in Gandhi’s ashram. He massaged Gandhi, bathed Gandhi, read scriptures to Gandhi, and because he was a Sanskrit scholar, explained to Gandhi what those scriptures meant. But as far as the country was concerned, he was an unknown person. Gandhi chose an anonymous person to be the first freedom fighter – that he would go to jail first, and the second would be Jawaharlal.

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Jawaharlal didn’t say, ”This looks disrespectful towards me.

This man, nobody knows” – and

particularly Jawaharlal never liked Vinoba. Jawaharlal was almost a western man, educated in the West, brought up in the West; his lifestyle was western. In every possible way he was not an Indian, except that he was born in India. He was a meat-eater; because he lived in England and grew up in England there was no question of his being a vegetarian. He had every reason to dislike Vinoba, but there was no problem because Vinoba was doing different work. I have talked with both Vinoba and Jawaharlal, and both have confirmed that they had a dislike for each other.

For example Vinoba’s beard – Jawaharlal did not like it. He himself shaved twice a day, and a beard was not the right thing for him. He was very intolerant, impatient: the dress that Vinoba used was not the ”right” dress; in the twentieth century you have to be a twentieth century man. Vinoba’s education was an orthodox brahmin education. He studied in Varanasi, in a Sanskrit college, and lived like an old Sanskrit scholar. He was not educated in western subjects, western languages, so there was nothing in common between the two – and to put this man first.... Jawaharlal must have felt hurt but his devotion to Gandhi was unquestionable: if Gandhi chose Vinoba to be the first, then it had to be that way.

If Gandhi had chosen Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to be the prime minister, Jawaharlal was not going to dispute it or say anything. He had actually offered to Gandhi, ”Why create so much misery in these people? I can withdraw; they can choose anybody they want. I am not interested, I have never thought about it. I was fighting for freedom and freedom has come, I am happy.” So he was not corrupted by his prime ministership. He was the second man to Gandhi, and after Gandhi’s death he had the whole monopoly of the Indian mind.

But Indira was a politician, a born politician. She dropped her husband and forgot about him: politics was more important than the husband. The whole love affair was finished when it became a question of choosing between them. And Feroz became insistent: ”Either you be with me or be with your father, the prime minister – I don’t care, but this cannot go on. The whole day you are there and you come here for a few minutes, just to say hello, and again you escape and you are in the prime minister’s house. You go on his travels with him but you never go anywhere with me.” He made it clear that the choice had to be made.

Indira simply moved out. She said, ”There is no question of choice; I belong to politics, and I am going into politics.” From her father she learned one thing: that no politician can pull you down if you are incorruptible. Let all of them be corruptible, but you keep an eye out and go on collecting all data about them. And that was her whole power; they could not discredit her because she had never done anything wrong, and she could discredit all of them.

Politicians are legal constitutional criminals.

Now this man, Don Quixote, wants to throw me and my commune out from here – absolutely. That’s why I said, perhaps Oregon should appear on the map of the Soviet Union. It should not be part of America – not of the U.S.A., but of the U.S.S.R. The way these people talk – they are senators

– is the way of a fascist, communist, nazi. They talk about democracy, they talk about freedom of speech, they talk about respect for the individual, but I don’t think they belong to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln; they belong to Joseph Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev. These people should put themselves in their proper line, and they should try to move Oregon to Soviet Russia; then only can they throw me and my commune out – otherwise there is no way.

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And who are they? But they are cashing in on us.... Now, by telling the Oregonians that I have called all of them idiots, he is trying to cash in on us. And I have not said that at all. But now I say: the first idiot, I have found. He himself has declared it. And I will wait for the second, because Oregon has two senators, so the second will be just... he is already late. Don Quixote has come first in the race.

My statement is so simple that even a child can understand it. I said the Oregonian idiot is a class in itself How does he manage to understand from this statement that all Oregonians are idiots?

Then what about me? Then what about you? We are all Oregonians. And we are going to remain Oregonians.

These people can do, can say, anything. He was saving just before... our sannyasins were there in this hearing where he spoke. He had called the hearing and two or three of our sannyasins were present but we never participated because what is the point of participating in all these nonsensical things? It was so absurd a hearing – one cannot imagine how people go on tolerating such things.

On our property we have a few small pieces of land which belong to the government, the federal government. They are leased for fifty years; and just as we purchased the land, the lease also came to us. This hearing was about us not allowing people to approach the government land – which was absolutely false, because even the officers who look after the government land said that we had never done anything illegal, we had never prevented anybody – and there is no reason for anybody to go to the bare land or hills.

So we never participated and argued there, for the simple reason that the government office itself was arguing for us, that we had never done anything illegal and everything was absolutely as it should be – so there was no case at all. But all the bigots who have been against us since we came here were all present there, giving their evidence against us. Strange evidence....

One commissioner said that when six months before he had visited Rajneeshpuram, he was given poison in water. One thing – if we do anything we do it properly. It is proof enough, if you are alive after six months, that we have not given poison to you; otherwise, you would not be alive. We never do anything halfheartedly. And where have you been for six months? For six months you have been silent, and now, after six months, you go before the hearing.... Because now he has been chosen commissioner again in this election. He may have been afraid, in these six months, to say such a thing; he may have lost our votes. So he was silent about it. Now the election is over – he has won

– now he can say it.

What proof has he got that we poisoned him? And the senator asked him, ”There was another commissioner with you. What happened to him?”

He said, ”He was also poisoned. He is still alive.” And the senator asked, ”There was a third man also with you” – the police commissioner or somebody – ”what happened to him?”

He said, ”He is a little more friendly towards the Rajneeshees, so perhaps he was not poisoned.” Just anything these people can say – and these people are commissioners – with no evidence. And if you were poisoned you should immediately have gone to the hospital, immediately gone to be From Ignorance to Innocence

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checked, and if the poison was found the case would have been absolutely correct. But after six months, now there is no way to know if your wife poisoned you, you poisoned yourself, whether you were poisoned at all or you simply dreamed about it. At least as far as we are concerned, we never do anything in such a way. If we had poisoned you, then you would not have been able to come out of the grave to give the evidence. It is enough proof that we have not poisoned you.

And this senator, Don Quixote, he was saying before our sannyasins, to the commissioners, how they could manage to destroy the commune, the city. He was giving instructions to these people –

in front of our sannyasins – about how they could do it and get around the law; how they could cut out agencies from the city, and how they could make our life impossible so that we have to leave.

This is democracy! These are democratic people! These are the people who are looking after people’s needs.

This is the democracy that has been described as ”for the people, of the people, by the people.” I don’t know who these people are – certainly we are not the people.

One more question....

Question 2

OSHO,

SINCE EACH OF US IS BORN ALONE AND DIES ALONE, AND ALONENESS IS THE STATE OF

OUR BEING, WHAT IS THE FUNCTION OF THE COMMUNE?

THE function of the commune is exactly that: to make you aware of your absolute aloneness.

The family does not allow you that. The family gives you the fallacy that you have a mother, you have a father, you have a husband, you have a brother, you have a sister – that you are not alone.

The society gives you the idea that you are a member of the rotary club, the lions club; that you belong to this church, to that temple, to this congregation or that congregation – that you are not alone. The society provides you with all kinds of crowds to mingle with. You are republican, you are democrat, you are liberal – but you are not alone, all the republicans are with you.

The function of the commune basically is to destroy all these fictions.

Nobody is with you.

You are alone, and you have to understand that this aloneness is so precious that you should not lose it.

It does not mean that you cannot relate. It only means that you don’t believe in relationships. Try to see the distinction between the two.

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Relating is a flowing river. You can relate, and you can relate only because you are alone, because you are an individual – there is somebody who can relate from your side. And you can relate only to the person who understands his aloneness, otherwise you cannot relate.

If you know your aloneness, and you fall in love with a woman who does not know her aloneness, this love is not going to go anywhere. This is going to be finished sooner that you can imagine, because the woman is asking for a relationship. The person who is lonely is asking for a relationship: ”Fill the gap, I am lonely. Be part of my being.”

But a person who is alone knows that neither can you fill anybody’s gap, nor can anybody else fill your gap.

You can meet, but you will remain two alonenesses.

And it is beautiful that two alonenesses can meet, two individuals can meet, but the meeting cannot be made solid, concrete. It cannot be reduced to a relationship, it will remain a relating. It will always remain a changing flux, a movement, because the other person is changing and you are changing.

You are not statistical – though that’s what people expect.

When two persons get married, both are getting married to a certain image which is going to change tomorrow. The woman you have married is not going to be the same tomorrow. She is alive, she is growing, she is moving – tomorrow will be tomorrow. But if you expect her to remain stuck here, at the moment when you signed the register in the court, you are trying to stop the clock.

But even if you stop the clock... your clock is not running the time. Both will carry the image stuck in their minds, and they would like you to go on fulfilling that image. If you in some way differ from that image, then you are deceiving, cheating. Nobody can fulfill that image, it is impossible, it is against nature.

The function of the commune is to give you the opportunity to be together, without any relationship.

It gives you the opportunity to relate to people without getting fettered to people.

It gives you the opportunity to know others, feel others, but without any bargain, without any bondage, without any imprisonment.

You remain you, the other remains the other.

It is good if we meet today, it is a joy to be together, but if it is not going to happen tomorrow then there is no need to go on weeping for the spilled milk. It is pointless. Perhaps this meeting was meant to be only for this time.

You remain a stranger, the other remains a stranger, and you don’t reduce each other into acquaintances.

The strangeness is absolute, indestructible.

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So the commune is not another society. It is not providing you with a society, a club, a congregation, a party, no. It is simply providing you a space, and an understanding that all these people are lonely, just as you are. But don’t try to fill it, because if you try to fill it, you are trying to do something against nature and you will be miserable. Hence, don’t think in terms of loneliness; better to think in terms of aloneness.

And to be alone is so beautiful; untrespassed, nobody trampling on you, you are left to be yourself and you leave others to be themselves. Yes, once in a while you meet....

India has produced a few great geniuses in this century; one of them was Rabindranath Tagore. I love one of his novels – The Last Poem is the name of the novel. There are two persons: one, a young man, a poet, a philosopher – he actually says what Rabindranath would like to say, he represents Rabindranath – and a woman who is in need of relationship. She is continually harassing him about marriage. And particularly in India, if one woman and a man are even seen walking together, that is enough for a scandal. They might not be doing anything, but just walking together and it is enough for a scandal; the whole town will be agog, and so many stories will start springing up from nowhere. And of course the woman suffers more because everywhere people start pointing at her.

So she was desperate. She was saying, ”Why do you go on postponing? – you love me, you want to be with me. If you don’t love me, I will not force you.” And the man says, ”I love you, that’s why I am not going to marry you.” Now, this is very difficult for the woman. If she had been from my commune she would have understood. But what kind of statement is this? – ”Because I love you I cannot marry you.” But she goes on and on, so he says,

”I will marry you on one condition.”

They are sitting on the bank of a lake. He says, ”I will make my house on this side of the lake and you make your house on the other side of the lake. Once in a while, walking, perhaps we may meet.

Once in a while, perhaps I may knock on your door or you may knock on my door. Once in a while, perhaps I am in a boat and you are also in a boat, and we meet on the lake. But it always has to be without any prearrangement. It has not to be a dating. I will never inform you that I am coming, you will never inform me that you are coming. I will marry you on this condition only. For a few days we may not be able to see each other. You will never ask me,’Where have you been?’ We will never interfere in each other’s freedom. We will remain as strangers, as we are now.” The woman said, ”Then what is the purpose of marriage?” Naturally she cannot understand what is the purpose of the marriage.

The purpose of marriage is to be on each other’s head twenty-four hours a day. The purpose of marriage is to destroy each other in the name of love; to nag, harass, fight. The man is suggesting exactly the right thing: ”It will be a great joy suddenly seeing you on the lake... I will not be expecting it. Unexpectedly, I will find you in the jungle by the side of the lake....” Just to think of that unexpected moment is relating. There is no relationship.

He cannot send a message, ”You have to come tonight because you are my wife, otherwise I am going to court.” In fact the husband cannot say to the wife, ”You sleep in the other room.” That is From Ignorance to Innocence

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enough to create trouble. The wife cannot say to the husband, ”You cannot sleep in my bed.” That is enough for trouble, because we have completely forgotten a simple thing, our aloneness. And we are trying to forget it as much as possible – the very idea should be dropped.

But aloneness is a natural phenomenon. And there is nothing painful about it.

When you know it, it is the greatest bliss.

The function of the commune is to give you the space, to give you the understanding, to give you the feel of aloneness, and the experience of relating without getting into relationship.

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CHAPTER 4

Danger: truth at work

2 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHY ARE THE COMMON MASSES AGAINST YOU, WHEN WHAT YOU SAY APPEARS TO US

THE VERY TRUTH?

THAT’S precisely why – because it appears to be the very truth.

Truth is dangerous, dangerous to all those people who have been living in fictions, beautiful lies, nice dreams, utopias.

Truth is bound to be looked on as an enemy by all these people, because it is going to shatter all that they have believed and lived for.

Truth is just the death of all kinds of lies, howsoever consoling they may have been.

Why were the common people against Socrates? Why were the masses so antagonistic to Al-Hillaj Mansoor? Why were the orthodox, the religious, the respectable against jesus? Their only crime was they were saying something which was tremendously disturbing to people’s sleep. Nobody wants to be disturbed when he is having a beautiful dream.

And people don’t have anything else except dreams.

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There have been, all around, dream merchants who have been selling dreams to people and exploiting people – and in return they were not giving anything.

All the religions, up to now, have been dream sellers, exploiters of people’s weaknesses.

Yes, there are weaknesses. Every man who is born is going to die. You cannot hide the truth of death.

How long can you make the cemeteries beautiful? Gardens, lawns, flowers, marble graves... but you cannot hide the fact of death.

You can see that in every country the cemetery is outside the city. It should really be exactly in the middle of the city, so everybody passing by comes to be reminded of death again and again –

because that is the only thing that is certain.

Everything else is just probable; may happen, may not happen. But death is not a probability.

Death is the only certainty in your whole life.

Whatsoever happens, death is going to be there. You cannot escape from it. You cannot go anywhere away from it.

Death will meet you wherever you go.

I am reminded of an ancient parable. A very great king dreamed that death was standing before him – a dark figure. He became frightened even in his dream. But he was a brave man: somehow he gathered his courage together and asked this strange figure, ”Who are you? And what do you want?”

The figure said, ”I am your death, and I have come to warn you: Don’t forget the right place, and the right time to meet me.” Only this much he said, ”Don’t forget the right place and the right time to meet me, tomorrow.” And the shock of his statement was such that the dream was shattered, the king woke up. It was in the middle of the night but he immediately called his wise advisers, astrologers, dream-interpreters, future-predictors, all sorts of people; and he told his dream.

They all started quarreling and discussing and arguing about what the dream meant. The old servant of the king, who had been almost like a father to him – he had raised him from his very childhood....

The king’s mother died early, and his father was constantly going on faraway journeys, invading countries, conquering, expanding the empire. So he was left with this trustworthy servant and he treated him almost like a father.

The old man was standing by his side. He whispered into the king’s ear, ”Don’t waste time! These people can quarrel for centuries; they have been quarreling for centuries. These philosophers, these astrologers, these prophets – they have never agreed on anything. And it is going to be morning; tomorrow is just going to begin and there is not much time. My suggestion is, you take your fastest horse and escape from this place.” The advice appeared to be solid: ”And let these people argue.

They are not going to come to any conclusion at all. The evening will come soon – they will take From Ignorance to Innocence

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centuries – and there will be no conclusion. If you depend on them, you will repent; you just escape!

Leave these people here; let them argue and I will be listening to their arguments.” The king simply slipped away, took his fastest horse and rushed as fast as it was possible, away from the palace where the dream had happened. By the evening he had gone hundreds of miles, and he was very happy that he had come so far away: ”Now it will be difficult for death to find me at the place, at the fixed time.”

The sun was setting. He had reached the outskirts of the city of Damishk. Just to rest... because the whole day he had not eaten, he had not even taken a cup of water. Time was so precious! Thirst is not going to kill you just in one day, hunger is not going to kill you just in one day. He was going to rest in a garden just outside of the city. He went into the garden and was tying the horse to a tree, and was thanking the horse, because the horse was really perhaps the best horse in the world.

He was thanking the horse and saying to him, ”You really proved your mettle today. Even I was not aware that you can go so fast. Now rest, and I will arrange for your food and for your water.” Just then, he felt a hand on one of his shoulders. He looked back. The same black figure was standing there, laughing. The king was shocked; he said, ”Why are you laughing?” Death said, ”This is the place and this is the time. I was worried whether you will be able to make it or not – but your horse certainly is the best horse in the world. I also thank him!” Where can you escape? Perhaps wherever you are going, there is the right place and the right time.

In fact every place is the right place for death, and every time is the right time.

Now, facts like death.... Religions have been trying to console you, giving you ideas that can help you to create a buffer between you and the fear of death – shock absorbers – so that you don’t get shocked continually; otherwise life would become impossible. So all kinds of fictions have been woven into mythologies, into theologies. Anybody saying the truth is bound to cut through all these cobwebs, these mythologies, these fictions.

And when you see suddenly the naked truth, you are going to be against the person who has brought you such a shocking gift.

You would like to believe that it is not true, but you know it is. Hence the anger; otherwise there is no need to kill Socrates.

If you are right, and you know that you are right, then let this man befool himself with his ”truth” – it does not matter to you. The people of Athens believed in an afterlife, as did the people of the whole earth. Everybody, except the atheists, believed in an afterlife of some kind. The Greek mythology was rich, but Socrates said, ”Nothing can be said about death because nobody has ever returned.

So we have to keep our minds open. We cannot accept any fiction about death and life after death, because there has not been a single eyewitness. Until I die, I cannot say whether one lives after death or not. If I die, then there is no question, no problem arises – I am simply not there.

”What was the problem when you were not born?” His argument was solid. In what trouble were you when you were not born? – what anxiety, what anguish, what suffering? You know that there is From Ignorance to Innocence

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no question of any suffering or any anguish when you were not born. Who was going to suffer, and who was going to be in anxiety and anguish? – you were not there!

Socrates just simply looked at death with the same vision. If you are simply finished, as the atheists say; if you completely disappear, if nothing of you will remain, then there is no problem because you are not there. With you, all problems, all anxieties disappear. This is one possibility.

The other possibility is that perhaps the theists are right, and you survive. But then too, he said,

”I don’t see any problem. You are surviving right now, and somehow you are managing your misery, your anxiety, your problems; somehow you are managing. And if you are there, you will be experienced, more experienced; you will be able to manage.” So he said, ”I don’t see any problem to be bothered about. Either I die, then there is no question; or I will be there, more experienced, more wise. And I can trust myself: if I could pass through life, I will pass through death too. But I cannot say anything before I have experienced it. And I cannot promise you either, that when I have experienced it I will be able to come back and tell you, because up to now nobody has come back. Perhaps there is no way to come back. Perhaps the very bridge falls as you pass, all communication becomes impossible. But nothing can be said about it.

He would not say anything definitely, and that was the problem that he was creating in people’s minds. He was creating anxiety. That was one of the points raised against his being in Athens:

”He should be expelled or sentenced to death, because this man has been creating anxiety and anguish in people’s minds. People who were perfectly happy doing their work, comfortably.... This man meets them, and once he has met them, they are never at ease again.” And this was a routine thing for Socrates: just to go around the town, to catch hold of anybody and ask him any question. Even if the other person wanted to escape, Socrates wouldn’t allow it: ”You have to answer!” And then, once you had answered a question, he would hammer your answer from every possible angle and soon you were left without any answer. Then he would tell you, ”You can come to my school” – he had a school – ”if you want to learn, because your answer was absolutely bogus. Some idio0t has sold that answer to you and cheated you. You have been living a lie.” Yes, lies can be comfortable can be very convenient.

Truth, in the beginning, is very inconvenient, is very uncomfortable, but in the end it is the ultimate blessing.

We can summarize: a lie is always sweet in the beginning, bitter in the end; the truth is bitter in the beginning, sweet in the end.

But you need patience for the end. If you are impatient, then you are going to buy some lie.

The common masses have no mind of their own.

For centuries they have been conditioned,

hypnotized, brainwashed continuously.

So when a man like me says something, it needs guts in the first place even to hear it. Then it needs tremendous courage to absorb it, because it is bitter, it goes against all your conditioning.

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So only a very few people who are really seekers of truth will be ready to go through all this turmoil.

Everything will go upside down: their God, their heaven, their hell, their devil, their messiahs, their prophets.

A thick wall exists between you and truth. And all these people are standing between you and the truth. You will have to tell them, ”Get lost! Go to Oregon!” That is my translation for ”Go to hell,” because that has become too old. We should continue to make proverbs fresh.

A Christian will have to put Christ aside; it is very difficult. It was difficult for Jews to put Moses aside when Jesus was telling them something far truer; it was difficult to put Moses aside. Now the same problem arises for the Christian; it is difficult for him to put Jesus aside. And Jesus’ claim is far more than Moses ever claimed. Moses never claimed that he is the only begotten son of God.

Jesus claims that he is the only begotten son of God. Can you put it aside and tell Jesus, ”Go to Oregon”? It will be difficult. Rather than doing that, you would prefer me to leave Oregon. That’s what your politicians are trying; they are telling me, ”Leave Oregon.” That seems to be simpler, because with me they have no ties. I have not sold them any sweet dreams. I have not promised them anything, nor am I promising them now.

My whole work is to demolish, to demolish all the lies that are surrounding you and not to replace them by anything else, but to leave you utterly naked in your aloneness.

To me, only in your aloneness will you be able to know the truth – because you are the truth.

You are not to go anywhere to find truth. Neither can Jesus give it to you, nor can Krishna give it to you, nor can Buddha give it to you, nor can I give it to you. It is not a commodity that somebody can just give to you.

Just think: if truth is a commodity, a thing which can be given to you, then it can be stolen, it can be taken back, it can be lost – anything can happen to it.

But nothing happens to truth. It happens to you, but nothing happens to it. It cannot be stolen, it cannot be purchased.

There is a story in Mahavira’s life.... One of the very famous kings, Bimbisara, had conquered the whole of India and the neighboring countries. He had made a vast empire. He was a man who, once he wanted something, would have it. He had never come across anything that he wanted and could not find a way to get. He had heard many times about Mahavira, who was just resting for the rainy season outside the city, his capital.

He enquired, ”What has this man got? – because I see thousands of people going to him.” Somebody said, ”He has got the truth.”

Bimbisara said, ”Then there is no problem. How much does he ask for it? I am ready to pay. There is no question of bargaining, you simply enquire how much he wants for it.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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The man could not say to the king, ” You are talking like a fool.” He said, ”It is better, your majesty, that you go to him and you negotiate. I am a poor man, don’t put me in this situation. You are a great king; he is a great tirthankara, a great soul which rarely happens. Only twenty-four persons reach that height in one cycle of existence.” He is saying that in millions and millions of light years, only twenty-four... and he is the last for this cycle. Now there is not going to be another man of his caliber again in this cycle of existence. When this whole existence burns out – when all these stars and galaxies and solar systems have gone, disappeared, and a new creation starts from the very scratch – then the first tirthankara will appear. ”Now this man is very rare because for millions of years there is not going to be another comparable to him. So it is better you go.” Bimbisara went with all his paraphernalia, and he was respectful to Mahavira – just a formality. In India even if a king goes to a sage, he has to touch the feet of the sage; that is just a formality. And he said. ”I have come for a simple thing. Give me your truth, and whatsoever you want – even if you ask for my whole empire – I will give it to you. This is my whole life’s standpoint: anything that I want, I have to have it. What it is going to cost matters not.” Mahavira laughed, he said, ”You unnecessarily came this far. In your very capital lives one of my disciples. He has got the truth; and he is a very poor man – he may be ready to sell it. I am not ready to sell it. And you must know that I am also the son of a king. I was going to inherit the kingdom of my father; I renounced it to get the truth. Now, how can I sell it for a kingdom? Even if you give me the whole kingdom, how can I sell it? I have already renounced a whole kingdom to get this truth, and after forty years of struggle, I have found it. I cannot sell it.

Mahavira must have had a sense of humor that Jainas have missed completely. He sent him back to the poor man in the capital. He had never gone to that quarter of the capital, because only the poorest, the very poor, in fact the outcasts, lived there. His golden chariot was standing there before the poor man’s hut. The poor man came running, and Bimbisara said, ”Rejoice! I am ready to give anything you want, just give me the truth. Your Master has sent me; I am coming from Mahavira.” The poor man said, ”My Master must have joked with you. Perhaps he did not want to hurt you before so many people because you had gone with your whole court, all your advisers, ministers, generals. He did not want to hurt you or say no to you. That’s why he has sent you to me. I can give my life if you want. I am just your poor servant; I clean your streets. You can ask for my life and it is here, ready – you cut off my head But truth...? Yes, I have got it, but the very quality of truth is such that it cannot be given. Not that I don’t want to give it to you; I am absolutely willing.

”If you can take it, take it. You can kill me; if you find it inside me, so far so good – I am ready. I will be happy that I had the chance to serve you so intimately and so closely. But I warn you, you will not find it there because the truth has to be authentically yours, only then is it true. If it is somebody else’s, then it is no longer true. My truth cannot be your truth. The moment I say something about the truth, you only hear the words – the truth is left behind. The truth can never be squeezed into words; there is no way.”

Words have been reaching the common people and they have been believing that those words are the truth – somebody believing in the words of Jesus, somebody in the words of Buddha, somebody in the words of Mohammed – but they are not the truth.

No book contains truth, no word can ever contain it.

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But you become satisfied, and whenever somebody disturbs your satisfied state, you are angry. And of course you have the majority of people with you. That helps you tremendously – so many people cannot be wrong.

And truth never happens to crowds, it happens only to individuals.

Whenever truth comes, it comes in the vibe of an individual, so that individual is always standing against the whole crowd.

Otherwise, the whole crowd is with you, because they have also been fed with the same kind of stuff. The Catholics: how many are they? – perhaps six hundred million. Now, any Catholic has a great consolation, that six hundred million people are with him. Six hundred million people cannot be wrong. And against one person... naturally they feel that this person is a disturbance. It is better to finish this person and go to sleep, back to their dreams.

It is not new to me. From my very childhood I have been in the same position. My father would take me with him if he was going to some ceremony, some marriage, some birthday party, anywhere.

He would take me on the condition that I should remain absolutely silent, ”Otherwise, you please remain at home.”

I would say, ”But why? Everybody is allowed to talk, except me!” He said, ”You know, I know, and everybody knows why you are not allowed to talk – because you are a disturbance.”

”But,” I said, ”in things which concern me, you promise me that you will not interfere with me, and promise you that I will remain silent.”

And many times it happened that he had to interfere. For example, if some elderly man was there

– a faraway relative, but in India it doesn’t matter – my father would touch his feet, and would say,

”Touch his feet.”

I said, ”You are interfering with me, and our contract is finished. Why should I touch this old man’s feet? If you want to touch them, you can touch them twice, thrice; I will not interfere, but why should I touch his feet? Why not his head?”

And that was enough disturbance. Everybody would explain to me that he was old. I said, ”I have seen many old people. Just in front of my house there is an old elephant; I never touch his feet. That elephant belongs to a priest; it is a very old elephant. I never touch his feet, and he is very wise – I think more wise than this old man. Just old age does not give him any quality. A fool remains a fool

– perhaps becomes more foolish as he becomes older. An idiot becomes more idiotic as he grows old, because you cannot remain the same, you are going to grow. And the idiot, when he becomes senile... then his idiocy is multiplied. And that is the time when he becomes very respectable. I am not going to touch the feet of this old man unless it is proved to me why I should.” Once I went to a funeral; one of my teachers had died. He was my Sanskrit teacher – a very fat man, funny – looking, and funnily dressed in the way of old brahmins, ancient brahmins, with a very From Ignorance to Innocence

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big turban. He was a laughingstock in the whole school but he was very innocent too. The Hindi word for innocent is bhole, so we used to call him Bhole. As he entered the class, the whole class would recite loudly, ”Jai Bhole” – long live Bhole. And of course he could not punish all the students; otherwise, how was he going to teach, whom was he going to teach?

He died. So naturally, thinking that as he was my teacher I would behave, my father didn’t ask for the contract. But I could not, because what happened there I had not expected – nobody had expected it. His dead body was lying there when we arrived. His wife came out running and fell upon him and said, ”Oh my Bhole!” Everybody remained silent but I could not. I tried hard, but the harder I tried, the more difficult it was. I burst out laughing and I said, ”This is great!” My father said, ”I had not made a contract with you thinking that as he was your teacher you would be respectful.”

I said, ”I am not disrespectful, but I am surprised by the coincidence. Bhole was his nickname and he used to get angry about it. Now the poor fellow is dead and his wife is calling him Bhole and he cannot do anything. I am just feeling sorry for him!” Every place I used to go with him he always made the contract; but he was the first party to break it because something or other would happen and he would have to say something. And that was enough, because that was the condition – that he was not to interfere with me.

One Jaina monk was in the town. Jaina monks sit on a very high pedestal, so that even standing you can touch their feet with your head... at least a five-foot, six-foot-high pedestal – and they sit on it. Jaina monks move in a group, they are not allowed to move alone; five Jaina monks should move together. That is a strategy so that the four keep an eye on the fifth to see that nobody tries to get a Coca-Cola – unless they all conspire. And I have seen them conspiring and getting Coca-Cola, that’s why I remember it.

They are not allowed even to drink in the night and I have seen them drinking Coca-Cola in the night.

In fact, in the day it was dangerous to drink Coca-Cola – what if somebody saw it! – so only in the night.... I had supplied it myself so there was no problem about it. Who else would supply them?

No Jaina would be ready to do it, but they knew me, and they knew that any outrageous thing, and I would be ready to do it.

So five pedestals were there. But one monk was sick, so when I went there with my father, I went to the fifth pedestal and sat on it. I can still remember my father and the way he looked at me... he could not even find words: ”What to say to you?” And he could not interfere with me, because I had not done any wrong to anybody. Just sitting on a pedestal, a wooden pedestal, I was not hurting anybody or anything. He came close to me and he said, ”It seems, contract or no contract, you are going to do whatsoever you are intending to do; so from now onwards we will not make the contract, because it is absolutely unnecessary.”

And those four monks were in such uneasiness and they also could not say anything – what to say?

One of them finally said, ”This is not right. Nobody who is not a monk should sit on an equal level.” So they told my father, ”You bring him down.”

I said, ”You think twice. Remember the bottle!” because I had supplied the Coca-Cola.

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They said, ”Yes, that’s right, we remember the bottle. You sit on the pedestal as long as you please.” My father said, ”What bottle?”

I said, ”You ask these people. I have a double contract: one with you and one with them, and nobody can prevent me. You all four agree that I can sit here, or I will start telling the name of the bottle.” They said, ”We are perfectly satisfied. You can sit here, there is no harm – but please keep silent about the bottle.”

Now, many people were there, and they all became interested... what bottle? When I came out of the temple everybody gathered; they all said, ”What is this bottle?” I said, ”This is a secret. And this is my power over these fools whose feet you go on touching. If I want, I can manage to tell them to touch my feet, otherwise – the bottle....” These fools!

My father, on the way home, asked me, ”You can just tell me. I will not tell anybody: what is this bottle? Do they drink wine?”

I said, ”No. Things have not gone that far, but if they remain here a few days more, I will manage that too. I can force them to drink wine... otherwise I will name the bottle.” The whole town was discussing the bottle, what the bottle was, and why they had become afraid:

”We have always thought that they were such spiritual sages, and this boy made them afraid. And they all agreed that he could sit there, which is against the scriptures.” Everybody was after me.

They were ready to bribe me: ”Ask whatsoever – you just tell us what is the secret of the bottle.” I said, ”It is a very great secret, and I am not going to tell you anything about it. Why don’t you go and ask your monks what the bottle is? I can be there, so they cannot lie – and then you will know what kind of people you are worshipping. And these are the people who are conditioning your mind!” In the university there used to be a professor who wanted to resign because of me. He was a very old, senior professor, and very much honored. Perhaps he is still alive. His name was Doctor S.N.L.

Shrivastava; he was a Ph.D., D.Litt. In philosophy he was a well known name – and he threatened to resign because of me. His condition to the university was that if I was not expelled from the university, then this was his resignation: only one could live in the university, either I or he. And I was just a student, only a first-year student. I had just matriculated from my village and had come to the bigger town. And within three months he became such a mess that when he saw me he would get out of the class!

I would run after him and tell him, ”What is the matter? Why are you going away? I pay the fee. You are supposed to teach, I am supposed to learn, and all that I do is learning. If I ask a question, it is just to learn.”

”But,” he said, ”you ask questions which are always putting me in a dilemma. If I say yes, then I am caught; if I say no, then I am caught. Each of your questions is just to provoke other questions, and there is no end to it. Three months have passed; you don’t allow me to go any further than the first From Ignorance to Innocence

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day. We are still stuck there; and I know that there is not going to be anything else for these two years you are going to be here with me. You won’t let that first day be finished. So it is better....”

”But,” I said, ”you are so learned, with so many degrees, honorary degrees, and thirty years’ teaching experience, you must have passed so many students – why are you so disturbed? If you don’t know, you can simply say ”I don’t know.” Your only trouble is that you cannot say ”I don’t know.” I am not your trouble. You want to keep the pretension that you know everything, and the fact is nobody knows everything, not even you know everything.”

He was teaching us Aristotelian logic; he was the professor of logic and philosophy. And in India, for the first two years you have to learn logic, so those two years, the beginning two years, are devoted to Aristotle and his logic. And I said to him that even Aristotle was not all-knowing; he was as ignorant as anybody else. He writes in his book that women have one tooth less than men.

Now look at the fool. He had two wives; he could have told Mrs. Aristotle One or Mrs. Aristotle Two,

”Just open your mouth.” And in fact women are always keeping their mouths open; there was no need to say it. If he was afraid he could have counted them in the night when they were asleep. But no, in Greece it was believed, traditionally believed, that a woman had to be, in everything, smaller than man, lower than man. How could she have exactly the same number of teeth as a man? But he never bothered to check.

So I told Shrivastava, ”This man, you say, is a logician, the father of logic? It is such a simple thing that even a very mediocre man would have thought of it: the first thing is to count the teeth. And what was he doing with two wives anyway? Only then should he have written it. Without counting their teeth, he was just believing public opinion. And for thousands of years in Greece, this was the opinion – nobody bothered to count them. But it is simply strange that neither any men bothered nor any women bothered. At least some woman should have counted them, and said that this was absolutely absurd and nonsense.

But he said, ”It is enough and I don’t want to listen any more. I am going to the vice-chancellor to give my resignation: either he expels you or I resign.” He didn’t come for three days, so the vice-chancellor called me. I asked him, ”What is my fault? You expel me – there is no problem in it – but please tell me what is my fault? Have I asked any single question that was not related to logic? And if I have come to learn logic, I have to ask questions because my doubts should be satisfied. Otherwise the man should say that he does not know, and I am allowing that. Once he says,’I don’t know,’ I will not raise that question again. He is not courageous enough even to say,’I don’t know.’ And now this is a threat, that he will resign.

”He knows that he is a valuable professor. If he resigns in the middle of the term, where are you going to get a man of the same caliber? He knows that against a student who has been in the college only three months, it is going to be decided in his favor. But,” I said, ”it is not going to be easy. Then my fight, which was going on with S.N.L. Shrivastava, will start with you. I will be here in your office every day. You will have to give me in writing what the reasons are that I have been expelled.”

He was a really nice and intelligent man. He said, ”I don’t see that there is any reason for you to be thrown out and I would be the last person to expel you. But please understand my situation: From Ignorance to Innocence

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we cannot lose that professor. So do one thing.... I will not expel you; I will make arrangements in another college. You do not have to do anything else, just do me a favor: I will make arrangements in another college, and you move to that other college. Jabalpur University has at least twenty colleges, so you can choose any college you want.” I said, ”It is not a question of my choosing any college. You phone all these principals to see if anybody is ready to accept me, because now everybody knows about this S.N.L. Shrivastava thing: that the best professor of philosophy in the university is ready to resign. Then who is going to take me? You try; I am ready.” Out of twenty colleges, only one principal was ready to accept me – on the condition that I would never go to the class. He would give me the percentage needed, but I should never go to the class.

I said, ”That is a perfect arrangement. I myself don’t like unnecessarily bothering to go and then finding idiots there who don’t know what they are doing, what they are teaching. So this is a good arrangement; you can make it. But remember, I am not going to pay the fees. I am doing you a favor, so you arrange for the fees for two years. I will never go to that college; you arrange for the fees, and you take care of everything. After two years I will come to you. If anything goes wrong, then you will be responsible.”

He said, ”I will take every responsibility” – and he took every responsibility.

After two years I went to him and said, ”Give me my permission card to enter the examination. I am not going to that college; I have not even seen that college.” This is the way of the common masses – even the educated people belong to the common masses

– they don’t have integrity, intelligence or even the courage to say, ”I don’t know.” Now this condition, I know, had come from the professor. The principal had asked the professor, ”Can we accept this student? This is the trouble....”

And the professor said, ”I don’t want any trouble in my class. You can accept him only on the condition that he never comes to the class.”

And now, just before I left India, I read an article by the same professor, Soleri is his name, proudly declaring that I was his student. I have not seen his face, he has not seen my face; I have never been in his class or on his college campus or around there. And now he is proud that I have been his student and that he always knew that I am going to be somebody special. These fools! They can lie so easily. But their whole lives are full of lies.

The common masses are, in a way, innocent. But the pedagogues, the priests, the politicians –

these are the people who go on poisoning the common masses and keep them at the level of a mob.

What we call democracy has not yet come to the point of being a democracy. It is still, everywhere, only a mobocracy, because the mass that elects the people is a mob; it is not yet alert or aware.

Just a few days ago was the president’s election here. What I heard was, that before the election on the sixth of November, on the night of the fifth of November, before the Wasco County Court, all From Ignorance to Innocence

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the Christian congregations gathered. All the priests – who are enemies of each other, continually fighting, arguing about who is right, who is wrong and who is closer to Christ and God and who is not closer, and who is really orthodox and who has just gone astray – they all gathered there together.

All the priests, with all their congregations, before the county courthouse... for what? To pray against the Antichrist, to save Wasco County.

Now who is the Antichrist in Wasco County? And Wasco County needs to be saved from the Antichrist? I really enjoyed it, that they are all praying for me – because I don’t think there is anybody else who can claim to be the Antichrist. But I am a little crazy. They say I am anti-Christ, anti-Buddha, anti-Mahavira, anti-Krishna, anti-semite.... Anything – just put ”anti” before it and it refers to me. And in reality I am just for myself and not against anybody. I don’t care a bit about Christ, so why should I be anti-Christ? I don’t care about anybody! They never cared about me, why should I care about them?

These people go on.... The journalists asked the priests, ”Who is the Antichrist?” and they were not even courageous enough to utter my name. They just went round and round answering, ”We are just praying so that the county is saved from evil forces.” But why only Wasco County? Are all the evil forces gathered here in Wasco County? They should have gone to the White House in Washington and prayed there. because if all the evil forces are gathered anywhere, there are two places: the Kremlin and the White House. And if the world is going to suffer, it is going to suffer from these two places: the Kremlin and the White House.

But the strangest thing about these priests is: in the second world war in England they were praying to God, the Christian God, for England’s victory, for Winston Churchill’s safety; and the Christians in Rome, where the pope is, in the Vatican, were praying for Mussolini’s safety and his victory – to the same Christian God. Not only that, Adolf Hitler was being blessed by the Christian bishops, and they were praying for his victory – to the same Christian God. Now what happened to that Christian God? He must have committed suicide! How to decide? – all are his people, and his agents are praying. In whose favor is He going to decide?

And Christians don’t see the point that when Adolf Hitler is in power, then the Christian priest prays for Adolf Hitler. He is just a coward. He could not say, ”I will not pray for you and the ideology you stand for. I am going to pray that you should be defeated.” But no, brave people don’t become priests; they have other, better things to do. These are cowards. And these cowards go on poisoning other people’s minds; they make other people cowards. They have destroyed the whole of humanity and made it into a madhouse.

So if the masses are against me, it is expected. It cannot be otherwise, it is natural.

What is unexpected is that there are a few people all around the world who are able to stand with me, who are courageous enough to put their prejudices aside and listen to me, who are intelligent enough to recognize the truth when they come across it – whatsoever the cost and whatsoever the consequence.

In fact, nobody before me has had such intelligent people as I have got around the world, people of such caliber, so receptive, so willing to go through the fire test.

Yes, it is walking on fire when you go towards truth.

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It is going to burn you, it is going to burn you completely. And then that which remains unburned, alive, is your reality. Everything else, which got burned, was rubbish poured over you by others.

Nobody can burn the truth, but to attain the truth you will have to drop so many things, so many burdens.

But I am fortunate that at least one percent of humanity is almost ready to jump and create the first religion of the world: the religion of truth, consciousness – with no lies about God, heaven, hell, devil

– just the purest twenty-four-carat truth.

Even one percent around the earth is a tremendous force. You should not think that it is only one percent against ninety-nine percent. No, those ninety-nine percent are nothing because they don’t have any fire of their own. They are dead before death; they are just walking corpses.

This one percent is tremendously powerful because it is alive.

The fire in it is going to transform the whole world. And those ninety-nine percent don’t count at all.

So I am not concerned with what the masses think about me. I am concerned only about the one percent of intelligent people in the world – what they think about me.

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CHAPTER 5

Ecstasy is now – why wait?

3 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHAT IS RENUNCIATION? WHAT IS ITS PLACE IN YOUR RELIGION?

THE idea of renunciation is one of the fundamentals of all pseudo-religions. Its phenomenology has to be understood very deeply.

All the religions have been preaching a division between this world and that world which is beyond death – between the soul and the body. The body belongs to this world, the soul belongs to that world; hence if you want to achieve the world beyond death, which is eternal.... and the happiness there is unending, the happiness here is not worth calling happiness; it is momentary, it is dream stuff. It comes, and even before you have been able to grasp it, it is gone. It is illusory, it is a kind of mirage in the desert.

When you are far away you see a lake of water. You are thirsty and great hope arises in you. And the lake is absolutely real as far as you can see, because the only proof of its reality, that water is there, is that the trees are being reflected in the water. If there is a mountain by the side, the mountain is reflected in the lake, the sun is reflected in the lake. What more. proof do you need? Without water these reflections cannot happen. You rush with great hope, but as you come nearer, you find the lake is receding; the distance between you and the lake remains the same.

It was just an illusion created by sunrays reflected back from the hot desert sand. When sunrays are reflected back, they move like waves, and their movement from far away creates the illusion of 55

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water. And in their wave-like movement they attain the quality of reflecting things; they become just like a mirror. That is one half of the mirage.

The other half is in your thirst. If you were not thirsty, perhaps you would have been able to detect, to find out that it was a mirage. You have seen mirages before; you know that mirages can appear almost as if they are real – but your thirst is there. The physical phenomenon of the returning rays of the sun gives half the reality to the mirage. The other, and the far more important half, is contributed by you and your thirst. You want to believe that it is true. Even if somebody was there trying to prove that it was not real, you would feel angry with this man: you are thirsty and the water is there and he is trying to prove that the water is illusory. He does not know what thirst means! – perhaps he is not thirsty. There is no way to convince a thirsty man that what he is seeing is not the real thing. All that you see is not necessarily real. Appearance does not mean reality.

The religions have been saying for millions of years to people, that the happiness in this world is of the same nature as a mirage in the desert. That’s why you are never capable of catching hold of it.

You never get hold of happiness in your fist; it comes and goes. You can feel it like a breeze, but by the time you become aware that it is here, it is already gone. Perhaps it is more unreal than the mirage. A mirage at least has some reality – the reflected sunrays contribute half, and your thirst, the other half But in your so-called happiness of this world, you are contributing one hundred percent.

There is nothing else there which contributes anything.

And you know it. Today one woman is so beautiful to you that you can say Cleopatra was nothing before her. She seems to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Not only today – you cannot conceive that there could have been any woman more beautiful ever, or could be in the future. You are projecting, because the same woman to others is nothing; and the same woman tomorrow will be nothing to you too. And then you will be surprised, shocked – what happened? What happened to the woman? Nothing has happened to the woman – she is the same person – something has happened to you.

Yesterday you were thirsty – there was lust being projected. Today the lust is fulfilled; now there is no biological projection. The woman is an ordinary woman and the happiness that you got was just out of your projection – you created the whole game. The woman at the most played the part of an inactive participant; she allowed you to project yourself upon her. Perhaps she was also projecting her mind upon you so it was a projection from both sides. Sooner or later it is going to disappear because projections cannot last, once their basic cause is missing.

The basic cause is in your biology; and biology doesn’t bother about love and poetry and romance, or anything – biology means business!

Biology is not interested in foreplay and afterplay; they are a sheer wastage. Biology is interested in reproduction.

Once biology has done its work, it withdraws; the projection disappears. Then you are standing there, the same woman is standing there – but nothing is anymore the same. Where has the happiness disappeared?

You were feeling just as if you were on the top of Everest, and you have fallen to the depths of the Pacific. The woman deceived you and the woman thinks you deceived her; and you both try to From Ignorance to Innocence

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dump on each other. Nobody has deceived, both have been deceived by biology. But biology is not somebody outside you, it is intrinsic to your body. You are a projection of two other biologies, those of your father, your mother; and they were a projection of two other biologies – it is a continuum, a river-like flow.

The religions tried to exploit this fundamental truth. It is true that romance and poetry... and the so-called love affair is just a shadow of biology. So it is not very difficult: a certain injection with certain hormones can create all the poetry right now, all the romance.... Another injection – and you fall into the Pacific! Now we know a man can become a woman, a woman can become a man; just a little change of hormones, just a little change of chemistry.

Religions exploited this simple truth. It is true, but rather than explaining it to you, they exploited it.

They said, ”This is the momentary happiness. Don’t run after it; you are wasting your time. The real world is beyond death.” Why beyond death? Because death will destroy all your biology, physiology, chemistry; everything that is material, death will take away. Only the spiritual will be left behind and the spiritual knows the eternal. The material, the physical knows only the momentary.

It appeared very logical; the first part is true, but the second part is fictitious. Yes, it is true that moments of happiness in this life are very fleeting, but that does not mean that there is another life beyond death where these moments become eternal. There is no evidence for it. At least these moments are there, are experienced by everyone. Howsoever small and fleeting, they exist. Nobody can deny their existence. You can say they are made of the same stuff as dreams are made of –

but still they are there. Even dreams have a reality of their own. They are there, they affect you; and when something affects you it becomes real.

For example, you are hungry. The whole day you have not been able to eat anything; you are tired, you fall asleep. Now, the body is hungry and wants food. The mind creates a beautiful dream that you are a guest in a great feast. The mind is serving you because if the mind is not going to create the dream, your sleep will be disturbed – the hunger is there. Somehow you have to be convinced that you are eating, that you are not hungry. Your sleep remains undisturbed. The dream is doing something real. How can something unreal do something real? It is not possible – but a dream has its own existence. Yes, it is different from a rock, but so is a rose flower different from a rock. The dream is even more different; but it affects you, it affects your life, it affects your lifestyle – and those changes are real.

So, one thing to be remembered: in this life there are momentary pleasures, fleeting experiences of happiness, sudden explosions of joy – but you cannot catch hold of them.

You cannot keep them in your safe deposit. You cannot make them permanent. Just because you cannot make them permanent, religions exploited you. It was a very cunning strategy. You want to make them permanent; your deepest desire is to remain happy for ever, not to know pain, sadness, anguish – ever. Just always to be in paradise – that is your desire.

The religions exploited this. They said, ”There is such a place, but you cannot get anything without paying for it.” It looks perfectly mathematical, economical. The religions started teaching that you sacrifice this life if you want to attain the permanent world of paradise that is beyond death. And it is very cheap, because what you are sacrificing are just momentary fleeting experiences that happen once in a while.

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If you collect all your moments of happiness in your seventy years of life, perhaps you may not get even seven moments which you can be absolutely certain were of the nature of ecstasy.

In seventy years of life, not even seven moments? Then what have you been doing here? –

torturing yourself and others? Yes, you cannot find even seven moments, because the nature of those moments is such that when they are there, they take you over totally, they possess you – yes, that is the right word – they possess you completely. But when they are gone, they dispossess you as completely as they had possessed you, so only a memory is left. And how long can you live on the memory which proved so deceptive?

After a few days you start doubting whether it happened or were you just imagining? Because in your whole life’s experience that moment is so contradictory: years pass, then one moment perhaps....

And that too is not in your hands; when and where it is going to happen, you cannot decide. So there are years of dragging, and a certain moment which has remained just a memory.... Slowly, slowly, even the smoke of memory starts disappearing.

So even if you ask a man of seventy years old, he cannot say that there are even seven moments.

And as you become older, there is less and less possibility of those moments. There is more and more disillusionment, more and more disappointment. In the future there is only death and darkness, and in the past nothing but deception.

The religions had a beautiful space through which to exploit you – and they did well all over the world.

For thousands of years they have found the greatest business – greater than anybody else’s: they have been selling you paradise, and almost for nothing.

All they ask is: ”Renounce this momentary life and the eternal world of ecstasy is yours.” Hence renunciation became a foundational belief: the more you renounce, the more you become worthy; and the more you can be certain that you are coming closer. So people have tried to renounce everything.

Mahavira was going to be the king. His father was old, and he was continually asking Mahavira,

”Now let me retire. I am tired; and you are ready, young, well-educated – I am perfectly satisfied.

Where can I find a better son than you? Just be ready to relieve me.” But Mahavira had other ideas. While he was being educated by the priests, the monks, they had poisoned his mind. They had told him that if he could renounce the kingdom, ”Then the kingdom of God is yours.” The greater the renunciation, the greater, of course, will be the reward. That’s why the twenty-four great Masters of the Jainas are all kings.

I have been asking the Jaina monks, ”What is the secret of this? Was there nobody else in the country who could attain, become a great Master? – a warrior, a brahmin, a scholar, anybody – why only kings?” They don’t have any answer. I used to tell them, ”I am not asking you for the answer because I have the answer. I am just asking you the question so that you start thinking about it.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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The answer is simple: because they renounced the kingdom, the greatest reward has to be theirs.

A poor man can renounce whatsoever he has – but what has he? He cannot become a tirthankara, the suprememost Master. Even in paradise he will be living somewhere outside the town. He won’t get in because they will ask him, ”What have you renounced? In the first place what have you got to renounce?”

So of course the kings will be very close to the palace of God; then will come the richest, the super-rich people; then the middle class people; then the lowest strata and then will come those who had nothing to renounce – they were already without anything. In fact they should be by the side of God already because they don’t have anything. But they will be outside the boundary lines of paradise; they will not be able to show what their bank balance is in the other world.

All the Hindu avataras are kings: Rama, Krishna... Buddha is a king. It is strange that these people are drawn only from kings, but if you understand the structure, the strategy of the priest, it is clear: they have renounced the most, naturally they are promised the most. Nobody knows whether they get anything after death or not, but the idea became so ingrained for the simple reason that it has a grain of truth in it: in this life everything is momentary.

To me, nothing is wrong if it is momentary. In fact, because it is momentary it is so exciting, so ecstatic. Make it permanent, and it will be dead.

In the morning, the rose flower opens up, so fresh, with fresh dewdrops still on its petals, so fragrant.

You cannot conceive that just by the evening these petals will be falling into dust, and the rose will disappear.

You would like it to remain permanent, but then you need a plastic flower; a real flower won’t do.

A real flower has to be momentary. To be real it has to be momentary; only plastic things can be permanent.

Plastic is a new discovery. It was not known to Buddha, Mahavira, Mohammed, Jesus, but I can say to you that paradise must be made of plastic.

If there is any paradise, it cannot be anything but plastic, because plastic has the quality of not dying, it is deathless.

Now scientists are worried – particularly the environmentalists are very worried – because plastic is so cheap that you go on disposing of it. Glass was not so cheap; you were saving the bottles or returning the bottles and getting your deposit back. Plastic is so cheap that everything made of plastic is disposable: use it once and dispose of it. But you don’t know where it is going. It is getting collected in the oceans, in the riverbeds, in the lakes under the earth, and there is no way for nature to dissolve it because nature is not prepared, was not made to absorb plastic.

If God has made this world, he certainly is not all-knowing. At least one thing he did not know: that plastic was going to happen one day. He has not made anything in nature, any chemicals, which can dissolve plastic, so plastic goes on accumulating. Soon it will have accumulated so much that it will destroy the fertility of the earth, it will poison the waters. Nothing can destroy it, and it will destroy everything.

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In the Hindu paradise, the apsaras – how to translate the word apsara? – they are callgirls for those great sages who live in paradise. Of course, they need callgirls. Those callgirls, those apsaras, are the most beautiful; it has to be so. They remain always young – that gives me the clue that they are plastic. They are stuck at the age of sixteen; for millions of years they remain just sixteen. Because in the Indian mind sixteen is the most mature age for a woman, they remain at sixteen.

Apsaras don’t perspire; neither Mahavira nor Buddha nor Jesus nor Mohammed had any idea of deodorants, so the only thing they could conceive of was that those girls who serve the sages should not perspire. But only if your body is made of plastic will you not perspire; otherwise, perspiration is absolutely necessary. And those girls will not get old, will not die.

Nothing dies in paradise, nothing gets old, nothing changes; it must be an utterly boring place. Can you imagine the boredom – where everything remains the same every day? There is no need for any newspaper there. I have heard that only once was one newspaper published – one edition, on one day – and it flopped because after that nothing happened! It described everything in the first edition; that was the last edition also.

This desire for permanency is somehow sick; but it was there, so the religious firms – yes, I call them firms – Christian, Hindus, Mohammedans, they did great business for centuries. They are still doing it... and their business can never end, for the simple reason that they sell invisible commodities.

They take visible things from you and they give you invisible things which you have to believe in.

I am reminded of a story. A king had conquered the whole world and he was very restless – now, what to do? He was thinking that once he had conquered the whole world he would rest. He had never thought that he would be so restless, he had never been so restless. While fighting, continuously invading, going on and on – because there is always some place to go, some enemy to destroy, some country to conquer – there was no space, no time to be restless; he was so occupied.

But now he had conquered the whole world, he was utterly restless – what to do now?

A con man heard about this situation. He came to the palace, asked for an audience with the king and said, ”I have the remedy for restlessness.” Immediately he was taken inside, because all the physicians had failed. The king could not sleep, could not sit, was walking back and forth and was worried continually. He was asking, ”What to do now? Isn’t there another world? Find out! We will conquer it.

This con man came into the court before the king, and he said, ”Don’t be worried. You are the first man who has conquered the whole world. You are worthy to receive the clothes of God himself –

and I can manage it.”

This was a great idea. The king became immediately interested. He said, ”You start working. God’s own clothes...! Have they ever before come on the earth?” The man said, ”Never, because nobody has been worthy of them. You are the first man. So for the first time, from paradise, I will bring the clothes for you.” The king said, ”Every preparation should be made... and how much will the cost be?” The man said, ”They are beyond cost; still, millions of rupees will be needed – but it is nothing.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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The king said, ”Don’t be worried, money is not a question at all. But don’t try to deceive me.” The man said, ”There is no question of deception. I will be staying in your palace and you can put your army around the palace. I will be working here; of course, my room has not to be opened until I give a knock from the inside. You can lock it from the outside so you can be completely satisfied that I cannot escape. But whatsoever money I ask, you have to go on sending to the person whose name I give you. It will take not more than three weeks.” And in three weeks he withdrew millions of rupees. He was sending a name every day – morning, afternoon, night – immediately! Urgent!

The king knew that the work was such... and the man could not deceive him. Where could he go?because he was locked in. And certainly he didn’t escape. After three weeks he knocked on the door, the door was opened. He came out with a huge beautiful box. He had gone into the room with the box, saying, ”I will have to take the box with me for the clothes I have to bring you.” Not to be deceived, the king had opened the box to see whether he was carrying some clothes in it, inside. It was empty, there was no deception; the box was given back to him.

And now the con man came out and said, ”The box will be opened in the court before all the wise, the learned, the generals, the queen, the king, the prince, the princess – everybody has to be present because this is a unique occasion.”

The man must have been really courageous – con men always are. He called the king, ”Come close, here. I will open the box. Give me your turban. I will put it in the box, because this is how I have been instructed: first, I put your turban in, then take out the turban which God has given, and give it to you. You put it on yourself. One thing more,” he declared to the court, ”these clothes are divine, so only those who are born really from their own fathers will be able to see them. Those who are bastards, they will miss out. I cannot do anything. This is the condition.” But everybody said, ”There is no problem in it. We are born of our fathers.” The king’s turban went in, and the con man’s empty hand came out, and he said to the king, ”Look at the beauty of the turban!” His hand was empty but the whole court started clapping, and everybody was trying to outdo the other, shouting that such a beautiful thing had never been seen.

Now the king thought, ”If I say his hand is empty then I am the only bastard and all these bastards are really born of their fathers. So it is better to keep quiet.” In fact, this was the situation with everybody. They all saw his hand was empty, but who would come out and be condemned when everybody else was seeing something there? They started suspecting, ”Perhaps I am a bastard, so better keep quiet. What is the point of becoming unnecessarily condemned by all the people?” So they started shouting more loudly in praise of its beauty.

The king put the turban, which was not there, on his head. But it was not only the turban; by and by, other clothes started disappearing. At last, only his underwear was left. The king thought for a moment: ”Now what to do?” But it was too late to turn back. ”If I have seen the turban and I have seen the coat and I have seen the shirt, then why can’t I see the underwear? Now it is better to see it. There is no way to go back. This man...!”

The man was holding the invisible underwear in his hands, and was showing them, ”Look how many diamonds are on the underwear!”

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The whole court was applauding, saying, ”Such an experience has never happened in the whole history of man.”

The king’s underwear also went in. But that con man was something! He said, ”When I was coming, God said to me,’These clothes are going into the world for the first time, so tell the king from me that when he wears these clothes he has to go in a procession round the whole capital, so all the people can see. Otherwise, those poor people will never be able to see them.’ The chariot is ready – you please come on.”

Now, with each step it was difficult to go back. The king started thinking, ”It would have been better if I had stopped the whole thing with the turban – but now it is too late. If I say I am naked.... But the whole court is applauding.”

And they started saying, ”Yes sir, this is right; if God has asked, it has to be done. And that is the right welcome for the clothes.”

The streets were packed with people because the rumor had gone far and wide that God’s clothes were coming. And the king agreed. Naked, he stood on his chariot, and before him the man was announcing, ”These clothes will be seen only by those who are born of their own fathers.” So everybody saw them, except a small child who had come with his father. Sitting on his father’s shoulders, he said, ”Da” – Da means daddy – ”the king appears to be naked.” His father said, ”You idiot, keep quiet! When you Grow up, then you will be able to see those clothes.

It needs a certain maturity; just a child like you cannot see the clothes. Keep quiet if you want to see. I was not willing from the very beginning to bring you here.” But the child could not resist; again and again he said, ”But I see him clearly, naked.” The father had to escape with the child out of the crowd, because if others heard him, it would have meant that the child, was not his but somebody else’s.

With invisible commodities it is very easy to exploit people, to force them to do things against themselves – and that’s what renunciation is.

It is con-manship, done by the priest in the name of God, truth, moksha, nirvana.

Their names may be different, but the priest is the greatest con man in the world. Other con men are just small criminals. Of what can they cheat you? But the priest, the prophet, the messiah, the avatar, the tirthankara – these are the super con men.

They have sold things which nobody has seen, which nobody is ever going to see. Not a single witness exists.

Nobody has returned from death and said, ”Yes, there is eternal beauty, eternal joy, eternal silence, eternal peace.”

The business goes on because nobody can contradict it. If you contradict it, you are wrong, because the whole world believes in it.

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But there was a certain truth which they tried to fix into their strategy of exploitation: in life everything is momentary. But nothing is wrong in it; it has to be so. If it were otherwise, life would have been intolerable.

Things change, and it is good that they change, otherwise they would be dead. Change keeps them alive.

You are changing continuously. Do you remember on what day you jumped from childhood and you became a young man, or from youth you became an old man? You cannot draw the line between when you were a child, when you were adolescent, when you became a young man, when you became middle-aged, when you became old. Can you draw a line? No, every moment you are changing. It is an ongoing process.

Since you were conceived, you have been changing. In your mother’s womb those nine months you changed so much; in ninety years of your life you will not change so much. If you are shown pictures of your nine months’ life in your mother’s womb you will not recognize that they are your pictures.

Or do you think that you can recognize them? You have changed completely, and you are changing every moment – and not only you, everything around you is changing. All the stars are moving and changing. Every day some star dies and disappears – it may have been here for millions of years –

another star is born. Every day that is going on.

Life is a flux, a movement, a continuum.

There is nothing wrong in it. Enjoy that moment which comes and goes.

Drink out of it as much as you can because it is fleeting – so don’t waste time thinking. Don’t start thinking that it is fleeting! Don’t be bothered about what will happen tomorrow, whether this will be with you or not; and don’t think of yesterdays.

While it lasts, squeeze the whole juice out of it, drink of it completely.

Then who cares whether it goes away or if it remains? If it remains we will be drinking it. If it goes, good, we will be drinking some other moment.

Why should you insist that this moment remain permanent? How do you know that better moments are not coming? Just a moment before you would not have thought of this moment. And who knows

– when this moment goes, something better may be on the way. In fact, it is on the way, because if you have drowned yourself in this moment totally, you have learned something of tremendous importance. You will be using that in the coming moment. Each moment your maturity is growing.

Each moment you are becoming more and more centered, more and more in the moment, more and more aware, more and more alert, more and more capable of living.

So who cares about death? We will enjoy it when we die. Death will also be a moment in life.

Death is not the end of life, but only a moment of transformation, because nothing can die. You cannot destroy anything, it only changes shapes, forms.

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Now science is capable of destroying Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the whole world... but not really. It cannot destroy a single piece of stone. It cannot destroy it totally, it cannot annihilate it; it will still be there. You can break it into pieces but those pieces will be there. You can heat it as much as if you have brought the sun itself under it; it will melt, but it will be there. Yes, you can change the form, but there is no way to throw it out of existence.

Nothing dies, nothing is born.

Birth simply means that the form that you were was not this form, but some other form, so you cannot recognize it.

You cannot recognize even pictures of you in your mother’s womb. If I show you a picture of your past life, are you going to recognize it? Forget about the mother’s womb, you may not be able to recognize the picture of when you were three months old, six months old, nine months old.

Continuously, everything goes on changing.

Death is a great transformation.

You ask what is the place of renunciation in my religion. Before I answer you, there is one thing more to be noted: this idea of renunciation became so deeprooted in the whole of humanity that even the people who have denied the existence of life after death have also used the same logic. The logic became almost universal.

For example, in India there was a school of atheists called charvakas. The word charvaka is worth understanding. Their enemies – and all the religions are enemies of Charvakas – have burned all their books so not a single book of the Charvakas is available. All that we know is from the scriptures of Hindus, Jainas and Buddhists criticizing Charvakas. So we can guess something of what those people were saying, but we cannot be absolutely certain. And these are all religious people, and they destroyed the Charvakas’ scriptures. Perhaps they have killed many of them also, because today there is not a single Charvaka in India. And all the scriptures are so much against the Charvakas that it seems they must have been a tremendous force once. Otherwise why criticize them when there is nobody who follows the philosophy?

All three religions were continually hammering and arguing against the Charvakas. It must have been a very popular philosophy. And in fact, it is still a powerful philosophy all over the world, but because people are hypocrites, they don’t recognize it. Just listen to their philosophy and you will see that out of one hundred people, ninety-nine point nine percent are Charvakas. They may be Christians, they may be Hindus, they may be Mohammedans, it doesn’t matter; these are just their masks.

So the enemy scriptures describe the meaning of the word charvaka: eat, drink, and be merry. In the enemy scriptures chanaka means one who believes in eating, eating, eating – through all the senses. I cannot say that any Charvakas have said it, but it is possible. The enemy scriptures quote Charvakas as saying, ”Even if you have to borrow money, don’t be worried, but drink, eat, be merry.

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priests telling you that you will suffer for your karmas. You enjoy yourself in every possible way. Don’t miss enjoyment. This is the only world.”

This is the meaning given by the enemies, but in one enemy scripture – it must have been a very liberal person who wrote it – it says that this is the meaning given by the enemies, by us. But Charvakas themselves have a different meaning of their name. It means one who has a sweet philosophy – that meaning is possible from the same word – one who speaks words of honey. And certainly they do speak words of honey. But they also are trapped in the same logic.

The religious people say, ”Renounce this world if you want to enjoy that world.” And Charvakas say, ”Renounce that world if you want to rejoice in this one.” But the logic is the same. They have taken it from different angles, but both are asking you to renounce one for the other. Charvakas say renounce the other world; there is no God, no nirvana, no paradise – renounce it. This is all there is

– so enjoy it.

Epicurus in Greece had the same philosophy and got caught up in the same logic. Even Karl Marx is caught up in the same logic: there is no other world. The first effort is to deny the other world, only then can you enjoy this world. So first demolish the other world: there is no God, no paradise, no heaven, nothing. There is no soul to survive; with your body everything dies. You are nothing but your body, your chemistry, your biology, your physiology, all together – a byproduct of all these things. It is just like the clock goes on working – it does not mean there is a soul which is moving the hands. Just take the pieces apart and you won’t find any soul, just a certain arrangement of the parts. Arrange it again, and it starts ticking.

Karl Marx says, ”Consciousness is only a byproduct, it has no independent existence.” So when the body dies, consciousness disappears. Why this insistence on denying the other world? – for the simple reason that unless you deny the other, you will not be able to enjoy this.

But please see my point of view which is totally different from all these people – the religious, the anti-religious, the theist, the atheist. I don’t belong to any of them.

I say to you that life continues to exist, but there is no need to call it the other world. It is the same world, the same continuity.

The Ganges comes out of the Himalayas; it is just a small rivulet. As it descends, other waterfalls, other rivulets go on joining it; it goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. When it comes out of the Himalayas it is a vast river. You cannot conceive that it is the same river. You can see from where it arises. Because Hindus love the cow as the mother, they have made the origin of the Ganges a stone cow’s face. The Ganges falls through the face; it is so small, so tiny.

By the time the Ganges reaches Benares, you cannot believe its size. And when it reaches near Calcutta to meet the ocean, it becomes almost oceanic itself. Standing there, you cannot decide which is the ocean; it is so vast. It falls into the ocean, then too it remains. Where can it go? Yes, it is no more a river – perhaps some water may evaporate into the clouds, some water may become ice and move towards the arctic – but it will remain, nothing is lost.

So I don’t say that you have to renounce anything: this world for that, or that world for this. You have not to renounce at all. You have to live!

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You have to live intensely and totally, wherever you are, whatever you are.

And if you enjoy this time, this space, this opportunity that is available to you, to its totality, you will be certainly moving to a higher consciousness. You will be gaining, learning, understanding, becoming more aware. Life will continue. It will depend on your awareness what form it takes, higher or lower; whether it moves towards more anguish or more ecstasy – but it depends on this moment. So I am not saying to renounce this world.

So I am a strange man in a way because I am against the religions. Religious people in India have been writing against me in books and articles – and communists have been writing books and articles against me too.

Once I was traveling, and the president of India’s communist party, S.A. Dange, was also with me in the compartment. His son-in-law had just written a book against me. He asked me, ”Have you seen the book my son-in-law has written against you?”

I said, ”I am so much involved in living that I don’t care who is writing what about me. And anybody who is writing about me must be a fool because he is wasting his time writing about me. He should live! Or even if he wants to write, he should write something about himself And why should I read his crap? He may be your son-in-law, so you can read it – i’m not interested.” He was ready to give me the book. I said, ”Throw it out of the window, because so many books have been written against me, I cannot waste my time.” I told him, ”Just for your information, it is strange but religious people write against me and anti-religious people, communists, also write against me. This has never happened before.”

But the reason is that I am trying to give you a totally new viewpoint which goes against all the old logic. They are both partners in the same game, and I am trying to destroy their whole game – the whole logic.

They both believe that one world has to be renounced; which one is another matter. But on one point they agree: one world has to be renounced. The religions say this for that; the communists say that for this – that is the only disagreement between them. But the basic logic is similar: you can have only one world. And I say: Why can’t we have both? I don’t see any conflict; I am having both! And my experience is that the more you have of this, the more you will have of that, because you will become more experienced.

If there is a paradise, then one thing is certain: your monks will not be able to enjoy it there. What will they enjoy? The whole of their life they were denouncing women, condemning women, and there they will find beautiful callgirls. They will be so nervous that many of them will have heart attacks.

Here they are renouncing: you should not eat food with taste, taste is an attachment to food – and there they will be served the most tasteful food. They will be vomiting! Their whole life experience will be against it.

Only my people can enjoy paradise fully.

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denied the existence of anything after death. They will keep their eyes closed to remain convinced that there is nothing; otherwise their whole life’s philosophy is proved wrong. It is better to keep your eyes closed. That’s what people do: if anything goes against you, any fact, you try to avoid that fact

– it is disturbing. Communists will go blind because they cannot accept the idea that Karl Marx is wrong and DAS KAPITAL is wrong.

And the religious people will be the most troubled people in paradise; everywhere they will find difficulty. Perhaps there are divisions in paradise, as it seems.... Mohammedans’ paradise seems to be different from the Hindus, from the Christians, from the Jainas – perhaps different zones are allotted to different kinds of people.

In the Mohammedan paradise there are rivers of wine. You drink as much as you want; swim, jump, drown yourself, whatsoever you want to do. But here, don’t touch wine. Now, this seems to be very illogical. Here these people should be trained for such a great experience or they will simply die! Sitting on the bank of a river where champagne is flowing, they cannot drink because of their past habits, their whole life’s training and discipline. And there is no description of any river which has water; in Mohammedan paradise all the rivers are wine. Why? When you can drink wine, why bother about water? So either they will die of thirst, or they will start drinking in spite of themselves.

They will be really in a mess. Many of them will go mad: that what kind of reward is this? This is punishment!

Only my people will be able to swim in any zone. In the Mohammedan zone they will not be worried, they will enjoy it. They will fit anywhere because they haven’t any fixed routine of living, a fixed style of living.

All that I am teaching them is to remain flexible, free, open, available to new experiences, to new explorations.

So my people are not going to remain in one zone. They are going to use all the zones and enjoy all the sights of paradise; nobody can prevent them.

You can have both worlds – so why cripple people?

Make this life an experience, a school, a learning, a discipline, because something unknown is going to open up after death and you have to be ready in every possible way.

So don’t miss any opportunity of living. Who knows what kind of life you are going to have after death?

I do not give you a fixed idea, because if I give you a fixed idea, I am your enemy; I make you a fixed person, inflexible, rigid, dead.

Be flexible, so you can move in any dimension that becomes available.

In my religion there is no place for renunciation.

The Sanskrit word for renunciation is now sannyas, because renunciation became so important that the very word sannyas was used for it. But I have given it a new meaning. The people who have From Ignorance to Innocence

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called sannyas renunciation, meant by sannyas ”the right way of renouncing life”. By sannyas, I mean ”the right way of living life.

The word sannyas can mean both. When it can mean the right way of living, why cripple people, cut their life, destroy their naturalness, their spontaneity? Why not help them to have as many aspects to their life as possible, as many dimensions open to them as possible?

My sannyasin is multidimensional.

The whole of life is yours. Love it, live it to the fullest. That’s the only way to get ready for death.

Then you can live death too, to its fullest; and it is one of the most beautiful experiences. There is nothing comparable to the death experience in life, except deep meditation.

So those who know meditation, they know something of death – that’s the only way to know before dying.

If I am saying there is no more significant experience in life than death, I am saying it, not because I have died and come back to tell you, but because I know that in meditation you move into the same space as death – because in meditation you are no more your physiology, no more your biology, no more your chemistry, no more your psychology. All those are left far away.

You come to your innermost center where there is only pure awareness. That pure awareness will be with you when you die because that cannot be taken away. All these other things which can be taken away, we take away with our own hands in meditation.

So meditation is an experience of death in life.

And it is so beautiful, so indescribably beautiful that only one thing can be said about death: it must be that experience multiplied by millions.

The experience of meditation multiplied by millions is the experience of death.

And when you pass on you simply leave your form behind. You are absolutely intact, and for the first time out of the prison of physiology, biology, psychology.

All the walls are broken and you are free.

For the first time you can open your wings to the existential.

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CHAPTER 6

Renunciation: mortgage today for a tomorrow that never comes 4 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

IS THERE REALLY ABSOLUTELY NO PLACE FOR RENUNCIATION IN YOUR RELIGION? THE

QUESTION ARISES BECAUSE SINCE I CAME IN CONTACT WITH YOU, MANY THINGS IN MY

LIFE HAVE DROPPED AWAY. I CANNOT EVEN RELATE TO MY OLD SELF.

THERE is really absolutely no place for renunciation in my religion.

I can understand the question, and the difficulty of the questioner. He has not been able to make a distinction between dropping things, and things dropping by themselves.

Renunciation is the enforced dropping of things. And whenever you do anything with force, nothing really drops away.

It simply goes deeper into your unconscious. It becomes more of a problem than it was before. Now it will try to come up in different ways, garbs, masks, and you may not even be able to recognize it.

But it is going to assert itself, and with force. You have given it that force by forcing it deep down into the unconscious.

When you force something, you are giving force to it.

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You are making it stronger, and you are making the enemy hide within you, in the darkness, from where you become more vulnerable. When it was in the conscious, it was in the light; you were less vulnerable.

Renunciation is repression.

That is the right psychological word for it: repression. How can you renounce sex, except by repressing?

And repressed sex becomes perverted.

It is easier to understand sex, to become more aware of it and let it drop by itself, than to understand it when it is perverted – because then it comes in an unnatural form.

First it is difficult to recognize it – that it is sex. A person too greedy for money – can you think that this greed for money can have anything to do with suppressed sex? It is so far-fetched it needs a Sigmund Freud to see it. An ordinary person will not be able to connect them at all. How? – money and sex seem to be so far away. They are not so far away.

If you repress sex, it comes as ambition.

It can become politics. The politician can completely forget about sex, because all his sexuality, his sex energy is now converted into his political ambition. He will have the same kind of enjoyment by reaching higher and higher in the hierarchy. The higher he reaches, the more he will feel a kind of sexual pleasure, which you cannot understand.

I used to live with a very rich man. He was a bachelor and he had no interest in women at all. His only interest was money – day in, day out he was working for money – but because I was living in his house, somehow he became interested in my ideas. He had a big house and he was alone; his father and mother were dead. He was unmarried with no children – just servants. I liked the place because there was no disturbance, no children, no old people in the house, and no fighting because he had no wife. It was really quiet, and the servants would go in the night, and it was such a big house that we two were almost alone.

He was not interested in anything except money. So he would close the doors of his room – there was nobody except me, but he would lock his room from inside and start working: counting how much he had gained, how much he had lost; how much was in this business and how much was in that business. Before he went to sleep, he would be perfectly clear where he was financially. Then only would he go to sleep – sometimes at two o’clock or three o’clock. By the time I woke up, at three o’clock, he was going to sleep and I was going for a walk.

I once asked him, ”Do you ever think of what you are going to do with this money? You are not extravagant, you are a miser. You don’t have any children for whom you are going to leave the money. You are not so generous that you give it to your friends or to those who are in need. You are not in any way parting from a single pai. What are you going to do? Are you going to take it with you when you die? What is the purpose of this money?” From Ignorance to Innocence

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Because money really is meaningless if you don’t use it; its whole meaning is in its use. You may have the same amount of money as I have but you can use it in such a way that you are richer than me. The value of the money is in its use. Certainly those who know how to use money use it a thousandfold more than those who don’t know. They have the same amount of money, but they are poor.

Now this man was a poor man. Money was in the safe, money was in the banks, money was in shares – but he was a poor man.

I asked him, ”There seems to be no reason for you now to go on earning; you have enough. If you live even two hundred years, it will do. The miserly way you are living, it will do for two thousand years... two hundred I am saying, if you live like me; otherwise two thousand, and still you may not be able to spend it all. You may go on living just on the interest from it forever. Why are you so worried?you cannot sleep well, you don’t have any time for anything – and have you ever thought about how this disease happened to you, where you got this cancer?” He said, ”I have never thought about it, but you are right. I have enough money, and I can live....

Certainly I am not going to live for two thousand years – even seventy or eighty will be enough.

My father died at seventy, his father died at seventy, so I cannot live more than seventy or perhaps eighty years. Yes,” he said, ”this makes sense. But can you tell me why I am doing this?” I said, ”For a simple reason: you have avoided women in your life.” He said, ”But what have women and money to do with each other?” I told him, ”That we will discuss later on, first you tell me why you avoid women.” The reason was very simple. He had seen his grandfather being harassed, nagged continually, tortured by his grandmother. He had seen his father in the same position, he had seen his uncles in the same position. They were all miserable, and their misery he thought was caused by women.

He became a woman-hater from his very childhood. And then he came under the influence of the Jaina monks, because his father was a very religious man.

People who are tortured by their wives become religious. Except for religion, there is no shelter for them. Only religion can give them some consolation: ”Don’t be worried, it is only a question of a few years. Next life, don’t commit the same mistake; and start withdrawing yourself even in this life. The woman is powerful over you because you are sexually interested in women. It is your weakness that she is exploiting.” And that’s what he heard from the Jaina monks. In Jainism, sex is the first thing to be renounced, because with it many other things are renounced automatically; you need not work at them separately: sex seems to be the main problem.

Seeing the situation of his grandfather, uncle, father, neighbors and then listening to the Jaina monks, it became a decided thing in his mind that he was not going to get involved in this constant headache. I told him, ”That’s from where your interest in money arises. The energy needs some object, some infatuation.” And I told him, ”You may feel hurt, but I have to say it: I have seen you counting notes, and the way you touch the notes looks as if you are touching your beloved.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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He looked at me, shocked. For a moment there was silence, and then he said, ”Perhaps you are right. I really enjoy touching the notes. I count them again and again. Although I have counted them, even in the night I count them again. Just touching them gives some strange satisfaction to me –

even the notes of other people.

For example, sometimes he would come into my room and if there was some money on the table –

because that was the only place for me to keep it – the first thing he would do was count it, and I would tell him, ”This is simply foolish. That is not your money, why are you counting it?” He said, ”I simply enjoy it... it is not so important to whom it belongs.” Can you see the point? If you become interested in somebody else’s wife, do you think of who she belongs to? There is no question of whom she belongs to – she looks beautiful, that’s all, so you are interested. Whomsoever she belongs to is not your business. Exactly this was the case with him: money is money, it is nobody’s really. And just to touch it, to count it, to play with it....

I told him, ”If you want to get rid of this infatuation with money, which is absolutely idiotic....” I am not against money, I am against the infatuation. The man who is infatuated with money cannot use it.

He is really destroying the money, its very purpose. In every language, in all the languages of the world money’s other name is currency – that is significant. Money needs to be a current, river-like, flowing, moving fast. The faster it moves, the richer is the society.

If I have a one-hundred-dollar note with me and I simply keep it in my pocket and never use it, then whether I have it or not, does it make any difference? I could have kept any piece of paper; that would have served the same purpose. But if I use this one-hundred-dollar note and it circulates in here, and everybody who gets it immediately uses it – so it passes through one hundred hands –

then it is one hundred dollars multiplied by one hundred; then that much money is here in this room.

The miser is really anti-money. He is destroying its utility because he is stopping it being a ”currency”.

I told him, ”You do one thing: become interested in a woman.” He said, ”What!”

I said, ”Just try. I can arrange for a few women to be introduced to you” – because so many women used to come from the university. There were many women professors from the colleges who came to visit me, to ask about meditation and things. I said, ”There is no problem. You just indicate in whom you are interested, I will introduce you; and any woman is going to be interested in you.” He said, ”Why?”

I said, ”Because of all the money! She is not going to be interested in you, she is going to be interested in your money. And once you become interested in the woman, you will start spending money; you will relax. The energy that has become perverted will start moving in the natural way.

And you can’t find anybody better than a woman to finish your money. You will not need to live two thousand years; long before that the money will be gone. And once you become interested in a woman, your infatuation with money will drop to its natural state.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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He said, ”I will have to think it over.”

I said, ”You can think it over, but don’t waste too much time because right now you are almost forty-five. Once you are over sixty, then it will be difficult even for me to make an arrangement. So don’t waste fifteen years. Think about it tonight and tomorrow morning when we meet, you tell me.” He could not sleep the whole night. He thought about it again and again, and slowly the thing became clear to him: ”Yes, deep down it is women, and I am constantly keeping myself occupied with money in order to avoid women, because if there is no space, no time, then from where can the woman enter? And why I am so infatuated now makes sense. It is a substitute woman.” So this greed for money, this greed for power, this greed for fame... sex can take any form, it will depend on the type of person. You will be aware of the fact that although poets continually write poetry about women, most of the poets have remained away from women. Most of the great novelists were not interested in women. Most of the great painters were afraid of women for the simple reason that either you can paint or you can be married: you can’t have two wives – together both will kill you.

There is an ancient parable in India: A man was caught as a thief in a house. He was presented in court and the magistrate said, ”Do you accept your guilt?” He said, ”I accept it absolutely but I want to say one thing. You can give me any punishment, but don’t tell me to be married to two women.”

The magistrate said, ”I have never heard of any punishment like that. My whole life I have been punishing people, but I have never punished anybody that way.” He said, ”Then you are a really good man. You can sentence me to death, but not....” The magistrate said, ”But I would like to know why this condition?” He said, ”This is the reason why I was caught. I entered a house where a man lives with two wives.

One wife lives on the ground floor, the other wife lives on the floor above. And they were both pulling at the man – one was pulling him to the upper floor, the other was pulling him to the ground floor. I became so interested that I forgot why I had gone there. I became interested in knowing what was going to be the result ultimately, who would win. Certainly the man had no chance of winning – he was getting beaten from both sides.

”That’s why I got caught – otherwise in the whole of my life, have you ever seen me in court? I am a born thief; my father was a thief, my father’s father was a thief – this is our inherited profession. And this is the first time anybody from my family has been caught. I am ashamed. My father’s soul, my grandfather’s soul – they will all be ashamed of me. And there was no problem, I could have stolen things and escaped, but the story with those two women and that one man.... And a crowd gathered, that is why I got caught. They said,’Who is this man? And what is he doing here? He does not seem to be from this neighborhood.’ So you can sentence me to death or life imprisonment, whatsoever you want, but please don’t order me to get married to two women.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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This has been the situation for the poet, for the painter, for the musician, for the dancer – any creative artist finds it easier not to get involved with women, or to get involved only casually, perhaps with strangers. Perhaps traveling in a train he may become interested in a woman because there is no fear – at the next station he is going to get out. Artists have told me that they get interested only in strangers; they don’t know their name, they don’t want to know their name. The strangers don’t know the artist’s name nor does he want them to know it – they remain strangers.

The fear is deep-rooted, and it has a reality of its own. And perhaps that is one of the causes that women have never been creative: they could not afford to live alone in this society which is absolutely man-made. A woman living alone is continually in danger. Only recently a few women started their careers – as a novelist, as a poet, as a painter. This is because for the first time, just in these last few years – and that too only in very few advanced, progressive, avant-garde places

– that a woman has been able to live independently, just like a man. Then they start painting, they start composing poetry, music....

Women have all the talents but for millions of years their sex was their only creativity, and when the whole sexual energy was involved in producing children.... You cannot imagine a woman having a dozen children and composing music – or can you imagine it? Those twelve musical instruments all around doing everything that is not right... and the woman can compose music or poetry or can paint? Do you think those twelve painters will sit silently? – they will be painting before she paints!

It looks strange that poets are the least experienced people about women. Perhaps that’s why they write about women – it is a perversion. Otherwise, why should poets write about women? – they don’t have much experience, they are almost monks. Why do painters go on painting nude women?

Why do sculptors go on making marble statues of nude women? For what? This is all perversion!

It is better than collecting money or going into politics, but still it is a perversion. They are satisfying their natural instinct in an unnatural way. So on the one hand they go on doing their painting, music, poetry, and on the other hand they go on feeling that life is meaningless.

Artists feel the meaninglessness of life the most. It is strange: they write such beautiful poetry, they paint such beautiful paintings, yet life is meaningless. Life is not meaningless for a clerk, and it is meaningless for Jean-Paul Sartre, who wins the Nobel prize! It is not meaningless for a schoolmaster who must be the most miserable person in the world – thirty children against one poor man – but he is not feeling life to be meaningless.

In fact, the people who feel that life is meaningless are the people who have not moved naturally; their natural energies have taken an artificial, arbitrary route. They will never feel meaningful. They have moved away from life’s source.

Similarly, it is strange how monks are the most articulate against women, and they have no experience about women at all. I have asked Hindu monks, Buddhist monks, Jaina monks, Christian monks, ”What experience do you have of women? You speak against them, but more experience is needed to speak against than in favor. What experience do you have?” And none of them could say that they had any experience. I said, ”Then why do you go on speaking against them?” Yes, the monks have one experience: the woman in their unconscious is continuously pulling them down from their holier-than-thou pedestal. They are projecting their antagonism against that woman From Ignorance to Innocence

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– they don’t know about it, it is deep in the dark – on any woman that they can find outside: all women are evil, agents of evil.

These people have no experience at all. In fact, if they stop condemning women, there is a fear that the infatuation for women may come back – it is just knocking on the door continuously. They have to keep themselves occupied, condemning them as loudly as possible so they cannot hear the knock – that the woman is there. If they stop condemning, they will hear the knock and it will be irresistible for them to open the door, and that will be their fall.

I told this friend, ”You just try – there is no harm. The women who come to me are not poor and they will not ask for money or any costly present from you. And I will be introducing you only as a friend, just so that you can have a little acquaintance with women.” Next morning he said, ”I am ready. And perhaps you are right, I will lose my interest in money. The whole night I thought about it, weighed it up: what should I do? But finally I thought that perhaps it is right, that what I am gathering is rubbish.”

I introduced him to a woman to whom he got married within six months – and I finished his career!

He was thinking of becoming the richest man in the city... but then the woman started using his money. Every day he would see me, and he would say, ”You have got me into trouble, there is no end to her demands. And I have lost interest in money, so I am no longer after it as madly as you have known me to be. If it comes it is okay, if it doesn’t come I don’t bother; but she is continually spending. Now, two hundred years or eighty years... I think she will finish me nearabout sixty or before. But you were right.”

I said, ”Now there is a possibility; before that, there was no possibility. If you had renounced money, you would have been renouncing something which is not at all a natural instinct in you. You would have been renouncing only a path of perversion without knowing that it was a perversion, and the perversion would have taken another path. You may not have been after money, you may have got involved in politics – then power would have become the same problem. But now you are on natural ground.

”Any transformation can happen only when you are a natural human being.” The philosophy of renunciation is that you renounce money.... I know – because money is an artificial thing, man-made – that even renouncing it is not going to lead you anywhere. These people will say,

”Renounce the house,” but what does it matter? You will be staying in the temple, you will become a burden on the society. These people say to you, ”Renounce earning your own livelihood” – then you will start begging.

In India you see so many beggars but you will never come across a beggar who feels guilty that he is begging. I have never come across one. Traveling for thirty years continually, I have never come across a single beggar who thinks he is doing anything wrong. If you don’t give to him, you are guilty.

One day it happened, at a station, Khandwa, a junction station.... I was coming from Indore, and from Khandwa I had to take a train for Bombay. I was alone in the compartment, and the train was to From Ignorance to Innocence

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leave from Khandwa in one hour’s time. So I was just sitting and looking out through the window. A beggar came and told me that his mother had just died and he needed some money for her funeral rituals, so I gave him one rupee.

He could not believe it, because he must have been begging his whole life and nobody gives one rupee. He looked at me. I said, ”I have given it to you knowingly. Your mother is dead. You go home and do something.”

The man thought, ”This man seems to be either mad or a simpleton.” He was wearing a coat, but he came back after fifteen minutes without the coat and, pretending to be somebody else told me, ”My father is very sick.”

I said, ”It is bound to be so.” I gave him one rupee and I said, ”Go and help your father. Just a few minutes before somebody’s mother had died. Your father may die; you just go and help.” Now, it was very difficult for the man to go and leave me alone. After fifteen minutes he removed his cap also, and he again came.

I said, ”Some family trouble?”

He said, ”How did you guess? My wife is pregnant; any moment she is going to give birth to a child and I have not a single pai.”

I said, ”You take one rupee and go fast. Today there are so many things happening. One man’s wife has died – he was wearing a coat and a cap. Another man’s father is almost dying – he was not wearing a coat, but wearing a hat. You don’t have a coat or a cap, and your wife is in danger. You just run!”

After fifteen minutes he came back. I said, ”Some family trouble?” He said, ”No. I was thinking that I am cheating you, but now I feel guilty.” I said, ”For what? You are a different man – those people were different.” He said, ”No, I am the same man.”

Then I said, ”Don’t be worried; then I must be a different man.” He said, ”How is it possible?”

I said, ”Don’t be worried – I must be a different man. Somebody else must have been sitting here before; otherwise an innocent person like you could not do that.” He said, ”now, this is too much. Please take these four rupees you have given to me.” I said, ”No. You take one more, so you need not come naked next time, because if you get rid of any more clothes.... And from where will you find more family? – your whole family will be dying, finished!”

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But what he said, I have not forgotten. He said, ”You are the first man who has made me feel guilty; otherwise, whenever people give to us we feel they are fools. If they don’t give to us, we say these are sinners; we never think about ourselves.” No beggar does. He is simply giving you an opportunity to be virtuous, you should be obliged to him. He is putting a ladder before you: you can go to paradise. No beggars, although they are begging, even feel inferior.

The mind is so cunning, it can take you in any direction and distort your simple, natural being.

Now, nobody naturally would ever like to beg, nobody is a born beggar. But the sexual instinct can take any form – it can become the greed of a rich man, it can become the greed of a beggar.

When I was a professor, one student of mine, studying in the post-graduate philosophy department, was always coming with costly clothes and looked rich. One day it happened, I was coming out of the station – because I was continually moving from Jabalpur all over India... twenty days per month I was out of town. I would come back after three days for a few hours, just to show myself in the university, that I was there – because they could not give me that much leave nor could I take that much leave; otherwise from where would I get money?

So this was the arrangement: one of my students used to take my car and park it in the same place where I would normally park it. The car was always parked there; that was a symbol that I was in the university. I told him, ”So park the car there at two o’clock and at four o’clock take it away –

just two hours. Everybody should know it is there because that is the rush hour, when everybody is there, and everybody knows that I never come before two; from twelve to two I sleep. So there is no problem.”

So every third day or fourth day I was coming and going: coming in the morning and going in the evening. And there was this beggar who was continually getting one rupee, fixed – whether I came or went, he would get it. One day, just by coincidence, I saw this student of mine with that old man, just behind the shed where my car was parked. I went closer: What was this rich man’s son doing with the beggar? And the beggar was giving him rupees.

So I went outside and called them both. They started trembling. The old man said, ”Don’t tell anybody – he is my son.”

I said, ”How much do you manage to earn? – because this boy lives the best in the university, so you must be earning nearly thirty, forty or fifty rupees.” He said, ”You are right.”

I said, ”How much have you got in the bank?”

He said, ”Now I cannot hide anything from you. He had fifty thousand rupees in the bank.

I told him, ”Then why are you begging? – because you can do some business.” He said, ”This is business. And with no investment, in what business can you earn fifty rupees a day in India?”

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I said, ”That is true.”

He said, ”And I am leaving enough for my son; he can live a rich life. I am not going to die for a few years yet, so I will leave enough for him; and he is now well-educated. But please don’t tell anybody, otherwise his career may be affected.” Now, this man is a beggar but he does not think begging is anything wrong. It is a business, without investment and with good earnings. All that you have to do is just befool people.

The sexual instinct can take many paths.

It can become greed. It can become a will-to-power. It can become a subtle ego trip: holier-than-thou.

That’s what the monks are doing; otherwise they have no other enjoyment. They are torturing themselves, and have renounced everything you think of as pleasure, as joy. Then what keeps them ticking – going tick-tock? What keeps them ticking? From where do they get the energy? The energy is from a holier-than-thou attitude: you are all sinners, we are the only people who are not sinners, we are saints. And they will look down from heaven and find you there, burning in hellfire.

Renunciation can teach you to drop sex, to drop tasteful food, to drop clothes, to be naked, to drop all possessions – but in a strange way you will remain attached to all those things.

When I was in Bombay, a Hindu monk came to see me; he had a disciple with him and he wanted to know what kind of meditation would be suitable for him.

I told him, ”Tomorrow morning we are meeting near the beach and we will be doing the meditation.

It is better that you come there because it is a question of a practical experience.” He said, ”It will be very difficult for me to come tomorrow. The day after tomorrow I can come.” I said, ”What is the problem with tomorrow?”

He said, ”The problem is that my disciple has some work tomorrow morning, he cannot come.” But I said, ”Let him do his work – there is no need for him to come.” He said, ”You don’t understand – I have renounced money.” I said, ”You are making it more and more of a puzzle! You have renounced money, perfectly good, but what has that to do with this man and his engagement tomorrow morning, and your coming to my meditation group?”

He said, ”Are you not aware of a simple thing: ”I cannot touch money, so he keeps the money for me. And in Bombay you have to go in a taxi – then who will pay? I cannot touch money, I have renounced it. He keeps the money: he pays out the money and if somebody donates money to me, he receives it. I am completely out of it; I have nothing to do with money.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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I said, ”Good arrangement! You have nothing to do with money, then what have you to do with this man? You will go to heaven and this man will go to hell, and he, poor man, is simply serving you continually, following you everywhere – and yet he is going to hell! If you have renounced money, then live without money, then suffer without money. Why send this man to hell? You will be responsible for sending this man to hell. You will fall into a deeper hell than this man.” People can find strange ways because they have not understood what they are doing; they are simply following a dead creed, a dead dogma. Because for centuries money has been condemned by the religious people, they are renouncing it. I said, ”But it is becoming more complicated. It would have been simple to put your hand in your own pocket; now you have to put it in somebody else’s pocket. That is pickpocketing.” I said, ”You are also a thief What are you doing? And you are a bigger pickpocket than others because at least they use their hand – you use his hand, picking up money from his pocket. His pocket, his hand, and you are completely above it – superior.” I said to the disciple, ”You escape right now, leave this man here. I will not allow him to go with you. Just escape as far as you can, where he cannot find you again, because he is managing and arranging for your hell. And whatever money you have, it is yours, because he has renounced money. He cannot claim it.”

He said, ”Is it so – all the money?”

I said, ”What do you mean by’all the money’?”

He said, ”Right now when we go somewhere, I keep just two or three hundred rupees in my pocket

– but at our temple we have thousands.”

I said, ”All that money is yours. You simply go. I will keep this man here, so you take all that money and escape. And if this man leaves here I will give him to the police because he has renounced money. He cannot even report to the police that his money is stolen.” The monk said, ”What! I came here to learn meditation.” I said, ”I am teaching you what renunciation means. And what you are doing is just cheating yourself, cheating this poor man, cheating God – cheating everybody.” Renounce anything and you will become more attached to it than when you had not renounced it.

Your mind will move around and around it.

An ancient parable.... A man was continually wanting to learn the secret of miracles. He had heard so much about it – that there are sages in Tibet, in the high peaks of the Himalayas who can teach you, who know all kinds of miracles. So he was always serving any kind of sage. In India there are so many sages – just as here there are so many sage bushes. When I first came here and I came to know that there are so many sages here also, I said, ”These people are not going to leave me alone!”

He found a very old, ancient sage and he was continually massaging his feet, bringing him food and doing whatsoever the poor man could do. The old sage knew, the whole town knew, why he From Ignorance to Innocence

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served these people. The old sage said again and again, ”I am a simple man, and I don’t know any miracles.”

The man said, ”That’s the true sign of a sage. Those who claim – they are worthless. You are the person who knows the secret.”

He said, ”It is very difficult. If I say I know then there is difficulty – you say,’Teach me.’ And I am telling you the truth, that I don’t know any miracle and I don’t think that anybody does except people like you, who go on creating myths around somebody; otherwise there is no miracle.” But the man would not leave; day and night he was serving the sage. One night the old man wanted to sleep but the man was massaging him. So he said, ”Stop!” The man said, ”I am not going to stop until you tell me – if you want to sleep tonight, just tell me a simple secret so I can do miracles.”

The sage said, ”Okay, I am going to tell you. It is very simple. You go home, take a shower, sit down in the lotus posture... and this is the mantra: Om Mani Padme Hum, the Tibetan mantra. Just say it five times and in the morning you will be able to do any kind of miracle that you want to do.” Hearing this, the man simply jumped up and out of the room. The old man said, ”Wait! You have not heard the condition.”

He said, ”In the morning I can come again.”

The old man said, ”No, the condition has to be followed, otherwise the mantra won’t work.” The man said, ”What is the condition?”

The sage said, ”The condition is, while you are repeating the mantra five times, you should not think of a monkey.

The man said, ”Don’t be worried. In my whole life I have never thought of a monkey. I always think of sages and saints, so this condition is nothing.” But as he was coming down the steps of the temple, wherever he looked he started finding monkeys in the trees, they were hiding in the bushes....

He said, ”My God! So many monkeys tonight!” They were always there, it was just that he had not renounced them; today he had renounced them. By the time he reached his house, he could not believe whether it was true or untrue: a crowd of monkeys all around him, making faces. But he said, ”First let me take a bath – perhaps that will help.” Nothing was going to help. While he was taking a bath, the monkeys were inside the bathroom.

He sat in padmasana, closed his eyes, and just... the monkey – not one, a whole crowd! He could not even repeat ”Om mani padme hum” – just a small mantra – even once. The monkeys were continuously there. He tried the whole night: again a bath, again the posture, but those monkeys....

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Before the morning, he rushed to the temple. The sage was laughing but the man was really angry; he said, ”This is no time to laugh. Is it funny?” The old man said, ”I have always told you that I don’t know any miracles, secrets, mantras, or anything – ut you wouldn’t listen to me, hence I had to lie.

The man said, ”If you had to lie, you could have at least kept your mouth shut about the monkeys.

The old man said, ”But without the monkeys, the mantra is incomplete. Did the monkeys trouble you?

The man said, ”Trouble me! You are an old sage and I have accepted you as my Master, otherwise would have killed you!”

Once you renounce something forcibly – and the very word renunciation means that you are forcing yourself against yourself – you are dividing yourself.

All renunciation creates a schizophrenic

condition in you: one part renouncing, another part becoming more infatuated – you are being split.

All these religions are criminal because they have made the whole of humanity split.

You can be one only if you are natural.

And I can understand the difficulty of the questioner. But the difficulty is that he has not understood a very clear-cut distinction. Yes, my sannyasins find that many things, many habits which they had long tried to drop, have simply disappeared on their own. They have not even made an effort. In fact, if they want to revive those habits, it is impossible to revive them.

But this is not renunciation, this is transformation As you become more aware, more natural, mol silent, more at ease with yourself, not fighting, in a deep let-go, you start seeing habits which are meaningless; and it simply becomes impossible to continue to do them. It is not that you stop doing them just the opposite: you simply find, one day...

what happened? A certain habit which used to be with you twenty-four hours a day has not been there for many days, you have not even remembered it.

There was one professor, my colleague in the university, who was a chain-smoker. The doctors were against it, his wife, his children and all his colleagues were against it because he was burning his lungs, destroying his health. The doctors said, ”If it continues, no medicine is going to help.

The moment you wake up, the first thing is a cigarette, and the last thing at night is a cigarette

– continually.” You never found him without a cigarette. When one cigarette was finished, another cigarette was lit from the one that he was finishing. He never carried a lighter with him, there was no need; he only carried cigarettes – in all his pockets.

One day I was sitting in the common room. One chair had become, without any effort, my chair.

Somehow... it was just accidental that the first day I entered, that chair was empty and I sat on it.

Slowly it became known that that was my chair. In the common room there was nobody’s personal From Ignorance to Innocence

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chair. It was a common room and all the professors could use any chair they wanted, and they were using them.

Just that chair was mine because people were somehow afraid of me because I was not interested in their gossips, I was not interested in the movies, I was not interested in their politics, not interested in who was going to win the election for dean or who was going to win the election for vice-chancellor, and this and that. And they were completely clear that I thought it was all crap. So not only my chair, but two chairs on this side and two chairs on that side – I had five reserved chairs. Only once in a while would somebody come, very afraid, and ask, ”Can I sit?” And I would say, ”There is no problem.”

This man came one day and almost shaking, with his cigarette in his hand, trembling. I can still visualize him... his fingers were burned, his lips were burned. I said, ”Yes, you can sit. Can I be of any help? – because nobody comes unless he feels I can be of some help.” He said, ”Only one thing: I want to drop smoking. My doctors are after me, my family is after me, my friends are after me – everybody is angry. And it is not that I don’t want to stop – I have tried in every possible way, but I cannot exist without cigarettes. Even for a few moments I cannot sit without cigarettes. And it is sure that I am going to die from them. Can you help me?” I said, ”Yes, I can help you. The first thing is, you tell all your friends, doctors, your wife, your parents, your children,’I am going to smoke and you have to stop telling me about it. I have heard enough about it, and if you don’t stop, I will disappear from the house.’ And,” I said, ”you can come to my house, and that will do; that threat will be enough. Tell them,’I will never come back to this house if anyone mentions cigarettes.”’ And I told him, ”Tell them,’If it is possible, now I am going to start smoking even in my sleep’ – but make it absolutely clear.”

”But,” he said, ” How am I going to stop?”

I said, ”You don’t have to stop, you just do what I say. Stop the very idea of stopping it, this is the first step. The second step is: smoke, but be conscious.” He said, ”What do you mean?”

I said, ”When you take your packet, take the packet from your pocket consciously.” I told him, ”Show me how you do it.

He simply took it out.... I said, ”That is unconscious. You were not alert that you were doing a certain action: your hand, the packet, the weight of the packet, the feel of the packet, the texture of the packet – you have to be alert to it. Try it in front of me.” He tried. He said, ”It seems to be different.”

I said, ”That’s okay. Now take a cigarette out – not the way you usually do. Be alert. And not the way you go on tapping it on the packet, but consciously. If you usually tap it three times, tap it six times, there is no harm – but be conscious. Put it in your mouth... wait a little, there is no hurry. And start carrying a lighter with you. Wait, be alert, then do the same with the lighter. Light the cigarette, but continue to be alert.

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”Start smoking, take the smoke in, but be alert that the smoke is going in, that the smoke is going out – be alert. This is what Buddha was doing, without a cigarette,” I told him. ”He was just doing it with pure air. You are a modern man, you are doing it with impure air, that’s all – there is no harm –

but the consciousness will be the same. Whether you do it with pure morning fresh air or with dirty cigarette smoke – it doesn’t matter.

”And whether you die two years earlier or two years later, what does it matter? What will you do if you live two years more? – you will smoke more! So don’t be worried. And these people will torture you more, so forget about it. Smoking has not to be renounced, it has to be watchfully understood, what is happening.”

He was really a very intelligent man, because within only twenty-four hours he reported to me, ”I am feeling completely different. I can do the same thing just by breathing.” I said, ”There is no harm. You try it just by breathing. Don’t use cigarettes, but keep the cigarettes with you. Any moment you feel uneasy, bring out the cigarette, but the new way, in the new style.” In just seven days the man was doing vipassana with his breathing. I asked him, ”Did you have to drop the cigarettes?”

He said, ”No, they have dropped on their own. And this awareness has not only helped me drop cigarettes, it has helped me in many other ways of which I was not aware.” A sannyasin will find many habits dropping from him, but he is not dropping them.

So I repeat categorically, that in my religion there is no place for renunciation. But that does not mean that you will remain the same.

I am giving you a potential methodology of transformation, which will take away all that is meaningless, all that is unnecesssary, all that is stupid, all that you are doing just out of habit, all that you are doing because others have said not to do it, and just to retaliate, as a reaction, you are doing it.

Yes, out of you will be born a new man who will find it difficult to relate to the old self – naturally, obviously, because the old self was nothing but a bundle of all the old habits which you have forgotten somewhere on the way. Where you have left it, you don’t know.

And the new self is sharpened by your awareness, cleaned by your awareness, is continually rejuvenated by your awareness.

Only one thing I want my sannyasins to learn, and that is awareness. It will take care of all your problems.

Without awareness, whatsoever you do you will create more and more problems; they will be farther and farther away from your nature, and it will be very difficult to solve them, because they are phony.

Even if you succeed in solving them you have not solved anything: your perversion will start moving in another direction, it will take another shape. It may not come in from the same door; it will find another door – your house has many doors, of which many are not even known to you.

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But with the light, with the flame of awareness inside you, you know your house for the first time with all its doors and with all its windows.

And when the house is lighted, then I don’t say, ”Do this, do not do that;” there is no need – you will do only whatsoever is right.

People ask me continually, ”What is right, and what is wrong?

My answer is: that which comes out of awareness is right. That which comes out of unawareness is wrong. Actions are not right and wrong, it is the source from where they come.

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CHAPTER 7

Shame is the name of their game

5 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHY HAVE ALL THE RELIGIONS USED REPRESSION AS A BASIC STRATEGY?

RELIGION has passed through many phases. The first phase of religion was magical; it has not died yet. Red Indians in America are still living in the first phase of religion. In South Africa, amongst the aborigines of India, the religion is a magic ritual of sacrifice to God.

It is a kind of bribery so that He helps you, protects you; so whatsoever you think valuable in food, in clothes, ornaments, whatsoever you think valuable, you go on giving to the God.

Of course there is no God to receive it; the priest receives it – he is the mediator, he profits by it.

And the strangest thing is that for at least ten thousand years this magical, ritualistic religion has kept man’s mind captured.

There are so many failures, ninety-nine percent are failures. For example, the rains are not coming at the right time. Then the magical religion will have a ritual sacrifice and will believe that God is happy now: the rains will come. Once in a while they do come – but they come also to those people who are not praising God, doing the ritual. They come even to the enemies of the people who have prayed to God. Those rains have nothing to do with their ritual, but it becomes a proof that their ritual has succeeded.

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Ninety-nine times the ritual fails, it is bound to fail because it has nothing to do with weather. There is no scientific cause-and-effect relationship between the ritual, your fire ceremony, your mantras, and the clouds and the rain. The priest is certainly more cunning than the people he is exploiting: he knows perfectly well what is really happening.

Priests have never believed in God, remember – they cannot, but they pretend to believe more than anybody else. They have to, that is their profession. The stronger their faith, the more crowds they can attract, so they pretend. But I have never come across any priest who believes that there is a God. How can he believe? He goes on seeing every day that it is only rarely, by a coincidence, that sometimes the ritual succeeds. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it fails. But he has explanations for the poor people – that your ritual was not done rightly, that while doing it you were not full of pure thoughts. Now, who is full of pure thoughts, and what is a pure thought?

It is very natural.... For example, in a Jaina ritual people must be fasting. And while they are doing the ritual, they are thinking of food: that is an impure thought. Now, a hungry person thinking of food

– I don’t see how it is impure. It is exactly the right thought. In fact, he is doing a wrong act at that moment doing the ritual; he should run to a restaurant!

But the priest has a very simple explanation why your ritual failed: ”God never fails, He always is ready to protect you. He is the provider, the creator, the maintainer; He will never let you down.

But you fail Him while saying the prayer or doing the ritual: you are full of impure thoughts.” And the people know that the priest is right – they were thinking of food... or a beautiful woman has passed and the idea has arisen that she is beautiful, and the desire to get her.... They threw away the thoughts but it was too late; it had already occurred.

So everybody knows that their thoughts are impure. Now, I don’t see that there is anything impure.

If a beautiful woman passes by a mirror, it will also reflect the beautiful woman. Is the mirror impure?

Your mind is a mirror, it simply reflects. And your mind is conscious of everything that is happening around you. It comments, it is continuously making a commentary. If you watch, you will be surprised

– you cannot find a better commentator.

The mind says the woman is beautiful – and if you feel a desire for beauty I don’t see that there is anything wrong in it. If you feel a desire for ugliness, then something is wrong, then you are sick.

Beauty has to be appreciated. When you see a beautiful painting, you would like to possess it.

When you see anything beautiful, just by the side of it the idea comes as a shadow, ”If this beautiful thing could be mine....” Now, these are all natural thoughts.

But the priest will say, ”The rains have not come because of your impure thoughts” – and you are absolutely indefensible. You know it, you are ashamed of yourself. God is always right. But when rains come, then too these thoughts were passing through your head; you were exactly the same person. If you were hungry, you were thinking of food; if you were thirsty, you were thinking of water.

These ideas were coming to you when the rains came; but then, nobody bothers about the bad thoughts. The priest starts praising you, your great austerity, your deep prayer: ”God has heard you.” And your ego feels so satisfied that you don’t say, ”But what about the impure thoughts?” Who wants to mention impure thoughts when you have succeeded and God has heard? But ninety-nine times nobody hears, the sky remains empty, no answer comes.... But magical religion goes on and on.

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Magical religion is the most primitive religion, but fragments of it remain in the second phase; there is not a very clear-cut demarcation. The second phase is the pseudo-religion: Hinduism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism – and there are three hundred ”isms” in all. These are pseudo-religions. They have come a little further than magical religion.

Magical religion is simply ritualistic.

It is an effort to persuade God to help you. The enemy is going to invade the country; the rain is not coming, or too much rains have come and the rivers are flooded, your crops are being destroyed....

So whenever you find these difficulties, you ask the help of God. But the magical religion is not a discipline for you. Hence magical religions are not repressive: they are not concerned yet with your transformation, your change.

The pseudo-religions shift the attention from God to you.

God remains in the center, but fades far away. For the magical-religious person God is very close by; he can talk to Him, he can persuade Him. Pseudo-religions still carry the idea of God, but now God is far away, far, far away. Now the only way to reach Him is not through rituals but through a significant change in your lifestyle. They start molding and changing you.

The magical religions leave people as they are, so the people who believe in magical religions are more natural, less phony, but more primitive, more unsophisticated, more uncultured. The people who belong to pseudo-religions are more sophisticated, more cultured, more educated. Religion to them is not just ritual, it is their whole life’s philosophy.

Your question comes here, at the second phase of religion. You ask why all the religions have used repression as a basic strategy, for what? The phenomenon of repression is tremendously significant to understand, because all the religions differ in every other way from each other, are against all other religions in every other aspect.

No two religions agree on anything – except repression.

So repression seems to be the greatest tool in their hands. What are they doing with it?

Repression is the mechanism of enslaving man, of putting humanity into psychological and spiritual slavery.

Long before Sigmund Freud discovered the phenomenon of repression, religions had already used it for five thousand years, and successfully.

The methodology is simple – the methodology is to turn you against yourself – but it does miracles.

Once you are turned against yourself, many things are bound to happen.

First: you will be weakened. You will never be the same strong person you were before. Before, you were one; now you are not only two, but many. Before, you were a single whole entity, now you are a crowd. Your father’s voice is speaking in you from one fragment, your mother’s voice is speaking from another fragment; and within you they are still fighting with each other – although they may both From Ignorance to Innocence

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be no longer in the world. All your teachers, they have their compartments in you; and all the priests you came across, all the monks, all the do-gooders, the moralists – they all have made places in you, strongholds of their own.

Whomsoever you have been impressed with has become a fragment in you. Now you are many people: dead, alive, fictitious... from the books that you have read, from the holy books – which are just religious fiction, like science fiction. If you look inside yourself, you will find yourself lost in such a big crowd. You cannot recognize who you are amongst this whole crowd, which is your original face. They all pretend to be you, they all have faces like you, they speak the language like you, and they are all quarrelsome with each other. You become a battlefield.

The strength of the single individual is lost. Your house is divided against itself, you cannot do anything with wholeness: some parts within you will be against it, some parts will be for it, and some parts will be absolutely indifferent. If you do it, the parts which were against will go on telling you that you have done wrong; they will make you feel guilty. The parts that remain indifferent will pretend to be holy, telling you that you are just third rate to listen to these people who don’t understand.

So whether you do something or you don’t do something, in any case you are condemned. You are always in a dilemma. Wherever you move you will be defeated and major portions of your being will always be against you. You will be always doing things with minority support. That certainly means the majority is going to take revenge – and it will take revenge. It will tell you, ”If you had not done this you could have done that. If you had not chosen this, you could have chosen that. But you are a fool, you won’t listen. Now suffer. Now repent.” But the problem is, you cannot do anything with wholeness so that there is nobody later on to condemn you, to tell you that you are stupid, unintelligent.

So the first thing: the pseudo-religions have destroyed the integrity, the wholeness, the strength of man.

That is very necessary if you want to enslave people – strong people cannot be enslaved. And this is a very subtle slavery, psychological and spiritual. You don’t need handcuffs and chains and prison cells, no; the pseudo-religions have created much improved arrangements. And they start working from the moment you are born; they don’t miss a single moment.

In Hinduism, the brahmin gets hold of the child the moment he is born, and the first thing he does is make a birth chart; and he will follow the child his whole life. On every important occasion he is there to guide him: about marriage he will decide, in death he will decide. After death he will be the first to be the guest of the family... because in Hinduism, after a death, on the third day there is a feast. So all the brahmins and all the relatives and all the friends come to the feast just to give solace to the soul of the departed.

The priest gets your neck in his hands, and he does not leave go even when you are dead.

In Hinduism, every year after a death there is a certain festival and ceremony when you pray for the dead: your father, your forefathers, all the people that you represent in some way – the whole long line of generations. In the very orthodox Hindu homes you will find a family tree, a map of the generations. It used to be so in my family but I burned it. My father was very angry. I said, ”You burn From Ignorance to Innocence

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these people completely and nobody is angry, and I have burned just the map. And what is the point of keeping it hanging on the wall?”

But he said, ”How were they troubling you?”

I said, ”They were troubling me – just to think of all these dead people every day.... I have to pass through this room two or three times a day and this whole tree... generations!” Now there was nothing else he could do so he started to write down again whatsoever he remembered. When he came to Poona to live with me he said, ”I don’t remember much – you destroyed the whole tree – I just remember my father’s father and his father, just four generations back.” I said, ”That is enough, even that is not needed. What are we going to do with these people and their names? And if you want I can make the tree and put any names – it will be just as valid.” But he was telling me, ”Please don’t destroy this paper – at least there are four generations. You are the fifth generation, and then my brothers are there and their children and their children; my sisters are there and their children....” He was making the tree again.

I said, ”You are unnecessarily wasting your time because once I get hold of this, I am going to burn it. What is the point of it all?”

But the brahmins used it. If you go to Allahabad or Benares... there are brahmin families, and you can go to the same family that your father had gone to. They have written in their books that your father went there on such and such a date, and he gave so much as a donation, and he did such and such a ritual, and that your father’s father went there.... They have it for generations, because for generations people have been going there from your family. And now, you sign your name and become part of it. They will show you records of thousands of years, because their family has always been doing that work. And you feel really thrilled to know that so many people from your family have gone there – you are not the only one.

The whole stream of your forefathers has been going, and this family of brahmins has been serving them as their priest. And they have written down everything and exaggerated it – because that is how they are going to exploit you: your father’s father gave a ten-thousand-rupee donation – that donation goes to their family – and his father had given twenty thousand.... Now, you don’t have any records, you don’t have any idea... and you feel very poor if you don’t give as much. At least you should be able to give ten thousand; your father’s father gave it, and it will look shameful if you cannot even uphold the name of the family. But whatsoever you give, don’t be worried; it will be written in thousands for your children – because they will be going there too.... From these people you can get your whole family tree. It was difficult for my father to get it, because Jainas don’t go to brahmins in Allahabad or Benares. For certain rituals, as when your father dies, you have to go just to take his ashes to the Ganges. And you go to the family that has been doing this work for generations, which has for generations, for thousands of years taken care of the ashes of everybody who has preceded you. That family will take care of you, will take you in a boat on the Ganges and in the middle of the Ganges they will do the whole ritual; there they will drown the ashes.

But because Jainas don’t believe in the Ganges and this type of ritual, my father was at a loss, he could not find a way. Jainas have to make their tree themselves or go to the brahmin, because From Ignorance to Innocence

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they have to depend on brahmins for certain things. Although Jainism is a religion in revolt against Hinduism and is basically against brahminism, finally they had to make the compromise, because there were a thousand and one things they could not figure out without the brahmins.

Now, who is going to make the birth chart? Jainas had no idea of astronomy, astrology, palmistry, so they had finally to negotiate. In marriage, who is going to do the rituals? – so the brahmin does it. And the mantras have to be recited – the brahmin has to do it. In death, who is going to recite the mantras when the fire is given to the body? – the brahmin has to do it.

So finally the whole rebellion disappeared, and Jainism became just a sub-caste, a sub-religion, a branch of Hinduism – but philosophically they are enemies. Deep down, Jainas think they are higher and that they are simply hiring these brahmins for certain works as they hire other servants.

Brahmins think that they are higher – ”Because without us you cannot even be born, you cannot die.”

These pseudo-religions have created a chaos in you – that is very necessary for them.

I have heard: One politician, one advocate, and one priest – three old friends – all had passed their seventieth year, but they used to go every morning for a walk and sit on a bench in the park and gossip about things which only they knew... the good old days. And many times arguments and discussions would start. One morning they started discussing whose profession was the first.

The advocate said, ”There is no problem about it: my profession was the first profession in the world, because people were fighting and somebody was needed to mediate, to negotiate, to do justice, to be fair to both parties. So of course my profession came first.” The priest said, ”But do you know who started the fight? Without the priest, why should they be fighting? It is the priest who gives the basic ideas and creates antagonism in people’s minds. And once they get attached, infatuated with an idea, then they are ready to fight; otherwise why should they fight?”

The politician laughed, he said, ”You both are right in a way, but you are not aware of the real situation. Why in the first place did people accept your ideas, your philosophies, theologies? –

because of us. We created the will-to-power. Of course, the right idea is going to succeed, but we created the whole idea of success, power, of reaching somewhere, of attaining something, of being victorious.”

Only when there is a will-to-power do you start getting interested in the ”right” kind of philosophy, the ”right” kind of theology, the ”right” kind of religion, so that you can reach the goal. And there are always many others who are saying, ”We are right – where are you going?” All the religions are saying, ”Except us, everybody is wrong.

The pseudo-religions disturbed man, his inner integrity. They disturbed the society by creating so many fictitious ideologies.

You will be surprised if you look into their ideologies and their theologies. You will laugh: How was it possible that great thinkers were concerned about these things? In the Middle Ages people like From Ignorance to Innocence

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Thomas Aquinas, a great theologian – perhaps the most important theologian amongst Christian theologians – was very much concerned about the problem of how many angels can stand on the point of a needle. Angels don’t have weight and they do not have physical bodies, but still there must be a limit – how many can stand there?

Thomas Aquinas wastes many pages discussing how many angels can manage to stand there –

and he was not alone. The whole Middle Ages remained concerned about the question. It was a great religious problem – of great urgency. I don’t know what urgency there could have been.

Perhaps they were thinking that after they die, they would become angels and they would have to stand on the point of a pin or the point of a needle. What was the trouble? But that is the situation in all the theologies.

Mahavira believed in seven hells and seven heavens. He was old by the time Gautam Buddha started moving about, teaching and impressing people. They had all heard Mahavira, and they would ask Buddha, ”Mahavira says so, what do you say?” Somebody asked, ”Mahavira says there are seven hells and seven heavens. What do you say?” Buddha said, ”He knows nothing. There are seventy-seven hells and seventy-seven heavens.” Now, there is nothing to prove and nothing to disprove it. It is up to you whom you want to believe.

The same question was asked of Ajit Keshkambal, who was even younger than Buddha and was just entering the field of controversy. He said, ”These people are perfectly right. Up to the seventh, Mahavira is right; up the the seventy-seventh Buddha is right, but there are really seven hundred and seventy-seven hells and seven hundred and seventy-seven heavens – because I have explored the whole. Those poor people – about whatsoever they have explored they are not wrong, but if they insist that this is the end and that they have come to the very end, then they are wrong. If they say,’This is the point up to where we have reached,’ there is no problem.” Now Ajit Keshkambal was really a man with a tremendous sense of humor; he is just joking. But what is Buddha doing? – he is very serious; but to me that too seems to be a joke. What is Mahavira doing? – he is even more serious. But to be serious about such things.... You cannot give any proof, but you can create conflict in people. Now a few became Jainas, a few became Buddhists, and a few followed Ajit Keshkambal, but because he was a man with a great sense of humor, his religion disappeared; people want something serious and soon they realized that this man was not serious.

How can you believe a man who is not serious? And in fact my own understanding is that Ajit Keshkambal was more sincere than the other two. He was simply making it a laughing matter, this theological business. He was saying, ”Get rid of all this nonsense! What business is it of yours to be bothered about?”

So the pseudo-religions created chaos in individuals, they created chaos in society, and they exploited both.

If there are Mohammedans, then Hindus remain united, then Christians remain united. It is just like the Soviet Union and America: nobody can stop making nuclear weapons, although both go on talking about peace. Nobody wants the third world war because everybody understands that it is going to finish everybody. It will be an absolutely idiotic war, if it ever happens, because a war only From Ignorance to Innocence

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has any meaning if somebody is going to win and somebody is going to be defeated. But in this third world war nobody is going to be defeated and nobody is going to be a victor – all are going to be killed. There will not be anybody left to declare, to announce, ”We are victorious.” But still they both go on, continuously pouring all their resources into nuclear weapons because of the fear that the other is doing it, so you have to do it. The other is also just like you, human – you are doing it, so the other has to do it. Now, where is this going to stop?

The same happened with religions. They have all helped each other unknowingly. Hindus became united against Mohammedans, Christians became united against Jews, jews became united against Christians. And the whole world became a battlefield.

Man became a battlefield inside, and the world became a battlefield outside.

And the strategy used was repression.

How can repression do all these things and many more? Repression simply means: remember that your nature is your enemy – you have to fight it, you have to kill it, you have to destroy it, you have to go above it; then only are you holy.

Now, this is impossible.

Nobody has ever been able to go above nature.

Wherever you are, you are within nature. Yes, you can cripple yourself, you can cut your limbs to the size prescribed by your holy scripture, you can suffer, you can torture yourself as much as you want

– but you cannot go beyond nature.

Nature is all there is – there is no beyond.

Beyond is within nature – not outside it.

So those who are fighting with nature never go beyond it. And their continual failure makes them miserable, makes them mentally unbalanced, makes them psychologically insane. And all these things are good for the priest: he exploits you.

His whole profession is to help you – but before he can help you, you must be put in a position where you need the help.

In India I came across many psychologists, psychiatrists, who had been trained in the West, and belonged to the Freudian school or the Jungian school or the Adlerian school or Assagioli’s school.

They had one thing in common: they were all against me. And I told them, ”Can you see the point?

You are all against each other, but you agree on one point: that you are all against me. Why? –

because I can simply destroy your profession.” And if the profession is destroyed, the Freudian will suffer just as much as the Adlerian, as much as the Jungian.

I can make man whole again.

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I can restore him to his integrated, centered, grounded being.

I am not a psychologist, I am not treating any psychological problems, because to me those problems are created problems. They create the problem and then they come with the solution.

And it is so easy to create the problem – you will be surprised how easy it is....

One of my professors – I was a student of psychology, and he was a famous psychologist.... One day I just told him, ”All the problems that psychologists deal with are created by them.” He said, ”You will have to prove it.”

I said, ”Challenge accepted.”

And next day I proved it. I went to his wife, who was very loving towards me – he himself was very loving towards me – and I told her, ”You have to do one thing, just for my sake, just once.” She said, ”What is it? Just tell me. If I can do it, I will.” I said, ”Do one thing: when your husband gets up in the morning, just say to him,’What happened?

Your face looks pale. Couldn’t you sleep the whole night? Your eyes look red.’ Just put your hand on his head and ask,’Have you a fever or anything?’ And certainly he will say something. Whatsoever he says, write it down on a piece of paper – exactly his words – because I will collect it later on.” She said, ”But what is this whole business about?” I said, ”I will tell you by the evening, but right now simply remember it, and do it for me tomorrow morning.”

She said, ”I will do it. It is done, believe me.” Just on one side lived the postmaster of the university. He was a very old man and a very good man; I went to him and chit-chatted about his garden. He was very interested in flowers and nobody used to come to praise his garden, I was the only person, so he was very happy with me. I said, ”Today you have to do something for me.”

He said, ”What? Anything!”

I said, ”When Professor Mehta goes to the university, when he comes out of his house, you simply remain by the fence and say,’What has happened? You look like a ghost! Your legs are trembling.’” He said, ”Has something gone wrong with him?”

I said, ”Nothing has gone wrong. But you have to say this and you have to show by your face that actually you mean what you are saying. He will say something; write it down exactly in his words and I will collect it.

Professor Mehta used to come to the department from his house – it was almost one mile... a beautiful road, so he used to walk. On both sides were gardens and professors’ houses: the From Ignorance to Innocence

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professors’ colony. So I made a few people ready, particularly the wives, a few small children –

anybody I thought was reliable. And they were very happy, they said, ”We will do it.” And lastly, as Professor Mehta used to enter the department, was the peon who used to sit in front of the office. I said to him, ”Dhyananda, I have never asked anything from you....” He said, ”That’s true.

Everybody tortures me:’Dhyananda bring this, Dhyananda bring that.’

Professors torture me, students torture me. That’s true, you are the only person.... In all these two years, you have not even asked for a single glass of water. And I was wondering... this is rare.

So whatever is to be done I will do.”

I said, ”You have to do this. When Professor Mehta comes here, you simply stand up and hold him and say,’You will fall down. You are trembling! What has happened?’” He said, ”But is it true?”

I said, ”No, it is not true, but you have to pretend it is true.” He said, ”Okay. You have never asked anything from me – I will do my best.” The next day I collected all the pieces of paper, because I was just following the professor. He was going ahead of me, and I was just following him collecting the papers. And Dhyananda really did a hatchet job. He really shook him so hard that he fell! I had to support him; we both took him inside.

He said, ”I am not able to even sit, just put me on the bench.” So we put him on the bench. I ran and brought a pillow and a blanket because he was shivering, perspiring.

I said, ”What has happened?”

He said, ”It seems I have some strange fever. Last night when I went to bed, everything was okay.

But now my headache is such as I have never had and I feel my whole body trembling. Just call the doctor. If it had not been for Dhyananda I would have fallen and broken my leg.” And it was actually because of Dhyananda that he was going to fall – because Dhyananda was an uneducated man and he did it for real! I called the doctor, and I explained to him, ”You have to be very serious. Nothing is the matter, it is only to do with a challenge that I’ve accepted; so just be kind to me – be very serious.”

He was very serious; he checked this and that, and he said, ”Mr. Mehta, you need at least three months’ complete rest.”

He said, ”Three months complete rest! But what has happened?” He said, ”I cannot tell you. I will talk to your wife.” And Professor Mehta said, ”But do one thing please. Take me to my house in your car because I cannot walk back again. One mile...!”

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He was walking every day, coming and going, because he loved walking, he enjoyed walking, but he said, ”Now I cannot walk.” To me he said, ”You just go to the vice-chancellor and say to him that I am in a terrible mess; the doctor is saying three months.... I don’t know what is going to happen, so you tell him that if for a few days I don’t come, not to mind, but replace me with somebody.” I took him in the car with the doctor and we took him inside the house. The wife was just trying to hold herself together, otherwise she may have started giggling and laughing. And really her husband was changed completely! The doctor was holding one hand, I was holding the other hand and he was not even able to walk. We put him on the bed, and he said to the doctor, ”You can tell my wife.” The doctor said, ”I will come in my own time. First let me go and prepare some medicines for you. It is urgent.”

So he left. Professor Mehta asked me, ”Has the doctor said anything to you?” I said, ”First look at these papers.”

He said, ”What papers? Has he given them to your

I said, ”No, just read them. This is the first statement that you gave to your wife:’I am perfectly okay, what nonsense are you talking?’ That was six o’clock this morning. And at seven-thirty you told the postmaster,’Yes, the night was a little disturbed.’ And then to Professor Nand Dulare Vajpeyel you said,’I had a terrible night.’ These are your statements. Nothing has happened to you – you can get up. There is no need to rest for three months, even three minutes are not needed: you are perfectly okay.”

”But,” he said, ”I was perspiring and I was just going to fall.” I said, ”There is nothing to it. It was Dhyananda who just jumped on you and made you fall and you thought you were falling. He did it too well; I had not asked him to do that much and I had no idea that he would do it so perfectly! So you get up.” He immediately got up and he said, ”Really? That’s true: I was perfectly okay last night, and this morning I was perfectly okay. When my wife spoke to me I simply said,’I am perfectly okay. What has happened to you?’ But when everybody started asking... strangely I started feeling that something was wrong. A small boy said,’Uncle your legs are wobbling,’ and I felt that certainly my legs were wobbling, otherwise this child...?”

I said, ”This is the note from the child. These were all my men, women, children, Dhyananda, the doctor.... I had to arrange this whole lot because I had accepted your challenge. I created the sickness. I could have managed it for three months, you may have even died.” He said, ”I cannot deny it. Seeing what has happened to me, it is possible that if I was in bed for three months and you went on trying your propaganda, you could have killed me.” I said, ”This is how your whole religion has been functioning: create problems in people’s mind and then where have they to go? They have to go to the priest. Then the priest gives the solution – and From Ignorance to Innocence

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gets paid for it. What the psychologists are doing is the same. Out of a hundred cases, ninety cases are created by you people.”

I am not saying that the psychologists do it intentionally – nor are the priests doing it intentionally

– they are doing it sincerely; they think it is so. They believe in what they are doing, and their belief is infectious, so the other person starts believing it. And then their solutions are there, their prescriptions are there.

If you go to a Freudian, then go to a Jungian, then go to an Adlerian, then go to Assagioli, you will know what I mean: all four will diagnose your disease differently, because their scriptures are different. They will all tell you that this is the real problem with you, and none is going to agree with anybody else. And because the problem is different, naturally the solution is going to be different.

The problem has to be different; otherwise, what purpose has Jung there in the world? – Freud has done the work.

That was the reason why Jung separated from Freud. He saw the point that with Freud he would at the most be a great Freudian, but he would never be an individual on his own. And what Freud was doing, he could do. And Jung started doing it, and he was perfectly successful. Adler escaped in the same way. If Freud reduced everything to sex, Adler reduced everything to ego.

Naturally their solutions are different because they have posed the problem differently.

And if

following their solutions, by chance you succeed, then their therapy has succeeded, not you. But if you fail, you have failed; you were not following the rules properly. And to follow the rules of psychoanalysis or any other school properly is such a long affair.

You may need three years’ psychoanalysis, and by the time you finish the psychoanalysis you end up more puzzled, more messed up than you were ever before. Now you need somebody else’s help.

Now you will be needing help for your whole life. There are people who have been psychoanalyzed their whole life – going from one psychoanalyst to another psychoanalyst.

The same was true with religion.

They created the problem by repression.

In fact psychology has used what the religions – the pseudo-religions – have sown: the psychologists have been reaping the crop. The psychologist is really the modern priest and he is exploiting the same ground, with the same strategy. For thousands of years the priest has prepared the ground, but people were becoming fed up with the priest, so they were very happy that a new science appeared. It is not a science at all – just a scientific jargon.

So the people who used to go to the priest – if they are educated, cultured, sophisticated – now go to the psychoanalyst... the same people. If they are not educated then they still go to the priest. The priest is cheaper, and less harmful because he is not so clever with words: conscious, super-conscious, sub-conscious, unconscious, collective unconscious, cosmic unconscious, cosmic conscious.... The poor priest cannot afford that much.

You can be hypnotized by the psychoanalyst and his jargon. He has arguments to support him, and what he is saying is in a way right: you are repressed – but that work was done by religion.

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Religion condemned sex, condemned your love for food – condemned everything that you can enjoy

– condemned music, condemned art, condemned singing, dancing.

If you look around the world, and collect together all the condemnations from all the religions, you will see: they have condemned the whole of man. They have not left a single inch uncondemned.

Yes, each religion has done its bit – because if you condemn the whole of man completely, he may simply freak out. You have to do it proportionately so that he becomes condemned, feels guilty, wants to be freed from guilt and is ready to take your help. You should not condemn him too much so that he simply escapes from you or jumps into the ocean and finishes himself That will not be good business.

It is just like the slaves in the old days. They were given food – not enough that they become too strong and revolt, and not too little either so that they die; otherwise you make a loss. You give them a certain percentage so they are just hanging in the middle between life and death, and they go on living and working for you. Only that much food is given, not more than that; otherwise there will be energy left after work, and that energy can become revolution. They can start revolting, they can start joining together, because they can start seeing what is being done to them.

The same has been done by the religions. Every religion has taken a different segment of man and condemned it, and through it made him feel guilty.

Once guilt is created in you, you are in the clutches of the priest.

You cannot escape now because he is the only one who can clean all the shameful parts of you, who can make you capable of standing before God without being ashamed.

He creates the fiction of God.

He creates the fiction of guilt.

He creates the fiction that one day you will have to stand before God: so be clean and be pure, and be in such a state that you can stand before Him without any fear, and without any shame.

The whole thing is fictitious. But this has to be remembered: it is true about the pseudo-religions.

And whenever I say all religions, I mean pseudo-religions; the plural is indicative of the pseudo.

When religion becomes scientific, it is not going to be plural: then it will be simply religion, and its function will be just the opposite of the pseudo-religions.

Its function will be to make you free from God...

To make you free from heaven and hell...

To make you free from the concept of original sin...

To make you free from the very idea that you and nature are separate...

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To make you free from any kind of repression.

With all this freedom you will be able to learn expression of your natural being, whatsoever it is.

There is no need to feel ashamed. The universe wants you to be this way, that’s why you are this way.

The universe needs you this way, otherwise it would have created somebody else, not you.

So not being yourself is the only irreligious thing according to me.

Be yourself with no conditions, no strings attached – just be yourself and you are religious, because you are healthy, you are whole.

You don’t need the priest, you don’t need the psychoanalyst, you don’t need anybody’s help because you are not sick, you are not crippled, paralyzed. All that crippledness and paralysis has gone with the finding of freedom.

Religion can be condensed in a single phrase: total freedom to be oneself Express yourself in as many ways as possible without fear; there is nothing to fear, there is nobody who is going to punish you or reward you. If you express your being in its truest form, in its natural flow, you will be rewarded immediately – not tomorrow but today, herenow.

You are punished only when you go against your nature. But that punishment is a help, that is simply an indication that you have moved away from nature, that you have gone a little astray, off the road

– come back.

Punishment is not a revenge, no. Punishment is only an effort to wake you up: what are you doing?

Something is wrong, something is going against yourself That’s why there is pain, there is anxiety, there is anguish.

And when you are natural, expressing yourself just like the trees and the birds – who are more fortunate, because no bird has tried to be a priest, and no tree has yet got the idea of being a psychoanalyst – just like the trees, and the birds, and the clouds, you will feel at home in existence.

And to be at home is all that religion is about.

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CHAPTER 8

God is not a solution but a problem

6 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST?

I do not believe that God does not exist, I know for sure He does not exist. And thank God that he does not exist – because the existence of God would have created so many problems, difficulties, that life would have been almost impossible.

You may not have looked at it from the angle from which I am going to talk to you – perhaps nobody has ever tried to look at it from this angle.

The Christians say that God created the world. In fact, the hypothesis of God is needed for the creation. The world is there; somebody must have created it. Whoever created it, that creator is God. But do you see the implication?

If the world is created, then there can be no evolution: Evolution means that creation continues.

Think of the Christian story. God created the world in six days, and then on the seventh day He rested; since then He has been resting. The whole creation was completed in six days. Now, from where can evolution possibly appear? Creation means: finished! – the full stop has arrived. On the sixth day, the full stop; and after that there is no possibility of evolution.

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Evolution implies that creation is not complete, hence the possibility of evolving. But God cannot create an incomplete world; that will be going against God’s nature. He is perfect, and whatsoever He does is perfect, neither He is evolving, nor is the world evolving: everything is at a standstill, dead.

This is the reason why the popes were against Charles Darwin, because that man was bringing in an idea which is going to kill God sooner or later. Those popes were perceptive in a way: they could see the faraway implications of the idea of evolution.

Ordinarily you would not connect creation and evolution. What connection is there between God and Charles Darwin? There is a connection. Charles Darwin is saying that the creation is an ongoing process, that existence is always imperfect, that it is never going to be perfect; only then can it go on evolving, reaching new peaks, new dimensions, opening new doors, new possibilities.

God had finished His work in six days and not long ago: four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ was born. It must have been the first of January, a Monday, because we manage to fit God into everything that we have created. He has to follow our calendar. If you ask me, I will say it must have been Monday, the first of April, April Fools’ Day, because that day seems to be absolutely suitable for doing such an act of creating a complete ready-made existence.

If evolution becomes impossible, life loses all meaning, life loses all future; then it has only a past.

It is not unnatural that religious people are constantly past-oriented – they have only the past.

Everything has been already done; there is nothing to be done in the future, the future is empty, blank, and yet you have to live in that future. Everything that had to happen happened four thousand and four years before Jesus was born. After that there has been no addition, no evolution, no development.

God created the world just as a potter creates a pot, a dead thing out of mud. But you have to remember, the potter can destroy the pot any moment. If you give the power of creation to God, you are simultaneously giving Him the power of un-creation too. These are the implications that have not been looked into. God can un-create. April Fools’ Day comes every year; any year on the first of April He can un-create. At the very most it may take six days again.

The very idea that you have been created makes you a thing, it takes away your being.

You can be a being only if there is no God.

God and you as a being, cannot coexist.

That’s why I say I am sure God does not exist, because I see beings everywhere.

The presence of beings is enough proof that God does not exist, cannot exist. Either you can exist or God can exist; you both cannot exist. The person who starts believing in God, unknowingly is losing his beinghood; he is becoming a thing. So there are Christian things, Hindu things, Mohammedan things, but not beings. They have dropped their being of their own accord; they have given their being to God.

The fiction has become alive, and the alive has become a fiction. I am simply putting things right side up.

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When I say God does not exist, I have no grudge against God. I don’t care a bit about God, whether He exists or not – it is none of my business.

When I say God does not exist, my purpose is to give you your lost beinghood; to show you that you are not a thing created by somebody arbitrarily.

Why did He decide, on a certain day, four thousand and four years before Jesus was born, to create the world? What caused the idea of creation? Was there something else that was forcing Him to create? Was there some serpent seducing Him to create? Why on a certain day, and not before? I want you to see the point. It is arbitrary, whimsical. If the story is true, God is insane. What was He doing for the whole of eternity? – the idea of creation came so late to Him.

The very idea of creation makes us arbitrary, whimsical, whereas evolution is not arbitrary, whimsical.

Evolution is eternal; it has been always going on. There was not a time when existence was not, there will never be a time when existence will not be: Existence means eternity.

God makes everything silly, small, arbitrary, meaningless, whimsical. Just that old man... and He must have been really old, really, really old, and then this idea of creation came to Him... and in six days He completed it. That’s why the popes were against Charles Darwin: ”You are saying that it is not yet completed, it is evolving. You are against the Bible, the holy scriptures. You are against God, against the idea of creation.”

Charles Darwin was saying simply, ”I am not against any God, I don’t know any God.” He was a very fearful person, and he was a Christian. He used to pray; in fact he started to pray more after he wrote the theory of evolution. He became very much afraid: who knows, perhaps he was doing something against God. He had believed that God created the world, but the facts of nature were telling a different story – everything is evolving, life is never the same again.

So if anybody believes in God, he cannot believe that you are a being.

Only things are created; they have a beginning and an end – beings are eternal.

Because of this fact, two religions in India, Jainism and Buddhism, dropped the idea of God –

because to keep that idea simply meant you were dropping the idea of being, which is far more significant. They would have liked to keep both, but it was logically impossible.

Once you accept that you have been created, you accept the other part of it, that the same whimsical man, any day, can un-create you. So what meaning do you have? – just a toy in the hands of some magical old man? So whenever He wants, He plays with the toys, and whenever He wants, He destroys them? It was really a great, courageous step on the part of Mahavira and Buddha to choose being and drop the idea of God – and that too, twenty-five centuries ago. They could simply see that you cannot manage both; they are against each other. But they were not aware of evolution; that was a later development. Now we know that creation goes against the idea of evolution too.

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Creation and evolution are absolutely against each other. Creation means completion; evolution means constant growth.

Growth is possible only if things are imperfect, and they remain imperfect. Howsoever they grow, there is always a possibility of growing more. There are a few other things which have to be considered.

If you are created, you can’t have freedom. Have you seen any machinery having freedom? – any

”thing” having freedom? Anything that is created is in the hands of the creator, just like a puppet. He has the strings in his hands; he pulls one string... you must have seen a puppet show. The strings are pulled – the man is behind the screen; you don’t see him, you simply see the puppets – and the puppets dance and they fight... but that is all false: the puppeteer is the reality.

These puppets cannot have freedom to fight, to love, to get married – all these things happen in a puppet show – to dance or not to dance... or when they don’t want to dance, to say, ”No! I am not going to dance.” The puppet cannot say no.

And all the religions have been teaching you not to say no don’t say no to God, to His messiah, to His holy book – never, never think in terms of saying no.

Why? – if you cannot say no, what is the meaning of your yes? It is a corollary: yes has meaning only when you are capable of saying no. If you have to say yes, and there is no other alternative except yes I have heard that when Ford first started manufacturing cars, he himself used to go to the showroom and take an interest in the customers, talk to the customers. He would say to them, ”You can choose any color provided it is black” – because at that time only black cars were available. But he used to say, ”You can choose any color provided it is black.” You are free, provided your answer is yes. What kind of freedom is this?

Puppets cannot have freedom. And if God has simply made you, you are a puppet.

It is better to revolt against God and be a being than to submit and be a part of a puppet show –

because the moment you accept yourself as a puppet, you have committed suicide.

You see puppets the whole world over, with different colors, different names, different rituals. Hindus say that without God’s will even a leaf in the tree cannot move – so what about you? Everything happens according to God. In fact, He has determined everything the moment He created; it is predestined. Now, it is so strange that intelligent people also go on believing in such garbage.

Just see the garbage: on one hand God has created you; on the other hand, when you do something wrong you will be punished.

If God has created you, and He has determined your nature and you cannot go against it, you don’t have any freedom.

There is no possibility, with God, to have freedom; then how can you commit a crime, how can you be a sinner? – and how can you be a saint either?

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Everything is determined by Him. He is responsible; you are not. But people go on believing in both things together: God creating the world, God creating man, woman, everything – and then throwing all responsibility on you. If there is something wrong in you, God is responsible and should be punished. If you are a murderer, then God creates a murderer; then He should be responsible for the Adolf Hitlers and the joseph Stalins and the Mao Tse-tungs. He created these people.

But no, the religious mind loses intelligence, becomes rusted, forgets completely that these are incompatible things; God and freedom are incompatible.

If you are free, then there is no God.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement I remind you of again. This man is certainly crazy, but sometimes the so-called sane people are so dumb and so dull, so idiotic, that crazy people come up with great insights; and Nietzsche has that genius. Once in a while he comes up with such a great insight that you cannot believe why people had not seen it before; and Nietzsche was alive just a hundred years ago.

Nietzsche says: God is dead, therefore, I declare, man from now onwards is free. This whole sentence brings freedom and God together for the first time in the whole history of man. It was waiting for this crazy man, Friedrich Nietzsche, to put these together: that God is dead, therefore you are free, otherwise, you are not free.

You may not have thought about it. How you can be free with a creator who is continuously watching you, who is continuously maintaining you and directing you? In the first place He has put everything in you as a fixed program. And you will follow that program; you cannot do otherwise. Just what you feed to the computer – the computer can only answer with that. If you start asking things which you have not fed to the computer before, the computer cannot answer it. The computer is a mechanism: first you have to feed it all the information, then whenever you need, you can ask the computer and the information will be available.

You are a computer – if there is a creator.

He has put certain information in you, he has programmed you, and you are doing things accordingly.

If you are a saint, you are not to take the credit for it – it was the program. If you are a sinner you need not feel condemned and bad – it was the program.

In India, the life of Rama has been played every year for ten thousand years. Almost all over the country, even in the smallest village there is a drama company. Once a year the drama company starts preparing one month ahead, and big cities who can afford it can ask professional companies.

There are professional companies, particularly in Ayodhya, which was the capital of Rama, and in other religious places too. So big cities who can afford it ask the professional companies. Small villages, towns, which cannot afford it, make their own company.

It happened in one of the villages....

The drama begins with Sita’s marriage.

In those days

particularly, princes used to have a certain ceremony called swayamvar. All the eligible young men

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move towards someone: it was for her to choose anybody she wanted. Or, if she was worried that on what criterion... it was a difficult job: a hundred princes were there, and they were all beautiful and from royal families, and young and strong. It was not easy to choose just like that, and it was not something that tomorrow you could reject.

In India it is not only a life-long affair, it is going to be for many lives. It is really a great burden on the mind of the girl... how to choose? So she can take the help of God in a certain way. Some device can be managed: that whosoever solves this puzzle will be the person she will choose. Now she is leaving it to God – it is easier, in wiser hands.

In Sita’s Swayamvar, the device was a bow of the Lord Shiva, which was given to Sita’s father because he was a devotee of Shiva. The bow was so heavy – of course, it was a god’s bow – that even to take it up needed a superman. An ordinary man would not be able even to move it; and to use it – that was something almost impossible.

There was a fish, an artificial fish hanging from the ceiling, and on the ground there was a small pond which reflected the fish. You had to look in the pond at the reflection, and with Shiva’s bow and arrow you had to shoot the fish above you – a great warrior was needed. First, the problem was how to lift up the bow. Even if you managed to lift it, then the problem was how to use it; it was not an ordinary bow. And then the puzzle was that you had to look at the reflection in the water and shoot the fish, which, like the reflection, was moving – it was on a wheel.

The whole country was agog. All the great warriors and kings – they all gathered there. Ravana was one of the greatest warriors of those days. He was the king of Sri Lanka and there was every chance that he would win the contest because he was also a devotee of Shiva, perhaps a greater devotee than Sita’s father. His devotion to Shiva was such, so the story says, that when Shiva was not listening to him, Ravana said, ”If you don’t listen to me, then I will cut off my head and put it at your feet. What more sacrifice do you want?” – and he did cut off his own head and put it at Shiva’s feet. Of course more sacrifice is impossible.

Even this is a strange story – how can you cut off your own head, and then put it at Shiva’s feet?

How will you manage to find where Shiva’s feet are? – your head is cut off, your eyes are gone!

But that’s the story – he managed it. Shiva was very happy with him and said, ”Because you have done something which nobody has ever done, I give you something which has never been given to anybody: you will have ten heads. Because you have sacrificed one, I will give you ten heads. And any enemy cutting off one of your heads will not be able to kill you – immediately another head will grow. Your ten heads will remain ten.”

This man with his ten heads was coming to the swayamvar. There was every fear that... and he must have been the ugliest man; even one head is enough – but ten heads! Everybody was afraid that he was coming and there was every chance that he would take up this bow; there seemed to be nothing to prevent him. Rama was also participating as a prince of Ayodhya. He was a young man, very young, and it was not known that he was a great warrior or anything. There was no possibility for him to win the contest.

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– which was made all of gold – ”is on fire and you are immediately needed. Without you everything will be gone.” So poor Ravana has to leave the bow and rushes to Sri Lanka. Meanwhile Rama wins the contest, and is married.

This is the story – the beginning. In this particular village the actors were all programmed and being prompted from the back. But when the man came saying, ”Sri Lanka is on fire,” the man who was playing the role of Ravana said, ”Let it be! I am going to marry Sita. Enough is enough; this time I am not going to go anywhere.

The prompter was trying hard: ”This is not what we have told you.” The actor said, ”You stop all this prompting – I know what I am doing.” In fact he was in love with the girl who was playing the role of Sita, and the girl’s father was not willing for them to marry. This was the only chance to declare before the whole town.... And before anybody else could do anything, Sita garlanded him.

Now, the whole town was in a shock. The story was finished before it had even started, because this was the beginning only, just the introduction: the real things were just going to happen. The actors were in such a hurry, they forgot even to pull the curtains. The whole mass was shouting and screaming and clapping, and they were saying, ”We have seen many things but nothing like this.

This is just the best drama that we have seen!”

In a drama you may go against the program, because it is acting, it is not your being; your being is still free. You may be acting the part of Ravana or Rama, but those are parts, roles; your being is still free. You can decide for or against.

But if your being is created then there is no possibility of your going anywhere other than where the program says, doing anything other than what’s in the program.

If there is a God who has created the world, then nobody is responsible except Him. And to whom can He be responsible? – there is nobody above Him. You are not responsible because He has created you. He is not responsible because there is nobody else to whom He can be responsible.

God means the world loses all responsibility, and responsibility is the very center of your life.

Then you can play the role, but you are not there, only promptings; whether given from the outside, from behind the curtain, or whether given from the inside through the hormones, through biology, physiology, psychology doesn’t matter. You are only a collection of promptings, and you are just following them.

It takes all dignity from man totally.

It reduces you to a puppet.

To accept God is not to be religious, because without responsibility how can you be religious?

Without freedom how can you be religious

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Without an independent being of your own, how can you be religious?

God is the greatest anti-religious idea.

If you look into it from every aspect, then those who believe in God are not religious, cannot be religious.

So when I say there is no God, I am trying to save religion.

There is no danger from the devil, the real danger comes from God. The devil is only His shadow.

If God disappears the shadow will disappear automatically.

The real problem is God.

And you can see what I am saying if you look at history. Every step in evolution is stopped by the churches out of fear that it proves that creation is incomplete. Man has reached the moon, but in India I have come across Hindu shankaracharyas, Jaina acharyas – they are equivalent to the pope

– who don’t believe it, because their scriptures say that the moon is a goddess. The sun is a god

– so the moon is not a planet. You will be surprised to know that one Jaina monk has accumulated millions of rupees in donations because he is creating a lab to prove that man has not reached the moon, he has landed on some other planet!

Now, these idiots... and people believe in them because the scriptures are in their favor. They collect all the quotations from all the scriptures spoken by people who are omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent: avataras, tirthankaras, God’s special messengers. And if they say this, then what can poor scientists do?

They are deceiving you, cheating you, cheating themselves. A fact that nobody can deny, a fact that all the scientists of the whole world, including India, have accepted, is not acceptable to the religious mind because it will destroy their faith in the scriptures. They are more worried about their faith than about reality.

When I say God is the greatest enemy of religion, it is going to shock the so-called religious people, because they think praying to God, worshipping God, surrendering to God is what religion is.

They have never thought about responsibility, freedom, growth, consciousness, being; they have never bothered – and yet these are the real religious questions.

Your prayers are silly. You are simply praising God in the same way you have been praising kings and queens; in the same tone, in the same words. You are praising God and thinking that just as your queens and kings become influenced by your prayer and you can persuade them to do favors for you, so you will be able to persuade God.

The Bible’s statement that God created man in His own image is absolutely wrong. Just the contrary is true: man created God in his own image; it is man’s creation – God! Hence the Hindu God is different, the Mohammedan God is different, the Jewish God is different, because different people From Ignorance to Innocence

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were trying to figure out how God looks, what language He speaks. Now, Jews cannot believe that He speaks any other language than Hebrew, and Hindus cannot believe it – God speaking Hebrew!

– have you gone mad? Do you think God is a Jew? He speaks pure Sanskrit!

I have heard that after the second world war a German general and a British general, just resting, taking a sunbath on the beach, started talking. The German general said, ”I am simply puzzled by one thing: that we were praying to the Christian God, and you were praying to the same Christian God but we are defeated and you have won. Is it not partial?” The English general laughed and said, ”It is not partial. Just tell me one thing: in what language were you praying – in German? That’s where the fault was. God understands only English – no other language – and we were praying in English. There is no mystery in it, it is simple.” Man, imposing himself by this creation of God in man’s own image, is not aware of what he is losing.

He is losing all that is valuable, everything that is beautiful, everything that can become a blessing to him.

The so-called religious person starts focusing himself upon a fiction and forgets his own reality, forgets himself and thinks of somebody there, above, in the sky. That person above in the sky is non-existential, but you can focus on any non-existential thing, and you can forget yourself in that focusing.

And that is where real religion happens – within you.

Hence prayer has nothing to do with religion.

In my religion there is no place for prayer.

No true religion can have anything like prayer, which is absolutely bogus.

What are you doing in prayer? You are creating first an image of your own imagination, surrendering to your own imagination, then talking to that image. You are just performing an insane act.

In all the churches, in all the synagogues, in all the temples and in all the mosques of the world, these people are doing something insane; but the whole earth is full of these insane people.

Because they have been doing this for centuries, and you have accepted them as religious, it shocks you when I say that they are not religious. They are not even normal – to be religious is far away.

They are below normal. They are doing something so stupid that if they go on doing it, whatsoever little intelligence is left in them, by and by, will go down the drain. Perhaps it has already gone.

To me, religion is a tremendous phenomenon.

It is not fictitious. It is entering into the very heart of reality. It is knowing existence from its very center. But you will have to drop your fictions. Those fictions will never allow you to enter into yourself, because those fictions are projected outwards, and you get completely identified with them.

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You know it. You watch a movie or a television show and you know perfectly well that many times tears have come to your eyes, although you know that it is only a television screen and there is nobody there. But you forget completely that you are only a watcher. You become identified with someone; so much so, that if the other person is in great suffering tears come to your eyes.

In Calcutta there was one very famous scholar of Indian literature, theology, history... of all that you can conceive. He was a rare mind, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar. Vidyasagar means ocean of wisdom. That title was given to him by the all-India conference of Hindu scholars. It has not been given to anybody else, neither before nor since. He was really an ocean of what they call wisdom. I will not call it wisdom....

I will show you how wise he is. Because he was so famous a scholar and carried all kinds of D.Litts.

from different sources, one Sanskrit university instead of a D.Litt. gave him the title Vidya Varidhi; that too means ocean of wisdom. Another gave him the title Vidya Vachaspati, master of wisdom, and the Hindu university in Benares gave him the title Mahamahopadhyaya – the greatest teacher of all.

He had all these degrees, and he was so respected all over the country and particularly in Bengal, that there was nobody who even came close to him. He was invited to a drama, to inaugurate it, and it was arranged by such great people that he could not refuse. Even the viceroy of India was going to be present there, because Calcutta in those days was the capital of India. So he went to inaugurate it.

He inaugurated it and was sitting by the side of the viceroy, just in the front row. In the drama there is a very corrupted, cunning character, a villain who is continually after a very innocent woman. The story becomes very intense: at one point he finds the woman alone – far away from the village. She has come to the river to fetch water. There is nobody around, the village is miles away, and he gets hold of her....

There is pin-drop silence because there is going to be a rape; that’s what the man intends to do. And suddenly – the audience could not believe it – Ishwar Vidyasagar jumped on the stage and started beating the man with one of his shoes!

For a moment nobody could think what to do or what not to do about Vidyasagar. But that actor took the shoe in his hand and he said to Vidyasagar, ”This I will not return; it is the greatest prize in my life. I have been playing this role my whole life, but if a man like Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar gets so involved and identified that he forgets himself, and forgets that it is only a drama... and I am not going to rape the woman. In the first place she is not a woman – you know it, and everybody else knows it. That chap is a young man from your own town.” Ishwarchandra felt very ashamed, and said, ”I am sorry that I disturbed the whole drama. But it is true, I forgot completely that it is a drama. I forgot completely who I am. I forgot completely that that woman is not a woman and that you are simply playing a role; you are not going to rape her. Before thousands of people and the viceroy of India, you are not going to rape her. I just forgot!” But you are also forgetting when you become emotional in a film or in a novel. And this is what your so-called religious people have been doing. They have become involved in imagining gods From Ignorance to Innocence

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and goddesses of all kinds and types that you can imagine. And they have completely forgotten themselves. They are worshipping something which is not there, but they have been worshipping so intently that they can create the hallucination of it.

It is possible for a Christian to see Jesus with open eyes; it is possible for a Hindu to see Krishna with open eyes. But the greatest difficulty would be for Jesus to appear to a Hindu. For a Hindu, Jesus never appears – never, even by mistake – and Krishna never appears to a Christian. Once in a while it wouldn’t do much harm, but they never commit that mistake. The Christian will not allow the mistake to be committed; his hallucination is of Jesus, he cannot hallucinate about Krishna. Only what you are projecting appears on the screen.

If you are projecting a film, only that film appears on the screen; if you project another film then another film appears on the screen. It is not possible to project one film, and for another film to start appearing on the screen – that is not possible. That’s why it is not possible for Krishna to appear to a Christian, or a Mohammedan or a Jew. It is not possible for Jesus to appear to anybody else except Christians.

Still we go on and on strengthening, enforcing our imagination and hallucinations. And what have you got out of it? From thousands of years of hallucination, what have you got? – this humanity that you see around the world, this mess? This is the result of thousands of years of religious practices, disciplines, ritual, prayer.

Millions of churches, synagogues, temples, all around the earth – and this is the result? – the man that you see, the actual man, this man has come out of this whole effort?

It was bound to be so, because we have wasted all these years in sheer stupidity, calling it religion.

We have wasted much time in which man could have grown to heights unknown, to depths unfathomable; to the freedom of the spirit, the compassion of the soul, integrity, individuality. If all these thousands of years had not been wasted after a bogus God, just hocus-pocus – of no worth, not a single penny.... And you ask me, ”Do you really not believe?” It is not a question of believing or not believing – there is no one to believe in or not to believe in!

There is no God.

So please remember: don’t start saying that I am an unbeliever. I am neither a believer nor an unbeliever.

I am simply saying that the whole thing is a mere projection of the human mind and it is time that we stopped this game against ourselves.

It is time that we said goodbye to God forever.

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7 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

I WAS SHOCKED TO HEAR YOU SAY THAT GOD DOES NOT EXIST. THEN THE QUESTION

AROSE IN ME: HOW CAN THERE BE ANY RELIGION WITHOUT GOD? ISN’T GOD THE CENTER

AND RELIGION THE CIRCUMFERENCE?

IT is fortunate that you were shocked. It needs intelligence to be shocked Millions of people on the earth have lost the quality of being shocked. They have been hypnotized for centuries, conditioned in such a way that no shock ever reaches them.

All the religions, the so-called religions, pseudo-religions, have been doing only one work: creating shock absorbers in you.

My function is to destroy all your shock absorbers and make you vulnerable so that you doubt, you question, you enquire.

One who doubts to the very end finds the answer.

One who enquires to the very end comes to know.

Those who go on believing without doubting, without questioning, without enquiring remain dull, dead, idiotic.

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So I congratulate you that you are shocked; it is a good beginning. The stupid person will be angry, not shocked. He will immediately become an enemy; he will not be shocked. To be shocked means that something in you is still alive, that the priests, the politicians, the pedagogues have not been completely successful with you. Perhaps a window has remained open; that’s why you are shocked.

And do you see the miracle of the shock? – immediately a question of tremendous importance arises in you.

Your question is not out of anger, it is not out of irritation. It is a valid, intelligent, tremendously significant question: How can there be religion without God? That’s what you have been told for centuries, that God is the center and religion is its circumference.

This is an absolute lie.

Religion has nothing to do with God at all.

Yes, it has much to do with you, your consciousness, your being.

You ask, how can there be a religion without God? One day, if you go on enquiring, you will ask me how can there be a religion WITH God?

And I would like you to contemplate how there can be a religion with God. God is nothing but our idea of the ultimate dictator, the ultimate Adolf Hitler.

He creates the world, just whimsically; there is no reason to create it. No religion has been able to answer why He created the world in the first place – and this world: ugly, nauseous, disgusting; this humanity, which religions go on proclaiming to be the highest peak of God’s creation.

God created man in His own image – what can be higher than that? And what has man been doing?

In three thousand years, five thousand wars! The whole of history is a history of murder, rape, crime

– and murder, rape and crime in the name of God.

Millions of people have been killed, burned alive in the name of God.

And God created man in His own image!

So you can think something about God too, just a little inference that if this is the image, then what will be the real? If Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini and Mao Tse-tung are only carbon copies, then what will be the original? It is going to be terrible!

If God created this world, man and everything, it should show signs of divinity, signatures of God, but they are completely missing. If He cannot read and write, He can at least make a thumbprint.

There seems to be no signature anywhere. It seems more probable that it was created by the devil rather than by God, because ninety-nine percent of proofs are for the devil, not for God.

With God you cannot create religion, for the simple reason that God has already created the Bible for the Christians, the Torah for the Jews, the Vedas for the Hindus.... He has created them already; He has given you ready-made religions. He has not allowed you to seek and search and find.

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And there is something of immense importance about truth: unless you find it, it never becomes truth to you.

If it is somebody else’s truth and you borrow it, in that very borrowing it is no more true – it has become a lie.

That is one of the reasons that the great mystics of the world have been saying again and again that truth is inexpressible, because the moment you express it, in the very process of expression it becomes a lie.

All your holy scriptures are full of lies.

God has not given you the chance to discover religion, but has given you ready-made religion; and He does not allow you even to question, to doubt: that is a great sin. There are all kinds of stupidities in your religious scriptures, but you have to believe in them totally.

A man like Bertrand Russell became very puzzled, for the simple reason that there are things which anybody who has a little intelligence cannot trust – but to doubt makes you a sinner; you start feeling guilty. Finally he wrote a book, Why I am not a Christian, and collected all the points that hindered him from becoming a Christian. For example: the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. It is so unscientific that to believe it is to destroy all your intelligence. To have faith in such an idea is suicidal; you are destroying yourself And what are you gaining? – a stupid idea... virgin birth!

If Bertrand Russell could not believe in it, we cannot blame him. It was the Bible that prevented a man who could have been religious.... Russell asked, ”Why in the trinity is there not a woman included? God the father, God the son, and the Holy Ghost – what kind of family is this? This holy family seems to be very idiotic. Why could they not put a woman in it?because all the religions have been against women. To put a woman into the trinity, in the highest position of power, was impossible for them; hence they had to put the Holy Ghost.

Now, nobody knows about the Holy Ghost, whether he is man or woman or neutral. And this Holy Ghost is the person responsible for making Mary pregnant – and still he is holy! He is a rapist, because Mary was not aware of it; she was not a willing partner in it, and she was already married to a person. But the Holy Ghost did this; perhaps he is still around the world – and he is one third of God!

A man like Bertrand Russell is prevented from being a religious person because of your idea of God.

But any idea of God will create problems. The Hindu God... instead of the trinity the Hindus have trimurti, parallel – one god with three faces; three persons joined together in one person. But all three are constantly fighting each other, so childish is their behavior. It is good that Sigmund Freud was only aware of Christian and Judaic traditions. If he had been aware of Hindu tradition he would have found immense support for his hypothesis.

In Hinduism, God created the world. The first being He created was a woman, naturally, because without a woman nothing else can grow – the woman has to come first. But in creating a beautiful woman, He himself became infatuated. Now, the father becoming infatuated with His own daughter

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life, Freud was trying to prove that each father is infatuated with the daughter and each mother is infatuated with the son. And there is some truth in it – but God getting infatuated with His own daughter...!

Then the woman becomes afraid and she tries to escape, and the only way to escape is to change shapes, forms, disguises. She becomes a cow, but how can you deceive God? – He becomes a bull. She becomes other kinds of animals, and God follows. That’s how the whole creation comes into being – the woman running and the father following her and trying to rape her. He is still doing the same thing.

With such a God, what kind of religion do you think is possible? This God is a sexual maniac; He needs psychotherapy. He cannot be the center of religion; He cannot even be on the circumference of religion – He has to be inside a mental asylum. But if you read Hindu scriptures you will be very much disturbed by the kind of things that millions of people of the oldest religion in the world are carrying.

These are the three phases of the Hindu God: Brahma is the creative phase, he creates the world; Vishnu, the second phase, he maintains the world, and Shiva – he destroys the world when the time comes to destroy it. In a way it is perfectly balanced; there are all the three functions that existence needs: creation, maintenance, and one day, de-creation. But if you look into the inner life of these three persons, you cannot believe it.

One day, Vishnu and Brahma are quarreling about something. In the first place, the idea of a quarrel between two parts of God makes Him schizophrenic. If both your hands start fighting each other...

and that’s what you are doing in the mind – one part fighting against the other part. Sometimes you become so split that you are already two persons, and sometimes you are many persons. God is already three persons – He is not one whole, one piece – and all the three are constantly quarreling.

These two were quarreling and they could not find some way to settle the argument, so they both thought it would be better to look for Shiva; perhaps he could be helpful. So they went to look for Shiva. Shiva must have been American – it was morning and he was making love to his wife, Parvati.

Indians don’t do that; that is absolutely unheard of I think Shiva is the first American... making love to his wife in the morning, with the doors open. Perhaps it would be better to call him Californian –

doors open! – just American will not do.

Brahma and Vishnu both entered, not knowing what was happening inside, and Shiva was so much into his act of making love that he didn’t bother about them. Both were very angry. In the first place, making love in the morning does not suit a god; secondly, with doors open, anybody could come in.

And thirdly, he does not even tell them to sit down; he has not even looked at them. Both the gods were very angry, so angry that they cursed Shiva, saying, ”You will be known in the world by the phallic symbol.” That’s why in India you find no statue of Shiva, only the phallic symbol. This is the curse of those two gods: ”You will be known and recognized as a phallic symbol.” You may not be aware that shivalinga, the phallic symbol for Shiva, is not alone; it is placed in a vagina. Both are in marble, and for thousands of years Hindus have been worshipping it. And still Shiva is one third of God!

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You can take any other conception of God and you will find it impossible to make a religion around it. But up to now this has been the case. The fiction of God is there in the center and around the fiction, all other fictions have been created – of heaven and hell, and sin and punishment, repentance, forgiveness. And this whole circus is nothing but exploitation by the cunning priests of all the religions.

Yes, without God there can be no priest. Without God there can be no concept of sin. Without God there can be no heaven and hell. Without God there can be no temple, no synagogue, no church.

If you think these are the things which make a religion, then of course you will find it difficult: how can there be a religion without God? But these things have nothing to do with religion. In fact, to me these are hindrances in finding religiousness.

And let this be another shock to you: the authentic religion is going to be Godless – and also religionless.

I am teaching you a religionless religion.

You will have to go a little deeply into this because the words seem to be contradictory: religionless religion. When I say religionless religion I mean that the priest, the synagogue, the rabbi, the pandit, the pope, the church, the prayer, the holy scriptures, the holy and unholy ghost – all these have to be dropped because this is what you have known as religion.

The holy scriptures are nothing but religious fiction, just as there are science fictions. And it is beautiful to write a science fiction, it is art. Those religious fictions are not even artistic – they are ninety percent rubbish, crap. Nobody reads them except a few people who have some vested interest in reading them.

I have heard... a man who was selling dictionaries, house to house, rang the bell of a house. The housewife came out and asked, ”What do you want?” He said, ”I have beautiful dictionaries. You must have children; they may need dictionaries, and I have all kinds for all ages.”

The woman wanted to get rid of him, so she said, ”But we have got a dictionary.” And far away in the corner, on a table, there was a thick book looking like a dictionary.

The salesman laughed; he said, ”That’s a Bible.”

The woman could not believe it because from that distance it was impossible to figure out that it was a Bible. She said, ”You surprise me. Yes, it is a Bible. I was just trying to get rid of you, saying that we have got a dictionary. But how did you manage it? Tell me and I will purchase one dictionary from you – but tell me the trick.”

He said, ”There is no trick. I just saw how much dust had gathered on it.” Only Bibles, holy books, gather dust. A PLAYBOY magazine does not gather dust. Who wants to open a holy book? It has not been opened perhaps for years; perhaps it has never been opened.

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Religious fiction has to be dropped because it is hindering your way, preventing you from reaching reality.

You have to get rid of all nonsense that has been told to you by your parents, by your society, by your teachers, by your religious elders.

Unless you clean yourself completely you cannot take the first step towards being religious.

Religiousness is a quality of your being; it has nothing to do with any ritual outside you, it is a quality of your being.

There are a few things which are qualities of your being and are in a dormant state because you have never thought that they are to be developed. Have you tried to develop your consciousness?

Have you tried to develop your compassion? Have you tried to develop your intelligence?

The scientists say even the people who are geniuses use only fifteen percent of their intelligence; eighty-five percent remains unused. And this is about a man like Albert Einstein or Karl Marx or Rutherford, the Nobel prize-winners.... What about the common man, how much does he use? –

not more than five percent. And that five percent he uses because it is needed for day to day work: his business, his family, his so-called religion, his political party and his club. Five percent is enough.

You don’t have to be a great genius to become a rotarian. I don’t think a genius would like to become a member of the lions club. A man trying to become a lion seems to be falling down rather than rising up.

If the genius himself uses only fifteen percent, that means nobody is trying to sharpen their intelligence. You only go on using whatsoever life, its situations and its circumstances force you to use. If there is nobody, no situation forcing you to use it, you will not use even five percent. That’s why you will not find rich people’s sons and daughters getting gold medals in the universities and topping the universities. No, they don’t need to use their intelligence; their servants can do that. And now computers are available. Soon you will not be using even five percent; people will be carrying a small computer. They are already carrying them. Have you not watched it...?

In my childhood, in my family, my father was very particular about handwriting. He would not allow a fountain pen in the house, because you cannot have the quality of an ordinary old pen with a fountain pen; the fountain pen is going to destroy your handwriting.

And you can see it. Just look back: before the press was invented, all the books were written by hand

– such beautiful, artistic handwriting. What the book contains is another thing; just the handwriting itself is a work of art. But that art disappeared with the fountain pen. And when the typewriter became available to people, even the little bit that was possible with the fountain pen disappeared –

people are typing. Now tell them to write and their writing looks as if they are uneducated. People are now carrying small computers to calculate, calculators – they will forget the small calculations that you can do.

There is a woman alive in India, Shakuntala, who has toured all around the world and has been exposed to the greatest mathematicians. She is only a matriculate and knows nothing of higher mathematics, but even Albert Einstein was puzzled by her. You just write any figure, howsoever big From Ignorance to Innocence

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it is doesn’t matter; tell her to multiply it by as big a figure as you want – and before you have finished writing that second figure down, the answer is there. Einstein said, ”If I had done it, it would have taken at least three hours.”

But what is happening to this woman? She knows nothing about it. She says, ”Just simply looking at the figures that have to be multiplied....” All that happens to her is a kind of silence; in that silence, figures start coming up, and she starts speaking, ”Write down this figure... I don’t know how it comes.” It seems from birth she has had a very sharp intelligence, so that within a flicker of the eye something happens in her mind. And this is not the only case, there have been others.

A young boy, Shankaran, was so poor that he used to pull a rickshaw. Now, it is an ugly thing; it should not exist anywhere: that a man is pulling a vehicle with you sitting in it! And he was just a boy – but his father was old – and in Madras he was just pulling the rickshaw. The mathematics department of the university became interested in him by accident. One day the professor, the head of the department, went in his rickshaw and just started talking to him. He said, ”You are so young: you should be reading and studying.”

The boy told him about his family. ”But,” the boy said, ”even without reading and studying – I know that you teach mathematics – I can do mathematics. That, somehow I know.” The professor tried him out, and he was amazed: the boy was a miracle. He sent the boy to Oxford, at his own expense, to display his ability, and wherever he went he simply amazed great mathematicians. Rutherford said that a certain question that had been bothering him for years, the boy solved within seconds.

And once he solved it, Rutherford saw that it was so simple – how was he missing it? Somehow he had gone round and round, just missing that point, and this boy simply jumped on that point. But he was not educated.

Intellect can be sharpened; there are ways to sharpen it. Modern psychology is trying to measure it. I say don’t be foolish, don’t waste time in measuring it – what is there to measure? The average person remains at the mental age of thirteen; he may be seventy but his mental age remains thirteen, and he uses five to seven percent of his intelligence.... Now why waste time in finding more accurate methods to measure it? Why not use methods which can sharpen the intellect? That is what I have been teaching you.

If you doubt, your intellect will be sharpened.

If you believe, your intellect will get rusted, it will start gathering dust: you are not using it.

Doubt is bound to sharpen it, for a fundamental reason: you cannot remain at ease with doubt. You have to do something about it; you have to find the answer. Till you find the answer the doubt is going to harass you, nag you – and that’s the way doubt sharpens your intellect.

But all the religions teach that to doubt is sin, to believe is to be religious.

I say to you: to doubt is to be religious, and to believe is to be irreligious.

But those pseudo-religions were really cunning and clever. What psychologists have not found even now, they found five thousand years ago: that doubt is dangerous, it sharpens intellect. Belief is From Ignorance to Innocence

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comfortable, convenient: it dulls. It is a kind of drug; it makes you a zombie. A zombie can be a Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan – but they are all zombies, with different labels. And sometimes they get fed up with one label, so they change the label: the Hindu becomes a Christian, the Christian becomes a Hindu – a new label, a fresh label, but behind the label the same belief system.

Destroy your beliefs.

Certainly it will be uncomfortable, inconvenient, but nothing valuable is ever gained without inconvenience.

In three hundred years, science has used doubt as its method, and given the world so much in three hundred years, – in ten thousand years religions have not been able to give even one thousandth part of it.

The religions have not given anything. On the contrary they have prevented everything in every possible way. They were trying to prevent science too, and they tried hard – they are still trying.

Now the Catholic pope goes on teaching the Catholics that methods of birth control should not be used; they are against God. Strange, even the Holy Ghost must be using birth control methods, because Jesus says, ”I am the only begotten son of God.” What happens to God? Has he stopped creating sons, daughters? Either He has become a brahmacharya, a celibate, which is not very likely, or He is using birth control methods. But the pope goes on continually against birth control –

because it is against God; God is sending people

This earth is already overloaded; it is already in such a situation that if we don’t cut its population by half it is going to die. There will be no need for a third world war: just the population itself will be enough to kill everybody, to starve everybody.

And God is continually sending people... either He has no idea... that at least send a small piece of land with each child, or try some new way so there is nobody hungry. Rather than real babies, make plastic babies which run on batteries; that would be easier. Once in a while you go and you can get your battery charged... and for God everything is possible. He has been doing all kinds of miracles, His son was doing all kinds of miracles: this will not be much of a miracle, creating a baby who runs on a battery.

But He goes on giving us stomachs and hunger, and no land – but the old land is losing its fertility every day. And the Catholic pope goes on saying no birth control, no abortion. Why no abortion? –

because it is killing. But it is very strange coming from a pope’s mind, because these popes have been making all kinds of crusades in the past and killing thousands of people. That has been their whole business: burning people, burning women just because of a fictitious idea....

Anybody could write to the pope informing him, ”In our village there is a woman who is a witch.” That was enough to start an enquiry; and there was a special court to enquire into whether the woman was a witch or not. They would torture the woman so much that she would find it easier to accept that she was a witch rather than being tortured continually. They would torture her till she accepted that she was a witch; and once she accepted that she was a witch, she had to be burned alive.

Thousands of women they burned alive!

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Now suddenly their interest is in non-violence: abortion is violence.

And the same pope’s

predecessors blessed Benito Mussolini in the second world war. That was not violence? The archbishop of Canterbury in England blessed the British forces – and that was not violence? – that was perfectly good? One wonders at what point abortion becomes violence.

At what point...? A child is conceived this moment – is he alive or dead? He is alive, but from where has the life come? He was alive in the semen cells before he became conceived in the mother’s womb; the semen cells are all alive. They have a small life span, just two hours, so if within two hours they can find a female egg, and can enter the egg, the child is conceived. The egg is alive: half of your being, the feminine part, is in the egg, and half of your being is coming from your father’s semen. And in a single intercourse millions of cells are rushing along....

You will be surprised to know that it is there that politics starts. Everybody is running fast towards the egg, because whosoever reaches first becomes President Reagan. Those who are left behind, just a little behind... finished! Only one sperm is going to enter, then the woman’s egg becomes hard and no more can enter. That is the natural process; it is vulnerable only to one. Only once in a while does it happen that two male cells reach exactly at the same time and enter. That’s why sometimes you have twins, or three or four or five or six – even nine children have been known. But that is a very rare event.

Millions of sperms... and they are really fast. It is almost like a car race. They are all racing, and they have to be quick: within two hours if they don’t reach, they are finished. In a single intercourse you are responsible for killing millions of beings. And what about an abortion? – just one. So whether it’s one million or one million plus one, what difference does it make?

But the Catholic pope is ready, just as the Mohammedan chief imam is ready, and the Hindu shankaracharya is ready to let the population grow, because numbers have a political significance.

It is the politics of numbers – how many Catholics are there. The pope is not interested in humanity, in the future, in a global suicide, no. His whole interest is in how many Catholics there are: the more Catholics, the more power he has. The shankaracharya is interested in more Hindus, so he has more power.

Everybody is interested in power.

In the name of God they are simply trying to become more and more powerful.

God is just a useful instrument in the hands of the priest. Whatsoever the priest wants, he makes God say: he writes the scriptures, he writes all kinds of nonsense in them.... And it is a strange fact to be understood about human beings, that people become very impressed with nonsense, because it seems mystical.

For example the Bible says: ”In the beginning was the word....” Now how can the word be in the beginning? Do you make any distinction between sound and word, or not? A word is a meaningful sound. Perhaps it can be said that in the beginning there was sound – but not word.

A word presupposes there was somebody who made the sound meaningful, who used a word. ”In the beginning was the word....”1 am just saying hypothetically that sound would be better, more From Ignorance to Innocence

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logical; in fact sound is also not possible. Scientifically sound is possible only if somebody is there to hear it, otherwise there is no sound.

I am speaking here. If nobody is here there will be no sound, because for sound two things are needed: me making a noise and your ears receiving it. Between these two the sound happens.

When there is nobody near a waterfall, you may think there will be much sound still happening near the waterfall. You are wrong; there is no sound because there is no ear.

So if even sound is not possible – what to say about a word! But they say, ”In the beginning was the word”just see how nonsense becomes mystical....” In the beginning was the word. The word was with God.” You have spoiled the first statement already. ”In the beginning was the word. The word was with God,” so already there were two – you have contradicted it immediately. And the third sentence: ”And the word was God.”

Now, such garbage impresses people: something very profound must be in it, that’s why we cannot understand it. There is nothing profound in it – just some idiot writing. But Christian theologians have been commenting on it for centuries, different commentaries on what it means. What is ”the word”? What does it mean that ”The word was God,” that ”The word was with God”? Just three sentences – and all contradictory to each other.

If you analyze any scripture you will find these kinds of statements. And they say, ”Don’t doubt, believe, have faith and great will be your reward; doubt and you are misguided.” But in this darkness, except for doubt there is no light.

Doubt, and not half-heartedly.

Doubt with your total intensity so that doubt will become like a sword in your hand, and it will cut all the garbage that has gathered around you.

Doubt is to cut the garbage, and meditation is to wake yourself.

These are two sides of the same coin, because burdened with all the garbage you will not be able to wake up. That garbage will create sleep in you; that’s its function. It is meant to keep you asleep.

Have faith and go to sleep so you don’t bother the politicians, the priests; you don’t bother the vested interests; you don’t bother anybody. You yourself become a man without any soul, a mechanism, a slave.

So doubt, and meditate.

And by meditation I mean a very simple thing: just be silent and start drowning in your silence.

In the beginning that too creates fear because silence is like an abyss; perhaps there is no bottom, and one wants to cling to anything available.

Silence needs courage, just as doubt needs courage.

Doubt is to throw out everything that others have put in you.

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And meditation is: after everything has been thrown out, to enter your self – which no God, nobody has put there.

It has been your being for eternity and it is going to be your being for eternity.

Drown yourself in silence.

Enjoy, drink it, taste it!

Just in the beginning there is fear. Once you have had a little taste, just a little taste on the tip of your tongue, then all fear disappears, because it is so sweet, so nourishing, so immensely centering and grounding. It gives you for the first time the feel that alone you are enough, that no God is needed, no prayer is needed, that the temple is not outside but within. And as the feeling grows, and you go on entering into it, you will be surprised:

In the beginning there was silence, not sound.

In the middle there is silence.

In the end there is silence.

It is perpetual, continuous, and it is your very being: so fulfilling, so tremendously fulfilling, giving you such contentment that for the first time you feel nothing is needed. All that is needed is provided already within you.

Existence is very generous.

God is very miserly – of course, because misers have created the fiction in their own image.

God is very miserly, very cruel, very jealous, very revengeful. Just for small things... somebody smokes cigarettes – now what kind of sin is he committing? I cannot conceive that he is committing any sin. Perhaps he is committing some mistake, but that is a medical thing, it has nothing to do with religion. Perhaps he is not taking proper care of his body, but that is his business. Perhaps he will die two or three years earlier, but if he thinks of what he is going to do for two or three years more, he will smoke more, so what is the point?

But there are religions like Buddhism and Jainism – smoke and you are in hell. Strange... here that man is smoking, and there you will throw him again into fire. Here he was throwing fire into himself; there you throw him into fire! What kind of revenge is going on? And he was not throwing anything on you – whatever he was doing, he was doing to himself And he has suffered for it: he may have tuberculosis, he may have cancer. He may suffer for it – he has suffered; now what is the need of a hell? Small things, natural things, and the religions have made so much fuss about them because of the very tiny mind of the God.

Existence is very generous, always forgiving, never punishing.

But the only way to reach to existence is through your own innermost silence. That is the silence between the stars – the same silence; there is no difference.

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There are no types of silence, remember that. There cannot be two kinds of silence. Silence is simply one.

Just the taste of it and you have tasted the silence that is there millions of light years away, surrounding the whole universe.

By feeling your inner silence you have felt the pulse of the universe.

I say to you, with God there is no possibility of religion.

And I say to you also, that with the so-called religions that have existed up to now, there is no possibility of religion either.

I teach you a Godless, religionless religion.

Of course, then my meaning of religion will be ”religiousness”. You are not a Christian, you are not a Hindu, you are not a Mohammedan. You are just a man of silence, a man of truth, a man of compassion, a man who is no longer searching – one who has arrived. And the feeling of arrival...

then there are no questions, no doubts, no beliefs, no answers either.

When Bodhidharma was dying his disciples asked him, ”Master, your last message?” He opened his eyes, and said, ”I do not know anything at all – I have arrived. Knowledge is left far behind; who cares to know? There is nobody asking, there is nobody questioning, there is nobody answering; all has become silent. Hence,” he says, ”all that I can say is that I do not know.” That was the statement of Socrates also in the end. He said, ”When I was young I thought,’I know much and soon I will know all.’ But as I went on searching, doubting, enquiring” – and he was a man not of belief, but of doubt. He is far superior to any of your religious prophets, messiahs, avataras, tirthankaras – he is far superior In the end he said, ”The more I started to know, the more I started to feel that I don’t know anything.”

His statements are tremendously beautiful, because on the surface they look contradictory. He says,

”The more I knew, the less I knew. The moment I came to know all, all was lost; only ignorance remained.” So he said, ”There is a knowledge which is ignorant, and there is an ignorance which knows.”

With belief you will come to a knowledge which is ignorant.

With doubt, enquiry, meditation, you will come to a state of ignorance which knows.

There is no need for you to be labeled. There is no need for you to be part of a congregation.

My commune is, in a way, strange, a contradiction.

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But perhaps alone you are not able to stand against the whole world. You need fellow travelers. You need people who are walking on the same path to give you courage, to keep you inspired; otherwise I would not have given you a certain color red. Those who are with me know perfectly well that this is just playfulness. Any color will do, because what has the color red to do with truth? It has nothing to do with truth. Green will be as good, blue will be as good – and even if you are naked, that will do. But I have given you the color red just out of playfulness, to give you a certain identity, a togetherness – because the vast mass is there.

These people poisoned Socrates.

These people killed Jesus.

These people killed Al-Hillaj Mansoor and so many others. I would not like that to happen to any of you.

Hence I had to commit a contradiction: create a commune. But you have to remember that this is just out of playfulness; you have not to become serious about it.

I have given you the mala with my picture in its Locket; that does not make you my follower. That simply means that you are available to me, receptive; that you can listen to me putting all your prejudices aside.

And I am not giving you any doctrine. I have none.

I will take all doctrines away from you.

I want you to become just an emptiness. And that is the ultimate quality of religious man: to know the inner emptiness. It is unbounded. It is as vast as the universe. It contains the whole universe in it.

When you are absolutely empty, stars start moving within you. The whole universe and you are no longer separate. You have found a subtle, secret door that goes from you to the whole.

God is not needed.

It is an absolutely useless hypothesis.

Nor are religions needed.

But a religious consciousness is absolutely needed – more today than ever before.

If we cannot create a great movement for religious consciousness there is no future for humanity –

man is doomed.

The priests, the politicians and other vested interests together have prepared your grave; any moment they will push you into it. Many of you, of your own accord, are sitting in that grave.

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The world has never been before at such a critical moment.

If a great release of religious

consciousness is not made available, man is doomed.

But I hope that religious consciousness is going to prevail, that man will pass through this dangerous moment and will come out of it far superior, far higher, far more humane.

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CHAPTER 10

God – the nobody everybody knows

8 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

GOD DID NOT CREATE PEOPLE LIKE ADOLF HITLER IN HIS OWN IMAGE. HE CREATED

PEOPLE LIKE JESUS CHRIST, HAZRAT MOHAMMED, KRISHNA AND BUDDHA.

IT is not a question. It is a statement, an answer, but I have not asked the question. The person seems even to know whom God created in His own image and whom God did not create in His own image. The person seems to be an eyewitness. What was he doing there? Did God create him in His own image? Then what is he doing here? But I can enjoy even answering an answer.

He says God did not create people like Adolf Hitler in His own image. What is wrong in Adolf Hitler?

The followers of Adolf Hitler believe that he was the reincarnation of the great Jewish prophet, Elijah. It is as true as the Christian’s belief that Jesus is the only begotten son of God, and the Mohammedan’s belief that Mohammed is the only messenger of God. Nobody else believes it, but that is not the point. Christians believe, the followers of Adolf Hitler also believe.

And Adolf Hitler was a very religious man. Let me give you a little glimpse of Adolf Hitler’s life. He lived like a monk, in an underground cell. He was not interested in so-called worldly things that everybody is interested in. He was a vegetarian, he never ate any non-vegetarian food in his whole life. He remained unmarried almost his whole life – except for three hours, the last three hours. That is almost a whole life; what do three hours count? And what is possible in three hours of marriage?

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The marriage was arranged after he decided to commit suicide, because he had been harassed by this woman continually: ”Why don’t you get married to me?” and he was refusing. He lived like a monk, absolutely alone in his cell, and he was worried that once he got married then it would be difficult to live alone, this woman would force her way into his room. So he went on postponing.

When he decided finally, Berlin was falling and the bombs were falling on the street outside the house; he could hear the bombs exploding from his cell. He immediately asked for a priest to be called so that the marriage could be arranged. Marriage for what? – to commit suicide together.

Perhaps most people do the same, not knowingly. Perhaps their three hours are very long; and the longer they are, the more tedious.

A priest was somehow brought in. He quickly did the marriage ceremony, and after the ceremony was over they drank poison and killed themselves. His order was that petrol should be poured over them and they should be burned completely; not even a trace should be found – and that’s how it was done.

Adolf Hitler used to wake up every morning before sunrise. All monks are not so religious. I know monks are supposed to get up before sunrise – but human beings are human beings. Adolf Hitler was made of a different mettle. Even in winter he would get up before sunrise, and the whole year round he would take a cold shower after getting up – the first thing, a cold shower. A very disciplined monk... he would go to sleep exactly at nine at night. He was not interested in anything that you can call bad. He neither played cards nor smoked cigarettes. His food was very simple, very frugal and he never drank wine – no alcoholic beverages.

When Germany took over France, all his generals wanted him to come to the most beautiful city in the world, but he was not interested. Beauty was not a concern in his mind at all; but because everybody was asking him, and they had done a great job of conquering France, he went there. But he stayed only twenty-four hours in his hotel room and did not go to see Paris.

You say God did not create Adolf Hitler in His own image. Why? Because he killed so many people?

But every day God is killing millions of people – who else is killing them? Adolf Hitler was simply sharing a little bit of God’s job. People have to be killed, everybody has to die; so what is wrong in it if Adolf Hitler shares a little work, takes a little burden off God?

And he did perfectly well, far better than God himself Sometimes it happens, the carbon copy comes out clearer than the original. He invented gas chambers, the most non-violent method of killing man; but you cannot call it killing – killing is too cruel. In a gas chamber the person never comes to know when he is and when he is not. It is so quick: just a switch put on and there is only smoke – you can call it holy smoke! He did his job perfectly.

In fact Hitler had this belief, this fanatic idea that he had been sent by God to destroy all that was not right, all that was hindering the growth of the superman on the earth. He was doing everything in good faith.

You cannot suspect his faith, his intention, because if he had been a little bit suspicious it would have been impossible to do what he did, killing millions of people. It needs tremendous faith, fanatic, From Ignorance to Innocence

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blind faith that what you are doing is the right thing. There was no suspicion in his mind, no doubt at all that he was doing God’s work – cleaning the world of all that was not in tune with the evolution of the superman.

You say God did not create Adolf Hitler in His own image. That raises a question: Then who created Adolf Hitler? Are there a few other gods also? That means there is a choice; you can shop and choose in whose shape you want to be created. You can just go into Devateerth Mall and choose your own god: ”I want to be created in this god’s image.” This is an old strategy of the so-called pseudo-religious people – that whatsoever is good belongs to God, and whatsoever is bad belongs to the devil.

Then who created the devil?

God has to take responsibility at some point or other. I cannot leave Him out of it. If He says that Adolf Hitler is being created by His enemy, the devil, okay, but who created the devil? God cannot shirk the responsibility, shrug it from His shoulders. He must have created the devil, otherwise from where does the devil come in? And if the devil can come from somewhere else, then anybody can come from somewhere else. So what is the need for god to create? – creation is being done somewhere else too. God should be told, ”You are not a monopolist, there are other potters – and perhaps there may be better potters, because the world that you have created does not seem to be a perfect world. And you seem to be absolutely impotent: if the devil goes on smuggling his people into your world, what are you doing there? At least you can stop this smuggling business. And it is going on, on a tremendously vast scale. In fact your people seem to be very few, can be counted on one’s fingers – the devil’s people seem to be in millions.” It is strange that God goes on sitting on His throne, gossiping with the Holy Ghost, playing with His only begotten son, Jesus; and the devil goes on running the whole world – goes on creating Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung.... The whole of history seems to be ninety-nine point nine percent a creation of the devil.

Then why go on giving credit to God as the creator? He may be an amateur potter – once in a while He makes a pot – but the devil seems to be the professional. Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and Ivan the Terrible – just go down through history – are all these people not created by God? They are, but you are afraid to accept the fact because then your God becomes almost a devil.

You say God created men like Jesus Christ, Hazrat Mohammed, Krishna and Gautam Buddha. Let us look at these people whom you think God created. Jesus is a Jew – born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew. He had never heard the word ”Christian”, and I don’t think that he had any idea of creating a religion called Christianity. There is no indication anywhere even to create a suspicion that he had it in mind to create a new religion, no. His whole life he was trying to do only one thing – to be accepted by the Jews as their messiah.

Now, the God of the Jews is a Jew, Jesus is a Jew, the high priest of the Jews is a Jew. The rabbis, who are in the highest posts in the great temple of the Jews, are all religious people, very scholarly and very knowledgeable. It is difficult to find more scholarly people than rabbis: their whole life is From Ignorance to Innocence

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devoted to study, to scholarship. And the high priest must have been a great rabbi, that is why he had been chosen.

They decide to crucify Jesus. A Jewish God creates Jesus in His own image, but Jewish rabbis, their high priest, and the Jewish community do not recognize that man at all, that he is an image of God. They look upon him as a mischief-monger, as a cheat, a deceiver.

Now, if God sends His own son, can’t He send a small message to the high priest: ”Please take care of my son, my only begotten son,” and they are all Jews so they all understand the same language.

There would not have been any difficulty – but He remains silent. Jesus is crucified and God is silent; His image is destroyed and He remains absolutely indifferent.

In fact, Jesus is not such a disciplined man as Adolf Hitler. Jesus drinks wine and even turns water into wine, which should be a crime. You try turning anything into LSD! Do that miracle and you will be in jail. Turn ordinary grass into real grass and you will find what it means to do a miracle!

Now, this man was turning water into wine, and he was drinking wine without any feelings of guilt. No Hindu, no Mohammedan, no Jaina, no Buddhist will accept this man as an image of God. An image of God drinking alcoholic beverages! The image of God should be the pinnacle of consciousness, and drinking anything alcoholic is just the opposite of being conscious; it is drowning yourself in unconsciousness. It is one of the most anti-religious acts possible.

This man Jesus, although he teaches about meekness and humbleness, is very arrogant himself Buddha could not have accepted him as an image of God. His proclamation, ”I am the only son of God,” is the greatest egoistic proclamation ever made. Adolf Hitler’s claim is not that great: Elijah...

who knows this Elijah? He must have looked into the Old Testament and found a name somehow appealing to him for some reason, because with Adolf Hitler you could never be sure what reason....

Perhaps he was counting the numbers which numerology gives to each letter of the alphabet, and found that Elijah was a good numerological name – because these were the things in which Adolf Hitler believed – numerology, astrology, palmistry.

You will be surprised that even his attacks on countries were not decided by generals but by astrologers. In fact, this was the reason for his continual victory in the first four years – it was not that astrology is right but that his enemies could not figure out where he was going to attack.

If he had been listening to his generals, then of course every other country would have been able to figure out his plans, because all the generals think in a certain way. There is a military science based on simple arithmetic: you don’t attack the enemy where he is strongest; obviously you attack him where he is weakest.

But Adolf Hitler would attack where the enemy was strongest. And the enemy would be thinking:

”Here we are strongest; Adolf Hitler is not going to attack here,” so they would move their armies to their weakest point. But he was not going to attack there, because he depended on astrology: the stars were in favor at another point, so from that point he would attack.

Now, if both sides were deciding through the generals, both sides would have been absolutely clear where the attack was going to happen, because both were functioning according to the same logic

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why” – that could not be asked of Adolf Hitler. You could not ask, ”Why have you decided on this procedure...?”

Nobody was allowed to ask; even the closest people were not close enough. Not a single man was close enough to put his hand on Adolf Hitler’s shoulder. Nobody was a friend; Adolf Hitler never allowed any friendship. He was far above that... the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah, and you ordinary human beings crawling on the earth – and you ask him why?

So for four years he was continually winning, until Winston Churchill himself had to come down to the same rules, against his will. This was stupid, but what to do? – if you are fighting with an idiot, you have to be an idiot, otherwise you are going to be the loser. He had to call astrologers from India, because that is where you can find the best astrologers. And the Indian astrologers felt tremendously great, that finally even Winston Churchill had understood that, ”Astrology is a science and we are far more advanced than you are.

And certainly Winston Churchill started winning with the entry of astrology, because now he was also going crazy. He was a great general but now he was doing things against himself, against his whole reason and experience – but what to do? ”That other fellow will be listening to the astrologers

– you have to listen to astrologers. And it is a question of victory, so it is not the time to argue about astrology; the time for that argument we can find later on. First finish this man and this mad situation.”

When Winston Churchill started listening to the astrologers, he started winning because he also began attacking in a crazy way, with no logic. And certainly he had stranger astrologers than Adolf Hitler, because Adolf Hitler’s astrologers were western: you could find in London the same kind of astrologers who could tell you what those German astrologers would be suggesting to Adolf Hitler.

But these Indian astrologers had a totally different astrology.

Adolf Hitler had no way to find out what these astrologers were suggesting, because both were different in their workings. Even in palmistry... in western palmistry some line shows something; in Indian palmistry the same line shows something else – because there is nothing written on the line.

It depends on you, what you want to make out of it.

Jesus died on the cross – that does not seem to be the right place for the son of God. And if you ask Jainas, Buddhists and Hindus, you will find an answer in what they say. You will be surprised also with their answer, but their answer seems to be more rational. They say, ”He must have committed some great sin in his past life and this is the outcome of that great sin – the simple law of karma –

otherwise why should he be crucified?

”No Hindu avatara is crucified, no Jaina tirthankara is crucified, no Buddha is crucified – that is impossible! In fact when Mahavira, the Jaina tirthankara, walks on the road” – and in those days there were no tar roads or cement roads, just muddy tracks – and if there is a thorn on the road it will immediately turn its pointed part downwards so that Mahavira’s feet remain unhurt and unharmed.

Because that man has finished with all his karmas, even a thorn cannot hurt him – what to say of a cross! Even a thorn has to consider that,’a man is coming here who is finished with all his karmas.

You cannot bother him; you had better put yourself in such a position that you don’t hurt him.”’ Now, these people – how can they accept Christ as the son of God, a messiah?

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In Buddhist scriptures there are so many incidents described. A mad elephant was released towards Buddha to kill him. The mad elephant had killed many people; whoever came in his way, he finished them. He was kept in chains by the king, just for the simple purpose of killing criminals.

The whole royal family, their advisors and their ministers, would sit on the balconies of the palace and enjoy the game. Down on the ground the criminal would be standing; the elephant would be brought in and his chains taken away. He would rush immediately towards the man who would run and scream; and all those people would enjoy it, just as you enjoy a bullfight or Mohammed Ali’s boxing. All these are of the same type, there is not much difference: what you are enjoying is violence. But the elephant was bound to kill him – where could he escape?

This elephant was sent to kill Buddha, but even the mad elephant recognized, when he saw Buddha, that this man was finished with all his karmas; you could not hurt him – rather this was an opportunity to touch his feet and to earn some good karma for your future life. So he touched Buddha’s feet and sat down there. The king could not believe his eyes. They had all followed what had happened, so they asked Buddha, ”Only you can say what happened.” He said, ”Nothing special. The elephant is wiser than you. He can see that all my karmas are finished and I have no more to suffer, my accounts are closed, the balance sheet is complete –

whatever I have done, I have suffered for it, and I am completely clean. Seeing this, the elephant thought,’Why miss this opportunity? Where will I find such a man?’ So he is touching my feet to be blessed. In fact he is already blessed; he has already gained enough virtue – he will be born in his future life as a great buddha. He will become enlightened himself, because if he can recognize a Buddha even in madness, then he is not identified with his madness. He is still aware that he is different.”

Now, do you think Buddhists will accept Jesus, the image of God, being crucified? Even an elephant can see when a Buddha is there; yet those thousands of Jews were there and nobody could see, not a single person, that this man was the image of God and you should not destroy him. It is just your conditioning... otherwise no other religion is going to accept Jesus in any way.

He is mixing with people – Mahavira will not allow his monks to mix, what to say of Mahavira himself Jesus is mixing with gamblers, prostitutes, thieves – the lowest strata of society. Mahavira will not allow it, Buddha will not allow it. And why is he mixing with those people? – because nobody else is ready to mix with him. The high classes, the richer classes, the educated and cultured and sophisticated people were not ready even to mix with this carpenter’s son-uneducated, a village idiot

– who was declaring himself son of God.

Only one time had a professor come to him, and that too, in the middle of the night. He was a rabbi and a known professor, Nicodemus. He had come in the night when there was nobody around and all the apostles had fallen asleep. Jesus was doing his last prayer before he went to sleep. In the dark came this very respected, rich rabbi, a professor in the university, and he introduced himself Jesus said, ”Why don’t you come in the day? It is the middle of the night; I was just going to sleep. I have just finished my last prayer.”

Nicodemus said, ”In the day I cannot come because people will see that I associate with a man like you. I have heard about you so much that curiosity has brought me here, but in the day I cannot From Ignorance to Innocence

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admit the fact that I came to see you.” The higher class people were not mixing – what to say of mixing – they were not even ready to talk to this man.

This is the son of God, created in His own image – and nobody in the whole of Judea could recognize him except those few fools who had no religious education, no understanding. They were fishers, woodcutters, farmers – and they enjoyed the idea of being associated with the only son of God because that gave them the hope that, ”When we reach the kingdom of God we will be with the son, close to God. Then all these rich people, these kings, these viceroys and these rabbis will see who we are. Right now we are only fishermen, woodcutters, farmers....” So that was their hope. That’s why it was so cheap to enter the kingdom of God with Jesus. This opportunity was not to be missed.

But he could find only those twelve people in the whole of Judea.

No great religion in the East will accept him, because a man is known by his company, and his company was certainly not good. And that company became his apostles, that company created Christianity; so if Christianity is a third-rate religion there is no wonder about it – it has come from a very thirdrate source. It hasn’t the profundity of Jainism or Buddhism or Hinduism: there is no comparison.

But you are asking about Hazrat Mohammed. Now what do you see in Hazrat Mohammed that you think he can be proclaimed as the image of God? For his whole life he was a killer. His hand was always on his sword, even in his sleep: his whole life was a continual war. Of course on his sword he had written, ”Peace is my mission.” A strange peace, that you have to write on your sword, ”Peace is my mission.”

And with the sword Mohammed wanted to bring peace into the world. Either you accepted that he was the messenger of God or you were finished – that was the peace. In both ways there would be peace: either you became Mohammedan and there was peace, or you were no more and there was peace. Certainly that message on his sword was really meaningful. You could choose: two kinds of peace he allowed you.

Mohammedanism had converted millions just on the fear of death: man’s lust for life is such that he will be ready to do anything. And what was he asking? It is nothing to make much of a fuss about.

His religion is simple, almost a simpleton’s religion: repeat the name of Allah five times and for one month every year – the month of Ramadan – keep a fast in the day. In the night you can eat; in the night there is a feast, so the whole day you fast and in the night you feast.

This is a strange kind of fasting – in India it is just the opposite. In the night you cannot eat at all –

fasting, not fasting, that is not the question; but while you are fasting then it is absolutely impossible to eat in the night. The sun has gone down, life has gone to sleep – and this is not the time for eating.

And it seems to be rational and reasonable that when the sun is there digestion is easier. You will be working, you will be perspiring, you will be doing something; digestion is easier. When in the night the sun has gone down and you are going to sleep, if you eat, then digestion is not going to be good. It is a simple fact.

But why did Mohammed choose the other way? The reason was that the whole day they were fighting. In the night the fight had to stop because in darkness, in the desert you could not fight, so From Ignorance to Innocence

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in the night you could eat and enjoy. In the day, the month of Ramadan is a month of fasting and fighting.

And when you are fighting it is good to fast so you are not bothered by food. Otherwise you need a foodbreak, a teabreak, a coffeebreak, and in war you cannot make all these breaks; in war you have to be totally in it, no break. In the desert, when the sun sets, war ends; you cannot fight in the night.

Then you are free; then with ease, with comfort you can eat, dance and enjoy yourself late into the night and then go to sleep – and be ready again in the morning with the sword to bring peace into the world.

Mohammed killed an uncountable number of people, and his followers have been killing people for these fifteen hundred years continually. I don’t think there is anybody – Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew or Jaina – who can kill as easily as a Mohammedan. A Jaina of course cannot even kill an ant

– that is enough to go to hell. Killing a man is unheard of.

In the whole of history not a single Jaina has been sentenced to death because he murdered; it is not possible. He can be murdered, but he cannot murder. Even if you give him a sword, it will fall from his hand immediately; he cannot hold it – he may not even know how to hold it. Except for the small knife that he uses in the kitchen, he knows nothing about any weapon. He will find it easier to be killed than to kill... because if you are killed you are not going to fall into hell, and if you are killed without any resistance, then heaven is yours: just the opposite of the Mohammedan.

If you kill somebody in a war of religion, a jihad, what Christians call a crusade... and all wars are jihads. They are for religion: they are to convert the other person. And Mohammedanism has used the lowest kind of methodology to pervert – yes, I would like to say pervert – a man into Mohammedanism. I would not like to use the word convert....

What kind of conversion is this? You have not even had a little conversation before it, you don’t give any opportunity to the man. You simply say, ”Either you believe in one God; one prophet, that is Mohammed; and one holy book, that is the Koran.... These three things you have to believe, that’s all, then you are a Mohammedan – otherwise, accept death.” Mohammed says the more people you bring to Mohammedanism, the more virtue you are attaining.

And if you have to kill many people, don’t be afraid: that too will be counted as virtue, because you have saved those people from remaining heretics all their life. The man may have lived forty years more, so you have saved him from forty years of a heretic’s life. That much compassion you have shown to that man! Strange logic! But all these pseudo-religions are full of strange logic.

Hazrat Mohammed had nine wives – God has not even one! And God created Mohammed in His own image? What kind of image...? He should have remained celibate, but he married nine women and allowed all Mohammedans to marry four women. The reason was that Mohammed wanted more and more soldiers. From where to get soldiers? One woman can get married to four men but then too in one year she will give birth to only one child, so that is absolutely uneconomical. But if four women are married to one man then certainly they can give birth to four children in one year.

He wanted more and more Mohammedans, more and more children, more and more soldiers – and this was a way to find them. But where are you going to find so many women?

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So for that there is also a good strategy: you can steal anybody’s woman and you can convert the woman to Mohammedanism.

Now in India, a woman who has been converted by the Mohammedans – if even for one night she has remained in a Mohammedan house – will not be accepted back into a Jaina family or in a brahmin family or in a Buddhist family.

That is

impossible because Mohammedans are thought to be the worst people in the world – the woman has remained the whole night with those people and they have even converted her – and their method of conversion is something which creates nausea in Jainas, Buddhists, brahmins, everybody in India.

The conversion method is that you have to eat with Mohammedans from one plate. So four, five, six... as many Mohammedans as are available will all sit around a table – their brotherhood is guaranteed now. The new person who is being converted will also eat from the same plate with them and then they will all drink from the same cup; the new person has also to drink from the same cup. Now, to any other Indian religion this is not acceptable at all. I know, because I had Mohammedan friends, and it was such a difficulty.

One of my friends in the university who was almost not a Mohammedan, he was just born a Mohammedan – because a fanatic Mohammedan cannot be friendly with me at all.... Listening to me, still he remained my friend; that was enough proof that he had an open mind. Professor Farid was his name, and many times he would come with me to my village which was eighty miles from the university. Once in a while I would drive to the village just to see my father because he was so much attached to me that if I did not come for eight or ten days, then he would come to see me; he would not be satisfied that everything was okay without seeing me. He was always afraid that something was going to be wrong.

So rather than troubling him I used to drive there, and Farid many times came with me. I had to explain to him, ”Listen, you are going to a Jaina family, so don’t feel offended – even I am not allowed in the kitchen, so what about you! They suspect me of eating with Mohammedans and Christians....”

You will be surprised that the Hindu word for Christian is Kristan. In the beginning Kristan was used for the Christian, but by and by it became associated with something wrong, something bad. So if you are doing something wrong, they will say, ”Don’t behave like a Kristan.” First I was puzzled that Kristan is the Hindi for Christian, but then I understood why: because to them, a Christian or a Mohammedan belong to the anti-religious – their religions are not worth anything.

So I told Farid, ”We will be sitting outside when eating, and you will be given a special plate that is kept separate, because they know that once in a while I bring a Christian or a Mohammedan home.

So they keep a whole set separate and nobody in the family will touch that set.” I had to bring it in and put it before my friend; then I had to clean it because nobody else was going to clean it. I said,

”Don’t feel offended in any way; this is just how things are. And don’t disturb these people, because even this much is too much for them – that just outside their kitchen a Mohammedan is sitting; this is too much.”

So it was very easy in India to get hold of anybody’s woman and just keep her one or two days in your house; then she could not go back. Even if she wanted to, even if you were ready to send her back, she could not go back; she had to get married to you – there was no other way. They converted millions of women in this way; and with the women came the increase in population. But this is ugly.

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If you convince somebody about your truth and he wants to come and belong to your fold, it seems human. But to threaten him, ”You will be killed if you don’t become a Mohammedan,” and out of that threat he decides to live as a Mohammedan rather than to die as a Hindu – this is not at all religious.

But this is what Mohammed brought into the world – and he was the only messenger. He is so uneducated, so ignorant that what he says does not look like philosophy, not like great treatises like the Upanishads, or the Tao Te Ching, or the Dhammapada – nothing like it. Just such things he is saying in the Koran, that a Mohammedan can marry four women, it is his religious right. And this persists....

In India now the constitution gives the right to have only one woman, but still Mohammedans go on marrying four women; and you cannot interfere, because if you interfere, immediately riots break out all over India. Thousands will be killed immediately and nothing will be changed. Simply thousands will be killed, thousands of houses will be burned, temples will be burned – so it is better to tolerate it. The constitution is there, the law is there, but who cares?

The Mohammedan goes on doing this because it is his religious principle, and you should not interfere in his religion. The government is secular, so it cannot interfere. It is strange, some religion can make cannibalism its principle, then you can start eating human beings and the government cannot do anything, because it is your religion and they should not interfere in religion.

Mohammed is not much different from Tamerlane, Nadirshah, Genghis Khan or Adolf Hitler. No, not different at all, he was just born in a different age so he speaks in a different language, which is more of a religious jargon; otherwise he is the same type of man – a criminal mind.

You ask me about Krishna. You must have thought that I would at least accept Krishna and Buddha as the images of God – no. There is no God in the first place so how can there be any image?

And whoever you bring before me as an image, I am going to hammer hard on. It is a fight with the fictitious God; it is not a fight with Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna or Buddha. If that fictitious God is finished with, much of the glory of these people will be demolished.

If there is no God, then ”I am the only begotten son” cannot be said. Then, ”I bring the message of God, and only my message is true because it comes from God” cannot be said. So I am trying to destroy the fiction of God. Of course I will have to beat the images too, because just by being God’s image they go on giving life to a fiction.

Krishna is one of the most cunning politicians the world has ever known; and perhaps in the future also it will not be possible to have such a cunning politician. He is not a man of his word at all: that’s why I call him a politician. He will say one thing and will do exactly the opposite. He will make you a promise and he will break the promise any moment he finds that it is in his favor to do so. You cannot rely on him at all. His whole life is full of using people’s trust, taking advantage, deceiving...

but the Hindus go on saying, ”This is God’s play.” You can always find good words for anything. The young girls of the town would be taking a bath in the river and he would collect all their clothes and sit in a nearby tree. Now, they would be asking for their clothes, standing naked in the water.... Anybody else doing such a thing would be immediately taken to the police station. But in many Hindu families you will find this picture hanging – of course not in those houses where I have stayed....

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Once, when I stayed with a Hindu family who had the picture in their home, I said, ”You should be ashamed – keeping this picture here, just in your sitting room. You think you are displaying some great religiousness – this is religiousness? If I did the same with your wife and with your daughter, then...?”

The man said, ”What do you mean?”

I said, ”Yes, if I actually do this, what Krishna was doing, that would be God’s play. Why should he be an exception?” Sixteen thousand wives were stolen by Krishna, forcibly taken away from people, from their husbands and from their children. He must have created a great concentration camp for these wives. And I don’t think that he would have recognized who was his wife and who wasn’t. And I don’t think that this is in any way an exaggeration.

In India it used to happen: kings used to have hundreds of wives. Even today, the Nizam of Hyderabad, who died just a few years ago, left five hundred wives behind him – five hundred widows... one man. So sixteen thousand doesn’t seem too big a number – only thirty-two times more than the Nizam of Hyderabad. And Krishna is certainly thirty-two times more wealthy than the Nizam of Hyderabad.

The person’s richness was counted by how many wives he had. A poor man could not afford even one wife; for a poor man to have one wife, only one wife, was difficult – he could not manage even two meals a day for himself So the way, in ancient India, to show how wealthy you were, was to have many wives – and Krishna defeated everybody. Just to defeat everybody, sixteen thousand wives and sixteen thousand families were destroyed. Their children may have become orphans or beggars – what happened nobody knows – but this man is thought to be the image of God!

You can’t see his cruelty? And it is not for love’s sake: he does not even know these women. How can you know sixteen thousand women? What love can you give to sixteen thousand women? What relatedness is possible with these women? They are just imprisoned to show your greatness.

The same egoistic attitude, perhaps even stronger.... Krishna says to his disciple, Arjuna: ”Surrender at my feet. Leaving aside everything – your doubts, your thinking – leave aside everything, just surrender at my feet. I am your salvation, I am your refuge.” Now, anybody saying that seems to be ugly. If it were true, then even Arjuna would recognize it himself You need not declare it, you need not persistently say to him, ”Surrender at my feet.” Certainly he is not surrendering, hence the insistence. He is continually arguing, bringing doubts, questions; and he is not convinced – I don’t think he was ever convinced.

I have tried hard to look into the whole conversation between Arjuna and Krishna – that is the Shrimad Bhagavadgita, the whole conversation. The way Arjuna is arguing is perfectly right and the doubts he is raising are perfectly valid; but what Krishna is saying – his answers are not justified.

They don’t dispel the doubts and they don’t dispel Arjuna’s confusion; hence, tired of arguing with Arjuna, Krishna says, ”Leave everything aside and simply surrender at my feet, because I am the perfect incarnation of God.”

But if you have to say it, then I say, you are not! If the other recognizes it even though you deny it, then perhaps there is something to it. If you are denying it, but the other goes on seeing something From Ignorance to Innocence

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which is more than can be understood by the mind, which is more than can be comprehended by intellect.... If the other goes on feeling it, the presence of it, the smell of it – and against your denial he says, ”You can go on denying it, I don’t care; I listen to my heart, and my heart is saying something to me” – that is something totally different. But that does not happen in the whole conversation in the Gita.

Krishna simply forces him; and seeing the situation and the awkwardness of the situation, because they are standing on the battlefield.... Krishna is functioning as his charioteer and both armies are facing each other, just about to begin the war for which they have been preparing for years and which is going to be decisive for the whole of India. And it proved to be decisive: it destroyed the very backbone of the country.

Three men I find responsible for India’s downfall. The first is Krishna, because he destroyed India’s zest, gusto for fighting. He drove India into a kind of third world war, in which almost the whole country was devastated and destroyed. Everybody – whosoever was alive – became so shaken and afraid of war that they were ready to do anything rather than go to war.

And then came Buddha and Mahavira who started talking about non-violence. That appealed very much to people who were so tired of war. And they had seen such a great war that they never wanted to have anything to do with it again. It would be better to be slaves rather than to have such a war and such destruction.

Mahabharata is the name of the war, the great Indian war; after that there have been only battles –

nothing like the great Indian war. Its magnitude was almost universal: whatsoever was known of the world at that time, every part of that world joined in the war, either from this side or from that side.

Both sides were cousin-brothers and the problem was: who should inherit the kingdom?

On one side were one hundred kauravas, one hundred brothers. Now you can see, the father was blind yet he must have had thousands of wives – even a blind fellow managed to produce one hundred sons – and his brother had five sons, the pandavas. The conflict was: who is going to inherit the kingdom? They could not negotiate in any way, so that was the only way to decide: go to war. And because it was one family, all the relatives were divided – somebody was fighting from that side, somebody was fighting from this side; a brother from that side, another brother from this side – and there were all their friends from all over the world.

You will be surprised to know that Arjuna had one wife from Mexico too – Mexican kings had come with their armies to fight on Arjuna’s side. The Sanskrit name for Mexico is makshika; Mexico is a distortion of Makshika. Now much historical evidence has been collected and it is certain that Makshika is Mexico. In Mexico, Hindu temples have been found, Hindu gods and goddesses and their statues have been found. And the latest discovery is that there was a time when the water between Asia and America, the ocean water, was so shallow that you could simply walk from America to Asia. You could simply walk over the ocean; it was one foot deep at the most.

So the whole known world at that time had gathered for this decisive battle and all were ready for the signal to be given. But they were waiting because Krishna was still persuading Arjuna. Arjuna wanted to leave; he said, ”I want to renounce war because I don’t see any point in it. All these people are my people: on this side are my people, on that side are my people. I see my friends on that side From Ignorance to Innocence

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that I will have to kill and I see my friends on this side. These people, these hundred Kauravas are my brothers, and I have to kill these people just for the kingdom? Millions of people will be killed in the war – and even if we win, who will there be to rejoice in the victory?” And he was absolutely right. ”Who will there be to rejoice in the victory over the corpses of millions of relatives and friends? These are the people for whom we would have fought, for whom we would have won the victory so that they could rejoice with us, celebrate with us – but all these people will be dead. There is no certainty we will win, there is no certainty that the other party will win, because both are equally balanced. But one thing is certain: whosoever wins, almost everybody will be dead.” And that’s what happened.

Finally Krishna argued: ”You are a coward, you are an impotent man escaping from the warfield; you are a warrior, and the religion of the warrior is to fight. Are you afraid of killing, of murdering? – but these people are going to die anyway.” Just see the argument, what he is saying: ”These people are going to die anyway, anyday. Nobody is immortal, so if you murder these people you are not doing anything that you have to be worried about. Perhaps you have taken a few years off this man’s life, but in that too you are wrong to think that you are doing: the doer is God, and whatsoever happens, happens through His will – we are only His instruments.” That’s what I was telling you – that these religions have been reducing humanity to puppets.

Krishna’s whole Gita can be condensed in a single sentence: ”Man is a puppet; the puppeteer is God.” So whatever the puppeteer wants, you do: if He makes you dance, you dance, if He makes you jog, you jog; whatsoever He makes you do, you leave everything to God. You simply act and don’t think of the consequences and the results. That’s the whole message of the Gita, on which the whole of Hinduism stands: you go on surrendering everything to God, and don’t bother about the result – the result is in His hands.

Now this is a very tricky argument. If I had been in Arjuna’s place I would have slapped Krishna then and there, told him to get down from the chariot and said, ”I am going – because this is the will of God. Who am I to think? Now my whole being is saying to renounce this war; I am going. This is my God’s voice. Who are you? And I am not going to think about the consequences, that people will think me a coward. Let them think it – that is their business.” In fact the argument that Krishna is giving to Arjuna is so bogus that if Arjuna had had a little insight into argumentation he could have turned the whole thing round. Krishna is saying, ”Only do, and don’t think of the result.”

Arjuna should have said, ”Great! So I will only do this, and I will not bother about the result” – and he should have turned his chariot towards the jungle.

But he got befooled, perhaps by the situation or the pressure. He had collected all these people, he had invited all these people, and now at the last moment to escape.... ”What will the world say?

And Krishna is God’s incarnation – that’s what people say – and if he is saying,’Fight and leave the consequences in God’s hands,’ then I should fight.” So he fought and they won. But whatsoever he was afraid of did happen. The whole country has never been again alive in the same way as it was before. It lost its backbone, it lost its manliness.

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I cannot say that Krishna is the image of God. He is far closer to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mao Tse-tung than to God. This is what Adolf Hitler was doing, what poor Adolf Hitler was doing – why should he be condemned? He was doing God’s will and not bothering about the consequences. It was the same thing with Krishna: he forced Arjuna to do something that he wanted, argued for it –

and destroyed the country for at least five thousand years. It is still not free of the shadow of the Mahabharata: that great war still falls like a shadow on India.

And the last the questioner asks about is Gautam Buddha. He must have thought that at least I will agree about Gautam Buddha – but he is wrong. In the first place Gautam Buddha does not believe in God, that God exists, so he will not agree that he is an image of God. He himself would disagree with this statement, that he is an image of God. He does not believe in God. He himself cannot say he is an image of God, and he has never said that.

The very idea of ”the image of God” is inapplicable to Gautam Buddha – Krishna is born as an incarnation of God, Jesus is born as the only son of God, Mohammed is born as the only messenger of God, but this is not the case with Buddha. He is born a human being, and he goes in search for truth. If he were made in the image of God he would have known the truth already, but he goes in search, a long search.

Buddha takes immense pains in every possible way to find out the truth. He does everything he is told. He goes to all the teachers that were well-known in the country until each teacher says,

”Now I cannot teach you any more because whatsoever I knew, I have taught you. You move on, go somewhere else; you know more than I know now.” But this knowledge was not satisfying. He did everything, and that was his basic mistake: all the teachers got fed up with him.

Teachers never get fed up with a person who goes on committing mistakes. Then the teacher is always happy: ”You committed this mistake, that’s why you are missing; you committed that mistake, that’s why you are missing.” But this man was so particular that he was overdoing what the teacher was saying. No teacher – and he was with dozens of teachers – could say to him that he had failed because he had not done something, he had missed something. No, every teacher understood that he had done everything – and nothing had happened.

He is standing there saying, ”You said all these things are to be done; I think they have been done to completion. If not, tell me where the mistake is, and I am going to correct it. But nothing is happening. The teachers soon realized that they could not cheat and exploit this man – he was ready to go to any length.

But a point comes where the teacher becomes afraid because he himself does not know. He is just a scholar, a great scholar maybe; he can teach you all the methods but he himself has never done them. He knows no truth; he has not realized himself, so this man becomes a question mark to him, because he is doing exactly what is being told and yet nothing is happening.

Finally the last teacher he was with told him, ”Don’t waste your time with teachers. I am the greatest of all those teachers; many of them have been my students. Seeing in your eyes your sincerity, your authenticity, I would like to say to you that you have to go on your own. Nobody can take you there, nobody can lead you there; you have to go there on your own. So forget about teachers, forget about teachings and just move on your own. You have done enough of all these disciplines, yogas, From Ignorance to Innocence

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mantras, tantras – all that is available.” And India is a great bazaar, buzzing with all kinds of things that you can do; it can drive you on for many lives. And those methods will not end; they are always there, and new ones too.

Buddha understood it because he had wasted twelve years and he was nowhere. But really, he had achieved something without being aware of it: he was finished with following. And that is a great achievement. To become religious, that is one of the greatest achievements: to be finished with following.

He went alone. He himself had gathered, in those years, five followers. He told them also, ”Forgive me, but all those teachers wasted my time and I don’t want to waste your time – you go on your own.

Leave me alone and I will leave you alone. I am not your leader, and you are not my followers. From now onwards I am alone. I will risk everything, but if there is any truth, I will find it; if there is none, I will find that.”

This man has never claimed that he was a born god, deity, messenger, prophet or anybody’s incarnation – no. And what he found was not God. He found absolute silence: no word, no idea, no image. He found tremendous contentment, but no God; nobody there even to thank. The whole universe was there, and he was grateful to the whole universe, but it was not separate so there was no question of saying thank you to it; he was part of it.

Buddha made no claim to be God or His image. That’s why I have loved him the most, because he is the most human of all these people.

Of course Buddhists corrupted all his teachings, made statues of him, started worshipping him and made a god out of him. But for that he cannot be held responsible.

You have not asked me a question, you have made a statement. But I have still answered you, for the simple reason that anybody living close to me and carrying such statements in the mind will miss me, is bound to miss me.

You have to drop your answers. With your questions, I am enough to wrestle; with your answers, you wrestle at least.

Drop them and I will kill your questions.

The day there is no question and no answer within you, and you are just sitting here empty – you have come home.

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CHAPTER 11

Truth: not a dogma but a dance

9 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

ARE YOU AGAINST ALL THE RELIGIONS? WHAT IS THEIR MOST FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE?

YES, I am against all the so-called religions because they are not religions at all. I am for religion but not for the religions.

The true religion can only be one, just like science. You don’t have a Mohammedan physics, a Hindu physics, a Christian physics; that would be nonsense. But that’s what the religions have done – they have made the whole earth a madhouse.

If science is one, then why should the science of the inner not be one, too?

Science explores the objective world and religion explores the subjective world. Their work is the same, just their direction and dimension are different.

In a more enlightened age there will be no such thing as religion, there will be only two sciences: objective science and subjective science. Objective science deals with things, subjective science deals with being.

That’s why I say I am against the religions but not against religion. But that religion is still in its birth pangs. All the old religions will do everything in their power to kill it, to destroy it – because the 139

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birth of a science of consciousness will be the death of all these so-called religions which have been exploiting humanity for thousands of years.

What will happen to their churches, synagogues, temples? What will happen to their priesthood, their popes, their imams, their shankaracharyas, their rabbis? It is big business. And these people are not going to easily allow the true religion to be born.

But the time has come in human history when the grip of the old religions is loosening.

Man is only formally paying respect to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, but basically anybody who has any intelligence is no longer interested in all that rubbish. He may go to the synagogue and to the church and to the mosque for other reasons, but those reasons are not religious; those reasons are social. It pays to be seen in the synagogue; it is respectable, and there is no harm. It is just like joining the rotary club or the lions club. These religions are old clubs which have a religious jargon around them, but look a little deeper and you will find they are all hocus-pocus with no substance inside.

I am for religion, but that religion will not be a repetition of any religion that you are acquainted with.

This religion will be a rebellion against all these religions. It will not carry their work further; it will stop their work completely and start a new work – the real transformation of man.

You ask me: What is the most fundamental error of all these religions? There are many errors and they are all fundamental, but first I would like to talk about the most fundamental. The most fundamental error of all the religions is that none of them was courageous enough to accept that there are things which we don’t know. They all pretended to know everything, they all pretended to know all, that they were all omniscient.

Why did this happen? – because if you accept that you are ignorant about something then doubt arises in the minds of your followers. If you are ignorant about something, who knows? – you may be ignorant about other things also. What is the guarantee? To make it foolproof, they have all pretended, without exception, that they are omniscient.

The most beautiful thing about science is that it does not pretend to be omniscient. Science does not pretend to be omniscient; it accepts its human limits. It knows how much it knows, and it knows that there is much more to know. And the greatest scientists know of something even deeper. The known, they know the boundaries of; the knowable they will know sooner or later – they are on the way.

But only the greatest scientists like Albert Einstein will be aware of the third category, the unknowable, which will never be known. Nothing can be done about it because the ultimate mystery cannot be reduced to knowledge.

We are part of existence – how can we know existence’s ultimate mystery?

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we exist with existence – we cannot separate ourselves from it. The moment we are separate, we are dead. And without being separate, just a watcher, with no involvement, with no attachment, you cannot know the ultimate mystery; hence it is impossible. There will remain something always unknowable. Yes, it can be felt, but it cannot be known. Perhaps it can be experienced in different ways – not like knowledge.

You fall in love – can you say you know love? It seems to be a totally different phenomenon. You feel it. If you try to know it, perhaps it will evaporate in your hands. You cannot reduce it to knowing.

You cannot make it an object of knowledge because it is not a mind phenomenon. It is something to do with your heart. Yes, your heartbeats know it, but that is a totally different kind of knowledge: the intellect is incapable of approaching the heartbeats.

But there is something more than heart in you – your being, your life source. lust as you know through the mind, which is the most superficial part of your individuality, you know something from your heart – which is deeper than the mind. The mind cannot go into it, it is too deep for it. But behind the heart, still deeper, is your being, your very life source. That life source also has a way of knowing.

When mind knows, we call it knowledge.

When heart knows, we call it love.

And when being knows, we call it meditation.

But all three speak different languages, which are not translatable into each other. And the deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes to translate, because at the very center of your being there is nothing but silence. Now, how to translate silence into sound? The moment you translate silence into sound you have destroyed it. Even music cannot translate it. Perhaps music comes closest, but still it is sound.

Poetry does not come quite as close as music, because words, howsoever beautiful, are still words.

They don’t have life in them, they are dead. How can you translate life into something dead? Yes, perhaps between the words you may have a glimpse here and there – but it is between the words, between the lines, not in the words, not in the lines.

This is the most fundamental error of all religions: that they have deceived humanity by blatantly posing as if they know all.

But every day they have been exposed and their knowledge has been exposed; hence, they have been fighting with any progress of knowledge.

If Galileo finds that the earth moves around the sun, the pope is angry. The pope is infallible; he is only a representative of Jesus, but he is infallible. What to say about Jesus – he is the only begotten son of God, and what to say about God.... But in the Bible – which is a book descended from heaven, written by God – the sun goes around the earth.

Now, Galileo creates a problem. If Galileo is right, then God is wrong; God’s only begotten son is wrong, the only begotten son’s representatives for these two thousand years – all the popes who From Ignorance to Innocence

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are infallible – are wrong. Just a single man, Galileo, destroys the whole pretension. The whole hypocrisy he exposes. His mouth has to be shut. He was old, dying, on his deathbed, but he was forced, almost dragged, to the court of the pope to ask for an apology.

And the pope demanded: ”You change it in your book, because the holy book cannot be wrong. You are a mere human being; you can be wrong; but jesus Christ cannot be wrong, God Himself cannot be wrong, hundreds of infallible popes cannot be wrong.... You are standing against God, His son, and His representatives. You simply change it!”

Galileo must have been a man with an immense sense of humor – which I count to be one of the great qualities of a religious man. Only idiots are serious; they are bound to be serious. To be able to laugh you need a little intelligence.

It is said that an Englishman laughs twice when he hears a joke: once, just to be nice to the fellow who is telling the joke, out of etiquette, a mannerism; and second, in the middle of the night when he gets the meaning of the joke. The German laughs only once, just to show that he has understood it.

The Jew never laughs; he simply says, ”In the first place you are telling it all wrong....” You need a little intelligence, and Galileo must have been intelligent. He was one of the greatest scientists of the world, but he must be counted as one of the most religious persons also. He said,

”Of course God cannot be wrong, Jesus cannot be wrong, all the infallible popes cannot be wrong, but poor Galileo can always be wrong. There is no problem about it – i will change it in my book.

But one thing you should remember: the earth will still go around the sun. About that I cannot do anything; it does not follow my orders. As far as my book is concerned I will change it, but in the note I will have to write this:’The earth does not follow my orders, it still goes around the sun.’” Each step of science, religion was against. The earth is flat, according to the Bible, not round. When Columbus started thinking of going on a trip with the idea that the earth is round, his arithmetic was simple: ”If I continue journeying directly, one day I am bound to come back to the same point from where I started... the whole circle.” But everybody was against it.

The pope called Columbus and told him, ”Don’t be foolish! The Bible says it clearly: it is flat. Soon you will reach the edge of this flat earth and you will fall from there. And do you know where you will fall? Heaven is above, and you cannot fall upwards – or can you? You will fall downwards into hell.

So don’t go on this journey and don’t persuade other people to go on this journey.” Columbus insisted that he was going; he went on the journey and opened the doors of the new world.

We owe so much to Columbus that we are not aware of The world that we know was brought to light by Columbus. If he had listened to the pope, the infallible pope, who was talking just nonsense – but his nonsense was very holy, religious....

All the religions of the world are bound to pretend that whatsoever there is, they know it. And they know it exactly as it is; it cannot be otherwise.

Jainas say their tirthankara, their prophet, their messiah is omniscient. He knows everything – past, present and future, so whatsoever he says is the absolute truth. Buddha has joked about Mahavira, the Jaina messiah. They were contemporaries twenty-five centuries ago. Mahavira was getting old, From Ignorance to Innocence

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but Buddha was young and was still capable of joking and laughing. He was still young and alive –

he was not yet established.

Once you become an established religion, then you have your vested interests. Mahavira had an established religion thousands of years old, perhaps the oldest religion of the world – because Hindus say, and say rightly, that they have the oldest book in the world, the Rig Veda. Certainly it is now scientifically proved that the Rig Veda is the oldest scripture that has survived. But in the Rig Veda, the first Jaina messiah is mentioned; that is proof enough that the Jaina messiah has preceded the Rig Veda. And he is mentioned: his name is Rishabhadeva.

He is mentioned with a respect that it is impossible to have towards a contemporary. It is just human weakness, but it is very difficult to be respectful towards somebody who is contemporary and alive, just like you. It is easy to be respectful to somebody who has died long ago. The way the Rig Veda remembers Rishabhadeva is so respectful that it seems that he must have been dead for at least a thousand years, not less that that, so Jainism is a long-established religion.

Buddhism was just starting with Buddha. He could afford to joke and laugh, so he jokes against Mahavira and his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. He says, ”I have seen Mahavira standing before a house begging” – because Mahavira lived naked and used to beg just with his hands. Buddha says, ”I have seen him standing before a house which was empty. There was nobody in the house – and yet this man, Jainas say, is a knower, not only of the present, but of the past and the future.”

Buddha says, ”i saw Mahavira walking just ahead of me, and he stepped on a dog’s tail. It was early morning and it was not yet light. Only when the dog jumped, barking, did Mahavira come to know that he had stepped on his tail. This man is omniscient, and he does not know that a dog is sleeping right in his way, and he is going to step on his tail.” But the same happened with Buddha when he became established. After three hundred years, when his sayings and statements were collected for the first time, the disciples made it absolutely clear that ”everything written here is absolutely true, and it is going to remain true forever.” Now, in those statements there are so many idiotic things which may have been meaningful twenty-five centuries ago but today they are not meaningful because so much has happened in twenty-five centuries. Buddha had no idea of Karl Marx, he had no idea of Sigmund Freud... so what he has written or stated is bound to be based only on the knowledge which was available at that time.

”A man is poor, because in his past life he has committed bad actions.” Now, after Marx, you cannot say that. ”A man is rich because he has committed good actions in his past life.” Now, after Marx, you cannot say that. And I don’t think Buddha had any idea that there was going to be a Karl Marx, although his disciples say that whatsoever he said is going to remain true forever – another way of saying that he is omniscient.

This was a good consolation for the poor, that if they did good works, in their future lives they also would be rich. It was a joy for the rich too: ”We are rich because we have done good works in our past life.” And they know perfectly well what good works they are doing right now... and their riches are increasing every day; their past life is finished with long ago and yet their riches go on increasing.

The poor people go on becoming poorer and the rich go on becoming richer.

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But in India no revolution has ever been thought about; there is no question of its happening –

and India has lived in poverty such as no other country has lived. India has lived longer in slavery than any other country of the world. But slavery, poverty, suffering – everything has to be accepted because it is your doing. You cannot revolt against it. Against whom are you going to revolt? The only way is to do something to balance your bad actions with good actions. The very idea of revolution has never happened to the Indian mind. If slavery comes, you have to accept it.

The Hindus know all the answers. They say, ”Without God’s will nothing happens. So if you are a slave....” And for two thousand years India has been in slavery. It is a miracle that such a big country has remained in slavery for two thousand years. And the people who invaded India were small barbarian tribes; they were nothing compared to India. They could have been simply crushed by the crowd, there was no need even to take sword in hand.

But anybody – Hunas, Moguls, Turks, Mohammedans, Britishers – anybody who was ambitious and wanted to invade India was always welcome. It was ready – obliged that you came from so far away, and you took so much trouble! The simple reason was that the Hindus know the answer: it is God’s will; nothing happens without God’s will, so this slavery is God’s will. And a man like Mahatma Gandhi – one would think that a man like Gandhi would show a little more intelligence, but no. If you are a Hindu you cannot show more intelligence than you are supposed to.

In Bihar, one of the provinces of India – the poorest province – there was a great earthquake. It was already poor; every year it suffers from floods. And then this earthquake... thousands died. And what did Gandhi say? Gandhi said, ”Bihar is suffering because of its bad actions.” In the twentieth century? – an earthquake? – and the whole population of Bihar?

It was understandable that you had been explaining to single individuals that they were suffering because of their bad karmas, but the whole state suffering because of its bad karmas...! As if all these people in their past life were also in this same state, and they all committed such bad karmas that the earthquake happened. And the whole of the rest of India did not suffer from the earthquake because they had done good karmas in their past life. Strange!

It is even more strange because Bihar is the birthplace of Mahavira, of Gautam Buddha, of Makhkhali Gosal, of Ajit Keshkambal – great teachers and great prophets – and Bihar is suffering because it has committed bad karmas! In India no other state has given birth to so many prophets, philosophers, thinkers. And what wrong could Bihar have done? But Hinduism knows everything.

I want you to remember that the basic mistake that all the religions have committed is that they have not been courageous enough to accept that there are limits to their knowing They have not been able to say on any point, ”We don’t know.” They have been so arrogant that they go on saying they know, and they go on creating new fictions of knowledge.

That’s where the true religion will be different, fundamentally different.

Yes, once in a while there have been single individuals who had the quality of true religion; for example, Bodhidharma. One of the most loveable human beings, he went to China fourteen hundred From Ignorance to Innocence

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years ago. He remained for nine years in China and a following gathered around him. But he was not a man belonging to the stupidity of the so-called religions.

Formally he was a Buddhist monk, and China was already converted to Buddhism. Thousands of Buddhist monks had already reached China before Bodhidharma, and when they heard Bodhidharma was coming, they rejoiced, because Bodhidharma was almost equal to Buddha. His name had reached them long before he came. Even the king of China, the great Emperor Wu, came to receive Bodhidharma on the boundary of China and India.

Wu was the medium to transform the whole of China into Buddhism, to convert it from Confucius to Gautam Buddha. He had put all his forces and all his treasures into the hands of Buddhist monks, and he was a great emperor. When he met Bodhidharma he asked, ”I have been waiting to see you.

I am old, and I am fortunate that you have come after all; all these years we have been waiting. I want to ask a few questions.”

The first question he asked was: ”I have devoted all my treasures, my armies, my bureaucracy

– everything that I have – to convert this vast land to Buddhism, and I have made thousands of temples for Buddha.” He had made one temple to Buddha in which there were ten thousand statues of Buddha; the whole mountain was carved. Because ten thousand Buddhas had to be carved, the whole mountain was finished – carved into Buddhist statues, so the whole mountain became a temple. He asked, ”What will be my benefit in the other world?” That’s what the other monks were telling him, ”You have done so much to serve Gautam Buddha that perhaps when you reach the other world, he himself will be standing there to welcome you. And you have earned so much virtue that an eternity of pleasures is yours.” Bodhidharma said, ”All that you have done is absolutely meaningless. You have not even started on the journey, you have not taken even the first step. You will fall into the seventh hell – take my word for it.

The Emperor Wu could not believe it: ”I have done so much, and this man says’You will fall into the seventh hell’!”

Bodhidharma laughed and he said, ”Whatsoever you have done is out of greed, and anything done out of greed cannot make you religious. You have renounced so many riches, but you have not renounced them unconditionally. You are bargaining; it is a business. You are purchasing in the other world. You are putting your bank balance from this world into the other world, transferring it. You are cunning: because this world is momentary – tomorrow you may die – and these other monks have been telling you the other world is eternal.... So what are you doing?giving momentary treasures to gain eternal treasures? Really a good deal! Whom are you trying to deceive?” When Bodhidharma spoke to Wu in this way, before all the monks and the generals and the lesser kings who had come with Wu and his whole court, Wu was angry. Nobody had spoken in this way to him before. He said to Bodhidharma, ”is this the way for a religious person to talk?” Bodhidharma said, ”Yes, this is the only way a religious person talks; all other ways are of people who want to cheat you. These monks here have been cheating you; they have been making promises From Ignorance to Innocence

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to you. You don’t know anything about what happens after death; nor do they, but they have been pretending that they

Wu asked, ”Who are you to speak with such authority?” And do you know what Bodhidharma said? He said, ”I don’t know. That is one point that I don’t know. I have been into myself, I have gone to the very center of my being and come out as ignorant as before. I do not know.” Now this I call courage.

No religion has been courageous enough to say, ”We know this much, and that much we don’t know; perhaps in the future we may know. And beyond that there is a space which is going to remain unknowable forever.”

If these religions had been that humble, the world would have been totally different. Humanity would not have been in such a mess; there would not have been so much anguish. All around the world everybody is full of anguish. What to say about hell – we are already living in hell here. What more suffering can there be in hell?

And the people responsible for it are your so-called religious people. They still go on pretending, playing the same game. After three hundred years of science continually demolishing their territory, continually destroying their so-called knowledge, bringing forth new facts, new realities, still the pope is infallible, still the shankaracharya is infallible!

In Jaipur there was a Hindu conference and one of the shankaracharyas....

There are four

shankaracharyas in India and they are equivalent to the pope; each one ruling one direction –

for the four directions, four shankaracharyas. One of the shankaracharyas belonged to Jaipur, he was born in Jaipur. He was basically an astrologer, a great scholar, so when one shankaracharya died, he was chosen to be the shankaracharya of Jaganath Puri.

I had known him before he was a shankaracharya and this conference was the first time that I had met him since he had become the shankaracharya. I asked him, ”Now you must have become infallible. And I know you perfectly well – before you were not. Can you tell me on what date, at what time you became infallible?”

He said, ”Don’t ask inconvenient questions in front of others. Now I am a shankaracharya and I am supposed to be infallible.”

I said, ”Supposed to be?”

He said, ”That is for your information. If you ask me in public, I am infallible.” Now a polack has become pope. Have you ever heard of any polack becoming infallible? But one pope, a polack, has become infallible. How far has this world to fall? Now there is nowhere to fall.

After the polack dies – because popes die very quickly, for the simple reason that by the time they become popes they are almost dead. It takes such a long time to reach the Vatican, that if they survive a few years that is enough. Now after this pope whom are you going to choose? Can you find anybody else? I think Oregon will be good. After Poland, Oregon will be the right place. You can find far superior idiots here, but they will also become infallible once they become the pope.

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A true religion will have this humbleness of accepting that only a few things are known, much more is unknown, and something will always remain unknowable.

That something is the target of the whole religious search.

You cannot make it an object of knowledge, but you can experience it, you can drink of it, you can have the taste of it – it is existential.

The scientist remains separate from the object he is studying. He is always separate from the object; hence knowledge is possible, because the knower is different from the known. But the religious person is moving into his subjectivity, where the knower and the known are one.

When the knower and the known are one there is no possibility of knowledge. Yes, you can dance it, but you cannot say it.

It may be in the walk, the way you walk; it may be in your eyes, the way you see; it may be in your touch, the way you touch – but it cannot be put into words.

Words are absolutely impotent as far as religion is concerned. And all these so-called religions are full of words. I call it all crap!

This is the fundamental mistake. But there are other mistakes too, worth remembering. For example: every religion is egoistic. Although every religion teaches the followers to drop the ego, to be egoless, to be humble, the religion itself is not humble, it is very arrogant.

Jesus says, ”Be humble, be meek,” but have you ever thought – Jesus himself is not humble, not meek, not at all. What more arrogance and what more egotism can there be? – he declares himself to be the only begotten son of God! You cannot declare yourself to be another son of God – not even a cousin, because God has no brothers. You cannot have any relationship with God: that one relationship is closed, Jesus has closed the door.

He is the messiah and he has come to redeem the world. Nobody seems to be redeemed, and two thousand years have passed. He himself died in suffering on the cross – whom is he going to redeem? But the idea that ”I am going to redeem you, come follow me”.... This has been one of the most important factors in destroying humanity – because all religions claim that they are the only right religion, and all other religions are wrong. They have been continually fighting, killing each other, destroying each other.

Just the other day I saw a panel on the TV. One rabbi, one Protestant priest and one Catholic monk were discussing me. And they came to the conclusion... the rabbi suggested, ”It is time now – we should make an effort to have a dialogue with this man.” I could not believe it – a rabbi talking to the Catholic priest, suggesting that a dialogue is needed. Why? There were so many rabbis in Jesus’

time, why wasn’t a dialogue needed with Jesus? Or was the crucifixion the dialogue?

And this idiot Catholic agrees. He does not even say, ”You, being a rabbi, do you believe in dialogue?

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right for the rabbis to have a dialogue with a Jew. If he has gone astray, bring the Jew back on the right path; or perhaps he is right, then you come to his path. But was the crucifixion the dialogue? It was not even a monologue!

But now they are all established. The Catholic, the Protestant and the rabbi have no trouble because now they are part of the vested business. And they all know that they are doing the same things, they are in the same business. Jesus was a trouble; perhaps a dialogue was not possible. It is not possible with me either, but the reasons are different.

With Jesus the dialogue was not possible because he was the messiah, but who were you? A dialogue is possible only amongst equals. He is the son of God. Who are you? – son-in-law? You have to be a somebody, otherwise what dialogue? No, it was not possible because Jesus was so egoistic that the rabbis knew perfectly well a dialogue was not possible. Once or twice they had approached him.

Once a rabbi asked Jesus, ”On what authority are you speaking?” He said, ”On my own authority – and remember, before Abraham was, I am.” Abraham was the forefather, the ancientmost; and Jesus says, ”Before Abraham was, I am. What more authority do you want?” Now this man is saying, ”Blessed are the meek,” but he himself is not meek; ”Blessed are the poor, blessed are the humble.... n But what is the reason? Why are they blessed? ”... because they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.”

A strange argument! Here you lose; there you gain a thousandfold. But what do you gain? – the same things. Here you are poor, there you will be rich. Here you are a beggar, there you will be a king. But what is the qualitative difference? – just here, and there – two different spaces. And these people are trying to be meek and humble and poor for one simple reason: to inherit the kingdom of God. Now this man is provoking and exploiting your greed. All the religions have been doing that.

A dialogue with me is also impossible, but for different reasons.

First: I don’t know myself – about that no discussion is possible – and that is the most fundamental thing to be discussed. What dialogue is possible? Either you have been within or you haven’t.

If you have been within, then just looking into your eyes is enough – that’s the dialogue. If you have not been within, then too just looking in your eyes is enough. The dialogue is finished before it begins.

With me a dialogue is impossible because I am not a scholar. I cannot quote scriptures, I always misquote them. But who cares? – because I don’t pay any respect to those scriptures. I don’t believe them to be holy. They are just religious fictions, so misquoting from religious fictions is not a problem at all. In fact I have never read them carefully. I have gone through them, here and there just looking – and even then I have found so much garbage.

So what dialogue is possible with me, on what points? There needs to be a certain agreement, and there is no agreement possible because I say there is no God. Now what dialogue is possible? You will have to prove God; then the dialogue can begin. Or bring God to the witness box; then we can discuss whether He is truly a God or just a phony American.

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I don’t believe that there is any heaven or hell. What dialogue is possible? Yes, in other religions you can have dialogues because these are the points of agreement. A Mohammedan, a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew – they can discuss God. One point is certain, that God is. Now, the question is only about His form, attributes, qualities – but the basic thing is agreed. They all agree on heaven and hell. Now, it may be that somebody believes in seven hells, somebody believes in five, somebody believes in three. This is only a question of numbers, not so very important. With me what kind of dialogue is possible?

When I heard the panel, I started wondering that if a dialogue has to happen, how is it going to start?

From where? There is not a single point of agreement, because all those religions are pseudo, they are not true religions; otherwise there would have been some possibility.

With Bodhidharma I can have a dialogue. He says, ”I do not know who I am.” That’s enough agreement. Now we can hold each other’s hand and go for a morning walk. Now there is no need to say anything more: all is said.

After nine years, when Bodhidharma was returning to India, he gathered four of his chief disciples and he asked them, ”Condense religion into a single statement so that I can know whether you have understood me or not.”

The first one said, ”Compassion is religion. That is Buddha’s basic message: compassion.” Bodhidharma said, ”You have my bones, but nothing else.” The second disciple said, ”Meditation. To be silent, to be so utterly silent that not a single thought moves inside you: that is the essence of religion.” Bodhidharma said, ”You have my flesh, but nothing more; because in what you are saying, you are only repeating my words. In your eyes I don’t see the silence; on your face I don’t see the depth that silence brings.”

The third one said, ”It cannot be said. It is inexpressible.” Bodhidharma said, ”You have my marrow. But if it cannot be said, why have you used even these words? You have already said it. Even in saying’It cannot be said, it cannot be expressed,’ you are saying something about it; hence I say you have only the marrow.” He turned towards the fourth. There were tears in the disciple’s eyes and he fell at Bodhidharma’s feet. Bodhidharma shook him and asked him again and again, ”What is religion?” But only tears of joy... his hands holding his feet in gratitude. The disciple never spoke a single word, not even that it cannot be said, it is inexpressible.

Bodhidharma hugged him and said, ”You have me. Now I can go in peace because I am leaving something of me behind.”

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an egoist, he may have been wrong, he may have been teaching something faulty, but nobody has the right to crucify the man – he had not harmed anybody. All that was needed was a gentlemanly argument, but they were not competent enough to argue with him.

Crucifixion is not an argument. You can cut off my head – that is not an argument. That does not mean that I am wrong and you are right. In fact, cutting off my head simply proves that you were incapable of arguing your point. It is always the weak who become angry. It is always the weak who want to convert you at the point of a sword. After two thousand years and still... I wonder that not a single rabbi has apologized. Why should they? They think they were right then and they are right now.

I wonder what kind of Catholic is this monk and what kind of Protestant is this priest who are sitting with the rabbi and discussing me. They should talk first about themselves, about why they are sitting together.

All these people have been egoists. Now, rabbis go on teaching people to be humble but they cannot give an apology. That is impossible. They have not even mentioned the name of Jesus in their scriptures, in their books. You will not find any mention of Jesus, his crucifixion or the birth of Christianity in Jewish sources, no: ”It is not even worth mentioning.” But the same is the situation of other religions. Mohammed says, ”I am the only messenger of God. One God, one messenger and one holy book, the Koran – if you believe in these three things, that’s enough, you are saved.” That brings me to the second point, that all these religions have been against doubt. They have been really afraid of doubt.

Only an impotent intellect can be afraid of doubt; otherwise doubt is a challenge, an opportunity to enquire.

They have all killed doubt and they have all forced on everybody’s mind the idea that if you doubt you will fall into hell and you will suffer for eternity. Never doubt. Belief is the in thing; faith, total faith

– not even partial faith will do, but total faith. What are you asking from human beings?something absolutely inhuman. A man – how can he believe totally? And even if he tries to believe totally, it means doubt is there; otherwise against what is he fighting? Against what is he trying to believe totally?

There is doubt, and doubt is not destroyed by believing.

Doubt is destroyed by experiencing.

They say, believe!

I say, explore.

They say, don’t doubt!

I say, doubt to the very end, till you arrive, and know and feel and experience.

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Then there is no need to repress doubt, it evaporates by itself Then there is no need for you to believe. You don’t believe in the sun, you don’t believe in the moon – why do you believe in God?

You don’t need to believe in ordinary facts because they are there. But they are not ultimate truth.

A rose flower is there in the morning; in the evening it is gone. Still you ”believe” in it but you don’t need to; you know it, there is no question of doubt. This ”belief” in a rose flower is a simple belief, not against doubt. Just so that you don’t get confused between a simple belief and a complicated belief, I have a different word for it: it is trust.

You trust a rose flower. It blooms, it releases its fragrance, and it is gone. By the evening you will not find it; its petals have fallen and the wind has taken them away. But it was not an eternal truth; you know it as a fact. And you know again there will be roses, again there will be fragrance. You need not believe; you simply know from experience, because yesterday also there were roses and they disappeared. Today again they appeared – and tomorrow nature is going to follow its course.

Why believe in God? Neither yesterday did you have any experience of God, nor today – and what certainty is there about tomorrow? From where can you get certainty for tomorrow? – because yesterday was empty, today is empty, and tomorrow is only an empty hope, hoping against hope.

But that’s what all these religions have been teaching: destroy doubt.

The moment you destroy doubt you have destroyed something of immense value in man, because it is doubt which is going to help man to enquire and find. You have cut the very root of enquiry; now there will be no enquiry.

That’s why, in the whole world, there is rarely, once in a while, a person who has the feel of the eternal, who has breathed the eternal, who has found the pulse of the eternal – but very rarely. And who is responsible? All your rabbis and all your popes and all your shankaracharyas and all your imams – they are responsible because they have cut the very root of enquiry.

In Japan they grow a strange tree. There are, in existence, three-hundred or four-hundred-year-old trees, five inches tall. Four hundred years old! If you look at the tree, it is so ancient but such a pygmy of a tree – five inches tall. And they think it is an art! What they have been doing is to go on cutting the roots. The earthen pot in which the tree is has no bottom, so once in a while they take up the pot and cut the roots. When you cut the roots the tree cannot grow up. It grows old but it never grows up. It becomes older and older, but you have destroyed it. It may have become a big tree, because mostly those trees are bo trees.

Japan is a Buddhist country, and Gautam Buddha became enlightened under a bo tree. The bo tree is called a bo tree in English too, because under it Gautam Siddartha became a Buddha, attained bodhi, enlightenment. The full name is bodhi tree, but in ordinary use it is enough to call it a bo tree.

So all those trees are bo trees. Now no Buddha can sit under these bo trees. You have stopped who knows how many Buddhas from becoming Buddhas by cutting these bo trees.

The tree under which Buddha became enlightened was so big that one thousand bullock carts could rest underneath it. It was so big. It is still alive – not the same tree of course, but a branch of the same tree. Mohammedans destroyed the tree. They could not tolerate that a tree exists underneath which somebody became far greater than their Mohammed. They burned the tree, they completely destroyed the tree.

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But one of the emperors of India, Ashoka, had sent one branch of the tree as a present to Ceylon with his own daughter, Sanghamitra, who had become a sannyasin. Sanghamitra carried a branch of the bo tree to Ceylon, and from that bo tree a branch has been brought back again and put in the place where Buddha had become enlightened. It is part of the same tree, but the third generation.

But what these people in Japan are doing shows something significant: it is what religions have done with man. They have been cutting your roots so you don’t grow up – you only grow old.

And the first root they cut is doubt; then enquiry stops.

The second root they cut turns you against your own nature, condemns your nature. Obviously when your nature is condemned, how can you help your nature to flow, grow and take its own course like a river? No, they don’t allow you to be like a river, moving zigzag.

All the religions have turned you into railway trains, running on rails, running from one station to another – and mostly just shunting, not going anywhere but still on rails. Those rails they call discipline, control, self-control.

Religions have done so much harm that it is almost incalculable – their pot of sins is full, overflowing.

It just needs to be thrown into the Pacific, five miles deep, so deep that nobody can find it again and start again the same idiotic process.

The small number of people in the world who are intelligent should get rid of all that their religions have done to them without their knowing. They should become completely clean of Jewishness, of Hinduism, of Christianity, of Jainism, of Buddhism. They should be completely clean – just to be human is enough.

Accept yourself.

Respect yourself Allow your nature to take its own course. Don’t force, don’t repress.

Doubt – because doubt is not a sin, it is the sign of your intelligence. Doubt and go on enquiring until you find.

One thing I can say: whosoever enquires, finds. It is absolutely certain; it has never been otherwise.

Nobody has come empty-handed from an authentic enquiry.

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Faith: the suicide of intelligence

10 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHAT IS THE GREATEST HARM THAT THE SO-CALLED RELIGIONS HAVE DONE TO

HUMANITY?

THE greatest harm that the so-called religions have done to humanity is to prevent humanity from finding the true religion.

They pretended to be the true religion. All the religions of the world have conditioned the human mind from the very childhood to believe that this is the true religion – the religion in which you are born.

A Hindu believes his religion is the only true religion in the world, all other religions are false. The same is the case with the Jew, with the Christian, with the Buddhist, with the Mohammedan. They are in agreement on one point, and that is that there is no need to find the true religion; the true religion is already available to you – you are born in it.

I call this their greatest harm because man without authentic religion can only vegetate, cannot really live.

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know your face through the mirror, you are acquainted with yourself through other people’s opinion; you don’t know yourself directly. And the opinions that you depend on are of those people who are in a similar position: they don’t know themselves.

These religions have created a society of blind people, and they go on telling you that you don’t need eyes. Jesus had eyes; what is the need for Christians to have eyes? All that you have to do is to believe in Jesus; he will lead the way to paradise, you have simply to follow. You are not allowed to think, because thinking may take you astray. It is bound to take you on different paths than they want you to take, because thinking means sharpening your doubt, your intellect. And that is very dangerous for the so-called religions.

The so-called religions want you dull, dead, somehow dragging; they want you without intelligence.

But they are clever in giving good names: they call it faith. It is nothing but the suicide of your intelligence.

A true religion will not require faith from you. A true religion will require experience.

It will not ask you to drop your doubt, it will help you to sharpen your doubt so that you can enquire to the very end.

The true religion will help you to find your truth.

And remember, my truth can never be your truth because there is no way of transferring truth from one person to another.

Mohammed’s truth is Mohammed’s truth; it cannot be yours just by your becoming a Mohammedan.

To you it will remain only a belief And who knows whether Mohammed knows or not? Who knows, jesus may be simply a fanatic, neurotic.

That’s what modern psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts agree upon, that Jesus is a mental case.

To declare oneself to be the only begotten son of God, to declare, ”I am the messiah who has come to redeem the whole world from suffering and sin” – do you think it is normal? And how many people has he redeemed? I don’t think that he was able to redeem even a single person from suffering and sin. He was certainly a megalomaniac.

How can you have faith? Even if a Gautam Buddha knows the truth, there is no way for you to know whether he knows it or not. Yes, you can recognize somebody knowing the truth, if you also know it; then you will have the capacity to smell it. Otherwise you are simply believing in public opinion: you are believing in mass psychology, which is the lowest.

Truth comes to the highest intelligence.

But if from the very beginning you are taught to believe, then you are crippled, you are destroyed.

If from the very beginning you are conditioned to have faith, you have lost your soul.

Then you will vegetate, you will not live. And that’s what millions of people around the world are doing: vegetating.

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What life can you have?

You don’t even know yourself

You don’t know from where you are coming, to where you are going, what the purpose of all this is. Who has prevented you from knowing? Not the devil but the popes, the priests, the rabbis, the shankaracharyas – these are the real devils.

As far as I can see, all these synagogues, temples, mosques, churches – they are all dedicated to the devil, not to God, because what they have done is not divine, it is sheer murder: the slaughter of the whole human mind.

But they have done many other things also. This fundamental harm cannot be done alone, it needs support from many other harms. For example: the religions have demystified the universe. I consider it to be one of the greatest crimes.

Let me repeat, they have demystified the universe, and I consider it to be one of the greatest crimes

– and they have done it so cunningly, so cleverly, that you are not even aware what has been done.

What do I mean when I say demystifying the universe? I mean they have supplied ready-made answers for you.

All the religions have a certain catechism. Christians have approached me: ”Why don’t you publish a small booklet which contains your catechism?because you have so many books that it is difficult to read them all, to find out and to figure out what your message is. It will be easy; just like the Christians have done, you can publish the catechism on a postcard.” I had to tell them, ”It is impossible for me because I don’t have a catechism at all. You will have to look into my books. You will have to enter into this jungle and you will have to find the message. And I don’t know whether you will be able to find one, or whether you will be lost yourself The second is the more probable possibility.”

But all the religions have provided a catechism. What is a catechism? For questions which are unanswerable they give you answers, even before you have asked. The child has not asked who has created the world; the child is not yet mature enough to ask such a question, but religions catch him before he becomes mature and the question arises. Once the question arises then their answer is not going to help.

Once the child asks who has created the world, then the answer that God has created the world is not going to help because the child is bound to ask, ”Who has created God Their answer is not an answer because the question remains the same; it is just delayed a little bit – one step backwards.

And finally religions say, ”God has not been created by anybody.” Very strange – because the logic behind their God is that everything that exists needs a creator.

I asked one of my religious teachers – I had to go every week to listen to his crap – ”You gave me the logic: everything that exists needs a creator.” He said, ”Of course.”

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I asked him, ”Does God exist or not?”

He became alert. If he says ”God exists,” then according to his own logic He needs a creator. And where this is going to land is in a regress absurdum. You can go on... A created B, B created C, C

created D – you can go on and the whole alphabet will be finished – and Z will be standing in front of you with the same question mark. Nothing has changed. The question was bogus, it was not answerable.

But no religion is courageous enough to say, ”There are things about which you can ask a question, but don’t expect the answer. Life is a mystery.”

And life can only be a mystery if there are questions which are unanswerable.

But then the religion loses all grasp on your neck. If there are questions which are unanswerable, then what have your – messiahs and messengers of God and incarnations of God – what have all these fools been doing? They have all answered questions which are basically unanswerable, and should be left unanswerable. An honest person, a sincere mind will accept the fact, ”Yes, there is a question but there is no answer.”

Hence I say poetry is far more religious than your so-called holy books. Music is more religious than your so-called sermons of great apostles. Painting is more religious because paintings are not answers, they are rather reflections of the mystery that existence is. Poetry does not answer anything for you, it simply reflects: the sunrise, the sunset, a cloud wandering in the sky, a bird on the wing, a rainbow.... It does not give you any answers.

A Zen haiku says: The wild geese fly over a lake. The lake of course reflects them. They neither ask, ”Please reflect us,” nor does the lake say, ”Thank you for coming to be reflected in me.” The lake is silent, the wild geese are silent; the reflection happens – but not a single word is uttered from either side. Not only that, the wild geese have no expectation that they should be reflected; if they are not reflected they won’t feel offended. If the wild geese never come to the lake, the lake will not feel offended, rejected, humiliated. It has never asked, never invited them.

Things happen but there is no why to it. In poetry and painting, in music... have you ever asked about great music, ”What is the meaning of it?” Listening to Beethoven or Mozart have you ever asked, ”What is the meaning of it?” Or looking at the paintings of Picasso...?

It happened once, an American super-rich millionaire asked Picasso, ”I want a few of your paintings.” Picasso said, ”But my paintings are very costly.” The man said, ”Money does not matter at all. Give me two paintings and whatsoever is the price – I will not ask the price – I will simply give it to you cash.” Picasso was in difficulty because he had only one painting ready right then. He went inside and cut the painting in two, brought out two paintings and sold them.

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you manage to find which is the top and which is the bottom, and how you manage to hang it. I have tried it all ways, and it is still beautiful any way you hang it – but that means that it has no meaning.

And now you have done a great miracle. You have cut the painting in two, and that man has left with two paintings which cannot be meaningful because each painting is only half – the other half is missing.”

”But nobody will ever come to know,” Picasso said, ”that they are not two paintings. I could have even made it four. I don’t know what it means myself, but it was such a joy to paint it.” And tears were in his eyes that he had to sell it.

These painters, poets, musicians have given the human mind a richness because they do not demystify existence.

In the beginning science was moving on the same lines as the so-called religions. In the eighteenth century science was doing the same stupid thing, perhaps because there was only one precedent: the religions. It was trying to demystify existence, but soon it realized that the deeper you go into existence, the farther into mystery you are moving.

Soon science realized the great statement of Socrates: ”The man who knows less, thinks he knows more; and the man who knows more, knows he knows less. The man who is just an idiot thinks that he knows all, and the man who is really wise knows only one thing, that he does not know anything at all.”

As your intelligence becomes more and more mature and you enter into existence from different directions, and you start feeling and living and loving it, it becomes more of a poetry, a painting, a music, a dance, a love affair – but not theology. It becomes, slowly, slowly, so much more mysterious that you could never have imagined that you are sitting on immense treasures of mystery. But religions give you ready-made answers.

Existence is there and naturally the question arises, ”Who created it?” Remain with the question. Don’t accept anybody’s answer... because there are peddlars all around – Christians, Mohammedans, Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas, Jews – all kinds of peddlars in search of customers, trying to sell you something which is simply poison and nothing else.

They will say, ”God created it,” or ”Allah created it.” Yes, they have given an answer, but do you know what harm they have done? If you accept their answer, your question dies. And with the death of the question, your enquiry dies – now you will never enquire. If you had enquired, I can say with my own authority... and my authority does not depend on the Vedas or the Bible or the Koran, it depends only on my experience, on my enquiry.

I say with my own authority that if you go on questioning without accepting anybody’s answer, including mine, by and by you will find that the answer is not found but the question disappears.

And that is the moment of feeling the mystery.

Do you see the difference? The so-called religions repress your question; they put an answer on top of it to cover it – an answer which they give as if God Himself has given it. Hindus say the Vedas From Ignorance to Innocence

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are written by God.... Sheer nonsense! – because in the Vedas there are so many things which are proved absolutely absurd. If God writes these absurdities then He should be dethroned.

They will all make their answer important, significant, infallible, as if coming from God Himself or from God’s son or from His messenger.

All these strategies are used to make their answer penetrate your being and condition you so deeply that your question disappears into your unconscious.

The function of a true religion is to discard all these answers, to discard all these authorities and bring out your authentic questioning, your doubts, your enquiries, and help you to go in search in the unknown, in the uncharted. It is a dangerous journey.

Religions have given you comfortable lives, convenient ways of living. But there is no way to live unless you decide to live dangerously, unless you are ready to go into the dark, to seek and search for yourself

And I say to you, you will not find the answer.

Nobody has ever found the answer.

All answers are lies.

Yes, you will find reality, but reality is not the answer to your question. The reality will be the death of your question.

And when your question disappears and there is no answer available, that space is mystery.

A true religion is mysticism.

In the beginning science tried to follow the well-trodden path of the old religions. But science could not go long on those lines because science had to tackle reality, and religion, so-called religion, is fictitious. So religion can go on living in its fictitious world but science has to encounter reality sooner or later. Not even for one century could it continue with the idea, ”Soon we will demystify the whole universe, soon we will come to know everything.”

Now, ask Albert Einstein or Lord Rutherford, ask these people who have penetrated into the deepest mystery of matter – and their statements look like the statements of mystics. And they are now very humble; the old egoism of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century scientist has disappeared from the world. Now the scientist is the most humble person in the world because he knows that it is impossible to know.

We can manage to live better, we can manage to live longer, we can manage to live more comfortably

– but we cannot know what life is. That question will remain a question until the very end.

My whole effort here is to help you again to become ignorant.

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The religions have been making you knowledgeable, and that is the harm they have done. They hand over to you so easily and so simply the whole Christian catechism which you can learn by rote within an hour and can repeat like a parrot. But you will not come to know the truth, the real, the one that surrounds you within and without. That catechism is not going to give it to you.

But to drop knowledge is one of the greatest problems, because knowledge gives so much nourishment to the ego.

The ego wants all knowledge within its power. And when I say you have to drop knowledgeability and you have to become again a child, I mean you have to start from that point where the rabbi or the priest distracted you. You have to come back to that point again.

You have to be again innocent, ignorant, not knowing anything, so that the questions can start arising again. Again the enquiry becomes alive, and with the enquiry becoming alive you cannot vegetate.

Then life becomes an exploration, an adventure.

Then everything starts having a mysterious aroma around it.

Then you cannot just pass by when a rose flower is calling you. What is his perfume if not a call?

It is his language: ”Please just for a moment be with me. It is too cold here, too alone.” You cannot pass by, no child can pass by.

But the rabbi, the pandit, the maulvi, and the scholar are so burdened with books, their minds are so cluttered with junk – all these people are collecting antiques, dead skeletons – that the rose will not be heard. And anyway they know everything. They know even who created God, they know who created the world, they know who created the soul, so what about this poor rose flower?

But ask a poet and the poet can say, ”A rose is a rose is a rose.” Is that an answer? Is that a question? It is neither a question nor an answer. It is simply a description, a reflection; he is simply saying what he is seeing. He is not quoting scriptures. But there are people who go on....

When I was in Calcutta some ten years ago, a man came to me – a famous scholar, a professor of philosophy, Doctor Bhattacharya, a well-known name in the philosophical circles of the world. He asked me, ”Can you say something – because this question has been bothering me a lot: Is there such a thing as holy language, different from ordinary language?” I said, ”A strange question – it has never occurred to me. Language is language; what has language to do with holy and unholy? But I can understand your question, because Hindus say Sanskrit is a holy language, a divine language.” Hence the brahmins, the priests, have kept a monopoly over it.

A majority of the Indian society has been deprived of knowing Sanskrit. No woman is allowed to study Sanskrit. For women they have created different scriptures which are just stories, religious stories, just not of any significance. But something has to be given to the women so they don’t start harassing them about the real scriptures.

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but the Vedas were not published. It was with great difficulty that the Vedas were published. Then they started saying that they should not be translated into another language, because then all their holiness would be gone. So it took centuries of fighting to translate them, but the brahmins still believe that the translations have lost the quality of holiness. How can the Vedas be written in English or in German or in French? These languages, for the Hindus, are not divine.

But the same is the case with other fools – they are not different in their foolishness. For the Jews, Hebrew is the language of God. When He spoke to Moses He spoke in Hebrew. One of the sins of Jesus was that he was using Aramaic, not Hebrew. Aramaic was the language of the lowest class of people and he was a carpenter’s son, not God’s only begotten son; otherwise he must have known Hebrew. Even with God he was talking in Aramaic, and this was an unholy act – to use the language of ordinary people.

So I told Doctor Bhattacharya, ”I understand your question; it is stupid, but it is scholarly.” He said, ”Stupid and scholarly both?” I said, ”There is no contradiction. These people are the same people. Some people call them stupid, some people call them scholars, because other than a stupid, who is going to become a scholar? For what?

”When existence is available, when life is everywhere vibrant, you are pondering over a book!” I am reminded... but of that a little later on. First let me finish with Professor Bhattacharya. I told him, ”Yes, you can make a distinction between holy language and unholy language.” You should not be deceived by the name of Professor Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya is a surname of high class brahmins in Bengal, but his father was a beggar, so he became converted to Christianity. And it was through Christianity that this man was brought up in convent schools, sent to the best colleges, sent to the West. He was a Christian, so I told him, ”It is simply like this: ordinary people say,’You son-of-a-bitch.’”

He said, ”You are calling me that?”

I said, ”No, I am not calling you that, I am simply giving you an example. People say,’You son-of-a-bitch.’ This can be translated into holy language:’You son-of-the-Holy Ghost’ – only this much difference. But I think the first is at least human, true, possible. The second is inhuman, untrue, impossible.”

Now, let me tell you what I was reminded of... One of India’s greatest poets was Rabindranath Tagore. He is the only Indian poet who got the Nobel prize. The reason is not that there are not other poets; in fact there are many who are far greater than Rabindranath Tagore, but they write in their own languages.

India has thirty major languages of such tremendously beautiful qualities that they cannot manage to translate them into English. Rabindranath got the Nobel prize for the simple reason that he wrote in English. In the beginning he would write in Bengali, then he would translate it into English – just for that simple reason.

Otherwise in India right now you can find one hundred poets who deserve the Nobel prize, but nobody will ever hear their names, for the simple reason that the Nobel prize is not available for these languages in which they are writing.

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But Rabindranath, being a very rich man’s son, was brought up in England, educated in England –

so it was easy for him. Although he himself never felt that what he has written in Bengali has really been expressed in English, he still got the Nobel prize for one of his books, GITANJALI: an offering of songs. While he was writing GITANJALI it was his usual practice to go on a small houseboat and live on the river, moving alone, and wherever he liked he would stop the boat. Those were the days when he would compose his poetry.

One full moon night he was writing about the full moon, the beauty of the full moon... sitting inside the small room in the houseboat, not at all aware that outside the full moon was there. He was in one of the best beauty spots of the river – for miles there was nothing but silence. Once in a while a water fowl would disturb the silence, but after this disturbance, the silence would become even deeper.

He was completely unaware; just by candlelight he was writing about the full moon, its beauties. In the middle of the night, feeling tired, he blew out the candle, and as he blew out the candle – he writes in his diary – ”a miracle happened. I was shocked, because as the candle was no longer there, from every nook and corner....” The hut that was on the houseboat was made of bamboos as they are in Bengal. So from every gap in the bamboo the moon started showering in.

For a moment he was struck dumb. He had never seen so much silence. He came out, he saw the moon and he wept. He went back and tore up the poetry he had written about the moon and the light of the moon and the beauty of it, and wrote in his diary: ”I was very unfair to the moon, to the silence of the night. My poetry was just rubbish; it could not represent even a thousandth part. The moon was outside just knocking on my door, but I was so much involved in writing my own book, I didn’t hear the knock. I was talking about silence in my poetry and the silence was so profound outside

– I have never before come across such silence, nor since. I would have missed it if I had gone to sleep without blowing the candle out. That small candlelight was enough to prevent the moon from coming in.”

These people are full of books and words which are not their experiences. And unless something is your experience, don’t go on deceiving yourself. Knowledgeability can be very deceptive; and these religions are responsible for making people knowledgeable.

The religions should help people to become innocent, they should help them to become ignorant; they should help them to enquire, search, seek.

But rather than that, they have given you everything, presented to you on a plate all the answers that you have to find. And what you have lost in receiving their present, you are not even aware of.

You have lost everything.

You live a borrowed life because they have told you how to live. They have told you how to discipline your life. They have told you how to control your behavior, your nature, and you have been blindly following them, not understanding a simple principle: Gautam Buddha is born only once. For twenty-five centuries millions of people have tried to become Gautam Buddha – not a single one has succeeded.

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A simple fact... and I say it is fortunate that nobody has succeeded; it would have been unfortunate if somebody had succeeded. Nobody could succeed because every being has some uniqueness to him: Gautam Buddha has his uniqueness, you have your uniqueness. Neither has he to follow you, nor have you to follow him. Following creates imitators.

The moment you become an imitator you lose contact with your life. That’s what I mean when I say you start vegetating. You are playing somebody else’s role, you have completely forgotten your real life.

In my village, every year, the drama of Rama’s life is played. Once it happened when I was present

– it was so hilarious, and so meaningful.... In the story, Rama’s wife, Sita, is stolen by Ravana.

Rama and his brother Lakshmana both gather armies and go to fight. After three years of Sita being imprisoned in Sri Lanka, they start fighting. Ravana was a great warrior; Rama and Lakshmana were also great warriors, but they were young. Ravana was very experienced; his first arrow hit Lakshmana... and it was known that whoever is hit by his arrow, it is impossible for him to survive.

The greatest physician was called immediately to do something.

He said, ”There is only one

possibility. There is a mountain, Arunachal, in south India. On Arunachal there is found a small plant sanjivani, a lifegiving plant. If within twenty-four hours that plant can be brought here, then there is a possibility; otherwise, after twenty-four hours nothing can be done, the poison will have spread all over” – he was already in a coma.

One of the disciples of Rama, Hanumana, who was a great warrior himself, said, ”I will go immediately and I will find it, but just give me an indication – because by the time I reach there it will be night – how am I to find this sanjivani, this life-giving plant?” The physician said, ”It is very simple, particularly in the night. In the day it is very difficult to find, but that plant gives off light in the night, so you can find it easily wherever it is. You will find it surrounded by rays as if it is aflame.”

Hanumana, in the story, is the king of the monkeys and is himself a monkey – all the Hindus say that it is a fact. Hanumana flew – but monkeys can do that, perhaps with a little bit of jumping from tree to tree. I don’t know how he managed but he flew. I know how it is done in the drama; a rope is tied to him; the rope moves and he is shown to the public, flying.

When he reached the mountain there was trouble. The trouble was that the mountain, the whole mountain, was aglow with light. Now, Hanumana was at a loss what to do. Which plant was the sanjivani? – because so many plants were like flames – were they all sanjivani? He tried to look; those plants were different... now what to do? But he was a crazy devotee – he took the whole mountain!

And in religious stories everything is possible. Jesus walks on water, turns water into wine, turns stones into bread: everything is possible. So he came back with the mountain.... But what happened in the drama?

He comes in with the mountain – the mountain is made of cardboard – and he is carrying the mountain while suspended by the rope. Somehow the rope gets stuck, and he is left hanging in From Ignorance to Innocence

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mid-air! The people – at least fifty thousand people, because people would come from far and wide for the drama – they are screaming and shouting. Rama is standing there, Lakshmana is lying down in a coma and the physician is sitting with him. The prompter goes on telling Rama whatever his part is, so Rama goes on saying, ”Oh, Hanumana, where are you?” – and he was just above his head – ”Where have you gone? Come back soon; otherwise if you are not back before sunrise, my brother will be dead!”

The manager of the drama was at a loss what to do. He ran onto the stage, tried to free the rope somehow, but nothing worked. He was in such a nervous state, he cut the rope! Hanumana, with his mountain, fell on top of Lakshmana! Lakshmana stood up, but Rama was still saying what was being prompted: ”Oh, Hanumana, you have come at the right time....” Hanumana said, ”Shut up! You and your brother go to hell! First tell me who cut the rope. I will take care of him first, then the story can start again.” And he was a wrestler of the town, so the manager simply escaped, afraid he would give him a few fractures!

But I was watching and I saw one thing: although he was acting Hanumana, when he fell from the rope, just in that moment he forgot all about the drama. He said, ”To hell with you” – he was saying

”To hell” to his God! – ”and to hell with your brother! First tell me where the manager is! Who cut the rope? First things first – this drama can wait a little.” Of course he was heard by everyone and the whole fifty thousand people were laughing at him.

The mountain was all in pieces and Lakshmana was already recovered, so there was no need....

The physician simply slipped out by the back door. There was no need for sanjivani any more –

Lakshmana was already standing up and looking at what had happened. They had to drop the curtains immediately and remove all those people from the stage. They changed Hanumana and when the curtain went up it was another person, because that Hanumana was so angry that he said,

”Unless I see that manager I am not going to act. I am going to find him, wherever he is.” Just a single hit, and what you are – you may be acting a Buddha, a Christ, a Krishna – it will disappear, just by a simple hit on your head. Imitation cannot go to your being, it is going to remain just on the surface. You can practice it for thirty years, forty years....

There are monks who have been practicing for fifty years.

There are monasteries, Catholic

monasteries, where once a monk enters, he never comes out; and thousands of people are living in such monasteries. What are they doing? Continually trying, making an effort somehow to become a little bit like Christ; if not the whole Christ, even a partial Christ will do. But that imitation is not going to help. It may give you a pseudo, phony mask, but scratch it just a little bit and you will find your real person is still there. You cannot, by imitation, deceive existence; you can only deceive yourself These religions, by giving you ideals – what to do, what to think, what to be – have supplied everything. They have not left anything for you to do, you have just to follow blindly. And if the whole of humanity is functioning in a blind way, there is no wonder.

But who is responsible?

All these religions are responsible for making you phony, plastic.

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They have told you in detail what to eat, what not to eat; when to go to sleep, when to get up –

you are controlled absolutely. You are transformed into a robot, and the more you are a robot, the greater saint you are. Then you will be worshipped, then you will have the respect of your religion.

The more you are unreal, the more respectable you are. And if any moment you show your reality, all respect for you will be withdrawn.

It happened when I was in Hyderabad that a Jaina monk, listening to me, became so interested that he dropped his monkhood. He came to the place where I was staying, and I told my host, ”He has taken a great step, so be careful; the Jainas will now be murderous towards this man. This same man – they were touching his feet for years, but now they would like to kill him, so just be careful and be protective. I will be leaving after three days, then I will take him with me and send him somewhere where he can live for a few months without being troubled by the Jainas.” But that very day I was going to speak in the Corporation Hall of Hyderabad city, and the Jaina monk insisted, ”I would like to come with you.” I didn’t see that that was any problem, so I said, ”Okay, you can come.”

But I became aware when I reached the town hall that the whole Jaina community was there.

Hearing that I was going to give an address in the town hall, they figured it out, they guessed that that monk would also be coming – ”and there will be our chance.” Seeing the situation, I told the monk, ”Just come with me onto the stage, and sit behind me on the stage. Now we have to see what happens.”

The mayor introduced me, but he was not even finished when hundreds of people stood up and they said, ”We want that Jaina monk to be removed from the platform.” The mayor was in difficulty. I was his guest and the monk had come with me; he was my guest. So I told the mayor, ”You sit down and let me tackle the problem.” I asked those people, ”Do you want to touch his feet again?” They said, ”Feet! We will cut off his head!”

I said, ”Just see the point. How many years has he been a monk? – twenty years. He became a monk when he was only twenty, now he is forty. For twenty years you have touched his feet, you have asked his advice – and just within a few hours you are ready to cut off his head. What has happened? The man is the same. You would have never allowed yourself to sit with him on the same floor, and now you are asking that he should be thrown off the stage and forced to sit on the floor where everybody else is sitting. What change do you see? Can you tell me what has changed?” They said, ”Everything has changed – he is no more a jaina monk.” I said, ”That is true; he is not in the dress of a Jaina monk, but were you worshipping the dress? I have brought it with me.”

I had carried his dress in a bag; even he was not aware of it. I brought the dress out and put it on the platform and I said, ”You can touch the feet of the dress – this is your monk. That man has From Ignorance to Innocence

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nothing to do with you because you have never touched his feet. You need not be so angry that you want to cut off his head. You neither touched his feet, nor do you have to cut off his head. That man is absolutely a stranger to you, but this dress and his begging bowl, these are here. You can do whatsoever you want: if you want to touch the feet, you can. If you want to cut off the head, you cut off the head.”

I told them, ”Can’t you see a simple thing: that twenty years of following the discipline....” And you cannot deceive Jainas because five monks have to live together. No monk is allowed to live singly because you can’t trust just one monk; he may find some way to do something which is not according to the rules. Four are spying on a fifth – in fact they are all spying on each other.

They are not supposed to stay in anybody’s house, they can only stay in a temple, because in a house anything is possible. Women will be there, food will be there – and these people are hungry for food, for women, for everything. They are completely hungry.

They have to eat only one time a day and they cannot touch a woman. What to say about touch, they are not allowed to see a woman. To avoid seeing them, the instruction is that they should walk looking at the ground four feet ahead, exactly four feet ahead; their eyes slowly become fixed to four feet ahead. That’s the way they have to walk, so even if they happen to see a woman they will see only the feet, nothing else.

They are not allowed to stay in a house with a family, because – who knows? – in the night they may open the fridge. Hungry people are hungry people. In the temple there is no fridge, no food and no water. They are not allowed to drink water in the night.

I said, ”This man was worshipped by you, like a god, for twenty years. Just because today he has thrown off his dress and changed his clothes, you are ready to murder him. You are non-violent people, but you are talking of cutting off his head!” And to the monk I said, ”You see these people – all these people have been touching your feet. This was a mutual understanding: they gave you respect, you remained their slave. Become more and more their slave, and more and more they will give you respect. Lose your individuality completely, become phony and they will carry you on their heads. But a single moment of reality and they are your enemies.”

No, nobody can give a discipline to you.

You will have to find it through your own awareness.

When sannyasins ask me how they should live, what they should do, what they should not do, I simply tell them, ”You don’t understand me. My single message is be more and more yourself.

The first thing is to be oneself.

And the second thing is to know who one is.

So remain yourself.

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Remain natural.

Try to become more and more aware of what this life current is that is running in you.

Who is beating in your heart?

Who is behind your breathing?

Just become more and more alert – about whatever you do, whatever you think, whatever you feel

– just remain alert, a watcher on the hill. And that watching will help to find the discipline that is your discipline.

The watching will help you to find what to eat and what not to eat, what to do and what not to do.

Watching continuously will make you aware to drop many things you are unnecessarily carrying which have become burdens, and to choose only that which is in harmony with you – not a burden, but a relief.

If you live with alertness, you live rightly.

If you live in imitation, you live wrongly.

To me there is only one sin:

And that is not to be yourself.

And to me there is only one virtue:

And that is to know yourself.

All these religions have prevented this happening. It is time that we got rid of all this nonsense which the past has left over our heads.

If you can become Adam and Eve again – no Moses, no Mahavira, no Mohammed, no Jesus, no Confucius, no Lao Tzu.... If you are Adam and Eve, just born, just getting out of the garden of Eden

– nobody to ask what to do, nobody to ask what discipline is right, no priest, no rabbi, no pope is available – what are you going to do?

Do that!

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CHAPTER 13

Ecstasy is knowing that nobody is holding your hand 11 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHAT IS MORE IMPORTANT IN YOUR RELIGION – TO BE THYSELF OR TO KNOW THYSELF?

Do you think they are different? How can you know yourself if you are not yourself? And vice versa

– how can you be yourself if you don’t know who you are? To be thyself and to know thyself are not two separate things, hence the question of choice does not arise. They are two aspects of a single process.

You have to work on both together simultaneously; neither can be neglected. But it is easier to start from being thyself; easier, because you have been distracted from yourself by others. The masks that you are carrying are not your own imposition. Unwillingly, reluctantly, you have been forced to be someone other than you are; hence it is easier to throw it off.

Slavery of any kind is easier to get rid of, because intrinsically who wants to be a slave? That is not in the nature of any being, human or not human. Slavery is against existence; hence it is easier to throw it off. It always remains a burden, and deep down you continue to fight with it, even though on the surface you follow it; deep down nobody can make you accept it.

At the innermost core of your being it remains rejected forever; hence it is easier to throw it off.

The process is simple. Whatever you are doing, whatever you are thinking, whatever you are deciding, remember one thing: is it coming from you or is somebody else speaking? And you 167

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will be surprised to find out the real voice; perhaps it is your mother – you will hear her speak again.

Perhaps it is your father; it is not at all difficult to detect. It remains there, recorded in you exactly as it was given to you for the first time – the advice, the order, the discipline, the commandment.

You may find many people: the priest, the teachers, the friends, the neighbors, the relatives. There is no need to fight. Just knowing that it is not your voice but somebody else’s – whosoever that somebody else is – you know that you are not going to follow it. Whatsoever the consequences, good or bad, now you are deciding to move on your own, you are deciding to be mature. Enough you have remained a child. Enough you have remained dependent. Enough you have listened to all these voices and followed them. And where have they brought you? In a mess.

So once you figure out whose voice it is, say goodbye to it... because the person who had given that voice to you was not your enemy. His intention was not bad, but it is not a question of his intention.

The question is that he imposed something on you which is not coming from your own inner source; and anything that comes from outside makes you a psychological slave.

Sheela, put this light out; this is driving me Oregonian!

It is only your own voice which will lead you into a blossoming, into freedom.

Yes, the path in the beginning will look dangerous, because you were always holding the hand of your father, your priest, your rabbi, your mother; and when a child is holding the hand of the father there is no fear, no danger. He can rely on the father. But now you are holding his hand only in imagination; there is no father, it is pure imagination. And it is better to know that you are alone and there is no hand supporting you, because then you will try to find your own way to protect yourself against dangers.

It is dangerous to go on believing that you are still protected when you are not really protected. That’s what has happened to millions of people in the world. They feel they are protected – protected by God, protected by all kinds of things.

There is no God.

There is nobody to protect you.

You are alone, and you have to accept your aloneness joyously. In fact, it is a tremendous ecstasy that nobody is holding your hand.

My grandfather loved me very much, just because of my mischiefs. Even in his old age he was mischievous. He never liked my father or my uncles because they were all against this old man’s mischievousness. They all said to him, ”You are now seventy and you should behave. Now your sons are fifty, fifty-five, your daughters are fifty, their children are married, their children’s children are there – and you go on doing such things that we feel ashamed.” I was the only one with whom he was intimate, because I loved the old man for the simple reason that he had not lost his childhood even at the age of seventy. He was as mischievous as any child.

And he would play his mischief even on his own sons and daughters and sons-in-law, and they would be just shocked.

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I was his only confidant because we conspired together. Of course many things he could not do – I had to do them. For example, his son-in-law was sleeping in the room and my grandfather could not go up onto the roof, but I could go. So we conspired together; he would help me, he would become a ladder for me to go onto the roof and remove a tile. And with just a bamboo and a brush attached to it, in the night, touching the face of the son-in-law.... He would scream, and the whole house would run there.... ”What is the matter?” But by that time we had disappeared, and he would say, ”There was some ghost or somebody just touching my face. I tried to catch him but I could not; it was dark.” My grandfather remained utterly innocent, and I saw the great freedom that he had. In my whole family he was the eldest. He should have been the most serious and most burdened with so many problems and so many anxieties, but nothing affected him. Everybody was serious and worried when there were problems; only he was not worried. But one thing I never liked – that’s why I remembered him this moment – and that was sleeping with him. He had the habit of sleeping with his face covered and I would have to sleep with my face also covered, and that was suffocating.

I told him clearly, ”About everything I agree, but this I cannot tolerate. You cannot sleep with your face uncovered; I cannot sleep with my face covered – it suffocates me. You do it lovingly” – he would keep me close to his heart and cover me completely – ”that’s perfectly good, but in the morning my heart will not be beating. Your intention is good, but you will be alive in the morning and I will be gone. So our friendship is out of the bed.”

He wanted me there because he loved me and he had said, ”Why don’t you come and sleep with me?”

I said, ”You know perfectly well that I don’t want to be suffocated by anybody, even if his intention is good. You love me and you would like to keep me close to your heart even in the night.” Also, we used to go for a long walk in the mornings, and sometimes, when there was a moon, in the night. But I never allowed him to hold my hand. And he would say, ”But why? You may fall, you may stumble upon a stone or anything.”

I said, ”That’s better. Let me stumble, it is not going to kill me. It will teach me how not to stumble, how to be alert, how to remember where the rocks are. But you holding my hand – how long can you hold my hand? How long are you going to be with me? If you can guarantee that you will always be with me, then of course I am willing.”

He was a very sincere man; he said, ”That I cannot guarantee; I cannot even say about tomorrow.

And one thing is certain, you will live long and I will be dead, so I will not be here forever to hold your hand.”

”Then,” I said, ”It is better for me to learn from now, because one day you will leave me in the middle, helpless. And if you have trained me to hold your hand, then there are only two ways: either I start living in a fiction – God the father....”

Why do you call God ”the father”? Yes, there are two kinds of religions in the world. A few religions call God ”the mother”, and a few religions call God ”the father”. The majority of religions call God

”the father” for the simple reason that the majority of societies are patriarchal, male chauvinist. And a very few – small tribes around the world – are still matriarchal, where the woman is higher than the man. Naturally God cannot be a man in those societies; in those societies God is the mother.

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But no society calls God ”uncle”. It is strange, very strange, because uncle is an older word than father. ”father” is not very old, it is a very late addition to language. The farther back you go, the more you will find there were societies all over the world – just as it is in other animals, birds – where the mother took care of everything. The father’s function was finished once the woman was pregnant.

In fact, in olden days it was difficult to know who was the father. So all the males of the age of the probable father – somebody was the father – all the males of the probable age of the father were called ”uncle”. So uncle is an older word, far more prestigious. Father only came later on when men became very possessive of women.

It came with private property. The word ”father” is joined with private property. When people started having private property – their land, their house – then they wanted to be certain about their son, because he was going to inherit it. Then matrimony became the basic system: you had to marry one woman, and the woman had to remain absolutely surrendered and committed to you so that there was no possibility of her conceiving somebody else’s son, and his possessing your property.

This whole business of matrimony is a question of economics, not of psychology.

And man kept himself free. He created prostitutes and he created all kinds of ways to get out of matrimony without disturbing the woman. But the woman had to remain absolutely dedicated to the man – not only in life, but even in death.

In India the woman had to die with the husband; she had to jump, alive, into the funeral pyre where her husband was being burned, because the husband was so jealous: ”What is the guarantee after I am dead that my wife may not start having some relationship with somebody else?” And the basic problem was that his property that he had accumulated – he had earned it, exploited for it, robbed for it – should not go to somebody else; it should go to his own blood.

So if one day you find the father’s hand is missing, you start creating a fiction: God the father – who is invisible of course – is holding your hand and He is leading you.

I told my grandfather, ”I don’t want to be left in the situation where I have to create a fiction to live in.

I want to live a real life, not a fictitious life. I am not a character in a novel. So you leave me alone, let me fall. I will try to get up. You wait; you just watch, and that will be more compassionate towards me than holding my hand.”

And he understood it; he said, ”You are right – one day I will not be there.” It is good to fall a few times, get hurt, stand up again – to go astray a few times. There is no harm.

The moment you find you have gone astray, come back. Life has to be learned through trial and error.

So the moment you start listening to the voices – and they are all recorded exactly as they were given to you – you will be surprised when you try to hear who is speaking to you. You will simply laugh:

”Oh, this is my mother. I have not seen her for twenty years, and she is still trying to manipulate me.” She may be dead, but from her grave she is still keeping her hand on your neck. Her intention is not bad, but she is crippling you.

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I used to tell my father, ”Don’t give me any advice, even if I ask you.

You have to be very

straightforward about it. You have simply to say,’Find out your own way.’ Don’t give me advice”

– because when some cheap advice is available, who bothers to find one’s own way?

I had been consistently telling my teachers, ”Please remember one thing: I don’t want your wisdom –

simply teach your subject. You are a teacher of geography and you are trying to teach me morality?

What relationship has morality with geography?”

I remember the poor man who was my geography teacher. He was in trouble because I had taken something from the pocket of the student who was sitting by my side. I had taken his money from his pocket and this teacher was telling me, ”Don’t do that.” I said, ”That’s not your business. You are a geography teacher and this is a question of morality. If you want, I am ready to go to the principal; you come with me. Nowhere in the geography syllabus...

I have read it and nowhere is it said that you cannot take somebody else’s money. And money is simply money; whoever has it, it is his. Right now it is mine. A few moments before it may have been his, but he has lost it. He should be more alert. If you want to give advice, give advice to him.

”In the first place, what is the need to bring so much money to the geography class? There is nothing to buy, nothing to purchase; there is not going to be any shopping. Why did he bring his money here?

Then if he has brought the money, he should be alert. It is not my fault, it is his fault, and I have simply taken advantage of it, which is my right. To take advantage of situations is everybody’s right.” I remember that poor man. He was always in difficulty, and always in difficulty with me. He would see me out of class and he would say, ”You can do whatsoever you want to do, just don’t bring so much philosophy into poor geography. And I don’t know anything about philosophy – I simply know about geography. And you turn the question in such a way that even in the night I go on thinking whether it was geographical or religious or philosophical.” Just in front of my school there were two beautiful kadambara trees. The kadambara is a very fragrant flower, and I used to sit in those trees whenever I could escape from the classes. That was the best place, because teachers would be passing underneath and the principal would be passing and nobody would be thinking that I may be hiding in the tree; and the trees were thick. But whenever this teacher of geography would pass by there, I could not resist dropping at least one stone or two stones on his head. And he would look up, and he would say, ”What are you doing there?”

One day I said, ”This is not a geography class. You disturbed my meditation.” And he said, ”What about those two stones that fell on my head?” I said, ”That is simply coincidence. I dropped the stones; it’s strange how you appeared exactly at the right time. Now I will be wondering about it. You also wonder about it, how it happened exactly.” He used to come to tell my father, ”Things are going too far.” He was a bald-headed man; and in Hindi the word for bald-headed is munde. His name was Chotelal, but he was known as Chotelal Munde. Chotelal was rarely used, just Munde was enough because he was the only completely From Ignorance to Innocence

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bald-headed person. When just in front of his house, I would knock on the door and his wife or somebody else would open the door, and they would say, ”Why do you torture him? You torture him in the school, you torture him in the market, you torture him in the river when he goes to take his bath.”

One day his wife opened the door and she said, ”Will you stop torturing Munde or not?”and he was just there, behind her.

He grabbed his wife and he said, ”You also call me Munde! This boy has spread around the whole city the idea that my name is Chotelal Munde – and now my own wife is converted by him. I will kill you if you call me Munde. I can forgive everybody else but my own wife, in my own house....” But I was insistent with my teachers: ”Please keep on your track and don’t give me any advice that does not belong to your subject, so that I can explore my life in my own way. Yes, I will commit many mistakes, many errors. I am willing to commit mistakes, errors, because that is the only way to learn.”

There is no other way to learn. If you make learning completely foolproof, so that no mistake is possible no error is possible, then you will become a parrot. You may start repeating words, sentences, but you will not know exactly the meaning of what you are saying.

So first find out the voices within you – and it is simple. Whenever you are deciding to do something, just sit silently and listen to the voice that is telling you to do this or not to do this. And try to find out whose voice it is. Once you have found it is your father, your mother, your uncle, your teacher, your aunt, your brother, it is very easy; then thank your brother and tell him,’”It is so good of you; although you are dead still you are taking care of me. But please, now leave me alone.” Once you have told a certain voice clearly, ”Leave me alone,” your connection with it, your identity with it, is broken. It was capable of controlling you because you were thinking it was your voice. The whole strategy was the identity. You were thinking, ”This is my voice, this is my thought,” hence you were doing what it said. Now you know it is not your thought, not your voice; it is something foreign to your nature. Recognizing it is enough. Just be grateful to your father: ”You are still taking care of me but I don’t need any more care. You have made me mature enough that now I can start taking care of myself.”

Get rid of the voices that are within you, and soon you will be surprised to hear a still small voice, which you have never heard before; you cannot decide whose voice this is. No, it is not your mother’s, it is not your father’s, it is not your priest’s, not your teacher’s... then a sudden recognition that it is your voice. That’s why you are not able to find its identity, to whom it belongs.

It has been there always, but it is a very still small voice, because it was suppressed when you were a very small child and the voice was very small – just a sprout, and it was covered with all kinds of crap. And now you go on carrying that crap and you have forgotten the plant that is your life, which is still alive, waiting for you to discover it.

Discover your voice.

Then follow it with no fear.

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Wherever it leads, there is the goal of your life, there is your destiny. It is only there that you will find fulfillment, contentment.

It is only there that you will blossom – and in that blossoming, knowing happens.

How can you know yourself? – you have not even grown. Perhaps you are still in the seed, perhaps even the sprout was not allowed. Every religion takes care: take the child to baptism immediately...

take the child to circumcision... take the child to some Hindu ceremony.... And the child knows nothing of what you are doing to him.

Just wait – even for having the voting right he will have to wait twenty-one years; just for third-rate politics he will need twenty-one years of adulthood. But for religion no maturity is needed? Perhaps forty-two may be the right time for a person to decide about religion. But it is not when the child is born and you start deciding, others are deciding.

Yes, you can take him to the voting booth. You can give him the vote and you can hold his hand to drop the vote in the box, and you can make him choose the president, the prime minister – but the child is completely unaware of what is happening: what is this box about, and what is this card all about...?

But you don’t do that. You understand that for politics, at least twenty-one years – at least – are needed for a person to understand. But for religion you don’t give any time at all. There is a reason why you don’t give any time at all. You are afraid, because if you give him time and you don’t mess his mind around before he starts thinking on his own, starts hearing his own voice, then there is no chance for you. You will never be able to make him a Jew or a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan.

He may become someday religious, but that will be his own search. Someday he may find paths leading to silence, ways of moving to the innermost core of existence, but that will be his own exploration.

And remember one thing: whatsoever you find on your own gives ecstasy.

Even if God is given to you ready-made, you will not find any ecstasy in it.

And just running on the seashore finding seashells of no value, you can see a child ecstatic....

I used to come from the river when I was very small. All my pockets... I used to have many pockets, I insisted on having many pockets. My father said, ”It looks crazy. People ask me.... You are continually a trouble and for no reason at all. Why should you have four pockets in front and two pockets by the side?”

I said, ”I need them. My needs and your needs are different. I never say to you that you should have so many pockets or that you should not have them; that is your business.” I needed pockets because when I went to the river I found such treasures – so many beautiful stones, so colorful, that I was for hours walking on the sands to collect them. And I would come home full – almost double my weight.

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My father would see me entering the house and he would say, ”This is the use of the pockets? Are you mad or something? Why do you go on bringing all these stones? And we have to throw them out every day.”

I said, ”You don’t understand. You can throw them, but if you have any understanding of a simple thing – I feel so ecstatic, so joyous when I see these stones. I am not interested in your money and I am not interested in anything else – I simply collect the stones.” But the joy was in exploring for them, searching far away, by the side of the river just to find one beautiful stone.

One day my father got so fed up that he brought four laborers and told them, ”Go to the river and bring as many stones as possible, because he is wasting hours every day.” So they brought buckets full of stones. They knew exactly from where to get them – I had no idea that there was a mine – and they poured them out in my small room where I had my own world, and where nobody was allowed to enter. My father said, ”You keep all these. Now there is no need to go there because you cannot find anything more. All colors and all kinds of stones we have collected for you... you waste so much time.”

I said, ”You have destroyed my joy. It was not the stones, it was my finding them. Now I see this

– thousands of stones are here and I don’t feel any joy. Take them away. You have destroyed something.”

”But,” he said, ”I thought you loved stones.”

I said, ”No, there is no question of loving stones, it was the finding. Stones were just an excuse.

Sometimes it is stones you are finding, sometimes it is butterflies you are finding, sometimes it is flowers you are finding, and sometimes it is truth you are finding – but remember, always the beauty is in the finding, not what you find. That is just an excuse.” He said, ”Whatever is done, it seems difficult to make you happy.” I said, ”That’s true. Never try to make anybody happy. Nobody can do that. You can make me unhappy – that is possible – but happy? That is simply my absolute right, to be or not to be. You cannot force me to be happy – this is an enforcement. Pouring all these stones in front of me, are you trying to make me happy?” But it was happening continually about everything. Slowly, slowly they started to understand that this boy seems to be eccentric so leave him alone.

When I was very small I had long hair like a girl. In India boys don’t have that long hair – at least at that time it was not allowed. I used to have very long hair, and whenever I used to enter, and the entrance was from the shop.... The house was behind the shop, so to enter I had to pass through the shop. My father was there, his customers were there, and they would say, ”Whose girl is this?” My father would look at me and say, ”What to do? He does not listen.” And he felt offended.

I said, ”You need not feel offended. I don’t see any problem. If somebody calls me a girl or a boy, that is his business; what difference does it make to me?” But he was offended that his boy was being called a girl. Just the idea of a boy and girl.... In India when a boy is born, there are gongs and bands and songs, and sweets are distributed in the whole From Ignorance to Innocence

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neighborhood. And when a girl is born, nothing happens – nothing. You immediately know that a girl is born because no gongs, no bells, no band, no singing – nothing is happening, no distribution of sweets – that means a girl is born. Nobody will come to ask because it will be offending you: you will have to answer that a girl is born. The father is sitting with his face down... a girl is born.

So he said, ”This is strange. I have a boy, and I am suffering from having a girl.” So one day he really became angry because the man who had asked was a very important man; he was the collector of the district. He was sitting in the shop, and he asked, ”Whose girl is this? It is strange, the clothes seem to be a boy’s – and with so many pockets and all full of stones?” My father said, ”What to do? He is a boy, he is not a girl. But today I am going to cut his hair – this is enough!” So he came with his scissors and cut my hair. I didn’t say anything to him. I went to the barber’s shop which was just in front of my house and I told him.... He was an opium addict, a very beautiful man, but sometimes he would cut half your mustache and would forget the other half. You would be sitting in his chair, with his cloth around your neck and he was gone, so you would search

– where had he gone? It was difficult; nobody knew where he had gone. And with a half mustache, where would you go to search for him? But he was the only one I liked, because it took hours.

He would tell you a thousand and one things, unrelated to anything in the world. I enjoyed it. It is from that man, Nathur – Nathur, that was his name – that I learned how the human mind is. My first acquaintance with the human mind came from him, because he was not a hypocrite. He would say anything that came to his mind; in fact, between his mind and his mouth there was no difference! –

he simply spoke whatsoever was in his mind. If he was fighting with somebody in his mind, he would start fighting loudly – and nobody was there. I was the only one who would not ask, ”With whom are you fighting?” So he was very happy with me, so happy that he would never charge me for cutting my nails or anything.

That day I went there and I told him – we used to call him ”Kaka”, kaka means uncle – ”Kaka, if you are in your senses, just shave my whole head.”

He said, ”Great.” He was not in his senses. If he had been, he would have refused because in India you shave your head only when your father dies; otherwise it is not shaved. So he had taken a good dose of opium and he shaved my head completely.

I said, ”That’s good.”

I went back. My father looked at me and said, ”What happened?” I said, ”What is the point? You cut my hair with the scissors; it will grow again. I am finished with that. And Kaka is willing, I have asked him. He said he is willing:’Whenever there is no customer you can come and I will shave your head completely, and no question of money.’ So you need not be worried. I am his free customer because nobody listens to him; I am the only person who listens.” My father said, ”But you know perfectly well that now this will create more trouble.” And immediately one man came and asked, ”What happened? Has this boy’s father died?” Without that, nobody....

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Then my father said, ”Look! It was better that you were a girl. Now I am dead! You grow your hair as fast as you can. Go to your Kaka, that opium addict, and ask him if he can help somehow; otherwise this is going to create more trouble for me. The whole town will go on coming. You will be moving around the whole city and everybody will think that your father is dead. They will start coming.” And they did start coming. That was the last time he did anything to me. After that he said, ”I am not going to do anything because it leads into more trouble.” I said, ”I had not asked – I simply go on doing my thing. You interfered unnecessarily.” But I never allowed him to give me advice. And soon everybody understood in my family that I was very averse to advice, because whatsoever they would say I would do just the opposite, to prevent them giving me any advice. I told them, ”If you give me advice I will do just the reverse, so just don’t give me any advice. I don’t want to carry these voices all my life within myself – please leave my mind clean. I want to listen to my own voice, if there is any. If there is none, I am perfectly happy with that. I am happy with my authenticity.”

Then slowly, slowly they understood that I should not be interfered with, and there was no point, it created more trouble: I would find out a way which was more troublesome for them. Then a time came when I would be sitting in the room, and my mother would look around and say, ”Nobody is here. I wanted somebody to go to the market to fetch some vegetables.” I said, ”I don’t see anybody either. There is nobody; only I am sitting here, there is nobody.” I was not counted as anybody at all – just nobody. She would see me in front of her and say, ”I don’t see anybody.” And she would agree with me: ”Neither do I see anybody, the room is empty” – and she would go back to find somebody else somewhere, to send to the market.

The moment they recognized me as nobody... I can see in myself that since that moment I don’t hear any voices. And it must have been at the age of nine or ten that they recognized – they had to recognize me as nobody; not to count on me in any way, not to depend on me for any work. Small things....

My mother would say, ”Go and bring a dozen bananas,” so I would go. The market was not far away, just two furlongs; it was a small place. But in these two furlongs I would meet so many people and there would be so many discussions that by the time I reached the market, I would forget what I had come for. And moreover the time was also finished. I had to pick up something quickly because the sun was setting or had gone down long before.

I would come home to ask, ”What was it that you wanted?” And my mother would say, ”You are good for nothing. I asked for a simple thing, one dozen bananas, and it took you five hours to come back empty-handed to enquire!” I said, ”What to do? There were so many people on the way, so many problems, questions, arguments. By the time I reached the market I had forgotten, so I have come to ask.” They dropped the idea that I could be of any use; but it helped me tremendously. Slowly, slowly in my own house I From Ignorance to Innocence

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became an absence. People would be passing but they would pass as if nobody was there. There was no need to say hello to me. There was no need to enquire anything of me.

I remember that since then I don’t find any voices. But up to ten they had been trying their hardest, and when I started working on myself I had to pass through all those voices and consciously drop them. And it is not a difficult process, you have simply to recognize that this is not your voice, this is your father’s voice, your mother’s voice, your rabbi’s voice, and you have to give a grateful thank-you:

”Great of you to follow me up to now, but no more, not any further. Here we part.” And once you are empty of all the voices then only... because in this crowd, in this marketplace that you have become inside you, it is almost impossible to hear your own voice. That is the beginning of being yourself Then much more happens, but that is very natural; you are not to do anything about it.

All you have to do is to negate the voices that have been covering your voice. Once that has happened you start growing your own insight. Slowly, slowly you start becoming aware of problems which you were never aware of before because you were carrying answers. For the first time you start hearing questions of tremendous importance, which you were not even aware that you had.

And your question, just because it is yours, is significant, because in that very question is hidden the answer.

But it has to be your question, only then it carries its own answer.

But these so-called do-gooders go on giving you their questions, their answers. Nobody bothers whether it is your question or your answer. In fact, they are afraid that some day you may find your question. The day you find your question all their answers will become invalid, all their scriptures will be rubbish. And they are afraid that by finding your own being you will become an individual.

The society does not want you to be individuals, it wants you to be a Christian, a good Christian, a good Jew, a good Hindu – respectable. But they don’t want you to be individuals, because individuals move, act, live in freedom. Individuals would be happy to die, but they cannot be forced to become psychologically slaves.

And once you are an individual it is so simple to know thyself, because now you are thyself Now it is only a question of closing your eyes and seeing who you are.

So don’t divide the question into two. Don’t ask me what is more important, being yourself or knowing yourself I can see why the question has arisen, because the famous maxim of Socrates is, ”Know thyself,” and one of the greatest findings of modern psychology is, ”Be thyself” Hence the question: which is more important?

Socrates is not somebody that you can put in the past. There have been a few people who will always remain contemporaries. Socrates is one of those people who will always remain contemporary.

When he says, ”Know thyself” he is implying that without being yourself, how can you know yourself?

So if you want to know yourself you will have to be yourself They are two aspects of the same coin.

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But to start with be yourself. because so much has been disturbed in you, so much has been diverted from you, so much has been taken away from you. Your being has been covered in so many layers of personality that you will have to do exactly what you do with an onion: you start peeling it. The moment you peel the onion and one cover is removed, a fresher cover is there. You remove it and there is another, even fresher and more alive.... And that’s how you are – covered with layers of personality.

The word personality is worth remembering. It comes from the root persona. In Greek drama the actors used to have masks, and they would speak through the mask. sona means sound. Persona means sound coming from a mask. You don’t know who the person is, you only hear the sound and it is coming from a mask. From this word persona comes the English word, personality. It is literally true: your personality is nothing but many many masks. And whatsoever you say and do is just coming through the mask; it is never truly your own, it has not your signature on it.

So first drop all personalities.

And you don’t have just one, remember.

People ordinarily think they have one personality – absolutely wrong. You have many personalities.

You have a storage of personalities, so whenever you need a different personality you immediately change your mask. You become a different person immediately; not even a moment is lost. It has become almost automatic, the change from one personality to another. And there are so many, you will not even be able to count how many personalities you have.

The more personalities you have, the more sophisticated, respected a citizen you will be in the society. Obviously your personalities give you more facilities. They make you capable of functioning in many ways in which others cannot function.

Gurdjieff used to play a game with his disciples. He would be sitting in the middle, one disciple on this side, another disciple on that side. And he had worked tremendously on personalities. He had worked so consciously that he had become capable, as many actors become capable, of showing....

From this side of the mouth one disciple would see that he was in a very happy mood, and from that side, another disciple would see that he was very angry and it was not the time to say anything; he may hit you or something. He was capable of smiling with half the mouth, and the other side would remain very somber and serious. It is difficult to learn, but one can be trained. It is not much of a problem – actors, great actors, are continually doing it.

You see the whole movie; you don’t see that one moment the actor has to laugh, another moment he has to cry. While the movie is being filmed, he goes on changing personalities. You see only the story that is presented to you, but what happens to the actor? He falls in love with a woman –

whom he hates! – and shows everything that even a lover may not be able to show: in his eyes, his face, his words, his hug, everything. For that moment he becomes the lover. He takes on the whole personality of the lover of the woman in front of him.

In the second scene maybe he has to cry – and actors become capable of crying, of bringing tears to their eyes. In the beginning they have to use chemicals to bring the tears, but that is only for amateur actors. Once an actor really becomes capable then there is no need; he simply changes From Ignorance to Innocence

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his personality. He brings the face of sadness, sorrow, and tears start flowing. He is not only deceiving you, he can deceive his own chemistry.

All these personalities are continuously moving with you. You are a crowd, many people together, all divergent: many enemies to each other in continuous conflict, fighting, wrestling. That’s why you see people in such anguish. Otherwise, there is no reason to be in anguish if you are not having many voices inside you, conflicting, fighting, trying to control all the others – one voice trying to become the monopolist.

Gurdjieff calls them ”selves; it is the same. You can call personalities selves or egos, and you can start looking for them – it is a tremendously charming game to look at them. In the evening, you decide that tomorrow morning you are going to get up at five. This you have been deciding for many years, and you know it – that every evening you decide.... But this night is different! – that too, you know. Every night you have been saying, ”This night is different; tomorrow I am going to get up.

There is a limit to everything!”

But all these things you have been saying every night. You are not saying a single new thing, but you are not aware of it. And at five o’clock when the alarm goes, you just press the button; and you are angry at the clock. You may throw the clock, turn over and say, ”Such a cold morning, and this stupid alarm clock” – and you go back to sleep. You are just going for a few minutes... and this has been happening for years.

Every morning ”just for a few minutes” you go back to sleep. When you wake up it is nine o’clock, and you are again repenting, sad, thinking, ”How does it happen? I had decided to get up.” And you will do it again but you will never see that the personality that decided in the evening must have been a certain personality, and the personality that threw the clock away is a different personality. These are not one personality, they cannot be one personality.

The personality that was saying, ”tomorrow I am going to get up” is no more on top, is no more on duty. Somebody else is on top and says, ”Forget all about this nonsense,” and throws the clock and says, ”Go to sleep. It is so cold out – are you stupid or something?” And it feels so warm and good to turn over, and after the disturbance of the clock it feels an even better sleep. And at nine o’clock when you wake up again you are sad. This is a different personality. It has not thrown the clock; it was not the personality who said to you, ”Just for a few minutes....” And this personality decides,

”Now, whatever happens, tomorrow morning I am going to get up.” This you will do your whole life, and you will never be able to see a simple fact: you have many personalities, and each time a different personality is speaking, speaks differently, has different ideas.

Just watch it; just watching it is such a great joy, such a great drama that one need not go to any movie. You can simply close your eyes and see the movie that continues there, with so many actors and so many actresses and everything is there that is needed – raw footage, unedited....

But before you can come to know yourself you have to be yourself You have to drop all these personalities like clothes and you have to come to your utter nudity.

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And from there is the beginning.

And then the second thing is very simple. The whole problem is with the first thing; the second thing is very simple. When personalities are gone, the crowd has left you, you are alone. Close your eyes, you will see who you are – because there is nobody else. There is only awareness of immense silence, of no object.

You will not meet any God there or any soul there or any angel there – all that is fiction. If you meet somebody, remember that you are again hallucinating. If you meet Jesus, throw him out! If you meet Krishna, tell him, ”Get out. This is no place for you people. lust leave me alone.” Only Buddha had the courage to say, ”If you meet me on the way, cut my head off immediately.” You have to cut off the head of the Buddha; otherwise you will not be alone – and without being alone how can you know yourself?

In aloneness, suddenly out of nowhere, comes the fragrance called enlightenment. You become illuminated; for the first time full of light, all darkness dispersed.

The night is over, the sunrise has happened – and a sunrise that is never going to become a sunset.

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CHAPTER 14

Society crowds you out; religon outs your crowd

13 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHY, IN THE FIRST PLACE, HAVE PEOPLE BEEN DISTRACTED FROM THEIR ORIGINAL

SELF?

MAN is born with an unknown, an unknowable potentiality.

His original face is not available when he comes into the world. He has to find it. It is going to be a discovery, and that is the beauty of it. And that’s the difference between a being and a thing.

A thing has no potential, it is what it is. A table is a table, a chair is a chair. The chair is not going to become anything else, it has no potentiality; it has only actuality. It is not a seed of something.

Man is not a thing.

That brings all the trouble and all the joy, all the challenges, all the disturbances.

The child comes just empty, with no writing on him, no indications even of what he is going to be-all dimensions are open.

This is the first basic thing to be understood: that a child is not a thing, a child is a being.

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He is not yet, he is just going to be. He is a process, and there is no possibility to predict where he is going to end; what will be the ultimate outcome of his life’s experiences, anguishes, anxieties, ecstasies; what it is going to amount to in the end, finally. The final sum total of his whole life is not available in the beginning.

He does not bring a chart with him. All the astrologers have been befooling you, palmists have been befooling you, and they could befool you because there was a chance to befool you. The parents are concerned what the child is going to be. And their concern is out of love, hence they can be exploited by all kinds of con men. Those con men can predict, ”He is going to be this, or that,” but they don’t do much harm; they simply exploit a little bit. Their predictions never come true.

The greater problem arises from the priest, from the politician, from the pedagogues. The politician is not interested in what the real potential of the child is. He is interested that the child becomes a part of his power trip. He has an investment in every child, because every child is a potential friend or enemy. It iS good to start canvassing as early as possible. So before the child starts on his own, he is distracted onto a path which is going to fulfill the politician’s desire, but which is going to kill the seed in the child himself.

The priest is interested – he has an investment. The pope is a bigger pope if he has more Catholics in the world. If Catholics disappear, what is the value of a pope? – who would care about him? Each child that is born has some power which can be exploited by politicians, priests....

Soon the child is going to become a fully-fledged citizen of the world – he should be grabbed. He should become a Catholic if he is born out of Catholic parents or if fortunately, he is an orphan, then Mother Teresa can look after him and convert him into a Catholic. They are immensely happy: the more the world has orphans, the more Mother Teresas can get Nobel prizes – and more orphans means more Catholics. The more poor people in the world... they can be easily converted to Christianity.

Jesus says man cannot live by bread alone. That is true of an authentic man but not true about the masses. As far as the masses are concerned, I say to you, man lives by bread and bread alone.

And there are only masses – where is the authentic man?

These politicians, these priests, these pedagogues don’t leave anybody to himself so that he can become authentic, so he can get his original face, so that he can find himself Everywhere there are people with vested interests in every child. And the child is simply a tabula rasa, nothing is written on him; it is a great temptation for everybody to write something on him.

The parents, of course, would like to write their religion, their caste, their philosophy, their politics, because the child should represent them. The child should carry their inheritance.

If they have been Hindus for centuries, the child should be a Hindu, carrying the heritage of Hinduism to future generations. They are not interested in the child’s own potential – nobody is interested in it

– they are interested in their own investment, and of course everybody is investing....

The parents are investing so much in the child, giving birth to him, raising him, educating him; and everything is conditional – whether it is said or not, that is not the point. They will ask one day, ”We From Ignorance to Innocence

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have done so much for you, now is the time that you should be conscious of what they are doing, because this is how they have been brought up by their parents – generation after generation, the same process.

The teacher is interested that the student should represent him. The religious teacher is interested that the disciple should be a model of his teachings....

What I want you to remember is that everybody is interested in the child for something in which the child is not interested at all.

But the child is very helpless, he cannot fight all these people. They are powerful. He is dependent on them; if they want to make something of him, he has to become that. This much is absolutely clear to the child, that if he goes against the parents, he is misbehaving, he is betraying them. These ideas are also given by the parents, the priests, the teachers. He feels guilty.

Any assertion of his own self becomes guilt, and every pretension of the parents, of the religious priests, of the educationists, of the politicians – which is only a pretense – pays very well. The child starts learning politics from the very beginning: to be hypocritical, base. Be authentic and you are punished. Now, the child has a simple arithmetic, and we cannot condemn him for it.

In my childhood – because from there I can speak to you more authoritatively; I don’t know your childhood, I know only my childhood – it was an everyday question. I was continually asked to be truthful. And I said to my father, ”Whenever you say to me to be truthful, you have to remember one thing, that truth has to be rewarded; otherwise you are forcing me not to be truthful. I am willing.” Very easily I figured out that truth does not pay: you are punished. Lies pay; you are rewarded. Now it was a question of very decisive, very great importance. So I made it clear to my parents that it had to be understood clearly: ”If you want me to be truthful then truth has to be rewarded, and not in a future life but here and now, because I am being truthful here and now. And if truth is not rewarded, if I am punished for it, then you are forcing me to lie. So let this be clearly understood; then there is no problem for me, I will always be truthful.”

I don’t think that every child tries to figure it out and makes a clear-cut contract with the parents. But this became a contract with my father. Howsoever the truth was against him, his morality, his family, his society, his respect, that did not matter; what mattered was that I was true. And for that I needed immediate reward, ”Otherwise next time you know I will say what you want to hear – but remember, it will be a lie.”

The day that for the first time I said this to my father, he said, ”Let me think it over, because you seem to be tricky. You are putting me into a subtle net. You do some mischief and are truthful, and I will have to reward you for your mischief”

I said, ”It is your business to decide whether you want me to be truthful or not. Anyway I am going to do what I want to do. The mischief would have happened anyway. It has happened, only afterwards the question arises to be true or to be untrue. So why bring mischief into it? It has already happened.

Now nothing can be done about it. You cannot undo it.

From Ignorance to Innocence

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What can be done is: you can force me to lie, and I can lie. And I can lie with such a face that you will think I am absolutely truthful. I will learn. If that is the way, then let that be the way, but remember, you have been responsible for distracting me from truth because you were rewarding lies and punishing the truth. You can think it over. I am not in a hurry. You are asking me.” What had happened was that, living two or three blocks away from my family was a brahmin family, very orthodox brahmins. Brahmins cut all their hair and just leave a small part on the seventh chakra on the head uncut so that part goes on growing. They go on tying it and keeping it inside their cap or inside their turban. And what I had done was, I had cut the father’s hair. In summertime in India, people sleep outside the house, on the street. They bring their beds, cots, on the streets. The whole town sleeps on the streets in the night, it is so hot inside.

So this brahmin was sleeping – and it was not my fault... he had such a long choti; it is called choti, that bunch of hair. I had never seen it because it was always hidden inside his turban. While he was sleeping, it was hanging down and touching the street. From his cot it was so long that I was tempted, I could not resist; I rushed home, brought the scissors, cut it off completely and took it and kept it in my room.

In the morning he must have found that it was gone. he could not believe it because his whole purity was in it, his whole religion was in it – his whole spirituality was destroyed. But everybody in the neighborhood knew that if anything goes wrong... first they would rush to me. And he came immediately. I was sitting outside knowing well that he would come in the morning. He looked at me. I also looked at him. He said to me, ”What are you looking at?” I said, ”What are you looking at? Same thing.”

He said, ”Same thing?”

I said, ”Yes. The same thing. You name it.

He asked, ”Where is your father? I don’t want to talk to you at all.” He went in. He brought my father out and my father said, ”Have you done anything to this man?” I said, ”I have not done anything to this man, but I have cut a choti which certainly cannot belong to this man, because when I was cutting it, what was he doing? He could have prevented it.” The man said, ”I was asleep.”

I said, ”If I had cut your finger while you were asleep, would you have remained asleep?” He said, ”How could I remain asleep if somebody was cutting my finger?” I said, ”That certainly shows that hairs are dead. You can cut them but a person is not hurt, no blood comes out. So what is the fuss about? A dead thing was hanging there... and I thought that you are unnecessarily carrying this dead thing inside your turban for your whole life – why not relieve you?

It is in my room. And with my father I have the contract to be true.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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So I brought out his choti and said, ”If you are so interested in it, you can take it back. If it is your spirituality, your brahminism, you can keep it tied and put it inside your turban. It is dead anyway; it was dead when it was attached to you, it was dead when I detached it. You can keep it inside your turban.”

And I asked my father, ”My reward?” – in front of that man.

That man said, ”What reward is he asking for?”

My father said, ”This is the trouble. Yesterday he proposed a contract that if he speaks the truth...

and sincerely; he is not only speaking the truth, he is even giving the proof He has told the whole story – and even has logic behind it – that it was a dead thing so why be bothered with a dead thing?

And he is not hiding anything.”

He rewarded me with five rupees. In those days, in that small village, five rupees was a great reward.

The man was mad at my father. He said, ”You will spoil this child. You should beat him rather than giving him five rupees. Now he will cut other people’s chotis. If he gets five rupees per choti, all the brahmins of the town are finished, because they are all sleeping outside in the night; and when you are sleeping you cannot go on holding your choti in your hand. And what are you doing? – this will become a precedent.”

My father said, ”But this is my contract. If you want to punish him, that is your business; I will not come into it. I am not rewarding him for his mischief, I am rewarding him for his truth – and for my whole life I will go on rewarding him for his truth. As far as mischief is concerned, you are free to do anything with him.”

That man told my father, ”You are getting me into more trouble. If I do something to this boy, do you think things will stop there? I am a family man: I have my wife, my children, my house – tomorrow my house will be burned down.” He was very angry, and he said, ”Especially now it’s a problem, because tomorrow I am going to perform a ceremony in the next village, and people seeing me without my choti....”

I said, ”There is no need to worry – the choti I am giving you back. You can also reward me with something for giving your choti back. Just don’t ever take off your turban in the other village; even in the night keep your turban on. That’s all. It is not a big problem, it is only a question of one night.

And in the night who is going to look for your choti? Everybody will be asleep. He said, ”Don’t you give me advice. I feel like beating you but I know better, because that will create a whole chain of things.”

I said, alt has already been created. You have come to complain; you are not rewarding me for my being so absolutely honest and sincere and telling you that I could not resist my temptation. And I have not done any harm to anybody; no violence has happened – not a single drop of blood came from your choti. Just by complaining to my father you have already created a chain of reactions.” He said to my father, ”Look...!”

My father said, ”It is not my business.”

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And I said to my father, ”That’s what the whole brahminism teaches – the chain of reactions.” My father said, ”You keep your philosophy to yourself. And stop going to these lectures of the sadhus and the monks and mahatmas, because whatsoever you get from them you somehow manage to conclude such strange things.”

I said, ”But this is what I am saying, and it is not strange. That’s exactly what the theory of karma is: you do one act, the reaction will follow. He has done an act of complaining against me, now the reaction will follow.”

And the reaction followed, because he had told me that he was going to the other village.... He was very angry with me, but when you are angry, you are angry – and he was really completely freaked out. So he was angry with his wife, with the children.... I watched everything, and he somehow managed to get his things together and went off in a horse buggy.

The moment he left, I told his wife, ”Do you understand where he is going? He is going forever –

and you don’t know! He had come to say this to my father, that he is going forever and he is never coming back again.”

The wife suddenly started crying and screaming, Stop him! Other people ran and they stopped his buggy.

He said, ”Why are you stopping me? I have to catch the train!” They said, ”Not today. Your wife is crying and beating her heart – she will die!” He said, ”But this is strange. Why should she beat herself, and why should she cry?” But the people would not allow him to go, and they were pulling at his bag and suitcase.

The man who was driving the buggy said, ”I will not take you. If this is the situation, that you are leaving your wife and small children forever, I will not do such an act.” The brahmin said, ”I am not leaving, I will come back, but I don’t have time to convince you. The train will be missed – the station is two miles away from my house.

But nobody was listening to him, and I was provoking people: ”Stop him, otherwise his wife, his children... you will have to look after them – who is going to feed them?” They brought him back with his bags, and of course he was angry and threw his bag at his wife. His wife asked, ”What have we done? Why are you...?” And I was there outside in the crowd He said, ”Nobody has done anything. That boy told me there would be a reaction. The reason is that three days before, in the temple, I was teaching the philosophy of action and reaction and this boy was present there. Now he is teaching me.” He told me, Forgive me and I will never say a single word about this action and reaction. And you can cut anybody’s choti if you want, I will not complain.

You can cut of my head and I will not complain – because I want to stop this chain completely. My train is gone.”

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Then everybody asked, ”What is the matter? We don’t understand. Who has cut your choti?n I said, ”Look! The chain is impossible to stop. These people are asking’Whose choti? Who has cut it? Where is the choti?’” I said, ”Just look inside his turban, on his head!” And a man who was considered to be a wrestler in the town came up and took off his turban and the choti fell out.

My father was also there, and saw it. When we were returning home he said to me, ”I will reward you but don’t take advantage of our contract.”

I said, ”I am not. That is not a contract between me and you. My contract is that I will always speak the truth to you, and you will reward me for it.” And he remained consistent. Whatsoever I had done, howsoever wrong in his eyes, he continually rewarded me. But it is difficult to find a father like that –

the father has to forcibly impose his ideals on you.

My father was condemned by my whole city: ”You are spoiling the child.” He said, ”If that is his destiny, to be spoiled, let him be spoiled. I will not be responsible for interfering in his destiny; he will never be able to say,’My father spoiled me.’ And if he is happy in being spoiled, then what is the wrong in being spoiled? Wherever, and whatsoever happens in his life, I don’t want to interfere. My father has interfered with my life, and I know that I would have been a different person if he hadn’t.

”And I know that he is right, that every father turns the child into a hypocrite, because I have been turned into a hypocrite. When I want to laugh, I am serious. When I want to be serious I have to laugh. At least let one person laugh at the time when he want wants to laugh. And let him be serious when he wants to be serious.” He said, ”I have eleven children but I will think of myself as having only ten.” And he always thought that he had only ten. Me he never counted among his children because, he said, ”I have given him total freedom to be himself Why should he carry any image of me?”

In a better society – and when I say in a better society, I mean a society which understands each person’s integrity, respects even a small child’s being, and does not impose on it. But that society seems to be far, far away, because all people have got their vested interests, and they cannot stop their trips; they have to use and exploit people.

Somebody becomes a president; you never think that he has become president at your cost, that something in you has been killed so that this man can become the president of the country.

If everybody was left unique, original, it would be impossible for the people who are presidents and prime ministers, who are ruling the whole world and who have been destroying the world for thousands of years and go on destroying it, to continue doing this.

With individuals there will be totally different kinds of societies: there will be communes, not societies. There will be no nations, because there is no need.

What is the need of nations?

The whole earth is one.

From Ignorance to Innocence

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Only on the maps do you go on drawing lines, and over those lines you go on fighting and killing and murdering. It is such a stupid game that unless the whole of humanity is mad, it is impossible to think how it goes on continuing. What is the need of nations? What is the need of passports and visas and boundaries? This whole earth belongs to us: wherever one wants to be, one has the right to be.

The sun is nobody’s property, the earth is nobody’s property, the moon is nobody’s property; the wind, the clouds, the rain – nothing is anybody’s property. Why do you draw these lines?

You can understand it easily... soon you will see lines on the moon. Right now there are not but soon you will see a Soviet zone, an American zone, a Chinese zone. Nobody lives there, nobody will ever live there. There seems to be no possibility of life growing on the moon. The moon is a dead planet – not a single drop of water. Yes, you can be there for a few hours with all your gas masks and oxygen cylinders and everything, but this is not the way that people can live there. But already they have put their flags....

There is nobody to see the flag, there is nobody to salute the flag – not even a bird sometimes to shit on the flag! The first thing the Americans did was to place a pole, and put up the flag. How idiotic! And for whom? But soon other fools will follow. They will go to Mars, they will go to other planets, and they will do the same thing everywhere.

There is no need for nations – except that politicians need nations because without nations there will be no politics – except that generals need nations, because without nations there will be no wars

– except that the factories that produce weapons will go out of production.

What will happen to your nuclear weapons plants and all the energy involved in them? – because if there are no nations there is no need to create nuclear weapons. For whom?

The simplest solution to save humanity is to remove from the map all the lines – and just from the map – on the earth there are no lines.

Just from the maps simply remove all the lines and you won’t have the third world war, and you will not need so many armies all around the world.

Millions of people are doing nothing except turning left, turning right.... If somebody is watching from above, he will be surprised. Why do people go on turning right, then left, then about turn, then march, then come back, disperse – every day millions of people all around the earth? He will certainly think something is wrong – some nut, some bolt, needs to be put right.

These nations can exist only if your personality is false.

These churches and religions can exist only if you don’t have your original face, because a man who has his own original face – what business has he to do that he needs to go to the pope? For what?

There is no reason why he should go to any religious teacher or to any temple or to any synagogue.

And why should he become a Mohammedan, a Christian, a Hindu?why?

With your original face you will feel so contented, so immensely fulfilled and at home that there will be no search left; you have found it.

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But these people will not allow you to find it. They will distract you, for the simple reason that they have some trips, they have some ideas of their own, and you have to be sacrificed for their ideas.

Politicians will sacrifice you for their politics. Religions will sacrifice you for their kind of politics.

Nobody is interested in the child, and the reason is clear: the child has to be molded into a certain pattern which fits in a society, in a nation, in a particular ideology.

In Russia the child has to be taught communism from the very beginning. He has to know the names of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin; they are their gods.

In non-communist countries it is the same thing only the names differ. Everybody is sacrificed to some stupid ideology, theology, politics, religion. That’s why people get distracted.

But the child allows it for the simple reason that he does not know who he is going to become.

Naturally he depends on his parents, elders – those who know better. And he is not aware that they don’t know better; they are in the same boat, as ignorant as the child. The only difference is, the child is innocent also. They are cunning but ignorant, and just because of their cunningness, they go on hiding their ignorance in borrowed knowledge.

My grandfather used to take me to any mahatma, any saint, and he used to say to me, ”If you don’t come then I am not going, because then it is so dull. You make it alive.” And I was simply raising very simple questions. What can a child do?

One Hindu monk, Swami Vidyananda, used to come to the town every rainy season. For four months he lectured there – he was a well-known teacher. The first day I went with my grandfather, I simply stood up; and because of my grandfather, nobody could throw me out or tell me to sit down.

Everybody knew about him, that he was a dangerous man in that matter. If anybody said, ”Boy, you sit down, you don’t understand such great things,” my grandfather would say ”But I don’t understand either, and I am seventy years old. So you keep quiet, you understand! AnD he would tell me, ”You ask.”

It was clear that they could not throw me out, they could not stop me, so I simply asked Vidyananda,

”One thing I want to know about what you are saying: is it borrowed or experienced? Now, remember that you are sitting in the temple of God.” It was a Rama Mandir, the best place in the town, the most precious temple of the town with a very beautiful marble hall – so all the best discourses were arranged there.

So I told him, ”You look at the statue of Rama; and remember that you are in a sacred place and remember your robe, that you are a monk. Don’t disgrace your robes and don’t disgrace your God; just say the truth: whatever you are saying, is it experienced? Do you know God? Have you seen God just the way you are seeing me? Have you talked with God the way you are talking with me?

Or have you just learned from the books?” There was a great silence. The man hesitated.

I said, ”Your hesitation says everything. You better tell the truth because if you have seen God, why should you hesitate? You feel a little afraid – I can see perspiration on your forehead, and it is cool inside.”

The man said, ”I never thought about it. But being a sannyasin and being in the temple of God, I cannot speak untruthfully. I have no experience. I am saying whatsoever I have heard and read and studied.”

From Ignorance to Innocence

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Then I said to him, ”Get out! Get out from this place immediately. Then find a person who has himself known, and bring him here. You are throwing borrowed rubbish on these poor people’s heads, and giving them the idea that they also know... because I know these fools, they are all from my own town, and they talk as if they know.”

And I told the people, ”Listen to your guru!” He was almost the guru of the whole city, because for years – he must have been sixty at that time – for years he had been visiting the town for four months every year. But that was the last time. Since then I have not heard about him in that town.

When I was traveling about India I went on enquiring about what happened to Vidyananda, whether he died or he was still alive; what happened? Finally I met him in a place I had never expected, near Madras, in Adyar. Adyar is the headquarters of the theosophical movement. I had gone to deliver a few talks in Madras, and my host wanted to go and see Adyar. Adyar is beautiful, the theosophists had done a really good job. They had made a beautiful place, but it is now Lying deserted, nobody goes there. They had made beautiful houses, cottages, a great garden – a whole colony.

Adyar has perhaps the biggest bo tree. When the theosophical movement was alive, underneath that bo tree they used to have their conventions; thousands of people can sit under its shade. And Adyar has perhaps one of the most precious libraries in the world. Theosophists had collected manuscripts from China, Tibet, Ladakh, Mongolia, Korea – strange places, strange languages –

and they have a very great underground library of ancient scripts. I found this man there in the library; he was working as a librarian, but he was no longer a monk.

I asked him, ”What happened?”

He said, ”That day you changed my whole life. After that I could not speak with the same authority as I had spoken before; I lost my courage. I tried, but every time the question arose in me that I don’t know, so why am I telling these people? Perhaps it is not right, perhaps it is right – who knows? I am committing a sin, because these people will start thinking that they know. That day in your city....” He had not been able to recognize me. I had to remind him because he had last seen me as a child. I could recognize him, although by then he was nearabout ninety; but from sixty to ninety, not much change happens.... Yes, you become older, but no basic change happens. He was older, fragile, but in a way younger, more alive.

I said to him, ”You are thirty years older now, but I can see your eyes are younger, more alive.” He said, ”Yes, because I have dropped that life of phoniness. Now I am simply what I am. I don’t know – i am searching but I don’t know that it will be possible to know in this life because so much is lost.

I said, ”Don’t ever be pessimistic. It can happen any day – it can happen today. If it is not happening that means that still somewhere you are carrying the borrowed. Can I ask you again, after thirty years, another question?”

He said, ”I will be obliged because that first question has done me a great service. It has taken away my monkhood, my mahatmahood, my followers – everything.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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I said, ”Why did you start working in the library as a librarian? – because this is again the same kind of business. Now you are searching in ancient scripts found in Tibet, found in Ladakh, found in Nepal. You are still not looking in yourself First you were searching for truth in printed books, now you are searching for it in hand-written ancient scripts, thinking that these people must have known. But you are again doing the same foolishness. Neither the printing press knows.... It goes on printing Bible after Bible – millions of Bibles – and the printing press remains just a printing press; it does not even become a Christian.

”And do you think in hand-written scripts you will be able to find? These people were just working as writers. They were simply copying, and they were being paid for it. It is not that they were knowers, they were copiers, and they were doing a primitive method of printing. In those days printing was not possible so people used to write, copying from one manuscript to another manuscript, and from that to another manuscript, and they would sell them. Do you think these people knew?” He said, ”Again you are right. I have been here for twenty years in this underground library, looking into all kinds of strange methods, ideologies – very impressive, very logical – but certainly I am doing the same thing; I am not looking in. Now you will not find me anywhere.” He dropped his job that very day. While I was still in Adyar he left. When I came back after walking around.... It is a big place and once it was a very throbbing commune; when Annie Besant was alive thousands of people lived there. When I came back to the main office and enquired about Vidyananda they said, ”He has left. What have you told him? – because after you met him in the library he came into the office and he said,’I am leaving, and leaving forever. I am finished with books. Although I am much too old.... But perhaps a few days may be enough, or at least before I die I should begin rightly. Perhaps in the next life I can complete my search, but at least I should begin.’ ”

Nobody is asking, ”What you know, is it your knowledge?” If it is not your knowledge, put it aside; it has no value. ”What you are doing, is it your aspiration? Do you really feel a bell ringing in your heart?” If it is not so then don’t waste a single moment more.

People go on doing things which other people have forced them to do – and people are going to continue to force them. It is most improbable that parents will stop forcing their children to be just images of their own idea, that teachers will stop forcing on them whatsoever they ”know”, as if they really know. They will go on pretending that they know.

My principal in high school was a mathematician. I was not a student of mathematics but I used to go to his office whenever I saw that he was alone and talk about higher mathematics – because now the older mathematics is not applicable any longer to physics, biology, chemistry, biochemistry.

They are going beyond it. So he told me, ”Why don’t you start attending my classes?” I said, ”I have no problem, I am not a student of mathematics, but whenever I am free and you have a class I would love to come if you allow me. But then don’t get disturbed by me because I will not just be dead there, I will be alive.”

He said ”What do you mean by being’alive’?”

I said, ”Exactly what it means: being alive. You just give me a chance and see.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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I was always interested in many things, trying to find out whether they were really based in knowing or were only hypothetical – because if they were hypothetical then they were not really true, they were just pragmatic, helpful, convenient. For example, Euclidian geometry – that’s the class he was teaching when he allowed me for the first day.... Now Euclid’s definitions – even a child can see that they are wrong. Euclid says: ”A line has length but no breadth.” Now, without breadth, how can a line be? It is so simple, one does not need to be a mathematician; I am not a mathematician, and I was not at all at that time. And I asked him, ”This is stupid what you are saying, that it has length but no breadth – it does have breadth. Draw a line on the board without breadth, just with length, then I will accept your hypothesis.”

He said, ”Now I know what you mean by being alive. I have done post – graduation mathematics and this question never came to my mind. Euclid says it; every school, every college, every university teaches it, so I never thought... but perhaps you are right. I can see, there is....” And I said, ”It is measurable. With the chalk you draw a line on the blackboard, and still you’re saying that it has no breadth. And’the point’ Euclid says,’has neither length nor breadth.’ Then how can it be? It may have a very, very small length, a very, very small breadth, but that does not mean that it has none. You just need a magnifying glass. You just wait and I will run to the chemistry lab and bring the magnifying glass and show you.

He said, ”There is no need to go – I can understand. But then, what am I to teach? Euclid is finished, because these are basic definitions.”

I said, ”These are hypotheses. Just one thing you have to accept, that these hypotheses are practical, but not truth.” So you have to find out about whatsoever you know – whether it is just hypothetical, useful in life, or really a truth that you know, that you have felt, that you have experienced. If it is only a hypothesis, put it aside and you will feel such an unburdening. All hypotheses, all borrowed knowledge that has gathered there and which you are carrying – you are dragging a mountainous load, you are being crushed under it – just put it aside.

Be ignorant, accept that ”I am ignorant.” And from that point you can start the search.

Every child is going to be burdened. I hope that someday it will not be so. In fact there is no need, because when you are teaching Euclid, you can teach very simply that this is not truth, it is only a hypothesis. With this hypothesis it becomes easier to understand the triangle, the circle and everything. But remember that at the base there is a hypothesis, and the whole palace is hypothetical.

Similarly, your God is a hypothesis and the whole pyramid of theology is based on nothing but that hypothesis. If you start looking into things it does not need great intelligence, it needs only simple innocence to see.

That principal called me into his office and he said, ”You are not to come again to my classes because now it will be difficult for me to deal with the children. They have seen me as ignorant. up to now I was an authority – you destroyed that.” But he was a sincere man in a way. He said, ”I can understand you, but don’t do it to any other teacher because they may not understand it. And now I know why so many complaints go on coming against you, that you are a disturbance. But this was From Ignorance to Innocence

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not a disturbance. You have opened my eyes, I will never again be able to be the same. But what puzzles me is that I never thought about it, I simply accepted it.” And that’s the point I want you to notice. You have accepted everything up to now: what they have said, you have accepted. You have to start questioning, doubting. Don’t be afraid of authorities –

there is no authority. Krishna or Christ, Mohammed or Mahavira – nobody is an authority. And if they are an authority, then they are an authority to themselves, not to you.

You will be an authority only to yourself if someday you come to know the truth of your own original face.

Then too, you will not be an authority to somebody else. Nobody can be an authority to anybody else.

This whole idea of authority has to disappear from the world.

Yes, people can share their experience, but that is not authority.

I don’t want to force anything on you – not a single word, not a single concept.

My whole effort is somehow to make you alert and beware of all authorities. And the moment you see there is some authority hanging around your being, throw it out.

Be finished with all that has been given to you, forced upon you, and the original face will start showing up.

You never know, you cannot even imagine what your original face will be, what your true being will be.

You will know only when you know, when you are face to face with yourself, when there is no hindrance of any kind and you are left totally alone.

In that aloneness have flowered all the beings that have flowered.

Not many have flowered. Only once in a while.... It is a strange tragedy that millions of people are born and only once in a while a person blossoms. That’s why I say there is no gardener, no God looking around, watching, caring, otherwise millions of trees and only one tree comes to flower...? Spring comes and goes and only one tree blossoms; millions of trees simply remain barren, unproductive. What kind of gardener is looking after the garden?

This is enough proof that there is no gardener, no God; but that does not mean that you have to become pessimistic. In fact that gives you a new dimension – that you have to be your own gardener. It is good that there is no God, because you can be your own gardener. But then the whole responsibility is yours, you cannot blame anybody.

I am taking the God away so that you cannot blame the poor old man. Enough He has been blamed for everything: He created the world, He created this, He created that.... I take all that blame away from Him – He does not exist.

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You have created Him just to throw your responsibility on Him. Take your responsibility back.

Accept your aloneness.

Accept your ignorance.

Accept your responsibility, and then see the miracle happening.

One day suddenly you see yourself in a totally new light, as you have never seen yourself before.

That day you are really born. Before that it was only a pre-birth process.

There are reasons why people have been distracted from their originality. First, you don’t know what your originality is. Second, there are people who are in a hurry to impose some idea of their own on you, because once that idea is imposed, you are psychologically enslaved.

A Christian cannot find truth, a Hindu cannot find truth, because Christianity is a prison, Hinduism is a prison. Somebody is burdened by the Koran and somebody else is burdened by the Torah.

So it is not a question of what has to be thrown – whatever it is.... That’s why with me, a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Jaina, a Buddhist, a Parsee, a Sikh – anybody can find something transpiring in him, because what I am saying is applicable to all.

Whether you are burdened with the Bible or the Koran makes no difference. I am not interested in you throwing the Bible, I am interested in you throwing any kind of garbage that you are carrying.

And I call it garbage because it has been given by others to you; it is not yours.

Remember it: only what you experience is yours.

What you know – only that you know.

Let it be very small, don’t be worried; seeds are very small, but a seed has potentiality. It is not a thing, it is a being who is ready to burst forth – it just needs the opportunity.

And that’s what to me is the function of the Master: to create the opportunity – not to give you knowledge – not to give you discipline – not to give you a doctrine or a dogma, but to create an opportunity where all these things slowly, slowly disappear. They are not clinging to you, you are holding onto them hard.

So when I say they disappear, I mean slowly, slowly you open your fist. Of course you take time because for so long you have thought that you are holding something precious, but even if you understand me, again and again the idea comes that perhaps if you drop it you may lose something precious. But there is nothing precious there.

Remember one criterion: anything precious is only that which you know, and there is no way to lose that which you know.

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Anything that can be lost, and which you have to cling to, cannot be precious because it can be lost.

That shows that it is not your experience.

So we have to accept that the society is going to continue the way it has continued, but we can find intelligent people and take them out of the society.

That’s what I mean by sannyas.

People cannot understand it because they think that I am trying to create a certain religion by giving you a certain dress, a certain identity.

No, I am not creating any religion.

It is absolutely religionless religion.

This dress I am giving you is simply so that you start having a distance from the crowd, so that the crowd pushes you out and does not allow you in. Otherwise you would like to be inside. Who wants to be outside the crowd? – it is so cozy there, so warm.

I give you this dress simply as a strategy, a device so that people will avoid you; wherever you go, people will turn away. That’s the only way to save you; you cannot mix with the crowd. Otherwise it would have been easier for me and easier for my sannyasins if I had not made you different – looking from other people. Many more people would have come here more easily. But I am not interested in many more people. I am not a politician, I am not a pope; what do I have to do with ”many” people?

I am interested only in those chosen few – intelligent, courageous, capable of coming out in the cold and dropping the coziness of the crowd and the mob. Just in the beginning it feels cold; soon your body has its own system of creating warmth. Your being soon starts creating its own aroma.

So we have to go on pulling people from the crowd, and continue to destroy whatsoever the crowd has given to them – because when you pull a person out of the crowd that person brings the crowd in his mind. You can pull the person out of the crowd very easily – it is not so difficult – but the person brings the crowd in his mind. Then the second part of the work is more difficult: to push the crowd out of his mind.

Both things have to be done: pull the person out of the crowd, and then push the crowd out of the person, so he is simply left alone.

And to me there is nothing greater than to be left utterly alone, in your pure, essential beinghood.

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CHAPTER 15

They say believe; I say explore

14 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

IS IT POSSIBLE FOR A POLITICIAN TO BE A RELIGIOUS MAN OR FOR A RELIGIOUS MAN TO

BE A POLITICIAN?

IT is absolutely impossible for a political man to be religious, because the ways of politics and religion are diametrically opposite.

You have to understand that it is not a question of adding something to your personality – religion is not an addition. If you are political, you can be a painter, you can be a poet, you can be a musician; these are additions.

Politics and music are not diametrically opposite; on the contrary, music may help you to be a better politician. It will be relaxing, it will help you to get unburdened of the whole day and the anxieties that a politician has to go through. But religion is not an addition, it is a diametrically opposite dimension.

So first you have to understand the political man, exactly what it means.

The political man is a sick man, psychologically sick, spiritually sick.

Physically he may be perfectly okay. Usually politicians are physically okay, their whole burden falls on their psyche. You can see that. Once a politician loses his power he starts losing his physical 196

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health. Strange... when he was in power, so burdened with so many anxieties and tensions, he was physically perfect.

The moment power is gone, all the anxieties are also gone; now, they will be somebody else’s business. His psyche is unburdened, but in that unburdening all his sickness falls on his body.

The politician suffers, as far as his physiology is concerned, only when he loses power; otherwise politicians tend to live long, physically well. Strange, but the reason is that their whole sickness is taken by their psyche, and when the psyche takes on the whole sickness, then the body can live unburdened. But if the psyche releases all its sickness, where is it going to go? Lower than the psychic is your physical existence – all sickness falls on the body. Politicians out of power die very soon. Politicians in power live very long. It is a known fact, but the cause is not well known.

So the first thing to be understood is that the political man is psychologically sick, and psychological sickness tends to become spiritual sickness when it becomes too much, when the psyche cannot hold it any more. Now, be careful: if the politician is in power, then his psychic sickness is bound to spread to his spiritual being, because he is holding his psychic sickness, so it does not fall downwards. It is his power, he thinks it is his treasure; he won’t allow it to fall down.

I am calling it sickness. To him it is his whole ego trip. He is living for it; there is no other purpose for him. So when he is in power he holds his sickness tightly, but he does not know anything about the spiritual realm, so those doors are open. He cannot close those doors; he has no idea that there is something more than his mind. When he is in power, his psychological sickness, if it is too much, after a certain point overflows his psyche and reaches to his spirituality. If he is out of power then he tends not to hold all that stupidity. Now he knows what it was, now he is aware that it was nothing worth holding. And anyway there is nothing to hold; the power is gone, he is a nobody.

Out of desperation, he relaxes – perhaps I should say, relaxation comes to him automatically. He can sleep now, he can go for a morning walk. He can gossip, he can play chess, he can do anything.

Psychically he finds himself loosening. The doors that he had kept closed between his psyche and the body start opening, and his body is bound to suffer now: he may have a heart attack, he may get any kind of sickness; everything is possible. His psychic sickness will flow to the weakest part of his body. But in power it flows upwards, towards his being, of which he is unaware.

And what is the sickness?

The sickness is the inferiority complex.

Anybody who is interested in power is suffering from an inferiority complex; deep down he feels himself worthless, inferior to others.

And certainly in many ways everybody is inferior You are not a Yehudi Menuhin, but there is no need to feel inferior because you never tried to be, and it is not your business. Yehudi Menuhin is not you either; so what is the problem? – where is the conflict?

But the political mind suffers from a wound of inferiority, and the politician goes on scratching the wound. Intellectually he is not an Albert Einstein – he compares himself with giants – psychologically From Ignorance to Innocence

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he is not a Sigmund Freud.... If you compare yourself with the giants of humanity you are bound to feel completely shrunk, worthless.

This worthlessness can be removed in two ways: one is religion, the other is politics.

Politics does not really remove it, only covers it. It is the same sick man, the same man who was feeling inferior, who sits as a president. But just sitting on a chair as the president, what difference can it make to your inner situation?

My first conflict with Morarji Desai happened exactly in such a situation. One of the great Jaina monks... great to the Jainas, not to me – to me he is the phoniest person you can find. In fact it is very difficult for me to compare him with any other phony person, he will defeat all. He had called a religious conference; that was their annual celebration, the birthday of their founder. Morarji Desai was invited. I was also invited. There were at least twenty guests from all over India, from every religion, from every direction of thought and ideology, and at least fifty thousand of Acharya Tulsi’s followers.

Before the meeting, Acharya Tulsi greeted the guests, these twenty special guests. It must have been about 1960, in a small beautiful place in Rajasthan, Rajsamund. It has such a beautiful lake, so big and vast, hence the name, Rajsamund. Samund, in Rajasthani means the ocean, and Raj means royal. It is so beautiful that the name exactly suits it. It is a royal ocean, very emperor-like.

The waves on it are almost as big as in the ocean. It is only a lake but you cannot see the other shore.

He called us to meet – before we all went and talked to the fifty thousand people who had gathered there – just to be introduced, and because he was the host who had invited us there. But from the very beginning trouble started.

The trouble was that he was sitting on a high pedestal and all the guests were sitting on the ground.

It was not a problem to anybody except to Morarji Desai, the politician. He was the only politician among those twenty people. Somebody was a scientist, D.S. Kothari who was chairman of the atomic energy commission in India – somebody was a vice chancellor.... From different directions those people had come, but it was not a problem for anybody.

Morarji said, ”I would like to start the conversation.” He was just sitting by my side. Neither he knew, nor I, that now a lifelong friendship was starting. He said, ”My first question is that you are the host, and we are the guests. Guests are sitting on the floor and the host is seated on a high pedestal. What kind of courtesy is this? If you were addressing a meeting it is understandable that you should sit higher so the people can see and hear you. But there are only twenty persons – and you are not addressing the meeting, just chit-chatting, just introducing people to each other before the conference, the real conference starts.”

Acharya Tulsi was at a loss. It would have been so easy for a real religious person to come down, and apologize, ”This is really a most idiotic error on my part.” But he did not budge from his place.

Instead he asked one of his chief disciples, who has now become his successor, Muni Nathmal,

”You answer the question.”

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Muni Nathmal was even more at a loss, nervous – what to say? Morarji Desai at that time was finance minister of India and that’s why they had invited him. They were making efforts to create a university of Jainism, and he was the man. If he was willing, then finance would not be a problem.

Muni Nathmal said, ”It is not any discourtesy to the guests, it is just our tradition that the head of the sect sits higher. And just a convention is being followed, nothing else is meant by it. Nobody is insulted by it.

Morarji is not an easy person to be silenced by such answers. He said, ”We are not your disciples, you are not our head. None of these twenty people here recognize you as their master or head.

You may sit on any pedestal you want amongst your disciples, your sect, your people – but we are guests. Secondly, you proclaim yourself a revolutionary saint, so why cling to a convention, tradition which is so uncivilized, uncultured?” That was one of the claims of Acharya Tulsi, that he was a revolutionary saint.

Now Nathmal was silent, Acharya Tulsi was silent, and all the other guests started feeling a little uneasy: this was not a good beginning.

I asked Morarji Desai, ”Although this is not my business, and I am not concerned at all, but seeing the situation, would you like me to answer you? It is just to start the conversation so this group does not end in an awkward situation.”

He said, ”I am concerned about the answer. Yes, you can answer.” I said to him, ”A few things: first, there are nineteen other persons, you are not alone here. Nobody else asked the question – why did only you ask it? It didn’t occur to me.” And I asked the people,

”Had the question occurred to you? If it has not occurred, please raise your hands.” All the eighteen hands were raised, that it didn’t occur to them.

Then I said to Morarji, ”You are the only person who felt hurt. You must be carrying a wound, you must be suffering from some inferiority – you are a psychological case. You can see: you know Doctor D.S. Kothari perfectly well, because he is chairman of the atomic commission of India; you know these other prominent people – nobody is bothered by it. And what does it matter?

Do you see the spider walking on the ceiling? – he is higher than Acharya Tulsi.... Just being higher, do you become greater? But somehow it hurts you. There is a wound in you which has not been filled even by being the finance minister of India. You would like to be one day the prime minister of India.”

He was very angry. He said, ”You call me psychologically sick?” I said, ”Certainly. These eighteen hands were raised for what? They are supporting me, they are saying,’This man seems to be very vulnerable as far as his ego is concerned, shaky’ – just a monk sitting a little higher, and it disturbs you.”

I said, ”Let us assume, for example: if Acharya Tulsi invites you also to sit with him on the high pedestal” – and let me remind you, even then Acharya Tulsi did not invite him. I said, ”For example, if he invites you and you are on the pedestal, will you ask the same question again for these eighteen poor souls who are sitting on the floor? Will the question ever arise?” From Ignorance to Innocence

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He said, ”That I have never thought of. Perhaps the question will not arise, because in hundreds of meetings and conferences, I have been sitting on the high pedestal, but the question has never arisen.”

I said, ”That makes it clear that it is not a question of why Acharya Tulsi is sitting higher than you.

The question is why you are sitting lower than Acharya Tulsi. Change the question to why are you sitting lower than Acharya Tulsi – this is what you should have asked. It would have been more authentic. You are projecting your sickness on somebody else.

”But perhaps that somebody else is also as sick as you, because if I was in his place... in the first place, I would not have sat there – if I was the host and you were my guests. Secondly, if by chance, by some coincidence, I was sitting there, the moment you asked the question I would have come down. That would have been enough of an answer:’There is no problem; it is just our convention and I forgot that you are my guests, because only once a year do I meet guests, but every day I meet my disciples. So just forgive me and let us start our conversation for which we have gathered.’

”But he did not come down. He has no guts. He is sitting there almost dead, he cannot even breathe he is so afraid. And he has no answer – he asked his secretary to answer you. And the question that you have raised about which he is also silent, is that he has been proclaiming himself a revolutionary saint. He is neither a revolutionary, nor a saint, so what answer can he give to you? But my basic concern is not him, my basic concern is you. This is the political mind who is always thinking in terms of lower and higher, in terms of power.”

Of course he was angry, and is still angry, and has remained angry for all these twenty-four, twenty-five years. And he has been in positions from where he could have harmed me, but he has no guts either. He was deputy prime minister and then became prime minister. Before he became prime minister, he had even asked my help. He had called me, unaware – later on he came to know that to call me was absolutely absurd. He was Indira Gandhi’s deputy prime minister; the post is not in the constitution itself

The first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, had a clash with another disciple of Gandhi’s, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The clash was such that if voting was allowed then Vallabhbhai Patel would have won. He was a real politician. He was just like Joseph Stalin.

Joseph Stalin was the secretary of the communist party when the revolution happened. He was not a great leader or anything. His function was in the office – he was the head clerk of the communist party to put it exactly. But because he was the secretary, he knew everything, everything passed through his hands. Every person had to be acquainted with him, and he had a tremendous grip on people.

The same was the situation with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He was a man, very strong, I told you, just like Joseph Stalin. Stalin is not his real name, it was just given to him because it means in Russian, ”man of steel”. Strangely, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was called in India lauha purush, that also means ”man of steel”. It is exactly the translation of ”stalin”.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had a grip on the organization, an inside grip. He was not an impressive person like Jawaharlal in public. If the whole of India was going to vote, Jawaharlal would have won, From Ignorance to Innocence

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nobody was going to win against him. But if the voting was going to be inside the congress party, the ruling party, then Vallabhbhai could have defeated anybody.

To avoid this voting, because this was going to be a party decision, Gandhi said, ”It will be good to create one post of deputy prime minister, so Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel will be happy that he is, if not the first, at least the second man.” And there is every chance, anytime, for the second man to be the first man, once you throw the first man out or he dies or something happens.

And Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was clever enough to throw out the man who was in front of him.

Jawaharlal was innocent in that way. He was not a politician at all. So without any constitutional basis for it, immediately an amendment was made that there would be a post of deputy prime minister It was created for.Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Once Nehru and Patel both died the post was dissolved, because it was unconstitutional, but it was again revived with Indira and Morarji Desai. The same conflict: Indira was Jawaharlal’s daughter, and Morarji Desai is almost a politically adopted son of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He was his disciple in politics, the chief disciple.

Morarji became aware later on, that it was my suggestion to Indira to throw him out. And I had suggested it just by the way. I was talking for almost an hour to her. She listened, and in the end said only, ”Whatever you are saying is right and should be done, but you don’t know my situation: my cabinet is not mine, my deputy prime minister is not mine. There is so much conflict and continual fighting in the cabinet; he is trying to throw me out by hook or by crook, any way, and to become the prime minister.

”If I say the things – that you are saying, everybody will be with him, nobody is going to be with me – because the things that you are suggesting are so much against the Indian mind, the Indian tradition, the Indian way of thinking, that nobody is going to support me. If you want, I can propose it before the cabinet, but the next day you will hear that Indira is no more prime minister.” Then just by the way I said, ”Then why don’t you throw out Morarji Desai first, because he is the man who will manipulate all others. All those others are pygmies. They don’t have any national character, they are all provincial people. In certain states, in Bengal or in Andhra or in Maharashtra they are important, but a provincial person cannot fight with you, he has no grounds.

”Only one man can manipulate all those pygmies, and that is Morarji Desai; so first finish him. And they all will be with you if you finish him; because of him nobody out of them can become the second man. So create the situation that this man is blocking the way of everybody, throw him out, and nobody is going to support him.”

And exactly that happened: within eight days Morarji Desai was thrown out, and nobody supported him. They were all happy because now they were all equal; nobody was of national importance except Indira. So once Indira was gone, died, or something happened, then those pygmies were bound to have the power; otherwise they could not have it. So Morarji’s removal was almost half the journey finished; now Indira was the only problem.

Morarji was not aware of it, but later on he became aware. Indira’s secretary, who was listening from the other room, told him. But before the secretary told him, Morarji Desai had asked me to help him.

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He said that he had been thrown out and it was unfair, unjust; without being given any reason, any cause, he had been just told to resign.

And he said, ”The strangest thing is that just eight days before there was no question of any change, there was no conflict between me and her. And another strange thing is I had always thought that the other people would support me against Indira. When I was thrown out, not a single cabinet minister was against it. They rejoiced! They had a party, a celebration!” He said to me, ”I need help.” I said, ”You have asked the wrong person. I would be the last person in the world to help you. If you were drowning in a river, and I was going along the side, and you shouted’Help! Help! I am drowning!’ I would say,’Do it quietly. Don’t disturb my morning walk.’ ” He said, ”What! Are you joking?”

I said, ”I am not. With politicians I never joke; I am very serious.” Later on he found out that it was my suggestion basically that got stuck in Indira’s mind; it was clear mathematics that if she threw this man out then there was nothing to be worried about: all those others were provincial people. Then she could do whatever she wanted to do and nobody could oppose her, because nobody represented India as such. And India is such a big country – thirty states – that if you represent one state, what does it matter? So it stuck in her mind. And Morarji became even more inimical.

Just as he had asked my help, he was asking everybody’s help, whomsoever he thought had some kind of power over people – he was asking everybody. He was a beggar. And he found one man who was a national character, Jaiprakash Narayan, but he was never in politics. He had renounced politics, and he was a sincere man, but as I go on explaining to you, even the sincerest man....

He was a great public servant, he did much service for India in many ways, but he proves my point.

His whole life he devoted to the freedom struggle, and after freedom Jawaharlal wanted him to be his successor – he refused. Naturally, anybody would think that he was a humble man – what more humility, what more meekness? He accepted to remain a nobody when Jawaharlal was offering him, ”Just be in my cabinet and I will make you my successor. I am ready to declare it.” And he was capable of being the right successor to Jawaharlal.

Morarji went to him too, and Jaiprakash Narayan agreed to help him for a strange reason – that’s why I am telling the story so that you understand that even such a man, who could renounce the premiership of India, was still a deep egoist. That renunciation was not out of humbleness, the renunciation was out of ego – that ”I don’t care.” Perhaps the very idea that Jawaharlal was offering him the successorship was not acceptable to his ego. He can become the prime minister on his own. Who are you to announce, proclaim, declare that he is your successor?

He had his own authority, and he was very influential – perhaps next to Jawaharlal in India, he was the most loved by the people. And the love became more and more as Jawaharlal became more and more engulfed in politics, and became farther and farther away from the people. Jaiprakash became more and more close to the people, and the people started loving him because, ”Here is a man who can renounce.” And in India, renunciation is the last word – you cannot go beyond that.

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That is the highest point. But a small thing triggered him and all the humanity, all the meekness, everything disappeared.

I have told you that the richest man in India, Jugal Kisore Birla, had offered to give me a blank checkbook if I was ready to spread Hinduism to the world at large, and create a movement in India to force the government to ban cow slaughter. When I refused him he said, ”Young man, you think twice because Jawaharlal gets money from me, Jaiprakash Narayan gets money from me, Ram Manohar Lohia gets money from me, Ashok Mehta gets money from me.” All these were the topmost leaders.

He said, ”And every month I am giving them money, as much as they need. Even to Ashok Mehta who is the president of the socialist party of India, which is against the rich people – even he is my man.” He said, ”I give to all party presidents, important people; whoever comes to power he will be my man. Let them talk what they talk; talking does not matter – I have purchased them.” I told Indira about Jaiprakash, just in that conversation in which I talked about Morarji – to throw him out. She was shocked! She could not believe it because she called him uncle; he was almost like a brother to Jawaharlal. He had been Jawaharlal’s secretary for many years and their relationship was very close. And Indira was brought up in front of his eyes. When she was just a small child she used to call him ”Kaka” – uncle.

And when I said, ”Jugal Kisore himself has told me, and I don’t think that old man was telling a lie. In fact, how does Jaiprakash maintain himself? – because he does not belong to any party. He does not have any group of supporters; he has renounced politics. He does not earn a single pai. How does he manage to have two secretaries, one typist? How does he manage to travel in airplanes continually? Money must be coming from somewhere, and he has no visible source. My feeling is that Jugal Kisore was not lying.”

Indira mentioned this to Jaiprakash: ”Do you get a salary every month from the Birla house?” And that was the thing that hit him hard; that was when he decided that Indira could no longer be tolerated. He willingly became a partner of Morarji Desai’s and all the people – it always happens whenever you are in power that you manage to create enemies – all the enemies were together. But Jaiprakash was the key. Morarji is not capable of gathering anybody – he is simply retarded – but Jaiprakash was an intelligent man.

He managed to overturn the government and to show his last renunciation: that although he had overturned the government, he was not going to be the prime minister. He wanted to prove that he was higher than Jawaharlal. That was his only, his deepest longing – to be higher than Jawaharlal.

So he placed Morarji Desai in the prime ministership just to show to history: ”Somebody was trying to place me as premier, but I don’t care about these premierships – I can create my own premiers.” But it was all ego.

I used to speak in Patna – Maitreya will be aware of the fact – and because Jaiprakash also belonged to Patna, his wife used to come to attend my meetings. I was puzzled. I enquired of my host, ”The wife comes, but I never see Jaiprakash.”

He laughed, he said, ”I asked the same question of Prakashwati, Jaiprakash’s wife. She said,’He From Ignorance to Innocence

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comes but he sits in the car outside and listens from there. He cannot gather courage to come in and let it be seen by people that he has come to listen to somebody.”’

The ego is so subtle and so slippery. And the politician is sick because of his ego.

Now there are two ways: either he can cover the wound by becoming a president, a prime minister....

He can cover the wound, but the wound is there. You can deceive the whole world but how can you deceive yourself? You know it. It is there, you have covered it.

I am reminded of a strange story. It happened in Prayag, the very holy place for Hindus, where three rivers meet. You know in India the whole country is treated as a toilet; there is no demarcation where the toilet is and where it is not. Wherever you can find a place – that is the toilet.

One brahmin, early in the morning, must have gone to take his bath, and before his bath he went to defecate. Perhaps he was in a hurry, perhaps he had some stomach trouble or something, but he just went on the ghat. ”Ghat” means the paved place where people put their clothes and go to take their bath. It is not allowed; nobody prevents you, but it is not conventionally allowed, on that paved place where people are going to put their clothes, that you defecate.

But the man must have been in trouble. I can understand, I don’t doubt his intention – I never doubt anybody’s intention. He defecated there, and as he was finishing he saw people coming. So he simply covered his shit with the flowers that he had brought to worship with. What else to do?

The people arrived and they asked, ”What is this?” And he said, ”A shivalinga – I am worshipping.” And he started worshipping, and because a brahmin was worshipping, others started pouring their flowers on it – a shivalinga had appeared! It is thought to be a great miracle in India – whenever any statue just appears or whenever you want to create a miracle, this is the simplest way. Other people started chanting mantras, and what to say of that man... he was feeling so bad. Not only had he dirtied the place, he had lied. One lie begets another lie, and then... now what was he doing? He was worshipping it, and others were worshipping it!

But how can you forget it? Is there any way for this man to forget what is under the flowers?

The same is the situation of the politician – just pus, wounds, inferiority, feeling worthless.

Yes, he has reached higher and higher, and on each step of the ladder, the hope was that on the next step the wound would be healed.

Inferiority creates ambition, because ambition simply means an effort to prove yourself superior.

There is no other meaning to ambition but an effort to prove yourself superior.

But why make an effort to prove yourself superior unless you are suffering from inferiority?

I have never voted in my life. My uncles, my two uncles – I have two uncles who both were in the freedom struggle – both have been to jail. Neither of them could complete his education because From Ignorance to Innocence

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they were caught and imprisoned. One uncle was just here for the festival. He was only in his matriculation class when he was caught, because he was part of a conspiracy to destroy a train, to bomb a bridge. They were making a bomb – and he was a student of chemistry, so he used to bring from the chemistry lab things needed to make the bomb. He was caught when he was just going to take the examination, just ten days before. And his education was finished, because after three years when he came back it was too late to start again.

So he went into business. My elder uncle was in his B.A. final when he got caught, because he was also part of a conspiracy group against the government. My whole family was political, except my father. So they were all asking me, ”Why don’t you register, why don’t you vote? – and why are you wasting your energies? If you move in the direction of politics you can become the president of the country, you can become the premier of the country.” I said, ”You have completely forgotten with whom you are talking. I don’t suffer from any inferiority, so why should I be interested in becoming the president of the country? Why should I waste my life in becoming the president of the country? It is almost as if I have no cancer and you want me to be operated on for cancer – it is strange. Why should I be operated on unnecessarily?

You suffer from some inferiority complex, and you are projecting your inferiority complex on me. I am perfectly okay as I am. I am absolutely grateful to existence wherever I am. Today whatsoever happens is good. More than that I have never asked, so there is no way to disappoint me.” They said, ”You talk of strange things. What is this inferiority complex and what has this inferiority complex to do with politics?”

I said, ”You don’t understand simple psychology and neither do your great politicians understand simple psychology.” All these politicians on top in the world are sick people, so one way is to go on covering their wound. Yes, they can deceive others. When Jimmy Carter smiles you are deceived, but how can jimmy Carter deceive himself? He knows it is just an exercise of the lips. There is nothing else inside, no smile.

People reach to the highest rung of the ladder, then they become aware that their whole life has been a wastage. They have arrived, but where? They have arrived to the place for which they had been fighting – and it was not a small fight; it was tooth and nail – and destroying so many people, using so many people as means, and stepping on their heads.

You have arrived at the last rung of the ladder but what have you gained? You have simply wasted your whole life. Now even to accept it needs tremendous courage. It is better to go on smiling and go on keeping the illusion: at least others believe that you are great. You know who you are. You are exactly the same as you were – perhaps worse, because all this struggle, all this violence has made you worse.

You have lost all your humanity.

You are no longer a being.

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people who discover their being have – they have it. Others are simply living in the illusion, because scriptures say, and all the religions preach, that you are born with a soul.” Gurdjieff was very drastic. He said, ”It is all nonsense. You are not born with a soul. You have to earn it, you have to deserve it. And I can understand what he means, although I will not say that you are not born with a soul.

You are born with a soul but that soul is only a potential, and whatsoever Gurdjieff is saying is exactly the same.

You have to bring that potential to actuality. You have to earn it. You have to deserve it.

The politician recognizes it when his whole life has gone down the drain. Now, either he has to confess... which seems very stupid because he is confessing that his whole life has been the life of an idiot.

Wounds are not healed by covering.

Religion is a cure.

The word meditation and the word medicine come from the same root. Medicine is for the body; what medicine is for the body, meditation is for the soul. It is medicinal, it is a cure.

You ask me, can the politician be religious?

Remaining a politician, it is impossible. Yes, if he drops politics, then he is no more a politician – he can become a religious man. So I am not dividing... I am not preventing the politician from becoming religious. What I am saying is: as a politician he cannot be religious because those are two different dimensions.

Either you cover your wound or you cure it. You can’t do both together. And to cure it you have to uncover it – not cover it. Uncover it, know it, go deep into it, suffer it.

To me that is the meaning of austerity, not standing in the sun – that is an idiotic act. And particularly in Oregon you should not do that.

Stand in the sun, the Oregonian sun and the Oregonian atmosphere, and you will become immediately the Idiot General of Oregon. Avoid it! Or starving yourself or standing in the cold, in the river, for days together; this is not the way to cure yourself You are just being befooled. Anybody who knows nothing is going to give you advice: ”Do this and you will be cured,” but it is not a question of doing something for the cure.

What is needed is an exploration of your whole being – unprejudiced, without condemnation, because you will find many things which you have been told are bad, evil. So don’t shrink back, let them be. You simply need not condemn them.

You have started on an exploration. Just note that something is there, note it and go on. Don’t condemn it, don’t name it. Don’t bring any prejudice against or for, because that’s what prevents you from exploring. Your inner world closes immediately, you become tense: something evil? – you go From Ignorance to Innocence

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inside and you see something, and you become afraid that it is evil: greed, lust, anger, jealousy....

My God! – all these things, in me! – it is better not to go in.

That’s why millions of people don’t go in.

They simply sit on the staircase outside their house. They live on the porch their whole life. It is a porch life! They never open the door of their house. And the house has many chambers, it is a palace. If you go in you will come across many things which others have told you are wrong. You don’t know, you simply say, ”I am an ignorant man. I don’t know who you are in here. I have just come to explore, to do a survey.” And a surveyor need not be bothered about what is good and what is bad, he simply goes on looking, watching, observing.

And you will be surprised by the strangest experience: that what you have called love up to now, just hidden behind it is hate. Just take note....

What you have been saying up to now is humbleness, just behind it is hidden your ego. Just take note....

If somebody asks me, ”Are you a humble man?” I cannot say ”I am,” because I know humbleness is only the ego standing on its head. I am not an egoist, how can I be humble? Do you understand me? It is impossible to be humble without having an ego. And once you have seen that both are together, the strangest thing happens, as I was telling you.

The moment you see that your love and your hate, your humbleness and ego are one, they evaporate.

You are not to do anything at all. You have seen their secret. That secret was helping them to remain in you. You have seen the secret, now there is no place for them to hide. Go in again and again, and you will find less and less things there. Gatherings inside you are withering, crowds are going away. And the day is not far off when you will be left alone, and there is nobody: emptiness is in your hands. And suddenly you are cured.

Don’t compare at all – because you are you, and somebody else is somebody else. Why should I compare myself with Yehudi Menuhin or with Pablo Picasso? I don’t see the point at all. They are doing their thing, I am doing my thing. They are enjoying doing their thing... perhaps – because about them I cannot be certain. But I am certain about myself, that I am enjoying whatsoever I am doing or not doing.

I said I cannot be certain about them because Pablo Picasso was not a happy man, in fact very unhappy. His paintings show his inner misery in many ways and he has spread that misery on the canvas.

And why did Picasso become the greatest painter of this age? The reason is: because this age knows inner suffering the most.

Nobody would have thought him a painter five hundred years ago. They would have laughed, and they would have put him into a mental institute. And five hundred years ago, mental institutes were From Ignorance to Innocence

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not easy places to be in. They did all kinds of things, particularly beating, because they thought it was possible to beat the madness out. Because madness was thought of as something like an evil spirit possessing you. A good beating every day, and they thought the madness would go.

They used – just three hundred years ago – to take the blood out of the madman, so he became weakened. They thought that his energies were being possessed by the evil spirit; if you took his energies out, the evil spirit would leave the place because there was nothing to feed on – it was feeding on his blood. Good logic – and they were doing just that.

Nobody would have thought that these were paintings. Only this century could believe that Picasso is a great painter, because this century suffers, is a little alert of suffering, of inner misery – and this man has put it in color.

What you cannot put even in words, Picasso has been able to put in color. You don’t understand what it is, but somehow you feel a deep at-one-ment. It has an appeal, something clicks in you. It is not intellectual because you cannot figure out what it is, but you remain stuck watching, looking, as if it were a mirror and something of your inside, of your intestines, is there. Picasso’s paintings became the greatest in this age because they served almost like an X-ray. They brought your misery out. That’s why I said ”perhaps”. And about anybody else I can only say perhaps.

Only about myself can I be certain.

I know that if you go on exploring your inner world without condemnation, without appreciation, without thinking at all, just watching the facts – they start disappearing.

A day comes, you are left alone, the whole crowd is gone away; and in that moment, for the first time you feel what psychic healing is.

And from psychic healing the door opens to spiritual healing.

You need not open it, it opens on its own. You just reach to the psychic center and the door opens.

It has been waiting for you, perhaps for many lives. When you come, the door immediately opens, and from that door, you not only see yourself, you see the whole existence, all the stars, the whole cosmos.

Hence I can say absolutely: no politician can become religious unless he drops politics. Then he is not a politician, and what I am saying does not refer to him.

You have also asked, can a religious man become a politician? That is even more impossible than the first because there is no reason at all for him to become one. If inferiority is the cause that drives you into ambition, then how can a religious man become a politician? – there is no driving force. But once in a while it has happened in the past, and it may happen in the future, so let me say it to you.

In the past it was possible because the world was dominated by the monarchy. Once in a while, the king’s son might turn out to be a poet. It is very difficult for a poet to become the president of America; who is going to listen to him? People think he is crazy, and he will look like a hippy. He cannot shape up himself, and he is trying to shape up the whole world?

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But in the past it was possible because of the monarchy. The last emperor of India, from whom the Britishers took over, was a poet – that is why Britishers could take over India – Bahadurshah Zafar, one of the greatest Urdu poets. Now, it is not possible for a poet to become an emperor; it was just accidental that he was born a son to an emperor.

The enemy forces were entering the capital and he was writing poetry. When his prime minister knocked on the door and said, ”It is absolutely urgent... because the enemies have entered the capital,” Bahadurshah said, ”Don’t disturb me. I am writing just the last four lines. I think I will be able to finish these four lines before they come here. Don’t disturb.” And he started writing. He finished his poem; that was more important for him.

And he was such a simple and good man; he came out and he said, ”What is this nonsense of killing people? If you want the country you take it, what is the fuss about? I was burdened with all the anxieties, now you be burdened with all the anxieties. Leave me alone.” But they would not leave him alone because these were politicians and generals. To leave this man in New Delhi was dangerous... he may collect his forces, he may have resources – nobody knows.

They took him out of India into Burma; he died in Rangoon. In his last poem that he wrote from his deathbed, he said, ”How poor I am. I cannot get even six feet in my beloved’s street.” He is talking about his New Delhi which he loved, which he had created; and he was a poet so he made the city as beautiful as possible. He said, ”I cannot get even six feet to be buried in my own beloved’s street.

How unfortunate Zafar” – Zafar was his poetic name – ”How unfortunate, Zafar, you are.” He was buried in Rangoon; they did not even bring his dead body to New Delhi. He insisted, ”At least when I am dead take my body to my city, to my country. A dead body cannot be dangerous.” But politicians and generals think in different ways. Bahadurshah was the emperor loved by the people. Seeing him dead...”There may be a revolt, there may be some trouble, why get into trouble?

Bury him there in Rangoon. Nobody will even hear for years that he has died.” So in the old monarchical days it was possible that in the western hemisphere a man like Marcus Aurelius could happen. He was a religious man, but this was just accidental. Marcus Aurelius cannot become a president or a prime minister today because he would not go asking for votes; he would not beg – for what?

In India it happened a few times. Ashoka, one of the great emperors of India, was a religious man.

He was so religious that when his son asked – the only son, who was going to be the successor

– to become a monk, he danced! He said, ”This is what I have been waiting for, that one day you would understand.” Then his daughter, his only daughter – he had only two children, one son and one daughter.... When the daughter, Sanghamitra, asked him – she also wanted to go into the world of meditation – he said, ”Go. This is my only happiness.” But today this is impossible.

In India there was one great king, Poras; he fought against Alexander the Great. And you will be surprised at how western books have been unfair to this man Poras. Alexander the Great becomes a pygmy in front of Poras. When they reached India, Alexander played a trick – he was a politician....

Alexander sent his wife to meet Poras, on a particular day. There is a day in India, the day of the sisters, when the sister just binds a thread on your wrist. You may be her real brother, you may not From Ignorance to Innocence

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be her real brother, but the moment she binds the thread on your wrist you become a brother to her.

And it is a double oath: the brother says, ”I will protect you,” and the sister says, ”I will pray for your protection.”

On that particular day, Alexander sent his wife to Poras. He was staying outside Poras’ kingdom.

There is a river that was the boundary of Poras’ kingdom; he was staying outside, and he sent his wife. And when it was declared in Poras’ court, ”The wife of Alexander the Great wants to meet you,” he came out to greet her, because in India that was a tradition. Even if the enemy comes to your home, he is a guest, and the guest is a god.

He took her into his court, gave her a throne to sit on, and asked, ”You could have called me. There was no need for you to come that long way.”

She said, ”I have come to make you my brother. I have no brother, and today is the sisters’ day, I heard; I could not resist.” And this was just a political game. And Poras could understand what Alexander and his wife understood about sisters’ day, and why Alexander waited up to this day to send his wife... but he said, ”This is perfectly right. If you don’t have any brother, I am your brother.” She had brought the thread; she tied it and Poras touched her feet. The brother has to touch the feet of the sister; whether she is younger or older does not matter.

A tremendous respect for womanhood has been there, side by side with a tremendous bitterness against women. Perhaps the bitterness was created by the monks and the priests, and the respect was created by the religious people. Immediately Alexander’s wife asked, ”Now you are my brother, and I hope that you will save me, but the only way to save me is not to kill Alexander. Would you like your sister to remain a widow all her life?”

Poras said, ”There is no question about it. You need not speak about it – it is settled. Alexander will not be touched at all. Now we are related.”

And this happened.... The next day Alexander attacked. And a moment came in the fight when Poras killed Alexander’s horse; Alexander fell from the horse and Poras was on his elephant – because in India, the elephant was the real fighter’s animal, not the horse. The elephant was just going to put his feet on Alexander – and Alexander would have been finished. And just by habit Poras pulled out his spear and was going to kill Alexander, when he saw the thread on his wrist. He put his spear back, told the mahout, the man who guides the elephant, ”Move away... and inform Alexander that I will not kill him.”

That was the moment when Alexander would have been killed, and all his desire of conquering the world would have been finished; the whole of history would have been different. But Poras was a religious man, made of a different mettle: ready to be defeated but not ready to be demoralized. And he was defeated – he missed his chance.

And Poras was brought before Alexander in his court, a temporary court, with chains on his hands and his legs. But the way he walked... even Alexander said to him, ”You are still walking like an emperor, even with chains on your feet and chains on your hands.” Poras said, ”This is my way of walking. It has nothing to do with my being an emperor or a prisoner; this is my way of walking. This is how I am.”

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Alexander asked him, ”How would you like to be treated?” Poras said, ”What a question!

An emperor should be treated like an emperor What a stupid question.”

Alexander says in his notes, ”I have never come across a man like Poras. He was in chains, imprisoned – I could have killed him immediately, then and there – but the way he walked, the way he talked....” Alexander was really impressed. He said, ”Take away his chains; he will remain an emperor anywhere. Give his kingdom back to him. But,” he said to Poras, ”before we leave I would like to ask you one question. When the chance was there when you could have killed me, why did you pull your spear back? – just one more second and I’d have been finished – or your elephant could have crushed me, but you prevented it. Why?” Poras said, ”Don’t ask that. You know it; you are a politician, I am not. This thread – do you recognize it? You had sent this thread with your wife; now she is my sister, and I cannot kill my own brother-in-law. It is not possible for me to make her a widow. I chose to be defeated rather than to kill you. But there is no need for you to feel obliged towards me; this is just how a really centered man should behave.”

So in the past it was possible because of the monarchy. But with the monarchy, idiots also became kings, madmen also became kings, everything was possible. So I am not supporting monarchy, I am simply saying that it was possible with the monarchy for a religious man, by accident, to become an emperor.

In the future, democracy is not going to last long, because the politician already is ignorant before the scientist; he is already in the hands of the scientist.

The future belongs to the scientist, not to the politician.

That means we will have to change the word ”democracy”. I have a word for it, ”meritocracy”.

Merit will be the decisive factor. Not whether you can gather votes by canvassing all kinds of promises and hopes, but your merit, your real power in the scientific world will decide. And once government comes into the hands of the scientist, then everything is possible because I have called science, objective religion; and religion, subjective science.

Once it comes into the hands of science, the world map will be different, because what is the fight between the Soviet scientist and the American scientist? They are both working on the same projects; it will be far quicker if they are together. This is sheer stupidity, that all over the world the same experiments are being repeated in every nation; it is unbelievable. All these people together can do miracles. Divided, it becomes more expensive.

For example, if Albert Einstein had not escaped from Germany then who would have won the second world war? Do you think America and Britain and Russia would have won the second world war?

No. A single man’s escape from Germany, Albert Einstein escaping from Germany, has shaped history. All these bogus names: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler – they don’t mean anything. That man did the whole thing because he created the atom bomb. He wrote a letter to Roosevelt: ”The atom bomb is ready with me, and unless you use it there is no way to stop the war.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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He regretted it his whole life, but that’s another story. The atom bomb was used – President Truman authorized it – and the moment it was used then there was no question of Japan going on fighting.

The war was won: Hiroshima and Nagasaki burning ended the second world war. Albert Einstein was working on the same project in Germany. He could have written to just a different address –

instead of to Roosevelt, to Adolf Hitler – and the whole of history would have been different, totally different.

The future is going to be in the hands of the scientist. It is not far away. Now there are nuclear weapons, politicians cannot manage to be on top. They know nothing about it, not even the ABC.

It was said while Einstein was alive that only twelve persons in the whole world understood his theory of relativity. One of these twelve people was Bertrand Russell who wrote a small book for those who could not understand it: THE ABC OF RELATIVITY. He thought that at least they could understand the ABC – but even that is not possible, because if you can understand the ABC then the whole alphabet becomes simple. It is not a question of only understanding the ABC; then XYZ

is not far away. The real problem is to understand the ABC.

Now all these politicians don’t understand anything at all. Sooner or later the world is going to be in the hands of the people who have merit. First it will move into the hands of the scientists.

This you can take almost as a prediction, that the world is going to move into the hands of the scientists. And then a new dimension opens up.

Sooner or later the scientist is going to invite the sage, the saint, because he cannot manage it alone.

The scientist cannot manage himself. He can manage everything but he cannot manage himself.

Albert Einstein may know all about the stars of the universe, but he knows nothing about his own center.

This is going to be the future: from politicians to scientists, from scientists to religious man – but that will be a totally different kind of world. Religious people cannot go asking... you will have to ask them. You will have to request them. And if they feel that your request is sincere and the need is there, they may act in the world. But remember it will not be politics at all.

So let me repeat, the politician can become religious if he drops politics; otherwise it is impossible.

The religious man can become part of politics if politics changes its whole character, otherwise it is impossible for a religious man to be in politics. He cannot be a politician.

But the way things are moving, it is absolutely certain that first the world will go into the hands of the scientist, and next, from the scientist it will go to the mystics. And only in the hands of the mystics can you be safe yourself.

The world can be really a paradise.

In fact, there is no other paradise unless we make one here.

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CHAPTER 16

Let’s not face it – you’re absolutely alone

15 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

IS THE HYPOTHESIS OF GOD NOT USEFUL IN ANY WAY? – BECAUSE THE VERY IDEA OF

DROPPING THE IDEA OF GOD MAKES ME IMMENSELY AFRAID.

IT is already too late. The moment one starts calling the idea of God a hypothesis, the idea of God is already dropped.

The so-called religious people will never use the word hypothesis for God. For them God is not our hypothesis, but on the contrary we are His creation, He is the very source of existence, He is the most existential being.

But when you call God a hypothesis that means you are putting Him in the same category as Euclidian hypotheses in geometry, or other hypotheses which are only assumptions; they may prove right, they may not prove right. Only experiment, experience is going to decide it, and that too will not be an ultimate decision because future experiments may cancel it.

A hypothesis is an assumed fact – for the time being accepted as true, but only for the time being.

Nobody can say it will be true tomorrow too. In three hundred years of scientific growth you can see it: something was true for Newton, it is not true for Rutherford; it was true for Rutherford, it is not true for Albert Einstein. Better experiments, better instruments can always change the hypothesis.

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So no theologian is going to call God a hypothesis – He is the very truth, and He is not dependent on your experiments. If you cannot find Him it is your failure, not a proof that God does not exist. If you succeed, of course, He exists. If you fail, you fail; God still exists.

Hypothesis is a scientific term, not a theological concept; and science is very honest. Theology is just the opposite, very dishonest.

The very word theology shows its dishonesty, insincerity. Theo means God, logy means logic. But nobody has ever offered any logic about God. Every argument goes against God; no argument has been yet produced which proves God. Still they go on calling it theology – logic of God. It would have been more honest for them to call God a hypothesis, but you cannot worship a hypothesis, can you?

Knowing that this is only a hypothesis, perhaps right, perhaps wrong... but worship is not possible with a perhaps, with a maybe; worship needs a blind faith that it is so. Even if all the evidences go against it, then too it is so. That’s the meaning of faith. Faith is not logic, it is absolutely illogical.

And to call the idea of God a hypothesis means destroying all the churches, all the temples, all the synagogues.

The very word hypothesis is very significant: it means you are allowed to doubt because you are allowed to experiment and find. It is only a temporary assumption to begin with. One has to begin with something, so for the time being, just to begin with, we accept a hypothesis. But how can you worship it? And how can the priest exploit you? It is absolutely against the religious people to use the word hypothesis. They will not even agree to call God an idea, because an idea is your mind thing, your projection. To them God is not an idea, God is the only truth.

In India, where religion has taken very subtle forms, they say you are an idea in the mind of God, not vice versa. God is not an idea in your mind – because in your mind there is all kinds of rubbish: you have nightmares, you have dreams, you have all kinds of desires. God is also put in the same category? And your ideas change every moment; they are just like clouds, changing their form continuously.

Certainly when you were a child your ideas were different. When you were adolescent your ideas were different, when you became a young man your ideas were different, and when you become old you cannot have the same ideas that you had in your youth. Experience changes everything. It will be simply impossible to retain the same idea your whole life; only a superb idiot can do it. If you have a little bit of intelligence then your idea is going to change with life.

Even to call God an idea will not be acceptable to the religious people – hypothesis is far away.

That’s why I say it is too late.

You are calling God an idea, and the definition of meditation is: to be in a state of mind where no ideas exist, not even the idea of God.

Gautam the Buddha says, ”If you meet me on the path cut my head off immediately, because what am I doing there? – disturbing you. The idea of me is a disturbance.” It is just like throwing a pebble in a silent lake, and so many ripples, millions of ripples arise. A simple idea thrown in the silent lake of your mind creates millions of waves; it may take you far away from yourself From Ignorance to Innocence

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Every idea takes you away from yourself; hence the definition of meditation: a state of consciousness without any ideas.

So in meditation there is no way to go away from yourself, you are simply centered in your own being. There is no object that you can see. You are left totally alone. Your consciousness starts turning upon itself

Consciousness is just like light. The light is here, we are all here; the light is falling on us, on the walls, on the curtains, on everything that is here. These are all objects. Just think for a moment: if all the objects are removed, then there is only light, not falling on anything. But light is unconscious

– you are conscious. So when all objects are removed, your consciousness falls upon itself, turns upon itself; it is a turning in, because there is nothing to prevent it.

That is the meaning of object: object means that which prevents, raises an objection, obstructs, is a hindrance. When there is no object, where can you go? You have to turn upon yourself, consciousness being conscious of itself – there is no idea of God.

In ordinary states of mind, ideas are just rubbish. In that extraordinary space of no-mind, ideas don’t exist. So either you have to put God in the category of rubbish, or you have to put Him where no objects are allowed.

The word idea cannot be used by religious people for God. ”Idea” is used by the philosophers, just as ”hypothesis” is used by the scientist. For the religious person God is the only reality, but in using the word idea you have already gone too far – too far from the so-called reality of God.

But your question is significant from many points. First: you ask, isn’t the hypothesis useful in any way? It is useful – not for you but for those who want to exploit you: the priest, the rabbi, the pope, the whole army of all these people around the world. Without the hypothesis of God, what is a pope? What is a shankaracharya? – just nobodies. Then who is Jesus? You cannot be a son of a hypothesis! It will look very odd. You cannot be a messiah of a hypothesis. It would be a very strange world if hypotheses start sending messiahs.

God has to be real for all these people to exploit you, and for thousands of years they have been exploiting.

And they will continue to exploit you for the simple reason that you are afraid to drop this idea. That shows a tremendously significant point within your being. Why do you feel afraid of dropping the idea of God? Certainly the idea of God is somehow preventing you from being afraid. So the moment you drop it, you start feeling afraid. It is a kind of psychological protection, that’s what it is.

The child is bound to be afraid. In the mother’s womb he is not afraid. I have not heard that any child in the mother’s womb ever thinks of going to the synagogue or to the church or reading the Bible or the Koran or the Gita; or even bothers about whether there is a God or not. I cannot conceive that a child in the mother’s womb will in any way be interested in God, in the devil, in heaven, in hell. For what? He is already in paradise. Things cannot be better than they are.

He is completely protected in a warm, cozy home, floating in chemicals which are nourishing. And you will be surprised – in that nine months the child grows more than he will ever grow in ninety From Ignorance to Innocence

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years, proportionately. In nine months he travels such a long journey; from being almost nothing he becomes a being. In nine months he passes through millions of years of evolution, from the very first being up to now. He passes through all the phases.

And life is absolutely secure: no need for any employment, no fear of starvation, hunger; everything is being done by the mother’s body. Living nine months in the mother’s womb in such absolute security creates a problem which has produced your so-called religions.

As the child comes out of the mother’s womb, the first thing that happens to him is fear.

It is obvious. His home is lost, his security is lost. His warmth, his surroundings, all that he knew as his world is completely lost, and he is thrown into a strange world, of which he knows nothing. He has to start breathing on his own.

It takes a few seconds for the child to recognize the fact that he has to breathe now on his own –

your mother’s breathing is not going to help. Just to bring him to his senses the doctor hangs him upside down, and hits him on his bottom, hard. What a beginning! And what a welcome!

And just out of that hit he starts breathing. Have you ever observed that whenever you are afraid your breathing changes? If you have not watched it before, you can watch it now. Whenever you are afraid, your breathing will change, immediately. And when you are at ease, at home, unafraid of anything, you will find your breathing falling into a harmony, in a deep accord, becoming more and more silent. In deep meditation it happens sometimes that you feel as if your breathing has stopped.

It does not stop, but it almost stops.

The beginning for the child is fear of everything. For nine months he was in darkness, and in a modern hospital, where he is going to be born, there will be just glaring tube lights all around. And on his eyes, his retina, which has never seen light before, not even a candle light, this is too much.

This light is a shock to his eyes.

And the doctor does not take even a few seconds – he cuts the connection that is still joining him with the mother, the last hope of security... and such a tiny being. And you know it perfectly well, that nobody is more helpless than a human child, no other child in the whole existence.

That’s why horses have not invented the hypothesis of God. Elephants have not thought about the idea of God; there is no need. The child of the elephant immediately starts walking and looking around and exploring the world. He is not as helpless as a human child. In fact, on the helplessness of a human child depends so much that you may be surprised: your family, your society, your culture, your religion, your philosophy – everything depends on the helplessness of the human child.

In animals, families don’t exist for the simple reason that the child does not need the parents. Man had to decide for a certain system. The father and the mother have to be together to look after the child. It is the outcome of their love affair; this is their doing. Now if the human child is left alone, just like so many animals are, you cannot imagine that he is going to survive: impossible! Where is he going to find food? Whom is he going to ask? What is he going to ask?

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body is such that the mother cannot carry the child for more than nine months, otherwise she will die, and her death will mean the death of the child.

It has been calculated that if the child can live in the mother’s womb for at least three years, then perhaps there will be no need for a father and mother and the family, and the society and the culture, and God and the priest. But the child cannot live in the mother’s womb for three years.

This strange biological situation has affected the whole of human behavior, thinking, the structure of family, society; and this has caused the fear.

The first experience of the child is the fear, and the last experience of the man is also fear.

Birth is also a kind of death; you should remember just look at it from the child’s point of view. He was living in a certain world, which was absolutely satisfactory. He was not in any need at all, he was not greedy for anything more. He was simply enjoying being, enjoying growing – and then suddenly he is thrown out.

To the child, this experience is an experience of death: death of his whole world, of his security, of his cozy home. Scientists say that we have not been able yet to create a home as cozy as the womb. We have been trying – all our homes are just efforts to create that cozy home.

We have even tried to make water beds, to give you the same feeling. We have hot bathtubs; Lying down in them you can have a little feeling of the child. Those who know how to take a really hot bath will also put salt into it, because in the mother’s womb it is very salty – the exact amount of salt that is in sea water. But how long can you lie down in a bathtub? We have isolation tanks which are nothing but a search for the same womb that you have lost.

Sigmund Freud is not an enlightened man – in fact he is a little bit cuckoo, but sometimes cuckoos also sing beautiful songs. Sometimes he has significant ideas. For example, he thinks this idea of man making love to the woman is nothing but an effort to enter the womb again. There may be something in it. This man is crazy, the idea seems to be far fetched; but even if a man like Sigmund Freud is crazy he has to be listened to very carefully.

I feel that there is something of truth in it: the search for the womb, for the same passage as he had come out from.... He cannot reach that womb, that is true. Then he created all kinds of things; he started making caves, houses, airplanes. You see the interior of the airplane – it will not be a wonder if one day you find that in the airplane people are floating in tubs of hot water, salted. The airplane can give you exactly the same situation, but it is not going to be satisfactory.

The child has not known anything else. We try to make it as cozy: just push a button and the air hostess is there. We make it as comfortable as possible, but we cannot make it as comfortable as it was in the womb. You were not needed even to push a button. Even before you were hungry you were fed. Even before you needed air, it reached you. You had no responsibility at all.

So the child coming out of the mother’s womb, if he feels it at all, must feel it as death. He cannot feel it as birth, that is impossible. That is our idea – who are standing outside – we say that this is birth.

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And the second time, again one day, after his whole life’s effort.... He has been able to make something – a little house, a family, a small circle of friends, a little warmth, a little corner somewhere in the world where he can relax and be himself, where he is accepted. Difficult – a whole life’s struggle, and suddenly, one day, he finds again he is being thrown out.

The doctor has come again – and this is the man who had hit him! But that time it was to start the breathing; this time, as far as we know.... Now we are on this side, we don’t know the other side.

The other side is left to the imagination; that’s why heaven and hell... and every kind of imagination has gone wild.

We are on this side and this man is dying. To us he is dying; perhaps he is again being reborn.

But that only he knows, and he cannot turn back and tell us, ”Don’t be worried; I am not dead, I am alive.” He could not turn in his mother’s womb to have a last glimpse and say goodbye to everybody, neither can he turn back now, open his eyes and say goodbye to you all, and say, ”Don’t be worried.

I am not dying, I am being reborn.

The Hindu idea of rebirth is nothing but a projection of the ordinary birth. For the womb – if the womb thinks – the child is dead. For the child – if it thinks – it is dying. But he is born; it was not death, it is birth. The Hindus have projected the same idea on death. From this side it looks as if he is dying, but from the other side.... But the other side is our imagination; we can make it as we want it.

Every religion makes the other side in a different way because every society and every culture depends on a different geography, a different history. For example: the Tibetan cannot think of the other side as cool – even cool is fearful, cold is impossible. The Tibetan thinks that the dead person is warm, in a new world which always remains warm.

The Indian cannot think that it always remains warm. Even four months’ heat in India is too much, but for eternity to remain warm – you will be cooked! The Hindu religion thinks.... They had no idea of air conditioning, but the way they describe their paradise, it is almost air conditioned – always cool air, neither hot nor cold, but cool. It is always spring, Indian spring – because around the earth there are different kinds of spring – this is the Indian spring. All the flowers are in blossom, the winds are full of fragrance, the birds are singing, everything is alive; but not warm, cool air. That they remind us again and again: cool air continues to flow.

This is your mind that is projecting the idea; otherwise, for the Tibetan or for the Indian or for the Mohammedan, it cannot be different. The Mohammedan cannot think that the other world is going to be a desert – he has suffered so much in the Arabian desert. The other world is an oasis – an oasis all over. It is not that after a hundred miles you find a small oasis with a little water and a few trees, no – just oases all over, and desert nowhere.

We project, but to the person who is dying it is again the same process that he has experienced once. It is a well – known fact that at the time of death, if the person has not become unconscious, has not fallen into a coma, he starts remembering his whole life cycle. He goes on back to the first moment of his life when he was born. It seems to be significant that when he is leaving this world he may have a look at all that has happened. Just in a few seconds the whole calendar moves, just as it moves in your movies.

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That calendar goes on moving, because in a two hour movie they have to cover many years... if the calendar moves at the usual pace, you will be sitting in the movie hall for two years; who is going to be able to afford that? No, the calendar just goes on moving, the dates go on changing, fast. It goes even faster at the time of death. In a single moment the whole life flashes by, and stops at the first moment. It is the same process that is happening again – life has come around full circle.

Why did I want you to remember this? – because your God is nothing but your first day’s fear which goes on and on until the last moment, becoming bigger and bigger. That’s why when a person is young he may be an atheist, he can afford to be, but as he grows older, to be an atheist becomes a little difficult. If, when he is just coming close to his grave, one foot in the grave, you ask him, ”Are you still an atheist?” he will say, ”I am having second thoughts” – because of fear... what is going to happen? His whole world is disappearing.

My grandfather was not a religious man, not at all. He was closer to Zorba the Greek: eat, drink and be merry; there is no other world, it is all nonsense. My father was a very religious man; perhaps it was because of my grandfather – the reaction, the generation gap. But it was just upside down in my family: my grandfather was an atheist and perhaps because of his atheism my father turned out to be a theist. And whenever my father would go to the temple, my grandfather would laugh and he would say, ”Again! Go on, waste your life in front of those stupid statues!” I love Zorba for many reasons; one of the reasons was that in Zorba I found my grandfather again.

He loved food so much that he used to not trust anybody; he would prepare it himself. In my life I have been a guest in thousands of families in India, but I have never tasted anything so delicious as my grandfather’s cooking. And he loved it so much that every week it was a feast for all his friends

– and he would prepare the whole day.

My mother and my aunts and the servants and cooks – everybody was thrown out of the kitchen.

When my grandfather was cooking, nobody was to disturb him. But he was very friendly to me; he allowed me to watch and he said, ”Learn, don’t depend on other people. Only you know your taste.

Who else can know it?”

I said, ”That is beyond me; I am too lazy, but I can watch. The whole day cooking? – I cannot do it.” So I have not learned anything, but just watching was a joy – the way he worked, almost like a sculptor or a musician or a painter. Cooking was not just cooking, it was art to him. And if anything went just a little below his standard, he would throw it away immediately. He would cook it again, and I would say, ”It is perfectly okay.”

He would say, ”You know it is not perfectly okay, it is just okay; but I am a perfectionist. Until it comes up to my standard, I am not going to offer it to anybody. I love my food.” He used to make many kinds of drinks... and whatsoever he did the whole family was against him: they said that he was just a nuisance. He wouldn’t allow anybody in the kitchen, and in the evening he gathered all the atheists of the town. And just to defy Jainism, he would wait till the sun set. He would not eat before because Jainism says: eat before sunset; after sunset eating is not allowed.

He used to send me again and again to see whether the sun had set or not.

He annoyed the whole family. And they could not be angry with him – he was the head of the family, the oldest man – but they were angry at me. That was easier. They said, ”Why do you go on coming From Ignorance to Innocence

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again and again to see whether the sun has set or not? That old man is getting you also lost, utterly lost.”

I was very sad because I only came across the book ZORBA THE GREEK, when my grandfather was dying. The only thing that I felt at his funeral pyre was that he would have loved it if I had translated it for him and read it for him. I had read many books to him. He was uneducated. He could only write his signature, that was all. He could neither read nor write – but he was very proud of it.

He used to say, ”It is good that my father did not force me to go to school, otherwise he would have spoiled me. These books spoil people so much.” He would say to me, ”Remember, your father is spoiled, your uncles are spoiled; they are continually reading religious books, scriptures, and it is all rubbish. While they are reading, I am living; and it is good to know through living.” He used to tell me, ”They will send you to the university – they won’t listen to me. And I cannot be much help, because if your father and your mother insist, they will send you to the university. But beware: don’t get lost in books.”

He enjoyed small things. I asked him, ”Everybody believes in God, why don’t you believe, baba?” I called him baba; that is the word for grandfather in India.

He said, ”Because I am not afraid.”

A very simple answer: ”Why should I be afraid? There is no need to be afraid; I have not done any wrong, I have not harmed anybody. I have just lived my life joyously. If there is any God, and I meet Him sometime, He cannot be angry at me. I will be angry at Him:’Why have You created this world?

– this kind of world?’ I am not afraid.”

When he was dying I asked him again, because the doctors were saying that it was a question of only a few minutes. His pulse was getting lost, his heart was sinking, but he was fully conscious. I asked him, ”Baba, one question....”

He opened his eyes and said, ”I know your question: why don’t you believe in God? I knew that you were going to ask this question when I was dying. Do you think death will make me afraid? I have lived so joyously and so completely, there is no regret that I am dying.

”What else am I going to do tomorrow? I have done it all, there is nothing left. And if my pulse is slowing down and my heartbeat is slowing down, I think everything is going to be perfectly okay, because I am feeling very peaceful, very calm, very silent. Whether I die completely or live, I cannot say right now. But one thing you should remember: I am not afraid.” You tell me, The moment I think of dropping the idea of God, fear comes up. It is a simple indication that with the rock of the idea of God, you are repressing fear; so the moment you remove the rock, the fear springs up.

I had a teacher in my high school days who was a very learned brahmin of the place. Almost the whole city respected him. He used to live behind my house, and a small path by the side of my From Ignorance to Innocence

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house went to his house. Just at the end of my house was a very big neem tree. He taught Sanskrit and was continually teaching about God and prayer and worship. In fact he was indoctrinating everybody’s minds.

I asked him, ”My grandfather does not believe in

God, and whenever I ask him why, he says,’Because I am not afraid.’ Are you very afraid? You seem to be continually hammering this word’god’ into our heads, and I see you every morning in your house chanting so loudly for three hours that the whole neighborhood is disturbed. But nobody can say anything because it is religious chanting.” If you do something like modern dancing, jazz music, then everybody will be on your neck, that you are disturbing them. He was disturbing everybody, every morning from five to eight – and he had a really loud voice – but it was religious....

I said, ”Are you very afraid? Three hours every day you have to pray. It must be a great fear if for three hours every day you have to persuade God to protect you.” He said, ”I am not afraid. Your grandfather is a rascal.” They were almost the same age.... ”He is a rascal, don’t listen to him. He will spoil you.”

I said, ”It is strange: he thinks you will spoil me, and you think he will spoil me; and as far as I am concerned nobody is going to spoil me. I believe my grandfather when he says that he is not afraid

– but about you, I am not certain.”

He asked, ”Why?”

I said, ”Because when you pass the neem tree in the night you start chanting” – because it was known that the neem tree had ghosts in it, so people ordinarily never went near that tree in the night.

But he had to go that way because his house was there; otherwise he had to go almost half a mile round by the main road and then reach his house. Going that way round each time was too difficult, so he had found a religious strategy: he would start chanting. As he entered the path, he started chanting. I said, ”I have heard you; although you don’t chant as loudly as you chant in the morning, you do chant, I have heard you. And I know there are ghosts so I cannot say you are doing anything wrong.”

He said, ”How did you come to know?”

I said, ”Many times I am there by the side of the neem tree in the darkness; your chanting becomes louder and you start walking faster – that much I know. Why do you chant there if you are not afraid?

And if you are afraid of ghosts, then that three-hour morning chanting with God is useless. Can’t he save you against ghosts?”

He said, ”From today I am not going to chant.” Certainly he kept his word. He was not chanting.

Although he was walking faster than usual. And all that I had to do was to sit in the tree with a kerosene can – empty, so I could beat it like a drum. I simply drummed the can and threw it on top of him. You should have seen the situation! He ran away screaming and shouting, ”BHOOT! BHOOT!

BHOOT! BHOOT!” BHOOT is the Hindi word for ghost.

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In India the ancient traditional dress is not like western dress. Now it is changing because western dress is more utilitarian; Indian dress is more luxurious but is not utilitarian. If you are working in the field or in the factory, Indian dress is dangerous because the robe is long and loose, it can get caught in any mechanism. Then the dhoti, the lower dress, that too is very loose. It reminds us that once the country must have been in a very comfortable time.

You cannot give the Indian dress to soldiers; otherwise they will not be able to fight, their dress will be enough to finish them. Even if they had to run away they would not be able to. Can I run in my robe? Impossible. It would be easier to die rather than to run.

He became so afraid.... When the tin can fell on him with a loud noise, his dhoti opened up and he was so afraid that he entered his house without it, naked! His dhoti was left there. I came down the tree, took the dhoti, and with my can I escaped from there.

His whole house was in a mess. Everybody, all the neighborhood people around were asking what had happened. He said, ”That boy disturbed everything. He told me this morning,’Don’t do the mantra. If you are not afraid, don’t do the mantra.’ He gave me a challenge. Tomorrow I am going to see him about what happened to me: that in my old age I have become a laughingstock. The whole neighborhood has seen me naked!” And in India to be naked, and that too for one of the very respected priests and scholars of the town....

He came the next day and was very serious. I knew that he was coming, so I took the tin with his dhoti inside. When he saw me coming with that tin, he said, ”What is that?” I said, ”First, you start. You have threatened... you have told the neighbors that you will see me. I have also come to see you – now it is a question of who sees whom. You can impose any punishment you want on me, but remember, I will open this can before the whole school.” He said, ”What is in it?”

I said, ”Bhoot! Ghost! I have caught in it the ghost that made you afraid.” He said, ”Ghost? Is this the tin can that fell from the tree?” I said, ”Of course.”

He said, ”You take it back, it is dangerous.”

But I said, ”Please look inside and see what is there.” I opened the tin can and took out his dhoti and said, ”At least take your dhoti back.”

He said, ”But how did you manage it?”

I said, ”Whom do you think was managing it all? You should thank me for taking all the trouble of climbing the tree, drumming the tin can, and then throwing it on top of you; then collecting your dhoti in darkness, and escaping before I was caught. It was just to show you... not to lie to me.” And since that day, although he knew that I was the person who did the whole thing, he stopped coming by that path, he would go around. I asked him why – ”You know perfectly well I was the person.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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He said, ”I don’t want to take any chance. I don’t believe you. You may have collected the dhoti and the tin can in the morning, and it may have been really a ghost.” I said, ”I am telling you, I was in that tree.”

He never came again in the night on that path. My whole family knew that I was the person because they had seen me going up the tree, but even my family became afraid. They started saying,

”Perhaps the ghost took possession of you.”

I said, ”Strange people! I have said I did it, but now you are projecting new ideas: that the ghost took possession of me, that’s why I did the whole thing. You can’t take simple facts as simple.” If the fear comes up, that means you have to face it; it is in no way going to help you to cover it by the idea of God. You cannot have faith again, that is destroyed.

Once you have met me you cannot have faith in God, because doubt is a reality, and faith is fiction.

And no fiction can stand before a fact.

Now God is going to remain a hypothesis to you; your prayer will be useless. You will know it is a hypothesis, you cannot forget that it is a hypothesis.

Once you have heard a truth it is impossible to forget it.

That is one of the qualities of truth, that you don’t need to remember it.

The lie has to be remembered continually; you may forget. The person habituated to lies needs a better memory than the person who is habituated to truth, because a true person has no need of memory; if you only say the truth there is no need to remember. But if you are saying a lie, then you have to continually remember, because you have said one lie to one person, another lie to another person; something else to somebody else. To whom you have said what you have to categorize in your mind and keep. And whenever a question arises about a lie you have to lie again, so it is a series. The lie does not believe in birth control.

Truth is celibate, it has no children at all; it is unmarried in fact.

Once you have understood, only once, that God is nothing but a hypothesis created by the priests, the politicians, the power elite, the pedagogues – all those who want to keep you in psychological slavery, who have some vested interest in your slavery.... They all want to keep you afraid, always afraid, trembling deep inside, because if you are not afraid, you are dangerous.

You can either be a person who is a coward, afraid, ready to submit, surrender, a person who has himself no dignity, no respect for his own being – or you can be fearless. But then you are going to be a rebel, you cannot avoid that.

Either you can be a man of faith or you are going to be a rebellious spirit.

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So those people who don’t want you to be rebels – because your being rebellious goes against their interests – go on enforcing, conditioning your mind with Christianity, with Judaism, with Mohammedanism, with Hinduism, and they keep you trembling deep inside.

That is their power, so anybody who is interested in power, whose whole life is nothing but a will-to-power, has tremendous use for the hypothesis of God.

If you are afraid of God – and if you believe in God you have to be afraid – you have to follow His orders and commandments, His holy book, His messiah, His incarnation; you have to follow Him and His agents. In fact He does not exist, only the agent exists. This is a very strange business.

Religion is the most strange business of all. There is no boss, but there are mediators: the priest, the bishop, the cardinal, the pope, the messiah, the whole hierarchy – and on top there is nobody.

But Jesus derives his authority and power from God – His only begotten son. The pope derives his authority from Jesus – His only true representative, infallible. And it goes on and on to the lowest priest... but there is no God; it is your fear

You asked for God to be invented because you could not live alone.

You were incapable of facing life, its beauties, its joys, its sufferings, its anguishes. You were not ready to experience them on your own without anybody protecting you, without somebody being an umbrella to you. You asked for God out of fear. And certainly there are con men everywhere. You ask and they will do it for you. You asked and they said, ”We know God is, and you have just to do this prayer....”

Tolstoy has a beautiful story. It became a great trouble for the highest priest in the Russian orthodox church, because three men who lived beyond a lake under a tree became very famous; so famous that instead of people coming to the high priest they started going to those three saints.

Now, in Christianity ”saint” is a very strange word. In any other language saint and the equivalent of saint are very respectful words, but not in Christianity, because saint means only: sanctified by the pope, certified by the pope.

Joan of Arc was made a saint after three hundred years. One infallible pope burned her alive.

After three hundred years they changed their mind, because people were becoming more and more favorable to loan of Arc; then the pope thought it was a good time to declare her a saint. She had been declared a witch and was burned alive – and this was done by one infallible pope. Then another infallible pope, after three hundred years, declared Joan of Arc to be a saint. Her grave was dug up again and whatsoever was there – a few bones may have remained – was brought out, worshipped, sanctified. She has become a saint.

”Saint” in the Christian reference is ugly. The Sanskrit word is sant, equivalent to saint. If you derive it from sant, if you write sant, you can read it saint; but sant means one who has arrived, one who has known satya. Sat means the ultimate truth, and one who has realized it is called a saint – not somebody certified! It is not a degree or a title that somebody can give to you.

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The high priest was very angry because people were talking about those three saints. He said, ”But how did they become saints? I have not certified anybody. This is simply outrageous.” But people are people.... People were still going, so finally he decided, ”I have to visit these people. Who are these people? They have declared themselves saints! I don’t even know who they are. I have not even been informed, and it is in my power only to sanctify a person to be a saint.” So he was very angry.

He went in his boat – and he had a beautiful boat because he was the high priest and he was higher than the czar as far as religion was concerned. Even the czar and czarina used to come to touch his feet. And he thought, ”Who are these fools, unknown, anonymous? – declaring themselves saints?” He went there and found those three very simple people, three old people, sitting under the tree.

They immediately stood up, touched the feet of the high priest and they said, ”Why did you take all this trouble? You could have sent a message and we would have come.” The high priest cooled down a little bit, but he said, ”Who declared you saints?” They said, ”We don’t know. We didn’t know that we are saints. Who told you?” And the high priest could see that all three were absolutely uneducated and knew nothing about Christianity or religion. And he said, ”What is your prayer? Do you know the orthodox prayer, without which you cannot be even a Christian? – what to think about a saint!” They said, ”We are uneducated and nobody ever taught us any prayer. But if you forgive us, we will tell you – we have composed a prayer of our own.” He said, ”What! You have composed a prayer of your own! Okay, let me listen to what your prayer is.”

One said to the other, ”You tell him.”

The other said, ”You can tell him.” They were all feeling very shy and very ashamed.

The high priest said, ”You tell it! Anybody tell it.” They said, ”We all three will tell it together.” Their prayer was simple: ”’You are three – God the father, the Holy Ghost and God the son. You are three, we are also three – have mercy on us.’ This is our prayer. More than that we don’t know. We have heard that He is three, and we know that we are three, and what more is needed?’Have mercy on us – you are three, we are three, have mercy on us!”’

The priest said, ”This is unforgivable. You are making a mockery of religion.” They said, ”Then you can tell us what the prayer is so we can repeat it.” The high priest told them the prayer, a long prayer of the Russian orthodox church. They listened and they said, ”Wait, you repeat it again because this is so long and we may forget it. Our prayer is so short, and we never forget it because it is so simple and we always remember that He is three, From Ignorance to Innocence

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we are three, have mercy on us. There is no problem about it. Your prayer – if we forget or if we commit some mistake....”

So he repeated it twice. They said, ”One time more.” He repeated it thrice, and they said, ”We will try.” He was very happy that he had put those fools on the right path... this is prayer? – and they have become saints? And he went back very happy that he had done a good deed. These are the do-gooders.

Just in the middle of the lake he saw all those three old men running, coming, on the lake! He could not believe his eyes. They said, ”Wait! We have forgotten the prayer! Just one more time, and we will never bother you again.” And they were standing on the water!

The high priest touched their feet and said, ”Forgive me. You repeat your prayer, that’s perfectly right. And you need not come to ask me; if I have something to ask I will come. I know now whose prayer is right.”

Those three persons indicate one simple truth: if you have faith that does not prove that there is a God. But your faith can give you a certain integrity, a certain strength. But the faith has to be very innocent. They were not hiding any fear behind it. They had not gone to any church to learn the prayer, they had not asked anybody, ”What is God? Where is God?” – nothing. They were simply innocent people, and out of innocence was their faith.

That faith does not prove that God is; that faith simply proves that innocence is a power.

It is only a story, but innocence is a power. Yes, you can walk on water, but out of innocence; and out of innocence if there is faith.... But that very rarely happens, because every parent and every society destroys your innocence before you are even aware that you had it. They go on forcing some belief on you, and that belief you accept because of fear. In darkness the mother says, ”Don’t be afraid; God is there looking after you. He is everywhere present.” I have heard about a Catholic nun who used to take a shower with her clothes on inside the bathroom. Other nuns became a little worried: ”Has she gone Oregonian or something?” But the poor nun said, ”It is because I have heard God is everywhere, so He must be in the bathroom too. And to be naked before God does not look right.” This woman may look foolish but she has a certain innocence. And out of this innocence, if faith arises, then it doesn’t matter in what the faith is.

Innocence gives power, but innocence is destroyed, and this is what I am trying to bring back to you, so that you become innocent again. And to become innocent again you will have to pass through these stages.

You will have to drop this idea of God which helps you to remain unafraid.

You will have to pass through fear and accept it as a human reality.

There is no need to escape from it. What is needed is to go deep into it, and the deeper you go into your fear, the less you will find it is.

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When you have touched the rock bottom of fear you will simply laugh, there is nothing to fear.

And when fear disappears there is innocence, and that innocence is the summum bonum, the very essence of a religious man.

And that innocence is power.

That innocence is the only miracle there is.

Out of innocence anything can happen, but you will not be a Christian out of that, and you will not be a Mohammedan out of that. Out of innocence you will become simply an ordinary human being, totally accepting your ordinariness, and living it joyously, thankful to the whole existence – not to God, because that is an idea given by others to you.

But existence is not an idea.

It is there all around you, within and without.

When you are utterly innocent, a deep thankfulness – I will not call it prayer because in prayer you are asking for something, I will call it a deep thankfulness – a gratitude arises. Not that you are asking for something, but thanking for something that has already been given to you.

So much has been given to you.

Do you deserve it? Have you earned it?

Existence goes on pouring so much over you that to ask for more is just ugly. That which you have received, you should be grateful for it.

And the most beautiful thing is that when you are grateful, more and more existence starts pouring over you. It becomes a circle: the more you get, the more you become grateful; the more you become grateful, the more you get... and there is no end to it, it is an infinite process.

But remember – the hypothesis of God is gone; the moment you called it a hypothesis the idea of God has been already dropped. Whether you are afraid or not, you cannot take it back; it is finished.

Now the only way left is to go into your fear.

Silently enter into it, so you can find its depth.

And sometimes it happens that it is not very deep.

A Zen story is: a man walking in the night slipped from a rock. Afraid that he would fall down thousands of feet, because he knew that place was a very deep valley, he took hold of a branch that was hanging over the rock. In the night all he could see was a bottomless abyss. He shouted; his own shout was reflected back – there was nobody to hear.

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laughed: there was no abyss. Just six inches down there was a rock. He could have rested the whole night, slept well – the rock was big enough – but the whole night was a nightmare.

From my own experience I can say to you: the fear is not more than six inches deep. Now it is up to you whether you want to go on clinging to the branch and turn your life into a nightmare, or whether you would love to leave the branch and stand on your feet.

There is nothing to fear.

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CHAPTER 17

Jesus, the only forgotten son of god

16 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

YOU SAY GOD IS NOT A HYPOTHESIS NOR AN IDEA. THEN WHAT IS GOD? HAS ANYONE

EVER MET GOD OR NOT?

GOD certainly is not a hypothesis.

A hypothesis can only be part of an objective science. You can experiment upon it, you can dissect it, analyze it.

That’s what Karl Marx has argued: ”unless God is proved in a scientific lab, I am not going to accept him.” What Karl Marx is saying is that, ”I can accept God as a hypothesis, but a hypothesis is not a truth. It has yet to be proved, and the proof has to be scientific.” But if God is put into a scientific lab, in a test tube, and dissected, analyzed, and we know all the constituents that make God, will it be the God who created the world? And if Marx is going to accept God only then, that means God has to be reduced into a thing.

Then what would be the difficulty in manufacturing God?

Once you have analyzed all the

constituents of God, all the chemicals, then there is no problem. Get your discovery patented, and start manufacturing God. But that manufactured God will not be the God you are asking me about.

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God is not a hypothesis, cannot be a hypothesis, because the very word hypothesis takes the ground from beneath His feet. God is not to be proved. If science has to prove God then the scientist becomes higher than God. The poor God will be just like a white rat. So you play around and make boxes, and God moves from one box to another, and you find out how much intelligence God has.

Delgado, the psychologist, will be very happy to find God in a mousetrap, because all that psychologists have found about man is not about man, it is about mice. They first find out about the mice, and then they project it onto human beings – because it looks inhuman to dissect a human being, to torture him and to experiment upon him.

But it is very strange that the mouse gives clues which help to understand the human mind, human psychology. Certainly man is more developed. You can extrapolate but the basic idea you can get from a mouse.

God, according to the pseudo-religions, is the creator of the whole of existence. According to them, we are His creation. To make God a hypothesis means from now onwards He is going to be our creation. We are trying to reverse the roles, putting the creator as a creature and the creature as the creator. The pseudo-religions will not agree. I also do not agree, but our disagreements are basically different.

They cannot agree because God is above everything; nobody can be above God. The scientist has to be an observer, above, to watch, and then God becomes just a plaything in his hands. He will put electrodes in God’s mind. He will have remote control so whenever he wants, God laughs; whenever he wants, God weeps; whenever he wants, God runs; whenever he wants, God stops.

The pseudo-religions cannot agree for this reason: that God is not a creature, not a thing; He is the creator. He has made you, you cannot be above Him, in no way.

My disagreement is that even for something to be a hypothesis a certain probability is needed –

not certainty, but at least a probability. God is not even probable. My reasons are totally different.

A scientist starts with a hypothesis because he sees some probability in it, some possibility, some potentiality.

God is only a word without any substance in it; a hollow word with no meaning at all.

Perhaps we have to interpret the Bible a little differently. It says, ”In the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God.” In this reference perhaps it is true, that the beginning of God is nothing but a word. And then the word starts gathering moss around it; as time passes people go on giving more and more meaning to it. What meaning they give to the word is their need. You should remember it.

God is all-knowing, because man has felt in every direction that his knowledge is very limited – just a little light, a candlelight throwing a small circle. Beyond that circle all is darkness; and that darkness creates fear. Who knows what it contains? Somebody is needed who knows. If he is not present, he has to be invented.

God is an invention of man’s own psychological need.

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He is all-knowing. You cannot be; whatsoever you know, howsoever you know, you can never be all-knowing. Existence is so vast and man is so tiny, so small, that to conceive that your small brain will be able to know all – past, present, future – seems to be a fool’s dream. Even a fool will not dream such a thing.

But to live in a world surrounded everywhere with darkness is difficult. You cannot be certain even of what you know, because the unknown is so vast, that who can say that if you know a little more, your known will not be found invalid.

In fact that has been the case. The more man knew, the more he became aware that the knowledge that was knowledge yesterday, today has become ignorance. What about today’s knowledge?

Perhaps tomorrow this too will become ignorance.

It became a great psychological need to have someone who knows all.

The priests did a great job, perhaps the greatest job ever done, and did it perfectly well: They invented God.

It helped in many ways. Man became more certain of himself, more stable, less afraid, because there is an all-knowing God, all-pervading God, everywhere present. All that you have to know is the key to turn God in your favor. And the key was with the priest, who was ready to part with it.

Every religion has been pretending that they have that key which unlocks all the doors, the master key.

And if you attain the master key, you will be just like gods; you will be all-knowing, you will be present anywhere you want, you will be all-powerful.

You just see in these three words, man’s three needs.

His knowledge is very limited, very poor. What really do we know? Even small things can make you aware of your ignorance.

Our power... what power do we have? Perhaps man is the only animal in the world who has no power. Can you fight with a lion? – with a tiger? Forget about lions and tigers, can you fight with a dog or a cat? You will be surprised – what to say about a cat, if even a hundred thousand flies attack you, what are you going to do? You have never thought about flies attacking, but if they attack, if some fly turns political, you will be helpless, you cannot survive.

Forget about flies; in fact there are plants in South Africa which catch birds and animals, suck them completely and throw them away. There are science fictions about plants attacking men. They can catch men, they are big enough. If you are in their vicinity their branches can just catch hold of you like the trunk of an elephant, and crush you completely. And they have ways to suck your blood.

Very perfect surgery – all over your body their branches will start penetrating you. And how thick is your skin? lust a little scratch is enough and blood is available. And those trees live on blood; they are man-eating trees – the man is still alive.

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There are science fictions about all the trees around you going crazy. They can go crazy because they have a certain kind of brain, a certain kind of mind. Now, it is a proved fact that they think, feel; that they have emotions, sentiments; that they love, they hate. Now there are scientific proofs about all this.

Buddha and Mahavira, twenty-five centuries ago, said not to hurt trees because they are as alive as you are. People at first laughed, that trees... and alive? But Buddha and Mahavira had no scientific proofs for it. It was only their experience in silence. Sitting under a tree, utterly silent, Buddha suddenly felt that the tree is not dead, that it is thriving with life. But these were their personal experiences; they could say it, but they could not prove it.

It was left to be proved by another Indian, Jagdishchandra Bose, who devoted his whole life to finding scientifically whether Buddha and Mahavira were right or wrong. And he conclusively proved that trees are alive. He was given a Nobel prize for proving trees to be alive. But that was only the beginning. Then more and more researchers went into it. Just to be alive is not enough.

Soon it was found that they have a different kind of brain system, but they do have one. You should not look for the same brain as you have. This is a stupid human idea, that your brain is the only kind of brain. If there can be so many kinds of bodies why can’t it be that there can be so many kinds of brain? And soon it was found that they have a certain kind of brain system, and things went on...

Just a few years ago it was found that trees not only have a certain way of knowing which we call a brain, they have a heart too. Certainly it does not beat like yours, because they have their own kind of heart. If their surgeons come to look around you, they will find no heart in you, no brain in you, because they will be looking for their type of brain, their type of heart.

Trees feel emotions, sentiments. For example when a gardener comes to water the tree, the tree feels happy. Now, the happiness can be measured on a graph like the cardiogram. The graph becomes harmonious, as if it is a song, rhythmic. If somebody comes with an axe to cut the tree...

he is far away but the graph changes. The man has not even said that he is coming to cut the tree, he has only thought about it, but the tree somehow has become aware of his thought.

If he is not going to cut the tree, and has no thought of it, he can pass by the tree with the axe in his hand and the graph will continue the same. But if he has the thought to cut the tree, then the graph immediately changes, zig-zags, all the harmony is lost, there is no rhythm. The tree is shaking with fear And if he cuts the tree, then the graphs of other trees around start going berserk. They are feeling hurt because one of their fellows, friends, a neighbor, is being cut.

So it is not impossible – if they have sentiments, emotions, a certain kind of thinking... my idea is not outlandish: sometimes they can go crazy, because all these things are needed to go crazy. They have them; and man has done so much harm to them that it is time they should go crazy. And he goes on harming them. There must be a limit, and it is not far away....

Man has destroyed the whole environment.

After my graduation I went to the Hindu university in Varanasi to study, because that is the biggest university in India. But I stayed there only twenty-four hours. The man I was staying with was Doctor From Ignorance to Innocence

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Rajbali Pandey; he was the head of the department of history. He tried to persuade me not to leave:

”Why? – you will not find a better place, at least not in India. It has the best scholars, the best professors, all the best facilities possible. You should think about it.” I said, ”I am not going because of this university, I am going because of you.” He said, ”What! What have I done to you?” He had stayed with me once, just accidentally. I was traveling in the same compartment to Jabalpur in which he was traveling. He missed the train that he had to catch from Jabalpur to Gondia – it was on a different line. Our train was late so he was very much worried, ”Now, what am I to do?” Only after twenty-four hours – Gondia is a small place

– would a very small train, a toy train go to Gondia, and the same train would come back. It takes twelve hours to go and twelve hours to come back, and it is not that far, just the train is such....

So I said, ”Don’t be worried, come and stay with me.” I was staying with one of my uncles. So in this strange way we became known to each other. And in the morning I took him for a walk – Jabalpur is very green, so full of trees that you don’t see the houses, you see only the greenery. And he said to me, ”I hate these trees, because these trees are the enemies of man. If just for five years you stop cutting them, they will run over the whole city and destroy all the houses.” There is truth in what he was saying, that man has created all these cities by cutting the trees. And if you allow the trees to grow again, they are going to destroy your so-called civilization. He said,

”Whenever you come to Benares, you are welcome to be my guest.” After two years I had to go, so I stayed with him. And in the morning I was going for a walk, so he said, ”I followed you in Jabalpur for a walk, so I will here also.”

Benares is barren, no trees at all. The whole university is just buildings and buildings, beautiful buildings because all the Maharajahs of India contributed to make a great Hindu university. The idea was a Hindu university should be parallel to Cambridge, Oxford, or Harvard. So much has been done, and beautifully done; there are marble buildings, great buildings, beautiful hostels, but no trees at all.

I said to him, ”Now I understand why you were so much offended by the trees that I love. I cannot survive here. It is true that trees had to be cut to make houses and cities, but that does not mean that trees have to be completely destroyed. Then you will die too. There needs to be a balance because the trees are continuously giving you oxygen. When you breathe in, you take oxygen; the oxygen is absorbed by your blood system and the carbon dioxide is thrown out.

Trees take the carbon dioxide; that is their food. That’s why when you burn a tree you get coal. Coal is nothing but carbon dioxide in solid form, it is carbon. They live on carbon dioxide, you live on oxygen; it is a good friendship. Neither do they have to destroy the civilization, nor do you have to destroy them. You should live in coexistence; that’s the only way to live – and here I don’t see a single tree.

”And just twenty-four hours here and I am feeling dry. Without seeing greenery your eyes will lose luster. No, I cannot be in this university. It may have great professors, it may have great libraries, it may have great facilities, but I would prefer some huge, big, ancient trees.” And I wandered all over India to find a university where there was something better than Jabalpur. And when I found Saugar From Ignorance to Innocence

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I remained there, because Saugar is just unimaginably beautiful. It is a small city, but the city is away beyond a very big lake. The city is on one side of the lake, and on the other side there is a range of hills, and on the hills is the university. And all around, huge trees... and so silent. Benares was so crowded and so buzzing with ten thousand students in the university. Saugar is a small place, and the university was new. I remained there.

Rajbali Pandey once came to Saugar while I was still there to deliver a series of lectures on history, and he saw me and he said, ”What happened? I thought you had gone back to Jabalpur.” I said, ”First I tried to look all over, perhaps there was something better – and here, you see.... The trees in Jabalpur are good but not so huge and not so ancient. And these hills and this lake and those lotuses... it is the right place.”

Man has done so much harm to nature, that when I say that one day it can go crazy, it is not only scientific fiction, it is possible. If all these trees that we have been cutting and destroying become just a little bit united... I don’t think they know anything about trade-unions and things like that. They have not heard Karl Marx’ famous slogan: ”Proletariat of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, and you have the whole world to gain.” So just change the word proletariat: Trees of the world unite, you have nothing to lose, not even chains, and you have the whole world to gain!

If these trees start attacking you, do you think you will be able to survive, even with all your nuclear weapons? Impossible. And it has happened a few times, that’s why the science fiction came into existence. In a few places it has happened. Once it happened in Africa, that a certain bird suddenly started attacking people, and it killed many people; before they could kill all those birds, a few people were killed.

It happened once in Indonesia with another bird; the whole community of that species started attacking people. They simply attacked the eyes and they made hundreds of people blind before anything could be done. Because we don’t think about these things, we are not prepared.

You have a fire brigade because you know fire can happen. You have the police for the criminals; you have the army if somebody attacks... but if birds start attacking your eyes, by the time you get ready to do something, much harm would have happened. And it was only one kind of bird.

If all birds and all animals and all trees simply decide one day, ”It is enough, now get rid of these people,” I don’t think man can survive, there is no way. All your armies will be useless, all your arms will be useless, all your nuclear weapons will be useless-and then you will understand how weak you are.

You have forgotten your weakness because of all these things. But think of the man in the beginning, when there was nothing, and he felt himself absolutely weak. lust think of before even fire was invented. What was the situation of man? The weakest animal on the earth.

Fire is perhaps the greatest discovery of man, not nuclear weapons, because it was fire that gave man tremendous courage. Then in the night he could make a bonfire and sleep around it; and the animals were afraid of fire so they would not come. Otherwise sleep was impossible – if you slept you were finished; any animal could take you away.

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The whole day you are hunting, and in the night you cannot sleep. In the day you can somehow survive – you can go up a tree, you can hide in a cave – but in the night, when you are asleep, what can you do? And the animals of those days are no longer here – only a few specimens like the elephant, which is not that huge. There were animals ten times more huge than the elephant.

For example, the crocodile – there were crocodiles that were many times bigger, which are no longer here. They did not need to chew you if they ate you, they simply swallowed you, they were such big animals. You simply slipped down their throat – and gone! – there was no eating or anything.

With these animals, with all the darkness, the people who invented God must have done a service in the beginning. They gave courage. They said, ”Don’t be afraid. All that you have to do is to be prayerful, faithful.” Certainly they took a certain amount of commission, and I don’t think that it was bad, because business is business. They were giving you so much, and if you gave a little bit to those people, you should not be grumpy about it.

So a little bit was given to the priest and the priest gave you the confidence and an omnipotent God

– omniscient, omnipresent – and you began to start feeling at ease in the world. The priest gave you the idea: ”God has created man in His own image, so don’t be afraid.... You are His special creation. All these animals He has created for you, all these trees He has created for you.” That’s the Mohammedan logic still. You cannot talk about vegetarian food because they say, ”Why did God create the animals then? The Koran says that God created the animals to eat. When the holy book says that the animals are created to be eaten, how can it be a sin or anything wrong?” The priest made man, at least in his mind, stronger. Of course they exploited him, and slowly, slowly, there were many more psychological needs.

And they had found a great treasure in the word ”god”: it fulfilled all kinds of things, all needs.

The greatest need of man is to be needed.

If you are not needed by anybody in the world you will commit suicide, you will not be able to live.

Strange – perhaps you have never thought about it, that you are seeking continuously to be needed.

That gives you preciousness, some value, some meaning. Perhaps a woman marries a man simply to fulfill the need that she is needed. And the same may be the reason for the man... that he wants to feel that some woman needs him.

The man has tried to force the woman not to earn money, not to do any work, not to be educated. The psychological reason is – there are political, economical, and other reasons but the psychological reason is – he wants her to be dependent on him so she is always in need of him, and he can feel good that he is needed.

They will produce children and both will feel good that now these children need them... you have some purpose to live for. You have to live for these children, you have to live for your wife, you have to live for your husband: life is no longer meaningless.

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And the priest has given you the greatest consolation – that God needs you; so much so, that He sends His son to save you from going astray.

He continually sends prophets, paigambaras, tirthankaras, incarnations, to save you, to keep you on the path. You are not neglected. He is constantly concerned about you.

Krishna in the Gita says, ”Whenever there is a need, and whenever people are going astray, I promise you I will come back.” Jesus says, ”I will be coming back to take my flock.” Why have people accepted these things? They wanted somebody to be concerned about them. And if God is concerned, what can be more fulfilling? And when you pray, and by chance if your prayer is fulfilled, then you know perfectly well that in this vast universe you are not just nothing. Your prayer is heard, it reaches to God; not only that, there iS a response.

In my neighborhood there was a temple, a temple of Krishna, just a few houses away from my house.

The temple was on the other side of the road, my house was on this side of the road. In front of the temple lived the man who had made the temple; he was a great devotee.

The temple was of Krishna in his childhood – because when Krishna becomes a young man he creates many troubles and many questions, so there are many people who worship Krishna as a child – hence the temple was called the temple of balaji. Balaji means...bal means child, and Balaji has become the name for Krishna. And then everything is simple because about his childhood you cannot raise all those questions which would be raised later on....

He becomes a politician, a warrior, manages the whole war and collects all those women – anything that you can imagine, he has done it. So in India there are many temples which are of the child Krishna. One of the greatest Krishna devotees, Surdas, a poet, simply sings songs only of the child Krishna; he never goes beyond that. Beyond that he cannot go. Beyond that it is much too difficult, particularly for Surdas.

Surdas was a monk, and he used to go to beg. It is not thought right for a monk to go again and again to the same house, because it may be burdensome to the family. They may not be so rich that every day they can give you food. But the woman who came to give him food was so beautiful that it was irresistible. If she had been only beautiful it would have been possible to resist, but what he saw in her eyes was a tremendous love towards him; that was more difficult – now the temptation became thousandfold. The fire was on both sides.

The next day he went again. The woman placed the food with great love, devotion. And the next day, again he was there; it became a routine. He saw that the woman certainly had fallen in love with him. Of course he was not courageous enough to accept the fact that he had also fallen in love with the woman; he was a monk, he was not supposed to do such things. But what was he doing, going for one month continuously to the same house?

One day is allowed; in certain difficult situations, three days are allowed, but that’s all. You may be sick and you cannot go far away, then three days, but not more than that. So the next day when he went, he gathered courage and he asked the woman, ”I have been coming here for one month. You have been giving me food every day, better and better more and more. What do you see in me, and why did you never remind me that this is not right for a monk? – one day is allowed, at the most From Ignorance to Innocence

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three days. And I see so much love coming from you towards me. I would like to know the exact truth. What is the situation?”

Now, he is throwing all his lust, all his desire on the poor woman; and what the woman said was a great shock. She said, ”I simply love your eyes, they are so beautiful and so silent, and I would pray you that you go on coming. We are not poor, but I want to see your eyes at least once a day. I have never seen such eyes.” She was not concerned with Surdas at all. She was talking about the eyes as you would talk about a flower, a rose; she wanted to see those beautiful eyes – there was nothing else.

Surdas – that was not his name at that time. In India you don’t call a blind man a blind man, because that looks bad, unmannerly; so all blind men in India are called surdas – Surdas means blind man.

That was not his name before; but he went home, took both his eyes out, went back with the help of another monk and presented those two eyes to the woman. He said, ”You keep these eyes, because soon we will be moving and I will not be able to come every day. You can see these eyes, you can keep them, and for me anyway it is good that I don’t have them.” That day he expressed his heart, ”I was also feeling a certain desire arising in me. Now I will never see beauty. Now these eyes are closed. The world of beauty is no more there.” I will not support such a thing because you can be blind but you can still dream of beautiful women, which is more dangerous. Because no real girl is a dream girl, but all dream girls are real when you are dreaming, remember – very real.

You will get frustrated with any beautiful woman. She may be Cleopatra, Amrapali, anyone, but you will get fed up, actually fed up, because this desire for beauty is also a kind of hunger; you are feeding on it. It is a kind of food, a nourishment, but you cannot eat the same food every day. Sooner or later you are going to be fed up. That word fed up is very beautiful. The same food can bring nausea if it is given every day to you.

So just by destroying your eyes you cannot go beyond your desire – that is stupid. But Surdas did that, and he was writing only poetry about Krishna’s childhood, because how can this man, who has taken his eyes out to avoid desire, think of his god dancing with girls, other people’s wives, and living the life of the most materialist person possible? So for him, Krishna never goes beyond seven years; he remains just below seven. And in India many temples are called Balaji’s temple, which means Krishna in his childhood.

This Balaji’s mandir was just in front of the house of the man who had made it. Because of the temple and the man’s devotion, continuous devotion.... He would take a bath – just in front of the temple was a well – he would take a bath there first thing. Then he would do his prayers for hours; and he was thought to be very religious. By and by people started also calling him Balaji. It became so associated that I don’t remember his real name myself because by the time I had any idea that he existed, I only heard his name as Balaji. But that cannot be his name; that name must have come because he made the temple.

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to be worried about time – three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening, he was constantly torturing the god of the temple. Nobody used to go there, although the temple was so beautiful that many people would have gone there; they would go to a temple further away because this Balaji was too much. And his noise – it can only be called noise, it was not music – his singing was such that it would make you an enemy of singing for your whole life.

But I used to go there and we became friendly. He was an old man. I said, ”Balaji, three hours in the morning, three hours in the evening – what are you asking for? And everyday? – and he has not given it to you?”

He said, ”I am not asking for any material things. I ask for spiritual things. And it is not a matter of one day; you have to continue your whole life and they will be given after death. But it is certain they will be given: I have made the temple, I serve the lord, I pray; you can see even in winter, with wet clothes....” It is thought to be a special quality of devotion, to be shivering with wet clothes. My own idea is that with shivering, singing comes easier. You start shouting to forget the shivering.

I said, ”My idea about it is different but I will not tell you. Just one thing I want because my grandfather goes on saying,’These are only cowards; this Balaji is a coward. Six hours a day he is wasting, and it is such a small life; and he is a coward.’”

He said, ”Your grandfather said that I am a coward?” I said, ”I can bring him.”

He said, ”No, don’t bring him to the temple because it will be an unnecessary trouble – but I am not a coward.”

I said, ”Okay, we will see whether you are a coward or not.” Behind his temple there was what in India is called an akhara, where people learn to wrestle, do exercises, and the Indian type of wrestling. I used to go there – it was just behind the temple, by the side of the temple – so I had all the wrestlers there as my friends. I asked three of them, ”Tonight you have to help me.”

They said, ”What has to be done?”

I said, ”We have to take Balaji’s cot – he sleeps outside his house – we have just to take his cot and put it over the well.”

They said, ”If he jumps or something happens he may fall into the well.” I said, ”Don’t worry, the well is not that deep. I have jumped into it many times – it is not that deep nor is it that dangerous. And as far as I know Balaji is not going to jump. He will shout from the cot; sitting in the cot, he will call to his Balaji,’Save me!”’

With difficulty I could convince three persons: ”You have nothing really to do with it. Just alone I cannot carry his cot, and I am asking you because you are all strong people. If he wakes up in the From Ignorance to Innocence

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middle it will be difficult to reach to the well. I will wait for you. He goes to sleep at nine o’clock, by ten the street is empty and eleven is the right time not to take any chances. At eleven we can move him.”

Only two persons turned up; one didn’t turn up, so we were only three. I said, ”This is difficult. One side of the cot... and if Balaji wakes up.... I said, ”Just wait, I will have to call my grandfather.” And I told my grandfather, ”This is what we are going to do. You have to give us a little help.” He said, ”This is a little too much. You have some nerve to ask your own grandfather to do this to that poor man who does no harm to anybody except that he shouts six hours a day... but we have become accustomed to it.”

I said, ”I have not come to argue about it. You just come, and anything that you want, anytime, I will owe it to you; you just say, and I will do it. But you have to come for this thing, and it is not much –

just a twelve – foot road has to be crossed without waking up Balaji.” So he came. That’s why I say he was a very rare man – he was seventy-five! He came. He said,

”Okay, let us have this experience also and see what happens.” The two wrestlers started escaping, seeing my grandfather. I said, ”Wait, where are you going?” They said, ”Your grandfather is coming.”

I said, ”I am bringing him. He is the fourth person. If you escape then I will be at a loss. My grandfather and I will not be able to manage. We can carry him, but he will wake up. You need not be worried.”

They said, ”Are you sure of your grandfather? – because they are almost of the same age; they may be friends and some trouble may arise. He may tell on us.” I said, ”I am there, he cannot get me into any trouble. So don’t you be afraid, you will not be in any trouble, and he does not know your names or anything.” We carried Balaji and put his cot over his small well. Only he used to take a bath there, and once in a while I used to jump into it, which he was very much against – but what can you do? Once I had jumped in, he had to arrange to take me out. I said, ”What can you do now? The only thing is to take me out. And if you harass me, I will jump in every day. And if you talk about it to my family, then you know I will start bringing my friends to jump into it. So right now, keep it a secret between us.

You take your bath outside, I take my bath inside; there is no harm.” It was a very small well, so the cot could completely fit over it. Then I told my grandfather, ”You go away because if you are caught then the whole city will think that this is going too far.” And then, from far away we started throwing stones to wake him up... because if he did not wake up the whole night, he might turn and fall into the well, and something would go wrong. The moment he woke up he gave such a scream! We had heard his voice, but this...! The whole neighborhood From Ignorance to Innocence

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gathered. He was sitting in his cot and he said, ”Who has done it?” He was trembling and shaking and afraid.

People said, ”Please get out of the cot at least. Then we will find out what has happened.” I was there in the crowd, and I said,”What is the matter? You could have called your Balaji. But you didn’t call him, you gave a scream and you forgot all about Balaji. Six hours training every day for your whole life....”

He looked at me and he said, ”Is that too a secret?” I said, ”Now there are two secrets you have to keep. One you have already kept for many years.

This is now the second.”

But from that day he stopped that three hours shouting in the temple. I was puzzled. Everybody was puzzled. He stopped taking a bath in that well, and those three hours evening and morning he just forgot. He arranged a servant priest to come every morning to do a little worship and that was all.

I asked him, ”Balaji, what has happened?”

He said, ”I had told you a lie that I am not afraid. But that night, waking up over the well – that shriek was not mine.” You can call it the primal scream. It was not his, that is certainly true. It must have come from his deepest unconscious. He said, ”That scream made me aware that I am really an afraid man, and all my prayers are nothing but trying to persuade God to save me, to help me, to protect me.

”But you have destroyed all that, and what you have done was good for me. I am finished with all that nonsense. I tortured the whole neighborhood my whole life, and if you had not done that, I may have continued. I am aware now that I am afraid. And I feel that it is better to accept my fear because my whole life has been meaningless and my fear is the same.” Only in 19701 went for the last time to my city. I had a promise with my mother’s mother that when she dies – she had taken it as a promise – that I would come. So I had gone. I just went around the town to meet people and I saw Balaji. He was looking a totally different man. I asked him, ”What has happened?”

He said, ”That scream changed me completely. I started to live the fear. Okay, if I am a coward, then I am a coward; I am not responsible for it. If there is fear, there is fear; I was born with it.

But slowly, slowly as my acceptance grew deeper, that fear has disappeared, that cowardliness has disappeared.

”In fact I have disposed of the servant from the temple, because if my prayers have not been heard, then how is a servant’s prayer going to be heard... a servant who goes to thirty temples the whole day?”because he gets two rupees from each temple. ”He is praying for two rupees. So I have disposed of him. And I am perfectly at ease, and I don’t bother a bit whether God exists or not. That is His problem, why should I be bothered?

”But I am feeling very fresh and very young in my old age. I wanted to see you, but I could not come, I am too old. I wanted to thank you that you did that mischief; otherwise, I would have continually From Ignorance to Innocence

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prayed and died, and it was all just meaningless, useless. Now I will be dying more like a man freed, completely freed.” He took me into his house. I had been there before; all the religious books were removed. He said, ”I am no longer interested in all that.” You ask me: if God is not a hypothesis, if God is not an idea, then what is God?

It is not a hypothesis because there is no way for science to discover God. Science does not move inwards, it moves outwards, and there you will find the world of things.

If you want to know consciousness, that center is within.

So God is not a hypothesis.

God is not an idea because an idea is a philosophical concept, and philosophers only go on weaving thoughts, ideas, rationalizations – and they create great systems of thought....

If you look into their systems of thought you will be immensely impressed. For example, Hegel or Kant... if you are not alert, you will be surprised at what a palatial system they have made – but there is no base. And it is not a palatial building either; if you come closer you will find it is made of playing cards. A little breeze and the whole palace falls down, because there is no base to it.

Philosophy is baseless.

It makes castles in the air.

Ideas are just ideas. You can project an y idea you like, nobody can prevent you; and once you project the idea you can find all kinds of rationalizations to support it. There is no difficulty.

One man came to me, he was an American. He was a professor in a Christian theological college.

Jabalpur has one of the greatest theological colleges in the whole of Asia, where they train ministers and priests and missionaries, and they go on sending them all over Asia to convert people to Christianity. There they teach everything – if you just go and see, you will laugh. I used to be invited there to speak on some subject.

This professor became interested in me. He took me around the whole college. In one class they were teaching how you have to stand up when you preach in church, in public; on what sentences you should put the emphasis, what words should be pronounced loudly, what gestures should be made with your hands.

I was simply amazed and said, ”What are you doing? Are you making these people actors or ministers?” And these people go on doing that acting – every priest will do the same. It is a training, a kind of exercise; there is no heart in it.

If there is heart in your words, the emphasis will come on its own. If there is something that has to be expressed by your hands, the hands will take care of it, you need not do anything. If something comes to your eyes, it will come. You are not to bring it, otherwise the whole thing becomes hypocrisy.

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He became friendly. One day he brought me a book which said that in America – I don’t know how far it is true – number thirteen is thought to be something bad. He showed me that somebody had done this research in his theological college under him: that thirteen is really bad. So he had collected all the information about how many people die every month on the thirteenth. People die every day, but he had taken only the figures for the thirteenth: how many wars have broken out on the thirteenth, how many disasters, calamities, earthquakes. From the whole of history he had collected thousands of facts – that all this had happened on the thirteenth.

So the professor was saying to me, ”This man has done a great job. He has really proved it.” That professor told me – I don’t know, because I have never stayed in any hotel, but the professor told me,

”In America the thirteenth floor is simply missing because nobody wants to stay on the thirteenth floor.” So after the twelfth comes the fourteenth! Great idea! Even deceiving God just by changing the number.

I told him, ”You do one thing.... I would like to meet your student too. So tomorrow when I go to my university, I will be coming here at this time. You keep your student in your room.” I asked the student, ”Have you thought about number twelve or number eleven? Before you submit this thesis... and this professor who is your guide for a Ph.D. thesis, he should have been intelligent enough to tell you that you should look for each date, and then only can you prove that the thirteenth is bad.

If on the first there were only five wars and on the thirteenth there were five hundred, then it proves something. If on the second only five people died, and on the thirteenth, fifty thousand people died, it proves something. You count the whole month; you have to present thirty-one days and compare them. There is no comparison here.

You have simply collected anything that is bad, that happened on the thirteenth. I can tell anybody to collect for the twelfth, or eleventh, or tenth, and the same kind of facts will be collected and the same number of facts. This is not a thesis, this is simply stupidity. You wasted your time, and your professor has been wasting his time.” He had been working on this thesis for three years and he was getting a scholarship for it.

Once you get an idea – it may be the date thirteen, it doesn’t matter – you can make a great philosophy out of it.

God is not an idea, although philosophers have tried... because philosophers are trespassers; they simply don’t believe that any territory is not their territory. They will enter into every direction, into every dimension, and they have some idea for everything. A philosopher never says, ”I don’t know.” He knows! And not only does he know, but he will give you all the arguments and proofs that his knowledge is valid. So how can they leave out such an important area like God?

They have discovered four arguments for God. Christians have accepted those four arguments, but none of those four arguments has any validity. They are all bogus.

The first argument I have talked to you about is that everything needs a creator; hence God is needed. Now it is clear that this is not an argument. Immediately the question is shifted back – who From Ignorance to Innocence

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created God? And then there is no end to it. But this is thought to be the most important argument brought in by philosophers in support of God.

It has been so easy for the atheists to laugh at these philosophers and these theologians: ”What kind of arguments are these people giving?” But atheists have not been very different either.

One very famous atheist, Diderot, was speaking and he stood up and told the audience, ”If God exists and you say He is all-powerful then let Him stop the clock, this very moment. I will wait one minute.” He waited one minute. The clock did not stop. He said, ”Now you see He is not powerful.

He cannot even stop the clock. He is not even courageous enough to accept my challenge.” But are these arguments? Some cunning person can manage to fix the clock so that at nine it will stop. And when it reaches nine, he stands up and says, ”God, prove yourself If you are real let the clock stop within one minute; otherwise it will prove that you don’t exist.” And the clock stops; God is proved.... These are arguments? Neither the stopping of the clock nor the not stopping of the clock can make any substantial contribution to the proof of God.

Hence I say God is not an idea.

You ask me: Then what is God?

It is simply a word, a meaningless word, hollow inside, with no substance in it.

Samuel Beckett has written his masterpiece, WAITING FOR GODOT, a very small piece of tremendous importance. Two persons are sitting under a tree. Both are hobos. One hobo says,

”It is getting late and he has not come yet.”

The other says, ”I also think that he must be coming.” They are waiting for Godot who has never said to them, ”I will be coming.” Nobody knows who this Godot is. They have never met him, but just to pass time they have invented this idea of Godot, because those two hobos, what are they going to do the whole time? So they sit and they wait, and they argue, ”I don’t think he is a man of his word.” The other says, ”No, I know perfectly well that if he has promised he will come. He may be a little late but he will come, don’t be worried.” This conversation continues, and then one becomes fed up and says, ”I am going. It is enough. Now I cannot wait.” The other says, ”Then I am also coming with you; we will wait there together, wherever you go.

Anyway what is the point? Do you think you will meet him there? We don’t know where he is.” When I first came across this small booklet, I thought perhaps Godot is German for God – these Germans are just such crackpots that they can make anything out of anything – that they must have made God a Godot. But I enquired of Haridas. Haridas said, ”No. In Germany we don’t call God Godot, we call him Gott.”

So I said, ”I was not very far off: G-o-t-t, Gott.” I said, ”You have come very close to Godot. It is perfectly okay. My guess was not absolutely wrong, I was on the right lines that it must be some German idea of turning God into Godot.”

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But whether you call Him God or Gott or Godot, it doesn’t matter because the word means nothing

– so you can call Him anything. It is simply a word without any meaning at all, so you can play with it. And in fact that’s what Samuel Beckett was doing. He means God. He doesn’t say so, but it is a clear-cut indication – waiting for God; but then it would have lost some beauty. When he makes it waiting for Godot, you know who Godot is yet you cannot say that you are speaking against God.

Nobody has seen Him.

Nobody has met Him.

Nobody has heard Him.

Still everybody is waiting for Him... that now He must be coming, that it is time, He should be here.

What are the Jews doing? Waiting, waiting. And they were angry when Jesus said, ”I have come.” He was disturbing their waiting. Just think if you had gone to those two hobos and you had said,

”Okay, I have come.... They would have both killed you – ”You think you are Godot? Do you know who Godot is? Are you trying to deceive us?”

They would have loved.... Even if Godot himself had come, they would not have believed that he was Godot – because how he can prove that he is Godot? They don’t have any photograph. They don’t have any address, a phone number. How can they recognize him? They have not seen him before.

That’s one thing which should be clearly understood. When Moses sees God, nobody asks him,

”How did you recognize Him? – because you have not seen Him before.” Recognition needs you to have seen Him before; otherwise some charlatan or somebody may be deceiving you. ”How, on what grounds...?”

When Jesus hears voices of God, or Mohammed hears them, how do they recognize that those voices are God’s? Have they heard Him before? Their recognition is not valid. They may have heard some voices, many mad people hear them. They may have seen somebody, many mad people see somebody. You can go into any madhouse and you will see a madman alone talking to another who is not there, and not only talking, but answering also from his side.

There is a game of cards that one man can play. In trains, once in a while, I came across a person...

because I would not speak in the trains. That was my only time to be silent, otherwise in the cities with five meetings a day.... So only between two cities, on the train, was the time when I would be silent and rest. But I saw people playing cards, alone. I was puzzled: this was a great religious game! They had a partner, and for that partner’s side they also played; they knew both sides and they knew both hands of cards.

Those two hobos were not doing anything new. All these religions for centuries have been doing just that, waiting for Godot, because waiting at least keeps you hoping that tomorrow... if not today, then tomorrow – but it is going to happen. And when so many people are waiting, somebody must know, somebody must have heard, somebody must have seen – he must have spoken to somebody! And then there are people who say, ”He has spoken to me.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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I used to receive... and even now, but I don’t see the letters because I stopped looking at all this rubbish, I used to receive letters – and still they come but Sheela simply reports to me: ”Fifteen or twenty letters of this type have come, saying that they have seen God and they want to meet You so that You can see whether their realization is true or not.”

”They have seen God,” I said, ”they should have asked Him. Why should they bother me? I am absolutely unconcerned with you and your God; why should you bother me? If you have seen God then what is the suspicion? Why should you need a certificate from me?” Just pure hallucinations, imagination, continual listening to idiotic sermons... millions of people waiting with great expectation – the imagination fires up: just a little effort and you will see God.

But remember, whatever you see is not you. Whatever you see is some object. And religion’s basic concern is not objective. Its basic concern is your subjectivity. When all seeing disappears, all hearing disappears, and all thinking disappears... when all your senses are silent, in that silence it transpires.

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One god, one messenger, one book – one big lie

17 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A RELIGION AND A CULT? – BECAUSE THE

CHRISTIANS GO ON CALLING US A CULT. IT SEEMS DIFFICULT FOR THEM TO ACCEPT US

AS A RELIGION. WHAT COULD BE THE REASON BEHIND IT?

IT is a complex question. You will have to understand many things before the question can be answered.

Religion is an individual experience.

Only an individual can be religious.

The cult is an establishment, it is an organization, it has nothing to do with religion at all. It exploits in the name of religion. It pretends to be religious and lives on the past.

For example: Christians will say that they have a two thousand year history. But the past is dead, it is a corpse. This is a very strange world in which we live. When Jesus was there, Jews could not accept him as religious: he and his followers were a ”cult”.

Jesus is a religious man so there was the fragrance of religion around him, and those who were sensitive, available, receptive, came close to Jesus. This coming to Jesus was not a question of any intellectual conviction; it was more like a love affair. They simply fell in love with the man.

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The religious man never converts anybody, but his presence inspires many people to be with him.

A religious person has no followers, only fellow travelers – it is impossible for a religious person to insult somebody by calling him a follower.

When Jesus was crucified, a strange thing happened, something that has happened to almost all the religions. The same type of people who had crucified Jesus – the rabbis, the priesthood... the same type of people gathered around the dead religious phenomenon, which had gone, which was not there anymore.

It is just like the fragrance of a flower.

The flower is gone, the fragrance lingers on a little – and then it is lost.

Religion cannot have a continuity.

It will always be individual, here and there.

One individual becomes enlightened and suddenly people start becoming attracted towards him as if by a magnetic force.

Jesus is not an intellectual; he is not even educated. He is not a theologian; he cannot argue for God or for religion. In all his teachings there is no argument, they are statements.

A philosopher argues, a religious person states.

The philosopher argues because he does not know; it is through argument that he wants to come to a conclusion. But the religious person knows it. He states it, it is a declaration – and he also knows that there is no way to prove it. No argument is going to be supportive of it.

But once that magnet disappears....

The priest is the most cunning part of humanity – and clever. He is a businessman, he sees the opportunity of a great business. While jesus is alive, it is dangerous to be with him. No businessman will come close to him – only gamblers may risk it and be with him. It is dangerous to be with him: he can be crucified, you can be crucified.

But once he is dead it is a great opportunity for business. Then a new kind of people start gathering around: those are the priests, the popes, the imams, the rabbis – learned, scholarly, argumentative, dogmatic. They create the dogma, the creed. They create the cult.

On the dead body of a religious person, a cult is created.

Christianity is a cult.

Friedrich Nietzsche used to say... and I feel that he has the tremendous quality of seeing certain things which others go on missing. The man was mad, but sometimes mad people have a very From Ignorance to Innocence

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sharp intelligence. Perhaps that is the reason that they go mad. Friedrich Nietzsche says, ”The first and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years ago. Since then there has been no Christian at all.” And he is absolutely right.

Jesus was the only Christain, although he never knew the word Christian. He knew only Aramaic, the language which he spoke, and a little bit oof Hebrew, the language which the rabbis spoke. But he had no idea of Greek. The word ”christ” is a Greek word, and the word christain comes out of Christ. Jesus never in his life heard the words christ or christain. The Hebrew word for Christ is

”messiah”, so Jesus knew ”messiah”.

But once he died.... And it was very strange that when he was alive, overflowingly alive, and was ready to give, to share, to pour his being into their being, the people were avoiding him. But once he was dead, the priests were not going to miss the opportunity.

The priests immediately gather around the dead body of a Buddha, of a Jesus, of a Lao Tzu, and they immediately make the catechism.

They start making a church on the dead body.

If Jesus comes back, the pope will be the first person to ask for his crucifixion again, because Jesus will disturb the whole business. That’s what he was doing the last time he was here.

Why were the rabbis angry? The business was going so well, everything was settled, everybody was satisfied and suddenly this man Jesus comes and starts disturbing people’s minds. He starts people thinking, enquiring, seeking.... The establishment cannot tolerate such a person, because if you start seeking and searching, soon you will find that the establishment is standing on a dead body.

I have heard that one day the bishop of New York phoned the pope, a long distance call, and he was really in avery shaky condition. He said to the pope, ”A hippy-like man has entered the church and when I asked him,’Who are you?’ he said,’Can’t you recognize me? I am your Lord Jesus Christ, exactly. What am I supposed to do in such a situation?” The pope said, ”You idiot! Just call the police. If he is just a hippy, there is no problem. If he is really Lord Jesus Christ then let him be imprisoned before he creates any disturbance – and get moving.

If he is the lord, just get busy and phone to the police – and be quick to get him imprisoned.” The same trouble will be there. Jesus has promised in the Bible, ”I will be coming,” but I can tell you authoritatively that he is not going to come – one experience was enough. Who wants to be crucified again? And that time at least there was a consoltation: that these were Jews, orthodox, traditional; they could not understand the revolution that he had brought.

This time, even that consolation will not be there. These will be the Christians, his own people, who will crucify him.

Last time, Jesus had prayed to God, ”Forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing.” What is he going to do this time? He will have to pray, ”Forgive these people – they know perfectly well what they are doing.” But they will do exactly the same thing.

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A cult is a business, a religious kind of business.

It has a religious jargon.

It has no experience.

Yes, once somewhere in the past there may have been a flower, but it is gone. Centuries have passed, and since then the priest goes on pretending that he is the representative of that fragrance.

Nobody can represent fragrance: it comes with the flower and goes with the flower.

But the priest can create a plastic flower, can even put French perfume on it. And that’s what he has been doing in all the religions.

Religion is rebellious, is bound to be so, because religion starts saying things which the tradition will oppose, because only one of these two can exist: either the mass, unintelligent crowd – mind which makes the tradition, or a man like jesus or Buddha or Mahavira.

They are alone.

And what they are saying can be understood only by the chosen few.

What they bring to the world is something so otherworldly, that unless you can have a heart to heart contact with them, there is no way of understanding them – you will misunderstand.

jesus is misunderstood.

Socrates is misunderstood.

Al-Hillaj Mansoor is misunderstood. Whenever you find a religious man, it will be simply ascertained that all around him there will be misunderstanding. But once he dies, things settle down. Once he dies the priesthood makes a new business.

Now, Jews have been suffering almost a heart attack for nearly two thousand years, for the simple reason that they missed the business. Christianity is now the biggest business in the world... and they missed. And Jews are not the people to miss when there is a business; they have the eye to see it.

I have heard a story... it has been happening for centuries that every year on a particular day in the Vatican, the chief rabbi of the city comes with roll in his hand to Saint Peter’s Square where the pope waits for him. Jews and Christians gather in thousands to see this meeting of the pope and the chief rabbi, but what transpires between them, nobody knows. The rabbi bows down, gives the roll to the pope. The pope bows down – that’s all.

The next morning, the roll is sent back to the rabbi to keep for the next year. For two thousand years no pope bothered to look into it, but this polack pope became curious: what is this? What kind of convention is this that has been going on and on? And every time the rabbi gives it to the pope and the next morning it has to be sent back, ceremoniously – the same roll goes back. What exactly From Ignorance to Innocence

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is in it? He opened the roll. It was very ancient – two thousand years old. And do you know what he found? It was the bill for the last supper! The Jews were still asking, ”Pay for it at least.” And of course Jesus died without paying, so....

Religion is basically rebellion against dead traditions, meaningless conventions.

It is a revolution to bring the birth of a new man, of a new consciousness.

The cult is not concerned with the new man. The cult does not want the new man ever to be born, because with the old, things are so at ease, why create trouble? Who knows what the new man will be?

And they are right. The new man is going to be trouble. He is not just going to accept any idiotic concept; he will ask questions. He is not going to be faithful. He will be basically a man of enquiry.

He will doubt – he will not believe.

A religious man doubts but never believes. He enquires, because doubt leads into enquiry; and he questions till he finds the answer on his own. Then there is no question of belief or faith – he knows.

If you ask him, ”Do you believe in God?” he will say no. You will be surprised – a religious man saying no! And if you ask him, ”You are a religious man and you say that you don’t believe?” he will say, ”Yes, I repeat it again: I don’t believe because I know; belief is for those who are blind. A blind man believes in light, a man with eyes knows. Do you believe in light?” But the believers are docile, ready to submit, to surrender to any idiotic concept.

Now, ask the Christian, ”What do you mean by the virgin birth?” – and each Christian believes in it; if you don’t believe in it you are not much of a Christian. Just a few days ago one bishop in London has been thrown out of his bishophood because he said, ”I don’t believe in the virgin birth.” If you don’t believe in the virgin birth, then you are not a Christian, so what right have you to be a bishop? And you are spreading dangerous ideas in people’s minds. Tomorrow you will say, ”I don’t believe in the Holy Ghost.” It is bound to come, that ”Who is this fellow, the Holy Ghost? Doing unholy things, making a poor virgin Mary pregnant, still he remains the Holy Ghost!” And if you suspect the virgin birth and the Holy Ghost, how long can you believe in a God? Because out of the trinity you have already doubted two. The third, you have not seen, and you cannot meet a person who has seen him. They will quote scriptures, but scriptures cannot satisfy a religious man.

He wants to taste truth himself. But that creates difficulty for the cult.

The cult may be any: Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jewish; it doesn’t matter – these are all cults.

Perhaps there has been a religious man in the beginning. I say ”perhaps” because priests are so cunning they can make a whole church even without a real religious man’s dead body; that is not such a necessity.

I am reminded of a small story. A young devil comes running to the chief devil and says, ”Do something quickly; one man has found truth just now. I am coming directly from there. Something has to be done. His truth has to be stopped, otherwise he will destroy our business.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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It is obvious, if people become truthful and people start discovering truth, what business has the devil left? But the old devil laughed and he said, ”You are too young, too new to the business. Our people are already there.”

He said, ”But I didn’t see anybody.”

The old devil said, ”You will take a little time to understand. Did you see the priests around the man?” He said, ”Yes.”

The devil said, ”They are our people. They won’t let the truth go anywhere. They will make a dogma out of it and they will not leave the man who has found the truth. Let him find it. They will surround him – they will become the mediators between him and the masses, and they are our agents.” All priests are the devil’s agents.

They have no interest in truth, no interest in enquiring about the ultimate reality. Their interest is how to exploit man’s fear, man’s greed.

They exploit your fear by creating hell.

They exploit your greed by creating heaven.

They exploit your helpless state by creating God.

They give you certain scriptures, mantras, prayers, and they say, ”These will save you; you are protected. You need not be worried, you are not helpless. And we are always there between you and God – you can depend on us.”

They don’t know of God at all.

They have nothing to do with God.

But God is a beautiful concept to exploit people who are feeling psychologically sick, afraid, fearful

– and the whole of humanity is in the same situation.

Whenever a religious man comes, he starts transforming you, not consoling you, because by consolation, your sickness is not going to disappear.

Only by transformation can you be absolutely on your own, can you be absolutely contented with yourself and with existence.

But the priest does not want you to be contented. He wants you to be discontented; otherwise why will you go to the priest? For what? He does not want you to become courageous. He wants you to be cowards forever, because only cowards will come crawling to his feet. Why would the courageous come to him? There is no need.

The religious man destroys the need for the cult; hence, whenever there is a religious man and around him the climate of religion, all the cults will be against him.

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So this is a strange situation – Christians calling us a cult! They are a cult. Hindus are calling us a cult; they are a cult because their religious people died two thousand, three thousand, five thousand years ago. And nobody actually knows whether there has been any religious person in the beginning at all or whether it was a fiction from the very beginning.

George Gurdjieff, one of the most penetrating intellects of this century, used to say, ”There has never been a Jesus Christ. It was only a drama that used to be played; and slowly, slowly, the priests became aware that this drama can be utilized:’Make it history.’” One thing is certain, that except for the Christian New Testament, there is no reference to jesus Christ anywhere, in any scripture.

If a man of the caliber of Jesus was there, it is impossible that somewhere in the Jewish scriptures his name would not have been entered – and particularly when he was crucified. Crucifixion makes his name the most historical name. In fact, now we know history only according to Jesus: before Christ, after Christ... that’s how we know history. That man becomes the central point of our whole history. Such an important person is not even mentioned anywhere: neither in Jewish scriptures –

nor in Roman scriptures, because Judea was under the Roman Empire.

Certainly in the Roman files Jesus must have been referred to. If you crucify a man, at least he deserves a place somewhere in your bureaucratic files. But nowhere, except those four gospels which are written by his four disciples... he is simply non-existent. If you just lose those four disciples’

gospels, Jesus becomes only gossip. Gurdjieff was very insistent that he was just gossip, and that cunning people had used the drama and made history out of it – and a great business of course!

It is bound to be so, that while I am here nobody is going to accept you as a religion.

And you are a religion only while I am here.

The moment I am gone, the best way is to disperse just like a fragrance.

The worst way is to become a cult.

Then these people – Christians and Jews and Hindus and Mohammedans – will accept you also as a religion. They will accept you as a religion only when you have become a cult. Do you see the strange logic of the world? When you have lost contact with a living experience, then of course you are as dead as they are, and of course dead people don’t argue. And one dead person pays respect to another dead person – it is just courtesy, a simple mannerism.

But how can the dead people be respectful to a living person? They are dead; that hurts. They don’t know; that hurts. They have only beliefs – and who, knows whether those beliefs are true or not.

There are three hundred religions on the earth, three hundred different dogmas, creeds. Do you think all three hundred dogmas and creeds can be true?

Truth can only be one.

You may verbalize it differently, but you cannot make two creeds out of it. Your languages may be different. Your concepts about it may be different, but anybody can see that it is about the same truth.

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You must have heard the story of the five blind men who went to see an elephant. In the first place, blind people should not go to see something; that is an absurdity. But they were curious, and the whole village was agog because for the first time an elephant had come to the village. So they also decided, ”Let us go.”

They could not see but they said, ”We can at least touch and feel, and we will see what this elephant is.” And they all five touched the elephant, of course from different angles. Somebody touched the leg of the elephant; he said, ”I have found it. The elephant is just like a pillar, the pillars that we have in the temple, exactly like a marble pillar.”

Another man said, ”You idiot, you must be touching some pillar, because what I see is totally different.” He was touching the ear of the elephant, and he said, ”It looks like a fan.” In India, in the hot summer, before electricity came into being there used to be fans hanging from the ceiling. And one person, a poor person, would go on pulling the fan with a rope the whole day, and the fan would give you, at least for the few rich people, cool air the whole day. Or people would be standing on both sides with two big fans the shape of an elephant’s ear, and they would both be fanning you.

So the second man said, ”This is impossible what you are saying.” A third one contradicted them both, and the fourth one contradicted all three. Then the fifth one said,

”You are idiots; I should not have come with you, because it is nothing but a brush – he was holding the tail. ”And so much ado about nothing; just a brush hanging with something... I don’t know what it is hanging with because I can’t see.” They were all quarreling the whole way back home.

But how can you decide when you are blind? You should accept one thing, that you cannot see. If you don’t accept that then there is going to be trouble.

These cults have no eyes. I have asked bishops, rabbis, shankaracharyas, Jaina monks, Buddhist bhikkus, ”Have you experienced it? And at least, for once, be sincere and be truthful.” And they have all told me, ”In private we can say we have not experienced it, but in public, if you ask us, we will absolutely deny that we have ever said it. Because in public we have to pretend. We have studied....”

When I spoke for the first time in Bombay, in 1960, a Jaina monk also spoke with me. We were the two to address the meeting. He spoke before me because he was a well-known person; I was absolutely unknown. And when he finished and I stood up, people from the hall started leaving because nobody knew me. I had to tell those people, ”Just for five minutes, stand still wherever you are. After five minutes you are free to leave or to sit down.” Of course they stopped because I was asking for just five minutes and it wouldn’t have looked good to go out just like that.

I said, ”Just for five minutes – you look at the clock and after five minutes you just empty the hall; there is no need to be here. But I have just a few things to say in five minutes. First: this man who spoke before me knows nothing; he is just a dodo!” Many who were standing sat down. I said, ”For five minutes, stand up! For five minutes you keep standing then you can either sit or go out.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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This man had been talking about Mahavira, the founder of Jainism. Mahavira’s original name was Vardhamana. Mahavira is a given name. ”Mahavira” means very courageous, a great warrior –

because in Jainism, truth has to be conquered. That is the exact meaning of Jaina; Jaina means the conqueror. Jainism means: the religion which teaches you how to conquer the truth – and Mahavira conquered it, so his name was changed from Vardhamana to Mahavira. Now, Vardhamana is almost forgotten.

That monk was saying, ”Vardhamana was born as a son to a king,” and ”Vardhamana renounced the palace, the kingdom,” and ”Vardhamana became realized.” And he was using both names –

Vardhamana and Mahavira – without any trouble, and all the people who were present there were Jainas so they understood it.

But I said, ”This man does not understand that he is talking about two persons, and he is very confused.” The people looked at me. I said, ”Vardhamana is one person; Mahavira is totally another.

When Vardhamana died, then Mahavira was born; they never met. This man has been talking as if they were one person and was saying that Mahavira was born to redeem you all from suffering, from misery.”

I said, ”That’s a lie, because Mahavira himself has said,’Nobody can make you miserable, and nobody can make you happy, except you.’ So how can he redeem the whole world? He cannot redeem a single person. He himself is saying the truth:’It is you who cause your misery. If you understand the cause of your misery, you stop causing it.’ And ecstasy is your nature. Misery is your effort, your great endeavor, your success.

”To be miserable, you have to stand on your head, upside down. You have to be as unnatural as possible, you have to swim upstream. To be ecstatic, blissful, you just go down with the river. You are in a let-go you simply allow your nature to be what it is. Mahavira says,’Nobody can make you miserable. Nobody can make you happy’ – and this poor fellow was saying that Mahavira was born to redeem the whole world.”

I said, ”Five minutes are over, now you can decide: either you sit down or get lost.” They all sat down, but the monk was very much shocked. It was an airconditioned hall but he started perspiring. But he was a sincere man, and when I finished, he whispered in my ear, ”Can you come to my temple just for ten minutes? I cannot come to your place – otherwise I would have come – because my followers will not allow me to go anywhere”... such a great monk with so many followers, and going to meet some unknown person; and someone who has made a mockery of him, who has criticized him on every point.

I said, ”There is no problem; I will come.”

I went there. Nearly one thousand people had gathered because people came to know that I was coming, and they had seen what had happened in the morning. But the monk said, ”I want to talk to him in private, so please sit outside; we will be going into the small room.” We went in. He closed the door and started weeping, crying, tears... and he must have been seventy years old. I said, ”But why are you crying?”

He said, ”I am crying because for the first time I felt that I really don’t know anything. For fifty years

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know. I have called you just to confess that I don’t know anything. I cannot say it in front of people –

I am not that courageous – because if I say that in front of people, I will be thrown out.

”No, for fifty years I have not worked. I have been worshipped for fifty years. I have been looked after; thousands of people think of me as their Master, and if I say that I don’t know anything, they will kill me. They will say,’Then why have you been deceiving us for fifty years?’ I cannot say it to them, but I wanted to unburden my heart to you – I don’t know. First I was shocked, angry, by what you said in the morning, but as I started thinking about it, everything seemed to be right.

”First I was thinking to stand up and argue against you, but I saw clearly that no argument was going to help – because I am not arguing; what I am saying is simply stating.” He said, ”I would love to know myself Enough of belief – fifty years I have wasted; and I am just standing where I started.” This happened to many religious leaders with me. When they were alone they accepted what I was saying, but in public they have a different face, a different mask. Now, these people – they may be Christians, they may be Jews, they may be Hindus – they don’t know... because knowing is not a function of a crowd. I can see, you can see, but there is no way that we can both see from the same place.

You cannot see through my eyes.

I cannot see through your eyes.

I can neither stand in your space, where you are standing, nor can you stand in my space, where I am standing.

Exactly like that, religion is absolutely individual.

And whenever you organize it, the priesthood immediately takes over.

If the man who has experienced is alive, he may try to ensure that the religion does not become a cult.

That’s what my whole effort is.

So as long as I am here with you, it is not going to become a cult. But once I am gone, then it will be very difficult to avoid, because up to now, there are so many religions in the world and nobody has succeeded.

Krishnamurti has tried his best. Nobody has done so much against becoming a cult, but it seems not to be succeeding. He dissolved the organization in 1925. An organization had been made for him, The Star of the East, to spread his truth and experience to the whole world. He dissolved the organization. He returned the castles and the money and the land, and everything that had been donated to the organization, to their original owners. And he said, ”I don’t want any followers.” He has been continually saying from that time, ”Nobody is my follower,” but there are people who say, ”We are Krishnamurtiites.” Now, what can you do? And he is still alive, and every day he is From Ignorance to Innocence

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saying, ”Nobody is my follower, and I am not your leader, teacher, Master, anything.” But people repeat these words and say, ”We are Krishnamurtiites.” When Krishnamurti dies they will again join together, because the Master is dead now and something has to be done in his memory – make a temple, make a church, make a memorial, make an organization – so his truth goes on living.

Truth is not some thing.

It is not a thing that you can preserve. It disappears with the person who has experienced it.

Can you preserve love?

There may be two great lovers and you see the phenomenon of love happening; can you preserve this phenomenon? Those two lovers die; can you preserve that climate? – that transfiguration that was happening between those two persons? How can you? It is not a thing; you cannot hold it in your hands, and you cannot put it in a safe deposit. You cannot make a temple out of it or a church out of it or a creed out of it.

Love happens between two persons – truth is even more difficult: it happens within a single individual being. At least in love there were two, and there was something visible outside also. Any observer could have seen something intangible but yet comprehensible transpiring between two persons. You can see it in their eyes, in their faces.

Once I was traveling in a train, and a couple was with me, a very old couple, a Spanish couple.

They had come to India to travel. The man must have been eighty, the woman must have been seventy-five; it was time they should have been in their graves. But I was surprised to see their love – because we had to be together for twenty-four hours – in each and everything that they did, just small things. It is not in big things that you have to show your love, just small things... but I could almost touch their love. It was so visible you could see it. I asked the old man, ”This is a rare phenomenon; how long have you been together?”

He said, ”If you count the years, we must have been together for at least sixty years – she was fifteen when I first met her – but those sixty years don’t seem to me as sixty years; they have all become a small moment, condensed, herenow. I never think of all those moments that have passed because this moment contains all of them.”

But once these people are gone, you will not find that aroma, that aura, that feel. It will be gone too; it is too subtle.

With truth it is even more difficult, because it is a single individual who has experienced his own being and is so full of ecstasy that if you allow, he may overflow; if you are available, he may enter in you.

If you are reluctant and resistant... this phenomenon is so delicate that a little resistance on your part and you miss it.

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So anybody who comes here with a certain prejudice, a certain mind, a certain idea, is going to miss me.

If he comes here open, vulnerable, then he will taste something of religion, he may smell something of religion.

And that is the only way to know religion:

To be in close proximity to a religious man. It is infectious.

But you cannot get it even if you hug pope the polack. There is nothing... a polack is just a polack.

He may also hug you and may crush your bones, because a polack hug is a little difficult on the ribs.

But you will not find anything.

I have met thousands of people who are known as great religious masters and teachers. India is so full of sages and saints you can meet them anywhere. There is no need to seek and search. They are seeking and searching for you, and fighting: ”You belong to me, not to yourself” – whosoever catches hold of you first. But they are all parts of a certain cult, repeating parrot-like – exactly parrot-like or you can say computer-like – scriptures, great words. But words only mean that which the person has.

When Jesus says ”truth” or Buddha says ”truth”, the word has meaning in it. When the Buddhist monk says ”truth”, there is no meaning in it; it is an empty word, there is no content in it.

You ask why they can’t accept you as a religion. It is obvious: they are in the marketplace; everybody is shopping and peddling his own goods. Now you come as a competitor, and you start selling new things which are more attractive because they are alive.

They become afraid that their young people, their young boys, their young daughters, may get attracted to you – and they are getting attracted, they are not wrong. And that’s what makes them freak out: these people should be going to church or to the synagogue – what are they doing here, in Rajneeshpuram? They should listen to the rabbi, to the minister – what are they doing here?

And certainly when they see you, they cannot figure it out. They have a certain idea: you should fit with that idea, then you are religious. And certainly I am trying my best so that you cannot fit in with anybody’s idea – including mine! – so that you can be just yourself.

My whole religious approach is to give you back to you.

You have been stolen.

You have been covered, conditioned in every possible way. They have closed all the doors of approach to yourself.

My whole work is just to make doors and windows in you.

And if I can withdraw all the walls and leave you just an open sky, you will know what religion is.

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But you will not fit with anybody else’s idea of religion.

They are going to call you all kinds of names. For them, cult is a condemnation, so they call you a cult.

Just the other day I was looking at a panel on the TV with one rabbi and two Christian priests – one must have been Catholic, one Protestant or something, different denominations – discussing me and what is happening here. And the rabbi said, ”It is a cult.” The coordinator asked, ”What is a cult? – and what is the difference between a cult and a religion?” And what the rabbi said, I agree with, but for a totally different reason.

The rabbi said, ”A cult is when there is a charismatic person and people are hypnotized, magnetized by him, surround him; and when the man dies the people disperse – no tradition is created. That is a cult.”

What he is saying, I am also saying – exactly the same but for different reasons. He says, ”If the cult survives the death of the founder, then it becomes a religion.” When Jesus is alive it is a cult, because it is his charismatic personality.... When Jesus is dead then it becomes a religion... a very strange idea: religion being born out of a cult. The cult should not be a condemnatory thing; it is the mother of religion, it is the womb from where the religion comes. It is a potential religion.

But he was saying, ”The cult is bound to disappear because it was only the charismatic person, it was his charisma, his magic that kept people together. Once he is gone, then there is nothing to hold onto. Then people disperse and the cult dies.” I say this is actually the definition of religion.

In a more intelligent world there will be no tradition. Religious people will be born, and with a religious person a religion will happen. Many more people will come, become close to him and will drink out of his well. Jesus says, ”Eat me, drink me.” Yes, they will eat, they will drink and they will be transformed in the whole process. And when the religious person is gone, certainly there is no need to make a tradition, because tradition will be dead.

Yes, you loved your father but when he died you took him to the grave. You didn’t say, ”He was my father, how can I take him to the grave or to the funeral pyre? I am going to keep him in my house. I loved him, he loved me....” No, when your father is dead it is sad but a natural phenomenon.

Everybody who is born is going to die. You say goodbye to him with all your gratitude. The same should be the case with every religious teacher.

Jesus is perfectly good, but Christianity is a disease. Moses is perfectly good, but Judaism is a curse. And the same is true about all of the religions. The people at the very source were really beautiful, but every beautiful flower dies. Even beautiful stars die and disappear, and don’t leave even a single trace behind. So what is the need for any religious person to leave a tradition behind him?

I am not going to leave a tradition behind me.

While I am here, enjoy the moment.

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Celebrate the moment.

Why be bothered for the future?

And remember one thing: anybody who tries, after me, to make a tradition is my enemy, is not my friend and is not your friend either.

He belongs to the devil.

He is now creating a church – and then the popes will come and everything. Then the businesses start and businessmen come in and religion disappears completely.

It is better it disperses in the universe, rather than becomes a part of the religious marketplace.

So whenever people ask me, ”What is going to happen to your religion when you are not?” I say,

”Why should you be worried? While I am here, it is enough.” And there will be people... somebody will blossom and there will be religions. People will go on blossoming, but don’t make traditions because those traditions prevent other people from blossoming. Leave the space. If you had not been told to be a Jew or a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian, and space had been left for you, perhaps you may have blossomed by now.

But from the very beginning they started clipping you, cutting you, cropping you....

Mukta was my gardener in Poona. She was always moving around with scissors, and whenever she would see me she would hide her scissors. I said, ”Don’t do this. Why are you unnecessarily cutting these trees?” One tree particularly she used to call a monster, because she wanted to cut it. So first you have to call it a monster and then it becomes easy to cut.

First you give it a bad name – it is a cult – and then it is good to destroy it. It was a monster.... And it was such a beautiful tree, it was growing huge, but whenever I was not watching, she was cutting it.

If it is a monster, then let it be a monster; it is that tree’s nature. Who are we to destroy it or to give it the shape of our ideas? Mukta has been in difficulty with me because she is Greek and follows the tradition of Aristotle – logical, mathematical. She wanted to create a European garden around my house.

I said, ”It is not possible.” And a European garden, particularly the English garden, is so much against nature, because where in nature do you find symmetry? But in an English garden you will find symmetry. They will cut two trees symmetrically, will make lawns symmetrical, will put plants symmetrically....

Symmetry is unnatural, nature is asymmetrical.

So in a Zen garden in Japan you will not find any symmetry. Even if there is, the Zen people won’t allow it; they will disturb the symmetry – something has gone wrong.

Nature is wild, and when it is wild it has freedom.

A religious person is also wild.

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In his wildness is his freedom.

And in his freedom he finds truth.

In his freedom he finds himself.

In his freedom he finds everything that there is to be found in existence.

But a cultist remains full of rubbish and crap, borrowed empty words; maybe great words – God, soul, truth – but all empty because he has not lived any of them.

And unless you live it, it has no meaning.

Only life gives meaning.

So it is true that they will not accept you as a religion – but why bother about them? Who cares?

I am not interested that they should accept us as religion. We don’t need anybody’s acceptance, recognition, certificate. Who are they?

Those three people in the panel finally decided, ”It is time now that we should have a dialogue. We should go to these people, the Rajneeshees, and we should have a dialogue.” I simply laughed at the idea – the Jew sitting there, and on each side the two Christians sitting there.

The Jews did not have the courage to have a dialogue with Jesus – or do you think the crucifixion was a dialogue? What dialogue can they have with me?

If they know, there is no need for them to come here. If they do not know, then it is going to be a monologue. I will speak and they will have to listen. A dialogue is not possible.

If you also know, and I also know, there is no need for a dialogue – silence is enough.

If you don’t know, and I don’t know, then too there is no point in a dialogue, because it will not be a dialogue, it will become a wrestling match.

I say I know. So with me there is only one possibility – a monologue.

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Religion is rebellion

18 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

IS IT NOT POSSIBLE IN ANY WAY TO PRESERVE YOUR LIVING RELIGION AND NOT LET IT

BE REDUCED TO A CULT LIKE CHRISTIANITY? THE VERY IDEA OF YOUR RELIGION BEING

REDUCED WITH TIME TO A CULT IS UNBEARABLE.

IT is almost impossible to preserve a religion as a religion. Up to now nobody has succeeded in doing it.

But I said it is almost impossible, not absolutely, because we are fortunate in seeing all the failures of the past: all that helps a religion to become a cult can be dropped from the very beginning. We know that many people have tried before. Their efforts are also helpful.

There is not an intrinsic impossibility of a religion remaining a religion. The reasons that reduce it to a cult are not very fundamental.

The first thing: it is not my religion.

I have nothing to do with it. In fact, when I ceased to be it came into being. This is the first thing to remember – it will help the religion to remain a living current.

Do not make it a certain kind of religion – Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism – no, just let it be pure religion.

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Let it be just religiousness.

Nobody can reduce religiousness to a cult.

That is absolutely impossible.

And what I am doing continually is withdrawing all possibilities, all potentialities, which can reduce it to a cult. For example, I have removed God. Without God it is very difficult to reduce a religion to a cult. That’s why Christianity is more of a cult than Buddhism.

This is our blessing, because we can look back upon the whole of history. And only fools say that history does not repeat itself; it continuously repeats, unless you prevent it from repeating itself. If you have accepted the idea that history never repeats itself you are not going to prevent it from repeating itself, there is no need. I say to you that it always repeats itself, unless somebody intelligently prevents it.

Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, are all God – oriented. Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, are not God – oriented. And the difference can be seen immediately. The God – oriented religions become cults immediately.

God is a very dangerous concept because in the name of God comes the priesthood.

If there is no God it is very difficult to create a priesthood. In Jainism there is no priesthood. They have to borrow priests from the Hindus for their worldly rituals; for example, marriage. They don’t have any priests, their religion is against brahminism. But Hindus have the greatest and the longest-standing priesthood; the most sophisticated, cultured, very solidly based establishment.

When my first uncle was getting married... at that time I became aware of a strange thing, that a brahmin had been called. I asked my father, ”Jainism is against brahminism, it was a revolt against the brahmin ritualistic, magical religion. And the marriage is being performed by a brahmin? From the very beginning the marriage is invalid. Can’t you manage to have a Jaina perform the marriage?” He said, ”You raise inconvenient questions, but I must accept that your questions are never wrong.

We may not be able to answer them, we may have practical difficulties in answering them, but that is really our problem – and we get angry at you! Now, the ritual is going to be performed; everybody is ready – the bride and the bridegroom, all the guests and the brahmin have come – it is just about to begin and you are starting to ask a troublesome question.” I said, ”It is my uncle’s marriage. I have every right to be concerned that it is done rightly.” My father wanted me to be quiet. He said, ”You can have a few rupees but get lost, go away.” I said, ”This is not the time – no bribery is going to help. I am going to create trouble; I am not going to allow this brahmin to do the marriage ceremony. Just the very idea.... He is your enemy; the brahmins are continually condemning Jainism, all their scriptures are full of condemnation. Jainas are continually condemning brahmins, their whole philosophy is against brahmins. I will not allow it.

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And I created trouble. I stood up and I asked all the Jainas – all the elders of the society were there

– I asked them, ”What is the meaning of all this? Can anybody answer me?” One old man said, ”This question has been arising in me my whole life – because I must have seen thousands of marriages. Each time the question was there, but I was not courageous enough to enquire. This boy is right. And one has to begin someday.” I told my grandfather, ”Now, you come to my help. What this brahmin is doing, anybody can do. If you allow me, I can do it.”

They said, ”That will be too much. Let some elderly person do it.” I said, ”That’s okay.”

The same old man performed the ritual. That was the first marriage in India amongst Jainas performed by a Jaina. I said, ”Don’t be worried. Whatsoever the brahmin is saying in Sanskrit, you say in Hindi. In fact it is better to say it in Hindi, because both the bride and the bridegroom will understand what you are saying. What the brahmin says is all nonsense – all Greek and Latin!

He may be simply talking gibberish, and you think he is saying great things. All that is wanted is a commitment, a promise, a word given before the society that you will take care of each other. All else is non-essential.”

And that old man performed it in Hindi. The brahmin was so angry because he lost his fee... and that was the beginning. After that marriage in my city no Jaina marriage was performed by a brahmin.

Jainas have no priesthood because without God what is the function of the priest? Things are interrelated. God is absolutely needed to create the hierarchy – then the messiah, then the pope, then the cardinals, then the bishops, then the priest.... And it goes on and on; from the bottom to the peak, so many steps. But they are all possible only if you accept the peak, and the peak is fictitious.

God is fictitious.

If I had met Jesus I would have told him, ”God is fictitious. I am not denying you anything; I am simply saying that unless you prove God as a fact, your messiahship is out of the question – so there is no need to deny it, as the Jews are denying it, saying that you are not the messiah, not the true messiah.”

Just a few days ago I saw a film, a beautiful film on a Jewish family, a very orthodox Hassid family.

The Jews don’t accept Hassids as really equal to them, they are outcasts. The Hassids even today don’t accept the nation of Israel, because they say, ”Israel will be established when the messiah comes – but where is he?”

Their logic is perfect. This Israel is created by the politicians, not by the messiah. They don’t accept this nation – and I agree with them that this is just a creation, a forced creation. It is not a nation that grew naturally; hence the Jews in Israel are going to be in trouble forever.

The Jews think that the Americans have done them a great favor by creating Israel; it is not so.

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problem. Israel had not existed for centuries; it was a Mohammedan country, Palestine, surrounded by Mohammedan countries.

Now just because you won the second world war and you happened to be in control of the land of Palestine, you forced the creation of a nation. It is arbitrary. The people are Mohammedans, it is their country. Israel may have been, thousands of years before, the country of the Jews. But for thousands of years it has been a country of the Mohammedans, and suddenly you simply change the map... and surrounded by the whole Mohammedan world. In the Middle East all the countries are Mohammedan.

This small country, Israel, is going to continuously suffer; and how long can America help it? And how long are American Jews going to pour their money into Israel? Sooner or later the truth of history will have to be accepted. If America had been really compassionate towards Jews, they should have given them an Israel in America. Oregon would have been perfectly good! I propose it: Let Oregon be the Israel. But what kind of compassion is this? – putting Jews there. They will never be able to live at ease, never.

So when I saw in this film the rejection of Israel by the Hassids... of course their reason is different.

I have always been against the creation of Israel. I was a child when it was created but even then my first reaction was that this was absolutely idiotic.

The country is populated by Mohammedans – all around there are Mohammedan countries, they are all together – and you put the poor Jews amongst this vast ocean of enemies. Previously they had somehow escaped from that Israel – history was more compassionate to them. And there was no need for a nation; they were living all over the world. The whole world had become their nation.

When you lose your nation, the whole world becomes your nation – why bother about a nation?

My reasons were different: that this was a political strategy to keep a military base – because Israel will always need the help of America, so America will always keep its military base in Israel, which is very close to Russia. And the Jews are not going in any way to be against America because they are protected by America; they are almost slaves of America.

Without America Israel would be immediately finished, they would be slaughtered; so they depend on America, and their dependence is a guarantee that America has a base in the Middle East.

Other Mohammedan countries will not give you a base – you are Christians, and Mohammedans and Christians have been fighting for fifteen hundred years, crusades upon crusades.

My reason is different, but the Hassidic reason is worth consideration. They say the scriptures are clear that the messiah will come and reestablish the kingdom of Israel. Where is the messiah?

Franklin Roosevelt? Winston Churchill? Who is the messiah? Then this Israel is bogus!

I like the idea. But for me it is bogus for different reasons, but it is bogus; on that I agree with the Hassids. Without God you cannot have a messiah. I would not have argued with Jesus that ”You are not the messiah,” because that is a secondary question. The primary question is that ”You have to prove God exists.”

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prophets sent by God, so what was wrong with poor Jesus? – why should he not be accepted? But if God had been denied, then...”There is nobody to send you. First you prove the existence of God

– then only the secondary question arises; then we will discuss it.” And Jesus would have been at a loss to answer and the crucifixion would have been easily avoided.

But Judaism is God-oriented, Mohammedanism is God-oriented, hence Mohammed becomes His messenger. And somebody has to be the messenger, otherwise how is there going to be any kind of communication between God and His creation? – a mediator is absolutely needed. It appears logical.

The people in the Arabian countries believed in God, so they could not raise the basic question.

They only argued that”You are not the right messenger.” But how can you prove who is the right messenger and who is the wrong messenger? You are fighting on very secondary issues. The real fight has to be on the primary issue.

In Jainism there is no possibility of a messiah. Nobody can declare that ”I am a messiah;” people will simply laugh and say that you have gone mad. Nobody can declare that ”I am a messenger of God;” he will be just a laughingstock, people will just joke around. He cannot say, ”I am an incarnation of God,” because God does not exist. From where are you getting this incarnation – an incarnation of nobody?

So in Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, no problem arises about the messiahs, messengers. And then how can you have popes and bishops and priests? This is the whole ladder.

If you accept the highest rung on the ladder you will have to accept the ladder. But if the ladder is going nowhere, if it is just standing on the ground and leading nowhere, reaching nowhere, all the rungs on the ladder will become meaningless.

I have denied the idea of God.

And with God disappears all messiahhood.

You cannot declare me a messiah even when I am dead.

You cannot declare me an incarnation, even when I am dead.

You cannot declare me a messenger.

Do you see the simple fact?that even when I am dead you cannot go against me. How can you create a cult? – because all the necessary ingredients for a cult I am denying. I am saying there is no messenger. I am saying there is no avatara.

But although Mahavira saved Jainism from the priesthood, he could not save it from becoming a cult, because he brought in a new concept – the tirthankara.

You have to understand: that concept is totally different from a messiah. A messiah is one who comes from God; that’s the exact meaning of avatara. Literally it means descendance – coming down from above. Tirthankara means growing up from below. It is man who has blossomed to his From Ignorance to Innocence

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fullness, who has achieved the ultimate. It is not a descendant of anybody; it is a growth. It is from the roots, it grows like a tree.

The avatara is upside down, the messiah is upside down, hanging from above, coming downwards; they are a kind of fall. A tirthankara is man risen up to his full potential.

Mahavira thought... and that was the concept of Buddha, the same – they were contemporaries, and they both thought, ”This way we avoid the priesthood, God, because we have made man the central point.”

One Baul poet of Bengal... Baul means mad, and they are really mad people – madly in love with existence. One of the most important of the Bauls is Chandidas. His famous statement is, ”Sabar upar manush jati, tahar upar nahin: Above all is the truth of man, and above that there is nothing.” Now man becomes the ultimate truth.

It was a great revolution – to throw God from His throne and put man on His throne.

But a cult still came into being. They forgot something, but we can remember it. They were experimenting; they were the first people, and they have done a great deal. They have cut out almost half the possibilities, but the other half of the possibilities are enough to create a cult: they made the tirthankara an extraordinary man, a superman. They had to, because the question was of continuous comparison – Hindus have avataras; they are all supermen with divine power.

The ordinary people would like to follow a man who has divine power, rather than only a man.

Naturally, when you are going to shop, you shop for the best and the cheapest. Now, Mahavira was neither. He was the costliest because his discipline was very difficult; that was the price you had to pay if you were to follow him. If you were to go on that path of austerity, that was the price you had to pay to become a superman – and still you would be a man.

So much trouble, so much fasting, living naked... the Jaina monk cannot even use fire. In the night when it is cold, winter, he cannot use a blanket, he cannot even use fire. There are naked Hindu monks also but they are not troubled: they do two things which are very inventive of them. First, they always sit with a bonfire in front of them, so they are warm. And second, they go on rubbing, all over their body, ashes from the fire. So all the pores in the body which breathe are closed – not completely, otherwise they would be dead, but closed enough so that their body heat does not go out. Then there is also the heat from the outside which prevents them from being cold.

The Jaina monk is also naked, but with no heat, with no ashes rubbed on his body. He shivers.

Shivering is the only method, the natural method to create a certain heat. Shivering is a natural protection against cold. You shiver, the body starts shaking; that creates a certain movement, exercise in the body, and creates heat. That’s all they can do the whole night. In the summer they are naked under the sun. They are completely burned up, with little food to eat and a small quantity of water to drink.

So the path is arduous... and what do you gain? You are just following a man who is not even a descendant of God, who is not even a relative of God, who is not even a messenger of God. Who knows whether he is mad, sane, insane? He is just a man, just like you. While, in comparison, there are messengers of God, messiahs of God, avataras of God, God Himself coming down....

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So in the market it was a difficult thing to sell. Hence they had to raise the tirthankara to the same status as the avatara, the messiah, even higher. This is simply the market economics. The tirthankara is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; he has the qualities of God. The messiah is only the messiah, the messenger is only a messenger, but the tirthankara has all the qualities of God Himself. This created the base, the loophole for turning the religion into a cult.

Hence I am insisting that I am an ordinary man. You cannot put me up for sale – who is going to buy me? When Jesus is available, Mohammed is available, Krishna is available, Mahavira is available, Buddha is available, do you think anybody is going to go for me? – a simple man, an ordinary man, himself insisting continually on his ordinariness.

I have been denying miracles, saying that they have never happened, they never happen, and they will never happen. Mahavira and Buddha both faltered on that point – but they were pioneers. I have twenty-five centuries of experience behind me. I am standing on their shoulders; I can see far away.

They could not think that these things would become their very weaknesses. They all – because Krishna was doing so many miracles, Rama was doing so many miracles.... What to say of Rama –

even his devotees, just in his name can do miracles.

For example, between India and Sri Lanka there is an ocean, and it was a problem for Rama to cross the ocean to attack Sri Lanka and get his wife back. But his disciple, the monkey god, Hanumana, said, ”Don’t be worried. Your name is enough.” And in his name he started throwing stones in the ocean – and because of Rama’s name the stones were floating, not drowning.

The whole army of monkeys and of donkeys, and perhaps yankees, all were there; so he started throwing stones, rocks, in the name of Rama, and the rocks started floating – soon there was a bridge. They passed over the bridge just by the using the name. Hanumana said, ”You need not be worried, your name is enough. You don’t need to do anything.” Now, where such stories are going around what chance you have got to compete? Buddha’s disciples had to invent stories, Mahavira’s disciples had to invent stories. They are all invented stories; and invented in such a way that they made Mahavira and Buddha superior to Rama, to Krishna, to the Hindu trinity, the trimurti – Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh.

When Buddha became enlightened, the story is that all the gods – Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh – all three came down to touch his feet, because an enlightened person is far higher than any gods. You should note that in Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, God is always singular; in Hinduism God is always plural – it is ”gods”, thirty-three million golds.

The chiefs of all these thirty-three million gods are these three, Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh. The moment Buddha became enlightened, all three ran down from paradise to touch his feet. For seven days Buddha remained silent. It was Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh, these three gods, who persuaded him to speak because even gods don’t know the supreme truth. Even gods are eager to hear from you: What have you attained? What’s your realization? What has it done to you? Buddha argued in many ways, but finally he was persuaded by the three gods.

His argument was very good. He said, ”If I speak, in the first place what I have experienced will not be conveyed through the words. Secondly, even if a little fragrance of it goes with the words, where From Ignorance to Innocence

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are the people who will be able to receive it? Where are the people who are available? And who wants truth in the first place? People want consolation.” But the three gods said, ”You may be right about ninety-nine point nine percent of people, but still there is point one percent of people left who are available, who are receptive, who are willing to go to the further shore. Will you disappoint them?”

Now this whole story is just to prove that even gods are not enlightened. And in Buddhism and in Jainism both, gods are people who have earned much virtue, and because of their great virtue they are rewarded with paradise. But there is a time limit to it. Sooner or later the reward for their virtues will be finished; they will have to come back again to the earth and again move into the wheel of life and death.

That’s why there are thirty-three million gods, because with one god how can you manage this idea?

So many people, in millions of years, have been virtuous, religious, truthful, honest – they all have to be rewarded; paradise is a reward.

In Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, you don’t have anything above heaven. In Jainism and Buddhism, you have something above heaven. Heaven is only a pleasure place, a holiday, a pleasure resort – a holiday from this continuous wheel of misery, anxiety, anguish. One needs a little holiday, a long weekend.

Heaven to the Jainas and the Buddhists is only a long weekend. But don’t forget! – it comes to an end and you fall back again into the same rut. And now it is even more unbearable because you have lived in such tremendous pleasure and splendor and now again you are living this boredom called life. It becomes more of a hell than it was before because you have something to compare it with.

The tirthankara does not go to heaven, the buddha does not go to heaven, remember.

The

enlightened person goes to moksha, which is beyond heaven. From there, there is no coming back. One has got out of the wheel of life and death completely. It is not a holiday resort.

Do you see my point? The Jainas and Buddhists had to create something above heaven. They had to give qualities to their tirthankaras, better, higher, superior to even those your god has, because it was a question of simple competition in the marketplace. But they forgot that this competition is going to be their very failure.

They succeeded in attracting people: almost the whole country’s intelligentsia was influenced by them. Only unintelligent people, the masses, remained with Hindu gods. The intelligent people could not bow down to a monkey god – it looked so idiotic; they could not worship a tree. Just any kind of a stone, you paint it red, put two flowers on it, and wait.... Soon, somebody else will come and put flowers, somebody else will come and put a coconut – and a god is born, you have given birth to a god. And this happens every day.

The corporations in India, the municipal committees in India are in continual trouble. In the middle of the road a god appears! Now you cannot remove it; that is interfering with the feelings of religious people – and soon a temple will arise there. First any stone colored red, any shape will do – because From Ignorance to Innocence

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with thirty-three million gods, who knows how many shapes they have? Just all that you need are worshippers, and worshippers are available. Then neither the government can remove it, nor can anybody else remove it.

And when the god is there, a shelter is needed for it. A temple is going to be raised there, just in the middle of the road. To remove it means immediate riots; people will be killed and slaughtered, and that fire will spread all over the country; so it is better to allow the god to remain there. It destroys the beauty of the road, it disturbs the traffic, it is dangerous, it can cause accidents, but there is nothing you can do.

In India only Jaipur has straight and plain roads – the only town, the only city – and it is perhaps the most beautiful city in India. But it happened because the man who made it, Jai Singh – he was the king of Jaipur state – was an atheist. And he called from south India, from the Nizam of Hyderabad.... The Nizam of Hyderabad had a very intelligent chief minister, Mirja Ibrahim. Jai Singh was born a Hindu but he asked Nizam to give Mirja Ibrahim to him for at least a few years while he was making Jaipur. He wanted it to be India’s Paris.

And he almost succeeded; he made something tremendously beautiful.

And why did he ask

a Mohammedan? He told Mirja, ”I don’t want any nuisance – because it is going to happen: everywhere temples and mosques and things will start happening, and our whole plan will be disturbed.

”So if a temple appears – you are not a Hindu, you simply remove it in the night. No hustle, no bustle about it; the way it appears, the same way it disappears. In the morning it is not there at all. Nobody should even be suspicious that it is disappearing; everything should go quietly, but in the night the whole temple is to completely disappear. And if any mosque appears, I am not a Mohammedan...

perhaps you will feel it is difficult....”

Mirja said, ”That’s true: A mosque I cannot remove.” Jai Singh said, ”That, I will do.”

They removed many temples, many mosques that were appearing, and Jai Singh proved right: they were bound to appear because Jaipur has the biggest roads. Now, on any crossroad where he wanted a garden to be, Hindus would love to have their temple. Where you can find such a beautiful place? And you need not buy it, you need not ask anybody for it, because for God there is no question.

And all that you have to do, simple things.... You just go in the night, you put a round stone – dig a little hole in the earth, put in the round stone – and the next morning you declare that in the night a God appeared to you, and he said that at such and such place he had been waiting for many, many centuries, and now it was time that he should be brought to people’s notice and a temple should be raised.

Soon crowds will rush to check whether the dream is true or not. And it is going to be true: a god is found! – and it is god’s own indication, you cannot interfere. But Jai Singh managed very well.

The god would appear; they would start working, and in the night the god would disappear. And Jai From Ignorance to Innocence

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Singh would say, ”What can I do? The way he appears, the same way he disappears. We cannot prevent him from disappearing; we cannot prevent him from appearing, what can we do?” That’s how he managed to have beautiful streets in Jaipur.

While he was alive, Jaipur had only one color, red. All the houses, on the main streets were made exactly the same; so for miles you can see the same houses. It looks so beautiful. And they were all made with red stone, nothing else was allowed. The whole city was red stone... and with the greenery, the red stone is so beautiful because green and red are the basic colors of nature. Nature knows only two colors, red and green.

Since Independence everything has been disturbed. Every year I would go there, and I would see gods appearing, temples being raised in the middle of the street, on the corner of the street, anywhere. Now, the secular government cannot do anything. The man had made it so beautiful...

and now people are painting different colors on their houses because how can you prevent them, it is their house.

Jai Singh was a crazy king. There was no question of anybody raising the idea that a house could be of any other color. In Jaipur only one color was allowed: ”If you don’t want that color, get out of Jaipur” – and he was whole and soul!

Even in his time, efforts to change it were made in the supreme court of India. But the supreme court said, ”As far as internal affairs are concerned we cannot do anything; that is our agreement with the king – only on foreign affairs, but this is not a foreign affair. He is absolutely sovereign. If he wants the red color, we cannot do anything. If he wants only one kind of model for all the houses, we cannot do anything.”

But now... when I visited the last time, I almost felt like crying, because they have destroyed the whole thing. All those beautiful lanes with similar houses had something poetic; and all those red stones with green trees... the whole place was a vast garden. Now all kinds of colors have appeared.

Old houses are being demolished, skyscrapers are being made. People are changing their houses because people don’t want a similar model, the same model... and nobody can prevent them. On the streets – temples, mosques, gurudwaras; in the name of religion you can do anything.

Buddha and Mahavira tried, but were not aware of all the implications. I am aware of all the implications. You may not be able to see what I am trying to do: I am destroying all the bases, so that when I am gone you will not find a single base to make a cult out of my religion.

Hence I said, it is almost impossible... because people are so stupid that out of their stupidity they can start inventing things for which I am not even leaving a single seed. For example: just the other day a letter was brought to me. Professor Vijay Chauhan, a professor in Washington university, gave an interview about me saying that we were great friends, and we used to have long discussions.

I have never seen this man, what to say about long discussions! – and friendship? Yes, I have heard his name, so I know who he is, but I have not seen him. His mother was a great poetess, Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, and because of Subhadra I used to go, once in a while, to her house, and she used to recite her poems to me. She just had mentioned to me, ”I have two sons, one is Ajay Chauhan, the other is Vijay Chauhan – but it is strange that whenever you come they are not at From Ignorance to Innocence

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home. I would like you someday to meet them.” But she died and that day never came. I was never introduced by her to her two sons.

Ajay Chauhan I have seen, just on the road, but we were not acquainted with each other. But this man, Vijay Chauhan, I have not even seen – and he is saying that he was a great friend and for hours we used to discuss philosophy, religion, and great problems.

Now, many letters of this type come. Sheela asks me, ”Do you know this man?” – she brings the photograph. ”This man says that he knows you from your very childhood, and you have stayed with him many times in his home.” I see the picture... and my memory is not bad, not so bad. I have never seen this man in my whole life, not even heard his name.

One letter was from New York; I had never heard the name. The man was from India; he says that he is a great poet and I have been quoting his poetry in my lectures. I have never known his name, I have never known any poetry connected with him, any book written by him. But he says that we are great friends.... Now what to do with these people? Once I have gone, all kinds of stories will start.

It will be for you to stop all these kinds of stories. Remember, whatsoever is meaningful I have told you, and whatsoever I have not told you is meaningless: that should be the criterion.

If somebody comes and says, ”I have seen a miracle....” And there will be people; it gives them importance – that I performed a miracle.... Yes, a few times I have performed a miracle.

One man, Doctor Bhagwandas – he is a professor now; we studied together in the same university, although he was in a different department. But we were friendly; he used to come, and he used to go for a walk with me. He invited me once to go to his home. His home was not very far away from the university, just fifty miles.

So I said, ”Next Saturday we can go. It is not far away.” We went there; we were both sleeping in the same room, on two beds. Between our two beds was a small table with a clock, because I wanted to get up at three. At that time I used to get up at three, but in case I went on sleeping, I told him to put on the alarm – but he had no alarm clock.

He said, ”I don’t have an alarm clock here.”

So I said, ”Then forget about it.” I went to sleep.

But he felt uneasy, so he went to the neighbor, borrowed an alarm clock and put it in the middle on the table. I was asleep. Because of my habit of getting up at three, I woke up at three, and I heard the tick tick of the clock by my side, so I looked. It was a luminous clock, so I could see that there were still five minutes to go before three o’clock. So I covered myself, and from inside the blankets I said, ”Bhagwan” – his name was Bhagwandas, and I used to call him Bhagwan – ”It is five to three.” He opened his blanket, and looked at me covered in blankets. He looked at the clock... five to three!

He said, ”What?”

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He said, ”You are already awake.”

I said, ”Just in case I fail asleep, because there is no clock and....” He said, ”No clock!”

And the next day the whole town was talking about it: a miracle! Exactly five minutes! The next day I told him, ”There was no miracle, nothing; I was just joking. I just looked at that clock and I thought, this is good.... You think that I didn’t know about the clock because you must have brought it in later on after I had fallen asleep.” But he wouldn’t believe me.

He said, ”You are trying to just drop the idea of miracles, but it was a miracle.” I said, ”I am saying that it was nothing.”

I explained the whole thing to him, but he said, ”This is all mere explanation.” Now what to do with these people? Once I am not there, they will all be there... and I have been in hundreds of homes, and many miracles I have performed – but none of them was a miracle. I was just joking, and when I found there was a possibility, I never missed it.

So remember it, that I have never performed a miracle, because miracles as such are impossible.

Nobody has performed them.

But the gullible mind... a man came to me almost in the middle of the night; it was twelve, I had been asleep for three hours. He knocked on the door, and made so much noise that I had to wake up and open the door, and I asked, ”What is the matter? What do you want at this time of the night?” He said, ”I have a terrible pain in my stomach, and this pain has been coming on and going away, coming on and going away, for at least three months. I go to a certain doctor, he gives me medicine, but no permanent cure has happened. And just nearabout ten, this pain came; it was so terrible that I went to the doctor and he said that this pain was something spiritual – he suggested your name.” I asked him, ”Who is this doctor? Is his name Doctor Barat?” He said, ”Yes.”

Barat was my friend. He was an old man, but he loved me very much. So I said, ”If Barat has sent you then I will have to do something. But you have to give me a promise that you will never say anything about this to anybody, because I don’t want to be disturbed every night, and I don’t want patients to be here the whole day. I have other things to do.” He said, ”I promise, but just help me. Barat has told me that if you give me just a glass of water, with your hand, I will be cured.”

I said, ”First give me the promise.” And he hesitated, because if he has found such a source of miracles, to give such a promise....

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He said, ”You don’t see my pain; you are talking about your promise. Just give me a glass of water

– I am not asking much.”

I said, ”First you give me a promise. Take an oath in the name of God” – and I could see that he was a brahmin and he had.... Brahmins of different faith believing in one god or another god have different marks on their forehead; those are trademarks, so you can judge, and know who the man is worshipping. So I knew that he was a devotee of Shiva, and I said, ”You will have to take the oath in the name of Shiva.”

He said, ”This is very difficult; I am a loud mouth, I cannot keep anything to myself such a great thing... and you are asking me to make a promise. I may not be able to keep it because if I keep it then it will be more painful than my pain. I won’t sleep, I won’t go anywhere, I won’t talk to anybody because it will be just there waiting to come out.” I said, ”You decide. I have to go to sleep, so be quick.” He said, ”You have created a dilemma for me. Whatsoever I do I will be in trouble. This pain is not going to go away because to keep your promise... and you don’t know me – I love gossiping. I am a liar; I go on lying – and this is the truth.”

But I said, ”Then you decide. You keep your pain.” Finally he said, ”Okay, in the name of Shiva I give you the promise. But you are too hard, too cruel.” I gave him one glass of water. He drank the water and he said, ”My God! The pain is gone!” Now, there was no miracle, but because I haggled so much about the promise he became more and more certain that the miracle was going to happen... otherwise this man would not insist so much.

The more I delayed, the more I insisted, the more he became certain that there was something in it.

That certainty worked.

It was simple hypnosis, he got autohypnotized; he became ready. If I had given him the water directly, the pain would not have disappeared. This much gap of haggling was needed. And I reminded him when he was leaving, ”Remember, if you break the oath, the pain will be back.” He said, ”You have destroyed me. I was thinking that when Shiva meets me I will be able to fall at his feet and ask his forgiveness; and I have heard that he is very forgiving. Now you have destroyed that too – and the pain will come back.”

I said, ”Certainly the pain will come back, once you utter a word.” And the next day he was there. He said, ”I could not manage it. At least I had to go to Doctor Barat and tell him,’All your medicine and medical knowledge is nonsense. Just a glass of water did what you could not do in three months. And you have been taking fees each time I was coming – give my fee back. If you knew it beforehand then for three months you have been cheating me.’ But the pain came back.”

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He came running to me, ”I am a fool, but what to do? I just could not resist putting this Doctor Barat right in his place. For three months I have been suffering and he knew the cure, and he went on giving me this tablet and that, and then he started the injections. Finally he started saying,’You may need surgery – and just a glass of water! And he did not suggest that at all.” I said, ”I cannot help you. Now the water won’t work; you have broken the promise – the miracle will not happen again. Now you go to Doctor Barat and take his medicine, or do whatsoever you want.” But he went around, even though still in pain, saying, ”I have seen a miracle.” These people are there – sometimes very educated people, but deep down they are as gullible as any uneducated person. Once I am not there, you have to remember it, that all my miracles were simply jokes and nothing else; that I have been enjoying every opportunity. If there was an opportunity to manage a miracle, I have not missed it. But there was no miracle at all. If you know just a little bit of human psychology you can do great things which are not prescribed in the psychology literature and textbooks – because they are not concerned with that.

But if you know a little bit of human psychology, just a little bit – not much is needed.... And man is ready, he wants the miracle to happen. He wants to see the miracle happen; he is ready for the messiah. He is hankering, desiring deep down to find someone who is higher than him, more powerful than him; then he can follow him.

But I have been cutting all the roots. You ask me, ”Is there any possibility of your religion not being reduced to a cult?” Yes, there is a possibility, only one possibility – and that is that sannyasins go on becoming enlightened, so there is always a chain of enlightened people around.

Buddha’s religion was not reduced to a cult for five hundred years. For five hundred years the chain continued; there was always somebody who was enlightened, so in some way the Buddha consciousness was present. It remained alive. But after five hundred years the gap came, and then for six hundred years Buddhism was just a cult.

Then came Bodhidharma.

Bodhidharma created a new dimension, Zen, which is still alive fourteen hundred years later. This is the longest time any religion has been alive. Bodhidharma has got the trophy, because in Zen, continuously in these fourteen hundred years, there has not been a single day when there was not somebody alive and enlightened – no break, no gap. Hence it is possible – difficult, but possible.

All that you have to remember is: no God, no priesthood, no holy scripture, no miracles, no superman. For the first time in the whole of history I am saying that an ordinary man can be enlightened. In fact only an ordinary man can be enlightened. Ordinariness for the first time is given this much respect. So don’t try to make me someone extraordinary.

I am trying in every way so that you cannot make me.... I go on doing everything that will prove that this was not a superman or a messiah or a tirthankara. I will not fit with any image. You cannot manage to make me extraordinary. Beware of the human tendency: one wants one’s Master to be extraordinary. But this is what leads ultimately to the death of religion.

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You should not desire your Master to be extraordinary. You should rather rejoice that an ordinary man has become enlightened. That means he has opened the doors to enlightenment for everybody. You need not be the only begotten son of God, you need not be a tirthankara earning virtue for millions of lives, you need not be born with special qualities, talents.

Have you seen the statue of Mahavira? In India you may have visited a jaina temple – otherwise you can look in a book. On all twenty-four tirthankaras you will see a few very strange things. One is that all twenty-four statues look exactly alike. You cannot say which is which, who is who. Even Jainas cannot say, so they have made small symbols under every statue: under one statue a lion, under another statue something else, under another statue the swastika. You may not be aware of it but just underneath the statue, there is the symbol which indicates whose statue it is – mahavira’s?

– otherwise there is no difference.

Now, this is not possible. These twenty-four people were born over ten thousand years; there is no possibility of them all being similar – the same face, the same nose, the same body, the same proportions. You will see one thing more strange: all their ears, their ear lobes, will be touching their shoulders – such long ear lobes. That is especially needed if you are a tirthankara.

I have seen foolish jaina monks massage their ear lobes, pull them to make them longer, because the longer they are, the more respectable you start becoming. It is possible that perhaps Mahavira had long ear lobes – I don’t think that long; he was a man not a donkey. Otherwise all donkeys have at least one quality to help them become a tirthankara. I have seen one man with ear lobes that long, so it is possible that Mahavira had them... but twenty-four people!

It is all imagination. Once Mahavira becomes established, then whatsoever he has becomes a necessary characteristic for anybody else to become a tirthankara. All tirthankaras have also to be molded again into the same pattern.

Remember, I don’t have any talents – because religion is not a talent. Music is, poetry is, painting is.

Religion is not a talent.

Religion is simply seeing yourself

You may be a painter, you may be a poet, you may be a musician, you may not be anybody, but you are!

This is not a talent, this is your existence.

And to experience it is everybody’s birthright.

You can save this living religion only so long as you go on meditating and you go on creating new flowers, new blossomings – so that you never become a desert; there is always some oasis. Just a single person amongst you is enough to keep the religion alive and prevent anybody from reducing it to a cult.

But please don’t call it my religion.

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It has nothing to do with me.

It is simply religion.

You have to understand, as totally as possible, that just a pure religion has more possibility of surviving, because then you don’t put any boundaries on it.

I have not put any boundaries on it. And I don’t want to put any boundaries on you: of discipline, of morality, of virtue.

I have given you freedom, and I have given you individuality, and I have given you just a little taste of something that is always yours.

Just you have to claim it.

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CHAPTER 20

Surrender: the ego upside down

19 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

This tapes of this discourse were erased the day after it was given, this transcription appeared a week later.

Question 1

OSHO,

ISN’T ORGANIZATION A NECESSITY FOR A RELIGION TO SURVIVE?

UNFORTUNATELY, it is.

Religion needs some kind of organization, but the problem arises. Organization in itself is a political entity; organization does not need religion at all.

To survive, religion needs organization.

To survive, organization needs no religion at all.

There is the crux of the whole problem.

There have been in the past efforts to create religion without any organization, seeing that all the organizations somehow end up in being anti-religious. For example, the Catholic church – it is a very solid organization but only an organization; there is no religion left.

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Religion is a disturbance as far as the hierarchy of the organization is concerned. Religion is a continuous trouble; religious people will be trouble.

The Catholic church has been throwing out from the church all the people who are really religious because those people will not support this criminal act of destroying religion. They will oppose it, they will rebel against it. But the church has so much authority. The head of the church, the pope, is a religious head and also a temporal head; the Vatican is his kingdom, a political nation. Once it was big, vast; now it is only eight square miles, but still he is the temporal head and the spiritual head.

There are religions where the temporal head is separate and the religious head is separate, but then there were problems of conflict. The temporal head has all the power of the army, the law, the state; and the spiritual head has no temporal power. For example in Hinduism, the shankaracharya is only a spiritual head. But that creates this other problem: a continuous conflict between the state and the religion – and of course the state is powerful.

You have to remember that the higher a thing, the more fragile it is. The lower a thing, the more strong it is.

Roots are strong, flowers are not; although roots are meaningless if the flowers disappear – the roots have meaning only because of the flowers. But the tree is not so stupid as man; so there is a harmony between the flowers and the roots, there is no conflict.

Flowers represent the spiritual fragrance, and the roots represent the state, the army and all its power.

The roots can deny food to the flowers and the flowers will die and disappear within no time. But no tree is so stupid: there is a harmony; the roots go on supporting the flowers, the leaves, the branches. And it is not only one-sided. The flowers, the leaves, the branches go on taking rays from the sun and carbon dioxide from the air, and they go on continuously sending them to the roots.

It is a communion, there is no question of conflict.

But in religion it has been a problem. If you keep them apart then soon the state starts trying to control the religion. For example, in England the church is separate but the queen is really the head of both: of the church and of the state. The church has its own head but there is a crowned head who is over him. What can the archbishop of Canterbury do against the queen?

In Russia the same was the situation. The church was separate, the czar was separate, but the whole power was in the hands of the czar. So it was just for show that the head of the church crowned the czar as if he was above the czar. But he knew and everybody knew that this was only ceremonial. In reality he had to follow the czar and the state, support the czar and the state, because without the czar, the church would die: it wouldn’t have any support, financial or otherwise.

That’s why Catholics tried to make church and state, one: to give both powers into the hands of one man so there was no conflict.

But the trouble is when a man becomes politically powerful, that political power tends to corrupt him.

He may misuse it; it is almost certain that he will misuse it.

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In the first place, if the head has both temporal and spiritual power, then the people who are spiritual will not make any effort to become the head, because the spiritual person does not want to get involved in power politics.

Then, only the people who are politically minded... they may be in a religious robe, they may be bishops and cardinals and ministers and they may have studied theology, but they are not spiritual people. If they had been in the world they would have tried to become the president or the prime minister; it is just accidental that they are in the religious robe. Their ambition can be fulfilled here only by becoming the pope. So they will make every effort to become the pope.

When they have the power they are bound to misuse it.

They were never spiritual in the first place.

Hinduism tried another thing also. If you make one person a spiritual head there is a possibility that the person is not really spiritual. You may have erred, because there is no criterion by which to judge, and it cannot be decided by election because people have no idea what spirituality is. How are they going to decide who is spiritual? They can only nominate. It cannot be chosen in an election

– if you have an election you bring politics in.

The Catholic pope is elected, so naturally the politically minded cardinals make every effort to approach all those people – perhaps there are two hundred cardinals who choose the pope – so there is an undercurrent of campaign, an election campaign, continuously. Even when there is a pope the campaign continues because popes don’t live long, for the simple reason that by the time the person becomes a pope he’s nearabout seventy. So you can hope that within two, three, four or five years he will be gone.

This polack is going to be tough – you cannot hope that he will be gone so easily, he may stay longer.

His predecessor was only in office for nine months – that is more gentlemanly, but who expects a polack to be a gentleman? That was more gentlemanly: in nine months he disappeared to give an opportunity for another person to become a pope. But very few people are so generous.

Hinduism tried to ensure that their religion would have many heads; all would be nominated. But then there is another problem: great confusion. Hinduism is a great confusion – you can’t even call it one religion. It is a thousand and one religions together, because there is no central control.

Anybody can gather disciples and can become a head and nobody can prevent it.

The idea was to give freedom but it turned out to be confusion. Any idiot can find a few other idiots who are always available everywhere. There are so many sects in Hinduism; each sect has many sub-sects and each sub-sect has its own head. They don’t even have a talking relationship with the other heads of the same religion! They are continually fighting in the courts because sometimes it happens that two persons claim that they are the head and if they can give some kind of proof...

One of the most important temples in India for Hindus is in the Himalayas, Badrinathdham. For almost ten years it has been locked under police control because the court is unable to decide who is the head because the shankaracharya who died ten years ago wrote two wills. He wrote one will perhaps twenty, thirty years before when he found somebody who was potentially very capable, and From Ignorance to Innocence

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he forgot about the will because he lived so long. For thirty years he must have kept it somewhere.

That man stole the will.

And when the shankaracharya was dying he was asked – by that time that man had left him –

so he chose another person and made another will; the first will could not be found in his papers.

Now before the Allahabad High Court there are two wills from the same man and both persons are claiming that they are the head. And the temple is one of the richest temples in India so it is not only a question of being head: it has money, it has power, it has lands – and it has millions of followers.

But both wills are from the same man. Now, how to decide? The signature experts have decided that both signatures are from the same man.

There are eyewitnesses for both.

But neither

shankaracharya is able to function because the court goes on postponing, simply for the reason that they don’t see any way of deciding it. They are simply hoping that one of these two dies, so that will decide the case. Otherwise it won’t be decided.

Hinduism has so many sects because each person in Hinduism... the caste system is very strict but as far as thinking is concerned you are absolutely free. If you are born in the house of a shoemaker you cannot change it, you will have to remain a shoemaker. No other profession will allow you in.

You cannot move from one caste to another caste; that movement is absolutely closed.

So for centuries your forefathers and their fore-fathers and their forefathers and their forefathers were all making shoes – so you will make shoes. If they were weaving clothes, you will weave clothes; you will be a weaver. If they were carpenters, you will be a carpenter. There is no movement as far as your business, trade, lifestyle is concerned, but as far as thinking is concerned there is no bondage. You could move from being a follower of Shankaracharya and you could become a follower of Vallabhacharya, another spiritual head, a contemporary of Shankaracharya’s and against Shankaracharya.

Sanskrit is such a language that with just a little logic everything can be interpreted in many ways.

Each word has many meanings; that gives beauty to it. It gives it poetry because you can play with the word in so many ways, it does not have a fixed meaning. But it is also dangerous: you cannot write signs in Sanskrit because then there will be so many interpretations, and that is what has happened. On the Gita there are one thousand famous commentaries, to say nothing about non-famous commentaries! – there will be many thousands more. But there are one thousand very famous commentaries.

It is thought that anyone who writes a commentary on three of the scriptures – the Vedas, Badarayana’s Brahmasutras and Krishna’s Shrimad Bhagavadita – becomes an acharya, a head: he can create a following. Now it is not very difficult to write commentaries on these three scriptures.

Many commentaries are available. Shankara wrote one in his own time. Vallabhacharya wrote differently, a totally different interpretation. Ramanujacharya wrote one, different again from both.

Nimbarkacharya wrote one different from them all – not only different but quite the opposite. But the Gita is capable of being looked at from 8any angle. It gives tremendous freedom to think, to comment, but it also creates great confusion.

So Hinduism is not a religion like Christianity, Judaism or Mohammedanism. In Mohammedanism there is one prophet, one god, one book – that’s all. In Hinduism there are thousands of scriptures, From Ignorance to Innocence

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all of tremendous value; and on each scripture there are thousands of commentaries, and every commentary has some value, some insight. Then there are commentaries upon commentaries....

Shankara writes a commentary on the Gita; then among Shankara’s followers one follower writes one commentary on Shankara’s commentary, and another follower writes another commentary on Shankara’s commentary – because the commentary is also as vulnerable to interpretation as the original. Then their disciples go on writing more commentaries.

If you just look, Hinduism is like a tree: each branch brings new branches, then small branches, then more small branches. And they are all creating a great noise, great controversies – one cannot say what exactly Hinduism is. Organization has been avoided in a way, but the religion has not been saved – it has fallen into a confusion. It has not become a cult and a creed; it has become a confusion.

Seeing this situation, Mahavira’s orthodox followers.... They are called digambaras because they live naked, their monks live naked. Digambara means one whose only clothing is the sky – nothing is between him and the sky. To avoid confusion, to avoid commentaries, to avoid organization, they simply destroyed all Mahavira’s scriptures.

So Digambaras don’t have any scriptures of Mahavira – a strange act, just to preserve his teaching.

It is given by word of mouth to the disciple but is not in a book. You cannot sell it in the market; nobody can write a commentary on it. The teaching goes on silently, transferred from one generation of monks to another generation of monks. It was a great effort of tremendous courage to destroy all the scriptures, so you could not print them. But what happened was that even by transferring it from individual to individual, there were different versions, because naturally....

You are all listening to me, but if you all go back home and write down what I have said, do you think you will be reporting the same? Tomorrow morning you can look at all the notebooks and be surprised that everybody has got something else, has laid emphasis on something which you have completely ignored. You have not heard it at all, but somebody else has heard only that. What you have heard, she has not bothered about.

So even though they tried to avoid written scriptures and remain consistent, there are different versions. There are only twenty-two naked monks now; I have met all twenty-two. I was puzzled that they all have different versions from their teachers, and they are giving a different version to their disciple who someday will become a naked monk. They are training the disciple, and they think in this way the purity of the message is preserved.

But I asked them, ”Have you ever compared notes with the other twenty-one?” They said, ”No, that is never done. What my teacher has given to me, I will give to my chief disciple, and he will give it to his chief disciple.”

But I said, ”I have met all twenty-two and you are all saying different things.” If it was in a book at least there would have been some possibility to come to some agreement. Now there is no way to come to any agreement. There are twenty-two religions arising from one source – which they have destroyed. So now there is nothing to fall back on and check; and you cannot prove anybody is wrong or anybody is right.

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The other sect of Jainas is the shvetambaras. The name, shvetambara, means white-robed; they are not naked, they use white robes. They have scriptures but they have many sects themselves. And on such small points there is so much difference that one cannot imagine what will be happening about spiritual, philosophical things.

They have strange disagreements – about whether Mahavira was married or not, there is a difference. One sect believes he was not only married, he had a daughter. The daughter was married – he had a son-in-law, and the daughter and the son-in-law were both initiated by Mahavira.

Not only that, they believe that the son-in-law slowly became more political, thinking, ”I am the sonin-law of Mahavira....” He must have been hoping that he would succeed him. But Mahavira simply did not encourage him. It came to such a point that he rebelled against Mahavira with five hundred other monks and made a totally different religion.

Now this is so much that it cannot be just invented – and for what? But the other sect says that he was never married because tirthankaras are not married. That is part of the definition of a tirthankara, that he remains unmarried; so how could Mahavira have been married? He was not married.

And to say that he had a child means he had a sexual relationship – that is an absolutely ugly thing to think of a tirthankara. Then you are doing more and more harm: the tirthankara’s daughter is married! Now the daughter of a tirthankara – his blood – thinking of marrying? Impossible!

And worse, you say that the son-in-law rebelled against him. How could anybody have rebelled against a man like Mahavira – what to say about the son-in-law! – it is impossible. This whole story is bogus, according to the other sect. Their scriptures say that he was never married, there was no question of a daughter, no son-in-law, no rebel.

If on such points, which are factual, there is so much difference, then what to say about the teaching!

On every point there is a difference. To avoid the differences the orthodox Digambaras destroyed the scriptures – but just destroying the scriptures won’t help. You have to create a certain mythology around it. And the mythology is that Mahavira never spoke. So there is no question of there being any scriptures – he never spoke.

Now the Shvetambaras have the scriptures, sermons of Mahavira on each subject, detailed instructions for the monks about each special thing: how he has to sit, how he has to stand up, how he has to walk, how far he can see. He should look only four feet ahead so he never sees a woman, because looking four feet ahead, at the most you can see the feet of a woman, that’s all.

He should walk very slowly, very carefully, so he does not kill any ants or anything. He should carry a woolen brush with him so that before he sits he brushes the place. It has to be woolen so that no ant or anything is killed by it, it is so soft. Such details!that he has to have three pieces of clothing, one begging bowl, one brush, one small mattress which he keeps rolled under his arm. He should not sit on anybody else’s clothes because you can’t be certain about the vibrations of other people....

And Digambaras say Mahavira never spoke!

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twelve teachers. Those twelve teachers were to tell all the other monks what they had heard in Mahavira’s silence. Now a very complicated affair... and all those twelve didn’t agree, so from the very beginning there have been twelve versions of Mahavira’s teachings.

To avoid organization Mahavira said, ”Now, there will be no successor to me.” But that did not make any difference. Yes, there is no one successor to him, but there are thousands of heads of small sects. They don’t claim to be successors of Mahavira, they don’t say they are tirthankaras; they are teachers of Mahavira’s teaching. But all those teachers are continually in conflict about everything.

The same happened to Buddha. While he was alive he did not allow what he was saying to be written down – you were simply to understand him, to experience him. And your experience and your understanding you shared with people. Otherwise there was every possibility that people would start worshipping those books – like Mohammedans worship the Koran, Christians worship the Bible.

”So it is better not to have my words,” Buddha said to his disciples, ”in a book form.” When he was saying it, of course it was going to be so. But when he died the disciples were in difficulty because there were so many people saying different things, something had to be decided – already there was chaos.

Then three hundred disciples together compiled what Buddha had said. The compilation was done in a closed place because there was so much conflict and they did not want people to know that the chief disciples were in conflict and fighting: ”This was not said by Buddha....” So in a closed place somehow they came to some agreement, through negotiations, following the middle path: ”If two persons are saying two things then come to the middle and keep that.” But that was a hodgepodge.

Buddha would not be able to recognize that those were his words – those were three hundred people’s agreement. Now, three hundred people in disagreement, coming to an agreement – you can imagine what the outcome will be. Yes, to the world they could then show that they had a scripture... but those who understand – how can they deceive them? Buddha avoided making any head of his religion. That created thirty two sects immediately after his death.

There were other teachers in Buddha and Mahavira’s time too. One was Sanjay Vilethiputta. He avoided even initiation, he said, ”You simply listen to me. If you feel like doing what I am saying, you do it, but I will not initiate you. If I initiate you, soon you will create an organization. You will need an organization to keep all the people who are my disciples together. There are so many reasons for them to be together – for their security, for their safety, because they will be persecuted by the other religions. And if they are left alone in the vast ocean of enemies, they will be destroyed.” And in India they have a very simple method of destroying anybody. India is a country of small villages, very small villages, millions of small villages. In a small village there are only twenty houses; twenty families are living there. They can destroy anybody by a simple method, a very non-violent method. They decide that a man is not to be accepted as part of them, so he cannot be invited to any marriage, to any ceremony.

Nobody will talk with him. He’s not allowed to take water from the village well. If the river is five miles away, he has to carry his water from there. When crops are to be cut, nobody is to support him.

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to cut the crop. Then somebody else’s are ready and the whole village helps him. Singlehandedly, he will be in immense trouble.

Nobody will talk to him. People should not recognize him on the street, should not say hello. You will kill the man – and he cannot go anywhere else because in India people are tethered to their land.

Nobody is going to purchase his land, his house. If he wants to leave he can leave, but where is he going to go and what he is going to do?

It’s a very easy, very non-violent, but really cruel method; far more cruel than killing the man. His children will not be playing with other children, his wife will not be meeting with any other woman.

He’s boycotted.

So Sanjay Vilethiputta said, ”If I initiate you an organization will be necessary. I will not give you initiation, then it cannot be known to others that you are my followers.

You just go on living,

experiencing, doing what I have told to you. And if you feel to convey it to somebody, you can convey it, but there is no question of initiation. So nobody knows that you belong to Sanjay Vilethiputta.” But what happened? Sanjay Vilethiputta’s scriptures we don’t have. The man must have been of immense intelligence because Buddha criticizes him, Mahavira criticizes him. Otherwise, Mahavira and Buddha would not criticize a man who had no status. He must have had a status exactly the same as Buddha and Mahavira. Mahavira does not criticize Buddha, he was too young. Mahavira was too old; it was below him to criticize Buddha.

It happened to me.... It was Gandhi’s one-hundred-year celebration year, a century was complete; if he had been alive he would have been one hundred years old. So one year, a whole year of celebrations was made in India. And I made it a point that for the whole year I would criticize him because that was the right time. So I spoke all over India, criticizing him everywhere.

The oldest Gandhian was Kaka Kalelkar. He was one of the very early disciples and by then was the most authoritative person. When he was asked in New Delhi what he thought about me, he said, ”He’s too young, and youth is bound to be rebellious. When he is my age he will not criticize Gandhi.” I was in Ahmedabad when I received the message. Someone from Delhi brought me a newspaper and showed me that this is what he had said.

I said, ”My comment is that Kaka Kalelkar has gone senile. If youth is rebellious and if it is to be decided by age.... He has not said anything against my arguments. He’s indicating my age, that I am saying these things because I’m too young; he’s not saying anything against what I have said.

Then naturally the simple answer is that he is senile. He’s too old to understand; he’s lost his brains and he should be in his grave.

”As far as I am concerned, one thing is certain: even in my grave I will criticize Gandhi because my arguments have nothing to do with my age, no relevance to my age. Gandhi was against everything that has been invented after the spinning wheel. I cannot conceive that even if I am three hundred years old I will support this idea that the spinning wheel should be the last invention of man, and after that everything is evil!”

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stuck there, not to move from there. And the reason he was giving was absolutely meaningless. The reason was that at that time people were happy, people were moral, people were religious, people were spiritual. Now, all these things are wrong.

In Mesopotamia they have found a stone – the whole civilization of Mesopotamia has disappeared –

it is a six thousand year-old stone with writing on it. If you read it you will think it is from somewhere in today’s newspaper’s editorial. It says, ”Young people are getting lost” – the generation gap, six thousand years ago – ”the young people are disobedient and don’t listen to their fathers and mothers and elders. This is the age of degradation” – six thousand years ago!

And it was the age of degradation. Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna, all were teaching people continually

– Mahavira for forty years, Buddha for forty-two years – and what were they teaching? ”Don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t lust after other people’s women.” Now if people were not doing these things then Mahavira and Buddha were both insane, completely insane. When people are not stealing, what is the point of teaching for forty years continually, ”Don’t steal”?

I was in Bhopal sitting in my host’s bedroom, and I saw on the wall a small notice: ”Please don’t spit on the floor.” Strange.... I said, ”People do?”

He said, ”Yes, in Bhopal this is the trouble. Only in Bhopal is this the trouble: people chew the betel leaves and spit them out wherever.” He said, ”You are surprised? You will find this kind of notice in every nice house.” But this notice is enough proof that people are spitting. Otherwise I have never seen that notice anywhere in India.

In my university, one day I saw one of the professors spitting the betel leaf on the floor – the pan that Indians go on chewing. Taru is an expert in it. I saw him spitting there, just in front of me. I was sitting alone and he was sitting in another corner and he just spat by the side of the chair. I went over and asked him, ”Are you from Bhopal?”

He said, ”Yes, I have just been transferred from Bhopal.” I said, ”That explains it.” He said, ”What?”

I said, ”We will now have to keep a small notice here that says,’Please don’t spit on the floor.”’

He said, ”Strange, but it is true that only in Bhopal people spit, and this is general. And nobody cares about those notices. Notices are there – in fact they remind you to spit. You may be chewing your pan joyfully and suddenly you see that board, and the desire to spit arises. They don’t prevent anybody.”

If Gandhi says everything was moral three thousand years ago, then to whom was morality being taught?

If everything was spiritual, then what was the need of so many spiritual leaders?

If

everything was good then why do you go on remembering only a few good names? – Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna – that can be counted on your fingers.

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masses; so high, that even three thousand years, five thousand years afterwards, you can still see them. The masses have completely disappeared; there is no description of the masses at all.

But Gandhi was adamant about technology: the telegraph, the telephone.... I don’t see that the telegraph, or the telephone are in any way violent. In fact these are very non-violent things; they should be supported by non-violent people. If you don’t have a telephone then you will have to walk down to the place, and walking may kill a few insects. Or if you drive the car there then you are going to kill a few small insects on the road – or you may have an accident, kill somebody or get killed yourself The telephone is saving you from all this violence.

I don’t see that I can change my argument anytime, because it is a simple argument. It has nothing to do with my age.

Mahavira did not criticize Buddha. To me that is a criticism of Mahavira. It was an egoistic attitude to think, ”He is too young and I am too established; he is just starting from scratch – who cares about him?”

But he could not ignore Sanjay Vilethiputta. Neither could Buddha ignore him, so it seems the man must have been of great influence. We find his name in the books of his enemies, and we find a few things that he must have been teaching – that too in the books of his enemies. His books are not available because there was no disciple to preserve them, no organization to preserve them.

And we cannot trust what his enemies were saying against him because this is an old logical strategy: to describe, to destroy, to criticize your enemy, first you impose a certain doctrine on him which is not really representative of the person. It may be similar but first you impose a similar doctrine on the person’s name – knowing perfectly the loopholes because you are imposing the doctrine – and then criticize it. Then whosoever reads your book will find your criticism is perfectly right. This has happened to me, that’s why I know.

One of the great Hindu monks, Karpatri, has written a whole book against me; and when I saw it I wondered how he managed. Statements that I have never made he makes in my name, and then criticizes them. Now, anybody reading his book will think that he has finished me completely. He has not even touched me.

His secretary has written the introduction to the book, and seems to be an intelligent man because in that introduction he says, ”We are obliged to Bhagwan because he created this opportunity and the challenge for all those who think to reconsider everything and not just to accept anything without reconsidering it.”

The secretary is a follower of Karpatri, so he thanks Karpatri for doing a great job in accepting the challenge of Bhagwan and criticizing him. He came personally to give me the book. I looked in it here and there and I asked him, ”You are the secretary to Karpatri” – he was a Hindu sannyasin himself – ”Have you not noticed that these statements are not mine? Most probably the book was dictated to you.”

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I just looked here and there in the book and I told him, ”This statement is not mine. Not only is it not mine, it is contrary to me, absolutely against my statements. You are an educated person: how did you allow it to happen? You should have prevented it, because this book is absolutely false and whosoever reads it will have a totally wrong concept of me.” So you cannot trust these people – because I have compared what Buddha said about Sanjay Vilethiputta and what Mahavira says about him is something else.

Buddha quotes Sanjay

Vilethiputta’s philosophy differently, Mahavira differently.

That shows certainly that nobody is

representing the other person accurately. That is dishonesty. The honest person should first state the other person’s argument in its totality, in its full strength, and then he should criticize it.

But without an organization Sanjay Vilethiputta is completely lost – we don’t have anything of his to compare. And we don’t have any disciple’s notes because he never initiated anyone. So perhaps within one or two generations the thing must have disappeared – and the man’s contribution must have been of immense value.

Krishnamurti is doing exactly what Sanjay Vilethiputta did. He abandoned the organization and for almost sixty years he has been trying to help people individually to understand – but nothing has happened; he’s the most frustrated Master ever. And now at the age of eighty-five he creates the Krishnamurti Foundation in England. This is the experience of sixty years – that he understands that the moment he dies there will be nobody even to preserve his words. What to say about his experience – even his words will not be there.

What is happening around me is totally different from what has been done up to now... because nothing has been successful; in one way or another every effort has failed.

Now the effort around me is not to create an organization like the Catholics because then the whole power becomes concentrated in one person – and that is dangerous.

That creates ambition in others to reach to the highest post. They forget about spirituality, growth.

Then their whole effort is how to become the pope. Deep down that desire.... So it becomes another world, an other-worldly politics.

And all the power in one person’s hand is always dangerous.

Around me the effort from the very beginning has been to decentralize power.

So around me many parallel organizations are slowly being created, and each organization is autonomous, functioning in one direction.

For example, Rajneesh Foundation International will be looking after my words and other religious affairs.

The Academy, another organization, will be purely esoteric.

For the Academy I have created

three circles of people. They will be the Academy; they will have the whole spiritual power in my physical absence. It will have all the best, the most intelligent sannyasins in there. Their combined intelligence will be enough – a power unto itself.

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Then the commune will have a separate body of its own.

Now there are almost one dozen

communes around the earth. And all the communes are patterned exactly alike. And they are coming up to the standards here. Europe is almost there. In Europe there are ten communes now.

Small centers have dissolved into bigger communes because small centers can be crushed very easily; only communes can live. So now the Zurich commune has hundreds of people; Medina, in London, has hundreds of people; Berlin has hundreds of people. So now these people can stand up for themselves and will not be easily persecuted.

Each commune is autonomous.

Still they are all alike, exactly patterned like the commune here. Their clothes are of the same quality, their food is of the same quality – because I was shocked when I heard that a few communes were so poor that they were only eating bread and soup.

So I am now sending Sheela, every month, for three days to each commune, to see that the religious work is carried out according to my vision; so no sannyasin living in any commune feels that he’s deprived of any facility. All the facilities should be absolutely similar and each commune is autonomous.

Our sannyasins in many ways are very innocent people. They may be very educated but they are innocent people – and after becoming sannyasins they have become more innocent. And therefore there is no problem; it needs a simple common sense.

Organization cannot be avoided.

We just have to be a little more sophisticated and more scientific and more mathematical about it.

We have to use it rather than being used by it.

So I am not against organization, but we can learn from the past. Whatsoever has happened in the past we can avoid. And we can do something totally new which has never been done.

And if you can see all the possibilities which destroy religion... and before they get hold of my religion I am going to finish all those possibilities. Sannyasins can have a totally different organization. That promise you can always remember: I will not leave you in a state of chaos.

In the past what has happened? These people made their organizations at the very last moment when they were dying; or mostly the organizations were created after the founders were dead, because when the founder was there things were going perfectly well, so who bothered about it. But when the founder was dead, immediately the need... his absence was there. And it was such a big emptiness that it was impossible for people to connect. They had connected with the founder, but they had no interconnection amongst themselves.

And that’s really what organization is. The word is very meaningful; it comes from organ. Your hand is your organ, your leg is your organ; your nose, your eyes – these are your organs. And your whole body is the organization. And they’re all functioning in immense harmony.

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How many parts you have – and they’re all functioning in harmony; you are not even aware of it.

Everything is going on so silently that scientists say that if we were to make such a mechanism that works so silently and does all the work that the body does, we would need at least a one square mile area to make it in the factory.

Even today it is not possible to turn bread into blood – how your body does it is an everyday miracle.

Millions of living cells are within you; you are almost a city. There are seven million living cells, perhaps having a certain small brain of their own, because their work is so intelligent you cannot say they don’t have any brain.

Everything is being shifted, is being supplied to the place where it is needed. Care is even being taken by those small cells inside you so that the nourishment should reach first to the parts which are most essential. Your brain gets the nourishment first, the legs can wait a little.

But if just for few minutes – I think six minutes – your brain does not get oxygen, it starts disintegrating. So the first thing – and how these small cells are doing and deciding it is a mystery

– oxygen should reach to the brain. When the brain’s need is fulfilled, then second-grade organs, third-grade organs, fourth-grade organs.... That way it should move.

You are a city of seven million living beings. This is an organization, and this is what it should be. All our separate organs should be connected, helping each other, remembering where help is needed more, and first; and remembering that your whole function is to be enlightened, so the torch of enlightenment remains burning. There is no gap. And I’m taking every care that there will be no gap.

Bodhidharma will feel jealous of me!

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Personality: the carbon cop-out

20 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHY WERE YOU SO MISCHIEVOUS IN YOUR CHILDHOOD?

Do you think I am different? Not a bit. I am still the same. I did not allow my childhood to be spoiled by anybody. And what you think of as mischievous, I have never thought about it in that way. Even today I don’t think that anything I have ever done was a mischief I had my reasons, and very valid reasons.

For example: the first day I entered high school from my middle school.... In high school they used to have a prayer at the beginning of the day. It was a very famous song of Mirza Iqbal, who was one of the greatest Urdu poets of this age. As far as the language is concerned, it is certainly a great piece of art, but the philosophy behind it is ugly. The song says: ”My country, my nation, is the best of all the nations. My country is a beautiful garden and we are nightingales in this garden....” And that’s the way it goes on.

I said to the principal who was standing in front of the two thousand students and fifty teachers, ”I will not participate in this prayer because to me this is absolute rubbish. Every country thinks of itself in the same way and every country has its ego in it.

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philosophical background is concerned. And I am against the very concept of ”nation”. The world is one; I cannot say that my country is the best of all the countries.

”And I don’t even see the reason for singing the song. It is not only that I am against nationalism, the song is untrue too, because what do you have? – poverty, slavery, starvation, sicknesses, increasing population and increasing problems. And you call this our garden and we are its nightingales! I don’t see a single nightingale anywhere! These fifty teachers are here; can anybody raise his hand and say, ’I am a nightingale’? Let him sing, and let us see! These two thousand students are here; can anyone say it? Look at these poor students.”

And they used to come from faraway villages, miles every day, from at least a twenty mile radius around the city, because there was no other high school except this. ”They walk, they come utterly tired, they are hungry. And I have seen what they bring with them: just dry bread, not even buttered, and a little piece of salt. That’s all that they bring every day and every day they eat it.

”These are your trees, this is your garden? So factually also it is not right. And I don’t care whether Iqbal is a Nobel prize-winning poet or not. I don’t care. It does not make me feel like singing this song; in every way uttering a lie.”

The principal was so annoyed and so irritated that he could not speak for anger; he became almost red. Trembling, he went into his office and brought out his cane which was very famous – but he rarely used it. He told me to put both my hands in front of him, and he said, ”This is my answer, and remember it.”

I said, ”These are my hands. You can beat my hands or my whole body if you want, but before you start, remember that from here I am going directly to the police station, because this is legally prohibited. Both you and your cane will be behind bars.” It was illegal to beat any student, but nobody cared. Still today, in India, students are beaten. And the law that students should not be physically beaten has existed for at least fifty years. So I said, ”You decide. Here are my hands, this is your cane; you are here. And remember, these two thousand students are eyewitnesses, fifty teachers are eyewitnesses, and you will leave your signature on my hands. Leave it there! If you have any guts, beat me.” I can remember even today that he remained almost like a statue. The cane fell from his hand. He just turned back and went into his office. I told all the students, ”Now you need not be worried; we are finished with this song. Unless they find something reasonable, we will simply be standing here for ten minutes in silence.”

Now, do you call that mischief? It can be called mischief, and it was mischief in the eyes of my principal. He reported to my father that I had misbehaved.

I told my father, ”You have to come with me. He has misbehaved. He should have answered me, told me that I was wrong. He should have convinced me that the song is right. Instead of that, he brought his cane to beat me. Is that an argument? Is that right behavior? Who has done the mischief, he or I? And then he had no guts even to beat me. I gave him the challenge; my hands were before him. I was ready to take as many beatings as he wanted, but I told him that I would go From Ignorance to Innocence

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directly to the police station which is not far away from the high school, and that soon he would be behind bars because beating is illegal. Now who has misbehaved?” My father said, ”Forget about it.”

I said, ”I cannot forget about it. You have to come with me. It has to be decided – because the man has some nerve to tell you that I was mischievous, that I was misbehaving, that I insulted him before the whole school, all the teachers and all the students. You have to come with me.” Now, my father said, ”Forgive me – perhaps you are right....” I said, ”No perhaps – if you don’t come with me, I will drag that principal here.” So I had to take my father, and he had to follow, persuading me all the way: ”Leave it. It is not such a big thing; he simply mentioned by the way that you misbehaved.” I said, ”That is not the question. He has to say it in front of me. This is backbiting. HE IS

MISCHIEVOUS.”

And when the principal saw that I was coming with my father, he again became afraid that there was, it seemed, some more trouble. And I said to him, ”Now you tell my father what I have done, and what you have done: saying behind my back to my father that I have been misbehaving, doing mischief, insulting you before the whole school. Repeat it! – because I don’t agree with any of it.

”You have insulted me by not answering my argument. Not only that, you wanted to beat me. Not only that, you are a coward: you could not even beat me. Now, this is very slimy, that you go around and tell my father. You prove it – that it was mischief.

”In fact, all the nations that have been proclaiming themselves the best nation in the world are mischievous. Their mischief has accounted for millions of lives; the whole of history is full of it, and still we go on doing the same thing.

”Small children are being told to repeat every day something which is absolute nonsense, and unrealistic too. There is no fact supporting it. A country which has been a slave for two thousand years cannot say,’In the whole world we are the best’ – the best slaves, or what? A country which is ninety percent poor, where one meal is difficult....

”There are days when millions of people in India sleep only by drinking water, just to keep the feeling that the stomach is full. This is the best country in the world! – whom are you trying to befool? These children will become conditioned to the idea. This is a strategy of the politicians: that tomorrow these children will become soldiers, and they will die for the ’best country of the world’, not even knowing that this is not true.

”And even if it is factual, then too it is egoistic, and it should not be a prayer. Accepting, just for the sake of argument, that it is true – that one country is the best in the world, the richest, the most well-educated, well-cultured, has everything that is needed so all the facts support it-still I say such a prayer is wrong, because a prayer should not be ego-fulfilling, a prayer should be ego-destroying.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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The principal said to me, ”Forgive me, and please forget it, and I hope that we will never come into any conflict again.”

I said, ”That depends on you. If you behave, and you promise to behave, perhaps the situation may not arise. Was it not possible for you to accept my argument humbly? – because it was true.

Do you think that would have been an insult to you? It would have raised your status before the whole school, that you are a man of some dignity, that you do not hesitate even to respect the right argument from a child, that you respect intelligence.

”You missed that opportunity; you brought your cane. And then again you created trouble for yourself; you gave me another chance to prove you are a coward. You are unintelligent, you have no respect for intelligence or for a child – and you are a coward: you should have beaten me! What would it matter if you were behind bars? – it was a question of your principles. If you were right, then it would have been good to be behind bars. But be right, and fight for it!” For three years he avoided me like anything. But I will not say it was mischief although it will appear so. I don’t see a single point supporting the idea that it was mischief.

For three years, while I was in the high school, we continued the silence. The ten minutes’ silence continued instead of prayer, because they could not come up with something better. Whatsoever they brought up I was capable of finding faults with. And without my approval, I was not going to allow it. So finally they decided, ”Let this boy be gone from here, then....” And the day I left the school and went to the university....

I came back in some holidays and I went there to see what was happening: and the children were repeating the same song again. I went to the principal and I said, ”I have just come to check. It has not reached your mind at all – again you started the same thing.” But he said, ”Now please leave us alone. I was afraid that if you failed, then you would be here for one year more. I was praying for you to pass. I had told all the teachers to support you, to help you so that you pass. Any way you should not fail, otherwise one year more.... But now, you leave us alone.”

I said, ”I will not be coming again and again. I have just come to check and to see whether you have any mind or not, and you seem to be absolutely unintelligent. You are a postgraduate in science, and that too in mathematics – which is just an extension of logic – but you can’t understand a simple thing. I will not be coming here because now I am occupied in the university. There are so many problems there, I cannot take care of your school.” One of my high school teachers was a certain Mr. Nigam; he used to teach chemistry. I knew him, the whole city knew about him, but he was such an angry, violent and idiotic man that nobody raised a voice against him. He killed his wife, but I was the only witness.

I was a witness because I was sitting in a mango tree. The mangoes were getting ripe, and it was nobody’s tree so I was not stealing. In India, mango trees are planted along the roads. They give shade and they give the most delicious fruit also; so, many people out of charity plant mango trees.

Municipal committees, corporations, plant mango trees. So it was a public tree and nobody could say to me, ”You are stealing” – or anything.

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But this mango tree was just by the side of this Mr. Nigam’s compound, outside his compound, and he was not aware that somebody was sitting in the tree. It was getting a little dark, the sun was almost gone, and I saw him dragging his wife along. He pushed the wife into the well – there was a well in his garden – and then he started shouting, ”My wife has fallen into the well!” Neighbors gathered. I also came down, but I thought it better first to enquire of my father, ”Do I have to get involved in this or not? – because I am the only witness that this man pushed his wife.” My father said, ”In the first place, what were you doing there?” I said, ”I was just picking a few mangoes. Even if it is a crime, it is not such a crime that a man can throw his wife down a well and I should remain silent. If there is some punishment for it, I am ready.

Just two mangoes I have taken. If somebody wants the price, you give the price, but just suggest to me what I am supposed to do. Should I speak? – because that man is trying to prove that his wife fell.”

And his wife died – the well was very deep. My city is such that half the city is on top of a hill, and the other half is in the valley. Cycling is very difficult in my city. You can come down very easily, but going up you have to walk with your bicycle, you cannot go on the cycle itself. Cycle rickshaws are not yet possible because of this situation. So half is on top of the hill, and it is a very plain hill – then suddenly the slope.

The middle city is on the slope, and the other half, the main city, is in the valley – the main market and everything. So in the valley wells are very easy to make. You can dig a well alone, there is not much of a problem: six, eight feet, that’s enough, and you reach the water because the river is just by the side. But on the top, sixty feet at least you have to go down.

This Mr. Nigam used to live on the top, so the well was very deep, sixty feet deep, and then the water was very deep.

By the time people gathered, his wife had died. Perhaps she died before she reached the water.

Sixty feet falling in the well... she must have hit something. The well was not very big, so she must have hit the sides, because when her body was brought up, it was bleeding from many places. Her head and body were bruised and bloody, so she must have died on the way down – or perhaps the little bit of life that remained was finished when she reached the water.

Now this man, when on the first day he came to teach.... The first thing is the attendance; so everybody who is present says, ”Yes, sir,” or ”Present, sir,” and for whoever is not present, nobody speaks, so he is marked not present. I said, ”Yes, mister.” He looked at me and he said, ”Don’t you hear everybody saying ’yes, sir’? – and you say ’yes, mister.’ Don’t you have any respect for a teacher?” I said, ”I have respect for people who are respectable. I know you perfectly well. The day your wife was pushed into the well, I was sitting in the mango tree in front of your house. I can still open up the case.... And you want me to call you sir?

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”There is a student in the class who lives by the house of the prostitute. You visit that prostitute almost every day. Do you want me to call out the name of the boy, and ask him to stand up and say that he sees you every day in the prostitute’s house? There is a boy here whose father sells wine and all kinds of drugs. He can stand up for me and tell you what kind of things you go on purchasing from his father. And still you want me to call you sir?” Now certainly it looks like mischief, but not to me. He was very angry and annoyed. He took me to the principal, and the principal said, ”It is better you settle it yourself” But he said, ”No. This boy is going to spoil the whole class. He was saying to the class,’From tomorrow nobody calls him sir.”’

I said to the principal, ”These are the reasons; now you tell me whether we have to call this man sir.

As far as I am concerned, even calling him mister is too much. If he does not agree to mister, then I am going to find something worse.”

The principal took him aside and said, ”You had better settle for mister. It is not a bad word, it is perfectly respectable. There is no harm, because what he is saying... and he has proofs. And what he is saying is that he is an eyewitness that you pushed your wife. He is dangerous, he can go to the police and you may be in trouble. And he is not afraid of your violence or anything which your neighborhood is afraid of.

That man settled for mister. The whole class... and then I started spreading it into his other classes,

”You have to call this man mister.” Finally he resigned. Seeing that the whole school knew about everything that I had been telling, he resigned; not only resigned, he left the city and moved to another town.

It can be thought of as mischief, but I don’t think it is mischief. I had valid reasons and still I will stand by what I did; it was perfectly right. In fact this man should have been thrown out of the school long before, thrown out of the city long before. And it was a good non-violent strategy that I applied.

He left on his own. I was the only person on the station to say goodbye to him. And I can still remember the way he looked at me as if he wanted to kill me, then and there. But the train moved, and I went on waving to him; I went on running up to the end of the platform. And I said, ”Don’t be worried. I will be coming to visit sometime, wherever you are.” This world, from a child’s standpoint, looks very different. You will have to understand it from a child’s standpoint because his standpoint is non-political, fearless, innocent. He sees things as they are.

And if every child is allowed to behave according to his understanding, you will see that every child proves to be mischievous. It is your attitude that interprets it as a mischievous act because you are not thinking from an innocent vision.

It continued in the university. One of my vice-chancellors was Doctor Karpatri, a very famous historian. He was a professor of history at Oxford, and then he became vice-chancellor at Saugar university; an old man, a world – famous authority on history. And the first address that he gave to the whole university was on the birthday of Buddha.

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He said with great feeling, ”I always think that if I had been born in Buddha’s time, I would have gone and sat at his feet and tried to understand the wisdom, the light, the vision that this man has brought into the world.”

I was there. I stood up and said, ”Wait a minute, please.” He said, ”Have I said anything wrong?”

I said, ”Certainly. Have you been to Krishnamurti. You have lived in England; Krishnamurti is often in England – have you been to this man’s feet to learn the great wisdom, the vision?” He said, ”No, I haven’t.”

”Then,” I said, ”you would not have gone to Buddha either. Did you go to Raman Maharishi?” – who had just died a few years before. ”He was alive your whole life, and he was known all over the world as one of the most enlightened Masters ever. And he was here in India, just living in one place, Arunachal. He never moved from one small hill in the south, he always remained there, his whole life.

”He went there when he was seventeen, and he died there; he must have been eighty-five. He never left, all these seventy years. He was just living on that small hill. From all the world over people were coming to him. Did you go there?”

He said, ”No.”

I said, ”Then can you repeat that you would have gone to Buddha? I can say with certainty that this is mere oratory. You are befooling others, you are befooling yourself. You have to accept the fact that you would not have gone. Why have you not gone to Raman, to Krishnamurti, to Meher Baba?

These people were available your whole life.

”But you think yourself a far higher authority, more and better educated than all these three people.

You have wisdom, you have vision, you have light – what can these people give you? I say to you with absolute certainty, you would not have gone to Buddha. Do you agree with me or not?” There was silence for a moment, such silence as rarely happens in a university convocation hall, pindrop silence. And the man said, ”Perhaps the boy is right. In fact I have no right to speak on Buddha because I have never been interested in enlightenment, nirvana, meditation. And he is right that I would not have gone to Buddha. For what? – because my interest is not in these things.

And he has pointed out clearly that I know three persons – these three persons are well-known as enlightened Masters – but I have not gone. And they have been very close to me.

”Krishnamurti has been very close; just an hour’s drive and I could have seen him many times. I have been speaking in Madras university, from where Arunachal is only a few hours’ drive. I have been speaking in Poona university, and Meher Baba lives there in Poona – but I have not bothered.” He apologized to me before the whole university and asked me sometime to come to his home; he would like to talk with me. I will say this man was at least intelligent; he was not annoyed.

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My professors told me, ”This is not right, particularly for you, because your scholarship depends on him. He can cancel your scholarship, and he has every opportunity in many ways to harm you, because he will appoint those who are going to be your examiners. He will appoint the one who is going to take your verbal examination. And your future... after your M.A., he is the person who will decide whether to give you a research scholarship or not.” I said, ”Don’t be worried about anything. I have taken care of everything today.” They said, ”By doing this mischief?”

I said, ”The man has offered an apology and still you are calling it a mischief?” They said, ”Yes, a disturbance in a public place making him look stupid.” I said, ”I was not trying to make him look stupid, and he proved that he is not stupid. And I have asked many students: they all said that their respect for him in their eyes has increased because he was ready to accept that what he had said was just oratory. You can go on sometimes carried away by words; one word takes you to another word.

”People who have been speaking their whole life – professors, teachers – go on saying things which they don’t mean. You have to pull them back:’Where are you going?’ lust one word leads to another word, that word leads to another word... you have to pull them back. Of course pulling on anybody’s leg looks like mischief, but it was not. And he has not accepted it as mischief” I went to him, and he said, ”You have done something great to me. In my whole life nobody has ever disturbed me while I was speaking. And you disturbed me on such a point that I had no way to deny you; and I loved you for the simple reason that you had the courage. Whatever you need and whenever you need it, always remember I am here. Just let me be informed about it and every facility, everything that is in my power will be available to you.” And I didn’t have to say anything to him. He, without my asking, made arrangements that from the university mess I should receive a free pass for two years, and that two hundred rupees per month, my scholarship, should be granted. And you will be surprised that before deciding on my examiners, he enquired of me, ”Do you have any preference for whom you would like?” I said, ”No, when you are deciding I know that you will decide on the best people. I would like the best, the topmost people. So don’t think whether they will pass me or fail me, give me more marks or less marks; that is absolutely irrelevant to me. Choose the best in the whole country.” And he chose the best. And strangely, it turned out to be very favorable. One of my professors that he chose for Indian philosophy, the best authority, was Doctor Ranade of Allahabad university. On Indian philosophy, he was the best authority. But nobody used to choose him as an examiner because he had rarely passed anybody.

He would find so many faults, and he could not be challenged; he was the last person to be challenged. And almost all the professors of Indian philosophy in India were his disciples. He was the oldest man, retired. But Doctor Karpatri chose him, and asked him as a special favor, because he was old and retired by then, ”You have to.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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A strange thing happened – and if you trust life, strange things go on happening. He gave me ninety-nine percent out of a hundred. He wrote a special note on the paper that he was not giving a hundred percent because that would look a little too much; that’s why he had cut the one percent,

”But the paper deserves one hundred percent. I am a miser,” he wrote on his note.

I read the note; Karpatri showed it to me saying, ”Just look at this note: ’I am a miser, I have never gone above fifty in my whole life; the best I have given is fifty percent.’” But what appealed to him were my strange answers, that he had never received before. And that was his whole life’s effort – that a student of philosophy should not be like a parrot, just repeating what is written in the textbook. The moment he would see that it was just a textbook thing, he was no more interested in it.

He was a thinker and he wanted you to say something new. And with me the problem was I had no idea of the textbooks, so anything that I was writing could not be from the textbooks – that much was certain. And he loved it for the simple reason that I am not bookish. I answered on my own.

He appointed, for my viva voce, one Mohammedan professor of Allahabad university. He was thought to be a very strict man. And even Doctor Karpatri told me, ”He is a very strict man, so be careful.”

I said to him, ”I am always careful whether the man is strict or not. I don’t care about the man, I simply am careful. The man is not the point: even if there is nobody in the room, I am still careful.” He said, ”I would love to be present and see it because I have heard about this man that he is really hard.” So he came. That was very rare. The head of my department was there, the vice-chancellor was there, and Doctor Karpatri. He asked special permission from the Mohammedan professor, Sir Saiyad, ”Can I be present? I just want to see this, because you are known as the hardest examiner, and I know this boy – he is also, in his way, as hard as you are. So I want to see what happens.” And my professor, Doctor S.K. Saxena, who loved me so much, just like a son, and cared for me in every possible way.... He would even go out of his way to take care of me. For example every morning when the examinations were on, he would come to the university, to my hostel room, to pick me up in his car and leave me in the examination hall, because he was not certain – I may go, I may not go. So for those few days while the examinations were on... and it was very difficult for him to get up that early.

He lived four, five miles away from the hostel, and he was a man who loved drinking, sleeping late.

His classes never began before one o’clock in the afternoon because only by that time was he ready. But to pick me up, because the examination started at seven-thirty, at seven exactly he was in front of my room. I asked him, ”Why do you waste thirty minutes? – because from here it is just a one-minute drive to the examination hall.”

He said, ”These thirty minutes are so that if you are not here then I can find where you are – because I am not certain about you. Once you are inside the hall and the door is closed, then I take a deep breath of relief, that now you will do something, and we will see what happens.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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So Doctor Karpatri was there at the viva voce, and he was continually hitting my leg, reminding me that that man was really.... So I asked Sir Saiyad, ”One thing: first you prevent my professor, who is hitting my leg again and again, telling me not to be outrageous, not to be in any way mischievous. He told me before, ’Whenever I hit your leg, that means you are going astray, and this will be difficult.’

So please stop this man first. This is a strange situation that somebody is being examined and somebody else is hitting his leg. This is inconvenient. What do you think?” He said, ”Certainly this is inconvenient,” but he laughed.

And I said, ”My vice-chancellor has told me the same: ’Be very careful.’ But I can’t be more careful than I am. Just start!”

He asked me a simple question, my answer to which my professor thought mischievous. The vice-chancellor thought it mischievous, because I destroyed the whole thing.... He asked, ”What is Indian philosophy?”

I told him, ”In the first place philosophy is only philosophy. It cannot be Indian, Chinese, German, Japanese – philosophy is simply philosophy. What are you asking? Philosophy is philosophizing; whether a man philosophizes in Greece or in India or in Jerusalem, what difference does it make?

Geography has no impact; nor have the boundaries of a nation any impact on philosophy. So first drop that word ”Indian”, which is wrong. Ask me simply,’What is philosophy?’ You please drop it and ask the question again.”

The man looked at my vice-chancellor and he said, ”You are right; the student is also hard! He has a point, but now it will be difficult for me to ask any questions because I know he will make a mockery of my questions.” So he said, ”I accept! What is philosophy? – because that question you have put yourself.”

I said to him, ”It is strange that you have been a professor of philosophy for many years and you don’t know what philosophy is. I really cannot believe it.” And the interview was finished.

He said to Doctor Karpatri, ”Don’t unnecessarily let me be harassed by this student. He will simply harass me.” And to me he said, ”You are passed. You needn’t be worried about passing.” I said, ”I am never worried about that; about that these two persons are worried. They somehow are forcing me to pass; I am trying my best to undo what they are trying to do, but they are pushing hard.”

If you take anything as mischief, you have a certain prejudice. Once you understand that whatsoever I have done in my life... it may not be part of the formal behavior, it may not be the accepted etiquette, but then you are taking your standpoint from a certain prejudice.

All things – and so many things have happened in such a small life that sometimes I wonder why so many things happened.

They happened simply because I was always ready to jump into anything, never thinking twice what the consequences would be.

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I had won my first inter-university debate; it was an all-india debate, and I had come first and brought the shield to my university. The professor in charge, Indrabahadur Khare, was a poet and a good man, but a very proper gentleman – just like proper Sagar – everything closed. Buttons, coat, everything had to be proper – and I was very unproper.

He took me to a photo studio. Because I had won the shield for the all-india competition, the newspapers needed a picture, so he took me. For my whole university career I was wearing a kurtha, a kind of robe without any buttons at all. So when I stood there by the shield, Indrabahadur said to me, ”Wait, where are your buttons?”

I said, ”I have never used buttons. I love the air, I enjoy it – why buttons?” And he was completely closed up with so many buttons. He was using a Mohammedan sherwani, which is the national dress in India, a long coat with many buttons; even the collar is closed with a button.

So he said, ”But without buttons... this picture will be reprinted in all the newspapers; I cannot allow this.”

I said, ”I cannot allow buttons. I can bring the buttons, and you can take a picture of the buttons for the copy – I have no objection. I have no interest in the picture. Has it to be my picture – or your picture? You stand up, you are absolutely proper; the picture will look good. But if you want my picture, it has to be without buttons, because I have lived without buttons for almost four years.

”I cannot change just for the picture – that will be phony, a lie. And how can I put on buttons, because there are no holes on the other side; even if I want to put on buttons, it will need holes and I don’t want to destroy my dress at all. So please forgive me – either my picture has to be without buttons, or it is not going to be at all.”

He said, ”But this is mischievous of you.”

I said, ”It is not mischievous of me, it is too much of a mannerism on your part. And who are you to decide? In these four years, every professor has tried to insist that I should use buttons, and I have asked them,’Where in the university code is it written that you should have buttons? lust show me the law, bylaw, any amendment, anything that proves that you should have buttons, and I will have buttons.’ But nobody has thought about buttons, that this question will arise one day, that you should have it printed in the university code. So they all became silent to show that it’s okay, nothing can be done about it.”

I used to walk in an Indian sandal which is made of wood. It has been used by sannyasins for centuries, almost ten thousand years or perhaps longer. A wooden sandal... because it avoids any kind of leather, which is bound to be coming from an animal who maybe has been killed, killed only for this purpose – and the best leather comes from very young children of animals. So sannyasins have been avoiding that, and using a wooden sandal. But it makes so much noise when the sannyasin walks, you can hear from almost half a mile away that he is coming. And on a cement road or walking on the verandah in the university... the whole university knows.

The whole university used to know me, know that I was coming or going; there was no need to see me, just my sandals were enough. Now, one of my professors, Awasthi, a very loving man From Ignorance to Innocence

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asked me, ”Why do you choose strange things? Now, there are thousands of students, hundreds of professors – and I have been to many universities as a professor – but I have never come across a single student using wooden sandals and disturbing the whole university.” I said, ”That’s not right. If you are disturbed that means you don’t have any control of your own mind.

My wooden sandals, what can they do to you? Otherwise there are so many noises around, you will be continually disturbed: the car is passing by, the bus is passing by, somebody’s horn – and in India you have continually....

Here I have not used the horn at all, but in India you have to use it every minute. There is no other way, otherwise you cannot move: a cow is standing there, a buffalo is standing there, a few people are standing and gossiping in the middle of the road.... Particularly in places like Varanasi, where people go on leaving bulls as a religious thing – it is thought to be a great virtue.

The bull is Shiva’s devotee, his symbol. So in a Shiva temple you will find a bull outside the temple.

Shiva is inside, and the bull is sitting outside. He is Shiva’s bodyguard, servant, devotee – everything.

And whenever Shiva wants to move around, he rides on the bull.

So it has become a convention for hundreds of years that people bring bulls and leave them in Varanasi, because Varanasi is thought to be Shiva’s city. And according to Hindu mythology it is the ancientmost city in the world. Perhaps it is true; it seems to be. The whole structure of the city, particularly the old city, seems to be really ancient.

So in Varanasi there are thousands of bulls, and to feed those bulls is a religious thing. A man may be dying, starving, but you will not bother about him: the bull has to be fed. If a bull comes to a vegetable shop and starts eating your vegetables, you cannot prevent him. No, he has the license from Shiva, he has simply to be allowed. When he goes, he goes. You cannot disturb him. He can eat sweets in a sweet shop, he can eat vegetables, fruits, whatsoever he wants; and he is completely free.

The only free being in India is the bull, particularly in Varanasi.

And nobody can beat the bull, nobody can do any harm to him. In Varanasi it was such a trouble.

You go on honking the horn, but the bull does not care – and the bull is sitting just in front of your car.

Unless you get out, push him, persuade him to move... and they are well fed because they are free, nobody can interfere with them. lust to travel a small distance, you have to start one hour earlier because on the way everything is possible.

I used to speak in the Theosophical Society in Varanasi, and the place where I stayed was just five minutes walk away. But it took one hour to drive, so I told my host, ”It is better if we can walk and reach there without this trouble and without troubling so many of Shiva’s devotees – because they are everywhere and they are resting and sitting. They have no other work – eating, walking, sitting, fighting.”

I told Awasthi, ”All these disturbances are going on around you.” He said, ”I know all those disturbances are going on, but still your sandal stands separate. It is impossible to forget that you are around, even in all this noise. Why have you chosen this sandal?

Just to annoy people, or...?”

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I said, ”No, not to annoy anybody. This keeps me alert. And my feeling is that they were not chosen to avoid leather, because Hindus are not against killing animals; they sacrificed animals. But they have chosen it. Jainas, who are vegetarians – non-violent, against sacrifice – they have not chosen even the wooden sandal. They walk without anything, just naked feet; Buddhists also, just naked feet. so this reasoning, that wooden sandals have been chosen so that leather can be avoided, is nonsense – because you see the same sannyasin sitting on the hide of a lion. That is the traditional seat for a Hindu monk: the full hide of a lion, even with the head!

”So for a man who is sitting on the lion’s hide, or a tiger’s hide or a deer’s hide, what problem has he to make shoes? That reason is not applicable. My reason is that when you walk on a wooden sandal you cannot fall asleep once. You can walk miles, you cannot fall asleep; that noise will keep you continually waking up, like an alarm. And it does keep you alert.

”If you start watching it, observing it, it is far better than breathing and watching the breath, because breath is a subtle thing, so you will miss it very soon: within a few seconds your mind will wander. But that click-clock, click-clock, click-clock hits you continually, as if somebody is hitting you on your head

– click-clock, click-clock.... How can you go astray? It has been of immense help for meditation.” Awasthi said, ”You are simply impossible. It is just mischief, but you are now making a philosophy out of it.

I still say that I was not making a philosophy out it. It was not mischief If somebody is disturbed, that simply means that the man is not very centered. Otherwise somebody walking on the wooden sandal... if you are disturbed, then you will be disturbed by anything: a dog will start barking, a crow may be sitting on the roof calling you; you will be disturbed by anything. Sometimes, if there is nothing happening, that may disturb you: ”What is the matter? – no noise, nothing is happening?” But he insisted, ”Whatsoever you say, I know that this is mischief” I said, ”If you know already, then there is no question of disputing the fact. I have explained it to you.

If you want to refute me, I can bring a pair for you; I have a spare pair. Just start, and you’ll see.” He said, ”You will make a buffoon out of me too! You are notorious for your sandals; now you want to play the trick on me.”

I said, ”No, just do it in your house, there’s no need to go outside. Just do it in your house and see how it keeps you alert.”

He seemed interested – just a little more persuasion.... His wife came out and she said, ”You are spoiling my husband. I will not allow these wooden sandals in my house. If you want wooden sandals and this meditation, do it anywhere else in the university, but not in my house. I have been tolerating even this boy’s sandals for two years, and now he is persuading you.” Awasthi said to me, ”This is true. I was almost on the verge of telling you to bring them. I have been trying meditation, but I have never been successful, because with breathing it is so subtle that the mind moves away easily. Your idea is good, but my wife....” From Ignorance to Innocence

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I said, ”You can try them outside; others’ wives will get disturbed” – because he was living in the professors’ colony. ”You can walk on the verandah of other people’s houses, so why should you be worried? Nobody can prevent me. I have already established the precedent – you just go.” He said, ”Let me think about it.”

The next day I came with a pair. He said, ”No, because I enquired of my neighbors. They said,

’Awasthi, if you do this then we are all going to complain against you that you should be removed from this colony to another colony; this is too much. This boy is enough. When he comes to meet you he wakes everybody. And a strange time he chooses – three o’clock in the morning! – and we cannot do anything against him. We have reported it to the vice-chancellor. The vice-chancellor says that he says it is a meditation.”’

Now, in India you cannot prevent anybody from any kind of meditation. That word is enough! When I started teaching people dynamic meditation, there was trouble everywhere, even in my own house.

My uncle started doing it, and the neighbor filed a case against him in the court. My uncle told me,

”This is a difficult meditation. That neighbor was my friend, and he would not normally do such a thing, but he is so angry that he says, ’unless you stop this meditation I am going to fight the case, because you disturb me early in the morning; when one really feels like falling into a deep sleep, that is the time of your dynamic!”’

But I told my uncle – and he is our sannyasin; he was here just a few days ago – ”Don’t be worried.

You just say that this is our religion, and this is our meditation.” Once you say ”meditation” in India, there is no problem.

When he came here, I asked, ”What happened to the case?” He said, ”We have won the case, because I said, ’This is our meditation,’ and I produced the book.

”The judge read the description and he said, ’If it is a meditation, then... the court has no power over religion.’ So he told the neighbor,’You have to accept it, there is no other way. This is his meditation.

If you want to do it, you can also do it. Why get unnecessarily boiled up and angry in your bed? –

better you also start.’”

And the neighbor was very irritated with the court.

He said, ”This is strange – the court suggesting, ’You also start, why waste time? And if it is meditation, we have no jurisdiction over religion.’” It may appear as mischief – it was not. My mischief was the same shape as now; my shoes are still the same shape.

This is the shape of the wooden one I dropped because now it would disturb my meditation! Now I don’t need any help from it; rather, it is a disturbance. That’s why I changed it!

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CHAPTER 22

The commune: the distillation of rebellious spirits 21 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

YOU HAVE BEEN SPEAKING ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ONESELF. COULD YOU

TALK ABOUT THE PARADOX OF BEING AN INDIVIDUAL AND MELTING INTO THE COMMUNE?

THERE is no paradox as such, as far as the individual and his melting into the commune is concerned. The question has arisen out of a confusion between two words: individuality and personality.

Yes, with personality there is trouble. The personality cannot melt into anything – into love, into meditation, into friendship.

The reason is that the personality is a very thin mask given to the individual by the society.

And every society’s effort has been, up till now, to deceive you and everybody, and to focus your attention on the personality as if it is your individuality.

The personality is that which is given by others to you.

Individuality is that which you are born with which is your self nature: nobody can give it to you, and nobody can take it away.

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Personality can be given and can be taken away. Hence, when you become identified with your personality you start becoming afraid of losing it. So anywhere when you see that a boundary has come beyond which you will have to melt, the personality withdraws. It cannot go beyond the limit it knows. It is very thin, an imposed layer. In deep love it will evaporate. In great friendship it will not be found at all.

In any kind of communion the death of the personality is absolute.

And you feel identified with the personality: you have been told that you are this by your parents, teachers, neighbors, friends – they have all been molding your personality, giving a shape to it. And they have made something of you which you are not and which you can never be. Hence you are miserable, confined in this personality. This is your imprisonment. But you are also afraid to come out of it because you don’t know that you have anything more than this.

It is almost a situation like this: you think your clothes are you. Then naturally you will be afraid to stand naked. It is not a question only of the fear of dropping the clothes, but the fear that if you drop the clothes there will be nobody, and everybody will see that there is emptiness, you are hollow within. Your clothes go on giving you substance. The personality is afraid, and it is very natural that it should be afraid.

As far as individuality is concerned, once you know your individuality... and my religion is nothing but a process of individuation, finding, discovering your individuality. And in that finding – this is the most important step – you discard personality, you take away the identity; you withdraw from the personality and you start looking at it from a distance.

Create that distance between you and personality.

You have come so close that you cannot see the separation. Once you have understood that you are somebody other than your personality.... You have been thinking up to now that you were somebody else: You are A, and you have been thinking up to now that you are B. That fallacy is bound to be afraid, that fallacy cannot be in love – there is no possibility.

That’s why lovers are constantly in conflict.

It is not their individualities conflicting, it is their personalities in conflict. Both want the other to melt, and both are afraid that if they melt they are lost, they are gone.

Friendship has disappeared from the world just as love has disappeared, because friendship is possible only when you meet naked, as you are – not as people want you to be, not as you should be, but simply just as you are.

When two persons open up to each other just as they are, friendship grows.

When two persons are ready to drop their masks, they have taken a tremendous step towards religiousness.

So love, friendship, anything that helps you to drop the mask, is taking you towards religion.

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But the pseudo-religions have done just the opposite. They are against love. You can understand now, why they are against love: because love will destroy the personality, and the pseudo-religion depends on your personality. The pseudo-religions have made a great effort – all these churches and priests and sermons – and what are they doing? Their whole work is to create the personality.

They manufacture personality – of course, different kinds of personality: a Hindu personality, a Christian personality, a Mohammedan personality. These are different models of personalities. All these religions are just like factories creating different models of cars, but the function is the same.

The pseudo-religions are all afraid of love.

They talk about love, and they teach you marriage.

They talk about love and they say marriages are made in heaven.

It is not something that you have to find out; God has already found the person for you. The astrologer will help you, the palmist will help you, the priest will help you, the parents will help you to find them – because God has already created the person for you, you are not to find the person on your own.

They prevent you from loving, and they go on saying great things about love. But their great words about love are bogus; they have no substance in them.

Jesus says, ”God is love.” There is no God – then what about love? So as far as Jesus’ love is concerned, there is no love.

If God is love, then with God’s disappearance love also disappears.

And to make God synonymous with love is a beautiful strategy. He has raised love to such a high pedestal – do you think it can happen between a man and a woman? God is going to happen when you fall in love? That is sin!

God is love when you love humanity, when you love words which don’t mean anything.

Have you ever met humanity anywhere?

Can you imagine that someday you will encounter

humanity? You will meet only human beings. Humanity is simply a word.

”Love humanity”...

it gives you the idea of something abstract.

”Love God, love truth”...

the

sentences seem to be linguistically right, but existentially they mean nothing.

And you have to remember it: that most of our beautiful words are only words. You can play with them, you can create poetry, but you cannot live them because words cannot be lived. There is nothing living in them.

Now, just think of the idea: ”Love God....” What does it mean? How does one fall in love with God?

You have not seen God. You don’t know Him. How are you going to recognize that this fellow is God?

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I was seeing a film, THE DIFFICULTIES OF AN ORDINARY GOD. It is a beautiful film. A man starts seeing a very ordinary God, just like an old hobo, with a hat cricketers use. Now, God in a hat which cricketers use! And he looks also like a cricket player. He is very old, but must have been in His young days a cricket player. And when God declared to this man, ”You don’t recognize me: I am God, I created the world,” the man said, ”My God! You created the world! Don’t say it to anybody otherwise people will think you are mad.”

But the old man insisted, He said, ”You want some proof?” The young man said, ”I don’t want any proof. Just seeing you is enough to know that you are no God. This is not the way – that God suddenly stops you on the way; that you are going somewhere and He wants a lift! This is a strange meeting. I have heard about the God Moses met on the mountain and Jesus heard from the sky, and Mohammed... but God asking for a lift?” But the old man was stubborn, He said, ”I will give you proof” And He gives him proof: He simply disappears.

The young man looks all around – He was in the car sitting by his side – He is not there! He says,

”My God!, perhaps He really was God, but what a funny God! And I missed the opportunity.” The old man appeared again, He said, ”Look, whenI was gone you started thinking you had missed an opportunity.”

But seeing Him again the young man said, ”You did some trick, you must know some magic. But I cannot accept you as God. Your clothes seem to be purchased from a secondhand place, or you have stolen them. They don’t fit you, they are too loose and too dirty – as if you have not taken a bath for many years.”

But the old man said, ”God is so pure that He does not need any bath or anything. And of course the clothes are very old, because I am very old. I have told you that I created the world; at that time I created these clothes. Since then I have not created anything, so they are very ancient.” The young man said, ”What to do about you? Where do you want to get out?” He said, ”Anywhere, because I am everywhere.

The young man said, ”Then why did you want a lift?” He said, ”Just because I see a potential in you, that you can become my messenger.” The young man said, ”My God! Your messenger? If I say to anybody that you are God they will think I am mad!”

But God said, ”You try,” gave His picture to him and disappeared.

The young man looked at the picture and said, ”It is better to keep silent about the whole thing.

Either I am hallucinating, dreaming....”

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He came home. His wife looked at him and said, ”You look very worried.” He said, ”No, nothing, there is nothing.”

She said, ”But you look very worried and pale and afraid, as if you have seen some ghost or something.”

He said, ”My God! You think I have seen something?” He took out the picture and showed the wife:

”Can you recognize this man?”

She said, ”He looks like a hobo – perhaps an old cricket player, or maybe he just got a hat from some old clothes store. And what kind of dress...? Where did you find this picture, and why did you bring it home?

He said, ”Can you keep this thing secret? I have something to tell you. Close the door. This man is God. He asked for a lift.”

His wife looked at her husband and said, ”Wait, I will phone the doctor. What are you saying? – God asking for a lift in your car? And He has given this picture to you?” He said, ”Yes, He has given this picture to me so that I can become His messenger. He wants me to become His messenger”

The wife said, ”The first thing is, you meet the doctor.” He tried hard: ”I am perfectly sane, there is no problem.” But the wife said, ”If you think this man is God, it is certain that there is some problem!” So she takes him to the doctor, and the doctor is also puzzled. He said, ”I have seen many ideas about God but this is an absolutely novel idea. Where did you get this picture?” He said, ”From God Himself He Himself gave it to me by His own hand; and He has shown a miracle too.” And he told them about the miracle.

The wife, the doctor, the nurses, they all laughed; they said, ”This is...!” So he said, ”Wait.” He raised his eyes upwards and said, ”God, now please help me... because these are all my friends. The doctor is my friend, the family doctor; my wife, the nurse – there is nobody from the outside, we are all like family. Please appear, otherwise they are all going to think that I am mad.” And suddenly the man came out from the ceiling!

They all looked at Him, and He said, ”Wherever you need me I will be present; you just go on spreading the word.”

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Now, four or five people had seen Him and they were all shocked: ”This man is not mad, there is something in it.” The whole town became agog with the rumor that five people had seen God. And the thing became so hot that the church became immediately annoyed and irritated thinking that this was a joke.... ”This man, and God!” The picture was printed in the newspapers and everybody was laughing: ”If this is God, then everything is finished.” The problem became so much that the church had to call a meeting of the elders and force this man who was the messenger to appear before the council and prove that this was God. He tried, he told them, ”Many times He has showed me miracles. Just this morning when I was shaving in my bathroom, a doubt arose in me that perhaps something was wrong with me; it was possible that I was simply fantasizing. And He immediately looked at me from the mirror. My picture disappeared and his picture was there in the mirror, and He said,’Again I go on giving you proofs, and you are again doubting.’”

And then at the church, the young man appeared before the church council. The high priest was there, and they were determined to punish this man if... and they said, ”You say that this man is God?”

He said, ”I have to say it. I have seen Him many times. He has shown me many miracles. This morning He appeared in my mirror.” Everybody laughed, and this poor man said, ”He has chosen me as His messenger.”

They said, ”This time He has really chosen a great messenger! Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus

– they were some people – but this man is just a clerk in a railway station. Now what qualities have you got that He would choose you as the messenger?” He said, ”I don’t know. I don’t have any qualities, and I have never dreamed in my life that God would choose me. But He has chosen me and He has promised that if there is a need He will come to support me.”

So the church council asked, ”Then let Him appear.” And they all were amazed that the door behind the priest opened, and God appeared. There was silence for a moment. Seeing God, the priest gathered courage and said, ”You think you are God?” He said, ”I don’t think, I am. And this is my messenger. But,” He said, ”you can understand the difficulties of an ordinary God. I am an ordinary God, that’s why I have chosen an ordinary messenger, because to find an extraordinary messenger would be very difficult for me. You can see I am an ordinary, poor God. So don’t be angry with this poor clerk; what he is saying is absolutely right.”

How are you going to recognize God if He meets you in a cricketer’s hat? – and of course He will be wearing some kind of hat – or without a hat. If He is like me, bald, then He will be using a hat, some kind of hat.

This reminds me of the man I have been talking to you about: my geography teacher, Chotelal Munde. He had cursed me because I made him famous as ”Munde”; so much so that once he From Ignorance to Innocence

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had to sign himself as Chotelal Munde. That day he was just fire.... I had asked the whole class for a collection. Twenty rupees were collected, and we made a money order in Chotelal Munde’s name. And we arranged with the postman, ”You come into his class when he is taking our class” –

we gave him the time. So he appeared exactly on time, with a twenty-rupee money order, sender anonymous.

Chotelal Munde was a poor man with a big family. He could not lose twenty rupees. In those days twenty rupees was a lot of money. In India, in those days, a man could live on two rupees for the whole month, things were so cheap. Before the first world war things were so cheap that servants used to get one rupee, two rupees, three rupees a month at the most. And that was enough. Twenty rupees....

But the postman said, ”You will have to sign ’Chotelal Munde’, because it is in the name of Chotelal Munde.”

He thought for a moment, and he said, ”I know who this anonymous sender is. He is here, and I will teach him a lesson because now he has forced me even to sign ’Munde’.” And he had to sign; he signed ”Chotelal Munde”. Then he came to me and he said, ”I curse you, that one day you will become bald headed just like me.”

I said, ”That’s perfectly okay. There is no harm in it.” And he said, ”Anonymous!”

I remembered him just a few days ago when Sheela brought a newspaper which said that in Oregon people have found a new word for a rascal”: Rajneeshee. That was Chotelal Munde’s second curse, that ”You will be known as Rajneesh the Rascal.”

I said, ”This is perfectly good.” Both his predictions have come true.

If you meet God in any dress, in any form, you will not be able to accept Him, because there is no way for you to recognize Him. There has never been any way to recognize Him. That’s why I say Jesus and Moses and Mohammed were all hallucinating. They had no grounds to declare that that was God’s voice because they had never heard it before. So what evidence was there that this voice was God’s voice? If they saw somebody standing before them, how did they recognize that this person was God? There was no way.

Jesus says, ”God is love.” But God is unproved, just a vague word.

He makes ”love” also a

vague, meaningless word. Between you and God, what kind of love will happen? What will be the relationship between you and God? All the religions have tried to find some kind of relationship with God. Many religions call Him father. There are a few which call Him mother. There are a few which call Him the beloved; for them He is a She, not a He.

In India there is a religion which believes that He is a lover and they are His beloveds. These people who believe God to be their lover and themselves to be His beloveds – in the day of course they are ashamed so they cannot move about in women’s clothes, but in the night they do wear women’s clothes, because the lover will be coming to meet them. And they sleep with a statue of Krishna, their lover.

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Now what kinds of foolishness have been going on for centuries? And it is not that these people are idiots. Very scholarly people are among them, very learned, but there is a blind spot. In every religious – so-called religious – person’s mind there is a blind spot. Everywhere else is light, but on that spot is complete darkness. Just as there are people who are color blind, these people, in a certain way, in a certain aspect of their mind, are blind.

Bernard Shaw was color blind. He came to know it when he was sixty. For sixty years such an intelligent man was not aware that he was color blind. On his sixtieth birthday somebody sent him a present, a suit, but the person forgot to send him a matching tie. So with his secretary he went to the market, because he liked the coat, the pants – everything was really the best available. So he went with his secretary to find a matching tie for it. And when he was looking for the tie – the suit was yellow – he looked at a green tie.

The woman secretary nudged him and told him, ”This won’t look right: a green tie on a yellow suit.

It will look odd.”

The shopkeeper also said, ”Yes sir, she is right. I was also worried about that.” He said, ”But isn’t it the same color? – my suit and this tie?” They said, ”No, this is green and this is yellow.” He said, ”My God! I have never in my whole life thought that these are two different colors.” He was blind to green; it appeared to him as yellow. Green did not exist for him at all. Many people remain color blind their whole life and never come to know about it. It was just a coincidence.... If he had passed sixty years he could have passed forty more; there was no problem in it. It was just a coincidence.

In the same way, every pseudo-religion creates a blind spot in your mind, and from that blind spot it goes on manipulating you.

That blind spot creates your personality; and because the blind spot creates your personality you can’t see anything wrong in it.

It is all wrong for the simple reason that it is not you; it is something glued over you.

It fulfills other people’s needs – it destroys you completely. And naturally when you are covered by a painted paper you will be afraid to go in the rain. You know that you will start disappearing.

The question is: on the one hand I teach you individuality, on the other hand I teach you to melt with the commune. There seems to be a paradox; there is none.

The personality is afraid; hence the personality will prevent you from melting in all the situations where melting is needed. And it seems absolutely logical that the personality should be afraid. But individuality is never afraid of melting, because it is your nature; there is no way to lose it.

You can melt in the commune, and by melting you will simply be more authentically individual than you were before.

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The very step – that you dared to melt – is going to throw away your personality, and only the individuality will remain.

Individuality is your intrinsic nature.

Nobody can take it, nobody can steal it.

If it was possible to take it away, society would have taken it away already; they would not have taken any chances. They would have taken the individuality from every child as he was born. But because it cannot be taken away, there is no way, they have tried another strategy: cover it. It can only be covered or uncovered.

I teach you to melt in the commune because that will uncover you. It will destroy your personality.

If you are too attached, you will find excuses for not melting, but those excuses are coming from your personality, not from your individuality. And the sooner the personality melts the better, because out of that melting you will find for the first time who you are. And you will be surprised that all along you have been playing a role which was prompted by the society, by the educationist, by the priest, by the parents. They were all prompting you, manufacturing you for a certain career.

I was staying in a friend’s house in Amritsar. Early in the morning I went into the garden. My friend’s young child, not more than eight years old, was also there picking flowers. Seeing me, he came to me and we started talking. I asked him, ”What are you going to become in life?” And he said, ”My mother wants me to become a doctor, my father wants me to become an engineer, my uncle wants me to become a scientist, my younger sister wants me to become the prime minister; and as far as I am concerned, nobody asks me. And I don’t know either. If somebody asks the way you have asked, I don’t know who I want to become.” But this is the situation of every child. He is being dragged by others, forced by others this way and that. Of course he lands somewhere, he becomes something, but he loses his being. In this becoming, he has lost his most precious treasure.

Hence, I teach you melting with the commune. The commune is only a device for you to melt.

What will be melting will not be really you, only your personality. And what will emerge out of that will be you.

But right now you don’t know who you are.

And the one you think you are, you are not.

That which you are not is going to melt, certainly.

And that which you are is going to be a revelation, to you and to everybody. That is going to be a finding; and it brings tremendous joy, ecstasy.

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In just coming to know who you are, all your fears, phobias, and mind problems simply disappear, evaporate, because they were part of the personality.

All your inner conflicts are no more there.

There is only harmony and a silence which is so profound that there is no way to imagine it.

And to see one’s original being is to see all that is worth seeing, because from there the door opens towards existence.

So I am teaching you everything that will help you to melt.

I teach you love, not marriage.

I teach you friendship, or even better, friendliness.

I teach you melting with the commune.

The commune is not the family. You are born in a family.... You have to understand a little bit about the family. The family is a very strange institution, and one of the most poisonous institutions. The parents think they own you. The mother thinks she has given birth to you, the father thinks he has given birth to you: you are his blood.

It was a continual problem in my childhood with my parents. I would object whenever they would mention or indicate indirectly that I belonged to them. I said, ”That’s absolutely wrong. Forget the idea of possessing me. Yes, I have come through you, but just because of that you don’t become my possessor; I am not your possession. A child comes through you: you are a passage. If passages started possessing, then any road you pass by will call to you,’Where are you going? I possess you, I have brought you here.’”

My parents would say, ”You can say anything you want to say to us, but such things, not in front of others. If anybody hears that you are telling your father,’You are just a road’....” I said, ”But I have to say these things because you provoke me; the whole fault lies in you. You start

– of course unconsciously, but you start thinking that you possess me.” He wanted me to become a scientist, and I told him, ”You should leave it to me. I am now mature enough to decide in what direction to go. And I am thankful that you have brought me up to this point; but now, leave me alone.

And this I am not saying out of any ungratefulness; I am grateful that you have made me capable of choosing my path. But one day I have to tell you:’Now, leave me alone.’ It is shocking, it hurts, but what to do? You are the cause because you have raised the expectation that this is what you would like.”

He was rarely angry with me, but on that point he was very angry; and he was right in everybody’s eyes. The whole family was in agreement with him. The neighborhood was in agreement with him,

”What is the point in going to an arts college and studying philosophy? You will be good for nothing.” In India many universities have closed their philosophy departments, and other universities which still have a philosophy department only get girls as their students. I myself was with two girls –

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only three students. And girls join it for a different purpose. Because in the philosophy department the professors are continuously in need of students, they are afraid to fail anybody. If people don’t come then their department is closed, and they will be unemployed; so they persuade students to come.... And for girls, a degree in India is only for marriage. A postgraduate girl will get a rich husband, a cultured family. She will move in the highest circles immediately. She has nothing to do with philosophy.

One of my professors was a Bengali, and he believed in celibacy – fanatically. In departments of philosophy you will find all kinds of strange creatures. Whether it was raining or not, whether it was hot or not, sun or not, he would walk with his umbrella just covering almost his face so he did not have to see any woman. The university was full of girls, and in his class there were two girls.

Because of those two girls, he used to teach with closed eyes.

For me that was a great opportunity; I used to sleep. For six months it went perfectly well. One day the girls didn’t turn up, but that was my time to sleep, so I went to sleep. That day he was teaching with open eyes – I did not think that he would teach with his eyes open. So he said, ”You can open your eyes. I know you also believe in celibacy.”

I said, ”For six months you were thinking this? I was simply sleeping. I believe in sleeping, not in celibacy.”

He said, ”This is strange; I was thinking you are just like me, and I was feeling great respect for you.

You deceived me for six months.”

I said, ”I will deceive you in future too. It is not a deception, this is just my time to sleep. And it was good that you were teaching with your eyes closed, so there was no trouble, no conflict – because nobody was listening.

”Those girls are not interested in philosophy in any way, and what you are teaching is so much crap that once in a while in my sleep when I hear it, I just throw it out. And those two girls have nothing to do.... You can teach, you are paid for it. But those girls are just earning a degree so that they can get a good marriage partner.

”I come here just to sleep, and you come here to teach; our ideas are different. I don’t say to you,’Don’t disturb me,’ and I don’t disturb you either. I am sound asleep and I don’t snore. Have I ever snored?”

He said, ”You are strange, you drive me nuts! You take the question in such a direction where I have nothing.... Now you are asking about snoring. Come to the point.” I said, ”I am exactly on the point. I am saying, have I ever disturbed you? If I have not disturbed you then what is the complaint against me? I could have not listened to you with open eyes. That’s what those two girls are doing, but they are not interested in philosophy at all. While you are teaching with your closed eyes, they are talking about clothes, about their saris, and enquiring where to get this from, and how much...? That’s what they are doing.

”Am I such a fool that I should listen to those two girls and you? Only I am caught in between. So I simply sleep; that’s the only way to escape from all this. And you know perfectly well from now From Ignorance to Innocence

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on that I am not deceiving you. If you had asked before I would have told you; it was just your assumption. You presumed that I am also a celibate, you projected that idea.” But he was so afraid of seeing a woman. And I said. ”Now that you have raised the question I would like to say to you that your celibacy is not worth anything. You can’t even look at a woman? Are you so afraid? Your umbrella is nothing but your cowardice. You are continually carrying it all around the university, and everybody is laughing. People can’t see your face, you can’t see people’s faces.” He would walk so fast that nobody could start walking with him or talking with him. And he had a really good walking pace – fast... covered with his umbrella.

”How long is this umbrella going to protect your celibacy, you tell me. And have you heard of any scripture that says an umbrella can help you to remain celibate? Have you seen any pictures of Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna carrying an umbrella? You are the first celibate in the world who is trying to be celibate by using an umbrella. And I know perfectly well that you must be looking; here in class also you must be looking sometimes, just opening your eyes a little bit.” He said, ”But how do you know, because you are fast asleep?” I said,”How do you know that I am fast asleep? You must be looking. How long can you keep your eyes closed? And then to teach....”

The family tries to make something of you. My family wanted me to become a scientist; they saw a potential. I said, ”I do understand that as a scientist I will be paid more, I will be respected more. As a philosopher perhaps I may remain unemployed. But the time has come that I should choose my own path. If it leads into the desert at least I will be happy that I have followed my own path; there will be no grudge against anybody. Following your path, even if I become the greatest scientist, I will not be happy because I have been forced; it is a kind of slavery. And you have the power to force me, but remember that I will not in any way allow anything to be imposed upon me.” That time my father became angry. He said, ”Okay, you go to the arts department but I am not going to give you any money.”

I said, ”That’s settled. Money is yours; I am not yours. If you don’t want to give me money, that I can understand. And I can understand that if I go to the science department, you are ready to give me money because then I am following your desire. You are ready to give money to me only if I remain under your control.

”So that’s perfectly clear: you are using money to force me in a certain direction which I refuse. But,” I said, ”you will suffer repentance just because you mentioned money. Do you think you can force me by threatening that you are not going to give me any money?” I left the house. For two years he was continually coming, saying, ”Forget that and forgive me. I am really sorry that I mentioned the money. I can see your trouble, and I am the cause of it” – because at night I used to work as an editor in a newspaper just to earn money so that in the day I could join the university. But I said, ”Money from you, how can I accept?” One day, when tears came to his eyes, I said, ”Okay, if you insist, just put the money on the table. I will not take it from your hand. From the table I can take it because with the table I have no problem, From Ignorance to Innocence

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no trouble, no conflict.” So that’s the way it continued the remaining four years. He would put it on the table and I would take it from the table, but not from him – ”because,” I said to him, ”that strategy is ugly.”

But the family exploits every child because it has the power of money, prestige, the power of numbers. And a child is just a child; how can he revolt? And the family poisons the child: you are a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian. It poisons the child: you are a republican, you are a democrat, you are a socialist, you are a communist. It goes on poisoning him. And this whole poisoning piles up and becomes your personality.

The commune is not your family or is your real family.

Strangely enough, every boy hates his father, every girl hates her mother; but nobody says so. On the surface everything is polite and nice, just goody-goody. Deep down there are wounds. All the wounds that have been inflicted upon you in your childhood you will carry your whole life. And those wounds will work upon you in such a way that they will spoil your whole meaning.

For example, I see that the girl who hates her mother will behave exactly like the mother – because from where is she going to learn? The mother was the first woman she knew. She hates her because the mother forced her to be someone who she is not, and now she has to carry that burden.

So on the one hand she hates her; on the other hand that was the woman she came to know most intimately. So in her gestures, in her language, in her reactions, in everything she will repeat her mother. She will be just a carbon copy: the personality that she is carrying is her mother’s personality.

No wonder that people hate themselves too. It is for the simple reason that the personality they think they are is the personality given by the people whom they wanted to rebel against, but against whom they were helpless.

Sigmund Freud has made a significant point about it: that the idea of God as father must have arisen as a compensation. Somewhere back in primitive prehistory days, some young man must have killed his father because that was the only way to be himself But then the repentance for killing the father....

Sigmund Freud has no historical facts about it, there is no history available, but his deduction is psychological, not historical. He says that every boy iS going to hate his father. He will go on hating him.

But in hating one’s own father, the conscience is disturbed. To console the conscience, he starts worshipping the father.

In India particularly – because I know India more than any other country – the son has to touch the feet of the father, of the mother, of everybody who is older than him. This is just a way to help him: by touching the feet of the father, he balances his hate with respect, and he feels at ease that he respects his father.

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If you don’t hate your father, I don’t think there is any need to touch the feet of the father. Perhaps once in a while, out of gratitude, you may touch them; but that cannot be a formality, it can only be an informal happening. Right now, people touch the feet, but there is no feeling in it. How can there be feeling in it? There is hate inside: this is the man who has spoiled your life.

The family becomes your basic unit; so if your family is in conflict with the neighbor, then it is your family – right or wrong, you will fight alongside your family.

In front of my house lived a goldsmith – he was a slightly eccentric person. One of his eccentricities was that whenever he would go to the market or to the river, he would lock his house – even if his wife was inside, his children were inside. He would lock the house from the outside and would pull the lock two or three times to see whether it was really locked. And if anybody created suspicion –

and I was continually.... I would stand just a few houses away when he was going to the river, and I would say, ”Soniji”that means ”goldsmithji” – ”have you forgotten to check your lock?” He would say, ”Have I forgotten?” and back he would go. Once when he was taking a bath in the river, I told him, ”Today you have forgotten.”

He said, ”Really?”

I said, ”I was sitting in front of you.” And half-bathed he ran back first to check.

He was in some conflict with my father – a legal case about some land. The land really belonged to him, but my father had paid his younger brother for it. The younger brother had pretended that it belonged to him, so my father paid him. And on the registry day, it was found out that the man was deceiving: the land belonged to the other brother. He would not return the money, and my father would not give up control of the land to the other brother to whom it belonged; so there was a legal case.

I told my father, ”I will be coming to support the eccentric goldsmith.” He said, ”What! You will be a witness against me?” I said, ”Of course. I know that you have paid, but that was your fault. You should have found out to whom the land belonged before you paid. And that poor eccentric goldsmith, what fault is it of his?

– the land belongs to him. And anyway he is far poorer than you; so even if you lose the money, it is better than if he loses the ground, because he is really poor.” My father said, ”But you don’t understand a simple thing... being against your own father?” I said, ”It is not a question of being against my own father. I don’t believe in this ’right or wrong, my family....’ And I know that your claim is right, but it is your mistake; you should suffer. And I have been harassing that poor goldsmith, so it is a chance to help him. I will be helping him.” The family wants you to be with it. I have seen families, generations after generations fighting in the courts, destroying each other, killing each other, for generations. Because your forefathers were against somebody – you have nothing to do with these people who are living now, they have not From Ignorance to Innocence

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done anything wrong to you – somewhere in the past, four, five, six generations ago.... You may not even know the names of the people who fought, but the enmity goes on.

The family tries to disconnect you from the whole society, just as the nation divides you from other nations. It is the same strategy of division.

A commune is not a family.

Nobody here is father, nobody here is mother.

Nobody here is brother or sister.

Nobody here is husband or wife.

Here are only individuals, and these individuals have decided to live in freedom, and to support each other in living the way of freedom.

Nobody possesses anybody.

Nobody has any hold on anybody.

Everybody is supportive of whatsoever you are, of whatsoever you can be.

The family is dictatorial.

A commune is simply supportive. I don’t give you even guidelines, because even guidelines may become dictatorial in your mind, because your mind has been made by the society. Even if I give you guidelines you may think these are commandments.

Guidelines are not commandments. You are not to follow them, just understanding them is enough.

Then you follow your path. Perhaps on your path something that I had said may be of use, or perhaps nothing will be of any use. So there is no need to have faith in it.

A commune is a gathering of free individuals – undemanding, non-forcing, non-dictatorial – just supporting and helping. Because alone it will be difficult; you will find it almost impossible to be yourself in the so-called society, because that society is not supportive. Yes, if it supports, it supports conditionally; it is always a bargain, a business. The society will do this for you if you are ready to do that for the society: a simple contract.

A commune is not a business, a relationship.

There is no contract.

Just a few people who feel imprisoned in the society drop out and create a gathering of similar rebels. They are all rebels, and they are all supportive of each other. Whatever one’s rebellion, and whatever one wants to be, the commune’s support is unconditional.

But the commune can exist only if you merge with it. If you keep yourself aloof, there is no commune because there is no communion.

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Hence I say, dissolve yourself in the commune.

And remember that you will become an individual by this dissolving.

You will not lose your

individuality, you will find it – that’s the only way to find it.

In the society you can go on changing your personality, but you will never find your individuality. You can change from a Catholic to a communist, but that will not make any difference at all. You will not go any longer to the Vatican, but now to the Kremlin... those red stars will be holy. Now Russia will become your holy land.

You have simply changed from one ditch and you have fallen into another ditch. Maybe they have a little different shape, but ditches are ditches. From one jail you move into another jail. Of course while you are moving from one jail to another, just in between you will have a little taste of freedom.

Don’t think that this is going to be the taste of the other jail. That is only in between.

Escape! Don’t go to the other jail; escape from any jail. And never go again into the same structure, because all structures are the same.

A commune is an immensely spiritual phenomenon.

You are with people and yet you are alone.

Nobody trespasses on your aloneness.

Everybody respects your aloneness. You are with many people, you are together, but nobody tries to impose any condition, any relationship, any bondage. Nobody takes from you any promise for tomorrow, because tomorrow you will be different, the other will be different. Who knows about tomorrow? When tomorrow comes we will see.

The commune has no tomorrow, it lives here and now.

And it lives totally and intensely, because we are not living as a means to some other life.

We are living as an end to itself

Catholics are living for some other life; this life is only a ladder. And the same is true with all the religions: this life is to be sacrificed. They all teach you sacrifice – they really sacrifice you. You are all butchered – on different altars, in different temples – but you are all butchered.

The only way to save yourself from these butchers who are all around is to join together with similar kinds of rebels, so the way of revolution becomes strong, grounded, self-supporting. And then you find everybody is living intensely. We are not living for another world, so why should we live lukewarm?

We should live real hot

In Ahmedabad I used to go often on one bridge where there was a very big advertisement. I liked that advertisement; just one word was not right. It was an advertisement for a certain cold drink.

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The advertisement said, ”Livva little hot, sippa gold spot” – gold spot is something like coca-cola.

But they have found a really good slogan: ”Livv little hot” – but why a little? That was my trouble.

Sippa anything, but why a little?

Jayantibhai used to drive me over that bridge, and he would go fast when the board was there. And I would say, ”Jayantibhai, wait!”

He said, ”That is why I was going fast; otherwise you will see that board again....” And I told him, ”That board is really very philosophical – just a little mistake, but all philosophers have been making mistakes. A little hot? – that hurts. Be really hot, because there is nothing to sacrifice for.”

All religions teach you to be martyrs.

All families teach you to be martyrs.

All nations teach you to be martyrs.

It is a strange world. Why are people being taught to be suicidal? – because to be a martyr is just a good word for committing suicide.

Nobody teaches living.

Nobody encourages living.

Nobody teaches you that you can be a little more hot – why are you just smoking with no fire? Many people are just smoking with no fire.

How long have you been smoking, and how long are you going to smoke?

Create some fire!

And when there is real fire, there is no smoke. When it is really hot there is no smoke. Burn like a flame without any smoke! But everybody is telling you to keep a low profile. Why? Such a small life, why keep a low profile?

Jump as high as you can.

Dance as madly as you can.

Melt as totally as you can.

And out of that burning, living, melting, you will find your authenticity, your individuality.

Individuality is never afraid.

In front of my house there was a tall tamarind tree. Now the tamarind tree is not very strong, its branches can break very easily. It was so tall, and I was always going and climbing it. My whole From Ignorance to Innocence

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family would gather around and they would say, ”Now stop, no further!” I would continue going higher, and they would shout, ”Do you hear or not? No further.” I would say, ”Till you stop shouting ’No further’ I am going to climb. At the most I can fall – perhaps a few fractures; but the height is so challenging, it is calling me up. You shut up completely, then I will stop.” When they saw that I had reached a place from where a fall was certain then they would shut up. And that was a condition: ”Unless you stop trying to stop me, I will go on and on.” Only my grandfather used to say, ”Don’t be worried about anything. These people are all cowards. I would have loved to come with you but I am too old, but you should remember always that I am with you. So let them shout ’Stop’”

Even neighbors would come and start shouting, ”Stop!” But I had made it a condition again and again: ”Unless you stop shouting, I will go still higher... and now it is getting really dangerous, so be quiet” They had to be quiet. But again, next time I would... and they would shout again, and I would say, ”You don’t understand. Just leave me alone! At least trust that I can also see that the branch is now getting thinner, and the wind is stronger, and the tree is swaying. I can also see it. Let me see and let me feel. And let me decide; don’t decide for me. I hate that.” But every family goes on deciding for you.

A commune does not decide for you. At the most it helps you.

So with the commune there is no paradox between individuality and melting.

It is not a society, not a family.

It is a gathering of rebels of all kinds.

So there is no need to fit with each other and be like each other. All are rebels of different kinds.

One thing is common, that they are rebels.

The rebellious spirit is the common factor that joins the commune and makes it one whole – without destroying anybody’s individuality, without destroying anybody in any way.

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CHAPTER 23

Conscience: a coffin for consciousness

22 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

IS THERE ANY POINT IN LIVING?

MAN has been brought up by all the traditions in a schizophrenic way.

It was helpful to divide man in every possible dimension, and create a conflict between the divisions.

This way man becomes weak, shaky, fearful, ready to submit, surrender; ready to be enslaved by the priests, by the politicians, by anybody.

This question also arises out of a schizophrenic mind. It will be a little difficult for you to understand because you may have never thought that the division between ends and means is a basic strategy of creating a split in man.

Has living any meaning, any point, any worth? The question is: Is there some goal to be achieved by life, by living? Is there some place where you will reach one day by living? Living is a means; the goal, the attainment, somewhere far away, is the end. And that end will make it meaningful. If there is no end, then certainly life is meaningless; a God is needed to make your life meaningful.

First create the division between ends and means.

That divides your mind.

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Your mind is always asking why? For what? And anything that has no answer to the question, ”For what?” slowly, slowly becomes of no value to you. That’s how love has become valueless. What point is there in love? Where is it going to lead you? What is going to be the achievement out of it?

Will you attain to some utopia, some paradise?

Of course, love has no point in that way.

It is pointless.

What is the point of beauty?

You see a sunset – you are stunned, it is so beautiful, but any idiot can ask the question, ”What is the meaning of it?” and you will be without any answer. And if there is no meaning then why unnecessarily are you bragging about beauty?

A beautiful flower, or a beautiful painting, or beautiful music, beautiful poetry – they don’t have any point. They are not arguments to prove something, neither are they means to achieve any end.

And living consists only of those things which are pointless.

Let me repeat it: living consists only of those things which have no point at all, which have no meaning at all – meaning in the sense that they don’t have any goal, that they don’t lead you anywhere, that you don’t get anything out of them.

In other words, living is significant in itself.

The means and ends are together, not separate.

And that is the strategy of all those who have been lustful for power, down the ages: that means are means. and ends are ends. Means are useful because they lead you to the end. If they don’t lead to your end, they are meaningless. In this way, they have destroyed all that is really significant. And they have imposed things on you which are absolutely insignificant.

Money has a point. A political career has a point. To be religious has a point, because that is the means to heaven, to God. Business has a point because immediately you see the end result.

Business became important, politics became important, religion became important; poetry, music, dancing, love, friendliness, beauty, truth, all disappeared from your life.

A simple strategy, but it destroyed all that makes you significant, that gives ecstasy to your being.

But the schizophrenic mind will ask, ”What is the point of ecstasy?” People have asked me, hundreds of people, ”What is the meaning of meditation? What will we gain out of it? First, it is very difficult to attain – and even if we attain it, what is going to be the end result?”

It is very difficult to explain to these people that meditation is an end in itself There is no end beyond it.

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Anything that has an end beyond it is just for the mediocre mind. And anything which has its end in itself is for the really intelligent person.

But you will see the mediocre person becoming the president of a country, the prime minister of a country; becoming the richest man in the country, becoming the pope, becoming the head of a religion. But these are all mediocre people; their only qualification is their mediocrity. They are third rate and basically they are schizophrenic. They have divided their life in two parts: ends and means.

My approach is totally different:

To make you one single whole.

So I want you to live just for life’s sake.

The poets have defined art as for its own sake, there is nothing else beyond it: art for art’s sake. It will not appeal to the mediocre at all because he counts things in terms of money, position, power.

Is your poetry going to make you the prime minister of the country? – then it is meaningful. But in fact your poetry may make you just a beggar, because who is going to purchase your poetry?

I am acquainted with many kinds of geniuses who are living like beggars for the simple reason that they did not accept the mediocre way of life, and they did not allow themselves to become schizophrenic. They are living – of course they have a joy which no politician can ever know, they have a certain radiance which no billionaire is going to know. They have a certain rhythm to their heart of which these so-called religious people have no idea. But as far as their outside is concerned, they have been reduced by the society to live like beggars.

I would like you to remember one great, perhaps the greatest, Dutch painter: Vincent van Gogh. His father wanted him to become a religious minister, to live a life of respect – comfortable, convenient

– and not only in this world, in the other world after death too. But Vincent van Gogh wanted to become a painter. His father said, ”You are mad!” He said, ”That may be. To me, you are mad. I don’t see any significance in becoming a minister because all I would be saying would be nothing but lies. I don’t know God. I don’t know whether there is any heaven or hell. I don’t know whether man survives after death or not. I will be continually telling lies. Of course it is respectable, but that kind of respect is not for me; I will not be rejoicing in it. It will be a torture to my soul.” The father threw him out.

He started painting – he is the first modern painter. You can draw a line at Vincent van Gogh: before him painting was ordinary. Even the greatest painters, like Michelangelo, are of minor importance compared to Vincent van Gogh, because what they were painting was ordinary. Their painting was for the marketplace.

Michelangelo was painting for the churches his whole life; painting on church walls and church ceilings. He broke his backbone painting church ceilings, because to paint a ceiling you have to lie down on a high stool while you paint. It is a very uncomfortable position, and for days together, months together.... But he was earning money, and he was earning respect. He was painting angels, Christ, God creating the world. His famous painting is God creating the world.

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Vincent van Gogh starts a totally new dimension. He could not sell a single painting in his whole life. Now, who will say that his painting has any point? Not a single person could see that there was anything in his paintings. His younger brother used to send him money; enough so that he did not die of starvation, just enough for seven days’ food every week – because if he gave him enough for a whole month he would finish it within two or three days, and the remaining days he would be starving. Every week he would send money to him.

And what Vincent van Gogh was doing was for four days he would eat, and for the three days in between those four days he was saving money for paints, canvasses. This is something totally different from Michelangelo, who earned enough money, who became a rich person. He sold all his paintings. They were made to be sold, it was business. Of course he was a great painter, so even paintings that were going to be sold came out beautifully. But if he had had the guts of a Vincent van Gogh, he would have enriched the whole world.

Three days starving, and van Gogh would purchase the paints and canvasses. His younger brother, hearing that not a single painting had sold, gave some money to a man – a friend of his not known to Vincent van Gogh – and told him to go and purchase at least one painting: ”That will give him some satisfaction. The poor man is dying; the whole day he is painting, starving for painting but nobody is ready to purchase his painting – nobody sees anything in it.” Because to see something in Vincent van Gogh’s painting you need the eye of a painter of the caliber of van Gogh; less than that will not do. His paintings will seem strange to you.

His trees are painted so high that they go above the stars; stars are left far behind. Now, you will think that this man is mad... trees going up higher than the stars? Have you seen such trees anywhere? When Vincent van Gogh was asked, ”Your trees always go beyond the stars...?” he said,

”Yes, because I understand trees. I have felt always that trees are the ambition of the earth to reach the stars. Otherwise why? To touch the stars, to feel the stars, to go beyond the stars – this is the desire of the earth. The earth tries hard, but cannot fulfill the desire. I can do it. The earth will understand my paintings, and I don’t care about you, whether you understand or not.” Now, this kind of paintings you cannot sell. The man his brother had sent came. Van Gogh was very happy: at last somebody had come to purchase. But soon his happiness turned into despair because the man looked around, picked one painting and gave the money.

Vincent van Gogh said, ”But do you understand the painting? You have picked it up so casually, you have not looked; I have hundreds of paintings. You have not even bothered to look around; you have simply picked one that was accidentally in front of you. I suspect that you are sent by my brother.

Put the painting back, take your money. I will not sell the painting to a man who has no eyes for painting. And tell my brother never to do such a thing again.” The man was puzzled how he managed to figure it out. He said, ”You don’t know me, how did you figure it out?”

He said, ”That’s too simple. I know my brother wants me to feel some consolation. He must have manipulated you – and this money belongs to him – because I can see that you are blind as far as paintings are concerned. And I am not one to sell paintings to blind people; I cannot exploit a blind man and sell him a painting. What will he do with it? And tell my brother also that he also does not understand painting, otherwise he would not have sent you.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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When the brother came to know, he came to apologize. He said, ”Instead of giving you a little consolation, I have wounded you. I will never do such a thing again.” His whole life van Gogh was just giving his paintings to friends: to the hotel where he used to eat four days a week he would present a painting, or to a prostitute who had said once to him that he was not a beautiful man. To be absolutely factual, he was ugly. No woman ever fell in love with him, it was impossible.

This prostitute out of compassion – and sometimes prostitutes have more compassion than your so-called ladies, they understand men more – just out of compassion she said, ”I like you very much.” He had never heard this. Love was a far away thing. Even liking....

He said, ”Really, you like me? What do you like in me?” Now, the woman was at a loss.

She said, ”I like your ears. Your ears are beautiful.” And you will be surprised that van Gogh went home, cut off his ears with a razor, packed them beautifully, went to the prostitute and gave his ears to her. And blood was flowing....

She said, ”What have you done?”

He said, ”Nobody ever liked anything in me. And I am a poor man, how can I thank you? You liked my ears; I have presented them to you. If you had liked my eyes, I would have presented my eyes to you If you had liked me, I would have died for you.” The prostitute could not believe it. But for the first time, van Gogh was happy, smiling; somebody had liked at least a part of him. And that woman had just said jokingly – otherwise who bothers about your ears? If people like something, they like your eyes, they like your nose, your lips – you won’t hear lovers talking about each other’s ears, that they like them.

Only in ancient Hindu scriptures on sexology: the Kamasutras of Vatsayana.... That is the only book I have been able to find that can be connected to this incident five thousand years afterwards with Vincent van Gogh, because only Vatsayana says, ”Very few people are aware that ear lobes are tremendously sexual and sensitive points in the body. And lovers should play with each other’s ear lobes” – and this is a fact, although unknown.

If you start playing with the ear lobes of your lover, she or he may think that you are a little crazy

– what are you doing? Because people have become fixed on certain ideas: kissing is okay....

But there are tribes where nobody has ever heard about kissing; they rub noses with each other, and that is thought to be the most loving gesture. Certainly it is more hygienic, far more medically supportable than the French kiss.

Those people who rub noses think of people giving French kisses to each other as just dirty, simply dirty.

But this prostitute perhaps was aware... because prostitutes become aware of many things which ordinary women and men don’t become aware of, because they come in contact with so many people.

Perhaps she was aware that ears have a sexual significance.

They certainly have.

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Vatsayana is one of the greatest experts. Freud and Havelock Ellis and other sexologists are just pygmies before Vatsayana. And when he says something, he means it.

Van Gogh lived his whole life in poverty. He died painting. Before dying he went mad, because for one year continually he was painting the sun: hundreds of paintings, but nothing was coming to the point he wanted. But the whole day standing in the hottest place in France, in Arles, with the sun on the head – because without the experience how can you paint? He painted the final painting, but he went mad. Just the heat, the hunger... but he was immensely happy; even in madness he was painting. And those paintings which he did in the madhouse are now worth millions.

He committed suicide for the simple reason that he had painted everything that he wanted to paint.

Now painting was finished; he had come to a dead end. There was nothing more to do. Now to go on living was occupying space, somebody’s place; that was ugly to him.

That’s what he wrote in his letters to his brother: ”My work is done. I have lived tremendously – the way I wanted to live. I have painted what I wanted to paint. My last painting I have done today, and now I am taking a jump from this life into the unknown, whatever it is, because this life no longer contains anything for me.”

Will you consider this man a genius? Will you consider this man intelligent, wise? No, ordinarily you would think he is simply mad. But I cannot say that. His living and his painting were not two things: painting was his living, that was his life. So to the whole world it seems suicide – not to me. To me it simply seems a natural end. The painting is completed. Life is fulfilled. There was no other goal; whether he receives the Nobel prize, whether anybody appreciates his painting....

In his life nobody appreciated his work. In his life no art gallery accepted his paintings, even free.

After he died, slowly, slowly, because of his sacrifice, painting changed its whole flavor. There would have been no Picasso without Vincent van Gogh. All the painters that have come after Vincent van Gogh are indebted to him, incalculably, because that man changed the whole direction. Slowly, slowly, as the direction changed, his paintings were discovered. A great search was made.

People had thrown his paintings in their empty houses, or in their basements, thinking that they were useless. They rushed to their basements, discovered his paintings, cleaned them. Even faked paintings came onto the market as authentic van Gogh. Now there are only two hundred paintings; he must have painted thousands. But any art gallery that has a Vincent van Gogh is proud, because the man poured his whole life in his paintings. They were not painted by color, but by blood, by breath – his heartbeat is there.

Don’t ask such a man, ”Is there any meaning in your painting?” He is there in his painting, and you are asking, ”Is there any meaning in your painting?” If you cannot see the meaning, you are responsible for it.

The higher a thing rises, the fewer the people who will recognize it.

When something reaches to the highest point, it is very difficult to find even a few people to recognize it.

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At the ultimate omega point, only the person himself recognizes what has happened to him; he cannot find even a second man.

That’s why a Buddha has to declare himself that he is enlightened. Nobody else can recognize it, because to recognize it, you will have to have some taste of it. Otherwise, how can you recognize it? No recognition is possible because the point is so high.

But what is the meaning of Buddhahood? What is the meaning of becoming enlightened? What is the point? If you ask about the point, there is none. It itself is enough. It needs nothing else to make it significant.

That’s what I mean when I say that the really valuable things in life are not divided into ends and means. There is no division between ends and means. Ends are the means, means are the ends

– perhaps two sides of the same coin inseparably joined together – in fact, they are a oneness, a wholeness.

You ask me, ”Is there any point in life, in living?” I am afraid that if I say there is no point in living, you will think that means you have to commit suicide, because if there is no point in living, then what else to do? – commit suicide! I am not saying commit suicide, because in committing suicide also there is no point.

Living: live, and live totally.

Dying: die, and die totally.

And in that totality you will find significance.

I am consideredly not using the word meaning, and using the word significance because ”meaning is contaminated. The word meaning – it always points somewhere else. You must have heard, you must have read in your childhood, many stories.... Why are they written for children? – perhaps the writers don’t know, but it is part of the same exploitation c humanity.

The stories are like this: a man is there whose life is in a parrot. If you kill the parrot, the man will be killed, but you cannot kill the man directly. You can shoot, and nothing will happen. You can swing your sword and the sword will pass through his neck, but the neck will remain still joined to the body.

You cannot kill the man – first you have to find where his life is. So in those stories the life is always somewhere else. And when you find out you just kill the parrot and wherever the man is, he will die immediately

Even when I was a child, I used to ask my teacher ”This seems to be a very stupid kind of story because I don’t see anyone whose life is in a parrot or in a dog or in something else, like a tree.” It was the first time I heard that story, that type of story; then I came across many. They were written specially for children.

The man who was teaching me was a very nice and respectable gentleman. I asked him, ”Can you tell me where your life is? Because I would like to try... ” He said, ”What do you mean?”

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I said, ”I would like to kill that bird in which your life is. You are an intelligent man, wise, respected.

You must have put your life somewhere else so nobody can kill you. That’s what the story says –

that wise people keep their life somewhere else, so that you cannot kill them, so that nobody can kill them. An(’ it is impossible to find where they have kept their life unless they tell the secret, nobody can figure it out This world is so big, and there are so many people and so many animals, and so many birds, and so man trees... nobody knows where that man has put his life.

”You are a wise man, respected, you must have kept it somewhere; you can just tell me in private. I will not kill the bird completely; just give him a few twists and turns, and see what happens to you.” He said, ”You are a strange boy. I have been teaching this story my whole life, and you want to give me a twist and turn. This is only a story.”

But I said, ”What is the point of the story? Why do you go on teaching this story and this kind of things to children?”

He could not answer. I asked my father, ”What can be the meaning of this story? Why should these things be taught, which are absolutely absurd?”

He said, ”If your teacher cannot answer, then how can I answer? I don’t know. He is far more educated and intelligent and wise. You harass him, rather than harassing me.” But now I know what the meaning of the stories is and why they are being taught to the children.

They enter in their unconscious and they start thinking life is always somewhere else – in heaven, in God, always somewhere else – it is not in you. You are empty, just an empty shell. You don’t have meaning in your life herenow. Here you are only a means, a ladder. If you go up the ladder, perhaps someday you will find your life, your God, your goal, your meaning, whatever name you give to it.

But I say to you that you are the meaning, the significance, and living itself is intrinsically complete.

Life needs nothing else to be added to it.

All that life needs is that you live it to its totality.

If you live only partially, then you will not feel the thrill of being alive.

It is like any mechanism when just a part is functioning.... For example in a clock: if only the second hand is working but neither the hour hand nor the minute hand moves – only the second hand goes on moving – what purpose will it serve? There will be movement, a certain part is working, but unless the whole works and works in harmony, there cannot be a song out of it.

And this is the situation: everybody is living partially, a small part. So you make noise but you can’t create a song. You move your hands and legs but no dance happens. The dance, the song, the significance comes into existence immediately your whole functions in harmony, in accord. Then you don’t ask such questions as: Is there any point in living? – you know.

Living itself is the point. There is no other point.

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But you have not been allowed to remain one and whole. You have been divided, cut into several parts. A few parts have been completely closed – so much so that you don’t know even that they belong to you. Much of you has been thrown in the basement. Much of you has been so condemned that although you know it is there, you cannot dare to accept it, that it is part of you – you go on denying it; you go on repressing it.

You know only a very small fragment in you, which they call conscience, which is a social product, not a natural thing, which society creates inside you to control you from inside. The constable is outside, the court is outside controlling you. And the conscience is inside, which is far more powerful.

That’s why even in a court, first they will give you the Bible. You take the oath on the Bible because the court also knows that if you are a Christian, putting your hand on the Bible and saying, ”I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” your conscience will force you to speak the truth, because now you have taken the oath in the name of God, and you have touched the Bible. If you speak a lie you will be thrown into hell.

Before, at the most, if you were caught you would be thrown into imprisonment for a few months, a few years. But now you will be thrown in hell for eternity. Even the court accepts that the Bible is more powerful, the Gita is more powerful, the Koran is more powerful than the court, than the military, than the army.

Conscience is one of the meanest inventions of humanity.

And from the very first day the child is born we start creating a conscience in him; a small part which goes on condemning anything that the society does not want in you, and goes on appreciating anything that the society wants in you. You are no more whole.

The conscience continuously goes on forcing you, so that you have to always look out – god is watching. Every act, every thought, God is watching, so beware!

Even in thoughts you are not allowed freedom: God is watching. What kind of peeping Tom is this God? In every bathroom He is looking through the keyhole; He won’t leave you alone – even in your bathroom?

There are tribes in the world where even in your dream if you do something wrong, in the morning you have to go to the person.... For example you have insulted somebody in the dream – in the morning you have to go to apologize: ”Forgive me, last night I insulted you in a dream; I am so sorry.” Even dreams are controlled by the society. You are not allowed even in dream to be yourself They go on talking about freedom of thought – that’s all nonsense because from the very beginning they put the base in every child for unfreedom of thought.

They want to control your thoughts.

They want to control your dreams.

They want to control everything in you. It’s through a very clever device – conscience.

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It pricks you. It goes on telling you, ”This is not right, don’t do it; you will suffer.” It goes on forcing you: ”Do this, this is the right thing to do; you will be rewarded for it.” This conscience will never allow you to be whole

It won’t allow you to live as if there is nothing prohibited, as if there are no boundaries, as if you are left totally independent to be whatsoever you can be. Then life has meaning, then living has meaning – not the meaning that is derived from ends, but the meaning that is derived from living itself Then whatever you do, in that very doing is your reward.

For example, I am speaking to you. I am enjoying it. For thirty-five years I have been continually speaking for no purpose. With this much speaking I could have become a president, a prime minister; there was no problem in it. With so much speaking I could have done anything. What have I gained?

But I was not out for gain in the first place – I enjoyed.

This was my painting, this was my song, this was my poetry.

Just those moments when I am speaking and I feel the communion happening, those moments when I see your eyes flare up, when I see that you have understood the point... they give me such tremendous joy that I cannot think anything can be added to it.

Action, any action done totally, with every fiber of your being in it.... For example, if you bind my hands I cannot speak, although there is no relationship be tween hands and speaking. I have tried.

One day, I told a friend who was staying with me, ”Tie both my hands.” He said, ”What?” I said, ”Just tie them, and then ask a question.” He said, ”I am always afraid to stay with you, you are crazy. And now if somebody sees that I have tied your hands... and now I am asking a question and you are answering it, what will they think?” I said, ”You forget all that. Close the door and do what I say.” He did, because he had to do it; otherwise I would have thrown him out, saying, ”And being my guest, you cannot even do this simple thing for me? Then don’t bother me at all, just get lost.” So he tied both my hands to two pillars, and he asked me a question. I tried in every possible way, but my hands were tied; I could not say anything to him. I simply said, ”Please untie my hands.” He said, ”But I cannot understand what this is all about.” I said, ”It is simply that I was trying to see whether I could speak without my hands. I cannot.” What to say about hands... if I put this leg on the other side, and the other leg on top of it – which is the way I sit in my room when I am not speaking.... If I have to put it under the other leg, then something goes wrong, then I am not at home. So the way I am sitting, the way my hands move, is a total involvement. It is not only speaking from a part of me; everything in me is involved in it. And From Ignorance to Innocence

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only then can you find the intrinsic value of any act. Otherwise you have to live the life of tension, stretched between here and there, this and that faraway goal.

The pseudo-religions say, ”Of course, this life is only a means so you cannot be involved in it totally; it is only a ladder you have to pass. It is not something valuable, just a stepping-stone. The real thing is there, far away.” And so it always remains faraway. Wherever you will be, your real thing will be always faraway. So wherever you will be, you will be missing life.

I don’t have a goal.

When I was in the university I used to go for a walk in the morning, evening, anytime.... Morning and evening absolutely, but if there was another time available, I would also go for a walk then, because the place and the trees and the road were so beautiful, and so covered with big trees from both sides that even in the hottest summer there was shadow on the road.

One of my professors who loved me very much used to watch me: that some days I would go on this road, some days on that road. There was a pentagon in front of the gate of the university, five roads going in five directions, and he lived just near there; his were the last quarters near the gate.

He asked me, ”Sometimes you go on this road, sometimes on that road. Where do you go?” I said, ”I don’t go anywhere. I just go for walking.” If you are going somewhere then certainly you will go on the same road; but I was not going anywhere, so it was just whimsical. I just came to the pentagon and I just used to stand there for a little while. That was making him more puzzled: how I figure it out, what I figure out standing there?

I used to figure out where the wind was blowing. Whichever way the wind was blowing I would also go; that was my way. ”So sometimes,” he would say, ”You have been going on the same road for a week continually; sometimes you go only one day, and the next day you change. What do you do there? And how do you decide?”

And I told him, ”It is very simple. I stand there and I feel’ which road is alive – where the wind is blowing. I go with the wind. And it is beautiful going with the wind. I jog, I run, whatsoever I want to do. And the wind is there, cool, available. So I just figure it out.” Life is not going somewhere.

It is just going for a morning walk.

Choose wherever your whole being is flowing, where the wind is blowing. Move on that path as far as it leads, and never expect to find anything.

Hence I have never been surprised, because I have never been expecting anything – so there is no question of surprise: everything is surprise. And there is no question of disappointment: everything is appointment.

If it happens, good; if it does not happen, even better.

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Once you understand that moment-to-moment living is what religion is all about, then you will understand why I say drop this idea of God, heaven and hell, and all that crap.

Just drop it completely because this load of so many concepts is preventing you from living moment to moment.

Live life in an organic unity.

No act should be partial, you should be involved fully in it.

A Zen story. A very curious king, wanting to know about what these people go on doing in the monasteries, asked, ”Who is the most famous Master?” Finding out that the most famous Master of those days was Nan-in, he went to his monastery. When he entered the monastery he found a woodcutter. He asked him, ”The monastery is big, where can I find Master Nan-in?” The man thought with closed eyes for a few moments, and he said, ”Right now you cannot find him.” The king said, ”Why can’t I find him right now? Do you understand that I am the emperor?” He said, ”That is irrelevant. Whoever you are, that is your business, but I assure you you cannot find him right now.”

”Is he out?” asked the king.

”No, he is in,” replied the woodcutter.

The king said, ”But is he involved in some work, in some ceremony, or in isolation? What is the matter

The man said, ”He is right now cutting wood in front of you. And when I am cutting wood, I am just a woodcutter. Right now where is Master Nan-in? I am just a woodcutter. You will have to wait.” The emperor thought, ”This man is mad, simply mad. Master Nan-in cutting wood?” He went ahead, and left the woodcutter behind. Nan-in again continued to cut wood. The winter was coming close, and wood had to be stored. The emperor could wait, but winter wouldn’t wait.

The emperor waited one hour, two hours – and then from the back door came Master Nan-in, in his Master’s robe. The king looked at him. He looked like the woodcutter, but the king bowed down.

The Master sat there, and he asked, ”Why have you taken so much trouble to come here?” The king said, ”There are many things, but those questions I will ask later on. First I want to know: are you the same man who was cutting wood?”

He said, ”Now I am Master Nan-in. I am not the same man; the total configuration has changed.

Now here I am sitting as Master Nan-in. You ask as a disciple, with humbleness, receptivity. Yes, a man very, very similar to me was cutting wood there, but that was a woodcutter. His name is also Nan-In.”

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The king got so puzzled that he left without asking the questions he had come to ask. When he went back to his court, his advisers asked what happened. He said, ”What happened it is better to forget about. This Master Nan-In seems to be absolutely insane! He was cutting wood; he said, ’I am a woodcutter and Master Nan-In is not available right now.’ Then the same man came in a Master’s robe and I asked him, and he said, ’A similar man was cutting the wood, but he was the woodcutter; I am the Master.’”

One of the men in the court said, ”You have missed the point of what he was trying to say to you

– that when cutting wood he is totally involved in it. Nothing is left which can claim to be Master Nan-In; nothing is left out, he is just a woodcutter.” And in Zen language, which is difficult to translate, he was saying not exactly that ”I am a woodcutter,” he was saying, ”Right now it is wood cutting not a woodcutter – because there is not even space for the cutter.” It is simply wood being chopped, and he is so totally in it, it is only wood cutting: wood cutting is happening. And when he comes as a Master, of course, it is a different configuration. The same parts are now in a different accord. So with each action you are a different person, if you get totally involved in it.

Buddha used to say, ”It is just as the flame of the candle looks the same, but is never the same even for two consecutive moments. The flame is continuously becoming smoke, new flame is coming up. The old flame is going out, the new flame is coming up. The candle that you had burned in the evening is not the same candle that you will blow out in the morning. This is not the same flame that you had started; that has gone far away, nobody knows where. It is just a similarity of the flame that gives you the illusion that it is the same flame.” The same is true about your being.

It is a flame.

It is a fire.

Each moment your being is changing, and if you get involved totally in anything then you will see the change happening in you – each moment a new being, and a new world, and a new experience.

Everything suddenly becomes so full of newness that you never see the same thing again.

Then naturally, life becomes a continuous mystery, a continuous surprise.

On each step a new world opens up, of tremendous meaning, of incredible ecstasy.

When death comes, death too is not seen as something separate from life. It is part of life, not an end of life. It is just like other happenings: love had happened, birth had happened. You were a child, and then childhood disappeared; you became a young man, and then the young man disappeared; you became an old man, and then the old man disappeared – how many things have been happening!

Why don’t you allow death also to happen just like other incidents?

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and still it weighs more. In every way it weighs more because it is the whole life condensed; and something more added to it, which was never available to you. A new door opening, with the whole life condensed: a new dimension opening.

Okay. You can ask your second question.

Question 2

OSHO,

ON THE FACE OF AMERICAN MONEY IS THE PHRASE, ”IN GOD WE TRUST.” THE PRIESTS

HAVE LIED AND SAID THAT THERE IS A GOD. THE POLITICIANS HAVE LIED AND SAID THAT

THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION AND CIVIL RIGHTS WOULD ENSURE SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR

ALL. HOW CAN I NOW TRUST IN A RELIGIONLESS RELIGION?

I have never asked you to trust in a religionless religion. How can I ask you? – because that very asking has been religion up to now. To boycott it I am calling it religionless religion, using an obvious contradiction. But the reason is clear.

Calling it religionless means that I will not ask you for any faith, any belief, any trust.

If trust arises in you, that is a totally different thing.

The religions ask that you believe in one God, one messiah, one book. I do not ask you; but how can I prevent you if trust arises in you? Then trust is nothing but a kind of love. It is not belief, it is not faith, because belief has to be forced to repress doubts; faith has to be continually indoctrinated in you. You hear it so many times that slowly slowly you start forgetting that you have only heard it, that you don’t know anything about it.

You have a tendency – and a comfortable tendency – to forget your ignorance and cling to your knowledge. Faith is conditioned knowledge given by others to you, forced upon you. But slowly, slowly, it goes so deep in your mind, it becomes part of you. You start thinking it is ”my faith”. Trust is neither.

Nobody can ask for trust, just as nobody can ask for love.

Can I ask anybody, ”Love me”? The person will say, ”But how?” If love arises, it arises; if it does not arise then what can be done? Yes, you can pretend, as the whole world is pretending. Trust can also be pretended if asked for. I am not asking. I want you to be completely saved from any kind of pretension, hypocrisy. But if trust arises I cannot help it, you cannot help it. Nobody can do anything about it if it arises. You suddenly feel a new heartbeat in you – what can you do?

In my religionless religion, trust is not required.

Trust is not demanded, not ordered, not commanded.

It happens.

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And we are all helpless about it; nothing can be done about it when it happens. It is so beautiful that who would like to miss it when it happens?

Yes, the politicians have deceived people, the religions have deceived people. And I have lived my whole life condemned by all the religions and all the politicians, for the simple reason that I was exposing them.

This is very strange. The question says that on the American dollar it says, ”In God we trust.... My God! On the dollar you say, ”In God we trust” – then what is this attorney general of Oregon doing?

He should declare America an illegal country! – because this is mixing state and religion.

If Rajneeshpuram is declared an illegal city... and we have not done anything like that: saying, ”In God we trust” on the dollar, you are mixing God with money, mixing state with religion. This attorney general of Oregon can make history. He should declare the whole American nation illegal.

They use the Bible in the courts for taking the oath – that is mixing law with religion, state with religion – or they ask, ”In the name of God....” All this mixing is happening, except in Rajneeshpuram where there is no mixing happening. In fact, we don’t have any God to mix!

These people are strange, and it looks as if they don’t think what they are doing, what they are saying. There seems to be no coordination in their mind; otherwise.... The president of America goes to a certain church; before he takes the oath of the president he goes to be blessed by his church priest. Now what business has a priest to bless the president, and why? The president should start from the very beginning mixing church and state?

Why does the president of America go to the Vatican to meet the pope? As president he should not go. He can go as Ronald Reagan, but then he should not have any facility that is provided for a president. But he goes as the president. And still we are blamed that we are mixing religion and state. We don’t have anything that can be mixed with the state!

I am against politics. How can you mix what is here with politics? I condemn politics. My whole life I have been condemning the politicians. I see them as criminals who are clever enough not to be caught, clever enough to cheat people by giving them false hopes, phony utopias. We don’t have any politics here. And we don’t have any religion that they think is religion.

My religion is a way of life.

It is not a way of prayer, it is a way of living.

Can you mix love with state? How will you mix them? They are unmixable. And this phenomenon that is happening here is of the same quality as love. We love life, and we want to live it in its fullness.

Who cares about your politics and your state?

The mayor of Rajneeshpuram is not a politician. It is just because of your stupid categories, that a city should have a mayor, that we have a mayor. It you allow us to be a city without a mayor, we will be immensely happy; and our mayor will be immensely happy, because whenever I look at him, he feels ashamed, he looks downwards because the poor man has to be in the position of a politician

– just a necessary evil. And it is just because of your constitution and your legal structure.

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We can’t change your constitution and your legal structure, so we decided: okay, let one sannyasin fall into the gutter. Let him become the mayor, what else to do? K.D. is suffering in the gutter, and we will pull him out. We will not leave him there forever, because he has not come here to become a mayor! Nor is anybody concerned in becoming the attorney general of Oregon or the governor of Oregon or the president of America. Nobody is interested at all.

We are interested simply in being left alone.

But these people are strange, they cannot leave us alone. They are afraid, they are worried. They are suspicious: what is happening, what is going on? They are not even courageous enough to come here and see; just on rumors, public opinion... and that public has also not come here. And these people go on deciding things!

The city of Rajneeshpuram the attorney general has declared illegal. This is a unique situation; in fact a unique city in the whole world, because there is no city in the whole world which is illegal, and there never has been before. Either a city is a city, or it is not a city. But an illegal city... that’s something that is absolutely unique!

But leave all this nonsense to these people. They should also create a post in Oregon: the Idiot General of Oregon, and he should be given all these kinds of things to do. Then one can understand that it is just humor; one can laugh at it and enjoy it. But they are very serious people; they are not doing these things out of a sense of humor. And my religion has a basic quality: a sense of humor.

If out of sheer being with me, with my people, a trust is born in you... and it is not trust in God, it is not trust in somebody particular; it is just a quality, unaddressed.

There is no address on the envelope: ”In God we trust.” Who are you to trust in God? On what authority do you trust in God? – you don’t know God. You are dragging God also to the same status as a dollar, making him a thing of the marketplace. And you cannot find anything more dirty than currency, because it moves in so many hands.

I have not touched any note for thirty-five years. It is the dirtiest thing. Not that I am against money but it is the most dirty thing. All kinds of people... somebody may have cancer, somebody may have tuberculosis, somebody may have AIDS... and who knows what he has been doing with his notes?

Anything is possible, because people are so perverted, they can do anything with the bank notes. I said, ”I am not going to touch them” – and I stopped touching them. And on that note you write, ”In God we trust”? Please forgive God and forget all about Him.

The trust that arises in my sannyasins is simply a quality of their heart; they just start trusting. It is not trust in something. They start trusting; even when they are deceived, they trust: knowing that this man has deceived them, they trust. It is not a question of whom, it is just their aroma.

In the university I had to live for a few days with a roommate. I had never lived with anybody but there was no space and the vice-chancellor said to me, ”For a few days you manage and I will find some other place for you. I can understand that you will not like anybody to be in the room, and it is good for the other fellow also that he is not in your room, because you may drive him crazy. I will arrange it.”

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But before he arranged it, it took four, five months. And that man was a very good boy; he just had one problem – just one, so you cannot say that it was a big trouble – he was a kleptomaniac. Just for sheer joy he would steal my things. I had to search for my things in his suitcases, and I would find them, but I never said anything to him.

He was puzzled. He would use my clothes. When I was not in the room he would just take anything.

He would take my shawl and go for a walk, so when I came back the shawl would be gone. I would say, ”It will come back, soon it will return.” To save money from being taken by him I used to deposit it with him and say, ”You keep this money, because if I keep it you will take it anyway. And then it will be difficult to know how much you have taken and how to ask you for it. It looks awkward. You just take it. It is this much: you take it!”

He said, ”You are clever. This way I have to return the whole money whenever you need it.” But after four, five months... because whenever and wherever he was, with whomsoever he lived –

his family or friends, or in the hostels – everybody was condemning him. But I never said anything to him – instead of looking into my suitcases I just looked into his. It was simple! It was not very different; my suitcases were in this corner, his suitcases were in that corner.

He said, ”You are strange. I have been stealing your things and you never say anything.” I said, ”It is a very small problem. It can’t create distrust in me for a human being. And what trouble is there? Rather than going to my suitcase, I simply go to your suitcase, and in your suitcase I find whatsoever I need.”

He said, ”That’s why I was wondering... that I go on stealing from you, you never say anything, and those things disappear from my suitcases again! So I was thinking that perhaps you also are a kleptomaniac.”

I said, ”That is perfectly okay. If you stop taking from my suitcases, I will stop taking from your suitcases. And remember, in this whole game you have been losing.” He said, ”What do you mean?”

I said, ”I take a few things that are not mine” – because he was stealing from everywhere, other rooms, professors’ houses; anywhere he would find any window open, he would jump in. And there was no intention of stealing, just the joy of it, just the challenge; an opportunity and challenge that nobody could catch hold of him.

I said, ”I will never prevent you. You can go on moving my things, you can move my whole suitcase under your bed; it doesn’t matter. In fact I am perfectly happy with you. I am worried now that soon the vice-chancellor is going to give me a single room. Where will I find a person like you? – because you provide so many things which I need. And I trust you perfectly!” From Ignorance to Innocence

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CHAPTER 24

Imitation is your cremation

23 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

YOU HAVE BEEN SAYING THAT DISOBEDIENCE IS A RELIGIOUS QUALITY IT SUDDENLY

MEANS I HAVE TO DISOBEY YOU, THE COMMUNE AND THE DISCIPLINE OF SANNYAS. I CANNOT EVEN PARTICIPATE IN OUR PRAYER, THE GACHCHHAMIS.

THE questioner is certainly an Oregonian, a born Oregonian, not just twenty days resident in Oregon. As far as I am concerned it is enough to breathe Oregon’s air for twenty minutes to become an Oregonian!

I have said that disobedience is a religious quality, but to be disobedient you need to be very intelligent. To obey... an idiot can do it. All that he has to say is ”Yes sir.” To disobey is not just saying no; that too can be done by an idiot very easily.

Disobedience needs tremendous intelligence because you are deciding your life, your future, your destiny.

I have said disobey anything that is imposed on you, against you, against your will, against your intellect, against your reason, against your being.

Then risk everything and disobey it – because in fact by disobeying it, you are obeying your inner self. By disobeying it, you are obeying existence.

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In other words, by disobeying it you are disobeying the personality and obeying the individuality.

I have not said that you have to disobey everything – you will go nuts, unless you are already nuts. I have emphasized disobedience because all the religions have been emphasizing obedience.

Obedience to whom?

Obedience to their God, which is their creation; obedience to the commandments, which are their creation; obedience to society, convention, tradition – which are all their vested interests – obedience to the parents, to the teachers, to the priests.

All the religions have been teaching you obedience; hence, just to emphasize it clearly before you, I had to say disobey, rebel.

That does not mean that I am against obedience. But the obedience I am for is a very different phenomenon.

It does not come as an imposition on you, it comes as a flowering of your being.

It is your intelligence, your maturity, your centeredness, your aliveness, your response.

You are the source of it; not Moses, not Mohammed, not Jesus, not me, but you, just you.

But do you know who you are? You know you are a Jew, and you are not. You know you are a Christian, and you are not. You know you are a Hindu, and you are not. These are all impositions.

People have been painting on you as if you are a canvas. They are making your face according to their idea. They want to become in some way ideals for you, and they want to reduce you to imitators.

There is a great Christian classic, Imitation of Christ, which is respected by the Christians almost next to the Bible. But it is an ugly book. The very title of the book shows what it is: Imitation of Christ. You may imitate Christ for millions of lives; still you will not be a Christ, you will be only an imitation. And the imitation is not your original face.

The more you succeed in imitating, the more you are failing as far as your being is concerned. The deeper you go into imitation, the farther away you are going from yourself; and the return journey is not going to be easy.

It is going to be immensely difficult, because when you were continuously imitating a certain pattern, you were becoming identified with it. The return journey means you will have to start killing all that identification. It will look like committing suicide, as if you are cutting off your own limbs. It is not going to be just like dropping your clothes, not that easy. It is going to be like peeling your skin.

It is so difficult that even a very intelligent man like Bertrand Russell confessed, ”My reason says that Gautam Buddha is certainly the greatest figure in the whole of human history, but although I am not part of any Christian congregation, although I have completely disassociated myself from Christian mythology, religion, theology, somewhere I cannot put Buddha above Christ. With my reason I understand, but as far as my feelings are concerned Jesus remains higher – and I know he is not.”

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Now, a man like Bertrand Russell cannot get rid of a certain conditioning. He has been told from his very childhood that there has never been anybody like Jesus. Although he has renounced Christianity consciously, publicly... he wrote a very famous book, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, and gave all his reasons, very valid reasons. Anybody who has a little bit of intelligence can understand that if what Bertrand Russell is saying is the case, then you cannot be a Christian either. And that is the case; he has exposed Christianity completely.

But even after that... and this confession was long after he had written that book. He had written the book some twenty years before, and this confession came when he was nearabout eighty-five, absolutely mature. He remained intelligent to the very last moment of his life. He lived almost a century; he never became senile. Even at the last moment of his life he was as intelligent and alive as ever.

He confessed: ”As far as my feelings and emotions are concerned, Jesus somehow hangs above everybody else. And I know perfectly well there is no comparison of Gautam Buddha with Jesus; Gautam Buddha is far superior. But that is only intellectual; emotionally Christ still has the grip.” Although he has said that he is not a Christian, he is still a Christian.

That’s why I say it is very difficult to come back. Going is difficult, but coming back is far more difficult. Imitation is going to be a difficult thing: you are trying to be something which you are not meant to be, which is not your destiny. You are going against the very nature of your being, you are trying to swim against the current. Yes, it is difficult to imitate – but not so difficult as when you start coming back to your natural self.

You have lost it somewhere far back. You can’t remember even where you lost it. You can’t remember where you deviated from yourself. You deviated in such moments when you were not even aware.

If you remember your past, you will at the most go back to the age of four, on average. Not all people can go back to the age of four. A few people, very rare people can go to the age of three. And rarely, once in a while, you can find a person who can go back to the age of two. It happens only once in a century that a person can go back to the age of one. And it happens only once in many centuries that a person can go into the memories of his mother’s womb.

But your deviation starts even when you are in your mother’s womb, because whatsoever your mother is doing is affecting you. When you are in your mother’s womb, your mother’s mind is your mind, her feelings are your feelings, her emotions are your emotions. If she is angry, something in you gets angry. If she is happy something in you rejoices.

In the East psychology is one of the most ancient sciences; in the West it is just a hundred years old – not even a hundred years old. The oldest name in western psychology, the ancientmost, is Sigmund Freud, who was alive just a few years ago. But in the East, in India, psychology goes as far back as Patanjali – five thousand years. And Patanjali cannot be said to be the source because he quotes more ancient sources. In China it goes as far back as Lao Tzu. But Lao Tzu quotes at least five-thousand-year-old sources: five thousand years before Lao Tzu, who is twenty-five centuries before us.

Eastern psychology says that when the mother is pregnant, those nine months are the most important period in the life of the child who is not born yet. In these nine months as much care From Ignorance to Innocence

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as possible should be taken. The mother should not become angry, should not become sexual, should not become worried, should not become irritated, annoyed. She should be kept in such a way that the child is not affected at all by her emotions. She should be almost in a meditative state for all those nine months.

That’s the recommendation of eastern psychology, that the mother for nine months should be continuously in a meditative state; that’s the only way to save the child from becoming an imitator.

Otherwise neither the mother knows the child, nor the child knows himself, and he becomes an imitator. This is the situation in the womb – what to say about when the child comes out of the womb. Then, at every step everybody is determined to give a certain shape, a certain color, a certain character, a certain career to you – and with all good intentions. The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

Nobody is your enemy, but they all prove to be your enemies.

There is one statement of Gautam Buddha which Buddhists try to avoid because they don’t have the understanding to explain it. And it is so clear, they cannot even explain it away. The statement that Buddha makes is, ”unless you hate your father, your mother, your brother, you cannot follow me.” Now, what kind of statement is this? – ”Unless you hate your father, your mother, your family, you cannot follow me.”

The Buddhists don’t quote it. In no Buddhist monastery does anybody even give a sermon on it.

Monks just pass it by quickly. How to explain it? A man like Buddha who teaches love, non-violence, is saying to hate your mother and father.

Then Jesus certainly seems to be far superior: ”Love your enemy; not only the enemy, love your neighbor” – which is certainly far more difficult. The enemy is far away and once in a while maybe there is some trouble, but the neighbor is a twenty-four hour trouble, and just a pain in the neck continually, twenty-four hours a day. And Jesus says, ”Love your neighbor just like yourself.” Naturally if you compare these statements Jesus will look far more religious than Buddha. But before I say anything else, let me quote Bodhidharma, who defeated his own Master, Buddha, in every possible way. And that is the only joy of a real Master, that he should be defeated by his disciple. Of course, they were not contemporaries; there was at least eleven hundred years’ difference between Buddha and Bodhidharma.

Bodhidharma says: ”First go and kill your father and mother, then come to me. First, be finished with your father and your mother and then come to me. Otherwise go somewhere else – I am not for you.” How you are going to explain it? And I say to you that what Jesus says is just hocus-pocus.

What Bodhidharma is saying is pure psychology. He is not saying that you should kill your father and mother, but in a certain way you have to kill the father that has entered you, and the mother that has entered you. That is your family inside, which is surrounding your being, which won’t allow any ray of light to reach your innermost corner. The crowd has gathered there, and because of that crowd the inner center is in darkness.

Bodhidharma brings Buddha’s statement to its logical conclusion. Why just hate? – be completely finished! Because hating is again a relationship, just like love. If you love somebody, you remember From Ignorance to Innocence

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him; you cannot forget him – you are not supposed to forget the person you love. Sometimes you may forget the person you love, but you cannot forget the person you hate. Although all the so-called moral teachers have been telling you to forgive and forget, you can neither forgive nor can you forget.

Perhaps you can forgive, with effort, but how can you forget? Then you will remember two things: first, that you hated him and second, that you have forgiven him – now you will remember even more.

So what have you done?

You cannot forget your enemy. It is a relationship, a very close, very intimate relationship. And that’s why it is very easy for lovers to become haters, friends to become enemies, enemies to become friends. It is very easy because both are relationships: just a little turn, a little change in the situations....

For example, in the second world war America and Russia became friends, great friends, fighting together hand in hand. They were enemies before, they are enemies afterwards. Strange! But the situation took such a turn... Adolf Hitler did a miracle, he was a man worth counting. All the miracles of Jesus are nothing compared to what Adolf Hitler did: he turned Americans and Russians into friends. Both the flags flying together by courtesy of Adolf Hitler! And the moment Adolf Hitler was finished, the friendship evaporated immediately, instantly. They were enemies again.

You can see the Berlin wall.... Half of Berlin remained with the Russians – they could not even wait for Berlin to become whole again. Adolf Hitler gone, the friendship finished. When the magician is gone, the magic is finished; the enemies are again enemies. But enemies can become friends, and without becoming friends you cannot become enemies. First you have to be friends, that is the first step; then only can you become enemies – that is something higher, more evolved. Perhaps you have brought your friendship to its logical conclusion.

So Buddha, by saying hate your father and mother, also does not mean your actual father and mother, but the father and mother that have penetrated you, that have become like a thick layer of personality in you. But he was a very sophisticated man, the son of a king, very educated.

Bodhidharma is very raw; he simply calls a spade a spade. Why bother about sophistication, hate, and this and that – simply kill. And I say to you, without killing you cannot get out of the prison.

So when I say disobey, I mean disobey everything that is not coming from your own self.

Obey that which is your nature.

Now, this man is saying that this means he cannot obey me. That’s why I called him a born Oregonian, because if listening to me say disobey, he disobeys, that is obedience. Can’t you see it? Before listening to me you were obeying; now because I have said disobey, you have to disobey.

This is disobedience? Then what is obedience? This will be obedience!

You have not understood me at all. You have just heard that I am saying disobey, so now you have to disobey me, disobey the commune, disobey the discipline of sannyas. This man may be representing parts in all of you, because I have been receiving letters continually: ”Osho, you are teaching disobedience, and in the commune we have to follow a certain discipline.” To them it seems contradictory.

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Disobey me or the commune, or sannyas if it is not from you. Who has forced you to be part of the commune? It is your choice. You were not born in the commune. It is your choice, and a difficult choice, because by being part of my commune you are going against everybody else around you.

You are taking a risk.

It is dangerous to be part of my commune. It is dangerous to be in association with me. You have chosen it. I don’t convert anybody; I try my best to dissuade you from becoming a sannyasin – what more can I do? I give you no consolation.

One question is there: ”Osho, You have taken God away, now there is only existence. Existence means nature; it is harsh, it is indifferent, it doesn’t care. If there is no God then I feel very much afraid.”

Naturally, you will feel very much afraid because your God was nothing but a way to hide your fear.

It was fear-oriented. It was just to keep your fear suppressed. Take God away and fear springs up. It is there; even when you are putting the rock of God on the spring, it is still there. You know perfectly well that it is there, alive, ready to burst forth any moment – just waiting for its chance, an opportunity.

Your whole life you have believed in God, and I have just said that there is no God – and that’s enough! Perhaps for fifty years you have believed in God, found consolation in it, then just an ordinary man like me says there is no God, and fifty years conditioning disappears and fear arises!

Whom are you trying to deceive?

If I can do this, anybody can do this. lust anybody meeting you on the road can whisper in your ear,

”There is no God” – finished! Your God is dead! Your fear is more alive than ever. Hence all the religions teach, their scriptures teach, ”Don’t listen to anybody who does not belong to your faith.” In India, laina scriptures say that if you are being followed by a mad elephant and you come close to a Hindu temple – although you could be saved if you take refuge in the temple and close the doors

– don’t go inside the temple. It is better to die on the road under the mad elephant’s feet, because who knows? – in the Hindu temple you may hear something which will spoil your faith. And the same, exactly the same, is repeated in the Hindu scriptures: ”Don’t go in a Jaina temple, because sometimes a single sentence coming from an antagonistic religion may spoil your whole life’s effort.” But this is strange.

Just a few days ago Hasya brought an old man here because he wanted at least once to sit close to me. He has been coming here for almost one year, has been doing all kinds of therapy groups, meditations, and is immensely interested in becoming a sannyasin – but unfortunately he is a billionaire. The family, the company of which he is the chairman... he is afraid of all those people –

the board members, the company, the family.

Millions of dollars every year they give in donations, but of course those donations go to the faith in which he was born. This time he was wavering between to be or not to be. Finally he decided that it is better, before he takes sannyas, to go and tell the family and the whole board of directors. Rather than afterwards, it is better to say it before.

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So he went. Now, he must be at least sixty, not less than that – not somebody immature who can be easily converted, programmed, deprogrammed. But you will be surprised: his family immediately went to a deprogrammer. The first thing, hearing his ideas they were shocked, they were angry; they could not believe that a man of sixty years old who earns one thousand million dollars per year can be so easily converted by a cult. He has to be deprogrammed.

These people are not special; it’s just the common mind. And the deprogrammer suggested, of course, the right thing to do. He said, ”He is not a child so you have to be very careful. You are not to be angry, you are not to show that you are against his new ideology, because your anger and your clear disappointment in him will take him farther away from you. You have to be very supportive, very loving.”

The deprogrammer is really cunning but he understands one thing, that a sixty-year-old man cannot be treated like a child, that you deprogram him in two days. And we have not programmed him at all.

We have not tried to make him become a sannyasin, he was asking to become a sannyasin. Now the family is pretending to be loving and very supportive. And the old man finds it very strange. The message has come, ”Very strange things are happening. My family has never been so loving.” But deep down they are all boiling inside. I don’t think that by their lovingness and supportiveness, which is all phony and American, the man can be prevented from coming here. In fact he will think

– which the deprogrammer has not thought about – that my ideology is so beautiful that just hearing about it the family has become so loving and so supportive. It would have been perfectly right to go as a sannyasin. And next time he is going to become a sannyasin.

But they will make every effort: this is just trying the first deprogrammer. If it doesn’t work they may try saying, ”This man is mad, he cannot be in a responsible post like the chairman of a company.

He should be put into a mental asylum or into some nursing home where he needs to be treated psychiatrically.” They will not leave him so easily. That’s why I said unfortunately he is a billionaire.

If he were a poor man, the family would have been happy: ”Get lost Who cares! It is good that we get rid of you. Why have you come back? You should have become a sannyasin there.” I have not given you any discipline. The questioner says, ”... the discipline of sannyas”. Can’t you understand a little bit of humor? What discipline of sannyas have I given to you? That you have to wear red clothes – does that mean anything? It is simply to annoy the old traditional sannyasins, just to give them a good headache. And that’s what we were doing in India, because I had thousands of sannyasins and it was becoming difficult for people to decide who was my sannyasin, and who was the old traditional sannyasin.

They would even touch the feet of my sannyasins. But when they looked at my picture on the mala, they were shocked! That mala and picture are just to shock people. What discipline have I given to you? You don’t know discipline. You should go and look in a Trappist monastery and then you will understand what discipline is.

I am reminded of a story. In a Trappist monastery you enter for ever; you cannot get out unless you are thrown out. Unless you become a nuisance and the monastery decides to throw you out, you cannot get out on your own. That freedom is not allowed; about that, you have to decide before you enter. You can take your time, but once you enter the monastery it is for your whole life, it is lifelong.

Only your dead body will come out of the monastery.

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This man entered the monastery, perhaps the most orthodox in the whole world. The monks remain absolutely silent. Only one time can they speak, after three years. After each three years they have the right to speak once, if they have any complaint or any difficulty or any problem.

This man was suffering continually for three years because he had no mattress, so he was just sleeping on the naked floor, and it was really cold. Even his bones started hurting. But three years you had to wait before you could say, ”I need a mattress.” After three years all the monks of the monastery gathered and the chief abbot asked them, ”If anybody has anything to say, he can say it. For three years again there will be no meeting; nothing is to be said.”

This man waited, then he said, ”I need a mattress.” Now, do you think for three years he was thinking of Jesus Christ? – only the mattress... and waiting and waiting, looking at the calendar for three years.

The chief abbot said, ”Okay. For three years, now, no more complaints. In three years time you can speak again. A mattress will be provided.”

The mattress was provided but it was too big, and his cell was too small, so that while they were bringing in the mattress they broke the glass of the door. The mattress was in but the glass was broken so the wind started coming in, the rain started coming inn, and now three years.... The poor man... at least before he could stretch his body; now he was sitting in a corner, the rain was coming in, the snow was coming in.

And what do you think? – that for these three years he was praying? Yes, he was praying that these three years should pass, ”And if I am still alive....” It looked as if it would be difficult to be able to survive three years, but he survived. Man has an immense capacity to adjust to any kind of circumstances. Even in a Trappist monastery people survive. He survived.

And after three years, again the gathering. He came running to the gathering, and even before the chief abbot had asked, he raised his hand. The chief abbot was very angry. He said, ”You are the same man again! Any complaint?” He said, ”For three years I have been suffering rain, wind, snow.

My glass was broken when the mattress was brought in. The mattress was big, and the door was small.”

The chief said, ”Okay. Now for three years be silent. Your door will be mended.” The door was mended. The three years he had survived, but the mattress had not survived. It was stinking, and because the door had been open the stink was not so much. Now the door was closed and no air was coming in.... And the mattress had become utterly rotten because for three years every kind of hazard that had been possible.... Now the man could not breathe! It became so... and for three years!

He said, ”Now these are my last days. I will not be able to raise my hand again.” But he survived.

Again he survived, because the adjustment capacity of man is really tremendous. If you are living in a stinking room, sitting on a rotten mattress, soon you will not smell it because your sensitivity to From Ignorance to Innocence

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smell will be dulled, will be killed by the stink, the continuous stink. Your nose is not so strong, it is not made of steel, and very small parts in your nose have the capacity to smell. If there was this continuous warfare against your capacity to smell your nose would become dead.

He survived, but after three years had passed he ran as fast as he could. And before he could raise his hand, the abbot said, ”Stop! Since you have come I have never heard anything but complaints.

You get out! I don’t want to listen any more.”

He said, ”But I have not said anything yet. Just please listen to me.” The abbot said, ”This type of people are not acceptable in a Trappist monastery. I have not heard anything from you in nine years except complaints, complaints, complaints.” They threw the poor man out.

And you say that you cannot follow the sannyas discipline? I have not given you any discipline. Yes, three things I have done....

I have given you a new name so that you can start disidentifying yourself from your old personality, and you can begin anew, as if a new child is born.

I have given you the red clothes just to destroy the monopoly of traditional sannyasins on red clothes

– they are nobody’s monopoly. And it was just a mockery of the sannyas that has existed in the East for thousands of years. I was saying that just by changing your clothes to red you don’t become a sage.

I have given you a mala, because all the ancient sannyasins of all religions have used a rosary for prayer. I have not given it to you for any prayer.

It was an old method of counting. For example in Hinduism: how many times you take God’s name, that’s your account in the other world. But to remember ”Ram, Ram, Ram....” You will forget. But to continue to remember, ”One Ram, two Ram, three Ram” will be a disturbance. And ”one, two, three, four, five” will grow to ”one thousand and four... one million, two million, three million....” You are going to get lost somewhere and forget the counting. Then it will be a real loss because God will ask, ”How many times...?”

So the rosary was a method: you count, you just go on, you say ”Ram” and you slip one bead down.

You needn’t say ”One.” You say ”Ram,” and you slip the second bead down. You don’t say ”Ram two, Ram three,” you just go on slipping the beads down. And it was good also because you could say it inside with nobody knowing about it. In India they have a small bag hanging around the hand, and the rosary is inside; so even walking on the road they can go on counting.

You will see shopkeepers selling things, and their hand is in their rosary bag: they are counting.

With the customer they are talking but deep down they are saying, ”Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram,” and with the rosary they are counting. In between they will say to the wife: ”The beggar!” and their rosary continues.

It was just to mock all these idiots that I put the rosary around you. It is not a prayer method for you, it is just a mockery of the whole tradition.

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And then I have put an ordinary man’s picture – anybody’s picture will do. That annoys them even more.

But this world is strange. Sometimes things can happen which you had never expected or even dreamed of Just the other day Sheela brought a letter from Punjab – because in Punjab there is now great trouble. Hindus and Sikhas are continually fighting and killing each other. Thousands of people have been killed within these two months.

In one small village there were two Sikhas, both our sannyasins, but the whole village was Hindu.

These two Sikhas were teachers in the school. The principal suggested to them, ”Don’t come out of your home; and be careful, very careful because the whole village is mad. The whole of Punjab is in madness, and you are only two – the crowd can kill you.” And that day, the whole day the crowd was moving around the city to find some Sikh to kill. They knew those two Sikhas were there, but where had they disappeared to? By the night as the sun set and darkness came over, those two Sikhas thought the crowds must have disappeared. The whole day they had been hiding in the house, so they thought to just come out for a little bit and breathe fresh air.

When they came out, immediately – as if the crowd had been waiting, hiding just nearby, knowing that they were hiding in the house – from both sides the crowd rushed towards them. One of them escaped into a nearby forest; in the darkness it was difficult to find him. But the other one was caught. He has written the letter to thank me, because when the crowd took hold of him, somebody in the crowd said, ”This is not a Sikh, this is a Rajneeshee!” So they said, ”It is useless to kill this man – he is no longer a Sikh.”

So he writes to me, ”Osho, you saved me; otherwise they would have cut me into pieces.” I have never thought that somebody would be saved by me, but strange things in this world always happen!

This is simply a strange thing. You can be killed in my name, but you cannot be saved. It was a strange situation: they were going to kill a Sikh, but seeing orange clothes and the mala and my photo, they said, ”This man is already no longer a Sikh. To kill him is pointless.” And they left.

But basically I had put that picture there so that it hangs around your neck and irritates everybody, and you cannot go anywhere without being noticed.

One of my sannyasins in Bombay... he took sannyas, and after two, three days he came back and said, ”I am in a real trouble. Will you give sannyas to my wife too? I have brought her.” I said, ”Why?”

He said, ”The problem is, wherever I go with her people say, ’What kind of sannyasin is this?

Sannyasins are not supposed to move around with women.’ And I cannot say that she is my wife, because if I say that, they will kill me. A sannyasin having a wife? So it is very awkward; what to do?

It is better you give sannyas to her.”

I said, ”I will give sannyas to her but this won’t solve the problem. Try it.” I gave sannyas to his wife.

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comes to work in the office and goes back. It was a holiday so he had come with his wife and child.

A crowd gathered, and they said, ”Whose child is this?” – because in Bombay children are being stolen.

In all the big cities of India children are being stolen. Then they are crippled, blinded, and they are made beggars. And there are gangs: a certain man who feeds them and takes all their earnings in the evening. He feeds them, he gives them clothes, he gives them shelter. But unless they are blinded, crippled, their legs cut off or their hands cut off, who is going to give them money? The more crippled and the more miserable they look, the better are their chances for begging, and the more money they bring in.

So in every big place children are being stolen. And they end up in some gang where there are hundreds of children. The police know; the police take their own part of the money. The police do not prevent the children from begging on the streets; rather, they protect them. In fact they help the owner of these children so that these children cannot escape anywhere.

In fact these children cannot escape because they have been blinded, crippled – where can they escape to? Who will look after them? They don’t know where their father is, their mother is, from where they have been brought – because if they were caught in Calcutta, they would be used in Bombay. If they were caught in Bombay, they would be used in Madras. So they don’t know where they come from or where they are right now.

They cannot escape, but the police still keep an eye out so that nobody tries to escape. Everybody has his share, except that child. And if he comes one day without any money, then he gets beaten.

So he has to come with it. He cannot try to hide some money from the owner, because he knows how much a child earns.

The owner goes on walking around and looking to see how much this child will have earned by the end of the evening. So tentatively he knows that this boy is bound to come with ten rupees, fifteen rupees. And if he comes with two rupees then he gets beaten. And where can he hide the money?

That money is found immediately.

So a crowd gathered and they asked, ”You are both sannyasins; this woman is a sannyasin, you are a sannyasin. In the first place, why are a woman and a man sannyasin together? That is not allowed. In the second place, this child – from where did you get this child?” They said, ”This is our child.” They had to say it. And people started getting ready to beat them:

”This is your child? You are a sannyasin and you have a child” Somehow the sannyasins tried to explain to them, showed my mala, and said, ”We are not old, traditional sannyasins.”

Somebody in the crowd knew about me. He said, ”Leave them. They are not your sannyasins. They belong to a different kind: neo-sannyas.”

From the station they came directly to me. They said, ”Give sannyas to our child also, because without sannyas we will be caught again. We are poor people and anybody can start beating us and From Ignorance to Innocence

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can create trouble for us.” I had to give sannyas to the child too! It was not a discipline; it was simply a revolt. I wanted to show to the sannyasins of India, who are in millions, that just by changing the clothes or having a rosary it does not mean that you have become a saint. I can create millions of saints like them without any trouble. And I have created them.

Only one thing that you can call discipline is meditation. And it is not an order from me that you have to meditate. I explain to you what meditation is. If it appeals to your reason, if something clicks in you, if a desire arises in you to explore this dimension of meditation, then it is not that you are following my idea, you are following your own intelligence. And if it does not appeal to you, of course you should not do it.

Asking me, ”I cannot even participate in the gachchhamis,” the person has used the words ”our prayer. It is not prayer. A prayer is always to beg for something. That’s actually the meaning of the word prayer, praying for something: ”Give us, Lord, our daily bread,” or whatsoever it is, but ”Give us something. You are the giver, and we are the beggar. You are compassionate, and we are in need of your compassion; save us. This life is miserable, this existence is suffering, take us out of this wheel of life and death.”

Different religions, different prayers....

But everybody is asking for something.

You cannot call our gachchhamis prayer. It is not; because what do you say in the gachchhamis? ”I go to the feet of the awakened one; I go to the feet of the commune of the awakened one; I go to the feet of the ultimate truth of the awakened one.”

You are declaring something, you are not praying. It is a declaration, and a determination – ”I go the feet of the awakened one” – a determination to drop the ego, a declaration, ”From now on, to be awakened is going to be my whole effort, my whole involvement, my whole commitment; I am not going to live an unconscious life any more.” It is not a prayer.

In my vision there is no place for prayer because there is no place for God.

To whom can you pray? – there is no one.

The sky is absolutely empty.

You are simply wasting your time and throwing nonsense words into the atmosphere, crowding the atmosphere with meaningless words.

You must remember: these words never die. Once uttered, a word goes on resounding just like a pebble thrown in a lake: waves start moving towards the farther away shore. But this existence has no shores, no banks, no boundaries. Once you say something it is going to remain forever. It will go on resounding farther and farther away. It will touch other planets, it will touch other stars; it will go on moving and moving.

Now we know – before the invention of radio we had no idea – that something said in Washington is passing just by your side. Now you know because we have discovered how to catch hold of it.

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Whatsoever they are creating is already passing all the stations of the world. Of course they are creating very strong vibrations. They go on moving around you; you just have to attune your radio to a certain wavelength, then on that wavelength whatsoever is uttered will be caught.

It is true about us too. Whatsoever we are saying is not very strong, but it never dies, the sound continues. One day we will find a way to catch hold of sounds which were uttered by different people in the past – because each person has a different vibe, a different frequency. If we can get hold of the frequency of Krishna, then what he really said in the Gita five thousand years ago, and whether it was said at all or not, will be caught again. And I am certain that this big book, the Gita, could not possibly have been written in the situation in which it was said to have been.

Two armies facing each other – they are just waiting for the signal and they will start slaughtering each other. And Arjuna says to his charioteer, Krishna, ”Take me in front.” He is the chief warrior of one side. Seeing all the people there, his friends, his relatives.... The other party was nobody else but his cousin-brothers, and they had all grown up in the same house, in the same palace, they were taught by the same man. Dronacharya, the man who had taught both parties the art of archery, was there on the other side: his own Master.

On this side everybody is related to those on that side. On that side everybody is related to those on this side: it was a family quarrel. Arjuna freaked out. He simply said to Krishna, ”I will not fight this war. This is not war, this is simply suicide. These are all our people. Whosoever dies will bring tears to my eyes. My father’s father, my grandfather, is standing there. My Master who has taught me, who has brought me up to be the greatest archer in the world, he is on the other side. No, I cannot fight. I would rather renounce the world and become a sannyasin and go to the Himalayas.” Now, this is the situation. This big book is a dialogue in which Arjuna goes on asking questions and Krishna goes on answering them. For me to comment on it took almost – Taru, how many years?perhaps three years: twelve volumes, one thousand pages each. In this situation it doesn’t seem to be likely that this big sermon.... In eighteen days the whole war was finished; in eighteen days the whole Gita cannot be finished! So perhaps he had spoken a few words and later on it is just elaboration, and more and more was added to it to clarify and simplify and to make it understandable.

But one day it is possible that we may catch hold of Krishna – or Jesus giving his sermon on the mountain – because no sound ever dies; once it is uttered it remains forever. Yes, it will become weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker, and you will need more and more forceful, forcible, stronger receptors, receivers to catch hold of it. And of course it will be a tower of Babel, because millions of people have been speaking for millions of years and all their words will be mixed.

But there is a possibility.... It is just as your fingerprints are yours alone: they have never existed before and there never will be a possibility for them to exist in the future. You fingerprints are simply your fingerprints. Your sound prints are also simply your sound prints; sooner or later we will be able to sort them out. And once we get your sound print, your frequency, then whatsoever you have said in your whole life can be reproduced.

You will be surprised to know that Mahavira is the only man in the whole of history who has said,

”Don’t say anything which you would not like to be associated with you forever, because whatsoever you say is going to be eternal.” He is the only man, but what he is saying certainly has a tremendous From Ignorance to Innocence

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insight. His reason for not saying bad words, ugly words, is very scientific, not religious. He is saying it because those words will remain always; they will be your footprints in time. Don’t leave anything ugly behind you.

When you declare, ”Buddham sharanam gachchhami – I go to the feet of the awakened one,” you are not saying a prayer. You are simply declaring to existence, to yourself, your intention: ”I want to drop my ego.”

Hence, gachchhami – ”gachchhami” simply means ”going”. The English word ”go” comes from the Sanskrit word gachchh. You will be surprised that the Sanskrit word for cow is gau, because the cow was very much loved by the Hindus, worshipped as a mother, thought to be holy. The movement of the cow – cow is pronounced gau – his movement is called gachchh. And from gachchh comes the English word, ”Going to the feet” needs one absolutely necessary condition: that you drop the ego.

With the ego you cannot go to the feet of the Buddha, the awakened one. And by ”The awakened one”, we are not saying any particular person. We are simply saying that because the quality of awareness is the same, all the awakened ones become the same when they are awakened: there is no difference at all. Awakening is simply awakening. So we go to the feet of whosoever is awakened, wherever he is awakened – in the past, in the present or in the future.

It is a decision to drop the ego. It is a declaration that: ”Existence, remain my witness, I am going to the feet of the awakened one. Let me be reminded if I forget.” That’s why it has to be separated. The more you repeat it, the better, because the more it becomes a determination, the more it becomes a clear perception of what it means.

But to go to the feet of the awakened one is not very difficult. It is very easy. The very presence of the awakened one will create in you the desire to go to his feet. It is not something literal, that you have to go to his feet. It simply means that you start feeling a kind of surrender. The surrender is not asked; if it is asked, disobey. If the surrender happens to you, obey; it is your own feeling, your own authentic experience. But it is easy, hence the second gachchhami: ”Sangham sharanam gachchhami.”

It is easy to go to the feet of the awakened one, it is a little difficult to go to the feet of the commune of the awakened one, because in the commune all will not be awakened. Many will be fast asleep and snoring; many will be even deeper in sleep than you. Now, the ego will feel it more difficult to go to the feet of these people. That means you will have to drop the ego now even more determinedly.

Perhaps in the first gachchhami you had only dropped a few leaves of your ego. In the second you will have to drop the whole tree.

The third is even more difficult, but for a different reason. ”Dhammam sharanam gachchhami – I go to the feet of the ultimate truth of the awakened one.” What it is that the awakened people have experienced, they have not said; it is inexpressible. They have all remained silent about it.

Where are you going to find the feet of the ultimate truth? And in your state of unawareness, in your state of unconsciousness, in what direction are you going to search? And not knowing where to surrender, to whom to surrender, what to surrender, it becomes even more difficult for the ego. You will even have to bring the roots of the tree out from the ground; they are hiding underground. Even if the tree has fallen, the tree can again grow from the roots. These are simple declarations – and they have to be your declarations, they can’t be my declarations.

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But listening to me say that disobedience is a quality of religion, immediately the desire to disobey arises in you. And you have listened to many things from me, but never before has any desire like this arisen. Certainly deep down you want to disobey.

Perhaps you have forced yourself into obedience. Then you have done wrong; then this is not the place for you. Then you have simply trapped yourself in something which has not come out of your decision. Perhaps you have imitated some other people – perhaps your friend was becoming a sannyasin, and you became a sannyasin. Perhaps you were impressed by my words, impressed by my reasoning. But your sannyas has not arisen from your deepest core; otherwise after listening to me say that disobedience is a religious quality, you would have waited a little and thought about it.

You should have asked, ”Then what is obedience? Is not obedience also a religious quality?” That would have been the right question. I am continually giving you the right answer to the wrong question, but nothing else can be done. I can understand you can’t ask the right question and I can’t give you a wrong answer; so what to do? This way it goes on. You go on asking the wrong question.

But I don’t care much about your question, I go on answering what I want to answer. Your question is just an excuse.

Obedience is a greater religious quality than disobedience.

Disobedience is only for the beginners who are just starting to learn how to walk – wobbling.

Disobedience is a religious quality for those who are much too attached to their personality, their conditioning, their programming. Disobedience is a technique for you to deprogram yourself, so that you become clean of all Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism. You simply come clean out of all that. You come out just simple, yourself, innocent. Then obedience is the quality of religion.

Then comes the time to obey; but first learn to disobey. Disobey is a negative word. It is simply to cut all the crap from you, to burn all the rubbish in you. It is a negative process. But it is only the beginning. When this negative process is complete and you have burned all the crap, and you are unburdened and free and ready to fly, then obedience is the quality of religion. But that is a higher quality, a far more conscious quality.

But you don’t obey anybody.

You now simply obey your being.

Wherever it leads you, go fearlessly, in freedom.

To be with me you have to disobey all that has been taught to you. I have not taught you anything. I have not said to you, ”Do this, don’t do that.” I am not bothered about details, I am simply concerned with the fundamentals; to make clear to you that these are the fundamentals. Now it is up to you what you want to do with these fundamentals. You can turn your back and go anywhere you like, and it is perfectly okay with me. But when you understand the fundamentals you cannot turn your back on them. It is not possible; in the very nature of things it is impossible.

Once you see a certain truth you cannot do anything other than obey it.

But it has to be your seeing, your perception, your realization.

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Begin with disobedience. It is always necessary to begin with the negative, with the no. If you want to reach to the yes, you will have to say a thousand noes to find one yes in life. Because your whole life has been ruined by so many people you will have to say no to all those people.

And after a thousand noes, perhaps you may find yourself in a state where you can say yes.

But that yes will come from the deepest core of your being, and it will bring out a fragrance in you.

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CHAPTER 25

Jesus – the only savior who nearly saved himself

24 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

YESTERDAY AFTER DRIVE-BY WE WERE MET BY FIVE BIBLE-PACKING CHRISTIANS WHO

HAD COME TO SAVE US. WHAT DO YOU SAY? CAN WE BE SAVED?

THESE idiots are all over the world, perhaps more so in Oregon. The very idea of saving somebody is violent. It is interfering, trespassing on somebody’s life. Nobody has the right to save anybody.

He can save himself... but there is a psychological reason why these Bible-packing people start saving others: they are not confident that they are saved. To gain that confidence they have to shout loudly, make a noise, make efforts to save others. And certainly they will find a few fools who are ready to be saved. That will give them tremendous confidence, but there is no base. Their very life is just the life of a fanatic who thinks he is saved because he believes in Jesus Christ.

Life needs transformation, and transformation is a great work upon oneself. It is not a child’s play, that: ”Just believe in Jesus Christ, go on reading the Bible again and again, and you are saved.” Saved from what? Saved from transformation!

So if you meet these people again, please tell them, ”You have come to the right place. Here we unsave people who have fallen into the mistaken idea that they are saved. We unsave them again.

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But the responsibility is not with these poor people – they are pitiable – the responsibility goes back to Jesus himself. He was trying to save people. And what signs was he providing them? No signs, no idea how they can change their lifestyle, how they can find their true being, how they can discover the truth that they are carrying within themselves. No structure, no process, no methodology is given. All that is required is that ”You believe that I am the only begotten son of God, that I am the messiah,” and that’s enough.

Is transformation of life so cheap that you believe in anybody and just by believing...? You are not losing anything, and Jesus is not giving you anything but a sort of hallucination that you are saved.

Not a single person has been saved by Jesus. And I don’t think he was able to save himself The way he behaves, the way he talks all show that it is not the flavor of an awakened being; something is missing. His ego is tremendously strong. Yes, it has a religious jargon about it, the ”only begotten son of God” – but any madman can say that.

What evidence does he bring? It is because of this that the Christians go on emphasizing the miracles of Jesus, because without those miracles what evidence has he got? And those miracles were never performed, because if such things were performed, it is impossible that Jewish sources would not have mentioned them. He would have been accepted as the messiah.

Jews never accepted him, not even today. His contemporaries have to be asked why not a single authoritative source even mentions his name. And if such a miracle man was around he would be the only news for centuries, but not even his contemporaries bothered about him. And his contemporaries have given a clear-cut indication by crucifying this man. Why did they crucify him?

People have not enquired into the incident, why Jews crucified Jesus. They crucified him for the simple reason that ”This man is mad, and is pretending something which will misguide millions of people. It is better to be finished with him. He is not the messiah”because Jews have criteria for who is the messiah, who will save the whole world from suffering, from misery, from anguish. The same idea that Jesus gives to the Christians, he has got from his ancestors. He is a perfect Jew.

What Jews were saying was about some messiah somewhere far away, happening in the coming history, in the future. Jesus’ fault was only this: he started saying, ”I am that man you have been waiting for. I am that hope you have been desiring. I have come.” And they really laughed at him –

anybody would have laughed at him.

The hope of the Jews has to remain a hope.

Whenever anybody will try to say, ”I have come to fulfill the hope,” he will be crucified, for the simple reason that he is taking away the hope of a whole race. They are living on that hope; that is their only light, their only guiding star...”and this carpenter’s son – ignorant, illiterate, good-for-nothing-wants to prove that he is that hoped for messiah! This man has to be finished off.” And there was one more reason why they crucified him: if on the cross he can manage to provoke God to help him, then we will be able to see whether he is the messiah or not – God will save him.

If God is not even bothering about saving His own son on the cross, then what to say about others?

And if Jesus cannot provoke God to save him, how can he provoke God to save others?

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The crucifixion was going to be a criterion. Thousands of people had gathered; it was not an everyday thing. Only once in a while a madman declares such a thing. And they were laughing and joking and throwing stones at him and spitting on him.

They had put a crown of thorns on him, they had forced him to carry his own cross. Three times he fell on the way; the cross was too heavy. He could not carry his own cross and he was trying to carry the crosses of the whole of humanity, trying to save the whole of humanity, taking all their miseries, their anguishes, their sufferings. And whenever he fell people laughed, and they said, ”You can’t carry even your own cross, how you are going to carry the crosses of everybody else?” And on the cross they had written ”King of the Jews”, just as a joke, because this man was constantly talking about the kingdom of God, and saying, ”Those who believe in me will be saved. At the judgment day, I will be there with God indicating the people who are my people: sorting out people into those who have to be saved, and those who have not to be saved. And I am going to be your witness. The judgment is in my hand.”

On the cross he himself feels shaken up. He cries to God, ”Have you forgotten me? Have you forsaken me?” – because he sees that the crucifixion is happening and there is no miracle. He looks upwards towards the sky... that God will be descending on a white cloud, angels will be coming, singing ”Alleluia, Alleluia.”

But no angels are coming, no God is seen anywhere; the sky is completely clear, not even a cloud.

And the crowd is shouting and rejoicing and dancing. They are hilarious, saying, ”Look at the fool!

He was going to save the whole world!”

And he feels thirsty, obviously. Walking a long way, carrying a heavy cross in the hot sun – and the crucifixion happened on a hill, Golgotha – he was thirsty, and on the cross as blood started oozing out from his hands and feet....

The Jewish crucifixion was the most cruel way of killing a man that has been practiced anywhere.

It took sometimes thirty-six to forty-eight hours for a man to die. An electric chair is far more nonviolent. You simply sit in it and you are gone – just a switch. Perhaps you may not even hear the click. By the time you hear the click, you are no more.

Every country has its way, but the Jews had the most torturous. Death is not a torture; death may be a relief from a torturous life, but on the Jewish cross you will be praying, ”Kill me, God, kill me; I cannot wait anymore” – because you are hungry and thirsty, and as the blood oozes out of your body, you feel more thirsty, more thirsty, because you are losing liquid. You are still alive, and the pain is tremendous... such a slow death. It is not just death. Death can be very simple: you cut the head off the person; it’s not much of a problem. It does not need forty-eight hours... forty-eight hours dying.

He started asking for water. Now, this is the man who used to walk on water. This is the man who used to turn water into wine. This is the man who raised the dead from their grave. But he cannot stop his blood flowing out of his body. He cannot make his blood flow backwards into the body. He cannot even manage a glass of water – and he was able to change stones into bread!

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Why can’t he change the air into water? Why can’t he arrange a cloud to shower just on him so he can have a good shower and drink the water? He proved absolutely impotent on the cross.

But the Christians go on, all over the world, saving people. They don’t even understand what it means to save.

In the East, no religion has ever proclaimed that anybody can save you except yourself; and the East knows far more deeply about man’s life and its transforming forces. It has been working on the human psyche for thousands of years. Still much has to be discovered – perhaps that is not the right word: rediscovered will be the right word – by the West, which the East has already discovered long before.

For example, when Sigmund Freud, Jung and Adler and other great psychologists of the beginning of this century started talking of the unconscious mind, the subconscious mind, the conscious mind, it was Freud’s rediscovery. But he never came to know that it was a rediscovery, that in India for thousands of years we have known all these divisions are there.

But the West was shocked, could not believe there was an unconscious. ”If there is an unconscious then why is it not mentioned in the Bible? – because anything which is not mentioned in the Bible certainly does not exist. God has given the whole message entirely about everything: the unconscious mind is not mentioned.”

Jung went a little deeper and found the collective unconscious mind. But you will be surprised that Buddha talks about not only these minds but a few more minds, because this is only one way....

For example, Freud goes downwards. The conscious mind is of course acceptable to everybody because that’s where we are, but Freud goes downwards and finds the subconscious mind. That’s when you dream. A boundary line between the unconscious and the conscious, it is just the middle part that joins the unconscious with the conscious.

Jung goes a little deeper and finds that if you go deeper into the unconscious, you suddenly find a depth which is not individual, which is collective. It is as if on the surface you see many icebergs, but as you go deeper you find only a big iceberg with many peaks above the surface of the water –

but underneath it is only one big iceberg.

Buddha goes upwards too. He goes downwards – and farther than Jung. After the collective unconscious mind he says there is a cosmic unconscious mind, because the collective unconscious mind means the unconscious mind of the whole humanity – but what about the animals and the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the stars? Go a little deeper and you will find a cosmic unconscious mind.

And Buddha goes upwards too. So going downwards, the conscious mind is just in the middle, where we are. Below it are the subconscious mind, unconscious mind, collective unconscious mind and cosmic unconscious mind. He also moved upwards, which in the future psychology has to do.

He says, ”Above the conscious mind is again the same ladder that goes downwards. Just as below there is a subconscious mind; above there is a superconscious mind.” If you move upwards then above the superconscious mind you will find, in Buddha’s language, the super-superconscious mind. Then you will find the collective conscious mind, and then you will find the cosmic conscious mind. Then you have traveled the whole journey, downwards and upwards.

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Now, before Sigmund Freud, people thought that Buddha was just imagining.

But Freud was

not a religious man in any sense.

He had a scientific mind: he proved the existence of the subconscious, the unconscious. Jung was not a religious man; he proved the existence of the collective unconscious. Now some other scientist is needed to prove the cosmic unconscious.

And he will be coming soon, because if it is a fact – and it must be, because if this man Buddha goes about finding the fourth absolutely correctly, there is no reason to doubt that he is correct about the fifth. And if he is correct about the downward ladders, then why should he not be correct about the upward ladders?

But to move upward you will need the religious mind. The scientific mind will not be enough.

The scientific mind can go more towards things. And this is how you are going to move towards things: from the conscious mind you have to come to the cosmic unconscious mind. Perhaps things have a cosmic unconscious mind, absolutely dormant, but it must be there. Otherwise how is it possible that you eat food, which is dead, which is a ”thing”, but it feeds your brain, your mind, and keeps them functioning. Somewhere, some part of the things you eat is releasing some consciousness, some mind quality to you. Otherwise from where do you get your mind?

They say if you don’t breathe for six minutes, and oxygen does not reach the brain, the brain starts deteriorating. Its cells are so delicate that at the most they can survive without oxygen only six minutes.

It happened in the second world war that a few people had heart attacks, just a psychological heart attack: a bomb fell just in front of them, exploded and killed many people. When you see so many people dying – suddenly an explosion and so many people dying – it is possible to have a psychological heart attack. You may fall dead. You are not dead, but amongst so many dead how can you stand alive? You can’t be an exception. You are not the only begotten son of God; you are just an ordinary human being, and when everybody is dying what are you doing here? Just the shock may stop your breathing.

They revived many people like this in Russia in the second world war. If the person was revived after six minutes had passed, he became alive, but he never became conscious. He remained in a coma because already the brain had broken, but the whole body came back; everything else started functioning.

I have seen one woman who had been for nine months in a coma, with everything functioning. She was breathing, her pulse was normal, everything was good, just somehow her brain had gone into nonfunctioning. The doctors said she could live years. If you went on supporting, helping, feeding her, she could live for years, but there was no hope that her brain could be restored. And we don’t yet have banks for brains, to put somebody else’s brain in your skull.

But somebody else’s brain will bring somebody else’s personality, not your personality. That is a difficult problem. Even if one day we can manage to have banks of brains, those brains will be carrying memories of somebody else, his education.... Perhaps he was a mathematician, a poet, a painter; perhaps he was a beggar or a very rich man: he will have different kinds of memories.

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His brain could be fixed into your skull, but it will not be you who comes back to consciousness, he will come back: he will use your body. He will speak his language: if he was French, he will speak French, if he was Russian, he will speak Russian. He will not take any notice of who you are, whether you have been somebody who had not even heard a single word of Russian.

That’s a problem. First, to have banks is a problem because the brain cells die so quickly. But perhaps we can find some way that when a person is dying, before he dies the brain is taken out and put into an oxygen tank where enough oxygen is available, so the brain can go on functioning.

He will be dreaming there in the oxygen tank – making love to a woman, or if he is a pervert then doing something else. Still, certainly he will be dreaming and doing his thing – what he was doing inside his original body.

Now he will be doing it in the oxygen tank – perhaps far better because more oxygen and more pure oxygen will be available. And he will not be able to know that he has been taken out, because one strange thing about your skull is that inside the skull there is no sensitivity.

So if you take the brain out, the brain will not feel as if it has been taken out, removed from its original place, placed into something else. It could simply live on its own. It could function on its own. And whenever it is put back again into a body, the body will start following the orders of this brain.

Buddha goes upwards too. He says this brain... and there are certain facts about the mind and the brain to be known, which scientists have discovered. For example, that half of the brain is nonfunctioning. Only fifty percent of your brain is functioning, and the other fifty percent of the brain, towards the back, is absolutely non-functioning.

Now, nature never creates anything for nonfunctioning. It only creates things to function, and such a valuable thing as the brain.... If half the brain is non-functioning it simply means that we don’t know its uses yet. We have not discovered for what it is meant to be used.

That gives me a clue.

The half of the brain that is functioning is being discovered by our psychologists, and the half of the brain that is not functioning starts functioning with meditation. And slowly, slowly you start becoming aware of something higher than you, beyond you, and beyond, and beyond. The cosmic conscious mind is your ultimate truth.

Unless you know it you are not saved, because then you will be moving in the labyrinth of the unconscious, the collective unconscious, the cosmic unconscious; you will be moving in this labyrinth of darkness which creates all your misery.

Now, what does Jesus know about it? Just by his telling people, ”Believe in me,” I don’t think that the other half of their brain will start functioning. These Bible-packing people – do you think that their other half is functioning? Most probably their whole mind has stopped functioning; they are in a coma.

Faith is a kind of coma.

You stop reasoning, you stop doubting.

You stop questioning.

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Naturally, because these are the functions of your mind, and when those functions disappear, by and by your mind stops. If it is not used it gathers junk; it becomes more and more dull, because doubt is not allowed. Strange things are expected from you....

Just the other day, Sheela brought me the latest message to humanity from pope the polack, a message of one hundred and thirty-nine pages. Naturally it has to be one hundred and thirty-nine pages because he has not left a single stupid thing unsaid. You will be surprised that he has found some new sins which are not mentioned in the Bible. Only a polack can do that; otherwise what were all those Old Testament prophets, and then Jesus doing?

The polack has found new sins, but those sins are worth consideration. One of the sins that he speaks of is the idea of class struggle: to believe in the idea of class struggle is a sin, a major sin.

Now whether you believe in the class struggle or not, the class struggle is there. There is a struggle between the rich and the poor. It is not a question of your belief.

In India there is a struggle between castes, a double struggle: class struggle and caste struggle.

Hindus have divided their society into four major varnas. The word ”varna” is significant; it means color. Perhaps in the beginning the division was done by color. The whitest were the Aryans, whom Adolf Hitler claimed to be the Germans, the Nordic Germans, the purest Aryans. He used the word

”aryans” for Germans, and he used the Aryan symbol of the swastika for his flag. That is a Hindu symbol, an ancient Aryan symbol. They were the highest, and as your color became darker, you became lower and lower and lower.

South India is almost black. If you cut Africa and India from a map and put them side by side, you will be surprised – they fit absolutely. It is a very recent finding that once South Africa and India were connected, then slowly they drifted away. So South India is really of Negro blood. And it is strange in many ways that the color of the South Indians is black and their languages are the only languages in India which are not Sanskrit-oriented, while all the European languages are Sanskrit-oriented. For example, thirty percent in English, forty percent in German, thirty-five percent in Russian, seventy percent in Lithuanian, forty percent in Italian....

So in Europe the roots have come from Sanskrit, but the South Indian languages – Tamil, Telugu, Kannad, Malayalam... not a single percent of their language has been borrowed from Sanskrit.

This is a very strange thing. It indicates something: these people are not Aryans. Germans and Russians and Swiss and French and English are offshoots of the Aryans, but the South Indians are not Aryans.

So perhaps in the beginning just on the basis of color... that’s why they call them the four varnas; but later on, slowly the color got mixed. When you live with people... even in America, you will find a person who is half Negro and half Caucasian, half Negro, half Italian, half Negro, half English.

When people live together they go on mixing. It is very difficult to keep blood separate. So slowly the varnas got mixed, the colors got mixed, but the castes remained.

There is a certain struggle between the brahmin and the sudra. The brahmin is the highest caste, and the sudra is the lowest caste. There is a struggle, a five-thousand-year-old struggle. Thousands of sudras have been killed, murdered, butchered, burned alive; even today that continues for small excuses.

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For example, in a small Indian village you will find two wells. One well is for the higher castes, the three higher castes: the brahmins, the priest class; the chhatriyas, the warrior class; and the wanikas, the business class. And the sudras, the untouchables, have a second well. Untouchables are not allowed to take water from the same well as the three higher classes.

And sometimes it happens that those poor people cannot manage to have a deep enough well –

and they are the poorest of the poor. In summer their wells dry up, so they have to go miles to a river or to a lake to bring water, but they cannot go to the well in the city. If they are found.... Sometimes it happens in the night, when somebody is thirsty. The river is so far away, everybody is asleep, and nobody will come to know.... He goes silently and tries to take a bucket of water – and he is caught.

That is enough. That well has become impure, and that will create a riot.

These poor untouchables, the sudras, live outside the town. They don’t live inside the town, hence their other name is antyaja. Antyaja means ”those who live outside the town”. And they have the poorest huts made of grass and bamboo. You can go with just one burning torch in your hand and set fire to the whole of their village. Just a single man within five minutes can set the whole untouchables’ village on fire.

Their children will be burned, their animals will be burned, their old men who cannot escape in time will be burned. And if a whole village is trying to burn the sudras, then with torches, burning torches, they will not allow anybody to escape; they will force them back into their burning huts. This happens even today on any small excuse.

A rumor that a high-caste girl is being seduced by an untouchable young man – just a rumor is enough! It may not be true; most probably it is not true, because in an Indian village it is very difficult to have any love affair, it is such a close-knit society.

And the women are not free to move outside the house. They don’t go to the school, they don’t go to the college, they don’t go to the university; there is almost nowhere they can go. The only places they go are the water well... the second place they go is the temple. In both places, the sudra is not allowed. So where will a high-caste girl meet an untouchable? To fall in love you have at least to be introduced.

And the sudras are so impure, so dirty in the minds of the higher classes that even their shadow is dirty. Great imagination! Now, a shadow has no existence. A shadow is simply there because you are standing in the way of the sun rays so the sun rays cannot pass you; hence you create a shadow. There is nothing like a shadow. You cannot catch hold of it, you cannot put it in a bag and take it home; you cannot escape from it, it will follow you. It does not exist; it is just an absence of rays because you are blocking them.

But Hindus have condemned those poor people so much that even if their shadow passes over you

– you are sitting and a sudra passes by, not touching you but his shadow touches you – it is enough to create a riot! A few people may be murdered, because...”Why was he so arrogant? He should be more careful.”

In the old days, and in very remote corners even today, as the sudra walks along, he first has to declare, ”I am a sudra and I am coming; so please, if anybody is on the road, move away.” In the From Ignorance to Innocence

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past a sudra used to have to do two things.... There were streets which were not open for him, he could not go on them. But for certain purposes it was impossible not to, so at certain hours he was allowed.

For example, he was to clean the latrines of the higher classes, so at certain hours, early in the morning before anybody gets up, he would come and quickly clean the latrines. But even then –

perhaps somebody may have gone for a morning walk – he had to go on doing two things. He had to shout, ”I am coming – I am a sudra. Please move away if you are somewhere on the way.” And the second thing – you will be surprised – he had to keep something like a brush made of a certain kind of grass that is used in India for cleaning the floors. That brush, that grass brush, used to hang behind him just like a tail; he had to keep it tied to his waist. That was to clean the path behind him. As he was moving, automatically the brush was cleaning the path after him, his shadow, any dirt that he is leaving behind – so nobody becomes impure.

This is a caste struggle.

Now, no sudra was allowed to study or be educated. If he was found studying, perhaps secretly, then it was enough of a crime for him to be killed; that was the only punishment.

And this pope, the polack, says, ”The idea of class struggle, the very idea is a sin.” This is a great discovery! And why does he say it? The fear of communism – he is not courageous enough to say that to believe in communism is a sin because the whole philosophy of communism is based on the idea of class struggle. Cunning.... Why not be clear that to be a communist is a sin? He must be afraid that when he goes back to Poland, then those communists there will kill him. And what will happen to communists in Poland? Poland now is a communist country; the whole of Poland will become sinners.

You see the trickiness of these priests? So he calls it class struggle: the idea of class struggle, to spread the idea of class struggle, is a great sin.

And another thing even more marvellous: he says that nobody can have a direct contact with God; that is a sin. You have to go via the Catholic priest; you cannot confess directly, that is not possible.

God is not going to hear you. Your confession is useless.

Can you see the strategy? The strategy is very complicated, but simple to understand. The Catholic priest lives on your confessions. The whole function of the priest disappears if you can have a direct contact with God; then what is the need of the priesthood?

The pope is not interested in saving you, he is interested in saving the priesthood. He is the head of the priesthood class, and he is worried about the thousands of Catholic priests if people start a direct communication with God. You have to go to the Catholic priest to confess; only then will you be forgiven. The priest will persuade God to forgive you. You cannot ask directly.

Many are the implications. The Catholic priest knows about every Catholic: with whose wife he is flirting, who is a homosexual; he also knows with whom his wife is flirting. He knows about every Catholic – that is his power. No Catholic can go against him. He has all the keys in his hands; he can expose you at any moment.

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Confession is a strategy of power politics.

Hence the Catholic is the most imprisoned religious man in the world, because the priest knows every wrong thing that you have done.

The court does not know, the police do not know, your wife has not any knowledge of it, but the priest knows everything. That is his power over the flock: he can expose you any moment in front of the society. The police will be after you, the government will be after you, your wife will be after you, your father will be after you – you will be crushed.

He knows all the sins that you have committed; but you have not been caught, so they are not crimes. And you yourself had gone to confess. In fact, that is his only joy in life. The Catholic priest... what else has he got? There is no need for him to go to the movies or to see the television: just sitting in his confession box and listening to all the groovy things is such a joy. And he goes on giving the punishment also. He says, ”You go out in the church and do this prayer ten times.” One day it happened: a rabbi who was a friend of a Catholic priest was visiting the priest; it was a confession day. Suddenly a man came running. The Catholic priest had just finished one confession and given the man a punishment of ten prayers because he had raped a woman. The rabbi was also sitting in the confessional box. They were friends so he was just listening to what was going on.

The man came running and said, ”Somebody is very sick, almost dying and you are needed to bless him for the journey.”

So the priest said to the rabbi, ”I will have to go. I will come back as quickly as possible. But meanwhile somebody may come to confess, so you just sit here.” The rabbi said, ”But what am I to do?”

The priest said, ”You just have to listen to so many confessions; just give them some punishment.

And you can’t see them face to face – there is a curtain – so nobody feels awkward.” Otherwise confessing one’s sins feels awkward. And the priest, enquiring more about it and going more and more into your sin – how you committed the rape, and what happened; what you did and what she did – would feel awkward asking these things.... ”So the curtain is there so nobody will know who is inside – a rabbi or a Catholic priest.”

So the rabbi said, ”Okay, go, but come back quickly because I am not accustomed to this business

– we do things differently.”

A man came, and by chance he had also committed a rape. The rabbi felt at ease, he said, ”Don’t be worried, son.” Exactly in the tone of the minister: ”Don’t be worried, son. You just go and do ten prayers.

But the man said, ”The last time I committed a rape you asked only for five prayers.” The rabbi said to himself, ”This is a difficult problem.” So he said, ”Don’t be worried; you can commit one more, but do ten prayers.” What else to do? ”For the future, you have five in advance.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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Now these people are gathering details of your underground life, which is very dangerous because that man now has every power over you. Whatsoever he says, you have to do it. Now, the pope is trying to save the priesthood and its power, and its hold over you. It has nothing to do with saving you, because what is the problem in confessing directly to God? What can this priest do? But no, you have to go via the right channel, the proper bureaucracy. Even with God there is a bureaucracy: you have to go through the priest. You cannot contact God directly.

This is his great message to humanity: disconnecting you from God completely; your only approach is the priest. It is none of your affair to think of having any direct contact with God. Now is this a religion?

True religion teaches you that you are part of this existence, already connected with it, already one with

The pope is teaching that you are not connected, that you are a lost soul; only through the priest can you be saved.

So when these Bible-packing Christians come to you, tell them, ”In the first place we are not lost, so don’t waste your time. In this place nobody is lost, we have never been lost, so the question of saving does not arise. And for your sake, we advise you, don’t come near here because our whole effort is to unsave people who believe that they are saved. If you go on coming here, we will unsave you again.”

In India I have come across these kinds of people; they are the most stupid type. And perhaps if they are Oregonians – and they must be – then they have an even better chance of being idiotic. In fact, listening to the question I thought that it would be a good idea to have a special election on the first of April every year.

All Oregonians would be eligible candidates and eligible voters. The only hearing process would be that before the polling booth they would have to do twenty minutes’ deep breathing. That is enough to prove that they are Oregonians. A simple process, not like Norma Paulus’ difficult process – I believe in simple things. Just breathe for twenty minutes and that is enough proof that you have lived in Oregon. And twenty minutes are enough to contaminate anybody.

This election will choose three persons: The Idiot General for Oregon, the Idiot General for America, and the Idiot General for the whole world. But all the three can only be Oregonians. If nobody stands then you can fill in the name of anybody you feel is the right person. And the polling booth will only be in this unique illegal city of Rajneeshpuram.

So each April I now give this work to poor K.D., the mayor of the illegal city of Rajneeshpuram: he has to listen to the hearing, the twenty minutes’ breathing, and then everybody... and no age limit, because children are more capable of seeing who is an idiot. By the time you become older, you become duller. And living with idiots, and dealing with idiots, you start, by and by, speaking their language. So even children, anybody who wants, man, woman, living, dead... just the hearing process will decide who can vote. The dead person of course will be in difficulty, but he need breathe for twenty minutes only.

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Every April first we will declare three Idiot Generals: Idiot General of Oregon, Idiot General of America, Idiot General of the world. And you cannot fill in the name of anybody who is outside Oregon because those idiots are lukewarm idiots. Here you will find real hotcakes.

Okay, you can ask one question more. My hands are not tired yet.

Question 2

OSHO,

WERE YOU NOT PUNISHED FOR YOUR MISCHIEVOUS ACTS IN CHILDHOOD?

I have been punished, but I have never taken any punishment as punishment. From my very childhood that has been my attitude: that how you take a thing makes all the difference. Nobody can punish me if I don’t take it as a punishment.

One of my teachers in the primary school when I was in the fourth grade.... It was my first day in his class, and I had not done anything very wrong, I was just doing what you do in meditation: ”Om, Om...” but inside, with closed mouth. I had a few of my friends, and I told them to sit in different places so he could not figure out from where the sound was coming. One time it was coming from here, another time it was coming from there, another time it was coming from here; he went on looking from where the sound was coming. So I told them, ”Keep your mouths shut, and do the ’om’

inside.”

For a moment he could not figure it out. I was sitting at the very back. All teachers wanted me to sit in the front so they could keep an eye on me, and I always wanted to sit at the back from where you can do many more things; it is more feasible. He came directly to me. He must have heard from the third grade teacher, ”You keep an eye on this boy!” So he said, ”Although I cannot figure out who the people are who are doing it, you must be doing it.” I said, ”What? What am I doing? You have to tell me. Just saying, ’You must be doing it’ does not make sense. What...?”

Now it was difficult for him to do what I was doing, because that would have looked foolish, and everybody would have started laughing. He said, ”Whatsoever it is, hold both your ears in your hands and sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up – five times.” I said, ”Perfectly okay.” I asked him, ”Can I do it fifty times?” He said, ”This is not a reward, this is a punishment.” I said, ’This morning I have not done any exercise so I thought that this was a good chance, and you would be very happy. Instead of five I will do fifty. And always remember, whenever you give me any kind of reward” – that’s exactly the word I told him – ”whenever you give me any kind of reward, be generous.” And I started doing fifty.

He went on, ”Stop! It is enough. I have never seen such a boy. You should be ashamed that you have been punished.” I said, ”No, I am doing my morning exercise. You helped me, you have rewarded me; this is a good exercise. In fact, you should do it too.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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I never took any punishment as punishment. How can you punish a man who is ready to accept it as a reward?

In my high school it was an everyday affair that I was standing outside the classroom, because the moment the teacher would see me, he would say, ”You better go out before you do something. I will have to send you out in any case. Please go out and leave us alone.” And I would say, ”Thank you sir, because outside I enjoy it so much; it is so beautiful.” And we had beautiful trees and birds and vast greenery for miles behind the school. ”Standing on the verandah is such a joy and the air is so pure that I feel sorry for you all sitting in this dirty room.” And I really enjoyed it outside.

They figured out that this was not a punishment, they were really providing a good opportunity and a chance for me to enjoy myself in complete freedom – because outside I was free to move anywhere or to just go into the thick forest that was behind. They figured out that this was not a punishment, this was a reward. They started stopping it.

I would ask them, ”What happened, has the policy changed? I am no more sent outside. Have I to do something before you send me? It saves me from the torture of you and your history. I am not interested in Alexander the Great, I am not interested in Emperor Akbar. What have I to do with these people? I am not interested in history at all. If I am interested then the only interest can be to make history. Only fools who cannot make history read history. You read, and you teach all these fools that are here, but you throw me out.

The teacher of history took me to the principal. He said, ”What am I supposed to do? You cannot give him any corporal punishment – he immediately threatens to go to the police station, and unfortunately the police station is just nearby, in front of the school, and he will create trouble.

And he is so strange that he has found a legal expert to support him.” One of my friends’ father was the best advocate in the city. Everybody called him Bachchubhaiya, I don’t know what his full name was. Bachchu is just a nickname for small children. It means just a child; the literal meaning is ”a child”. He must have been loved by people; he was a very lovable person. He used to be called Bachchubhaiya. Bachchubhaiya means brother. He was almost sixty, still everybody called him Bachchubhaiya, and he was very friendly with everybody.

So I went to him and asked him, ”They threaten me with corporal punishment. You have to support me, because I will report it to the police but the police may listen to me, may not listen to me. It is better I go with a legal expert.”

He said, ”Don’t be worried. I will keep your case prepared. Whenever you want I will come along with you and I will see that what you want has to be done.” So this teacher of history told the principal, ”Bachchubhaiya has promised him that he will go with him. That will create immediate trouble because the police inspector, the police commissioner, nobody can deny Bachchubhaiya: he is the most powerful advocate, and he has power over all police authorities, civil authorities, criminal authorities. And Bachchubhaiya has told him that if the police inspector does not listen he will go directly to the collector. So we cannot punish him.

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”I asked him to sit down and stand up. He thinks this is exercise. And one day it became such a scene that he told all the students ’Why are you sitting? You also do it. Exercise is exercise, it is good for the body.’ And all those students – they listen to him more than to me – they all started doing the exercise. I looked like a fool standing there, and I started thinking why I punished him.

And he won’t stop. Then I started throwing him out of the class, but he enjoyed it so much that it is not a punishment any more.”

The principal sent me back. He wanted to talk with the teacher in private. He suggested, ”You give him such punishment that his family comes to know.” There used to be a register in the principal’s office – whenever somebody was doing real mischief, the teacher would go and write in it his name and the fine of ten rupees. Then I would have to collect the ten rupees from my family, from my father; I would have to ask them.

So he did that. He put a ten-rupee fine on me and came back and told me, ”We have found the way: I have put a ten-rupee fine against your name.”

I said, ”Okay. Now I am going to fine you.”

He said, ”You are going to fine me?”

I said, ”Of course, because in the register it is not mentioned anywhere that only teachers can fine the students. There is no condition like that.” And I went and I put twenty rupees against his name.

The principal said, ”Are you mad or what? You are a student!” I said, ”I know I am a student, but is there any prohibition that I cannot fine a teacher if he is doing mischief? – and this is mischief. If I am doing anything wrong then I should be punished; this fine is punishing my father. Can you justify it? Why should my father be punished? He is not involved in it at all.”

I wrote my teacher’s name and the twenty-rupee fine and I said, ”Unless he pays, I am not going to pay.”

Still in that register those two punishments remain unpaid because he would not pay me what the principal asked: ”You pay the twenty rupees.”

And I told the principal, ”Don’t cross this out, otherwise I will fine you. And even crossing it out won’t make any difference because when the inspector of the school comes I am going to report this, and I am going to show him what has been crossed out, and you will have to answer for it.” So he never asked for the ten rupees from me because my condition was: ”First you get twenty rupees from that man, then I will consider it.”

Punishments have been given but I enjoyed the whole thing. It was sheer joy. It is a question of attitude – how you take it – and that is something to be learned about your whole life.

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I am reminded... there was a world conference of psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists – people who are involved in the mind games. They are still games, they have not yet got to the point where you can call them a science. Although they are arriving slowly, and are on the right track, still they are playing games. It was a world conference of all the famous psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists.

While the president was inaugurating the conference, he was feeling very uneasy, very disturbed by something just in the front row. There was a beautiful woman, a famous psychiatrist, and an old psychologist, also very famous in his own way – the only surviving colleague of Sigmund Freud. He was playing with the tits of the woman; and just in the front row! Now, how could the president go on speaking?

He tried looking this way, looking that way, but you can’t address a conference just looking this way or that way; you have to look in front too, at least once in a while. And it was too much. The old man was really something; he was not worried that the whole conference, everybody in the hall, could see what was happening. And the woman was even greater; she was sitting and listening to the lecture.

Finally it was too much, and the president said, ”Please forgive me, but, lady, can I ask you a question?”

She said, ”Of course.”

He said, ”Why don’t you complain against this dirty old man?” She said, ”It is his problem, it is not my problem. His dirtiness or whatever he is doing, that is his problem. How am I concerned in it? – he is doing no harm to me. And if it gives him some consolation, some satisfaction, so far so good. He is a patient, that much I can say; he is not a therapist, he is a patient. But you don’t complain against a patient – I feel sorry for him. Buy why are you disturbed? You continue. If I am not disturbed then why are you disturbed and why is everybody else disturbed?”

It is not a joke. The woman is saying something immensely meaningful: she is saying, ”It is his problem, and he is suffering from a problem. He needs sympathy not complaint.” But this woman must have been of immense understanding, really a therapist, not only playing games but moving to the very roots of man’s psychic troubles.

The woman simply said that he is behaving like a child, and treating her like his mother, so what is wrong with it? He has not grown up, he is retarded. Now, to make a fuss about it, to disturb the whole conference about it, is meaningless. Let him.... She told the old man, ”You continue,” and she told the president, ”You also continue. I am undisturbed because it does not concern me at all. Just touching my skin, what does it matter?”

This woman can become awakened because she is behaving like a watcher, even about her own body. She is not identified with the body, she is far above, looking at the retarded old man but not feeling offended – because ”I am not the body.”

I have been caned, not by my teachers, because they were afraid I would go to the police station, but by my uncles. My grandfather was always favorable to me about anything. He was ready to participate if he could; of course he never punished me, he always rewarded me.

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I used to come home every night and the first thing my grandfather would ask was, ”What did you do today? How did things go? Was there any trouble?” We always used to have a good meeting in the night in his bed, sitting together, and he enjoyed everything. I used to tell everything that had happened in the day, and he would say, ”It was really a good day!” My father only punished me once because I had gone to a fair which used to happen a few miles away from the city every year. There flows one of the holy rivers of the Hindus, the Narmada, and on the bank of the Narmada there used to be a big fair for one month. So I simply went there without asking him.

There was so much going on in the fair.... I had gone only for one day and I was thinking I would be back by the night, but there were so many things: magicians, a circus, drama. It was not possible to come back in one day, so three days.... The whole family was in a panic: where had I gone?

It had never happened before. At the most I had come back late in the night but I had never been away for three days continuously... and with no message. They enquired at every friend’s house.

Nobody knew about me and the fourth day when I came home my father was really angry. Before asking me anything, he slapped me. I didn’t say anything.

I said, ”Do you want to slap me more? You can, because I have enjoyed enough in three days. You cannot slap me more than I have enjoyed, so you can do a few more slaps. It will cool you down, and to me it is just balancing. I have enjoyed myself.” He said, ”You are really impossible. Slapping you is meaningless. You are not hurt by it; you are asking for more. Can’t you make a distinction between punishment and reward?” I said, ”No, to me everything is a reward of some kind. There are different kinds of reward, but everything is a reward of some kind.”

He asked me, ”Where have you been for these three days?” I said, ”This you should have asked before you slapped me. Now you have lost the right to ask me.

I have been slapped without even being asked. It is a full stop – close the chapter. If you wanted to know, you should have asked before, but you don’t have any patience. Just a minute would have been enough. But I will not keep you continually worrying where I have been, so I will tell you that I went to the fair.”

He asked, ”Why didn’t you ask me?”

I said, ”Because I wanted to go. Be truthful: if I had asked, would you have allowed me? Be truthful.” He said,”No.”

I said, ”That explains everything, why I did not ask you – because I wanted to go, and then it would have been more difficult for you. If I had asked you and you had said no, I still would have gone, and that would have been more difficult for you. Just to make it easier for you, I didn’t ask, and I am rewarded for it. And I am ready to take any more reward you want to give me. But I have enjoyed From Ignorance to Innocence

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the fair so much that I am going there every year. So you can... whenever! disappear, you know where I am. Don’t be worried.”

He said, ”This is the last time that I punish you; the first and last time. Perhaps you are right: if you really wanted to go then this was the only way, because I was not going to allow you. In that fair every kind of thing happens: prostitutes are there, intoxicants are available, drugs are sold there” –

and at that time in India there was no illegality about drugs, every drug was freely available. And in a fair all kinds of monks gather, and Hindu monks all use drugs ” – so I would not have allowed you to go. And if you really wanted to go then perhaps you were right not to ask.” I told him, ”But I did not bother about the prostitutes or the monks or the drugs. You know me: if I am interested in drugs, then in this very city....” Just by the side of my house there was a shop where all drugs were available: ”and the man is so friendly to me that he will not take any money if I want any drug. So there is no problem. Prostitutes are available in the town; if I am interested in seeing their dances I can go there. Who can prevent me? Monks come continually in the city. But I was interested in the magicians.”

And my interest in magic is related to my interest in miracles. In India, before partition, I have seen every kind of miracle being done on the streets by magicians, poor magicians. Perhaps after the whole show they may get a one-rupee collection. How can I believe that these people are messiahs?

For one rupee, for three hours they are doing almost impossible things. Of course everything has a trick to it but if you don’t know the trick then it is a miracle.

You have simply heard – I have seen them throwing a rope up, and the rope stands by itself. They have a boy with them they call jamura; every magician has a jamura. I don’t know how to translate it... just ”my boy”. And he goes on talking with the jamura, ”Jamura, will you go up the rope?” And he will say, ”Yes, I will go.” And this continual conversation has something to do with the trick; it keeps people’s mind on the conversation, and the conversation is funny in many ways. I have seen that boy climbing up the rope and disappearing!

And the man calls from down below, ”Jamura?”

And from far above comes the voice, ”Yes, master.” And he says, ”Now I will bring you down part by part.” Then he throws a knife up, and the head of the boy comes down! He throws the knife up, and a leg comes down! Part by part the boy comes down, and the magician goes on putting the parts together, covers them with a bedsheet and says,

”Jamura, now be together.”

And the jamura says, ”Yes, master.” The magician removes the bedsheet and the boy stands up! He pulls down the rope, winds it up, puts it in the bag and starts asking for money. At the most he would get one rupee – because in those days sixty paise was equivalent to one rupee and nobody was going to give him more than one paise, two paise at the most; a very rich person would give him four paise. If he can gather one rupee for his miracle he is fortunate. I have seen all kinds of things, and the people who are doing them are just beggars.

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So when I hear that your faith in Jesus will disappear if you know that he never walked on water, that he never turned water into wine, I cannot conceive of it, because in the twentieth century, the secrets of how to do all these magic tricks are available, even in books. And you can do them, you just have to learn a little strategy.

One sannyasin was with me; he lived with me in Bombay, and he was interested in magic. So I told him, ”Have a press conference and give a show of your magic, but call them miracles, not magic.” And he did it. Even Vivek was one of the participants in his magic – miracles, not magic.

The miracle was that Vivek has to swallow a thread, a long thread which she goes on swallowing.

And then he takes back that thread from her navel; he goes on pulling it and it all comes out. And the whole trick was just a small operation. A few days before, he just made a little cut near the navel and pushed a thread inside; and this was the thread that was coming out. The thread that she had swallowed was a different thread – but to the press it was a miracle. ”The woman has taken the thread inside and he takes it out from her navel! – and it comes out, the same length and everything.” But just a small trick....

He did many things there, and you know, just because he was my disciple many papers described how I had done these miracles. He drank some poison, enough to kill a man... but everything was a trick. He was just practicing there, in my own house and on my own people, and they all were saying, ”What is happening?”

Vivek was saying, ”This is cheating... I thought it was going to be a real miracle. It is nothing like a miracle, it is just a cheat.”

I said, ”Everybody has been a cheat; there has never been a miracle.” So I told my father, ”I was interested only in the magic, because in the fair all kinds of magicians gather together, and I have seen some really great things. My interest is that I want to reduce miracles into magic. Magic is only about tricks – there is nothing spiritual in it – but if you don’t know the trick, then certainly it appears to be a miracle.” I have been punished, but I have enjoyed every mischief so much that I don’t count those punishments at all. They are nothing.

I have a certain rapport with women, perhaps that’s why mischief – if it was Mister Chief or Master Chief, perhaps I would have avoided it, but Miss Chief! – the temptation was so much that I could not avoid it. In spite of all the punishment I continued it. And I still continue it!

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CHAPTER 26

Meditation: watchfulness, awareness, alertness – the real trinity 25 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

HOW DOES ONE EXPLORE THE HIGHER STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS?

THERE are not many ways, there is but one: the way of awareness.

Man is almost unconscious. I say ”almost” – there are moments, situations where he becomes conscious, but they are momentary.

For example, suddenly your house is on fire. You will feel a flare-up within you, a sense of alertness that was not there before. You may have been tired, you may not have slept for a few days, you may have been traveling and you were hoping that as you reached your house, the first thing you were going to do was to fall asleep – but the house is on fire!

All tiredness disappears.

You forget the whole nightmare of the journey, and inside you find something new which perhaps you will miss because the house is on fire; so you will become not alert of your alertness, but alert of the fire that is burning your house.

In ordinary life also, there are moments when people touch a higher state of consciousness, but miss because that higher state comes as an emergency, and they have to tackle first the emergency that is facing them. And that cannot be the circumstance where they can start exploring what is happening inside them.

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But if you can remember – even as a memory – some moments in your life when suddenly you were more aware than you usually are, it will be a great help to understand what I am going to say to you.

I have told you that modern psychology has moved below the so-called human consciousness. And when people like Sigmund Freud found that just underneath your thin layer of consciousness there is another layer, it was a great discovery for him, and for the West. And his whole life he devoted to exploring the underground, the basement of your consciousness.

That’s why he became interested in the analysis of dreams, because when you are conscious you can pretend, you can be a hypocrite. You can say something that you don’t mean, you can do something that you never wanted to do. You can smile, and inside you want to cry, weep. You can cry and weep, and inside you are enjoying, you are rejoicing.

So your consciousness has been so polluted by the society, it is not reliable. This was one of the most significant contributions of Sigmund Freud: that your consciousness is not reliable. Strange, that he feels your unconsciousness is more reliable than your consciousness.

Nothing can be a greater condemnation of the whole human civilization, the whole human history of all the religions.

What else can be a greater condemnation than this: that your consciousness is not reliable; that your society, your tradition, your religion, your convention, have made it unreliable.

In one of Kahlil Gibran’s stories, the mother and her daughter are both sleepwalkers. The daughter one night walks in her sleep, goes into the garden and starts saying nasty things about her mother.

And just by accident her mother also sleepwalks behind her and starts saying ugly things about her.

But the cold wind outside suddenly wakes them both. And the daughter says, ”Mum, you don’t have anything warm around you, you should not come out at your age. You make me so worried.” And the mother says, ”My beloved daughter, in this whole world there is nobody except you whom I can call mine.”

This much is the story, but it contains the whole discovery of Sigmund Freud: while they were asleep they were saying really what they feel about each other. When they wake up they are saying what they are supposed to say to each other. And they will not become aware of their two sides.

And if there were only two sides things would have been far easier, but there are many more sides.

I have told you – it will be good to be reminded – consciousness is a very thin layer where we are existing. Below it is the subconscious mind; that is half-conscious, half-unconscious. That’s why you remember dreams only of the later part of the night. You don’t remember all your dreams from the whole night because in eight hours of sleep, for six hours you are dreaming.

Now this is a scientifically proved fact. Only here and there for a few minutes you fall into deeper sleep where dreams are no more; the total is two hours. But the dream total is six hours. You don’t remember in the morning six hours’ dreams – almost the length of three movies. At the most you remember some fragment, or sometimes a whole dream, but that dream was the last dream when you were waking up.

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CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY

The subconscious mind has two sides. One is connected with the unconscious, the bottom part.

When you are deeply asleep, dreams are moving at the bottom part of the subconscious. The conscious is very far away. But when you are waking up in the morning, you are coming closer to the conscious mind, then the top layer of the subconscious is dreaming.

That’s why your consciousness can hear little bits and pieces of dreaming, and in the morning you can remember something. But that is only the tail of the elephant. The whole elephant has disappeared, you have no notion of it. And of course the tail makes no sense because the elephant is not there.

Hence the psychoanalyst is needed to find out the elephant: what kind of elephant it was, whether it was an elephant or a camel or a cow or a horse, because you have only a tail – perhaps not even the whole tail, a few hairs of the tail.

The whole function of psychoanalysis is to put those hairs together and to figure out whose tail this can be; to dig you from this corner and from that corner, and hit you from this point and that point, so something comes up which is there, but of which you are not aware. The psychologist almost makes the whole animal on the basis of the few hairs of the tail. That’s why there are so many schools of psychoanalysis.

It was bound to be so. Sigmund Freud wanted psychoanalysis to remain one integrated movement.

It was impossible, because the work of the psychoanalyst is more or less imagination: he has a few things in his hand but those things can lead to any conclusion.

If you go to Sigmund Freud then those same hairs will prove you are sexually obsessed: that is his elephant. And once he has found the elephant you will start seeing according to his vision, and you will find explanations that perhaps he is right. And perhaps he is right.

If you go to Adler, he has a different kind of imagination: will-to-power. For Sigmund Freud it is will-to-sex, will-to-reproduction. To Sigmund Freud it is more of a biological phenomenon than to Adler.

To Adler it is more of a political phenomenon: will-to-power. If you take the same hairs to Sigmund Freud he will manage to figure out and discover perversions of sex in you. And I am saying perhaps he is right, and I also want to say perhaps Adler is also right.

If you go to Jung then he will find through those same hairs some mythological phenomenon. It will not be biological, it will not be political, it will be mythological. And I want to say: perhaps he is also right.

All these three continually quarreled, not knowing that man’s mind has multi-aspects, that it is not exhausted by one explanation, that not only are there these three, there are more possibilities. Just a few more Freuds, Jungs and Adlers are needed who have some poetic imagination, and some scientific way of explanation.

Man’s mind is multidimensional.

And every dimension is connected.

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CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY

For example: sexuality is part of his will-to-power, it is not separate. Through sex also he is trying to be powerful, to be a creator, to give birth, to possess a woman or a man. And you can look at any couple: they are continually in a power conflict – who possesses whom?

The wife is trying in every possible way... and she has some natural capacity which she uses. If you are not allowing her to be more powerful than you then she will deprive you of sex, and she knows that you cannot starve as far as sex is concerned. You are going to beg her, you are going to persuade her: you are going to bring chocolates and ice cream and beautiful clothes. She understands that this is all bribery. You also understand it, that this is trying to make a coexistence possible.

But your effort is also continuously to dominate her.

One of my friends was in love with a woman but was not ready to marry her. Now the woman was troubled; she came to me and she told me, ”This is strange. Now my family is after me saying, ’If he loves you then he should marry you, otherwise you are passing the marriageable age.’” And in India it is then difficult to find a young man of your age available. They will already be married.

Then you will have to be married to somebody who is far older than you – perhaps once or twice married before, and whose wives fortunately went on dying and who is still a bachelor. ”So, they are after me: ’Either he marries you or we choose somebody else.’” I said, ”Let me ask him what is the problem.”

And he told me, ”I cannot hide it from you. I really love her, but when the question of marriage arises, the trouble is she is taller than me.”

I said, ”What kind of trouble is that? I don’t see any trouble in it. If she is taller, you can stand up on a stool and kiss her – at the most a stool is needed!” I showed him a picture – just that day it was in the newspaper and the newspaper was lying there

– of Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, who was a very tall man, with the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was only five feet five. So when he gave the oath to Jawaharlal it would have looked really bad: the prime minister would have looked very small, the viceroy really tall. He must have been six and a half feet, or even more, so they arranged it in the picture....

I showed him, ”You see the management. Jawaharlal is standing on a step, the steps that lead to the throne. He is standing on a step, and Mountbatten is standing on the floor so they seem almost equal in size.” I said, ”Can you see the trick? It is not much of a problem. You can have a folding stool which you can always have in the back of your car, so wherever you need you take your stool.” He said, ”You are making a laughingstock of me. I am serious, because wherever I go, she will be taller and I cannot continually walk with the stool. And in the marriage ceremony when I am taking the seven rounds around the sacred fire, I will be ahead of her looking almost like her child she is so tall. I love her, but I cannot marry her because everybody will laugh.” And in the marriage ceremony in India all the relatives and friends from faraway gather. It is a gathering of thousands of people. And they were rich people, so everybody would come and From Ignorance to Innocence

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everybody would see only one thing: the tallness of the wife. Love had to fail before the power instinct.

I said, ”What does it matter? You can tell them, ’I am not taller than my wife.”’

But you can look around the whole world, and you will find the husband always taller than the wife.

How has it been managed? Why have women remained smaller than the man? It is simply a question that for millions of years that was the choice: the man will always choose a wife smaller than himself Slowly, by sheer selection, the taller women went out of existence; it was difficult for them to find a husband. They became prostitutes, they became part of the marketplace, available to all. They could not live a respectable life unless they happened to meet a man taller than them.

But the man was always taller; slowly, slowly, this is how it happened. You can enquire of those people who crossbreed animals. After generations of this continual crossbreeding: taller husband-smaller wife, taller husband-smaller wife....

If the woman is so tall that she cannot find a husband, she becomes a prostitute, she goes out of the biological market, she is a dropout. She will not be creating children any longer, because a prostitute cannot afford children. So her line dies out; that branch grows no further It is not natural that women have to be smaller.

It is the power instinct, the will-to-power.

But sexuality and the will-to-power are not two separate things, not as separate as Adler and Freud think.

The people who become very much power-oriented start losing interest in sex because their whole energy moves into the will-to-power.

The people who are very deeply interested in exploring their sexuality cannot go into politics; they don’t have any energy left.

You can see it in actuality in many places. We don’t allow soldiers to have their wives on the battlefield. The general can, because the general remains behind; he is not really fighting, he is simply ordering people to fight. And he is perfectly defended; if any danger is there, he will be the first to get out of it. He is far behind the forces. He is allowed to have a wife there because there is no problem, he is not going to fight. But the soldiers are not allowed to. Why? For the simple reason that if their energy goes into sex, they don’t feel like fighting.

You can observe it in yourself. If you are deeply in love with a woman, you don’t feel like fighting with anybody. But if you cannot find any outlet for your is standing on a step, the steps that lead to the throne. He is standing on a step, and Mountbatten is standing on the floor, so they seem almost equal in size.” I said, ”Can you see the trick? It is not much of a problem. You can have a folding stool which you can always have in the back of your car, so wherever you need you take your stool.” He said, ”You are making a laughingstock of me. I am serious, because wherever I go, she will be taller and I cannot continually walk with the stool. And in the marriage ceremony when I am taking From Ignorance to Innocence

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CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY

the seven rounds around the sacred fire, I will be ahead of her looking almost like her child she is so tall. I love her, but I cannot marry her because everybody will laugh.” And in the marriage ceremony in India all the relatives and friends from faraway gather. It is a gathering of thousands of people. And they were rich people, so everybody would come and everybody would see only one thing: the tallness of the wife. Love had to fail before the power instinct.

I said, ”What does it matter? You can tell them, ’I am not taller than my wife.”’

But you can look around the whole world, and you will find the husband always taller than the wife.

How has it been managed? Why have women remained smaller than the man? It is simply a question that for millions of years that was the choice: the man will always choose a wife smaller than himself. Slowly, by sheer selection, the taller women went out of existence; it was difficult for them to find a husband. They became prostitutes, they became part of the marketplace, available to all. They could not live a respectable life unless they happened to meet a man taller than them.

But the man was always taller; slowly, slowly, this is how it happened. You can enquire of those people who crossbreed animals. After generations of this continual crossbreeding: taller husband-smaller wife, taller husband-smaller wife....

If the woman is so tall that she cannot find a husband, she becomes a prostitute, she goes out of the biological market, she is a dropout. She will not be creating children any longer, because a prostitute cannot afford children. So her line dies out; that branch grows no further It is not natural that women have to be smaller.

It is the power instinct, the will-to-power.

But sexuality and the will-to-power are not two separate things, not as separate as Adler and Freud think.

The people who become very much power-oriented start losing interest in sex because their whole energy moves into the will-to-power.

The people who are very deeply interested in exploring their sexuality cannot go into politics; they don’t have any energy left.

You can see it in actuality in many places. We don’t allow soldiers to have their wives on the battlefield. The general can, because the general remains behind; he is not really fighting, he is simply ordering people to fight. And he is perfectly defended; if any danger is there, he will be the first to get out of it. He is far behind the forces. He is allowed to have a wife there because there is no problem, he is not going to fight. But the soldiers are not allowed to. Why? For the simple reason that if their energy goes into sex, they don’t feel like fighting.

You can observe it in yourself. If you are deeply in love with a woman, you don’t feel like fighting with anybody. But if you cannot find any outlet for your sexual energy then you will become a criminal, you may kill somebody. You may be constantly searching for some excuse to fight.

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CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY

It is not just a coincidence that all the religions have preached that their monks remain celibate, because once they are celibate then their whole energy starts moving towards an imaginary God –

then God becomes their sexual object.

And you can see it in the songs of the devotees. They talk of God almost as if they are talking of a beloved or of a lover. Meera, one of the most famous mystics in India, must have been studied by Sigmund Freud. If he did not study her, he will have to be born again, because those two have to meet and come to an understanding. Freud never heard about Meera, otherwise he would have found all the great explanations that he needed and searched and looked for – and was unable to find.

Meera talks of Krishna almost in sexual terms. She sleeps with the statue of Krishna. She calls Krishna ”my husband”. And the words she uses are exactly those romantic words which lovers use for each other. The same is true about the Sufi mystics who think of God as a beloved, a woman.

And you have to see their description of the beauty of God, the youthfulness of God.

When Fitzgerald, a very talented poet, translated Omar Khayyam, a Sufi mystic, he did something almost impossible, because Omar Khayyam, in the original, does not seem to be so impressive as he becomes in the translation of Fitzgerald. And the reason is, Fitzgerald had no idea that Omar Khayyam was talking about God, not about a woman.

The Sufis call God saki. Saki is the woman in the pub who pours wine for the customers. Particularly in the Arabic and Persian nations, the sakis are chosen just as in the West you choose Miss World, Miss universe, Miss America. The saki is chosen just like that. The most beautiful girl in the city will become the saki. The most beautiful women move into the profession of being the saki. And Sufis call God ”saki”.

Fitzgerald had no idea that saki means, to a Sufi, God. He simply translated literally that saki is a woman, and when Omar Khayyam says, ”Saki, fill my cup full,” he thinks he is asking a woman to fill his cup full. And when Omar Khayyam says, ”Even the wine is not so sweet as your kiss,” he is thinking of a woman; hence, his poetry becomes more romantic, more colorful. One who understands the Sufi terminology will not find much in Omar Khayyam.

You will be surprised that in Persia, Omar Khayyam is not known as a great poet. But in the whole world, Omar Khayyam is Persia’s most important poet, and this miracle has happened because of Fitzgerald. And you would not have enjoyed Omar Khayyam. He was a mathematician; that was the first mistake that Fitzgerald made: he did not realize that Omar Khayyam was a mathematician.

Now, a mathematician writing poetry – you understand, it cannot be juicy. From where can a mathematician get juice? Then over and above that, he is a Sufi, a seeker of God. There is no place for any woman in his life; he lived a celibate life.

Fitzgerald never bothered about the man’s life. Before he translated his poetry he should at least have looked to see whether this man was capable of writing poetry about women. He was a celibate mathematician! A Sufi! But Sufis remaining celibate think of God as a woman, dream of God as a woman, the most beautiful woman of course – there can be no comparison with God. So they pour all their sexuality on the image of God, the beloved. He is not a man.

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CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY

In Omar Khayyam’s book – it is an illustrated book – naturally Fitzgerald saw the most beautiful pictures of women pouring wine. He thought that this was really a woman. And he looked at the poetry; it talks about the woman. Sufis are very angry: Fitzgerald made Omar Khayyam world famous, while their real poets of Persia are unknown to the world. This man was not thought to be a poet at all. Once you understand that this woman is not a real woman but God looked at through the eyes of a celibate Sufi... it is an hallucination.

Religions understood it: that if you stop sexual energy moving in its natural way, then the man can manage to see God, to meet Jesus, to talk to Krishna; anything is possible. The sexual energy is a kind of drug, the most powerful drug that nature has invented. That’s why, when you fall in love with a woman, you start seeing in that woman things that nobody sees. It is your projection, it is your drug, your chemicals, your hormones which are creating the hallucination around the woman. The woman is just an object, a screen, on which you are projecting your picture.

And once your sex is satisfied with the woman, you are going to be very disappointed. You will find that this is not the same woman: you had fallen in love with somebody else. This is not the woman...

but you know that this is the woman. So there is some deception, this woman deceived you. You are being deceived by biology, not by this woman.

This woman was also projecting on you. And once the honeymoon is over, the projection is over.

Now she looks at you and finds just an ordinary man, nothing special about you. Everything was special before: the way you walked, talked, everything had something unique. Now you are just an Oregonian, nothing more. There is great frustration on both sides. Now you are standing face to face, seeing each other without any projection; hence the continuous fight. It is bound to be so.

In India, where even today ninety percent of marriages, or even more, are arranged marriages, this kind of frustration never happens. In an arranged marriage you are not given the chance of hallucinating. From the very beginning you are just standing on the earth, and there is no romance.

You cannot even see the woman before you get married to her.

The very cultured families now allow the picture of the woman to be seen. Now a picture of the woman, and with all the photographic tricks – and that too only if you ask.... You are going against the heritage, the culture, you are not supposed to ask. And particularly the girl cannot even see the picture of the man she is going to be married to. And even after marriage, they are not going to see each other in sunlight. They will meet each other in the darkness of the night. Of course, they remain to each other mysterious.

The mystery lingers longer in India than anywhere else. In the day they cannot talk to each other because in India there are joint families. They cannot talk in front of the children because that is a bad example, they cannot talk in front of the elders because that is disrespectful. And there are so many elders in the house, and there are so many dozens of children in the house... there is no possibility.

You will be surprised that the father of a child cannot take the child in his hands in front of others: that is disrespectful. I was told by my father, ”I took you in my hands only when you were five years old.” The grandfather can, that’s why I became friendly with my grandfather. Naturally, he was acquainted with me, and me with him, from the very beginning. The father came after five years; he remained a stranger for five years. He never talked to me for five years.

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I have asked my mother. There was no possibility of their talking or meeting or seeing. They did not see each other for years after their marriage. Children were born, but they had not seen each other because they would meet only in the darkness of the night. And in India, in a joint family, there are sometimes forty people, fifty people in the house. And those houses are just like Noah’s ark.

For example, my grandfather used to have his horse tied to his cot in the night too. And I told him

”The smell of the horse is so much that even if I want to meet you, your horse prevents me.” Cows in the house, elders, children, everybody in the house – how Indians manage to make love is a mystery.

How they manage to produce dozens of children is simply mystifying. It all happens in darkness, without whispering a single word. What to say of loving chitchat and foreplay and afterplay. There is no possibility only the play is enough! Fore and after does not exist; and the play has to be quick –

so nobody comes to know.

I was staying with my grandfather in the house of one of his friends – and when a very close guest is there, in India, you don’t allow him to sleep in a separate room, that is not hospitality. My grandfather and I were sleeping in the same room where my grandfather’s friend, his son, and his son’s wife were sleeping. And what I learned.... My grandfather was old so once in a while he would cough; his friend was even older than him, and once in a while he would cough. And because of their coughing my sleep was difficult, so once in a while I would wake up. And once in a while I would see the son of my grandfather’s friend making love to his wife... then I would cough.

That was enough! That was enough; he would jump into his own bed. And while I remained there I did not allow him to sleep with his wife. On the day we were leaving he pulled me aside and said,

”You rascal!”

I said, ”What? Why are you calling me a rascal?”

He said, ”You coughed exactly at the time... do you sleep or not? Those two old men, I know they cough – but not exactly at the time. I am so happy that you are going because for these two months I have not met my wife, because the moment I started moving towards her bed you would start coughing.” And coughing is such a thing that when I started then those two old men would hear it and start; it is infectious. One person starts, then the other starts feeling a temptation too.

Stop the sexual energy of people, then it will find some other outlet. Religions learned the trick: stop sexual energy – it moves, and gives the movement towards God. The military generals found it very soon: stop the sexual energy and the man is ready to fight, to quarrel; he is just hankering to fight.

In fact Sigmund Freud’s explanation for all weapons is just sexual. He says that when you throw a knife into somebody’s body, it is sexual penetration. A bullet is a sexual penetration from a faraway distance. He is a little bit obsessed with sex, but there is some truth in it, because sexually fulfilled people have not discovered weapons. There was no need.

So all these explanations are about your dreams because your dreams are truer than your waking life. In waking life you don’t beat your teacher, but in dreams you can. That’s your real desire. If you were allowed, or if you were powerful enough you would have done it. But it is not possible, not practical. In dreams you are free to do it; it is a kind of substitute.

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CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY

So below the conscious is the subconscious, which is the field of your dreaming.

Below the

subconscious is the unconscious, which is the field of your dreamless sleep, when you are in a kind of coma. You reach the same state as you were in your mother’s womb; hence the relaxation, hence the feeling of rejuvenation. After a deep sleep, when you wake up you are fresh, young, full of energy.

If those two hours have been missed then you may have tossed and turned and dreamed a thousand and one things, but in the morning you will find yourself as tired as when you had gone to bed, perhaps more tired. That coma is needed, because in that coma your mind stops functioning and your body takes over

When you are conscious, it is mind over body; when you are unconscious, it is body over mind. And the body has a wisdom because the body is far more ancient. Mind is a very late development, a very new comer, just amateurish.

Hence, anything important nature has not left to mind.

Everything important has been left to the body, because body will take care more proficiently, more professionally, more wisely, without any mistakes, errors.

For example, breathing has not been left to the mind; otherwise sometimes you may forget, particularly in sleep. What will you do? – when deep sleep comes breathing will stop. No, breathing is not left to the mind. It is a body function because it is so essential for your life. And the mind is so amateurish and so stupid, because it is just trying to wake up, it is still not awake.

Nature has given every power to the body, all essential powers to the body. Your mind can be put aside and your body will go on functioning perfectly well.

In fact, mind is always a hindrance in everything. He tries to overcome body, because mind is a power tripper, he wants to control everything.

What do these people go on doing in the name of yoga? They are trying to control even their pulses, they are trying to control even their heartbeat. For what? – what do they gain out of it? I have seen people practising for forty years how to stop the heartbeat; and certainly if they do that much practice they can stop the heartbeat for a time.

But what is the gain? You cannot see anything. I have seen these people: you don’t see any aura, you don’t see any fragrance. You don’t see in their eyes that there has been any vision of reality.

You don’t see in their life any impact of the higher consciousness.

But they have immense power over the body. I have seen people lying down and a car passing over their body; they will simply stop their breath and the car passes over with no harm. I have seen one man stopping the body of a railway engine just with his hands. And all that he was doing was stopping his breath. By stopping his breath he was capable of stopping a railway engine or any car.

Strangely... it was as if he had become a rock, so heavy that it was impossible for the car, a four horsepower or six horsepower car, to push the man aside. With his breathing disappearing, it was as if all his hollowness had disappeared and he had become a solid rock. The earth and its gravitation is functioning perhaps ten times more on that person than it functions on you.

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It is just like when you are in water: the gravitation functions less on you; that’s why you can float on water. In water you can take a big rock in your hands without any trouble. The same rock outside the water you cannot pick up.

Water cuts somehow the power of gravitation. The water has the quality of levitation, of taking things up; levitation against gravitation. That’s why you can take a bigger man’s body in your hands in water, just like a child, as if he is a child. Outside the water you cannot do the same, he is so heavy.

Perhaps by stopping the breathing – the quality of air must give a great levitation – the person becomes so heavy, and the power of gravitation is almost eight times more that he can manage normally. The wheels go on moving, but the car cannot move a single inch.

But what is the point of it? I have asked these people, ”Yes, you have done a great job, but to me it seems idiotic. What is the point? How have you become more spiritual by this? You have simply proved that you are eight horsepower. The car is six horsepower, so you now have eight horses’

power in you.”

We still measure with horsepower because man takes a long time to forget old language. Now horses are disappearing, horse-drawn buggies are disappearing.

There are cars, there are

airplanes, there are trains, but still we measure their power through the horse. An eight horsepower car means there are eight horses in your chariot.

”So of course you are more powerful than the car, but is that your goal – to become a powerful engine in a car? And you wasted forty years in learning the trick!” Yes, it influences people because everybody is a power tripper. It shows what great power this man has. It makes you feel inferior; he becomes suddenly superior.

Why do so many millions of people go on watching boxing matches? For what? Two fools beating each other for no reason at all.... If there is any argument, sit down and settle it, negotiate. But there is no argument, no problem; the problem is only who is more powerful. That too can be decided in a more human way: just toss a coin and be finished. But why beat each other and break each other’s bones? And the noses are bleeding, and the eyes are red, and millions of people are clapping, enjoying somehow a certain identity.

There are fans of Muhammad Ali, and there are fans of other Alis. So these two fools are doing their stupidity, and a million fools are there to support and give them the idea that they are doing something important. I cannot see that in a little bit more enlightened humanity things like boxing can exist.

Boxing simply looks so primitive, so ugly, so inhuman; but these millions of people.... And these are not the only people: millions more will be sitting in front of their television. It seems the whole humanity is somehow after power. So whoever shows some power of any kind: power of money, power of body, power of politics, position, status, anything....

Sheela has just brought to me two days ago the news that since Indira Gandhi’s assassination, her son Rajiv has been fighting the election to become the prime minister. He has chosen people very From Ignorance to Innocence

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cleverly: he has chosen many of the film stars as his candidates. Poor Vinod missed! If he had been in India he would have been in the prime minister’s cabinet next month. His rival in the film world, Amitabh Bachchan... these two were the topmost actors of the Indian film world. And you will be surprised that India produces more films than Hollywood. Hollywood is number two, India is number one as far as film production is concerned.

These two persons, Amitabh and Vinod, were the top two. He has chosen Amitabh as one of his candidates, and Amitabh is going to be in his cabinet, absolutely certainly. And he will win, because film actors have a certain power, a glamour, as if they are superhuman. He has chosen old descendants of royal families. One is a very strange fellow, but he will be elected.

Mysore was one of the richest states in India because Mysore jungles are jungles of sandalwood, and that is the costliest wood in the whole world. All the jungles were the private property of the maharajah of Mysore. And Mysore has the greatest population of elephants, so Mysore’s maharajah has the biggest tusks of elephants in his palace. It is unique, because for thirty-six generations they have been kings.

Now this descendant – the estate is no more there, but he has his private property: a palace worth fifty million or more dollars, a vast palace all made of Italian marble. His throne must be priceless because it has so many diamonds, so many sapphires, so many rubies, emeralds, because Mysore has many mines, and the king had first rights to all the best stones found in those mines. Just the gold is worth nearabout fifty million dollars. The gold of the throne and all these diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds – there is no way to count how much they will be worth. But that kind of throne is just one of its kind, there is no other.

This young man weighs three hundred and fifty pounds. He never goes out of the palace. He speaks in a nasal tone, almost inaudible. He has never spoken in public in his whole life because how can he speak? What he says is almost inaudible; perhaps only a few servants who are continuously with him understand him. He has an imported dog; his name is Kinky – and all that he does is go on playing with Kinky.

Now he has been chosen as a candidate by Rajiv. He will win the election, because in Mysore, who can win against him? In Mysore the royal family are thought to be the descendants of God. And thirty-six uninterrupted generations of royal blood – and no small quantity: three hundred and fifty pounds! There is no need for him to make a public speech. He cannot, he may not even go out of his palace, but he will win. And he has been chosen just because he has status and people worship him. So it is impossible for anybody to stand against him. And he has money, so he will give money to the election campaign, as much as they want.

People are not conscious of what they are doing. Now the people who are going to vote for this man, will you call them human beings? Perhaps Kinky is far more intelligent than the man who goes on playing with him: he is an utter idiot. He has not done anything else in his life; but just to belong to a royal family is enough. And he has money, and money is power. Perhaps he may become a cabinet minister.

You are in your unconscious mind when you are fast asleep with no dreams. Freud had reached the unconscious just by analyzing dreams. If you are on the right track and you analyze a dream From Ignorance to Innocence

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rightly, the miracle is, once the dream is analyzed completely – that means you become aware of its reason, why it happens, why it is, of what it is constituted – once you become aware of a dream, its total structure, root and all, it disappears.

To summarize: to be aware of a dream is the death of the dream.

And after a few years of psychoanalysis when all your dreams slowly disappear.... Then Freud became aware that there is still another depth. He died before he could penetrate the other depth, but he had found it, discovered it: the unconscious.

Jung tried to go as deep into the unconscious as possible. It is easier in hypnosis to reach the unconscious of any person, very easy. Hence in the future hypnosis is going to become part and parcel of every psychology. In India it always has been, because three years of psychoanalysis is a wastage of time. Within three minutes you can be hypnotized and all your dreaming process can be put aside; then there is direct entry into the unconscious.

Because Jung was interested in hypnosis, Freud condemned him as unscientific. It is not right.

Hypnosis is a scientific method of digging deep into you. And when Jung tried to go deep into the unconscious, there is still another layer: the collective unconscious, the unconscious of the whole humanity.

Everybody has it; and sometimes from that collective unconscious you get ideas, but because they come from so far away from your conscious, you think that they are coming from somewhere outside you. When Jesus hears the voice of God, it is not God speaking, it is the collective unconscious.

But it is so far away that poor Jesus can be forgiven. He simply is mistaken, and he had no idea that there are depths within depths depths behind depths.

This collective unconscious is to do with the mythological. Hence, Jung became interested in mythology to discover its existence, just as Freud became interested in dreams to discover the existence of the subconscious. Mythologies are dreams dreamed by the whole of humanity over thousands of years, but those mythologies carry some idea, some significance. For example, the Indian mythology that life for the first time appeared as a fish. The first incarnation of God is matsyavatar: incarnation as a fish. A strange mythology – how did they figure it out?

Out of this vast world of animals, why did they fall upon the fish? – some indication from their collective unconscious. Now science says that perhaps life was born first in the ocean. It comes very close to the fish. And the child in the beginning, in the mother’s womb, looks like a fish. He moves from there and passes through all the stages that man has passed through in millions of years – there is a point where he looks like a monkey.

Jung’s discovery of mythology and its connection with the collective unconscious is of immense importance. But he stopped there because he was afraid, and obsessed with death, just as Sigmund Freud was himself obsessed with sex. Anything you brought to him – I say anything, and I mean anything – he would immediately manage to make it sexual. Whatever it was, it did not matter; he was capable of making it sexual.

Freud’s whole mind was focused on one point; but perhaps that’s the only way. In a small life, what can a man do? If he can work out only one idea in its totality, then he needs to be obsessed; From Ignorance to Innocence

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otherwise it is difficult, life is so vast. If you go on jumping all around on everything, then it is difficult for you to move in one direction to the very end.

Hence all scientists, all philosophers, all thinkers, are obsessed with one particular idea. And then they try to fit everything into that idea. That’s where they go wrong. If they were a little more alert they would see that life is vast. Their idea is meaningful, but meaningful only from a certain aspect.

Jung was very much afraid of death; he was death-obsessed. Just as Sigmund Freud was sex-obsessed, jung was death-obsessed. And both obsessions are not very different. Sex is the beginning of life and death is the end of life. Sex is the A and death is the Z; it is one alphabet, connected. It is not different but distant, so distant that neither Freud nor Jung could see that they were both concerned with one thing; but the poles were so far apart that they were unable to join them.

Jung was very much afraid of death, and as he came closer to another layer behind the collective unconscious he backed out. He tried many times to approach the idea of death. He went to India because in India people have been thinking about every possible aspect of life for thousands of years. Of course, about death India has thought much more than anybody else – but he avoided the man who could have been of some help.

He was asking people who were educated in the West – professors in the universities who had western degrees, doctors who had western degrees – because he had a fixed idea that East and West can never meet. The idea was old; it was given by an English poet, Rudyard Kipling, that East and West can never meet: ”East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Somewhere in Jung’s mind that idea remained his whole life, and he was continually insisting to his disciples that the West had to discover its own methods; it should not use eastern methods, because they could prove dangerous: ”They are not our heritage.” Now, this is a strange situation and a strange argument. A man who discovers the collective unconscious still believes in East and West.. Then there are two collective unconsciouses: eastern collective unconscious and western collective unconscious. He never became aware of the simple fact that if you talk about collective unconscious then East is no more East and West is no more West. And if you think they cannot meet then you can come and see here in Rajneeshpuram: they are meeting. They have met!

Just a few days ago one man from South Africa declared a new conflict. He said the real conflict is not between East and West, it is between North and South. That was never thought of before, it is a real discovery. But it has a point in it. There is a conflict, just like the one between East and West which has become famous and well known. But South and North are also in conflict, which has not become so well known. But then there will be four collective unconsciouses, and it is going to be very difficult.

But Jung was not aware. One thing he was certain of: eastern methods were not to be used. So he avoided the only man alive in India, Raman Maharishi, who could have taken him to the lowest level which Buddha called the cosmic unconscious. But that is almost a death. It is a death, because you are no more there.

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The cosmos is, but you are no more there.

The seeker disappears; he has found what he was seeking, but he is no more there.

That’s a quantum leap.

The subconscious, unconscious, collective and cosmic unconscious – these four layers are under your conscious. Above are also four layers. The question is how to reach the higher states of consciousness.

The method is a very strange one, but there is only one way. You have to go down first. You have to enter the cosmic unconscious. Unless you disappear into the cosmic unconscious, you cannot enter into the superconscious, the first level above conscious.

What actually happens:

as you enter the cosmic unconscious, your subconscious, your unconscious, your collective unconscious all disappear, just like small rivers falling in the ocean

– a vast ocean of cosmic darkness. It is a death. And unless you are born again you will not enter the kingdom of God.

Jesus must have heard that statement somewhere in India from a Buddhist monk, because it has no source in Jewish religion. Its only source can be a Buddhist source, because that’s what Buddha was teaching: that you dive deep into the cosmic unconscious, and as you enter into it, all is darkness, you are lost completely. But wait – don’t be in a hurry and don’t back out. Don’t run back, because where will you go? You will go back again to the same routine world in which you had lived.

Don’t run. Wait, wait a moment. And the darkness as you wait starts becoming less and less dark.

It is almost as if you are coming from the outside in the hot sun, and enter in the house and you suddenly see darkness because your eyes are focused for the light outside. The sunlight is so bright that your pupils shrink. They cannot bear that much light going in, so they become small, very small.

And then suddenly you enter your house; it takes a little time for your eyes to adjust to the new situation; the sun is no more there. Your pupils start becoming bigger. When they become bigger then the house has more light.

That’s how thieves who come into your house in the night when everything is dark.... You yourself in your own house cannot move; you may stumble into this desk, that table, this chair. But a thief who has never been in your house, who knows nothing about the house enters in darkness, and without stumbling into anything finds exactly the place where you are keeping all your treasure. It needs training; it is an art. Of course it is a crime. That’s another aspect; I am not concerned with that. But it is an art.

The famous Zen story is: a very great Master who was also a master thief was getting old. His son asked him, ”Before you die, please teach me your art of stealing.” He said, ”I was just waiting for you to ask because we never impose; art is something that you should have a feel for. If you are ready, I am ready. Today is the beginning of your teaching. Tonight you come with me.”

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The old man takes the young man. The young man is trembling, his heart is throbbing. He is looking from side to side, but the father is moving as if going for a morning walk, at ease. He cuts a hole in the wall – the son is perspiring and it is a cold winter night. And the father is doing his work so silently, and so artfully, the son is amazed.

The father goes in, calls the son in. They move inside the house. The father has the master key, he opens the doors. They reach the innermost chamber of the palace. The father opens a cupboard, a walk-in cupboard, and tells the son to get in. The son is trembling, just trembling. He gets in and asks, ”What I am supposed to do?”

He said, ”You simply get in. You are not supposed to do anything. You simply get in and then whatsoever happens, happens.”

He got into it. The father locked the door and ran out leaving the son inside the cupboard, and while he was leaving the house, he shouted, ”Thief! Thief!” so the whole house woke up. All the servants were running here and there, and were searching with torches everywhere. And they found the hole in the wall... certainly somebody has come in. A maidservant watching closely on the floor found some foot marks and went exactly near the wardrobe.

The son is aware; he cannot even breathe. He knows now that somebody is there, and is coming in with a torchlight: ”Soon they will open it and I am caught. And this old man... in what unfortunate moment I asked him to teach me the art; and is this a way of teaching? He finished me in the first lesson!”

But suddenly – and that is God’s voice – he heard somebody inside him saying, ”Make the sound of scratching, as if a rat is inside scratching or eating.” He could not believe it – who was speaking inside? He had never heard such a thing: making a scratching noise like a rat? But he made the scratching noise, and the woman opened the door... certain there was a rat inside. She opened the door, and he came out.

She was holding just a candle in her hand. He blew the candle out and ran away. When he was running out, people followed. He could not figure out who had said to him: ”Blow the candle out.” He had heard the voice say, ”Blow the candle out and run away,” but it was not his thinking because he had heard it; it was coming from somewhere.

And now in the dark night, he is running and people are following him, and they are coming closer and closer and they are shouting, ”He is there! Catch him!” – they can see him.

He comes near a well, and the voice inside him says, ”Take a rock and throw it in the well.” So he takes a rock.... There is no time to question why, and ”Who are you?” and ”What purpose will it serve?” These are questions which you ask when you are conveniently, comfortably seated in a classroom, when there is no hurry for the answer – neither do you mean that you really need the answer. But in such a situation when he is just being caught, the voice speaks and he follows.

He throws a rock into the well and runs away. Certainly, the rock falling in the well makes a big noise, and all the people who are following him stop near the well – they think that the man has jumped into the well. So now some arrangement has to be made: more light has to be brought, somebody From Ignorance to Innocence

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has to go down and find out who this man is, whether he is alive or dead. Now their whole mind is diverted.

He reaches his home, really angry, almost ready to kill the father. And the father is sound asleep, covered with his blanket... it was a cold night. He pulls off his blanket, and he says, ”Is this the way to teach your own son?”

He said, ”Are you back? That’s enough; you have learned the art. Now go to sleep, we will discuss it in the morning.”

But he said, ”You should ask me how....”

He said, ”That does not matter. You are back; about the ’how’, we will discuss in the morning. And I know how, because the same voice that has been speaking in you has been speaking in me my whole life. That’s why I was the master thief. It was not the working of the brain, it was not the working of the mind; it was from my very depths. I have followed only the deepest in me, and I have never gone wrong.

”You are back; that simply means you heard it, and that’s the whole secret of the art. There is no other lesson. The first lesson is the last lesson. If you were not back it meant the student was not able to survive the first lesson: finished. He was not capable.” You have to take a jump. First it will be dark, very dark.

Rest in that darkness.

Darkness has a beauty of its own.

You have known the beauty of light, and the beauty of flowers and trees, and men and women: that is all beauty in light, through light. It is all light reflected: different colors, different faces, different flowers, but it is all the world of light.

You have not known the silence, the depth, the unboundedness of darkness. It also has its own beauty, totally different.

It is the beauty of death.

And once you have allowed it to happen, once you relax in it, you say, ”Okay. If it is death then let it be death, but I am not going back.” Once you relax in this darkness of the cosmic unconscious, slowly it starts becoming lighter.

And the first glimpse of light is the beginning of the superconscious.

When it becomes even lighter, so that you can see the tremendous emptiness, then it is the supersuperconscious. When it becomes so strong a light that it becomes unbearable – again you may feel like escaping – it is the collective conscious. It is not only your conscious, it is the consciousness of all human beings, of the whole history, in totality, condensed. Hence it is too bright.

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Just as darkness makes you afraid, too much brightness also makes you blind and afraid. Don’t be afraid, there is nothing to be afraid of It is your nature; there is nothing to be afraid of, it is your being.

If you allow this tremendous intensity of light of the collective conscious, you enter into the cosmic conscious.

Cosmic consciousness is neither dark nor light.

If you can find just the middle point between light and darkness – very soothing, warm from the side of light, cool from the side of darkness – it is the meeting, the ultimate meeting of the polar opposites.

And this cosmic consciousness is what I call enlightenment.

In darkness you were lost, but the fear, the trembling, the death surrounding you kept something of you still there: a very subtle ego which you cannot catch hold of You feel you are lost but there you are still, because you are afraid. If you are not there, who is afraid? The darkness is so much that you are focused on darkness, and you are not in your focus at all.

In the cosmic consciousness you are really lost. There is no fear, there is no way of going back, or of going anywhere. Hence I call this the arrival – from where you had never departed in fact. It was always there above you, hanging above you, for millions of lives, just waiting, waiting. But to reach it first you will have to go deep down to the very roots.

Friedrich Nietzsche again... because this man I find tremendously insightful. On the whole he is a mess, but in fragments he has such penetrating insight, which is rarely available anywhere else.

He says, ”Before you can reach heaven, you have to reach to hell. Unless you have fathomed hell completely, there is no way to heaven.”

It looks very absurd. And he used to write in maxims; he never wrote essays explaining anything, that was not his way. Insights never come in essays, in theses; they never come for Ph.D., D.Litt.

degrees. No. For a Ph.D. degree you have to sit in a library and do a clerical job, just collecting from here and there. You can simply take a pair of scissors and if you can cut from this book and that book, this journal and that journal, and just go on collecting them in a file, sooner or later you will be a Ph.D. There is not much more to it.

Men like Nietzsche only write maxims. One day suddenly he will write a maxim, and then for months he will not write. This is the meaning of what he says.... Now, Jesus cannot understand it. Jesus says, ”If you want to avoid hell, come follow me, I will take you to heaven. That’s the only way to avoid hell.” Nietzsche is saying, ”If you avoid hell, heaven is already avoided, because heaven is a second step. You have missed the first step.”

In another passage, a similar passage, Nietzsche says, ”Before you can reach to the top of a tree and can understand the flowers blossoming there, you will have to go deep to the roots, because the secret lies there. And the deeper the roots go, the higher the tree goes.” So the greater your longing for understanding, for cosmic consciousness – because that is the ultimate lotus, the lotus paradise – then the further you will have to go to the deepest roots in the darkest underground; and the way is only one.

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Call it meditation, call it awareness, call it watchfulness – it all comes to the same: that you become more alert, first about your conscious mind, what goes on in your conscious mind.... And it is a beautiful experience. It is really hilarious, a great panorama.

In my childhood in my town there were no movies, talkies. There was no cinema hall. Now there is, but in my childhood there was not. The only thing that was available was that once in a while a wandering man would come with a big box. I don’t know what it is called. There is a small window in it. He opens the window, you just put your eyes to it and he goes on moving a handle and a film inside moves. And he goes on telling the story of what is happening.

Everything else I have forgotten but one thing I cannot forget for a certain reason. The reason, I know, was because it was in all those boxes that came through my village. I had seen every one, because the fee was just one paise. Also the show was not long, just five minutes. In every box there were different films, but one picture was always there: the naked washerwoman of Bombay.

Why did it used to be in every one? – a very fat naked woman, the naked washerwoman of Bombay.

That used to be always there... perhaps that was a great attraction, or people were fans of that naked washerwoman; and she was really ugly. And why from Bombay?

If you start looking... just whenever you have time, just sit silently and look at what is passing in your mind. There is no need to judge, because if you judge, the mind immediately changes its scenes according to you. The mind is very sensitive, touchy. If it feels that you are judging, then it starts showing things that are good. Then it won’t show you the naked washerwoman of Bombay, that picture will be missed out. So don’t judge, then that picture is bound to come.

Don’t judge, don’t make any condemnation, don’t make any appreciation. Be indifferent. You just sit silently looking at things, whatsoever is happening. And absurd things will be happening: a horse becomes a man.... Now you need not ask why, there is no need to ask, you simply see it.

For anything that is happening, you have only to be a seer.

And that’s the strategy that helps the whole scenery to slowly disappear from the conscious mind.

And when the conscious mind disappears from the screen, the subconscious is very colorful, much more meaningful, much more truthful.

But remember not to judge; otherwise the subconscious will slip down and you will be back into the conscious.

So two things: no judgment, just simple alertness.

Soon you will find these pictures also disappearing. Then the unconscious appears, which has very strange things to say to you, very mysterious. No need to be afraid; they are voices from the past, of your past lives and of other people’s past lives. Now you are moving into a denser forest, of a tremendous magnitude. Don’t become afraid. The voices are very strong, and it is not only voices....

The unconscious remembers not only the voices, not only the pictures, it remembers all the experiences of all your senses. You will smell things that you have never smelled... but sometime in From Ignorance to Innocence

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a past life somewhere, you must have smelled that smell; it is still there. You may hear music that is not known to you. You may hear languages which you are absolutely unaware of. You may feel the taste of strange foods. All the five senses will supply experiences of many, many lives. You have simply to remain a seer, no judgment. Then these start disappearing.

And when the collective unconscious opens, then animals and trees and birds – all are available to you. You are not separate from them. Stories like Saint Francis can be right. But there is no miracle in it. This man is perhaps the most important man in the whole of Christian history, because he talked to birds, animals, and they understood it. He would just sit on the bank of a river and start calling the fishes, and the fishes would start jumping all around him, listening to him. And he would talk to them. He would say, ”Sisters, how are you?” His disciples would think he was mad, but they could not say that, because they could see that the fishes were listening, nodding their heads. Even the donkey on which he used to move he used to call ”brother donkey”. He just had to say, ”Brother donkey, move right” – and the donkey would move right.

When he was dying, his last words were not said to any man, they were said to the donkey. He said,

”Thank you, brother donkey; you have carried me your whole life and I am immensely grateful” –

and there were tears in the donkey’s eyes. As Francis died the donkey died. He could not bear the separation.

Now, there is nothing miraculous in it. This man has moved through the collective unconscious; perhaps just one life more and he will be able to enter the cosmic unconscious; and from there begins the upward flight.

It’s very strange: if you want to go above consciousness, you have to go below consciusness. But there is only one method.

My name for it is meditation.

But meditation is equivalent to watchfulness, awareness, alertness.

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Baptism: wading for godot

26 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHAT DO YOU WANT MAN TO DO? WHAT IS RIGHT AND WRONG ACCORDING TO YOU? IS

THERE SOMETHING LIKE SIN AND ITS PUNISHMENT TOO?

MY concern with man is not about his doing, but about his being. And this is a very fundamental issue to be understood by you.

All the religions have been concerned about man’s doings. They have been labeling a few acts as wrong, a few other acts as right, a few acts good, a few acts bad. They have not at all pondered over the real problem.

Man is asleep, and when a man is asleep the question is not what he should do or should not do.

The question is: he should be awakened, he should be awake.

And remember, awakening is not a question of doing right, avoiding wrong; not committing sin, doing virtue.

Man’s sleep is not an ordinary sleep. He walks, he talks, he does things, but it is all being done in sleep. So when I say man is asleep, I mean metaphysically, spiritually, man is asleep.

He knows nothing about himself

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His innermost center is in darkness, and the society, the religions, the parents, the cultures, civilizations – nobody is bothered about his being awake. Their concern is that he should do things which are comfortable to them, convenient to them.

They reward you, they give you respectability, and they encourage your greed: so even in the other life, if you go on doing the right thing you will be immensely rewarded, and if you do the wrong thing you will be punished, heavily punished.

Centuries of conditioning have made you ask this question. I am not at all interested in what you do, because a man who is asleep, unaware of himself – whatever he does is wrong.

Let me repeat it: whatever an asleep man does is wrong.

He may be doing virtuous acts: charity to the poor, opening hospitals, schools, colleges, universities; educating people, donating to every cause, helping in every calamity – but I still say whatever he does is wrong, because he is asleep.

He cannot do right.

In sleep it has never been possible to do right.

lust the other day, Sheela brought me the news: in India, in one of the biggest cities, Bhopal, a few days ago there has been a great accident. One big factory which produces some poisonous gas –

must be for military reasons – exploded. It is just in the middle of the city. Two thousand people who were close to the factory died immediately, and one hundred thousand people have been seriously injured.

It is a big accident, and naturally – you can guess – Mother Teresa is running from Calcutta to Bhopal, because these people like Mother Teresa are praying every day to the Lord, ”Give us an opportunity to serve.” And the Lord, their Lord, is so compassionate, he goes on giving opportunities to serve. She went to Bhopal, moved around the injured, went to the families whose people have died, and what she said to them is very important. She said, ”Don’t take it as a tragedy.” This is what the religions have been doing for thousands of years: befooling people. This is a tragedy. She told people, ”Don’t think of it as a tragedy, it is a great opportunity. Look positively. It has brought the best out in man. So many people are serving others, helping in every way. Look at this side of it: the situation has brought the best out in thousands of people. They may never have done anything good in their life, but they are doing it now.” But do you understand the implications of it? It means it should happen in every factory! It should happen in every city, because it brings the best out in people. What can be more beautiful than this?

A great opportunity to be good, to do good, to serve those who need your service, to help those who are in a helpless condition. This is a God-given opportunity for do-gooders. And nobody objected to her!

Perhaps I am the only person here, on this whole earth, who is objecting that this is befooling people.

This is creating a camouflage, a bogus spiritual jargon. If God has any sense, any intelligence at From Ignorance to Innocence

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all, He should find some better way to bring the best out in people. This does not seem to be very intelligent. If this is what God is doing then where is the devil? And what will the devil do? God has taken his job too; the devil is unemployed.

And people applauded her; she is a great saint. And what present has she brought to them? – a small statue of Mother Mary. A great help: ”Pray to Mother Mary, and don’t take it as a tragedy and don’t complain that it is the fault or carelessness of certain officers concerned; no, that is not good.” Of course if those people were not careless, and those officers had not allowed this tragedy, then Mother Teresa could not be a saint. Her sainthood depends on these stupid officers, this bureaucracy.

Now she is consoling people, giving them the impression that it is a God-given opportunity.

Two thousand people have died, two thousand families are now on the streets; children, wives, old parents will become beggars. One hundred thousand people are seriously injured; many of them will die, and if they don’t die they will live a crippled life: somebody blind, somebody without legs, somebody without hands, somebody deaf, somebody dumb. Mother Teresa is consoling these people, giving them a Madonna, Mother Mary’s statue saying, ”Pray to Mother Mary and everything will be okay – and don’t complain against the officers.” Now, that’s strange! Why? Because those officers, the government, go on showering money on her charitable trusts: ”All help to Mother Teresa, all great titles of the country to Mother Teresa.” Every university is competing with the others to give D.Litts. to Mother Teresa; naturally she has to protect those people also. These people should be punished if it is their carelessness – but she is protecting them: ”Don’t complain, because your complaining means you are taking things negatively. Take it positively.”

So she is doing two things: consoling people – which is just rubbish, because this consolation is not going to help, the tragedy is not going to become comedy, they will have to suffer it. And secondly she is protecting those people whose fault it was. They should be really punished! But they are not to be punished”Don’t complain against them” – because she is gathering favor with the government, gathering favor with the officials, with the hierarchy, the bureaucracy.

And the last thing she did, which was her real purpose in going there, was to tell her secretary to write down all the names of the orphans. Many children have become orphans. That was her actual purpose in going there: she is in search of orphans. She has many orphanages, which are just factories to turn orphans into Catholics. You see the works, the miracles of saints!

All those orphans will be taken by her. The government will be happy, the people will be happy, the city will be happy that all those poor children.... Who was going to take care of them? They would have been a nuisance. And in India if two thousand people die that means at least twenty-four thousand children must have been left as orphans. This great chance she could not miss.

Calcutta is far away from Bhopal – a thirty-hour journey by train – but she rushed immediately.

Nobody takes note of where these orphans go on disappearing to. She goes on collecting these orphans, then where do they go on disappearing? She goes on giving them for adoption to Catholic families – but remember, only to Catholic families.

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One American wanted a child; he simply went for that because the doctors had said that the situation was such that he and his wife couldn’t have children; they would have to adopt. He simply went to India to get a child from Mother Teresa. But he forgot one thing, that he is a Protestant. He would have never thought about it. And when he wanted a child to adopt, the secretary asked him about his religion, because she had to fill in the form. When he said that he was a Protestant Christian, she said, ”There is a difficulty. Right now we don’t have any orphans to give for adoption.” Now, in India you don’t have any orphans... I And Mother Teresa is collecting hundreds of orphans every day. And if there was no orphan, why did you want him to fill in a form in the first place? You should have told him before, ”There is no orphan right now, we are helpless. We will inform you; you just leave your address.”

But the secretary was willing to give him a child – just fill in the form, and you go in and choose a child – but as he was a Protestant Christian.... He is still a Christian, what to say about a Hindu, a Mohammedan or a Jaina. And those children belong to Hindus, to Jainas, to Mohammedans.

For example, in Bhopal – Bhopal is a Mohammedan city – those children will be mostly Mohammedans. They will not be given to Mohammedans, to Hindus, to Jainas, no – even a Protestant Christian is denied. And what an excuse, ”There is no orphan available.” There were seven hundred orphans already inside that orphanage, and the secretary was denying that there was one orphan.

These children go on increasing the Catholic population. God is gracious, compassionate: let all the factories explode! Let everybody become an orphan so Catholics go on increasing by millions, and the pope again becomes the emperor of almost the whole world.

There is no wonder that the pope respects Mother Teresa and gives her all the great titles of the church. There is no wonder that she receives the Nobel prize, because she is being recommended even by the pope. You can’t get a Nobel prize unless you are recommended by a certain category of people. Either they have to be Nobel prize winners, or they have to be kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers.

The pope is the king of that small kingdom of the Vatican, eight square miles. He is the king of that kingdom – twenty soldiers he has, and six hundred million Catholics around the world. He has great power, and people like Mother Teresa are working everywhere to bring in more and more people.

You ask me what I want man to do.

First thing: I want man to recognize that he is asleep, because unless he accepts and acknowledges that he is asleep there is no possibility of waking him up. Can you wake a man who thinks he is awake? He will slap you! ”Stop all this nonsense, I am awake! What are you doing?” First you have to recognize it, create a recognition.

I have always loved this story: A few friends, on a full moon night, got drunk. The night was so beautiful and they wanted to enjoy it, so they drank to the full and went to the beautiful river. The boatmen had gone, leaving their boats on the bank on the river. It was the middle of the night, the full moon was just above their heads, and it was a fairy land all over.

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Seeing the boats, one of the friends said, ”It will be good if we go in the boat, on the river. Just look!

The moon is reflected in the river, and when something, a waterfowl, runs over the water or takes a dip into the water, the whole water becomes silver. The moon spreads all over the river.” They were just a little bit awake the way man is: ninety-nine percent they were drunk. They went into a boat, they took the oars and started moving out into the river. The others who were just sitting went on telling the people who were rowing the boat, ”Go faster, it is so beautiful. Don’t move so slowly, make speed.” And the oarsmen were trying hard and perspiring.

As the morning was coming closer, one of them said – because a cold wind started blowing and they came back to their senses a little bit – one of them said, ”We must have come miles away from our place. Somebody should get out and have a look where we are, so that we can go back home.

Soon the sun will be rising, and before that we have to get back; otherwise that boatman whose boat we have picked up without asking will create trouble.” One man got out and started laughing madly. They said, ”Why are you laughing?” He said, ”Just come here and you also will laugh.” They all climbed out – and then they sat there laughing, because they had forgotten to unchain the boat! The whole night they had rowed and had tried to go faster and faster and they were exactly where they had started. Not a single inch... the boat was tied on the bank, it was locked.

This is the story of man as he is.

Now, Mother Teresa must be thinking that she is doing good. I have no doubt about her intentions, but I have tremendous doubt about her wakefulness. She is not awake, she is fast asleep. In sleep at the most you can go on dreaming good dreams, or bad dreams; but what does it matter? If it is a dream, whether you dream of heaven or hell, what does it matter? In the morning you will find both were dreams.

In a dream you can be a thief, or you can be a monk. And of course in the dream you will enjoy being a monk and the ego that comes with it; it is part and parcel of a very polished, cultured ego.

And if you are a thief, certainly, even in your dream you will feel bad that unfortunately you have to become a thief. You don’t want to become one, but situations are forcing you to become a thief even though it is a sin.

You ask me, is there something like sin?

There is only one sin: that is not recognizing your sleep, not recognizing your state of deep hypnotic slumber. That’s the only sin. There is no other sin.

Out of this one sin millions of things can arise, but this is the root. And if this sin is there you cannot do anything right. Even if you try to do anything right you will do it for the wrong reasons, the wrong motives. The action may look right, but the motivation will be wrong. You are wrong; so from where can you get the right motivation?

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Now, what is Mother Teresa running around for in her old age? There should be a time of retirement even for saints. These poor saints never get retired; they become senile but still nobody retires them.

Nobody tells them, ”Now you retire, you have done enough. Now let others do some good works; otherwise you will be the only monopolist in heaven. Share with other saints also. Now you retire, and we will do the good things you were doing.” But no, saints never retire.

Sinners retire but saints never retire.

Strange.... It’s because the saint never gets tired, for the simple reason that his ego goes on becoming stronger and stronger. And he is collecting virtue; his treasure in the other world is increasing more and more. He is coming closer to God every day, so certainly he needs orphans, he needs accidents, he needs poor people.

On the one hand the pope says, ”The idea of class struggle is a sin. The poor have to remain poor; they should not make any effort to change the structure of the society. This is the only society that has been given to them by God. Who are you to think that you can improve upon it?

”If the class structure is there it is a great opportunity, not a tragedy. If you are poor it is a great opportunity: Blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of God. If you want the kingdom of God then don’t make any effort to change the society, to create a revolution, to create some kind of structure where there is not so much distance between the rich and the poor.” I know it will be difficult for the sleeping man to create a society where there is no class at all.

A classless society can only be an enlightened society.

Before that, a classless society is not possible.

Marx is as much asleep as you are.

Communists are as much asleep as the capitalists.

So in Russia, what happened? Sixty years, more than sixty years have passed. They changed the old structure; now there is nobody who is rich and nobody who is poor. That division they destroyed, but a new division has come in: between the bureaucracy – one who is in the government – and one who is just an ordinary citizen. Now all the power is in the hands of the bureaucracy; much more so than it had ever been in the hands of rich people.

Rich people had power because they had money; through money they could purchase anything. But in Russia, the bureaucracy has every power over every individual: to let you live or to finish you off, to keep you in the country or send you to Siberia to die in that eternal world of ice. They have power over your life and death. Such power was never in the hands of the people who had money.

Yes, they had certain powers. They could have a better house than you, they could have more luxuries, more comforts than you, but they did not have the right over your life and death. If they killed you, then in the court they were treated in the same way as everyone else. Perhaps they may have managed a little bit by bribing the court, the judge, but that was very indirect, very difficult. In Russia it is blatantly naked: direct power is in the hands of the bureaucracy.

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I have heard that when Stalin died.... Stalin remained in power perhaps more than anybody else in the whole world. Alexander the Great died very young; he was thirty-three, the same age as Jesus was when he died. Napoleon Bonaparte died on a small island, Saint Helena, as a prisoner. Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

Stalin seems to be the only man in the whole of history who ruled over the biggest of empires –

because Russia is one sixth of the whole earth – for almost half a century. He had all the powers that you can imagine. He killed millions of people. Nobody could even raise a finger, because the moment you raised a finger against Stalin, the next day you disappeared.

When he died Khrushchev came to power, his second man, his very right hand. And at the first communist party meeting he spoke against Stalin. He said, ”I have been watching all these years what this man has been doing. He has brought the classes back; only the name has changed.

There are powerful people and there are powerless people, and the distance between them is the same as it was before. In fact the distance has increased, it has become bigger, tremendously big”

– because in a capitalist country a poor man has every chance to move into a higher society.

Henry Ford was not born rich, and he became the richest man in the world, just through his own talent, his genius. When he was a child he used to polish boots for people. And when his children were born, he was already moving higher and higher, becoming richer and richer. When they came from college he said, ”First, you start polishing people’s shoes in front of the factory” – where he created the Ford cars – ”in front of the doors you start polishing shoes.” They were shocked. They said, ”What are you saying? We are your sons and we should polish the shoes of your servants, your workers?”

Henry Ford said, ”That’s the way I made it, and I would not like you to just inherit capital; that is below your dignity. You are a Ford. You have to earn it, you have to show your mettle.” And you will be surprised – his sons had to polish people’s shoes in front of Ford’s own factory. That man was absolutely right: those people, starting from the very scratch, became rich in their own right. And Ford said, ”Now everything of mine belongs to you. You deserve it.” But just being a son of Henry Ford was not enough.

In a capitalist society it is difficult for a poor man to rise, but it is not impossible. In fact rich people’s children, because they are born in riches, don’t know how to create wealth, and slowly, slowly their wealth disappears. By the third or fourth generation you will find them on the streets amongst the hippies. The poor man’s son knows what poverty is; it hurts. He puts his total energy, all his talents to work. His only focus becomes how to get out of this imprisonment of poverty.

Yes, it is difficult, but not impossible. In fact, the richest people of the world come from poor families.

But in a communist world it is almost impossible to enter into the elite few. It is almost impossible.

First, to become a member of the communist party in Russia is very difficult.

Russia is not like other countries where you pay a little money and you become a member of the republican party or the democratic party, the liberal party or the socialist party. In Russia, to become a member of the communist party you have to prove that you are a communist every inch, that there is not even a lurking shadow of the bourgeoisie. And that you have to start proving from your From Ignorance to Innocence

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very childhood, because there are many layers of the communist party – even the kindergarten communist party.

Now what do you think of that – little kids, the kindergarten school? From there the conditioning begins. And the teachers recommend who is possibly the right candidate to become, one day, a member of the communist party. Then there are youth leagues. All those kindergarten children who have come with recommendations will not be chosen for the youth league, but only a few of them: a few fortunate ones who have proved their devotion.

And how do you prove your devotion in Russia? A very strange method of proving your devotion: to spy on your mother, to spy on your father, to spy on your family and to report to the communist party that your mother has been complaining against the government, that your father is deep down against communism.... And it is not just a question of complaint; you are arranging murder, imprisonment – a life sentence, a death sentence for your mother and father – and you know it.

But this is the only way to prove your devotion. Wives are spying on husbands and reporting against them. Husbands are spying against wives and reporting them. And they know what that report means. It means that tomorrow the wife will be simply missing; you cannot even find where she has gone. There is no case in a court, there is no question of appeal – she simply disappears.

Either she is killed.... Mostly they were killed, because Stalin never believed in unnecessarily burdening the economy of the country with people who were against communism, and if you keep them in prison you have to feed them, you have to give them clothes. And why should your country be feeding its enemies? What is the point? Get finished with them. Unburden the country. And he really unburdened in millions.

Khrushchev was very angry, and he said, ”This man is the greatest murderer in history, and it is good that he is dead. We should remove his grave from Red Square” – because when Stalin was in power, at that time he had ordered his grave to be made near Lenin’s grave in Red Square. While he was in power, the grave was already made according to his design, according to his idea. It had to be the grave of one of the greatest communists.

Khrushchev said, ”We have to remove that grave. It is an ugly spot.” And he removed it. Stalin’s bones were taken out and sent back to the faraway Caucasus where he was born. There, near a monastery where he was educated, is now his poor grave, made with ordinary earthen bricks. That marvelous Italian – marble grave simply disappeared from Red Square.

While he was speaking to the communist party, one member at the back stood up and said, ”You have been with Stalin all these years; why didn’t you say these words then?” And the man sat down.

Khrushchev said, ”I will answer your question; just please stand up again and say what your name is. Comrade, stand up again!” Nobody stood up again. He said, ”This is my answer. Why aren’t you standing up again and saying your name? And now you know why I was silent too; because tomorrow you would disappear. If I have lived to this day, it is because I kept absolutely silent.” Even walls have ears in Russia; you cannot even whisper in your bathroom, because nobody knows...

and particularly people who were in power, like Khrushchev, who was next to Stalin. His bathroom, his bedroom, everything must have been bugged. A slight suspicion and that was enough.

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Stalin never wanted proofs for anything; just a suspicion was enough proof for him. The idea of justice that has prevailed in the world, the whole world, is that not a single innocent man should suffer. Even if ninety-nine criminals have to be left unpunished, not a single innocent man should suffer. That has been the criterion.

Stalin reversed it.

He said, ”Not a single criminal” – and criminal means one who is against communism – ”not a single criminal should be left unpunished, even if ninety-nine innocent people have to be killed.” Just the suspicion was enough; there was no need of finding proof.

And what harm was there? – because communism believes that man is only matter. Is there any harm if you dismantle your chair? Is there any harm if you take your clock apart and put the parts all over the place? Nobody can call you a criminal, although the clock was something alive, moving, and all these parts separated cannot show you the time and will not give the tick-tock of a clock.

Marx’ idea about man is exactly like a clock; man is only a byproduct of matter In a certain arrangement, he speaks, talks, thinks, loves, feels – but all these are epiphenomena, not real phenomena. Put all the parts aside, take man apart: put the head on one side, leg on another side, hands there, heart here, and everything stops, nothing is left. And you can weigh all the parts, they will weigh exactly the same weight as the man. That is his scientific logic: that no soul has left the body. Nothing has gone, it is the same weight. You have just dismantled the organism – it was a machine.

According to Marx, in summary: man is a robot.

So to kill a robot who is creating a nuisance can’t be thought of as anything bad. Stalin did not think he was doing anything bad. He was serving the society, serving the great ideal of communism, bringing the classless society closer and closer.... But all that he brought was a new class society: the bureaucracy, and the people. Now the bureaucracy is exploiting the people in every possible way, torturing them. Every property belongs to the government. There is no private property any more.

In the very beginning of the revolution, that is from 1917 to 1927, for ten years, the idea was discussed continually, ”Should we do the same with women also as we have done with other property?” – because a woman is property. She should not belong to a single man; all women should belong to the nation.

But it seemed difficult, too difficult. The whole nation was against it. Nobody wanted his wife just to be public property like a public bench in the park or a public bus. Even the communists themselves were not ready for that, although Stalin was very much in favor of it. He treated his own wife almost like a thing; he used to beat her.

I have met Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana. After Stalin’s death she came to India. Just by chance I happened to be in Delhi, and the woman I was staying with... she is a rare woman. I will not tell you her name because what I am going to say refers to people who are still alive, and particularly to a person for whom I have tremendous respect. This woman is now nearabout seventy-five. I have never come across a woman that old and yet so beautiful.

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She was in love with J. Krishnamurti.

She wanted to marry J. Krishnamurti, but because

Theosophists did not allow Krishnamurti even to meet with any women.... They wanted him to become a world teacher, and a married world teacher does not look right – I don’t know why.

Perhaps it creates the suspicion that whether you are a world teacher or not, if you have a wife she will be boss. And the world teacher should not have a boss. He is the boss. So they prevented it in every possible way. And finally J. Krishnamurti, even though he renounced the Theosophical movement – their world teacherhood that they were going to impose on him – he still continued to have the idea that a man like him should not be married.

This is how millions of years of conditioning goes deep. If you don’t want to marry that is perfectly okay; it is your decision to be married or not to be married. But to make it something unholy – that is strange. He still stays in this woman’s house if she is in Delhi, because she is in a very high government post. Her principal house is in Bombay. If he is in Bombay then he stays in her house in Bombay.

It is because of Krishnamurti that she became interested in me, because Krishnamurti was continually speaking against me to her. Naturally she became interested, because if Krishnamurti speaks against me.... And he never speaks against anybody else by name, that is below him: this is a subtle kind of ego. For example, if I criticize Mahatma Gandhi, I criticize him openly. Krishnamurti criticizes him but he never mentions his name; that is below him.

But with me Krishnamurti is really cross, particularly because of my sannyasins. Wherever he goes, anywhere in the world, they are sitting in the front row. And the moment he sees their red clothes and the mala, he freaks out. Then he forgets on what subject he was going to speak. Then he starts speaking against me, against sannyas, against the rosary, against disciplehood and against Masters.

In Bombay I have many sannyasins and they used to ask me what to do. I said, ”Just go and sit in front. There is nothing you have to do, just smile and enjoy it.” And the more they enjoyed it, the –

more he would beat his head; he would just go out of his senses. He would forget all awareness.

He would act just like a bull does when you wave a red handkerchief or a red umbrella or a red flag: the bull becomes mad. I think Krishnamurti must have been a bull in his last life.

So he was continually speaking against me to this woman. And the woman’s sisters, sisters-in-law

– her whole family was very much interested in me; they were all my people. Krishnamurti was speaking against me and all the family was speaking for me. Finally the woman decided that she had to meet me. She invited me, saying, ”If you pass through Delhi, stay with me this time.” I was staying with her and she told me, ”Svetlana is here. Would you like to see her?” I said, ”That’s very good. I wanted to meet Stalin, but no harm; some part of Stalin... at least royal blood!”

When I asked her, ”How was he behaving with your mother?” she just started weeping.

She said, ”He was a monster. He used to beat my mother. He used to beat me for any small thing and we could not say a single word against him, because he would do the same to us as he would have done to anybody else – he would kill us. We were treated just like servants.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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Even Stalin’s wife could not enter his room without knocking and asking permission. She had to make an appointment – and they lived just in the same house. Stalin was very much in favor of what he called women’s liberation. And people thought it was not women’s liberation; it was just making all women prostitutes. Everybody was against it. The whole of the communist party’s high-ranking people were against it; not a single person was in favor. That’s why the policy was dropped.

Otherwise everything that was private became public – and by public it simply meant it became state-owned. Your house, your horse, your hands, your land – everything became state-owned.

Hence, in Russia it is not communism.

I call it state capitalism.

The state became the only monopoly – capitalist. In America there are many capitalists; in Russia there is only one capitalist. And certainly to have many is better. Rather than giving all the power to one person.... And it is like a pyramid: the communist party is the base and then slowly the pyramid becomes smaller and smaller with higher bureaucrats and finally and ultimately at the apex comes the central committee of the communist party with only twelve persons.

One of the central committee will be the president and one of them will be the prime minister. And the prime minister is the real power; the president is only a rubber stamp. He has to sign anything that the prime minister decides. Even if the prime minister decides that the president has to be sentenced to death, he has to sign it. He has no other power except to stamp it. Whatsoever comes from the prime minister, he stamps it.

This is a new class structure.

Now, the pope seems to be not aware that to call the class struggle a sin means you are supporting not only America, you are also supporting Russia. Of that he is not aware. That’s the situation of a man who is asleep. He does not know the implications of his own words, his own actions, because class exists everywhere on the earth. There is no country which is classless.

And yes, it is needed that one day the world becomes classless. And by a classless society I don’t mean communism. I simply mean enlightened people who can see that there is no need for poverty to exist; we have enough technology to destroy it. There is no need to destroy the capitalist. All that is needed is to spread capitalism so that everybody becomes a capitalist.

Now, my approach is just the opposite of communism.

In Russia, in China, in other communist countries what have they done? They have destroyed all the capitalists and made the communist party the only monopolizing agency, the only capitalist alive.

And what have they distributed? Poverty! – because after sixty-five years Russia is still poor, still starving, still without enough clothes, still without enough medicine. Seventy percent of their budget goes to the army. Only on thirty percent of the budget does the country live. Seventy percent is absorbed by arms and the army and the piling up of nuclear weapons.

It is such a small thing to see: if we stop the idea of war, which the pope does not call a sin.... War is okay. He does not include war in his long list of sins. War is okay – because if he says war is From Ignorance to Innocence

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a sin then all the popes up to now have been sinners because they have been continually warring, crusading against Mohammedans, against Jews, against everybody. And they have been saying that the crusade is a holy war!

No war is holy. No war can ever be holy.

How can destruction be holy?

How can killing be holy?

How can butchering, slaughtering innocent people, children, women, old people, be holy? It must be holy in the same sense as the Holy Ghost: it is absolutely unholy.

But the classes are there. The capitalist wants the classes to remain there because he feels that without the poor he will not be rich. That is wrong! That is absolutely wrong! Do you think that if poor people breathe then you cannot breathe? All that you need is enough air.

Certainly if air is in short supply then only rich people will breathe, because you will have to pay for it. Of course millions of poor people will die because they cannot pay – they don’t have money to breathe. It is just like in a desert: you have to pay for water.

When Alexander came to India he met a fakir. The name of the fakir, he reports in his diary, does not seem to be Indian, but perhaps he misspelled it, mispronounced it, which is natural – just like me!

The Oregonians are very angry because I pronounce it Oreg-on; it should be Oreg-un. I cannot do that. I will go on pronouncing it Oregon. OreGUN? – sounds like son-of-a-gun. It doesn’t feel right.

Alexander pronounces the name of the fakir, Dandamesh. Dandamesh is not an Indian name at all, it cannot be. It must have been Dandami. And there is in India a sect of monks who carry a staff in their hands called a danda: danda means a big staff. These monks are called Dandadhari, staff holders; that is their symbol, their sect’s symbol. Perhaps that man was carrying a danda and was known as Dandami: one who always keeps a danda. He was a naked man but the danda was absolutely necessary.

You may not understand why it is so. India is so full of dogs, and for certain reasons dogs are very much against monks, policemen, postmen: anybody who has a uniform. All the dogs are against uniforms. I don’t know whether it is true in other countries or not, but in India.... Indian dogs are absolutely against uniforms; anybody in uniform will be in trouble. And because of non-violence dogs cannot be killed, so their population goes on increasing.

This staff was invented so that the poor monk, who has nothing, can at least protect himself against the dogs, because naked men also look like they are in a uniform, to the dog. In a way it is a uniform.

All the naked monks, and there are many.... And at the time when Alexander went to India, India was full of naked monks. The poor naked monk had to keep the danda, the staff.

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and he looked so fulfilled, so contented, so immensely rich that 1, Alexander the Great, the very great conqueror of the whole world, standing before him, looked like a beggar. The very flavor of the man was that of an emperor.” Alexander said to Dandami, ”I would love it if you can accept my invitation. I would like to take you to Greece, particularly, because my teacher” – his teacher was Aristotle – ”has asked me. when I was leaving for India, ’If you come across a real sannyasin –

because a sannyasin is something eastern – if you find a real, authentic sannyasin, you invite him as a royal guest and bring him here. I would love to see and meet a sannyasin. I have heard so much; so many rumors have been coming about sannyasins.’” Dandami laughed and he said, ”What can you give to me?” Alexander said, ”Whatever you ask.”

He said, ”If I ask for half of your kingdom?”

For a moment Alexander was stunned; what to say? But before he could say anything, Dandami said, ”Okay, I ask for the whole kingdom. Don’t be worried. I can see your worry – it is not up to your standards to give just half the kingdom. Okay, you give me the whole kingdom.” Alexander said, ”You are asking too much. I had never thought....” But Dandami said, ”Do you think your kingdom is too much? In a desert you could give it for one glass of water; that’s the value of your kingdom. You keep it, I was just joking. I am not going anywhere. If Aristotle wants to see a sannyasin he will have to come here. The thirsty go to the well, not the well to the thirsty. Tell Aristotle that you have met me. But your kingdom is not worth more than a glass of water. In a desert, at the last moment when you are thirsty and dying, and somebody says, ’Here is a glass of water, but I want your whole kingdom...’ what will you say?” Alexander had to accept it: ”Yes, I would give the whole kingdom for one glass of water.” When water is scarce then of course rich people will be able to have control over water. If air becomes one day scarce, as is possible, because with more and more great happenings like Bhopal

– that great opportunity, where the best comes out of man.... The air is becoming polluted, so much so that soon you will see that only rich people will be capable of breathing – not everybody – because they will have stores of oxygen and oxygen masks. Just let there be a nuclear war anywhere, and you will see that rich people will have facilities to protect themselves, and poor people will be simply dying.

There is no need for war; there is no need for poverty. We have enough money, enough resources, but seventy percent of the whole world’s resources goes towards war. If that seventy percent is prevented from going towards bringing death to humanity, there is no need for anybody to become less rich. All poor people can be raised to a higher standard of living. Marx’ idea, Lenin, Stalin, Mao

– their whole philosophy is to bring the richer people down to the level of the poor people. That they call communism; I call it stupidity.

My idea is to raise every poor person higher and higher and bring him to the level of the richest person. There is no need for poverty.

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I will also have a classless society, but it will be of rich people. If Marx succeeds, he will also have a classless society – but phony. First, it will be of poor people. Secondly, because of those poor people, you will need a very strong and powerful bureaucracy to keep them down; otherwise they will revolt.

In America there is a possibility of a revolution, but in Russia you cannot conceive even the idea of revolution. You cannot talk with anybody about revolution. The very word will be enough for you to evaporate in some gas chamber

Russia is not classless. America is not classless.

Yes, different classes, but nobody is classless. And when the pope says that the idea of a class struggle is a sin, he certainly implies that the idea of creating a classless society is also a sin. No, the poor should remain poor, the rich should remain rich.

The very idea of class helps the so-called religions, because if everybody is rich and everybody has everything that is needed and everybody lives comfortably and luxuriously, who is going to bother about your heaven? Instead people will pray, ”Please, send me back to the earth. I don’t want to come to your heaven.”

In the first place heaven will be a very ancient place – perhaps even bullock carts may not be available there, because I have never heard that God created bullock carts. And the spinning wheel... I sometimes feel sad for Mahatma Gandhi: if he has reached heaven, what will he be doing? – because the spinning wheel is not available there. There is no mention in any religious scripture that the spinning wheel is available to the angels.

Mahatma Gandhi will be simply dying to get back to the earth to find his spinning wheel again, because the whole day he was spinning. In the train, traveling, he was spinning; talking to people, he was spinning; dictating letters, he was spinning; dictating articles, he was spinning. He carried the spinning wheel everywhere.

There is no need for poverty, but the spinning wheel will keep people poor. Even if you spin for twelve hours a day you will not be able to create enough clothes for yourself And there are other things to do, not just make clothes. You will need to eat something, drink something. And there are many other things you will need, not just clothes. Even if after twelve hours spinning you can make enough clothes to cover your body somehow, by that time the body will have disappeared because there will not be any food.

Gandhi wanted cultivation also to be done by ancient methods. That would mean that India had to fall back to Buddha’s time, twenty-five centuries back. Then there were only twenty million people in India. Now there are seven hundred million people in India. You would have to cut out six hundred and eighty million people completely. And this will be non-violent?

Yes, two million people, twenty million people are capable of living by ancient methods – a little food they can manage – but what to do with seven hundred million people? By the end of this century India will be the most populous country in the world, it will have gone farther ahead than China.

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numbers! – one thousand million people. India will have passed beyond that by the end of this century.

But there will be more orphans, more poor people to be converted to Catholicism, to be made Christians, and more Mother Teresas.

No, a man asleep cannot do right.

You ask me: what is right, what is wrong?

I say to you to be awake is right.

To be asleep is wrong.

I don’t determine acts wrong and right as such.

My focus is your being.

My effort is that you are there, in your being.

Then whatever you do is right.

A Zen monk used to steal – and he was a great Master – but I say it was right because he was fully awake. Now, stealing in itself does not matter; whether it is right or wrong. It is a question of who is doing it. And why was this Master stealing? He had never said why in his whole life.

All his disciples suffered for it because everybody was telling them, ”What kind of Master have you got? He talks about great things and then suddenly one day you find him stealing some small thing.

And he always gets caught. Even ordinary thieves don’t always get caught. And you say he is fully aware, careful, alert. And we understand, because even his disciples have a different quality surrounding them. And we know your Master, we see him. We are surprised – why should he steal?” And the disciples used to ask him and he would simply laugh. At last, when he was dying, a disciple said, ”Now at least tell us why you were doing this stupid thing. And you have not been stealing big treasures or anything, just somebody’s cup and saucer, somebody’s coat, somebody’s shoes, even one shoe! – which is meaningless. What were you going to do with one shoe? – and then too you would be caught. And the judges are tired of you, the jailers are tired of you.” At the last moment he said, ”I was stealing because nobody takes care of those thieves and prisoners inside the jail. That’s a great place to teach awareness; and those people are very innocent. And I love them because I have found them getting the idea more quickly than the so-called ordinary people. So I have been stealing and going inside the jail because that was the only way to get in. But those idiot judges would not send me for a long time, for two months, three months, because I am a great Zen Master.

”I used to tell them, ’Give me as long a term as you can manage,’ and they would say, ’What kind of man are you? We respect you. What do you want for just stealing one shoe – that we should send you for your whole life? Fifteen days will do.’”

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He used to quarrel: ”No, not fifteen days. At least three months, four months.”

”But for what?” they said.

He simply said, ”I love to be there. Outside I don’t like it at all.” Jailers were tired, and they would see him and say,”Again!” He said, ”Where to go? Outside I don’t like it at all. Inside the jail looks almost like my home.” And in fact it was his home because almost his whole life he had lived there. For just a few days he would be out, and then soon he would be in again. But he changed thousands of people inside the jail. He said, ”Where can you get so many people? In the monastery people come, but not in such quantity; and not such qualitatively innocent people.”

So to me it is not a question of what you do: the act is neither right nor wrong, the act is neutral.

It depends on who does it, that person’s integrity, awareness. If an awakened man is doing it, it is right. Otherwise whatever you do, it is going to be like Mother Teresa’s work: on the surface looking really great; deep down just third-rate.

You also ask: Is there something like sin and its punishment?

I have told you there is only one sin:

That is unawareness.

And you are being punished every moment for it.

There is no other punishment.

Do you want more?

Your suffering, your misery, your anxiety, your anguish – and you are still hoping to be thrown in hell?

You are not satisfied with all the misery that you are going through? Do you think hell is going to be better than Oregon? What more punishment is there?

Each moment of unawareness carries its own punishment, and each moment of awareness carries its own reward. They are intrinsic parts, you cannot divide them.

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Science plus religion – the dynamic formula for the future 27 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

IT SEEMS THAT ALL THE PIONEERS IN ART AND SCIENCE HAVE REACHED THE UNKNOWN

SPACES THROUGH SOME KIND OF OBSESSIONS. WHAT KIND OF OBSESSIONS HAS THE

NEW RELIGIOUS MAN?

SCIENCE, art, and other dimensions open to the human mind are all one-dimensional – hence the obsession. The mind moves in one direction, dropping all others. It chooses a single point to be focused on, against the whole of life, hence the obsession.

Concentration is obsession, but there is no other way – science and art can work only obsessionally.

For example, a man like Albert Einstein... a man of tremendous intelligence, a superb genius, but he is obsessed. He is so much in his own dimension, the world of stars, the universe, that by and by he becomes completely blind to everything else. He forgets when he has to go to sleep, he forgets when he has to come out of his bathroom.

Sometimes for six hours Einstein used to remain in his bathtub – till his wife started making too much fuss, knocking on the door. And she was understanding, hence she tolerated as much as was possible – but six hours in the bathtub! And she would be sitting with his lunch getting cooler and cooler and colder and colder, and she knew it was not good to disturb him because even while he was in his bathtub playing with the soap bubbles, his mind was moving into depths of the universe.

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He discovered his theory of relativity in his bathroom. He used to say, ”Don’t disturb me. Nothing is more important. When I am moving in a certain direction, and I am coming close to the clue, and you knock on the door.... Let the lunch be cold, throw it away, because just for your lunch you have distracted me. I was just getting close; now I am as far away as I was before. And nobody knows when again I will come so close to the point. It is not within my hands.” Now, this man is certainly obsessed.

Edison was a great genius; perhaps nobody else has so many discoveries to his name, to his credit, as Edison: one thousand discoveries. But he was so obsessed that once he forgot his own name.

That is a very rare possibility, most improbable... forgetting one’s own name! – then you can forget anything.

It was before the first world war, when, for the first time in the world, ration cards were invented, and he had gone to take his ration. He was standing in a line and people went on moving forward. When his number came and he was at the front of the line, they called again and again, ”Thomas Alva Edison, is there anybody by the name of Thomas Alva Edison?” And he looked here and there: who is this Thomas Alva Edison?

One neighbor standing behind, far back in the line, said, ”What are you looking at? You are Thomas Alva Edison, I know you.”

He said, ”If you say so, then certainly I must be, because you are such a nice guy, you can’t lie.” What happened to him? How did he forget his name? Even standing in the queue for the ration card, he was not there. He was in the world of electricity. He was figuring out things which had no concern with the place where he was standing or with the ration card or with the person named Thomas Alva Edison.

It is said... perhaps it is just a joke, but it is possible that if a man can forget his own name it may be true and not a joke. He was going for a journey. He kissed his maidservant thinking she was his wife, and patted his wife thinking she was the maidservant. They both were shocked. But he said, ”What is the matter? Why are you both looking shocked? Aren’t you my wife and isn’t she my maidservant?” And he was not joking; he was simply not there.

Obsession means you are possessed by some idea so totally that everything else becomes absolutely unimportant, everything else falls into darkness. Only one spot remains lighted, and it goes on growing narrower and narrower and narrower. That’s the way of discovery. When it comes to be the narrowest, you have found the center for which you have been looking for years.

But when your focus is narrowing, and when the circle of your focus is becoming smaller and smaller, what about you? You are also becoming narrower and narrower – one-pointed. The whole universe disappears for you.

The scientist is bound to be obsessed: the greater the scientist, the bigger the obsession. Hence, obsession is not a disease for a scientist, it is absolutely necessary. It is his way of working. If you relieve him of his obsession he will be an ordinary man, not a scientist.

It is defined, that science knows more and more about less and less. The object of knowledge becomes less and less, and your knowledge of it becomes more and more. If the definition is From Ignorance to Innocence

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stretched to its logical conclusion, it means science ultimately will come to a point where it knows everything about nothing. That will be the logical conclusion.

And science is coming closer to that point where it knows all about nothing, because ”less and less” is finally going to become nothing. And knowledge about ”more and more” is finally going to become about everything.

Just the opposite is the situation of religion. It knows less and less about more and more. Obviously a religious man becomes more and more unobsessed. The more he becomes religious, the less obsessed he is. His method is to know less and less about more and more. His ultimate conclusion is to know nothing about all.

That’s why Bodhidharma says, ”I know nothing.”

Socrates says, ”I know nothing.”

Nothing about what? About all.

The focus is no longer there. The religious man is just a presence opening into all dimensions simultaneously.

Art is similar to science. Everything except religion is bound to be a kind of an obsession for the simple reason that you have to go deeper and deeper to find the source of something; but your vision becomes narrower, and everything else starts falling out of your vision. You don’t see, you become more and more blind about everything else except the one thing with which you are obsessed.

The painter, while painting, is not aware of anything; the poet also. One of the greatest poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, used to lock himself in his room or in his porch for days together. He was not to be disturbed for food or anything. Nobody knew what he was doing inside his room because he had locked it from inside. Sometimes three days would pass and the whole family would be in a panic, wondering whether that man was still alive or dead. But there was no way to disturb him.

They would all move around outside his room just to figure out if there was some noise inside or not, at least some indication that he was still alive.

When he was asked, ”Why do you do it?” he said, ”Unless I forget the whole world, and my family....” His family was a big family. His father was one of the richest men in Bengal, his grandfather was even richer. The British government had given them the title of rajah, the king, although they were not kings. But they had so much land and so much property and so much money that they were equivalent to any king; they had their own kingdom.

There were one hundred people in the family. Rabindranath writes in his autobiography: ”There were many people that I never came to know who they were. Guests used to come and then never go, and nobody would bother about it. Faraway relatives would appear – nobody had heard about them, they just used to declare that they were faraway cousins. That was perfectly okay, they were allowed in the family. They stayed in the family, they lived in the family, and they were so rich that nobody bothered whether these people should work or anything.

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So, Rabindranath says, ”In that family it was always a marketplace. It was impossible to be in that space where poetry becomes possible. It comes only when you are alone. It is very shy, it is very feminine; it won’t come in a crowd. It won’t come if you are concerned with something else. It will come only when you are concerned only with it. It is very possessive, just like the feminine. Of course as graceful as the feminine, and as shy as the feminine, but of course, as possessive too.” He said, ”When I am possessed I don’t want any disturbance. So many times I have missed, and a half poem has remained half I could not manage that space again; the remaining lines never came.

And I am not a poet who will compose poetry just intellectually. If it comes from the beyond, I am receptive.” And that beyond is really within your unconscious; it comes from there. But it looks like it is coming from the beyond.

Now, if you cure the poet of obsession, you kill him. Sigmund Freud is not needed by poets and scientists and artists. He will destroy them all. He will psychoanalyze them, disperse their obsession, and they will be reduced into ordinary human beings. But religion is not one-dimensional, hence there is no need for any obsession.

In fact, if you are obsessed you cannot be religious.

Yes, these people – scientists, poets, painters, musicians, dancers – have sometimes reached into unknown spaces through their obsession. But those unknown spaces are not spiritual spaces; they are within the mind, and they belong to some part below the conscious mind, either to the unconscious or to the collective unconscious or to the cosmic unconscious.

The deeper the space is, the more unknown it is. But just because it is unknown does not mean that you have touched something spiritual. It is unknown but part of the unconscious world of your mind

– it is not spiritual. It is tremendously exciting because it is so unknown. You have entered into an unknown corner of your being.

It is just a tremendous discovery, but still it is not religious. It won’t bring you to the ecstasy and the blessing of a religious man. On the contrary, it may create a tremendous anguish in you, a tension which is unbearable, a nightmare which is pure suffering. Hence, you will find poets, musicians, scientists, in a kind of anguish. What they are doing is certainly a kind of fulfillment to them, but it does not bring solace to the soul.

Albert Einstein, before dying, said, ”If I am born again I would prefer to be a plumber than to be a physicist.” What anguish he must have suffered that he is ready to become a plumber and does not want to be a physicist again! – because any obsession is a torture. You are being stretched.

It is not a harmonious growth of your being because it is one-dimensional. It is as if a man’s head starts growing and becoming bigger and bigger and bigger; the whole body shrinks and the head becomes so big that he can only stand on his head, there is no other way. The body cannot support the head.

In Japan they have dolls called daruma dolls Daruma is the Japanese name for Bodhidharma. Those dolls are beautiful. They represent Bodhidharma: their base is heavy, very heavy, so you can throw the doll in any way, and it will always go back into the lotus posture again. Because the base is heavy and the head iS light, and the whole body is light, it cannot remain in any other position. If From Ignorance to Innocence

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you put it in any other position it will immediately turn and sit in the lotus posture. The daruma doll was created because of a certain statement of Bodhidharma. He said, ”When you become really centered in your being, nothing in t e whole of existence can create even a slight trembling in you.

No fear is possible. And when you are centered in your being, even if the whole of existence wants to throw you upside down, it is impossible; you Will always come rightside up.” That gave the idea of the daruma doll.

The religious man is multidimensional.

All his windows and all his doors are open.

His consciousness is available to everything.

He is not looking for a certain discovery, he iS not looking even for God. That is why I am continually saying to you, ”There is no God, don’t look for Him otherwise you will be obsessed. That’s why I cal a the religions that have existed up to now pseudo-religious: they are obsessed, just like anybody else – in fact, more obsessed.

What is a Tibetan monk doing his whole life. Just repeating the name of Buddha. If that is not an obsession, then what can be an obsession? – and a useless obsession too. If Albert Einstein is obsessed, at least he contributes to the world. He suffers, but he gives something to the world.

These Tibetan monks, what have they given to the world? The Hindu monks, what have they given to the world? What is their contribution? Of the Christian monks, the Catholic monks alone are one million in number. One million monks! – and what iS their contribution? They are just burdens on humanity – obsessed people, but obsessed with something that does not exist; hence there is no contribution.

The scientist is obsessed with something that really exists – he is obsessed with some objective reality. The poet is obsessed with something of subjective reality. But your pseudo-religious man is obsessed with a God which does not exist, and out of a non-existent God what are you going to get? Where are you going to reach? These monks are moving in circles their whole life. They are obsessed.

So let me make it clear to you. If you find a religious man obsessed, then that is enough proof that he is not religious. A really religious man is not obsessed at all. He is open to the whole. And he is not concerned in any way to discover something, to create something: a song, a painting, a dance, a sculpture. No, he is not concerned.

It is possible that a really religious man may create a song, but that is just play; he is not serious about it. It is just... you are sitting on the beach and you start playing and making a statue out of wet sand. You are not obsessed with it; there is no need to complete it. And when you leave you may push over the statue that you have been creating for hours.

This was not an obsession, you were just being playful. Sitting alone... you were not doing something serious. A religious man sometimes composes poetry or music or dance or a statue or a painting, but they are all just games.

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There are millions of statues in the East so beautiful that Michelangelo would feel jealous, but the sculptors have not even signed their name: that would become a serious affair. Millions of statues of the same caliber and quality as those of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo – but nobody knows who made them. The people who made them were just enjoying, playing. Out of play, if something comes, you cannot claim it is your creation and that you have to sign it.

Who made the Ajanta caves? – the Ellora caves? Who made the Khajuraho temples? Who made the Konarak temples? There is no way to find out. The people who made such tremendous beauty, incomparable, were not concerned at all to leave even a single trace behind. They enjoyed making it, of course, but that was all. It was not an obsession.

If you go to the Ajanta caves, which are Buddhist caves, where for thousands of years Buddhist monks must have been working.... Many caves are incomplete. I used to go there, and I asked the guides – different guides – again and again.... There were many guides, and I would always choose a different one so I could torture him. Incomplete caves, incomplete statues, Buddhas only half-made... and I would ask, ”What was the matter?” And they would have no explanation.

Somebody said, ”Perhaps the artist died.”

I said, ”There were so many other artists – there must have been thousands of artists for so many caves; each cave must have needed hundreds of artists to make it – couldn’t they complete even a Buddha? Just the body is there, the head was just being started. This looks a little disrespectful to Buddha. You should complete it.”

And they would say, ”What can we do? Nobody knows who made them. Nobody knows why they stopped in the middle.”

I said, ”I know, that’s why I am asking. This whole thing was just a big game. The person who was making it was not obsessed, otherwise he would have completed it. If he was dying, he would have taken a promise from a friend to complete it.”

The obsessional man is a perfectionist.

He will not leave anything incomplete, he will make it entire; he will not rest till it is complete. But to a religious man.... They played as long as they enjoyed it. The moment they felt it was time to stop this game, they stopped the game. And because they stopped the game, no other artist – they were all religious people – would interfere with it.

Anybody could have completed it; just a little work was needed and it could have been completed. It was almost complete, but nobody interfered with it because that was trespassing. If that man wanted his Buddha to remain this way, it was his business. And that man may have started something else, because it was all play.

A religious man can create playfully but cannot be serious. Seriousness is part of obsession.

For example, Karl Marx is the ideal obsessional man. His whole life he spent in the British Museum library. He had no actual experience of poverty; he had never been part of the proletariat, the laborers for whom he was going to be the messiah. He had not a single friend who was a laborer.

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He had only one friend, who was a capitalist, Friedrich Engels. And he had to be friendly towards Engels because who was going to feed him? His obsession was to create the whole philosophy of communism, in its entirety, so there would be no need for anybody else to add anything. He was a Jew – and somehow it is very difficult to get rid of your conditioning. Although he became an atheist, denied God, denied soul, a Jew is a Jew – he wanted to make communism absolutely complete.

Before the museum library was open, he was standing there at the door. The librarian would come after him; before he came, Marx was waiting. And the whole day he was in the library. The library would be closed, and the librarian would be persuading him, ”Now please, you stop. Come tomorrow.”

And Marx would say, ”Just wait a few minutes more; something is still incomplete. I have to complete this note.”

In the beginning they used to be nice to him. Finally they found this was not going to help: they had to forcibly throw him out of the library. Four people would take him out, and he would be shouting,

”Just a few minutes more! Now, are you mad, or what? What are you doing? Tomorrow I will have to work hours to find those few sentences that I could write just now. Just wait!” But the library has to be closed at a certain time, and those people have to go to their homes. They are just servants. They don’t care about your communism and what philosophy you are writing. And you have been doing this for twenty years, thirty years, forty years! Forty years continuously! And sometimes it used to happen that he would not eat. The food would be with him, because he used to come with his tiffin carrier so that he did not have to go home or to a hotel and waste time.

So he would be just eating and referring to encyclopedias and books: with one hand he would be continually writing, and with the other hand he would be eating. And sometimes he forgot to eat; and as he became older, many times it happened that he was taken not to his home but to the hospital, because he was found unconscious: hungry, continuously reading, writing, reading, writing.

One feels sad that nobody reads this poor Karl Marx’ book, Das Kapital – nobody! I have not come across a single communist who has read it from the first page to the last. Perhaps I am the only person who has read it from the first page to the last – just to see what kind of madman this Karl Marx was. And he was certainly a madman – so obsessed with economics, with exploitation, that he forgot the whole world.

He forgot small things. He was moving into the higher realms of mathematical theorizing, and he forgot simple mathematics, simple economics. He was a chain-smoker; he was reading, writing –

and smoking. His wife, his physician, his friend Engels, they were all worried that this smoking would kill him.

One day he came home with big boxes of a certain cigarette that had just come on the market. His wife could not believe it: ”Are you going to open a shop? Are you going to sell cigarettes? So many big boxes!”

And he was so happy. He said, ”You don’t understand. I have found this new cigarette, just introduced on the market. And the cigarette that I was smoking was costing double. Now with From Ignorance to Innocence

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this cigarette you smoke one cigarette, and you save so much money; you smoke two cigarettes and you save so much money again. The more you smoke, the more money is saved! And I am going to smoke them because everybody has been torturing me, saying, ’You don’t earn.’ Now you will see how much money is saved.”

The wife thought, ”Your economics...!” She informed his friend Engels, and called him to come immediately. ”Your friend seems to have gone completely mad, because this stupid thing even I can understand. How will money be saved? But he does not listen and he is just in his room smoking two cigarettes together, to save money!”

Engels came, took the cigarettes from his mouth and said, ”Are you mad? What are you doing?” He said, ”I am just trying to do something so that I need not depend on you: saving money.” It was so difficult to explain to him, ”Nothing will be saved, you will simply kill yourself. Yes, in figures it looks as if you smoke one cigarette and half the money is saved, but in actuality there is no money saved. And just to save that money you will be smoking double, treble, four times the number of cigarettes. So in fact you will be wasting more money than you were wasting before. And money is not the question,” Engels said, ”I take care of it. You need not be worried about it.” He was a millionaire, owned factories, and he loved Karl Marx.

But Marx was so obsessed with making the system complete. And of course he has left a complete system; after Marx there has been no addition to it. To add anything to it, first you will have to read him, and that is going to drive you nuts.

Aristotle has created a whole system of logic; that was his obsession. Just a single man.... His whole obsession his whole life was this: that the system of logic that he was creating should be complete, he should leave it with a closed chapter. So for future generations, for the whole future eternity, he would remain the logician, the only logician. And he completed his system. Of course he was obsessed. Day and night he was working: he wouldn’t sleep until he fell asleep on his books.

But these people are not religious people.

You ask me, what kind of an obsession will the new religious man have? The new religious man is simply the religious man. The old religious man was not religious, he only pretended to be religious.

He made religion also an obsession. He was more obsessed than the scientist, than the painters and poets – because at least poets were going to the coffee house, meeting with the friends, doing other things besides poetry. Painters were not only painting, they were doing a thousand and one other things too. But these pseudo-religious people were not doing anything else. They closed themselves in cells, in monasteries, and all that they were doing was nagging God.

Nietzsche said, ”God is dead.”

Nobody asked him, ”Who killed Him7”

I know: these so-called religious people.

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They nagged Him for centuries. And all kinds of religious people, in all languages, nagging a single poor God – He must have committed suicide His suicide is more probable than a natural death. He cannot die a natural death; He must have committed suicide But those people are still after Him. Even in H;s grave He will be tossing and turning, because the Catholic is shouting in His ear, the Protestant is shouting in His ear, and then come the witnesses of Jehovah, who can drive anybody nuts. All these people, all around the world, day and night, year in, year out, just after one single poor old God. These people must have provoked the desire for suicide in Him.

It is a known fact that God never created anything after He created man. I have been wondering why Why did He stop with man? Up to man’s creation; everything was good. The horses were not becoming monks. The donkeys were not becoming priests. The monkeys were not declaring themselves popes. God was happy. It is said that He created each thing and said, ”Good” – just the way I say, ”Good.” He must have learned it from me because I don’t know anybody else who says good the way I say good. But when He created man He didn’t say that.

He must have lost His nerve – ”What have I done?” – because immediately man must have created the business of the so – called religions. He must have grabbed His feet immediately: ”God, my Lord....” Since then nobody has heard about Him, where He is.

Either He escaped to the farthest star – and physicists say those stars are running farther away; perhaps it is because of God.

Those stars are not static there. That was the idea up to this century, that the stars are static there, far away, but they are there. Now physicists say that they are not there. Where you see the stars in the night, there they may have been millions of light-years ago. The light has reached your eyes tonight, but light takes time to travel.

Where you see a certain star tonight. one thing is certain: it is not there. It may have been sometime far, far back – perhaps when the earth was not made, when even your solar system was not in existence, the star was there. That day the light started moving towards the non-existent earth and the non-existent sun, and it has arrived today. This much time it took to reach. Meanwhile the star is not sitting there. The light is coming towards you and the star is going farther away with the same speed as light – that is, at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second the light is coming towards you and the star is going away from the point where it was.

Perhaps God is riding on the farthest star and running as fast and as far away as possible from all these prying monks and religious people and churches, temples, mosques, synagogues. But it is good to say that there is no God, it saves God all the trouble. And one day it will save man also from this stupid obsession.

The religious man has no obsession.

His life is simple, natural, spontaneous, moment-to-moment. He has no great ideas that he wants to bring to the world. He has no great ideologies that he wants to impose on humanity.

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He is a simple man. That’s why it is very difficult to find a religious man, because he will be so simple and so ordinary that you are going to miss him. He won’t have any talent. He will not be a Picasso, he will not be an Einstein, he will not be a Stalin; he won’t have any kind of talent. You will not be able to judge his genius because his genius is unobsessed, so he cannot produce science, he cannot produce new discoveries, new inventions.

It is not just a coincidence that in the East, where religion has existed for at least ten thousand years.... And there have been a few authentically religious men. Of course there has not been yet an authentic religion; but here and there, once in a while, there have been authentic religious men.

But the East has not been able to create science.

Do you think Buddha had not the genius equivalent to Albert Einstein? He had a far bigger, higher, deeper genius than any Albert Einstein could ever have. But he is not obsessed, hence his genius does not move in one direction. His genius becomes a fragrance around him, becomes a light around him. Those who have eyes can see the light. Those who have ears can hear the music around him, can hear the silence that surrounds him... can smell the fragrance of the man.

But Buddha is not going to invent a computer. He is not obsessed; he is absolutely unobsessed.

So you can feel his genius, but you cannot see it reflected in some objective achievement. What is his achievement? Far smaller people have achieved much more. He has not achieved anything, but he has been just himself. If you can call it an achievement, then call it achievement. But it is not achievement.

What he is, he has always been. Achievement means something that was not there and now is there. But to realize oneself; to know oneself, is not to bring any new thing into existence. It has been there; whether you know it or not doesn’t make any difference to its existence. It has been there. It is there. Yes, there was a time when you were keeping your back to it, and now you have taken a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and you are facing it – but nothing new has come into existence.

You can feel that experience – yes, it is an experience. All that you need is to be receptive, available, open, because a man like Buddha cannot even knock on your doors: even that will be interfering with somebody else’s being.

Buddha can stand before your doors and wait till eternity: someday you may open the door, someday you will invite him in. Without your invitation he is not going to come in. There is not a question of ego. It is your house, you are the host, and unless you invite him it is not right to trespass on your privacy in any way.

Buddha became enlightened – but for seven days he remained silent. And he gave many arguments why he remained silent for seven days; in fact he wanted to remain silent forever. Later on when he was asked again and again why he had remained silent for seven days and then had spoken, he said, ”Even to speak is to interfere; let the other understand the silence. And if he cannot understand the silence, do you think he will understand my words? Because my words will be far away from my silence. They won’t be representative. There is every possibility he may be misguided by my words, and I may be helpless to prevent it. In silence if somebody comes to me, he cannot misinterpret it. He may understand, he may not understand; there are only two possibilities, and I will not be From Ignorance to Innocence

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responsible for sending him on a track which was not my intention at all. But my words can take him in a direction which is not the direction I am pointing at.” So for seven days he remained silent and people asked, ”Why did you speak?” He said, ”Now, this you will have to just take on faith, if you trust me. But there is no need to accept it, because it is meaningless. I was persuaded by other enlightened beings who are in the cosmos.

But this you will have to take on faith, unless you reach that state.” He insisted, ”This should not be part of my teachings; I am just fulfilling your curiosity. You can reject it because it is not an essential part of my teaching. But if you insist on asking why I spoke, then I have to answer you.

Buddha said, ”People who have become enlightened before persuaded me, they argued with me.

They said, ’In thousands of years a man comes to this state of being, where you are. Even if out of a hundred people one person understands your words rightly, that is enough. Don’t be worried about the ninety-nine because they will go astray even without hearing you. They are bound to go astray.

”’If they can go astray even hearing you, then what do you think – that without hearing you they will not go astray? Take it for granted: those ninety-nine are determined to go astray whether you speak or not. But what about that one percent? We appeal to you for that one percent who may not be able to find the path without your speaking.’”

And Buddha said, ”I am speaking for that one percent.” Strangely, I am still speaking for that one percent.

The world has not moved a single inch.

Twenty-five centuries and man is as blind, as asleep, and unconscious as he ever was.

Charles Darwin was absolutely wrong, because looking at man there seems to be no evolution: as far back as we can see, he is the same. If for ten thousand years there has not been any evolution in man, do you think one day suddenly a few monkeys jumped from their trees and, without any Patanjali to teach them yoga exercises, stood – instead of on their four legs, on two legs? And their two front legs turned into two hands? And their monkey mind became man’s mind?

It seems to be a far greater miracle than any prophet or messiah has been performing. It would have been far better for Jesus to turn a monkey into a man, because that would have proved poor Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But he could not even turn man into man – what to say about turning a monkey into a man!

In English you have only one word for man; that is a poverty of language. In Hindi we have two words for man: one is admi – that is from Adam – and another is insan: both mean man. Admi is the lowest state of mankind; insan is the highest state of mankind.

One of the great poets, Mirza Ghalib, has a statement in which he says, ”In this world the most difficult thing is the transformation of an admi into an insan. It is one of the most difficult things to make man really a man. He is subhuman.”

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So I say, still I am speaking for the one percent. And that one percent are not people having a special talent, a special quality, no – they just have an open heart, an open being, open from all directions, unobsessed with anything. They will be pure ordinariness – not in any way tense, pushed, pulled in any direction, as if there was a magnet. They will be relaxed, with no tensions.

Yes, if the whole of humanity one day turns into a religious commune, many things will disappear from the world which are not needed.

Ninety percent of scientific discoveries are used only in war; they are not needed.

Ninety percent of paintings are just absurd; they are not needed.

Ninety percent of problems that you continuously have to face are absolutely unwanted, unbased.

They will disappear.

And whatever ten percent is left, the whole of humanity, radiant in its innocence and simplicity, will be able to cope with.

There will be no problem.

With that much innocence on the earth, and that much fragrance on the earth, and that much light on the earth, it is inconceivable that any problem could exist.

But many professions will disappear. What will the psychoanalyst do? What will the psychologist do? What will the therapist do? What will the priest do?

Hence all these people are going to prevent the coming of the new man in every possible way, because his coming is their departure.

Who will bother about nuclear scientists? They will be simply cured from their obsession. Nuclear science? – you must be nuts! Man is starving, and you are piling up atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and neutron bombs... and man is starving. What kind of intelligence is at work? People are dying for small, little things: no shelter, no clothes, no food – and you are trying to reach the moon!

For what? At what a cost!

And nobody asks, ”Please at least let us know what is the point. Even if you reach there, then what you are going to do?” What did those people really do when they reached the moon? They must have looked absolutely foolish standing there – and they had risked their life. They went through all kinds of strange training – in isolation tanks, in isolation rooms, in airless rooms, in gravitation

– less rooms, for years. And then the whole journey, which was full of hazards – any moment anything could have gone wrong. And when you arrived what did you do there? What has been the attainment?

And now they are trying for Mars and other planets. Something seems to be crazy, buzzing in the politicians’ mind, in the scientists’ mind. Something seems to be basically wrong. And I say to you, it is the unobsessed religiousness that is missing. When a man is simple, innocent, ordinary, with no pretensions, no hypocrisy, his eyes are clear, he can see through and through: problems simply drop.

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There is no need for problems to be. We create problems with one hand and we try to solve the problems with the other hand – and both are our hands! And where is this nonsense going to stop?

Because with one hand we will go on creating problems, and with the other hand we will go on solving the problems. And it is our energy.

The religious man simply understands that these are both his hands; they have to learn to be together, they have to learn to function together in harmony.

If all the scientists of the world can have a little understanding of religiousness, they can at least refuse to create for war.

And if politicians are very much interested, they can have wrestling matches. Everybody will enjoy it and there will be no harm. Why kill people? – people who have no interest in anything for which they will be killed. Why kill children? Why kill women? Why kill old people? They have no desire, no ideology; they simply want to live and be left alone to live. But the politicians won’t let them.

Now, is it not a simpler thing that the president of America goes into a wrestling match with the president of Russia?

Then whosoever wins, good.

And drop all this nonsense – just a little

sportsmanship will do; no politics is needed, no army is needed. If your generals are so interested in fighting, then let generals have boxing matches – or Indian-style wrestling, which is far better, far simpler, more human: you don’t hit people’s faces and their noses and their eyes and their lips and you don’t disfigure them. And you don’t break people’s bones; there is no need. It is more articulate, more sophisticated. Just let the politicians – rather than have the Olympics for ordinary people, have Olympics for politicians, generals, and each year you can decide who is the winner. It is simple.

What I am saying is that to me it looks so simple that the world can be one. And there is the solution: the whole world, one. Poverty cannot exist. All the efforts going into war can move into production.

All the sciences working to kill each other can work together – they both are our hands. And I don’t see that there is any problem that cannot be solved; we only need a simple vision.

The religious man’s vision is simple, uncomplicated, clear.

Unclouded is his being.

He is just a mirror. You can see your face in the mirror. You can see how you are creating your troubles, how you are creating your misery, your suffering, and then searching for solutions. Once you can see how you create the suffering, you stop creating it. There is no need for any solution, no question needs any answer, you just have to be simple to see that the question is meaningless, and the question drops. And in the dropping of the question, without finding any answer, you have found it.

Let me repeat: except for the religious man, every direction in life is in some way obsessional.

Religious man is not moving in any direction, he is simply sitting in himself, just being himself, not going anywhere. He has no goal, no target.

He simply is, and in his is-ness there is no pOSSibility of any obsession.

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He is the only really healthy and whole person. Everybody else is sick – in different ways, but sick all the same.

And I call the whole man the holy man.

Yes, once in a while these people have existed, but one person in centuries is not much help. It is just dropping a teaspoonful of sugar in the ocean to make it sweet. Obviously you simply lose the one teaspoonful of sugar which might have been used in a cup of tea. Make a cup of tea, that is understandable, but don’t try to make the ocean sweet. The ocean is too big. For the ocean you will need oceanic methods.

My basic effort is to create communes – rather than the religious man, religious communes.

Religious men have existed but they have not been of much help. Yes, to themselves – they arrived home – but the whole of humanity is still wandering in darkness.

I want religious communes all over the world.

Slowly, slowly in every city, create a religious

commune. Many religious people together perhaps may be able to transform the face of the earth and to create a new world, which is urgently needed.

If we miss twenty years more then there is no hope, because the other side is coming to a climax.

The mad side of man – the politician, the priest – is coming to a climax where the only conclusion is war.

And this war means total annihilation of all life from the earth, which will be the most idiotic thing to do.

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Positive thinking: philosophy for phonies

28 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

I AM A FIRM BELIEVER IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF POSITIVE THINKING, AND IT WAS A GREAT

SHOCK TO HEAR YOU SPEAK AGAINST MOTHER TERESA AND HER PHILOSOPHY OF

POSITIVE THINKING.

I am pleased that at least someone was listening, someone was awake, someone was not asleep.

This is what positive philosophy is: you are shocked and I am happy!

But I am not a believer in anything at all.

Belief as such is against my way of looking at things.

Belief is a blind man’s groping in the dark. I do not believe in anything, I do not disbelieve in anything

– because both are belief systems. Either I know or I don’t know. I am absolutely clear about it You are saying that you are a ”firm believer. What does it mean? A firm believer – why have you used the word ”firm? There must be some infirmity hiding behind it. Is not just being a believer enough? You know it is not; hence you have to add something more, make it more solid, more strong. But whatever you do, a belief is a belief, and can never become knowing. Your firm believing simply proves that your doubting is very firm. A firm doubter needs a firm believing. An ordinary doubter simply believes.

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Belief is to cover something. If the doubt is too big then you have to stretch the belief into a firm belief. You have to repress your doubt very strongly, because you know that if it is not repressed strongly it will throw off the cover of belief and you will be naked before your own eyes – hence the shock. The shock is not irrelevant.

If I criticize Mother Teresa, why should you be shocked? Either you see that what I am saying is right and there is no question of shock, or you see that what I am saying is wrong; then too there is no question of shock. From where comes the shock?

Shock needs two things: one part of you – the deeper part of you, the repressed part of you – sees the truth of what I am saying, and the repressor part of you does not want to see it. This conflict creates the shock.

You may be a firm believer in the philosophy of positive thinking, but I don’t think you understand what the philosophy of positive thinking means.

First, the philosophy of positive thinking means being untruthful; it means being dishonest. It means seeing a certain thing and yet denying what you have seen; it means deceiving yourself and others.

Positive thinking is the only bullshit philosophy that America has contributed to human thought –

nothing else. Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and the Christian priest, Vincent Peale – all these people have filled the whole American mind with this absolutely absurd idea of a positive philosophy.

And it appeals particularly to mediocre minds.

Dale Carnegie’s book, HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, has been sold in numbers just next to the Christian Bible. No other book has been able to reach that popularity.

The Christian Bible should not be a competitor in fact, because it is more or less given free, forced on people. But Dale Carnegie’s book people have been purchasing; it has not been given to you free. And it has created a certain kind of ideology which has given birth to many books of a similar kind. But to me it is nauseating.

The very idea that you want to influence people is the idea of a salesman, and that’s what Dale Carnegie was – salesman turned philosopher. It has happened many times. Just recently Werner Erhard, the founder of EST.... He was a salesman of encyclopedias, dictionaries, but in trying to sell enclyclopedias and dictionaries he became aware of salesmanship. Then why bother about encyclopedias? Why not sell ideas directly? – which are a more invisible commodity.

People can’t see an idea and yet they go on purchasing it. And once you have paid two hundred and fifty dollars for a certain idea which you can’t see, you have to pretend that you have got it; otherwise people will think you are a fool. Two hundred and fifty dollars, and you have not ”got it”...? It is very simple.

In the East there is an old story. A king caught his prime minister fooling around with his wife.

Naturally he was mad. In those days, this was a common punishment: he cut off the nose of the prime minister. And the nose was cut off only when somebody was caught fooling around with somebody else’s wife, so that became a signboard. Wherever you went, your missing nose went ahead of you as a declaration.

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But the man was a politician, he was a prime minister. He simply escaped from his kingdom to another kingdom and entered the other kingdom as a saint. Now, nobody can doubt a saint. The nose was certainly missing, but to doubt a saint is to commit a sin. But some curious people asked him, ”What happened to your nose?”

And the saint smiled; he said, ”That’s a secret. It is a certain technique to attain to the ultimate truth.

But you have to lose your nose: the nose represents the ego.” He is on the right lines: he is creating a philosophy – people’s egos are written on their noses. The crowd thought that what he was saying was significant. The nose represents the ego, and the ego is the only barrier between God and man.

There must be some technique that if you remove the nose, the ego is removed and you meet the ultimate truth, you realize it.

One idiot immediately was ready. The politician-turned-saint called him in the night, alone, because it was an absolutely private matter. Before he cut off the nose of the man he said, ”When I cut off your nose you keep your eyes closed. When the nose is removed I will say, ’Open your eyes,’ and you will see God standing before you.” The nose was cut off, and the saint said, ”Now you can open your eyes: God is standing before you.”

The man opened his eyes – there was nobody. He said, ”But I don’t see anybody.” The saint said, ”Now it is your problem. If you don’t see God, people will think you are an idiot. Do you think I see Him? I don’t see Him either, but now try positive thinking. What is the gain in being proved an idiot? Say that you have got it.”

Werner Erhard may think that he has created the philosophy of EST. That is not so. It was created thousands of years before by this politician who cut off the nose of that idiot. That was the first EST

graduate.

The idiot thought it over and he said, ”That seems to be the right thing; yes, I see it.” The saint said, ”You have also become a saint. From tomorrow you start spreading the philosophy by word of mouth. It was just as Werner Erhard has been doing: no need to advertise in the newspapers and the magazines; no need – just by word of mouth. It is more impressive, more alive: there is an eyewitness. An advertisement in a newspaper may be just not true, but the man with the nose missing, smiling, radiant with the realization of the ultimate truth....

The next day people saw there were two saints now. And the number started increasing by the same strategy. First your nose is cut off, then the alternative: either you prove yourself an idiot, or you become a saint. Now who is going to choose to be an idiot? Even an idiot cannot be that idiotic

– when he can become a saint so easily. And now there is nothing left, he has to become a saint. It seems to be perfectly right – people are respectful, and the crowd around the saints is increasing, and the saints are increasing....

Even the king of that kingdom became interested. He asked his prime minister... the prime minister said, ”You wait a little, because I know this man – he was the prime minister of the neighboring kingdom. I don’t think that he has attained ultimate truth, he has simply lost his nose.” Politicians understand the language of politicians easily. He said, ”You wait. Let me enquire of the other king, From Ignorance to Innocence

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and investigate the whole thing before you lose your nose and realize God. Give me just a little time.”

He enquired of the other king. He said, ”That man is really a nasty man. It is my fault because I cut off his nose. I should have cut off his head. I never thought that he would do such a thing as cutting the noses off thousands of people. Every night hundreds of people are turned into awakened souls, enlightened people, God-realized.”

He got the whole information and then he said to his king, ”This is the information I have got. Now I will invite the great saint to the palace and give him a good beating.” The saint was invited and of course he was very happy; and all the other saints also were very happy that now even the king was becoming interested in the positive philosophy. That’s what he was saying: ”This is simply positive philosophy. Now, bothering about the missing nose is a negative approach. It is gone; what is the point of all this crying over spilled milk? Why not make something positive out of it? And I am giving you the ultimate truth, just for the price of a nose.

They were all happy. They all went and waited outside the palace. The great sage entered – by now he had become a great sage. The prime minister closed the doors. He had two wrestlers, strong men, there, and they started beating the man. The sage said, ”What are you doing?” The prime minister said, ”Now tell the truth, otherwise the beating will continue. We will not kill you, but we will not allow you to live either. We will keep you hanging between death and life. It is better that you say it quickly.”

Seeing the situation he said, ”Okay, the truth is that my king has cut off my nose because I was fooling around with his wife. Now what do you suggest? What should I have done? In this situation, with a nose missing, wherever I went I would have been condemned, boycotted. So I found this positive philosophy. In the same position, wouldn’t you have done the same?” The prime minister said, ”Of course I would have done the same – but now it is time that you move from this kingdom, because even my king is becoming interested, and I don’t want his nose to be removed by you and him to become a sage. You move from this country to another. The world is large; there are fools everywhere, and you will find them everywhere. Right now, already you have a great following.”

When Werner Erhard or people like him found that they could sell encyclopedias, worthless encyclopedias which nobody is going to read, and nobody is going to look into.... Encyclopedias people simply keep for show, in their study or in their sitting room. They look beautiful. They are not to be read, they are to be looked at. If you can sell encyclopedias – and people are so foolish that they will purchase useless books, highly-praised but meaningless books, at a high cost – why not sell ideas? Once you know the simple technique of salesmanship you can sell anything.

Positive thinking is just deceiving people.

If influencing people and winning friends becomes your ideology, you will have to do two things. One is you will have to act, behave the way people like you to act and behave. That’s the simple way to influence them, there is no other way.

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The whole philosophy can be condensed into a simple sentence: if you want people to be influenced by you, just behave the way they think is the right way to behave. You prove to be their ideal, which they also want to be but have not been able to be yet. Of course, you cannot become anybody else’s ideal, but you can pretend. You will become a hypocrite.

And if you are going to influence many people, then of course you will have to have many personalities, many masks, because each person is influenced by a different mask.

If you want to influence a Hindu, you have to have a different kind of personality than when you are trying to influence a Christian. To Christians, Jesus crucified on the cross is the symbol of the greatest sacrifice anybody can make to redeem humanity.

To the Hindus, crucifixion simply means this man must have committed a great sin in the past. Their philosophy is of karma and its consequence. You cannot be just crucified without any karma on your part. You must have acted in evil ways, and this is the outcome of that. The crucifixion of Jesus does not prove to the Hindu or the Jaina or the Buddhist that he is a messiah.

But to the Christian, Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu – nobody seems to be comparable to Jesus. In fact to a Christian mind they all look very selfish: they are just working for their own redemption while Jesus is working for the redemption of the whole of humanity. A man who is interested in his own ultimate realization is obviously the most selfish man in the world. What selfishness is possible which can go beyond this selfishness?

If he renounces the world that is selfish, because he simply wants his soul to be freed from the wheel of life and death. He wants to meet the universal spirit of God, or he wants to enter nirvana and disappear into the cosmos where there is no suffering, where there is only bliss, eternal bliss.

And this man does not bother about anybody else. You call him a saint?an incarnation of God? – a tirthankara? No, not to the Christian; that is not appealing.

If you want to influence many people you will have to have many personalities, many masks.

You will have to continuously pretend that which you are not, and you will have to hide that which you are.

Now this is what makes a man phony.

Dale Carnegie’s whole philosophy is for phonies.

In fact, the word ”phony” is also a contribution of America.

Strangely, it exactly means what

personality means. In Greek drama the actors used masks and they spoke through the mask.

Sona means sound, and sound coming from a mask is called persona in Greek – it is not the real man, but the mask. You don’t know who is behind it; all that you hear is the sound, and you see a mask. The mask is a mask, it cannot speak. And the one who can speak you don’t see; he is hiding.

From persona comes the English word ”personality”. And phony is exactly the same.

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or by wireless much is changed. It is phony; ”phony” comes from ”phone”. Strangely, ”persona” and

”phony” mean exactly the same. You don’t see who is speaking, you only hear the voice. That too has gone through a change, through the mechanism; it is not exactly the same voice.

Dale Carnegie’s philosophy creates phonies, but the real purpose is to influence people. Why? To win friends, but why? What is the need? Two things have to be understood. First, influencing people is only a means to win friends. The word win has to be underlined. It has the whole of politics in it.

The more people are under your influence, the more powerful you are. Your power depends on how many people are supportive of you, how many people you have influenced so much that they will be ready to do anything for you.

Hence, the politician speaks in a language which is always vague – you can interpret it the way you like – so that many people can be influenced. If he is very clear and what he says is absolutely scientific – without any vagueness, certain; if it has only one meaning, then perhaps he will succeed in annoying people.

That’s what I have been doing my whole life – how to lose friends, how to create enemies.... If somebody wants to learn it, they can learn it from me. And the reason is that I don’t want to influence anybody. The very idea is ugly, and against humanity. To influence means to interfere, to trespass, to drag you on a path which is not yours, to make you do things which you have never thought of before.

To influence a person is the most violent act in the world.

I have never tried to influence anybody.

It is another thing if somebody saw some truth in what I was saying or I was being, but it was not my effort to influence him. If, in spite of me, he was able to see something, then the whole responsibility is his.

Jesus says to his people, ”On the judgment day I will sort out my sheep and tell God that these are my people – they have to be saved. For others I am not concerned.” If there is something like a judgment day – there is none, but just for the argument’s sake – if there is something like a judgment day, and if I am to do the sorting out, I will not be able to find a single sheep, because I have never influenced anybody. And when you influence somebody, certainly you become the shepherd and that person becomes just a sheep. You are reducing human beings to sheep; you are taking their humanity away. In the name of saving them you are destroying them.

Don’t be influenced by anybody.

Don’t be impressed by anybody.

Look, see, be aware – and choose.

But remember, the responsibility is yours.

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Never follow anybody, because that’s how you go astray from yourself Dale Carnegie started this whole school of positive philosophy, positive thinking: Don’t see the negative part, don’t see the darker side. But by your not seeing it, do you think it disappears? You are just befooling yourself. You cannot change reality. The night will still be there; you can think that it is daytime for twenty-four hours, but by your thinking it, it is not going to be light twenty-four hours a day.

The negative is as much part of life as the positive.

They balance each other.

After Dale Carnegie, the great name in the tradition of this positive thinking is Napoleon Hill. THINK

AND GROW RICH is his greatest contribution to the world – a beautifully written book, but all crap.

Think and grow rich... you don’t have to do anything, you only have to think in absolutely positive terms and riches will start flowing towards you. If they don’t come, that simply means that you have not been thinking absolutely positively.

So these are beautiful games in which you cannot defeat the man who is proposing the game. He has the key in his hands. If you succeed by chance, then he succeeds because his philosophy – think and grow rich – has succeeded. You have been thinking and thinking and thinking and positively thinking that dollars are showering on you – these are not snowflakes but dollars showering on you

– and suddenly your uncle dies and leaves you a big inheritance. Naturally, positive thinking works!

But if you don’t succeed... and ninety-nine percent of the time you are not going to succeed – you know perfectly well that your positive thinking is not absolutely positive; you know that there is doubt.

Once is a while you open your eyes to see whether they are dollars or just snowflakes. You see they are just snowflakes, and you again close your eyes and start thinking that dollars are showering.

But the doubt is there, that these really are snowflakes. Whom are you trying to befool? All these thoughts are going on: ”This is just nonsense, I shouldn’t waste my time, I could be earning some dollars; this way I am losing rather than gaining.” But Napoleon Hill writes beautifully and gives examples of how people have succeeded by positive thinking. And you can find people – this world is big enough. For everything you can find an example.

Why one? – you can find hundreds of examples if you just look around and try to find them. And all these people have been doing just that: they find examples, and they place the examples in beautiful poetic prose. And of course you want to be rich, so they exploit your ambition, your desire. They give you such a simple method – and they don’t ask anything of you in return.

About Napoleon Hill I remember... he himself was a poor man. That would have been enough proof to disprove his whole philosophy. He became rich by selling the book, THINK AND GROW RICH.

But it was not positive thinking that was making him rich – it was fools around the world who were purchasing the book, it was his work, his labor, his effort. But in the very beginning days, when his book came out, he used to stand in bookstores to persuade people to purchase the book.

And it happened that Henry Ford came in his latest model car and went into the bookshop to find something light to read. And Napoleon Hill did not want to miss this chance. He went forwards with From Ignorance to Innocence

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his book and he said, ”A great book has just been published – you will be happy with it. And it is not only a book, it is a sure method of success.”

Henry Ford looked at the man and said, ”Are you the writer of the book?” Napoleon Hill said proudly, ”Yes, I am the writer of the book.” And he can be proud: that book he has written is a piece of art. And to create a piece of art out of crap is real mastery.

Henry Ford, without touching the book, just asked one question, ”Have you come in your own car or on the bus?”

Napoleon Hill could not understand what he meant. He said, ”Of course, I came on the bus.” Henry Ford said, ”Look outside. That is my private car, and I am Henry Ford. You are befooling others; you don’t have even a private car and you write a book called THINK AND GROW RICH!

And I have grown rich without thinking, so I don’t want to bother with it. You think and grow rich! –

and when you grow rich then you come to me. That will be the proof. The book is not the proof” And it is said that Napoleon Hill never could gather up the courage to meet this old man, Henry Ford, again, even though he became a little richer. But compared to Henry Ford he was always a poor man and was bound to remain a poor man, always. But Henry Ford’s logic was clear.

Out of these people, one Christian priest, Norman Vincent Peale, has created a positive philosophy.

And he has tried to convert the whole Christian attitude – as if it is a philosophy of positive thinking.

And of course he could have quoted all the religions of the world, but he wants to spread Christianity, so he doesn’t take account of any other religions.

And in Jesus you can find.... All the religions have been doing the same harm that Jesus did:

”Blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom of God” – now Mother Teresa is not saying anything different. Norman Vincent Peale has become a world-famous preacher. His whole standpoint is: don’t look at anything from the negative, critical attitude. Look from the positive, accepting, receptive attitude. And he says that if you do it, you transform the nature of the object – which is absolutely wrong.

Just by saying, ”Blessed are the poor because theirs is the kingdom of God,” you don’t change poverty. Otherwise in two thousand years Christian priests would have made poverty disappear.

Poverty goes on growing, the blessed people go on growing.

In fact, there will be so many blessed people that in the kingdom of God, shared by all these blessed people, they will again be poor; they are not going to get much share in it. All these shareholders in the kingdom of God will make God also poor. It will be a company of poor shareholders and directors – the directors of course must be the beggars who are poorer than the poor.

Two thousand years of continuously teaching... has it changed the nature of poverty? No. It has done only one thing – it has killed the revolutionary spirit in the poor. Poverty remains in its own place and goes on growing in leaps and bounds.

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But it has done one thing certainly: it has taken away the guts of the poor man. His rebellious spirit has been poisoned. And on one thing only I agree with Karl Marx – that religion is nothing but opium for the poor people. I have to agree with him because that’s what all the religions in the world have done. They have given opium, a drug, so you can have beautiful dreams.

In India it is a common routine. In Indian villages poverty is such that if only the man goes to work, it is not enough; the wife also has to go. It is against the Indian idea which is that women should not go to work; their place is the home, and they have enough work there. But even if it goes against the Indian culture, the Indian civilization, the poverty is so great that just the man earning cannot feed the whole family – the woman has to go.

And the woman may be carrying a small child, because Indian women are constantly either pregnant or getting ready to be pregnant again; meanwhile they raise the other child. They have to carry the child to the place where they are working, maybe on the road, making the road, or in the field or in the garden, or in construction, anywhere. But what to do with the child? They will be continuously at work and the child will be Lying down by the side of the road.

So the routine method is that they give a little opium to the child. All over India that is done, even though opium is now illegal; but nothing can be done about it. And everybody understands that that is the only way. The child remains hungry but happy. Just a little opium and for six to eight hours he is floating in the lotus paradise. He will not cry, he will not weep; he will not disturb the mother.

Religions have done the same to the whole of humanity.

Be hungry, be uneducated, be sick, suffer every kind of misery possible – but take it positively.

No. I do not believe in any philosophy of positive thinking; nor do I believe in the opposite, in the philosophy of negative thinking – because both are there. The positive and the negative make one whole. My philosophy is holistic – neither positivist, nor negativist, but holistic, realistic. You see the whole in its totality, whatever it is. Good and bad, day and night, life and death, they both are there.

My approach is to see exactly what is the case.

There is no need to project any philosophy on it.

Mother Teresa says to these people in Bhopal, – ”Take it positively.” Two thousand people dead!certainly through some mistake of some lazy Indian. And it has been happening in many places all over India; it is not a singular case. Bridges fall down after millions of rupees have been put into years of construction. The first day the train passes by... and with the bridge, the train and the passengers all go down into the river – but take it positively.

Dams continually go on flooding thousands of miles because they break. India goes on borrowing money from all over the world, from the world bank and from other sources, to make new dams.

And with all the engineers and all that expertise, what happens? It does not happen anywhere else in the world, it happens only in India! India is a very positive country because the people who are responsible are not punished; otherwise it would stop.

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The contractor should be punished when a bridge kills thousands of people and destroys the labor of thousands of people and makes the country borrow more and more – which India will never be able to repay. That is absolutely clear, because how are you going to pay it back? Slowly slowly, you are becoming slaves again – economic slaves.

Political slavery is gone; now economic slavery is coming from the back door. If you cannot pay money, then you will have to substitute it by something. If you owe to America, or if you owe to the Soviet Union, then you will have to give them bases for their military forces. You have to, because there is no other way to pay them back. And why do these countries go on giving to these poor countries, knowing perfectly well that they cannot get it back? In fact they don’t want to get it back!

This is a new form of slavery.

People don’t understand that forms go on changing but things remain the same. Political slavery became costly, very costly. To those who were the masters, it became more costly to have a slave country than not to be bothered with slave countries. That was more economically profitable. Leave these poor countries politically free – but what are they going to do with their economy? They will beg from you, and then you can exploit them economically. And in fact that is the real exploitation.

Political slavery was useful because you were powerful enough to exploit them economically.

All such exploitation is economic – if you were politically powerful then of course you could exploit them economically. By the end of the second world war it became clear that it was no longer feasible, no longer economically useful to have political slavery in the world. But the real thing was economic exploitation. Drop the political slavery, influence people, make friends – and go on exploiting them economically the way you were doing before. Now you will do even better because you are friends, you are helping in every possible way... but for what reason are you helping?

Russia goes on pouring money into India. In Russia itself there is poverty; they are not too worried about that poverty, they are more concerned to create factories in India, steel plants in India. Go on giving as much money and expertise as India asks, because soon they will be so much in debt that while politically they can remain free, it will make no difference – your armies, your military bases will be inside their country; they will have to give in to you. Their political freedom will be just paper freedom: underneath they will be slaves again.

In India nobody is punished for all these things which go on happening. In India there are really miracles that happen. They have five-year plans just like Russia used to have five-year plans. In those five-year plans so many dams have to be made, so many roads, so many bridges, and the country is given a great hope that within five years everything will be changed: poverty will be gone, every village will have a school, a hospital, and everything.

And on paper these things do happen. You can see the road has been made, on the map. The contract has been signed, the contractor has taken the money, the engineers have been working, the laborers have been paid, the machines have been purchased. Five years of work and the road is ready. The road is even inaugurated by a great leader – and there is no road!

You see the picture of the leader in the newspaper, inaugurating the road. They have made just a small piece for the inauguration, so that a small piece of road is shown in the picture. And the leader From Ignorance to Innocence

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is inaugurating it, cutting a ribbon with the scissors, and people are clapping all around. And it is a miracle! If you go just one furlong ahead, there is no road – and the road was going to be one hundred miles in length. It is non-existent.

Great miracles! But take it positively, and don’t complain against anybody, otherwise everybody will be caught: the leader who inaugurated the road will be caught and asked, ”What road have you inaugurated? Where is it?”

The minister who gave the contract must have been bribed. The contractor must have taken the major portion of the money that was going to make the bridge, and everything else is fictitious.

Engineers have been paid, workers have been paid; for years the work goes on, and reports go on coming into the files that the work is going well, and the road is coming along, and it will be ready even before the time set for it.

It can be ready any day; the way it is going it can be ready any day. And then the great leader comes to inaugurate it, and people are clapping because they believe in positive philosophy. They know the road goes only one furlong, but still they are clapping because a great leader has come, and they have all been given money to clap Praise the leader, wave flags to welcome him. And these pictures will be the proof. All these people have to be punished.

And Mother Teresa says to those poor people, ”Don’t complain.” Whom is she going to save? The criminals?

Yes, I use the word ”criminals”, because I don’t know anything worse than that. Sinners I cannot call them, because I don’t believe in sin. But they are criminals. If it is the carelessness of one person who did not lock the plant correctly, and it kills two thousand people....

And this is a government report of two thousand people killed. Whenever there is a government report, particularly from India, multiply it by five and you will be almost right. If they say two thousand people have died, that means at least ten thousand people have died. If they say one hundred thousand people have been seriously injured, don’t believe their numbers – at least five hundred thousand people must have been injured. Who is going to count? The government officials reduce it as much as possible so that there is no negativity in people, and positive philosophy goes on living.

And then they call in these people like Mother Teresa who say, ”Don’t complain.” Why?

Then what about Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers? Take it positively – and yes, if you want to take it positively, it can be argued in a very positive way: those millions of Jews that evaporated in the chambers, the gas chambers of Adolf Hitler.... Now think positively. If they had lived they may have been poor. They may have suffered any kind of disease, tuberculosis. cancer. And they were all Jews, so you can understand they would have suffered from AIDS, because Jews are the oldest homosexuals in the world. And it is not that I am saying it, I am simply quoting the Old Testament.

Even God could not take it positively! He had to destroy two cities, Gomorrah and Sodom, in the Old Testament. It is not written by me. God had to destroy both the cities completely! Why? Sodom became so famous that now we have the word ”sodomy” because of Sodom. People were making love to animals – that’s what sodomy is. Now sodomy means making love to animals, but it comes from the name of the city, Sodom. People were making love to all kinds of animals.

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And Gomorrah – just the sound of the name is enough to give you an idea what else must have been happening there – homosexuality, sodomy, other kinds of perversions. I have always wondered why people have missed on this name Gomorrah; it is so phonetically connected with some sexual perversion. God had to destroy both cities completely.

God could not take it positively

God has never taken anything positively, otherwise why is there hell?

If God takes things positively then criminals He will just hug and kiss and say, ”Come on, boys! I was just waiting for you. This paradise is yours because I take things positively. I have read the books of Norman Vincent Peale.” But he goes on throwing people in hell. Mother Teresa seems to be very anti-God. But all these religions are in a contradiction.

Here they go on saying one thing, and there they go on saying, ”You will be punished. Each sin will be counted, calculated. And you cannot hide anything from God; He will read you just like an open book – there is no way to hide – and accordingly you will be judged.” So Christians have judgment day... if God believes in the philosophy of positive thinking, then what is the need of a judgment day?

All are to be forgiven, and whatsoever they have done has to be looked at positively. Then what is the need of a day of judgment? Saints and sinners will be the same, they will receive the same welcome – but that creates trouble.

That is why nobody has raised this question: What about God and His philosophy? If you say that God is going to forgive everybody, then sainthood loses all charm. Then who is going to suffer all the austerities and fasts and prayers, and renounce all the pleasures of life – knowing perfectly well that those who are having all the pleasures here on earth will again have the same pleasures that you will have in heaven? So you are a loser!

And perhaps because your whole life you denied yourself pleasures, you may not be able to enjoy them, because you will be so inhibited that when beautiful girls in the Hindu paradise appear dancing before you.... The saints are certainly bound to close their eyes, just out of habit of millions of lives

– for Hindus it is a question of millions of lives.

Gandhi used to have three monkeys just by his side on the table. They were presented to him by a Japanese saint; in fact, four were presented, but the fourth has been missing from all the pictures.

When I went to Gandhi’s ashram I asked his son Ramdas, ”Where is the fourth monkey?” He said, ”How did you come to know about the fourth monkey? – because when they came, all four were joined together, they were not separate, and immediately the fourth was separated and destroyed. How did you come to know? – because this thing happened long ago.” I said, ”I am really an explorer of strange things. Tell me about the fourth.”

”But,” he said, ”it has been completely destroyed. How did you...? Who told you?” – because except Gandhi, Ramdas, his son, and Ba, his mother, nobody knew about it. ”We opened the parcel, and we destroyed the fourth.”

I said, ”That’s okay. I was also present.”

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He said, ”You must be joking.”

And nowhere is it mentioned that there were four monkeys... but I know because originally those four monkeys were Chinese. They are very traditional, Taoist monkeys, at least three thousand years old, so I knew the fourth was bound to be there. From Taoism they traveled to Japan, and they had never been three. But his whole life he kept those three monkeys by his side; they are still preserved in the Gandhi memorial museum in Delhi. But it is a lie, because the fourth is missing.

One monkey has his hands over his eyes, closing them. ”Don’t see anything evil” is the message.

The second one has his hands over his ears: ”Don’t hear anything evil.” The third monkey had his hands over his mouth – not to throw a kiss at you, but: ”Don’t say anything evil.” What was the fourth doing so that they destroyed him? The fourth was keeping both his hands over his sexual organ:

”Remain celibate, don’t do anything evil.” Now, Gandhi was worried that this monkey would create trouble. ”Anybody coming will ask what he is doing. And just sitting by my side.... Destroy this one; these three are okay.”

All the religions have been teaching these saints to practise austerity but when they are in paradise and have freedom, it is going to be difficult for them, really difficult. The sinners will enjoy paradise; the saints will hide just at the sight of an approaching apsara – that is a young woman that is made available to all in paradise – and there are thousands of beautiful apsaras. You can call them divine call girls... I don’t know how to translate that word because in the Christian heaven apsaras don’t exist.

What the saints will do is start shaking and feeling nervous and perspiring, and they will close their eyes immediately because that is what they have been doing their whole life.

To make clear the distinction between saint and sinner all the religions had to be ”realistic, the way I am telling you to be realistic – to see the wholeness of a thing, the positive and negative.

Now this woman, Mother Teresa, is a bigger criminal than those people who created the calamity of Bhopal, because she is not only trying to cover their laziness, their mistake, their error; she is giving the idea that wherever such a thing happens you just cover it up.

So I say that when millions of Jews are evaporated, Hitler must be doing great, positive work: perhaps with a smaller population there will be less poverty. And these Jews were the richest people in Germany, so let their money and their riches be distributed. And anyway they are going to die sooner or later, so why not sooner? What could they have done by living? So why make so much fuss? They may have died from a very terrible disease – AlDS, cancer, or something – and Hitler has given them the simplest and the quickest death, a painless death. Look at it positively!

But Mother Teresa will not have the guts to say, ”Look at it positively,” because the Jews in America who go on giving respect to her will be immediately enemies. She cannot say that.

Why not take communism positively? Stalin killing millions of people – has she ever said to take that positively? It is good: those millions of people are freed from life’s miseries, sufferings, troubles. But she will not say that. Communism cannot be taken positively – her master, pope the polack, has just declared that the very idea of class war is a sin. Now, is that taking things positively? Then class war is not a sin but a virtue, if you take it positively.

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But why do such an ugly thing to the poor Indians? And your purposes are dear. Your purpose is political: to keep the government happy. Because in India it is a problem.... Many missionaries have been deported from India, and there is constant pressure from the Hindu population that missionaries should be deported from India because they are exploiting poverty and converting people to Christianity – not by argument, because as far as argument is concerned Christianity has nothing compared to eastern religions. They cannot win in any argument; Christianity has no argument at all.

India has had ten thousand years of continual argumentation and nothing else! As far as argument is concerned, nobody can come close to the Indians because they have done only that one thing for ten thousand years – nothing else. They have tried to split hairs, and they have succeeded.

There are books which cannot be translated even today because scholars find that it is impossible to find any western words equivalent to them. For example, Indian logic is impossible to translate –

Aristotle is just a pygmy. Indian logic has gone so deep in splitting hairs continually and has created such words because it needed them.

Words are created only when you need them. For example, here you have ”snow”, ”ice”, and perhaps one more word I don’t know. But ask the Eskimo; he has a dozen words for snow. No other language has a dozen words, but the Eskimo has. And the reason is, he knows those twelve different qualities. He has lived for thousands of years with snow. He is acquaint ed with it. He can make differentiations which nobody else can.

Now, after ten thousand years of continually arguing, India has come to words that no other language in the world can translate. Even to understand them is as difficult as to understand Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, perhaps more difficult.

So India is continually deporting missionaries; the pressure goes on becoming bigger and bigger The reason.... Hindus are not worried about argument. If you want to argue they are ready, the Jainas are ready, the Buddhists are ready. About argument there is no problem; your Christian missionaries will not have any chance of winning. But they can convert people by giving bread, by giving medicine, by opening a hospital, by making a school, a college, by creating institutions for the orphans, for the widows.

All these things Indians cannot do; they have never done them, they have never bothered about them. In fact. they have reasons, explanations, arguments why: if somebody is an orphan, it means in his past life he has done something wrong. Now let him suffer, don’t interfere; otherwise he will have to be an orphan again in the next life, and you will be simply prolonging his suffering. Let him be finished with it and the accounts be closed, so that in the next life he comes fresh and is not an orphan. Widows – it is their fate; if their husbands have died, it is nobody else’s business. According to Hindus these women must have done immense wrong in their past lives... so they are suffering.

So nobody is going to do anything about any real problem. Christian missionaries tackle the real problems. And naturally, when they feed, give medicines, serve the poor with their doctors, their nurses, their hospitals, their schools, their teachers – those people become impressed: ”No Hindu ever cared, nobody bothered about us. If we were dying they just left us dying. You care for us –

certainly you are really religious.” And if they start getting more and more involved with Christianity, it is simple. But they are not converted the way conversion should happen. It is smuggling them through the back door.

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They don’t know about their own religions, because nobody has taught them. But Christians are teaching them about Christianity; that is their only knowledge. And they see these people and their service, their compassion, their sympathy, and naturally they think this is the religion you should belong to. And if these missionaries are doing so much, what about Jesus, the messiah? If he says that he will redeem the world, he means it. These people are his representatives.

But Hindus are pressuring the government that these people should be thrown out because they are misguiding people, taking advantage of their poverty, of their sickness, of their old age. But nobody can dare to say, ”Deport Mother Teresa,” because she is continually protecting the government. This is a political strategy: protecting the officers, protecting the rich, and underground doing the real work of converting people to Christianity.

I am not against anybody being converted to Christianity. If with understanding, with feeling a person moves towards Christianity, it is perfectly good; nobody has the right to prevent him. But if he is in some way bribed, seduced, then this should be prevented. Whether he was going to become a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Christian or a Buddhist, it does not matter: nobody should be allowed to cunningly change a person’s life, his vision, his thinking. He should be left alone. All missionaries

– it makes no difference to which religion they are connected – all missionaries are against humanity.

But people like Mother Teresa do their work in a very sophisticated way, a very polished way.

You ask me: Am I against positive philosophy? Yes, because I am also against negative philosophy.

I have to be against both because both choose only half the fact, and both try to ignore the other half.

And remember: a half-truth is far more dangerous than a whole lie, because the whole lie will be discovered by you sooner or later. How long can it remain undiscovered by you? A lie, of course, is a lie; it is just a palace made of playing cards – a little breeze and the whole palace disappears.

But the half-truth is dangerous. You may never discover it, you may continue to think it is the whole truth. So the real problem is not the whole lie, the real problem is the half-truth pretending to be the whole truth; and that is what these people are doing.

The philosophy of positive thinking says: ”Take everything positively. The negative should not have any space in your approach, there should be no negative part.” This is making a part, the positive part, almost the whole.

The same is true about negative people, although there are none who preach the philosophy of negative thinking, because who is going to listen to them? They will say, ”If somebody is smiling, look out – there must be something he is hiding behind the smile. In fact, he must want to cry or weep. Look out – don’t be deceived by his smiling; find out the negative. If he is looking very happy, that means certainly there is something that he is trying to hide behind his happiness.” People are so miserable, who is going to listen to such a philosopher? They will say, ”We are already so miserable, and you are teaching us to search for more misery! Even if a false smile is there, at least it is there. Please forgive us, we can’t go on digging and finding the tears. We have enough tears a!ready. And just a smile – although it may be just a mannerism, a formality, just a civilized way of meeting somebody....”

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When you meet somebody and ask, ”How are you?” – he says, ”I am perfectly well.” Now, if you are a negative philosopher you have to find out what this man is hiding: ”How can he be perfectly well?

Have you ever heard of anybody in the world being perfectly well? He is Lying!” But nobody will listen to a negative philosopher. You also say, ”I am perfectly well. You are perfectly well? – good.” And you depart in good spirits. What is the point of showing one’s wounds to each other and making each other more miserable than before?

So there is no school of negative philosophers. But there are more people who believe in negative philosophy without knowing it than there are people who believe in positive philosophy.

In fact, all these believers in positive philosophy are basically negative. To hide that negativity they believe firmly in the positive philosophy.

I am not in support of either side. I am in favor of taking the whole truth, and that’s what I would like you to do too: take the whole truth, because the negative is as essential as the positive.

You cannot create electricity with only the positive pole; you will need the negative pole too. Only with both the negative and the positive pole can you create electricity. Is the negative absolutely negative? It is complementary, so it is not against the positive.

If I had been in Bhopal I would have told them, ”Find out the people who are responsible for this calamity; it is manmade.” Of course we cannot find God when there are natural calamities. If we could then I would be in favor of catching hold of God and punishing Him, because this is not even a human way – what to say about a divine way! But we cannot catch hold of God because He is non-existent – so we are helpless.

But when manmade calamities are there, please don’t say such stupid things to people as, ”Take it positively. Don’t complain.” No, find out who the criminals are and let them be punished as heavily as possible. You punish a single man if he kills somebody, and perhaps a single man was behind the whole explosion which has killed thousands of people, crippled thousands of people. But he will be left completely free to do it again, and people like him will also not feel any necessity to be more alert, to be more careful.

If India has become a country of lazy and lousy people, the reason is simple and clear: nobody has bothered to deal with the sources from where this laziness and lousiness arises. And everybody is lazy and lousy.

When I joined the university I was puzzled because the whole years course was not enough for more than two months; in two months it could be finished. I used to finish it in two months. My professors, senior professors, the head of the department, the dean, they all told me, ”This is not the way. You simply finish in two months a course which has to be finished in ten months... that makes us all feel guilty.”

I said, ”That is your business. If you don’t want to feel guilty, finish your course also in two months, or change the syllabus – make the syllabus in such a way that the course is really for ten months.

This is lousy, absolute laziness, and I cannot be part of it.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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It is because of this that I used to travel so much. My students were not at a loss at all. I would finish their course quickly and then would say, ”Now unnecessarily you will be bothering and I will be bothering... what is the point? Once in a while, whenever I am here, I will come. If you have any questions you can ask them, otherwise I will see you when the examinations come round.” And my professors, my department, my head, they were not courageous enough to report me because they knew that if they reported me, then I was going to expose the whole thing: that these people were lousy. And my students would have been my witnesses that I had finished my course – now for what did they want me here too?

I was moving around the country. Everybody knew because the newspapers were publishing that I was in Calcutta addressing the university, I was in Benares... and they knew that I was supposed to be there in Jabalpur. My principal once asked me for dinner, and at his home he said, ”Do at least one thing: Go wherever you want, but don’t let it be published in the newspapers because then it becomes a problem. People start asking us, ’If he is in Madras... but we don’t have any application for leave. He never informs us when he goes or when comes back.’” I said, ”I cannot do anything about that. How can I prevent the journalists reporting? What can I do?

I don’t know who is reporting; I simply speak and move on, and whatsoever they want to do, they do.

But if you have any problems, if anybody reports to you, you can call me. I can put that man right, there and then.”

For nine years I managed this way. The whole university was just in a state of shock. They could not believe that nobody raised any question against me. I got the whole salary, and I was rarely seen.

But the reason was that my department was afraid to report me, for the simple reason that I had said that I would expose the whole thing.

The country has become lazy. I told the vice-chancellor, ”All your courses are not enough for the whole year. What you teach in six years can be taught very easily in two years; four years you are wasting. In those four years you could teach so much that the degrees of no other country could be compared to your degrees. Right now no country even accepts your degrees.” He said, ”Perhaps you are right, but no professor will agree because they are happy with the way things are going; they have always done it this way. So I don’t want to take the responsibility on myself.”

Doctor Radhakrishnan, who became president of India, was basically a professor of philosophy. First he was professor of philosophy, then he became vice-chancellor of the Hindu university in Varanasi, and then he managed and manipulated to become the president of India. When he became the president of India, he declared his birthday as ”teachers’ day”.

That is a very cunning strategy that is being done in India. Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday is ”children’s day”, because once Jawaharlal was dead people would soon forget about him. But children’s day will continue because children are not going to disappear from the world, and on children’s day Jawaharlal will be remembered.

So Doctor Radhakrishnan created a teachers’ day. On the first teachers’ day in my university, I asked the vice-chancellor, who was presiding over the meeting, ”I want to enquire about a simple thing: why do you call it teachers’ day?”

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He said, ”You don’t know? It is so simple. A teacher has become president of the country.” I said, ”Who is being respected, a teacher or the president of the country? I will call it a teachers’ day if a president drops his presidency and becomes a teacher. Then it will be a teachers’ day, putting teaching higher than the presidency of the country. Let him resign from the presidency and become a teacher.

”This is my challenge to Doctor Radhakrishnan: resign from your post, become a teacher, and we will celebrate the teachers’ day. Right now this is absolutely absurd. Tomorrow a shoemaker becomes a president and so then a ’shoemakers’ day’; someday, somebody else is a cloth merchant, then

’cloth merchants’ day’. But in all these days you are respecting the post of the president. So simply call all these days ’president’s day’. Why drag the poor teacher into it?” My vice-chancellor said, ”Will you please keep it to yourself! Soon the media will be here, and if they hear your challenge or anything, then I at least am in difficulty because it is because of Radhakrishnan that I have been appointed vice-chancellor here in this university. I am his student, and what you are saying is perfectly right, but – forgive me – don’t say it in front of people.” I said, ”Everybody goes on:’Be truthful, be honest, be authentic,’ and whenever I try to be truthful, honest and authentic, immediately I am stopped.”

I am certainly against people like Mother Teresa... because I count them as criminals, not as saints.

And I will not take them positively because they are doing certain harm – and so subtle a harm to humanity that it cannot be forgiven.

It may have shocked you. Think about your shock and look at both the sides of the shock, the negative and the positive, so that you can understand why the whole phenomenon happened to you.

And this is going to be my approach to everything.

Look holistically. Be a realist and you will be surprised, amazed. When you look at both sides they fit together, they complement each other. They are just like the Chinese symbol of yin and yang.

Have you seen the Chinese symbol of yin and yang? – two fish in a circle, one fish in one half-circle, the other fish in the other half-circle; but both fish fitting together, making it a whole. Yin means the feminine; yang means the masculine.

This is applicable to all polarities, positive and negative; they are just like two fish moving in such a way, so closely, that they make a circle.

Then you look at existence with the eyes of a religious man.

Then there is no saint, no sinner; they are all complementary to each other. They both are needed in some way.

Yes, better ways can be found so that they can complement each other more lucidly, more gracefully, more beautifully.

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CHAPTER 30

Surrender: the ego upside down

29 December 1984 pm in Lao Tzu Grove

Question 1

OSHO,

WHAT IS THE PLACE OF SURRENDER IN YOUR RELIGION?

I do not teach the ego, hence I cannot teach surrender, because surrender is nothing but the subtlest form of the ego.

Surrender is not against the ego, it is in fact an act of the ego. Who surrenders? And by surrendering, who becomes humble? Who becomes meek? It is the ego standing upside down. It makes no difference whether the ego is standing on its legs or on its head. In fact it is more dangerous when it is on its head because then you will not be able to recognize it.

Jesus says, ”Blessed are the meek,” but what is meekness? ”Blessed are the humble,” but what is humbleness? Can a man who has no ego be humble? How can he be humble? Who will be humble? A man who has no ego has no way to be meek or to be humble. He cannot be an egoist on the one hand; he cannot be a humble person on the other hand.

To teach surrender is to give you a strategy to hide your ego, to sublimate your ego.

Yes, that’s the right word, sublimation Freudian word, very significant. You can sublimate anything, so much so that recognition becomes impossible. You may even start thinking that this is the very opposite of the original thing. Meeting a humble man you will feel how egoless he is – he also feels 441

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how egoless he is. The ego has come from the back door and now it is no more condemned, but appreciated.

And why is a meek person, a humble person appreciated? That too is a strange story. He is appreciated because he fulfills everybody else’s ego. lust see the whole game of it. Why do you appreciate a humble person? – because being humble to you he buttresses your ego. And because your ego is buttressed, you in response buttress his humbleness.

Now a vicious circle is created. He will become more and more humble because everybody loves his humbleness. He gains respectability, and everybody enjoys his humbleness because everybody is being satisfied by his humbleness – it is a deep satisfaction for the ego.

Yes, blessed are the humble and the meek because without them how are the egoists going to be contented?

And when you say, ”They shall inherit the kingdom of God,” then naturally one is ready to do anything.

I want you to understand it clearly:

Ego and surrender are two sides of the same coin.

I don’t teach the ego, so how can there be any place for surrender in my religion? I don’t teach you to be meek, I don’t teach you to be humble.

I teach you to be authentic, integrated individuals with immense self-respect. The word self-respect may create doubts in your mind because self-respect seems to mean again the ego. It is not so. You have to understand both words, ”self” and ”respect”; both are significant.

Self is that which you are born with.

Ego is that which you accumulate.

Ego is your achievement.

Self is a gift of existence to you. You have not done anything to earn it, you have not achieved it; hence nobody can take it away from you. That is impossible because it is your nature, your very being.

Ego is all that you go on accumulating through education, manners, civilization, culture, schools, colleges, universities.... You go accumulating it. It is your effort, you have made it, and you have made it so big that you have completely forgotten your real self To know the real self is enough: the ego falls flat on the ground without any effort to surrender it.

Unless the ego falls on its own, without your effort, it is not going to leave you. If you make effort to drop it, and that is what surrender is....

All the religions teach surrender, hence I say they don’t understand even the very basics of psychology.

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Ego has not to be surrendered, it has to be seen.

It has to be understood through and through.

That is the meaning of respect. It is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It does not mean what it has come to mean: honor. No – respect simply means re-spect, to look again.

That’s the literal meaning of the word; there is no place for honor. Just look again, look back, look deep. ”Spect” means honor. ”Spect” means to see, look; ”re” means again. And once you knew the real self

Before you entered and became part of a society, a culture, a civilization, you knew it. It is not a coincidence that people go on thinking that their childhood was the most beautiful part of their life. It is a long-forgotten memory, because there have been days in your life, the earliest days, which you cannot remember exactly; only a vague feeling, a kind of fragrance, a kind of shadow is there.

If you re-spect, if you look again and go deep into your existence, you are going to find the place from where you started losing yourself and gaining the ego.

That moment is a moment of illumination because once you have seen what the ego is, the game is finished.

So I cannot say to you, drop the ego, because that means I accept the reality of your ego. And how are you going to drop it – you are it. Right now, you are it. The self you have lost far away back in the past. There is a great distance between you and your self. Right now you are existing at the periphery of your self. That periphery is pretending to be your self. That pretender is the ego. Now telling the ego, ”Drop! Surrender! Be humble!” is simply idiotic.

I used to go at least three or four times a year to Mount Abu in India. Mount Abu has one of the most artistic temples in the whole world. They are Jaina temples, Delwada temples. The carving in the marble is incomparable. When for the first time I went to Mount Abu, the priest of the Delwada temple came to invite me. I went with him to his office. The Delwada temple is a very precious temple, very ancient, and yet as fresh as if it had just been finished, just created.

Marble has that quality of freshness: for thousands of years it remains young, fresh, innocent. And Delwada temples are just marble and marble. The Taj Mahal is nothing compared to Delwada temples. The Taj Mahal is a simple structure, but Delwada temples are the artwork of thousands of artists, perhaps over hundreds of years. Each inch is carved.

In his office – and he had a beautiful office, because governors, governor – generals, and even George the fifth, the king, had come to visit the Delwada temples If you miss the Delwada temples you miss much of India, the India that was. Delwada has something of the past beauty and glory. So he had a beautiful office because he was continually receiving guests from foreign countries, prime ministers, presidents, kings, queens.

I went into his office. And in his office there was carved on the marble wall, a beautiful sentence, a statement from Mahavira. The statement is such that nobody could object to it, and nobody had ever From Ignorance to Innocence

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objected The priest was almost seventy years old and the priest’s forefathers, and their forefathers from generation to generation, had served the temple. The statement was simple. The statement was: ”The humble man is respected universally. Be humble.” But the reason you are given for being humble is that you will be honored universally. The whole statement of Mahavira is: ”The king is honored in his own country, but the humble man is honored universally”there are no boundaries to his honor. A king’s honor has boundaries – within his own kingdom. Beyond those boundaries he is nobody. But the humble person has no boundaries to his kingdom, the whole universe is his kingdom; he is universally honored.

But to whom is this idea going to appeal? The ego will immediately catch hold of it. That’s what the ego wants: to be honored universally! And if humbleness is the way, then okay, the ego is ready to be humble If surrender is the way, the ego is ready to surrender People used to come to me and they would say, ”We want to surrender to you.” I would say, ”But what will you surrender to me?” And they would say, ”It is such a simple thing – we want to surrender our ego.” And I would say, ”That is okay, but what will I do with all these egos? You are tortured by one, I will be tortured by the thousands of egos you surrender to me. It is as if somebody comes and says, ”I surrender my cancer to you.” Great surrender! You are obliging me? And how can you surrender your ego? Have you ever met it? Have you even seen it? Have you seen its subtle ways of movement, its workings? Do you know it? You don’t know it” I asked the priest, ”Remove this sentence from this temple. Mahavira has no understanding about ego because what he is saying is an appeal to the ego. Yes, he will get people ready to surrender, ready to be humble, ready to be meek; but behind their meekness will be a sophisticated ego, far more dangerous than the ordinary raw quality of the uncultured ego, which can be easily traced to where it is.”

The sophisticated ego becomes more and more difficult to find. It becomes so subtle that it goes on slipping from your hands. And it becomes so clever at changing its faces. If it can change its face to meekness, humbleness, surrender, then what else do you want it to do? It is doing almost the impossible: it is pretending to be its opposite.

And the religions have been exploiting the idea; they say, ”Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” Now, to inherit the earth... what more can your ego demand? And what more can your ego find? And this man is giving you a simple proposal: ”Be meek, and the earth is yours.” It is a bargain! And you are not going to be the loser. What you are losing? – you are simply gaining.

Karl Marx, in his most famous book, THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, has a beautiful sentence at the end. With that sentence he concludes the communist manifesto. The sentence has some great insight in it. It says, ”Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.” He is calling on the workers, the proletariat, the poor people of the world, the laborers, to unite, to fight for their rights, to rebel against the whole system of exploitation, because what have you got to From Ignorance to Innocence

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lose except your chains? You don’t have anything else except your chains, so there is no need to be afraid of fighting. The other party has to lose. If you win, you gain. If you are defeated, you lose nothing, because you don’t have anything in the first place.

He was giving a great incentive. He thought that the revolution would happen first in America. He had never even dreamed that it would happen first in Russia. He must have been puzzled in his grave, almost shocked.

He had never thought that the revolution would happen in Russia, in China, in Poland, in Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia – these names had never occurred to him, could not have occurred to him. He thought the revolution would happen where capitalism had come to its peak, where the class division was perfect, where you could see the rich and the poor.

Marx forgot just one thing, and that changed the whole course of communism. He forgot that the American poor have something to lose. He forgot his own declaration. When he predicted that the revolution would happen first in America, he forgot completely that the American poor have something to lose. The Russian poor have nothing to lose, the Chinese poor have nothing to lose.

The wonder of wonders is India! It has the poorest people in the world; you cannot conceive what they can lose, but no revolution has happened there.

In India it could not happen because the religious tradition is so deep that it has convinced the poor people that, ”You are the blessed people. Your poverty is just a test of your faith. All these small troubles are nothing before the blessings of paradise. This life is just a life consisting only of four days.”

That’s a proverb in India, that life is nothing but four days. Two days pass in desiring, the remaining two days pass in waiting. It is so small that half of it – while you are young, you have ambitions and desires to be someone, to be somewhere, to get your name carved for the coming generations –

those two days pass in desiring. And the other half, when you start getting older, those two days pass in waiting for some miracle to happen and your desires to be fulfilled. This is all your life is: a soap bubble.

For this small life are you going to lose the eternal blessings of heaven? Be patient. Have faith.

Your poverty is a God-given opportunity. If you can pass this fire test – which is not a long journey, just four steps – the doors of paradise open, and you will be received with bands and singing and dancing.

In India revolution seems to be impossible. It should have happened first in India, because what Karl Marx says has a truth in it. When you don’t have anything to lose, what is the fear of fighting, of rebelling, of risking?

I have told this ancient story many times, but each time that I have told it I have loved it more. A Master is going from one place to another with his chief disciple. They have to cross a jungle. The disciple is puzzled because the Master says, ”Move a little quicker, we have to pass the jungle fast.

The sun is coming down and soon it will be night.” The disciple has been with the Master for many years and the Master has never been afraid of the night. He has never been in such a hurry. Moreover, he is keeping a bag hanging from his shoulder.

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He is clutching that bag, and once in a while he puts his hand inside and feels something there, and then looks at ease.

The disciple was very puzzled: what is the matter? What is he carrying in the bag that he is so afraid?

But the path was long, and although they were almost running, in the middle of the jungle the night came. The disciple saw for the first time the Master trembling, almost in a nervous breakdown.

He said, ”What is the matter? We have been in jungles many times, and we have stayed in jungles.

We are steps – the, we have renounced the world. Even if a wild animal comes and eats us, there is nothing much to be worried about. One day one has to die. There will always be some excuse

– about some disease, wild animals, some enemy. And it does not matter when one dies; what matters is how one dies. And you know and I know how to die. So why be afraid?” But the Master is no longer in a state to listen to him. They stop at a water well, and the Master says, ”I am tired and thirsty so let’s pull up some water so we can wash our faces and drink some water and do our prayer: the prayer that is done at sunset.” In his nervousness he even forgot that the sun had already set.

He gave the bag to the disciple and told him, ”Be careful with the bag.” The Master went to pull water from the well. This was the chance the disciple had been waiting for, to look into the bag to find out what was the matter. He opened the bag and found what was the matter – the Master was carrying a brick of solid gold. Now he knew what the fear was. It was not death, it was not wild animals, it was not the night – it was some robbers, some thieves. This gold brick was the cause.

So he took out the brick, threw it away in the jungle, found a stone of the same size, weighing almost the same, and put it in the bag. And when the master was back, the first thing he did was take away the bag. It was as heavy as before – the brick was inside.

They started walking again, faster than before. The disciple said, ”Now there is no need to go so fast.”

The Master said, ”What do you mean?”

He said, ”I have thrown away the cause of fear, long ago.” The Master said, ”The cause of fear? How can you throw away the cause of fear?” He said, ”You can look in your bag.”

The Master took out the stone. He said, ”My God! You have thrown away my gold brick. Now there is no need to rush, we can stay here the whole night.” And they stayed in the jungle.

In the morning the Master thanked the disciple: ”You did right. Because I had something to lose, there was fear. When there was nothing to lose, there was no point in the fear. I slept such a beautiful sleep. With that brick I could not have slept the whole night. At least a dozen times I would have touched the brick and felt whether it was still there or gone. But you did the right thing.” From Ignorance to Innocence

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When you have something to lose, there is fear. That’s why in America the revolution has not happened, and is not going to happen – because America has really rich people and poor people, but the poor are almost in the same position as are the middle classes in the poor countries. The middle class never revolts because it has something and it can hope for more; it can invest for more, it can desire, be ambitious, wait. So of course the middle class can never go into revolution. Who knows? – you may lose even that which you have got.

America has only two classes, the middle class and the rich class, hence there is never going to be a revolution. In Russia it happened, in China it happened, because they were class-divided societies with clear-cut divisions. Now, in India ninety-five percent of the people have nothing to lose. Four percent of the people, the middle class, have a little bit to lose. One percent of the people, the super-rich, have much to lose.

But in India the revolution has not happened in five thousand years. Religion is the cause: it goes on giving you the whole of paradise, for nothing. Why bother about the revolution? What are you going to gain? Rather, be patient, prayerful, faithful; surrender to God and you will have everything.

Jesus says to the poor people that it is possible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, but it is not possible for a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven. I don’t believe it. This is simply a consolation. This is poison, pure poison. There is every possibility that the rich man will get through the gates of heaven. He may bribe the gatekeeper – and if the gatekeeper is Indian, there is no problem.

And the rich man, whom Jesus says cannot pass through the gates of heaven, has done everything to be qualified to get through the gates of heaven. He has made synagogues, temples; he has been donating to the poor, giving charity, making hospitals, schools. What are the poor doing? Do you think just being poor is a qualification?

At the gates of heaven will you be just saying, ”Because I was poor, I claim... and where is that guy Jesus who said, ’Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God’?” You won’t find Jesus there either. He himself was poor – who will allow him to enter heaven? There is no possibility.

Poverty is not a qualification for anything.

The rich man will find a thousand and one ways. All the priests will be there to support the rich man.

All the scriptures will be there to support the rich man – because they were all created by the money of the rich man. The priests have lived off the money of the rich man. Even God is the creation of the rich man to befool the poor. And you think the poor will enter heaven?

In fact, there is no heaven.

It has been created to give hope to the poor, to give consolation, to titillate their greed – using simple methods which the poor can afford, like being humble. In fact, what else can he do? His poverty has humiliated him enough and now you are saying, ”Be humble.” No, I cannot say that. I cannot humiliate anybody. And this teaching is nothing but a strategy to make peace with his humiliated state.

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You have been humiliated by everybody, you have been trodden on by everybody, you are crushed by everybody – and then comes the priest to give you the opium: ”Don’t be worried, my son, this is just a passing phase. If you remain humble and surrendered, everything is going to be okay for you.

And these rich people who are treading all over you – they will be thrown into hell.” And this priest lives on the money of the rich. He knows there is no hell.

The rich know there is no hell, there is no heaven, that this is a strategy for the humiliated to be consoled No, I am not at all in favor of surrender.

My religion has no place for surrender.

It teaches you integrity.

It teaches you individuality.

It teaches you selfhood.

It teaches you self-respect.

And the magic of self-respect is that the moment you start searching for yourself, you will come across many shadowy selves, all phony. And it is not difficult to see what is phony because anything that you come across is phony. A simple criterion: anything that you find within you and think, ”This is my self” know well that it is phony.

It is the finder who is the true one, not the found.

The found is just the object that you have achieved and accumulated.

Discard all those selves that you go on finding within you: ”This is the self... No – this is the self. Go on discarding them. A simple criterion, there cannot be a more simple criterion: anything that you find as your self is not your self

Go on discarding, and a moment comes when you cannot find any self anywhere. You cannot find anything – all is empty.

And that is the moment of awakening.

Suddenly the seer is seen.

You are awakened to your own awareness.

You don’t find an objective self, you find a subjectivity, and finding it is such a blessing, such an ecstasy that you will not care a bit about paradise. And you will not be bothered any more about surrendering because there is nothing to surrender. You have discarded all that was phony, that was only pretension.

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are. It is only you who can discover it. In discovering it, the ego evaporates it is not surrendered, because it is a non-existential, a shadowy thing, it has no substance in it.

A famous incident.... One of the kings, Bimbisara, came to Buddha. That day a rare thing had happened. A poor man, a shoemaker, Sudas was his name.... sudas means a good slave, a nice slave, a slave who has no ideas of rebellion, of revolt or anything, who is absolutely contented with his slavery. He had a small hut and a small pond behind the hut.

That day, in his pond a lotus flower blossomed out of season. Once in a while things like that happen in nature. It’s nothing to brag about, nothing to make a miracle out of Sudas asked his wife, ”I should take this to the richest man in the town because he goes every day to Gautam the Buddha, and he will be delighted. And at least he is going to give me one rupee as a reward.” The wife said, ”Go, be quick – he may be leaving.” He went out on the road and found that the chariot of the richest man was coming, going towards the mango grove where Buddha was staying. He stopped the rich man and said, ”Out of season a rare lotus flower has blossomed in my pond, and I thought it would be good if you could present it to your Master, Gautam the Buddha.”

The rich man was really happy. He said, ”Of course, because even my Master will be surprised to see it. This is not the season for lotuses. I will give you one thousand rupees as a reward.” The poor Sudas could not believe it – one thousand rupees! In those days rupees were solid gold.

In fact the word ”rupee” comes from the Sanskrit word rup, which means gold, pure gold. The coins were pure gold – one thousand gold coins! The poor man said, ”Please say it again, I cannot believe my ears.”

The rich man thought that perhaps he was not willing to sell for one thousand rupees. He said,

”Don’t be worried: I will give you ten thousand, or you can ask and whatever you ask I will give you, because I would love to put this rare flower at Buddha’s feet; perhaps nobody has ever presented such a thing to him.”

Sudas was so shocked, he lost his voice. He could not say, ”Yes, ten thousand is enough.” And the rich man said, ”Why are you silent? Are you not willing?” While this negotiation was going on another chariot, the chariot of King Bimbisara, came by. Seeing the lotus flower, the king stopped and said to Sudas, ”Sudas, whatsoever the rich man is going to give to you, I will give you five times more. Whatever he is offering, you just come to the palace and collect five times more.”

Sudas was almost on the verge of falling dead. Ten thousand the rich man was offering, and he was willing to give even more. And now comes the king who says, ”Five times more, whatever!” – he is not even enquiring. Kings are kings, they should not enquire the prices of things. And of course in front of the king the rich man could not say anything. He knew well that whatsoever he says, the king will give five times more. He had lost it.

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The king asked Sudas... Sudas opened his mouth and said, ”Forgive me, but if this flower gives you so much pleasure, just presenting it to Buddha – then I am going to present it myself. You can keep your money.

The king could not believe it. The rich man could not believe it. They both said, ”What are you saying?”

He said, ”I am a poor man, but I manage to live. What am I going to do with all your money? But this chance that you think is so precious, I am not going to miss. I am going to put this flower at Buddha’s feet myself.”

But kings cannot be denied. The king said, ”Then you should be aware that you will never reach Buddha; your head will be cut off. I will give you ten times.” Seeing the situation, the poor man had to give the lotus to the king. The king was already going with a very precious diamond to present to Buddha. That diamond that Bimbisara had was the biggest diamond known in those days. Now he had two presents. When he went to Buddha, both hands were full; in one a very precious diamond, in the other a very rare flower. Which to present first? –

of course he thought of the diamond.

As he was going to place the diamond, Buddha said, ”Drop it!” He did not give him the chance to put it at his feet, he said, ”Drop it.” And when Buddha says drop it, he has to drop it... unwillingly, reluctantly, because such a precious diamond.... In the whole country, all the kings were jealous of the diamond – he was the owner of a rare piece – and Buddha says, ”Drop it!” He is not even giving him the chance to put it at his feet.

Then he raised the other hand with the flower, and Buddha said, ”Drop it!” So he dropped both and stood there empty-handed.

Buddha said, ”Drop it!”

Bimbisara said, ”Either you are mad or I am mad. Both my hands are empty – now what can I drop?” Sariputta, one of Buddha’s disciples, said, ”You have not understood Buddha. He is not interested in your diamond or in your lotus; you can take them away. Drop the real thing.”

”What real thing?” he said. ”I have only brought two things.” Buddha said, ”Drop yourself!”

”But,” Bimbisara said, ”myself? I don’t know who I am.” Buddha said, ”That was the point. Go home, find out, and when you find out who you are, then come back.”

It was very insulting in a way. In front of ten thousand steps – the, Bimbisara is told to go back and look into himself and find out who he is. But he was a man of tremendous courage, intelligence, From Ignorance to Innocence

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integrity. He told the palace, ”Nobody should disturb me. Whatsoever time it takes, I am going to find what this man says.”

For three days he remained in isolation. The fourth day he came out, radiant, and went to Buddha.

And when Buddha saw him, Buddha said, ”Now there is no need to drop anything because what you have found cannot be dropped. I can see it on your face, in your eyes. I was telling you to drop that which you were not.” But you cannot drop it unless you find who you are. And the moment you find who you are there is no need to drop it, it simply drops of its own accord.

Let me repeat your question: you ask me, ”What is the place of surrender in Your religion?” From my side, there is no place.

I do not ask you to surrender. I ask you to seek and search your being.

Surrender will happen, but it will be a happening, not a doing. Neither I will ask you for surrender nor have you to do it. But what I am asking you to do, if you do it, surrender is going to happen. And when it happens of its own accord then it is a totally different phenomenon, qualitatively different.

Then it is not ego pretending to be humble and meek and surrendered. Then it is a state of no-ego.

The ego disappears in a very simple way. It is just like you are doing some arithmetic and for two plus two you put five. Somebody draws your attention to the fact that two plus two are four, not five, and you see the point. Do you have to drop five? Will it take effort to drop five? – some struggle, some austerities, some fasting? You simply erase it. It was just a mistake, and you will write four.

The ego is just a mistake – just like two plus two is equal to five. Just like that, when you look inwards and search for the real self, you come to know that two plus two is four, not five. Nothing has to be dropped, but something has disappeared from you. Something that was continuously pretending to be your self, something that was destroying your whole life, something that was messing up everything is found no more.

When the ego is not found, I call that surrender from your side; it is not part of my religion. I will not ask you to surrender, but I will ask you something else which brings the surrender of its own accord. But then you are not humble, you are not meek, you are very grounded, very centered, very self-respectful. And only a man who is self-respectful is capable of respecting others.

The man who respects himself cannot humiliate anybody else, because he knows that the same self is hidden in every being, even in the trees and the rocks. Perhaps it is fast asleep in the rock, but that doesn’t matter; it is the same existence in different forms.

A man who respects himself suddenly finds himself respecting the whole universe.

He cannot humiliate anybody, he cannot be disrespectful to anybody.

But remember – he is not humble, he is not meek; you cannot exploit him in the name of meekness and humbleness. He will not allow you to put him in a position of humility, and he will not care about your kingdom of God.

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He will say, ”You can go to your kingdom of God. I have found my kingdom of God; it is within me. I don’t need any messiah to take me to the kingdom of God, all I need is an inner search. Except me, nobody else can do it. I am responsible for losing my self; I have to be responsible for finding it” The truly religious man is difficult to understand because he will not fall into any category of yours.

Your categories are opposites: arrogant-humble....

Now where can you put a religious man?

Arrogant? – he is not arrogant.

Humble? – he is not humble.

He is simply himself

A religious man cannot be categorized.

All your categories fall short.

A religious man is beyond all your categories.

Hence he is bound to be misunderstood.

I am not an arrogant man; I am not humble either.

But then the question arises, where do I stand? I don’t even stand in the middle of both because that will be just half and half, something of arrogance and something of humbleness. No, I don’t stand even in the exact middle. That’s where I disagree with Gautam Buddha. He teaches to be always in the middle: don’t be arrogant, don’t be humble, just be in the middle But I say: exactly in the middle you will be something of both.

No, the really religious man is beyond the categories of opposites.

You cannot categorize him.

He is neither on this pole nor on that pole.

He is not in the middle either; he is just above.

He is a watcher on the hills, and everything else is deep in the valley.

Nothing touches him.

So sometimes you can interpret him as arrogant, sometimes you can interpret him as humble, but those are your interpretations. As far as his own experiences are concerned.... And I can say it with my authority, I do not need any scriptures to support me. I am not arrogant, I have never been arrogant; I have never been humble either. I have been just myself So whatever the situation From Ignorance to Innocence

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demanded, I acted, responded, neither with humbleness nor with arrogance, but just whatsoever the moment needed – with awareness.

Hence my teaching is in a way very simple if you can see the point.

If you miss the point it is very difficult.

I will not say to you to turn your other cheek if somebody hits you, no. Jesus can say it because he teaches humbleness. I cannot say that. I can only say one thing: let that moment decide. Sometimes perhaps you have to turn the other cheek. Sometimes perhaps you have to hit the man harder than he has hit you. Sometimes perhaps you have to hit him on both cheeks – but nothing can be given to you as a ready-made formula. It will depend on you, the person, the situation.

But act with awareness, then whatever you do is right.

So I don’t label acts as right and wrong.

To me, the quality of your awareness is decisive. If you can respond with awareness, then whatever your response is, I declare it right. If you lose your awareness and react, then whatever you do –

you may be turning the other cheek – it is wrong. Do you see I have used two different words? With awareness I used the word response; with unawareness I used the word reaction.

Response comes from yourself.

Reaction is created by the other man.

He has hit you. He is the master of the situation, and you are simply a puppet. You are reacting.

His action is decisive, and because he has done something, now you are doing something in reaction. This is the unconscious man’s behavior. That’s why the unconscious man’s behavior can be manipulated very easily. You smile, he will smile. You be angry, he will be angry.

It is because of this that people like Dale Carnegie can write books like HOW TO WIN FRIENDS

AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE. All that you have to know is simple reactions. He himself describes a situation. He was functioning as an agent of an insurance company. And there was a rich woman, the richest in the town, a widow, who was very much against insurance, and insurance agents; so much so that insurance agents could not even see her – just from the gate they were thrown out.

Her orders were, ”Throw them out!” No question of appointment....

And when he came to the city, all the other agents said, ”You have written this book, HOW TO

WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE.... Now, if you can insure this old lady we will think that you have something to say, otherwise it is all hocus-pocus.” Dale Carnegie managed to insure the woman. How did he do it? A simple method.

Early in the morning he went around the woman’s house. She was in the garden. Standing outside the fence, he said, ”I have never seen such beautiful flowers.” The old woman said, ”Are you interested in roses?” From Ignorance to Innocence

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He said, ”How did you manage to know? I am mad about roses; the only flower that attracts me is the rose.”

The woman said, ”Why are you standing outside? Come in. I will show you my roses. I am also mad about roses, and you will not come across such big rose flowers as I have got” And he was invited in. They went around her big garden, full of beautiful roses. And he was all praise, and all the poetry that he knew.... The woman was so immensely impressed that she said, ”You seem to be such a wise man that I want to ask you one question. What do you think about insurance?” – because she was tortured by these insurance agents continually, and they were being thrown out.

He said, ”For that I will have to come again because I will have to think it over and do a little research on it. I never advise anybody unless I am certain.” The woman said, ”That is right. You are the first man who is not too eager to advise. That is the sure sign of a fool: too eager to advise.”

He said, ”No, I will have to look at the whole matter. Perhaps it will take a few days.” And during those few days he used to come every morning and stand outside the fence.

And the woman said, ”Now there is no need to be standing out there – I have told all the servants that for you the doors are open twenty-four hours a day. Whenever you want to come into the garden, you can come. If you want to come into the house, you can. It is your house, don’t be shy.” And within a few days he came with all the forms, the files and everything. He said, ”I have worked out the whole thing. In fact I had to become an agent of an insurance company to find out absolutely all the details, the inside story, because from the outside you cannot know much. Now I am absolutely certain that this is the thing for you.”

Now, this is the way the whole of humanity functions: reaction.

You just do something that you know how the other unconscious being is going to react to. And it is very rare that an insurance agent will meet an awakened man, a rare possibility. In the first place the awakened man will not have anything to be insured. Only with the awakened man will Dale Carnegie fail, because he will not react, he will respond. And about response you cannot be predictable.

The man of awareness is unpredictable because he never reacts.

You cannot figure out beforehand what he is going to do.

And each moment he is anew.

He may have acted in a certain way in a certain moment. The next moment he may not act in the same way because in the next moment everything has changed.

Every moment life is continuously changing; it is a moving river; nothing is static except your unconsciousness and its reactions, which are static.

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beautiful. That expulsion was also beautiful. I had to search for a new college, but before I could be admitted I somehow had to persuade the principal, because the whole city knew – there were twenty colleges – the whole city was aware that I was continually being expelled from one college to another.

I have been educated in many colleges. People ordinarily for one degree go to one college; for one degree I have gone to a dozen colleges. For two or three months at the most they were able to withstand me. So I went to the principal’s house, not to the college. I enquired about him from the neighbors, what kind of man he was. They said, ”Very religious; every morning.... He is a follower of the goddess Kali.” He himself was a very strong man, black – kali means black – very tall and very fat. He never needed any microphone, there was no need; he could address ten thousand students without any loudspeaker system.

So the whole neighborhood told me, ”Early in the morning for two hours, three hours, he is such a nuisance because he just continues, ’Jai Kali! Jai Kali! Jai Kali!’ – and you know the man and his voice! ”Jai Kali means victory to the mother goddess Kali. ”And he gets so agitated that he gets louder and louder. First he starts by sitting, and then he stands up. And he almost looks like Kali himself”

Kali is a very ugly goddess, a very ugly woman with four hands, with a necklace of human skulls.

With one hand she is holding a head, freshly cut off, blood dropping from it; in another hand, a sword. And she is standing on her husband’s chest! – a real woman. The world needs such women.

So I enquired about everything, and then I went early in the morning at six o’clock and he was doing his thing, and really he was hot! He had a small temple in his house. I simply went in and sat there by the side. When he was just coming to the end of it I started, ”Jai Kali!” He looked around and he said, ”Who are you?”

I said, ”Don’t disturb me,” and I started again: ”Jai Kali!” He said, ”But this is strange. For the first time – and you are so young. Are you a devotee of Kali?” I said, ”What do you think? Do you think you are the only devotee of Kali in this city?” He said, ”I used to think that nobody was such a devotee as I am, but you certainly seem to be!” I said, ”No, not compared to you. You are far ahead. You are almost a saint; I am just a beginner, an amateur.”

He said, ”No, you are not an amateur! What do you do?” He wanted to talk and he pulled me along:

”Come with me, have breakfast.” So I had breakfast with him. He said, ”You are the only man who has understood me – when you said, ’You are almost a saint....’ Nobody thinks me a saint, they think that I am a monster. And these neighbors would kill me if they could manage, but knowing me they are afraid, they are cowards. You are the only man in my whole life who has understood me. What do you do?”

I said, ”I study in a college.”

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He said, ”Drop that college. You join my college.” I said, ”If you say so, I can drop anything. Dropped! Done!” And I joined his college.

After a few days he came to know. Then he called me and said, ”You are a rascal.” I said, ”You should have understood, even on that day. You are not a saint either, but I wanted admission. What else to do?”

Unconscious people are predictable. You can manage them easily. You can make them do things, say things, even things that they never wanted to do or never wanted to say, because they react.

But a man of awareness, an authentically religious man only responds. He is not in your hands; you cannot pull him down, you cannot make him do anything. You cannot manage to draw out even a single sentence from him. He will do only that which in that moment he finds – through his awareness – is appropriate.

Yes, surrender happens. But remember, in my religion there is no place for ”doing” surrender.

Surrender is not expected of you, it is not asked from you, but it happens. I am simply making you aware of it. And when it happens nothing can be done about it. But the happening is so graceful and beautiful it does not leave any trace behind it.

The ego simply evaporates and you are left without ego – neither humble nor arrogant, just without ego.

You cannot even say, ”I am egoless,” because there is no longer an ”I” to declare it; there is only a kind of am-ness, there is no ”I” in it. The ”I” goes with the ego.

Am-ness remains with your existence and becomes really a tremendous force, changing everything that you have been before.

It cuts you from your past.

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Document Outline

- 1 Pseudo-religion: the stick-on soul

- 2 The other cheek: the masochist's slap-up feast

- 3 The nuclear family -- the imminent meltdown

- 4 Danger: truth at work

- 5 Ecstasy is now -- why wait?

- 6 Renunciation: mortgage today for a tomorrow that never comes

- 7 Shame is the name of their game

- 8 God is not a solution but a problem

- 9 I teach a religionless religion

- 10 God -- the nobody everybody knows

- 11 Truth: not a dogma but a dance

- 12 Faith: the suicide of intelligence

- 13 Ecstasy is knowing that nobody is holding your hand

- 14 Society crowds you out; religon outs your crowd

- 15 They say believe; I say explore

- 16 Let's not face it -- you're absolutely alone

- 17 Jesus, the only forgotten son of god

- 18 One god, one messenger, one book -- one big lie

- 19 Religion is rebellion

- 20 Surrender: the ego upside down

- 21 Personality: the carbon cop-out

- 22 The commune: the distillation of rebellious spirits

- 23 Conscience: a coffin for consciousness

- 24 Imitation is your cremation

- 25 Jesus -- the only savior who nearly saved himself

- 26 Meditation: watchfulness, awareness, alertness -- the real trinity

- 27 Baptism: wading for godot

- 28 Science plus religion -- the dynamic formula for the future

- 29 Positive thinking: philosophy for phonies

- 30 Surrender: the ego upside down