Beloved Osho,

You said a few days ago that the really innovative man comes two hundred years ahead of his time. You also said that time is elastic. Haven’t you chosen to come precisely now, before these chaotic times the world is facing, so men will be more receptive to a radical change? And is the ever-faster-growing communication technology not making in this respect the world smaller for your message to spread? Will it really take two hundred years for mankind to open up to your vision?

Govindo, we are living in a very special time. There are not two hundred years available. If man does not understand my message now, there will be no man after two hundred years to understand. Two hundred years is very long; even twenty years….

Mankind has never been at such a critical moment as it is today. There have been wars – thousands of wars – but they were not going to destroy all life. In the ancient days, wars were almost like football games.

The greatest war in India, Mahabharat, happened somewhere around five thousand years ago, and it gives the idea – because that is the only war in India which has been described in such minute detail. Just one family – two brothers: one brother who was sick, had five sons; the other brother was blind, but he had one hundred sons. He must have had many women – to manage one hundred sons from one woman is almost impossible.

Now the question was: who was going to succeed? The five brothers were very intelligent, courageous, trained in many martial arts. One of them was a great archer; another was a great wrestler; the eldest was a very intelligent man. But the hundred brothers were all what you would call “bad guys” – so everybody wanted the kingdom to go to the five brothers and not to these hundred rascals; even without power they were harassing the people so much. But they were not ready to agree so easily, so the final decision had to be made by war – whoever wins….

Now it was a family war, and they invited all their friends, all their relatives – and they were all interrelated. The grandfather, although he loved those five, had chosen to be with the one hundred, for the simple reason that those five were the sons of a sick man, and a sick man could not rule, because of his sickness. So the kingdom had gone into the hands of the brother with one hundred sons, and to give the kingdom back to the other party would be unfair; although he loved those five and he hated those hundred – still, he was fighting with them.

In the evening, as the sun was setting, the war would stop, and people would go into each other’s camp. The whole day they were killing each other, and at night they were playing cards, and they were gossiping about the events of the day. That was a totally different kind of war. Man was directly involved, and only soldiers had to fight, not civilians. Thousands of wars of that kind we have survived.

But now we are in a very exceptional time. A nuclear war simply means total destruction – a global suicide. Nobody is going to be defeated; nobody is going to be victorious: all are going to be dead. And not only man – birds, animals, trees, all that is living on the earth will be dead.

And both the great powers – America and the Soviet Union – go on piling up more and more nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union has proved more sensible. Seeing the fact that right now we have so many nuclear weapons that every man can be killed seven times – although there is no need to kill any man seven times, once is always enough – the Soviet Union has proved far more intelligent than Ronald Reagan. First they tried hard to negotiate that we should stop this piling up of nuclear weapons – it is pointless now, wasting money on it – but Reagan is not willing. So, of their own accord, the Soviet Union for many months has not created any nuclear weapons. They have stopped, but America goes on piling up….

The danger is so great that if man can survive this century, it will be a great miracle. So there is not that much time, Govindo. For the first time the future is very short. It always used to be eternal; now it is at the most twenty years.

So in the lifetime of each of you, the decisive moment is going to come: either man commits suicide or, seeing that this is an absolute absurdity, man changes his consciousness. It often happens that under pressure people change – and there will never be again a greater pressure than is present today.

It is most probable that man will go through a transformation. In that sense my message is exactly at the right time: that nations should disappear, because it is nations who fight; religions should disappear, because it is religions who fight. The idea of races – of superiority and inferiority – should disappear, because that has been one of the causes of wars.

It is a time either to destroy the whole earth or to destroy all these arbitrary conceptions of nation, race, religion, and make the whole earth one humanity.

But I do not agree on one point with you. You say, “Have not You chosen to come precisely now, before these chaotic times the world is facing?”

I have not chosen anything. Perhaps existence has chosen me to be a vehicle to give you the message – but I have not chosen. I have disappeared long ago… and existence can speak through you only when you are not.

It is hoping against hope – but I still hope that the danger of global death will be the shock which awakens humanity. If man survives after this century, it will be a new man and a new humanity. One thing is certain:

Either man has to die or man has to change.

I cannot think that man will choose to die. The longing for life is so great… just to think that the earth has become dead – no trees, no humanity, no birds, no animals, no sea animals…. It is such a great crisis, because in the whole universe – it is only an assumption of the scientists that there may be life on fifty thousand planets, but there is no absolute evidence. It is just a mathematical and logical conclusion, but there is no scientific proof.

As far as we know, only this earth is green, only this earth has flowers, only this earth has love; only this earth has produced people like Gautam Buddha; only this earth has birds which sing, people who dance, people who love. This is the only place in the whole universe where people search and seek for truth. To destroy it – for no particular reason at all – is such utter stupidity that I don’t think that the third world war is going to happen.

And if the third world war does not happen, that will mean a great change, a tidal change in human consciousness. We will see a new man, who is not Christian, not Hindu, who is not a Jew, who is not a Chinese, who is not an American. If all these trees can exist without being Christians and without being Hindus; if all these birds can exist without any boundaries of nations… and when a bird passes the boundary of India and enters into Pakistan, he does not need any entry visa, does not need even any passport….

Except for mankind, the earth is one. And it is only a question of raising human consciousness…. Nations can disappear, religions can disappear, discriminations can disappear; and with that, much crap will disappear. Politicians will not be of any use; priests will not be of any use; churches and temples and mosques will not be of any use. There are millions of people who don’t have homes, and God – who is just a lie – has millions of houses for himself.

We have lived in an insane way, and now it is a choice between insanity and sanity. If insanity wins, there will be no life at all. If sanity wins, life will become for the first time free from all superstitions, all boundaries, all divisions – one humanity, one earth; freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom to choose where you want to live.

It is our earth.

Osho, The Rebellious Spirit, Ch 12, Q 4