The first question:
Osho,
Why is it that only humans repress, manipulate, kill, try to conquer the natural flow in nature, the Tao? Why are we so stupid?
Man is not a being, man is a becoming. This is one of the most fundamental things to be understood. The trees, the animals, they are all beings. Man is different: he is a becoming, he is a process. And with the process the problem arises: you can fall below the animals, you can rise above the gods. A dog cannot fall below doghood, nor can he become a buddha; both are impossible. He is neither stupid nor a genius; he has no growth. The way he is when born is the way he will live and die. Between his birth and death there is not going to be any evolution.
Man is different. That is man’s privilege, his prerogative, but there also lies great danger. Man is not born fully complete; he is not born entire – birth is only the beginning of a process. Now, the process can take any form: it can become deformed, it can take a wrong route, it can go astray. Man begins his life as freedom but freedom has its price; you can’t have it for free. No other animal has any freedom except man.
Hence for centuries the mystics have said that man is a bridge between two eternities: the eternity of the unconscious and the eternity of the conscious. Man is always moving between these two polarities. He is like a tightrope walker. Each moment is full of danger, but full of possibilities too. No possibility comes alone; it has its own danger. You can miss – you can fall from the rope into the abyss.
Man has been called a ladder by the mystics. Now, the ladder can do two things: you can use it to go upward and the same ladder can be used to go downward. You use the same ladder for both purposes, just your direction changes. When you are moving upward your direction is one way; when you are moving downward your direction is just the opposite. But with the same ladder the result will be totally different. Man is a ladder between heaven and hell.
That’s why it is only human beings who repress, who manipulate, who kill, who try to conquer the natural flow in nature, who are stupid – because they can be buddhas. Because man has intelligence, that’s why he can be stupid. Stupidity simply means you have not used your intelligence; it does not mean absence of intelligence. If there is no presence of intelligence you cannot call man stupid. You cannot call a rock stupid; a rock is a rock – no question of stupidity.
But you can call man stupid because with man there is hope, a ray of great light. With man, a door opens toward the beyond. He can transcend himself and he is not transcending – that’s his stupidity. He can grow and he is not growing, he is clinging to all kinds of immaturity – that is his stupidity. He goes on and on living in the past, which is no more – that is his stupidity. Or he starts projecting in the future, which is not yet – that is his stupidity.
He should live in the present with deep passion, with great love, with intensity, with awareness and that will become his intelligence. It is the same energy: upside down it is stupidity; put it right, rearrange it and it becomes intelligence.
Intelligence and stupidity are not separate energies. The same energy functioning in harmony is intelligence, functioning in contradictions is stupidity. Man can be stupid – don’t think that it is unfortunate. It looks on the surface that it is unfortunate, but hidden behind it is great glory, great splendor which can be discovered.
But the society, the so-called religions, the state, the crowd, they all want you to be stupid. Nobody wants you to be intelligent. They all condition you to remain stupid your whole life, for the simple reason that stupid people are obedient. Intelligent people start thinking on their own; they start becoming individuals. They start having their own life, their own lifestyle, their own way of seeing, of being, of growing. They are no longer part of the crowd – they cannot be. They have to leave the crowd behind, only then can they grow. And the crowd feels offended. The crowd does not want anybody to be more than the average person – it is against the average person’s ego. The crowd, the collectivity, has a great involvement: the involvement is that anybody becoming more intelligent, more individual, more aware, will not be part of the mob psychology any longer.
You cannot force Buddha to follow the stupid people. And the stupid people are many, the majority, ninety-nine point nine percent. They have a great power with them – the power of violence – and they show it whenever it is needed. They showed it to Jesus, they showed it to Socrates, they showed it to Mansoor… They would like to show it to me.
The man who threw a knife to kill me just few days ago was simply a representative of the ninety-nine point nine percent people. He was not a single individual. The whole crowd psychology is behind him, he has the support of the crowd. The crowd also thinks in the same way; there is no difference in it. He is a leader, he is fulfilling the desires of many. They would like to remove me from the scene – I am becoming a disturbing factor to them. I am going against their taboos, I am going against their inhibitions, I am going against their past. They call it their culture, their heritage, their religion.
Before he threw the knife, the man shouted, “You are talking against our religion, our culture! We cannot tolerate it!” He is simply a mouthpiece. He is trying to show that the crowd can be violent if you try to be an individual. It will not tolerate your existence even. All the vested interests would like everybody to be stupid.
You will be surprised to know, in fact, that your schools, colleges and universities don’t exist to help you to become intelligent – no, not at all. I have been associated for many years with universities as a student and then as a professor. I know the very inner structure of your educational system: it is not concerned with creating intelligence in people. Of course it wants to create efficiency, but efficiency is not intelligence, efficiency is mechanical. A computer can be very efficient, but a computer is not intelligent.
Never think that intelligence and efficiency are synonymous; intelligence is a totally different phenomenon. Efficiency is not intelligence, it is mechanical expertise. The universities are concerned to create efficiency so that you can be better clerks and better collectors and better station masters and better postmasters, etcetera. But they are not concerned to create intelligence, in fact they are all against intelligence. The whole structure of your educational system all over the world is to make you more and more capable of memorizing things because memory is a biocomputer.
Intelligence is a totally different phenomenon. Intelligence arises out of meditation, intelligence arises out of rebellion. Intelligence does not arise out of memory. But your examinations are only concerned with your memory. Whosoever has better memory is thought to be more intelligent. But it happens many times that stupid people have beautiful memories and intelligent people are not so good as far as memory is concerned.
Edison was not good as far as memory is concerned. He discovered one thousand scientific gadgets; nobody else had discovered so many things. Just the quantity of his discoveries is enormous, unbelievable. You may not be aware that you are using Edison’s discoveries every day: the gramophone record and the light bulb. These things that you are using come from one single person, Edison. But as far as memory is concerned, his memory was very lousy, very sloppy, so much so that once he forgot his own name, which is really very difficult. It is almost impossible to forget your own name. If you can forget your own name, you can forget anything! This seems to be the last thing. He managed to do the last thing.

In the First World War, rationing came into existence for the first time, and he was standing in a queue to take his ration card. Slowly, slowly he came closer to the window. Then the last person in front of him moved and they called his name: “Thomas Alva Edison!” And he looked around as if they are calling somebody else; he looked in the queue.
One man recognized his face because many times he had seen his pictures in the newspapers. He said, “As far as I remember, you seem to be Thomas Alva Edison. Why you are looking here and there?”
He said, “You are right. I had completely forgotten! Many, many thanks that you reminded me. Yes, I am Thomas Alva Edison.”
His wife used to keep everything in order because his whole room was in constant chaos: thousands of papers, research papers, and whenever he would want to find a particular thing it would take days. He will go on forgetting everything. He may have already discovered something and he may start discovering it again. And his wife will remind him, “You have done it. It is already in the market!”
He used to keep loose papers and would go on writing whatsoever thought would come to his mind. Then those loose papers would be lost here and there. His wife told him, “You better keep a notebook.”
He said, “That’s beautiful idea! Why has it never happened to me?” But then he lost his whole notebook! He said, “Look, I followed your suggestion. With loose papers one thing was good: once in a while I used to lose few a papers, but not all. Now all of the papers are lost!”

Albert Einstein was not a man of memory. He failed in his matriculation simply because he could not memorize anything. This greatest mathematician of all the ages and for ages to come, was incapable of counting small amounts of money. He would have to count again and again.
Once he was traveling in a bus. He gave the conductor some money; the remaining money was returned to him. He counted it once, twice, thrice, and each time the result was different, so he started counting a fourth time.
The conductor was looking and he said, “What is the matter with you? Don’t you know figures? Thrice you have counted, now you are counting for the fourth time! Don’t you know figures?”
He said, “Yes, I am a little lousy with figures!”

This man who has worked out the greatest figures possible was incapable of counting small amounts of money. He would go into his bathroom and would not come out for hours because he would forget that he had to come out.
One of my friends, Doctor Ram Manohar Lohia, went to see him. He was telling me, “I had to wait six hours because he was in the bathroom! And his wife started apologizing again and again and she said, ‘He is in the bathroom, he is in the bathroom.’ I said, ‘But what is he doing in the bathroom?’ The wife said, ‘Nobody knows but if you disturb him he becomes very angry – he starts throwing things! But he always forgets; whenever he goes in he forgets to come out. Now we have to wait for whenever he comes out. When he feels hungry or thirsty or something, then he will remember.’”
Doctor Lohia asked, “But what does he go on doing there?”
The wife said, “Yes, I have also been curious my whole life what he goes on doing. So in the beginning I used to peep through the keyhole – what is he doing? He sits in his bathtub and goes on playing with soap bubbles! And when I asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ he said, ‘Don’t disturb me, never disturb me, because it is by playing with soap bubbles that I have discovered the Theory of Relativity and the theory that the universe is expanding just like a soap bubble. It goes on expanding and one day it will burst – just like a soap bubble!’”

Down the ages you will find thousands of geniuses with very bad memories and thousands of people who had tremendous memories with no intelligence at all, because memory and intelligence come from different sources. Memory is part of the mind, intelligence is part of no-mind. Intelligence is part of your consciousness and memory is part of your brain. The brain can be trained – that’s what universities go on doing. All your examinations are tests for your memory, not for your intelligence. But universities give you the wrong impression – as if memory is intelligence. It is not.
This whole educational system exists to destroy intelligence and to divert you from intelligence toward memory. Memory is useful, utilitarian. Intelligence is dangerous; it has no utility for the status quo, it has no utility for the vested interests. Intelligent people have always proved to be difficult people just because of their intelligence. They cannot bow down to any stupid thing. And our society is full of superstitions, stupidities – all kinds of nonsense prevails in the name of religion, in the name of politics, in the name of literature, art.
Each child is distracted, is diverted. Hence so much stupidity. It is really a miracle how few people have escaped from this prison – a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, a Jesus, a Pythagoras – very few people. It is almost impossible to escape from this prison because the prison is all around and it begins from the very beginning. From your very childhood you are conditioned to be a prisoner: a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan – these are all prisons. And when you are prisoners of churches, nations, races, then naturally there is going to be violence.
No animal is as violent as man. Animals kill but they kill only when they are hungry, otherwise not. Man is the only animal who enjoys killing for no reason at all, as if killing in itself is a blissful activity.

One day, a lion and a hare entered a restaurant. The manager was shocked. Nobody could believe their eyes. A great silence fell over the restaurant. Many people were there eating, talking, gossiping; all became absolutely silent. What is happening? The manager rushed to the new customers. Somehow he managed to stammer to the hare, “What would you like, sir?”
The hare asked for coffee. The manager asked, “And what would your friend like to have?”
The hare laughed and he said, “Do you think if he was hungry I would be here? He is not hungry; otherwise he would have taken his breakfast – I would be gone! We can be together only when he is not hungry.”

In a zoo in Moscow, they have kept a lion and a sheep in one cage to show the philosophy of peaceful coexistence. Everybody goes to see the cage. It is a miracle! The sheep and the lion sitting side by side – sometimes the sheep is fast asleep, just so close to the lion, her head resting on the lion’s belly. This is something!
A very curious young boy asked the zoo keeper, “How do you manage? How have you trained them?”
The zoo keeper was retiring from the job on that very day, so he told the truth. He said, “There is no miracle in it. All that we have to do is to change the sheep every day – a new sheep every day, that’s all. There is no miracle. And when the lion is no longer hungry there is a peaceful coexistence.”

But a lion won’t kill if he is not hungry. It is only man who kills for no reason at all – for stupid ideas. One can understand if somebody is hungry, one can understand, but one cannot understand Hiroshima and Nagasaki – destroying one hundred thousand people within three minutes, a sheer joy of destruction.
This is happening because we have not allowed man’s intelligence to flower. And whenever it has happened in any society that intelligence was allowed a little freedom, that society becomes weaker than other societies. In India the country has remained a slave for two thousand years for many reasons. One of the reasons was the great revolution that was brought by Krishna, Patanjali, Saraha, Mahavira, Buddha. These people brought such a great revolution, such a radical change in the consciousness of this country that many people were released from the bondage of stupidity; a great intelligence was released. The result was that the intelligent people stopped killing, they became nonviolent; they refused to be recruited in the army. Buddhists and Jainas refused to be recruited into the army, the brahmins refused to be recruited into the army. Now, this was the cream and the cream refused to fight. Then very stupid countries and very ordinary people – Hunas, Turks, Moghuls, who were far backward in every possible way – ran over the country. And because the most intelligent part of the younger Indian generation was no longer interested in killing and violence, there was no resistance, no fight. They conquered the country. A big country was conquered by very small countries. For two thousand years this country remained in slavery for the simple reason…
The same thing happened in Athens. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, these were the people who released great intelligence and a climate was created of freedom, of free thinking. And the whole Greek civilization disappeared. It was destroyed by stupid people who were surrounding the civilization. It was one of the most beautiful phenomena that was happening on the earth.
Now the same thing is happening again in America. If America and Russia are ever in conflict, there is every possibility America will be defeated for the simple reason that American youth is far more intelligent than the Russian youth. American youth has started thinking; Russian youth is absolutely conditioned – they function like machines. In these two world wars and in many small wars it was noted down that American young soldiers are very disinterested in fighting. Otherwise, how you can explain the phenomenon of Vietnam? America with all its sophisticated arms could not defeat a poor country with no scientific sophistication at all.
It was found that thirty to forty percent of American soldiers never used their weapons. They would go to the battlefield every day but they would not kill. It is beautiful, it is something to be appreciated, but dangerous too because thirty to forty percent is a big percentage and soon it will be fifty to sixty percent.
If Russia and America are ever in conflict, if the clash ever happens, there is every possibility that America will be the first to lose. The difference will not be much, maybe ten to fifteen minutes difference, because now the question is not of human beings fighting. The question is of releasing atomic energy, hydrogen bombs and missiles and they are all controlled by computers. If the Russians attack America, then it will take ten minutes for the American computers to react and launch against Russia. And the same will happen if America attacks Russia: it will take ten minutes for Russian computers to react and launch against America. The difference will be only of ten to fifteen minutes; both will be destroyed. But if it ever happens, then that difference of fifteen minutes will be predictable. America will be the first to go for the simple reason that great intelligence is being released. Always higher cultures have been defeated by lower cultures, hence no culture can afford to release intelligence.
My own suggestion is, unless we create a world government, intelligence cannot be allowed. And the time has come for a world government. National governments are no longer needed: they are things of the past, they are part of our stupid past. Nations are no longer needed, just a world government. And if there is a world government it will have a totally different quality, for the simple reason that armies will have to be reduced because there will be no question of fighting with anybody.
Now seventy percent of money, wealth, income goes to the army – seventy percent; only thirty percent is left for other purposes. That means seventy percent of our energy is to kill, to be violent, to be destructive. A world government is an absolute necessity to save humanity. And the quality of the world government will be totally different because it won’t need great armies; just small police forces will be enough. It will have all the functions – the post office, the railway, the airplanes, etcetera – but they are not destructive; they serve people.
And once armies disappear from the world, great intelligence will be released because it is armies that are destroying intelligence. They recruit the healthiest people and destroy their minds, because a real soldier is possible only if he becomes absolutely mechanical.
Man kills for no reason. Man tries to repress rather than to understand, manipulate rather than to relate, because to relate with somebody needs great understanding. Manipulation needs no understanding. Repression is easy, very easy – any fool can do it.
That’s why if you go to the monasteries you will find all kinds of repression and you will find all kinds of fools gathered together there. I have never come across intelligent monks and nuns; if they are intelligent they would not be monks and nuns any longer. They will renounce that nonsense, they will come out of their so-called religious prisons. But repression needs no wisdom; it simply needs a powerful ego, so you go on suppressing everything into the unconscious. But whatsoever you suppress will have to be suppressed again and again and still it will never be eliminated. It will become more and more powerful as you grow older because you will become weaker. The suppresser will become weaker and the suppressed will remain fresh and young because it has never been used.
The real problem arises in old age when suppression starts exploding and creates all kinds of uglinesses. It is five thousand years of suppression that is creating all our neurosis, all our perversions. Suppress sex and you will become more sexual; your whole life will be colored with sex. You will think always in terms of sexuality and nothing else. Suppress sex and the ugly institution of prostitution will arise, is bound to arise. The more suppressive a society is, the more prostitutes will be found there; the proportion is always the same. You can count your nuns and monks and you can know by counting them how many male and female prostitutes will be in the country. It will be exactly the same number because nature keeps a balance. And perversions…because sexual energy will find its ways, its own ways. Either it will create neurosis or hypocrisy; both are ill states. The poor will become neurotic and the rich will become hypocrites.

It is told that when Moses in his rage smashed the tablets of the Ten Commandments, everybody rushed to grab a piece.
Of course the rich and the politicians were the first. They got all the good pieces on which was inscribed, “Commit adultery,” “lie,” “steal.” The poor and all the rest got only the pieces that said, “Thou shalt not,” “Thou shalt not.”

Repression creates cunningness. You lose authenticity, you lose naturalness, spontaneity, you lose truth. You start lying to others, you start lying to yourself. You start finding ways to lie and to go on lying. And a single lie will need thousand other lies to protect it, to support it.

Two mediaeval knights are leaving on a crusade. Since they are old friends, the one asks the other, “Explain something to me. You are always complaining that your marriage is finished, that your wife is a bore and that she has become as ugly as a witch. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” answers the other.
“So then tell me,” says the first, “why did you lock her in a chastity belt?”
“Because on my way back,” he explains, “I am going to tell her that I lost the key!”

Either lying, hypocrisy, deception, or madness…

The safari had been in the remote African jungle for months, capturing animals for the zoo. Smedley’s sexual frustration had risen to a point where he decided to try sex with a huge, ferocious female gorilla.
His friend helped chain her down and put a bucket over her head and Smedley started making love right away, when suddenly the gorilla broke the chains and wrapped her arms around Smedley.
The others grabbed her arms to rescue him, as Smedley moaned incoherently. When, with three men on each arm, they finally freed him, he shouted, “No. The bucket, you fools! Take off the bucket! I want to kiss her!”

In madness you can do anything!
Repression means a method of creating conscience instead of consciousness. Consciousness is non-repressive; it depends on understanding, it depends on meditativeness, awareness. Conscience is repressive: it simply goes on giving you orders, “Do this. Don’t do that.” It does not change you but it poisons your life.
Friedrich Nietzsche is right when he says, “Religions have not been able to transform man but only to poison his joys.” I perfectly agree with this man about this – religions have really poisoned all your joys. If you are eating, then there are religions which condemn everything that you eat… And great guilt arises about sex, about food, about clothes, about everything.
Jainism even teaches… Particularly its monks and nuns don’t take any baths; they are not allowed to take a bath because to take a bath means you are trying to make your body look beautiful. That is sex, nothing else. You may never have thought about it that taking a bath has something to do with sex, but perversions know no limits. Jaina monks and nuns are not allowed to brush their teeth because that means you are trying to make yourself beautiful. There is no need – the body is dirty. There is no need to give it an appearance of beauty, freshness, fragrance – no need. It has to be hated: it is disgusting, it is nauseating.
But then I have come across Jaina monks and Jaina nuns who will take a sponge bath, but they have to lie about it. They will keep their toothpaste hidden in their bags – they have to hide it; nobody should know about it. They used to come to see me when I used to travel around the country and I would immediately know in whose bag there was toothpaste because their mouth smelled so foul if they didn’t use any toothpaste or any kind of cleaning their teeth. Then to talk with them was almost a torture. So I would immediately know if some nun… Particularly nuns because women after all are women; even if they are Jaina nuns it makes no difference. They are more body-oriented and nothing is wrong about it; it is perfectly good, it is perfectly healthy. So I would immediately know – if the foul smell was not coming I would immediately know – and I would tell them that “I know that your bag has toothpaste in it!”
And they would be surprised. They would say, “How do you come to know about it? Nobody knows about it! Can you see inside our bags?”
I said, “Yes! I can see inside you; what about your bag?”
They would say, “You are the first person who has immediately discovered it.”
I said, “There is nothing much in it. Don’t think that there is some miracle or anything. Just I am so tortured by Jaina monks and nuns that whenever somebody from your company comes and is not smelling bad, I immediately know that there is something in the bag. You must be taking a sponge bath.”
Now, even to take a sponge bath seems to be doing a crime. Cleaning your teeth looks like you are getting ready for hell. It has poisoned your life, it has not transformed your life.
Repression cannot transform. Either it makes you hypocrites… If you are a little intelligent, just even a little intelligent, you will be a hypocrite. If you are utterly stupid, you will go insane.

“How was your boat trip to Europe?” asks Pedro to his friend.
“Fantastic! Imagine, on the first night I met a girl, one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen. We chitchatted for a while and it was love at first sight. We were soon in each other’s arms. It was only the next morning as I held her in my arms that I found she was the wife of one of my best friends. It was such a shock that we both felt tremendously guilty, we both cried and cried and cried.”
“That’s really something! But how was the rest of the trip?”
“Well, you know, it was just fucking and crying, fucking and crying, fucking and crying!”

That’s what is going to happen.
Repression is one the greatest calamities that has happened to humanity. And it is because of repression that manipulation comes in. Because you cannot be true with yourself, you cannot be naked with others. You lose all truth, all respect for truth. You lose all authenticity and you start being deceptive. Manipulation is a deceptive way of exploiting the other. You lose all respect for humanity because you have lost respect for yourself. How can you respect yourself if you are lying, if you are not authentic, if you are not sincere? And if you don’t respect yourself, you cannot respect anybody else in the world. When you lose respect for others you manipulate, you start using them as means.
Respect means each individual is an end unto himself; disrespect means nobody is an end and you can use everybody as a means for your own purposes, for your own ends. The husband uses the wife as a means, the wife uses the husband as a means; this is manipulation. And because you use each other as means… Even parents use their children as means and children use their parents as means. Religious people are using God as a means, what to say about others? Everybody is using everybody else as a means. Then you are constantly afraid: somebody may take your means.

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