INTERVIEW WITH THE WORLD PRESS
The Last Testament Vol 1 20
Twentieth Discourse from the series of 30 discourses - The Last Testament Vol 1 by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
Penny Allen
Freelance journalist, Sisters, Oregon, United States
Osho,
I am so delighted to be here. I've been working on what I am writing for almost a year now, and I think I've been here fifteen or twenty times. I always hoped that I would get a chance to talk with you, but you weren't talking then.
It's been very exciting these days since you've been talking because I've been hearing about what you've been saying, all over.
I want to communicate something to people about what's happening here and about you that will intrigue them and that will make them want to know more.
I have read that your goal is to make enlightenment available to as many people as possible. Now I hear that you're saying that enlightenment is not all its cracked up to be, and that you want to be normal. What's happening?
Enlightenment is only the beginning. There is infinity to go far. Enlightenment is only a door, and then there is an unending existence, an unending evolution, expansion.
The people who are unconscious, for them enlightenment is the goal; but they are not aware of the fact that enlightenment is only a door. Once you have reached it, then a new kind of pilgrimage starts. Up to this door you were an entity; beyond this door you will not be an entity, you will be just pure consciousness without a body, without a mind. You will be just a fragrance which will go on spreading all over existence.
And the fragrance is luminous. It is full of awareness. It knows itself and it knows the whole existence around it – not as separate but part, a kind of at-one-ment. It is the universe and the universe is it; there is no division, no duality. Now the observer becomes the observed, the seer becomes the seen. He is both. It is difficult to explain to people who have not even thought about the door, whose lives go on like sleepwalkers, somnambulists. They live – but at the very minimum level, without any intensity, without any totality.
And this calamity has happened because of a few vested interests. The priest, the politician, all those who have been in power – they never wanted man to be awake, because if humanity consists of awakened individuals there is not going to be any Christianity, there is not going to be any Hinduism; there is not going to be any American, any Russian, any German; there is not going to be the white man and the black man; there is not going to be man the superior and woman the inferior. All these stupidities will disappear. For the awakened man the whole existence is one – not only this earth, but now he is joined with the stars too. And in his vision the smallest blade of grass is as significant and important to existence as the biggest star, millions of light years away.
The priest does not want people to be awake, because they can be exploited only when they are asleep. The politician does not want people to be awake, otherwise they will not be democrats, republicans, socialists and communists. They will be individuals, intelligent and conscious enough to decide for themselves. They will not need parties and religions and cults and all their struggles and squabbles.
The vested interests have kept man almost drugged. I don’t agree with Karl Marx on any other point, but on one point I absolutely agree with him, that religion is the opium of the people. On that point also I have my reservations. First, he was only aware of Western religions: Judaism – he was a Jew – Christianity, which is an offshoot of Judaism, and a little bit of Islam – that too is an offshoot of Judaism. He had no knowledge about the Eastern religions: Buddhism, Jainism, Tao, Zen. They were unknown dimensions to him.
Secondly, he was not aware, he could not be aware, of me, my people – we were not yet there – and a totally new quality of religion which I call religiousness. Not religion, but religiousness; no God, but godliness. I change every noun, every pronoun, into a verb, because existence is a verb, it is not a noun. It is continuously growing, flowing, expanding.
Now physicists say that the stars you see in the night are continuously moving further away from the center. We don’t know where the center is, we don’t know where they are going – and the speed is immense: 186,000 miles per second. With that speed, though, the stars are going further and further away. This continuous growth needs not static things but growing things.
That’s why you will find so many contradictions in me, because I have never stopped anywhere. I have been going in absolute tune with existence, wherever it leads. And if it contradicts my yesterdays it is perfectly okay; they are dead anyway. I am happy that I am in tune in the present moment. I am happy that I know the secret of being in the present, because time has no other tense. It is always now. And once you know the secret of being in the now, you have known the greatest mystery of existence.
But the people who are in power would like human beings to remain involved and occupied with very stupid things – communism, socialism, this party, that party, Christianity, Hinduism. The people are burdened with their own problems; they, too, are mostly created.
For example, marriage. It is a problem created by the priests. It is unnatural, it has not happened naturally. Now the man is being nagged by the wife, the wife is being continuously put down by the man. Then there are children, and the pope and Mother Teresa go on telling people that these children are sent by God, don’t use any birth control methods – that’s sin. So people have dozens of children, thousands of worries. How to bring them up? How to educate them?
We have made a world so difficult for human beings, and on top of it there is hell. If you just slip a little bit you fall into eternal hell – for small things. And there is paradise, luring you with all those things every religion condemns here on earth. And the saints are enjoying all those things there.
I have heard a story of a Zen master. He was always teaching his disciples that celibacy is categorical; without it you cannot enter into nirvana, the kingdom of God. The poor disciples were trying hard to be celibate. It is really doing something unnatural, almost impossible. They were all feeling guilty. And then the master died. His last words were, “Remember, celibacy is the foundation of religion.”
After a few days one of the disciples died, and the moment he entered paradise he was so full of joy that now he would be meeting his master. He had been with the master for thirty, forty years. He saw the master sitting by the bank of a beautiful river under the shadow of a very huge and ancient tree, with a beautiful naked woman sitting in his lap. The disciple could not believe his eyes, “What is happening?” Still, just out of old habit, he fell at the master’s feet and asked, “What is happening? What happened to celibacy?”
The master said, “You will always remain an idiot! This is the reward for all my celibacy. Now I can enjoy as many women as I want. And here no woman grows old, no woman perspires, no woman has menstrual periods; you cannot improve upon the women that are available here. Their very bodies are fragrant; they don’t use French perfumes.” But the poor disciple was at a loss. It was such a shock.
This is the situation of all the religions. All the things that they deny people here, they will give a million times more as a reward in paradise. Naturally, the poor human being is pulled: To be or not to be? To enjoy a woman here or to wait just a few years more and enjoy for eternity as many women as you want? No marriage happens in heaven; all marriages happen in the churches. And they say that marriage is made in heaven. In heaven there are no couples, only individuals. The poor man is pulled apart. His fear of hell represses him, his greed for heaven represses him, and so many problems of day-to-day living… He has no time to think of enlightenment. He has no time to think that there is anything more than this miserable world.
And this is a created situation, because only in such a situation can you keep them enslaved. You can send them to Vietnam to kill innocent people, without any hitch. You can send your pilots to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki within seconds, without any feeling. You have turned people into robots. Millions of people around the earth are in the armies, just functioning like robots. And those who are not in the armies are also imprisoned in some kind of social, political, religious ideology. It is so difficult to find an individual who is clean, completely clean.
And that’s my whole effort: to create a completely clean human being – unburdened of the past, unburdened of any guilt, unburdened of fear and greed, unburdened of politicians and priests – just clean, so clean that he becomes a mirror. And in that mirror you see for the first time where the door is. In that mirror the door reflects.
Just as our eyes are mirrors in which things reflect – we find where the table is and where the chair is because our two eyes are mirroring things around us – when a man is completely clean, silent, serene, his inner being becomes a mirror. And the inward door that was always there is reflected in it. And the magnetism of the door is such that once one has seen it, there is no way to escape from it. You start moving toward that door the way the moth moves toward a flame, the moth knowing perfectly that coming closer to the flame he is going to be burned, is going to die. But some strange attraction… The moth is ready to die.
The same is the situation when you see the door of enlightenment for the first time. You become the moth and the door becomes the flame. You know you are going to die, but at the same time you know that you are going to be reborn on the other side. This is resurrection.
Osho,
If I could ask you a question about your past: you spent a year – when you were a student in India – mad; in which you couldn't formulate a sentence, and you lost your perspective. Is that the time that you were looking for that door?
I had been looking for that door as long as I remember – from my very childhood. I must have carried that idea from my past life, because I don’t remember a single day in my childhood in this life that I was not looking for it.
And as far as my craziness is concerned, naturally I was thought crazy by everybody. I never played with any children. I never could find any way to communicate with the children of my own age. To me they looked stupid, doing all kinds of idiotic things. I never joined any football team, volleyball team, hockey team. Of course, they all thought me crazy. And as far as I was concerned, as I grew I started looking at the whole world as crazy.
In the last year, that was when I was twenty-one, it was a time of nervous breakdown and a breakthrough. Naturally, those who loved me, my family, my friends, my professors, could understand a little bit what was going on in me – why I was so different from other children, why I would go on sitting for hours with closed eyes, why I sat by the bank of the river and went on looking at the sky for hours, sometimes for the whole night. Naturally, the people who could not understand such things – and I did not expect them to understand – thought me mad.
In my own home I had become almost absent. I would be there in the room and my mother would be asking me, “If you see someone in the house just tell me, because I don’t see anybody here and I have to send somebody to fetch some fruits or some vegetables from the market.” The market was not far away, just two minutes’ walk, but I was not considered to be somebody. They had accepted the fact that I am good for nothing.
And they were right. In the morning they would send me to purchase something which was needed immediately, and I would return in the night. And then I would say, “I think you had sent me for something, but I completely forgot about it. If you remind me, I can run again.”
And they said, “Please excuse us, that we sent you. If you go again now, then the whole night… Nobody knows when you will turn up.”
By and by they stopped asking me anything, and slowly, slowly they started feeling as if I were not there. And I loved it, the way I had become a nothingness, a nobody, an absence. That one year was tremendous. I was surrounded with nothingness, emptiness. I had lost all contact with the world.
If they reminded me to take a bath, I would go on taking the bath for hours. Then they had to knock on the door: “Now come out of the bathroom. You have taken enough bath for one month. Just come out.” If they reminded me to eat, I ate; otherwise, days would pass and I would not eat. Not that I was fasting – I had no idea about eating or fasting. My whole concern was to go deeper and deeper into myself. And the door was so magnetic, the pull was so immense – what physicists now call black holes.
They say there are black holes in existence. If a star comes by chance to a black hole it is pulled into the black hole; there is no way to resist that pull. And to go into the black hole is to go into destruction. We don’t know what happens on the other side. My idea, for which some physicist has to find evidence, is that the black hole on this side is a white hole on the other side. Because the hole cannot be just one side; it is a tunnel.
I have experienced it in myself. Perhaps on a bigger scale the same happens in the universe. The star dies; as far as we can see, it disappears. But every moment new stars are being born. From where? Where is their womb? It is simple arithmetic that the black hole was just a womb – the old disappeared into it and the new is born. This I have experienced in myself, I am not a physicist. That one year of tremendous pull made me farther and farther away from people, so much so that I would not recognize my own mother, I might not recognize my own father – so far that there were times I forgot my own name. I would try hard, but there was no way to find what my name used to be.
Naturally, that one year, for everybody it was that I was mad. But to me that madness became meditation, and the ultimate of that madness opened the door. I passed through it. I am now beyond enlightenment – on the other side of the door.
Osho,
Even though you're beyond enlightenment, on the other side of the door, do you still have black moments?
No
For example, this spring when you stopped giving discourses for two months, where were you? Were you in a black hole?
No. I have passed the black hole. Now I am always in the White House! Presidents will come and go, but I am going to remain in the White House all the time.
Is there a reason why you were silent for over two months? Were you sick?
I have been silent for three years – more than three years. The reason was that I wanted… I had gathered around me more than half a million sannyasins all over the world, whose number has been continuously increasing. I went into silence because I wanted only those people with me who can stand – and understand – my silence.
But this spring, why were you silent?
Now, I have been continuously silent for three and a half years. This spring was included in it. I was not silent especially in this spring.
No, but you started talking again in November and you gave a discourse every day. And then, I understood that you were ill or something in April or May of this year, just a couple of months ago.
Yes. I was sick at that time. I was not feeling well, so I simply rested. But I was not in silence.
I see. It wasn't a loss of perspective, or something like that?
No, nothing. That cannot happen now. That is an impossibility.
Osho,
You have said that here on the ranch, in the buddhafield, your sannyasins experience and share moods, that joy is contagious. Does a bad mood ever pass through the commune?
Just wait a minute. First let me finish your first question, otherwise you will be in difficulty to figure it out. For three and a half years I was silent to sort out those people who were hanging around my words, who were enchanted by my words, who loved my voice, who loved the way I speak, I argue.
But that is not my basic function. I speak to help you to be silent. I say something so that you can go beyond words. I use words to help you to go into wordlessness. It is just like having a thorn in the foot: with another thorn you pull it out. Your mind is full of words, so many, and so much chattering – yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak – it goes on and on. But then people became intoxicated with my words. That was not my purpose. I continuously insisted, “Don’t be concerned with my words. Be concerned with my silences, the gaps between the words, the gaps between the lines.”
Three years I remained silent. A few remained hanging around for a few months, some managed to hang around for one or two years. Three years was too much: by and by, they all left me thinking that I was going to remain silent forever. The day I saw that all those people who were interested in my words – but not in silence – had left, it was time to speak.
And this speaking is totally different from the speaking that was there three and a half years ago, because I was speaking to people who were listening through the head. I was arguing, I was rationalizing, I was doing everything to convince their heads. Now there is no need of that, I have got people with whom I can talk heart to heart. My words don’t pass through their heads; there is no scrutiny in their heads when they hear my words. My words simply penetrate directly into their hearts.
Albert Einstein has proved according to non-Euclidean geometry that there are no straight lines in existence. He is right as far as objective lines are concerned. Every line is a curve – of a very big circle, so you cannot see it as a curve. If you go on drawing the line at both ends, one day you will find that you have made a circle.
In existence there are no straight lines – for the simple reason, if we draw a straight line here on the floor it looks absolutely straight, but it cannot be because the earth is round. This small straight line is just a piece of a vast circle which goes around the earth. Einstein is dead, otherwise I would have said to him that I know there are lines which go straight too. But those lines are not of geometry, they are lines of love.
I experience it every day. My being and my sannyasins’ beings are joined not by curved lines but straight lines. Now it is a totally different affair; I can say whatsoever I want to say. Three and a half years ago I had to say things which people wanted to hear. I had to drop a few things because they would not be able to digest them. I had to impose interpretations on Jesus, on Krishna, on Buddha, for the simple reason that if I impose that interpretation on Jesus I can have a certain communication with the Christian – we can come close.
Now I have my own people, so I don’t take the trouble to interpret Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, Buddha, Lao Tzu. On the contrary, I am saying now all the things that I left unsaid before my silence began. And the interpretations that I had managed through Jesus’ mouth I am taking back – and putting Jesus in his own place!
So my work has really started now. Before the silent period I was just preparing the ground and finding the people who will be able to remain with me in every climate, in every season, in every change, because I am not a thinker who remains consistent. I am an existential man who moves with existence, so only those who don’t bother about what I said yesterday can move with me. If today I am contradicting it, they don’t worry about it.
One thing is to be understood very clearly. To my sannyasins, whatever I am saying is not important, what is important is that I am saying it. Whatever is being said has no significance, but in saying it on my part and hearing it on their part, something else, side by side with the words has transferred. Those words were just vehicles creating a way for something which cannot be said, cannot be reduced to language at all. That’s why they are never concerned about contradictions. I am not creating a philosophy or a theology; it is a religious field of experience.
Now, you were asking something. You can ask.
I asked about the energy field here; and I was wondering if it ever happened, particularly when you were not feeling well, that a melancholy caught on? Or is the energy here always positive?
It is always positive. My sickness is a physical thing; the energy has nothing to do with my body. The energy is never sick. It is never negative – I mean the energy of an enlightened person is never negative.
The energy of an unenlightened person is always negative. The unenlightened knows nothing of positive energy. He only reads books on positive thinking, and this and that. Idiots like Norman Vincent Peale go on writing books on positive thinking, and millions of people read those books, thinking that perhaps by positive thinking they can become millionaires, by positive thinking they can produce palaces. And they don’t bother about how many palaces Norman Vincent Peale has created. They don’t bother at all that Rockefeller has never read Peale, that Henry Ford has no idea of Peale.
It is not a question of positive thinking. Positive thinking is appealing only to negative people, because they know their negativity continuously. But without enlightenment you cannot have positive energy. So I say: throw away all those books on positive thinking. They are deluding you. They are giving you a sense as if without being enlightened you can be positive. That is impossible. Positivity is beyond the door of enlightenment. Negativity is on this side, the night is on this side – the black hole – and the day is on the other side, where the sun never sets.
So as far as I am concerned, I am always overflowing with energy. My body can be sick, but that makes no difference to my innermost being; it remains exactly the same. And whether I am speaking or silent, my field is vibrating – is ready to welcome anybody who comes with an open heart, is ready to receive into the innermost center of the energy field one who is not resistant, not reluctant, but is ready, vulnerable, open, is willing to risk.
There is a field already existing, and the moment you enter Rajneeshpuram you will feel a different air, a different milieu, a different silence, a different loving energy all over the place. But those who come with closed eyes and closed heart, those who come with prejudices already determined, with their conclusions… Naturally they come, they go – and they remain untouched by the immense energy that was available, free.
I have been known around the world as the “free sex” teacher. Now they should change it, because things have gone far beyond sex. Sex is energy, the energy of the sleepy man; the moment a man becomes enlightened, the same energy turns into a positive field. Now they should start calling me the “free energy” guru, because I have traveled miles and they go on calling me something which I have left far behind.
Even if I die, and my people can remain rejoicing, loving, the energy field will remain. I cannot take it away with me. But if they start being ordinary again, jealous, full of hate, hostility, violence, then they will destroy the energy field.
I have created the energy field; now it exists almost independent of me. And my whole effort is that while I am alive I should detach myself completely from the energy field and see whether my people can manage it.
And that’s what I am doing every day. I am giving more and more responsibility to my people. I am sending people from one commune to another. If twenty people are ready here, I send them to Germany. If in Japan they need people, I send them there. Twenty people go to Germany and from that commune twenty people come here. So in both ways it is a great exchange program. My twenty people there will try to create the energy field, and those twenty people here will learn how energy fields are created and how one should preserve them.
Soon I want a belt of energy around the earth. And as far as I am concerned, that energy belt is the only hope for life to exist beyond this century. Otherwise, the politicians have already arranged for global death.
Osho,
How can the energy field continue with no children being born? I understand your views on that subject and I agree with them, I just wonder how it can continue if everyone just gets older and there are no young people coming up?
They will be coming. I am telling my people not to produce children. There are enough young people all around the world – why bother creating children and waste your energy in raising them? I need all that energy for my energy field. So right now I cannot spend any amount of energy in giving birth to children and rearing them.
And what is the use when all over the world there are millions of young people frustrated with the old society, searching for a new way of life? It is so easy: when you can get ready-made young people, it is simply uneconomical to produce children. And we are going to get hold of all the youth because there is no competition around.
The young man has fallen away from the old generation, and the old people are trying hard to bridge the gap. Their priests are learning psychology, doing research work, getting Ph.D.s in psychology, in psychiatry and philosophy, to somehow figure out what has happened – why this generation gap goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. But they are not going to be able to bridge it, for the simple reason that they are still trying to bridge it so that they can keep the young people in the old fold. The young people need a milieu of freedom, love, responsibility, joy. They are not concerned with your God, whether he exists or not. They are not interested in your heaven and hell.
The whole old mind is so out of date that just by changing words and paraphrasing old things into new language, they are not going to manage to fulfill the needs of the young people. In fact, they are the cause of creating this whole frustration, anxiety, anguish in young people all around the world.
I am the alternative. I will tell my people to produce children only when we cannot get any from the ready-made market. And I don’t think that is going to happen. The ready-made market is so big, and people are continuously bringing new children into the world, not knowing that they are bringing people for me! They would stop if they knew that Pope the Polack and Mother Teresa-type people are all working for me, preventing people from using birth control methods, the pill, by teaching people that abortion is a sin. They don’t know – unknowingly, they are my agents, they are working… And you need not worry, for centuries new people will be coming in.
And when we have enough energy field that the whole earth is surrounded by a certain belt of energy, then I can tell to my people: it is time, you produce. Certainly, your children will be far better. They will come out of your meditativeness, out of your love; they will not be accidental.
But not now. The way I have got all these people from ready-made shops… I am going to continue my business the same way.
Osho,
I know that you have said that you don't worry about what the community in Oregon thinks about you – that they worry about you, you don't worry about them. I finally came to the conclusion that the polarization was a kind of public Dynamic Meditation that you were carrying on to try and increase tension for a long time, so that after a while it would relax.
I will go on finding new ways to create more and more madness in the Oregonians, because that is one of my ways of working. That’s what I have been doing in India, and I am going to do it in America. Wherever I am, my way of finding friends is to create enemies. Then a clear-cut polarization happens. If there are no enemies outside, your friends become lousy, lazy, dull, dead. A certain hostility around is absolutely necessary for you to be alert, to be stronger, to be together. This happens naturally. I can create any kind of opposition – if one dies, another; there is no trouble in it. And since we are not troubled and we are always the beneficiaries of it, why should we stop it?
That’s why I refused point blank the question of a journalist who asked if there was any possibility of coexistence. I said, “Never. Either we, or they.” It is a question of either-or. It is not politics in which nations coexist. Jews and Christians coexist, with all their hostility repressed; they are not friends.
Now the pope is trying to make some arrangements with the Jews, trying to forget all those two thousand years of hostility. But neither can the Christians forget that Jesus was crucified, nor can the Jews forget what has been done to them continuously for two thousand years. This is a political way: you keep your hostility repressed and I keep my hostility repressed, because somehow we are here. We have to be here, so we coexist.
I don’t like that word at all. I have my own word, I call it parallel existence: we will exist the way we want to exist, you exist the way you want to exist. There is no question of coexistence, it is parallel existence – two lines running parallel, never meeting.
The only way is for you to convince us that you are more joyful, more dancing, more blissful. I am not concerned about theories, that you convince us about God; I am concerned about people. You have to prove that you are more joyful than we are, you are more blissful than we are, you are more peaceful than we are. Then certainly we will mix with you. What is the need to remain separate? Or, sooner or later, you have to recognize – in fact, even in their hostility people have recognized it, reluctantly – the fact that these people here are certainly happy, far happier than they have ever been. Their theology has not helped; it has helped them to become more miserable. Their Jesus Christ has not come to save them, their politics and their politicians have failed them, their leaders are just professional liars.
They have to see that there is a small oasis amongst them where no politics exists, no competition exists, no jealousy exists, where the people are working so hard for twelve and fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, with no holiday. Since I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe that on Sunday he stopped working, so I cannot give any holiday! People are working fourteen hours a day and looking so happy and so radiant and so joyful and so dancing – how long can they ignore that fact?
It is something existential, not theoretical. It is not like Protestant Martin Luther arguing with the Catholic pope, it is not Hindus arguing against Buddhists. It is a totally different kind of argument. We are not saying anything; we are showing them something, and sooner or later they will have to see it. They will have to hear our laughter, they will have to see this desert again becoming green, bringing flowers. For fifty years it has been a dead land. They will see birds coming again, animals coming.
I don’t think that they are more stupid than the animals. Go in the commune in the night and you will find deer standing on the road, not caring at all about you. They know my sannyasins – nobody is going to hurt them. People have to get out of their cars to push them away.
In my own garden I have one hundred peacocks. They don’t allow even me in the house. They are blocking my way all over the place – not only blocking, if they are somewhere else they rush toward the car just to stand in front. I enjoy it. That means they have understood that nobody is going to harm them, and they love the play. I move the car slowly, they go on moving backwards slowly, but they will not go out of the way. I don’t think Oregonians are more stupid than the peacocks and the deer and the swans that we have. Nobody is worried here, not even animals.
When I came to this place the junipers were small, almost dead – dying. Now they are lush green, have become thicker, bigger. Just four years more and you will see all these hills green and all this valley full of laughter.
Oregonians cannot resist the temptation to come here, to see the people, to understand the people. That’s why I don’t believe in coexistence. My denial was not understood by the journalist who had asked, because the moment I said “Never,” she immediately left the mike. She should have asked what my implications were, what I mean by never, why I was saying never. Perhaps she had come to hear that word, and once she got it her prejudice was fulfilled and she immediately left. If she had asked my implications she would have understood: we coexist only with enemies.
I would like to be one with the Oregonians, not coexist – that word is ugly. But that woman was so prejudiced she could not stay a single moment. She did not give me a chance to explain what I meant. That’s what I was going to do, but when I looked she was gone. So I said it is better to let her go; that will create more hostility and it will do something good!
In my life, everything has done good to me. I have never come across any situation which has not been a blessing, finally. So I have learned to trust life and its ways.
Osho,
So much original music has come out of this place; do you think that there will ever be literature coming out of here?
Soon everything will be coming out of here, and everything that will come out of here will have a different flavor to it. Because… We have sculptors here, but right now they are making houses, roads, and other things which are of more basic necessity. Once we are finished with the infrastructure of the commune, all our sculptors will be free, all our painters will be free, all our poets will be free – and you will see something of a totally new quality coming in every direction, every dimension.
I have around me here the most intelligent group you can find – the most talented people who can do anything – you just have to give them time, the opportunity, and they are ready to do anything.
Do you see my watch? Piaget was asking half a million dollars for it. I sent one of my sannyasins to Switzerland to learn how to make watches. Within two weeks he was back, and since then he has made four or five watches and he has been teaching other sannyasins. Another sannyasin has made this watch; it is far better than the Piaget, far more accurate, and it is made of real stones, not of diamonds. It is not fake – real, authentic stones.
One of the idiots from Portland said on television that I was wearing a fake watch. He does not understand language. These stones are not fake; these stones are as real as any diamonds. If he cannot distinguish between diamonds and stones, that simply means he should accept his ignorance about jewelry. But he cannot make my watch fake! It has been made with so much love that to me these stones are far more precious than any diamonds can be. I will not sell this watch for ten million dollars; no price will be accepted for the watch. It cannot be sold: love cannot be sold and purchased.
Hearing the man calling the watch fake, I could see how people are blind. If I was saying that these are diamonds and later on you find they are not, then certainly it is a fake watch. But I am saying these are stones. And if you cannot understand any difference between stones and diamonds, it shows your state of knowledge or ignorance. To me it makes no difference. These stones are so beautiful, I don’t see any reason why diamonds should be costlier than these stones. These stones have cost nothing, and my sannyasin’s work was a meditation for him.
We have all kinds of people here. We have made all the houses ourselves; we have made the big Gurdjieff Dam, and soon we are going to double it, because there is still space and we can go deeper into the mountains. We have made all our roads – and sometime I can take you to my own road which my people have made especially for me. Perhaps I am the only man in the whole world who has a road for himself. No traffic, no need to follow any rules of the road. I can go the British way or the American way or the Russian way – it makes no problem; the whole road is available.
And my people who made the road had never made roads, but they learned it immediately. You need just a little intelligence to learn anything. My people are doing all kinds of computer work. They have become so expert that now they are selling their expertise in the outside world. My people had never made any houses; now they have become so expert that they are making houses for others in Germany, in Switzerland, in England – cheaper, better, more comfortable, more contemporary.
Novels will be coming, dramas will be coming; everything that man can do we are going to do, and better. We just have to settle down.
And we are settling down – even against the Oregon government, the Oregonians; nothing makes any difference – we are settling down, we are settled. Nobody can throw us out of here.
Osho,
Would you personally like to ever travel again?
No, because there is nothing outside. Here, yes – I went to the disco yesterday. I enjoyed it!
Did you dance?
Yes.
Osho,
I read in the Osho Times from one of your interviews this past week that you said that you didn't have the energy to make love to a woman anymore – you didn't have the energy for those gymnastics. But now that you're going to the disco…
I have energy for women also. I just wanted my men sannyasins not to be worried – because if I am interested in any woman, then her boyfriend is finished! It is just to solace them. I have enough energy, there is no problem. So all my male sannyasins have been immensely happy. The women sannyasins look a little sad, but I find other ways to make them happy. There is no problem.
Osho,
What happened to your glasses?
That was just because of these lights. My eyes were feeling teary. Continuous exposure for two hours in the morning or two and a half hours, and two and a half hours in the evening, my eyes started feeling teary. That’s why I used those glasses; I don’t need them now that they have managed to put the lights a little farther away. I think they need still to adjust them because I can feel the strain on the eyes a little. Otherwise, my eyes… Just look at my eyes.
People think they get hypnotized… I don’t know. Journalists avoid looking into the eyes – perhaps they may get hypnotized… And for me it is such a simple job that I don’t need to exert too much energy – just a little smile toward a woman is enough! I don’t have to chase her and go through all the dramas and traumas; there is no need. In my whole life I have never met a single woman who was not ready the moment I looked into her eyes. Where else was she going to find such a simple man who has not even asked her name, who has not asked her address? And on the next railway station I get down and we shall never meet again. The introduction has not happened, but I have made love to the woman. I am not British – they will not do anything without an introduction!
But to me everything is love. Talking to my people is making love to them. My words reaching into their hearts create orgasmic reactions in their being. Just coming and going, dancing with my people, just for a second stopping to dance with someone, and that’s enough. That woman is not going to sleep the whole night. You can ask the woman – she is going to dream continuously of the dance. I had already made love.
To me, love is nothing in particular to do with sex. There are a thousand and one ways of making love. Sex is the lowest, the animal heritage. And I would like my people to rise above biology. Only then will they be really free. Then you can find thousands of ways of making love. Just sitting silently together, doing nothing, but full of love for each other, and there is a certain meeting which is happening between the two energies. So I am continuously making love to my people in every possible kind of way.
Don’t be worried about my energy. And don’t be worried about my eyes – they are perfectly okay. And I am a non-serious man, so I have the freedom to say anything that comes to my mind without ever bothering about the consequences. My whole life’s experience is such that nothing has ever gone wrong, so I have become absolutely certain that nothing ever goes wrong. You just have to trust existence, and whatever happens is right.
Meet my people and ask them: everybody will say I have made love. Talking is a way of making love, dancing is a way of making love – but these are higher qualities of love. Animals cannot understand it; you can go on playing the flute and the buffalo will go on chewing the grass. She will not even stop to look at what you are doing. The flute makes no sense to her. But play the flute to the lover, and something immediately starts transmitting from your song and showering on your beloved.
And my people are searching all possibilities, finding all possibilities of being in love. Sex is only one of them, and the very lowest of the kind. In fact everybody should have a film of himself making love and see it once in a while. Then he will see what kind of gymnastics – and what happens to the woman’s face, distortions, and you call it orgasm? She is having a fit. And the man is trying so hard, huffing, puffing!
Everybody should have a film of his own lovemaking just to see it whenever the desire arises. Just see the film and that will be enough. That is the very lowest type of thing that is available to all animals. Man can manage to have many other dimensions, many other levels. And the higher you reach toward enlightenment, new dimensions open up.
For a man who has passed through the door to the other side, everything is love. My whole day, twenty-four hours, I am making love to existence in different ways. If I am taking a shower I enjoy it as much as making love to a woman. So what is the difference? I am contacting existence through water. It is not necessarily that I should make the contact with existence through a feminine body.
Eating, I am making love, because I eat with such joy. And I don’t see any difference: my joy is the same. So twenty-four hours a day I am in love; it does not matter what I am doing. That you can take as a criterion of the man who has gone beyond enlightenment: whatever he does is love, whatever he says is love. If he does nothing, that is love. If he remains silent, that is love.
Now, should we start dancing?
Freelance journalist, Sisters, Oregon, United States
Osho,
I am so delighted to be here. I've been working on what I am writing for almost a year now, and I think I've been here fifteen or twenty times. I always hoped that I would get a chance to talk with you, but you weren't talking then.
It's been very exciting these days since you've been talking because I've been hearing about what you've been saying, all over.
I want to communicate something to people about what's happening here and about you that will intrigue them and that will make them want to know more.
I have read that your goal is to make enlightenment available to as many people as possible. Now I hear that you're saying that enlightenment is not all its cracked up to be, and that you want to be normal. What's happening?
Enlightenment is only the beginning. There is infinity to go far. Enlightenment is only a door, and then there is an unending existence, an unending evolution, expansion.
The people who are unconscious, for them enlightenment is the goal; but they are not aware of the fact that enlightenment is only a door. Once you have reached it, then a new kind of pilgrimage starts. Up to this door you were an entity; beyond this door you will not be an entity, you will be just pure consciousness without a body, without a mind. You will be just a fragrance which will go on spreading all over existence.
And the fragrance is luminous. It is full of awareness. It knows itself and it knows the whole existence around it – not as separate but part, a kind of at-one-ment. It is the universe and the universe is it; there is no division, no duality. Now the observer becomes the observed, the seer becomes the seen. He is both. It is difficult to explain to people who have not even thought about the door, whose lives go on like sleepwalkers, somnambulists. They live – but at the very minimum level, without any intensity, without any totality.
And this calamity has happened because of a few vested interests. The priest, the politician, all those who have been in power – they never wanted man to be awake, because if humanity consists of awakened individuals there is not going to be any Christianity, there is not going to be any Hinduism; there is not going to be any American, any Russian, any German; there is not going to be the white man and the black man; there is not going to be man the superior and woman the inferior. All these stupidities will disappear. For the awakened man the whole existence is one – not only this earth, but now he is joined with the stars too. And in his vision the smallest blade of grass is as significant and important to existence as the biggest star, millions of light years away.
The priest does not want people to be awake, because they can be exploited only when they are asleep. The politician does not want people to be awake, otherwise they will not be democrats, republicans, socialists and communists. They will be individuals, intelligent and conscious enough to decide for themselves. They will not need parties and religions and cults and all their struggles and squabbles.
The vested interests have kept man almost drugged. I don’t agree with Karl Marx on any other point, but on one point I absolutely agree with him, that religion is the opium of the people. On that point also I have my reservations. First, he was only aware of Western religions: Judaism – he was a Jew – Christianity, which is an offshoot of Judaism, and a little bit of Islam – that too is an offshoot of Judaism. He had no knowledge about the Eastern religions: Buddhism, Jainism, Tao, Zen. They were unknown dimensions to him.
Secondly, he was not aware, he could not be aware, of me, my people – we were not yet there – and a totally new quality of religion which I call religiousness. Not religion, but religiousness; no God, but godliness. I change every noun, every pronoun, into a verb, because existence is a verb, it is not a noun. It is continuously growing, flowing, expanding.
Now physicists say that the stars you see in the night are continuously moving further away from the center. We don’t know where the center is, we don’t know where they are going – and the speed is immense: 186,000 miles per second. With that speed, though, the stars are going further and further away. This continuous growth needs not static things but growing things.
That’s why you will find so many contradictions in me, because I have never stopped anywhere. I have been going in absolute tune with existence, wherever it leads. And if it contradicts my yesterdays it is perfectly okay; they are dead anyway. I am happy that I am in tune in the present moment. I am happy that I know the secret of being in the present, because time has no other tense. It is always now. And once you know the secret of being in the now, you have known the greatest mystery of existence.
But the people who are in power would like human beings to remain involved and occupied with very stupid things – communism, socialism, this party, that party, Christianity, Hinduism. The people are burdened with their own problems; they, too, are mostly created.
For example, marriage. It is a problem created by the priests. It is unnatural, it has not happened naturally. Now the man is being nagged by the wife, the wife is being continuously put down by the man. Then there are children, and the pope and Mother Teresa go on telling people that these children are sent by God, don’t use any birth control methods – that’s sin. So people have dozens of children, thousands of worries. How to bring them up? How to educate them?
We have made a world so difficult for human beings, and on top of it there is hell. If you just slip a little bit you fall into eternal hell – for small things. And there is paradise, luring you with all those things every religion condemns here on earth. And the saints are enjoying all those things there.
I have heard a story of a Zen master. He was always teaching his disciples that celibacy is categorical; without it you cannot enter into nirvana, the kingdom of God. The poor disciples were trying hard to be celibate. It is really doing something unnatural, almost impossible. They were all feeling guilty. And then the master died. His last words were, “Remember, celibacy is the foundation of religion.”
After a few days one of the disciples died, and the moment he entered paradise he was so full of joy that now he would be meeting his master. He had been with the master for thirty, forty years. He saw the master sitting by the bank of a beautiful river under the shadow of a very huge and ancient tree, with a beautiful naked woman sitting in his lap. The disciple could not believe his eyes, “What is happening?” Still, just out of old habit, he fell at the master’s feet and asked, “What is happening? What happened to celibacy?”
The master said, “You will always remain an idiot! This is the reward for all my celibacy. Now I can enjoy as many women as I want. And here no woman grows old, no woman perspires, no woman has menstrual periods; you cannot improve upon the women that are available here. Their very bodies are fragrant; they don’t use French perfumes.” But the poor disciple was at a loss. It was such a shock.
This is the situation of all the religions. All the things that they deny people here, they will give a million times more as a reward in paradise. Naturally, the poor human being is pulled: To be or not to be? To enjoy a woman here or to wait just a few years more and enjoy for eternity as many women as you want? No marriage happens in heaven; all marriages happen in the churches. And they say that marriage is made in heaven. In heaven there are no couples, only individuals. The poor man is pulled apart. His fear of hell represses him, his greed for heaven represses him, and so many problems of day-to-day living… He has no time to think of enlightenment. He has no time to think that there is anything more than this miserable world.
And this is a created situation, because only in such a situation can you keep them enslaved. You can send them to Vietnam to kill innocent people, without any hitch. You can send your pilots to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki within seconds, without any feeling. You have turned people into robots. Millions of people around the earth are in the armies, just functioning like robots. And those who are not in the armies are also imprisoned in some kind of social, political, religious ideology. It is so difficult to find an individual who is clean, completely clean.
And that’s my whole effort: to create a completely clean human being – unburdened of the past, unburdened of any guilt, unburdened of fear and greed, unburdened of politicians and priests – just clean, so clean that he becomes a mirror. And in that mirror you see for the first time where the door is. In that mirror the door reflects.
Just as our eyes are mirrors in which things reflect – we find where the table is and where the chair is because our two eyes are mirroring things around us – when a man is completely clean, silent, serene, his inner being becomes a mirror. And the inward door that was always there is reflected in it. And the magnetism of the door is such that once one has seen it, there is no way to escape from it. You start moving toward that door the way the moth moves toward a flame, the moth knowing perfectly that coming closer to the flame he is going to be burned, is going to die. But some strange attraction… The moth is ready to die.
The same is the situation when you see the door of enlightenment for the first time. You become the moth and the door becomes the flame. You know you are going to die, but at the same time you know that you are going to be reborn on the other side. This is resurrection.
Osho,
If I could ask you a question about your past: you spent a year – when you were a student in India – mad; in which you couldn't formulate a sentence, and you lost your perspective. Is that the time that you were looking for that door?
I had been looking for that door as long as I remember – from my very childhood. I must have carried that idea from my past life, because I don’t remember a single day in my childhood in this life that I was not looking for it.
And as far as my craziness is concerned, naturally I was thought crazy by everybody. I never played with any children. I never could find any way to communicate with the children of my own age. To me they looked stupid, doing all kinds of idiotic things. I never joined any football team, volleyball team, hockey team. Of course, they all thought me crazy. And as far as I was concerned, as I grew I started looking at the whole world as crazy.
In the last year, that was when I was twenty-one, it was a time of nervous breakdown and a breakthrough. Naturally, those who loved me, my family, my friends, my professors, could understand a little bit what was going on in me – why I was so different from other children, why I would go on sitting for hours with closed eyes, why I sat by the bank of the river and went on looking at the sky for hours, sometimes for the whole night. Naturally, the people who could not understand such things – and I did not expect them to understand – thought me mad.
In my own home I had become almost absent. I would be there in the room and my mother would be asking me, “If you see someone in the house just tell me, because I don’t see anybody here and I have to send somebody to fetch some fruits or some vegetables from the market.” The market was not far away, just two minutes’ walk, but I was not considered to be somebody. They had accepted the fact that I am good for nothing.
And they were right. In the morning they would send me to purchase something which was needed immediately, and I would return in the night. And then I would say, “I think you had sent me for something, but I completely forgot about it. If you remind me, I can run again.”
And they said, “Please excuse us, that we sent you. If you go again now, then the whole night… Nobody knows when you will turn up.”
By and by they stopped asking me anything, and slowly, slowly they started feeling as if I were not there. And I loved it, the way I had become a nothingness, a nobody, an absence. That one year was tremendous. I was surrounded with nothingness, emptiness. I had lost all contact with the world.
If they reminded me to take a bath, I would go on taking the bath for hours. Then they had to knock on the door: “Now come out of the bathroom. You have taken enough bath for one month. Just come out.” If they reminded me to eat, I ate; otherwise, days would pass and I would not eat. Not that I was fasting – I had no idea about eating or fasting. My whole concern was to go deeper and deeper into myself. And the door was so magnetic, the pull was so immense – what physicists now call black holes.
They say there are black holes in existence. If a star comes by chance to a black hole it is pulled into the black hole; there is no way to resist that pull. And to go into the black hole is to go into destruction. We don’t know what happens on the other side. My idea, for which some physicist has to find evidence, is that the black hole on this side is a white hole on the other side. Because the hole cannot be just one side; it is a tunnel.
I have experienced it in myself. Perhaps on a bigger scale the same happens in the universe. The star dies; as far as we can see, it disappears. But every moment new stars are being born. From where? Where is their womb? It is simple arithmetic that the black hole was just a womb – the old disappeared into it and the new is born. This I have experienced in myself, I am not a physicist. That one year of tremendous pull made me farther and farther away from people, so much so that I would not recognize my own mother, I might not recognize my own father – so far that there were times I forgot my own name. I would try hard, but there was no way to find what my name used to be.
Naturally, that one year, for everybody it was that I was mad. But to me that madness became meditation, and the ultimate of that madness opened the door. I passed through it. I am now beyond enlightenment – on the other side of the door.
Osho,
Even though you're beyond enlightenment, on the other side of the door, do you still have black moments?
No
For example, this spring when you stopped giving discourses for two months, where were you? Were you in a black hole?
No. I have passed the black hole. Now I am always in the White House! Presidents will come and go, but I am going to remain in the White House all the time.
Is there a reason why you were silent for over two months? Were you sick?
I have been silent for three years – more than three years. The reason was that I wanted… I had gathered around me more than half a million sannyasins all over the world, whose number has been continuously increasing. I went into silence because I wanted only those people with me who can stand – and understand – my silence.
But this spring, why were you silent?
Now, I have been continuously silent for three and a half years. This spring was included in it. I was not silent especially in this spring.
No, but you started talking again in November and you gave a discourse every day. And then, I understood that you were ill or something in April or May of this year, just a couple of months ago.
Yes. I was sick at that time. I was not feeling well, so I simply rested. But I was not in silence.
I see. It wasn't a loss of perspective, or something like that?
No, nothing. That cannot happen now. That is an impossibility.
Osho,
You have said that here on the ranch, in the buddhafield, your sannyasins experience and share moods, that joy is contagious. Does a bad mood ever pass through the commune?
Just wait a minute. First let me finish your first question, otherwise you will be in difficulty to figure it out. For three and a half years I was silent to sort out those people who were hanging around my words, who were enchanted by my words, who loved my voice, who loved the way I speak, I argue.
But that is not my basic function. I speak to help you to be silent. I say something so that you can go beyond words. I use words to help you to go into wordlessness. It is just like having a thorn in the foot: with another thorn you pull it out. Your mind is full of words, so many, and so much chattering – yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak – it goes on and on. But then people became intoxicated with my words. That was not my purpose. I continuously insisted, “Don’t be concerned with my words. Be concerned with my silences, the gaps between the words, the gaps between the lines.”
Three years I remained silent. A few remained hanging around for a few months, some managed to hang around for one or two years. Three years was too much: by and by, they all left me thinking that I was going to remain silent forever. The day I saw that all those people who were interested in my words – but not in silence – had left, it was time to speak.
And this speaking is totally different from the speaking that was there three and a half years ago, because I was speaking to people who were listening through the head. I was arguing, I was rationalizing, I was doing everything to convince their heads. Now there is no need of that, I have got people with whom I can talk heart to heart. My words don’t pass through their heads; there is no scrutiny in their heads when they hear my words. My words simply penetrate directly into their hearts.
Albert Einstein has proved according to non-Euclidean geometry that there are no straight lines in existence. He is right as far as objective lines are concerned. Every line is a curve – of a very big circle, so you cannot see it as a curve. If you go on drawing the line at both ends, one day you will find that you have made a circle.
In existence there are no straight lines – for the simple reason, if we draw a straight line here on the floor it looks absolutely straight, but it cannot be because the earth is round. This small straight line is just a piece of a vast circle which goes around the earth. Einstein is dead, otherwise I would have said to him that I know there are lines which go straight too. But those lines are not of geometry, they are lines of love.
I experience it every day. My being and my sannyasins’ beings are joined not by curved lines but straight lines. Now it is a totally different affair; I can say whatsoever I want to say. Three and a half years ago I had to say things which people wanted to hear. I had to drop a few things because they would not be able to digest them. I had to impose interpretations on Jesus, on Krishna, on Buddha, for the simple reason that if I impose that interpretation on Jesus I can have a certain communication with the Christian – we can come close.
Now I have my own people, so I don’t take the trouble to interpret Jesus, Mohammed, Mahavira, Buddha, Lao Tzu. On the contrary, I am saying now all the things that I left unsaid before my silence began. And the interpretations that I had managed through Jesus’ mouth I am taking back – and putting Jesus in his own place!
So my work has really started now. Before the silent period I was just preparing the ground and finding the people who will be able to remain with me in every climate, in every season, in every change, because I am not a thinker who remains consistent. I am an existential man who moves with existence, so only those who don’t bother about what I said yesterday can move with me. If today I am contradicting it, they don’t worry about it.
One thing is to be understood very clearly. To my sannyasins, whatever I am saying is not important, what is important is that I am saying it. Whatever is being said has no significance, but in saying it on my part and hearing it on their part, something else, side by side with the words has transferred. Those words were just vehicles creating a way for something which cannot be said, cannot be reduced to language at all. That’s why they are never concerned about contradictions. I am not creating a philosophy or a theology; it is a religious field of experience.
Now, you were asking something. You can ask.
I asked about the energy field here; and I was wondering if it ever happened, particularly when you were not feeling well, that a melancholy caught on? Or is the energy here always positive?
It is always positive. My sickness is a physical thing; the energy has nothing to do with my body. The energy is never sick. It is never negative – I mean the energy of an enlightened person is never negative.
The energy of an unenlightened person is always negative. The unenlightened knows nothing of positive energy. He only reads books on positive thinking, and this and that. Idiots like Norman Vincent Peale go on writing books on positive thinking, and millions of people read those books, thinking that perhaps by positive thinking they can become millionaires, by positive thinking they can produce palaces. And they don’t bother about how many palaces Norman Vincent Peale has created. They don’t bother at all that Rockefeller has never read Peale, that Henry Ford has no idea of Peale.
It is not a question of positive thinking. Positive thinking is appealing only to negative people, because they know their negativity continuously. But without enlightenment you cannot have positive energy. So I say: throw away all those books on positive thinking. They are deluding you. They are giving you a sense as if without being enlightened you can be positive. That is impossible. Positivity is beyond the door of enlightenment. Negativity is on this side, the night is on this side – the black hole – and the day is on the other side, where the sun never sets.
So as far as I am concerned, I am always overflowing with energy. My body can be sick, but that makes no difference to my innermost being; it remains exactly the same. And whether I am speaking or silent, my field is vibrating – is ready to welcome anybody who comes with an open heart, is ready to receive into the innermost center of the energy field one who is not resistant, not reluctant, but is ready, vulnerable, open, is willing to risk.
There is a field already existing, and the moment you enter Rajneeshpuram you will feel a different air, a different milieu, a different silence, a different loving energy all over the place. But those who come with closed eyes and closed heart, those who come with prejudices already determined, with their conclusions… Naturally they come, they go – and they remain untouched by the immense energy that was available, free.
I have been known around the world as the “free sex” teacher. Now they should change it, because things have gone far beyond sex. Sex is energy, the energy of the sleepy man; the moment a man becomes enlightened, the same energy turns into a positive field. Now they should start calling me the “free energy” guru, because I have traveled miles and they go on calling me something which I have left far behind.
Even if I die, and my people can remain rejoicing, loving, the energy field will remain. I cannot take it away with me. But if they start being ordinary again, jealous, full of hate, hostility, violence, then they will destroy the energy field.
I have created the energy field; now it exists almost independent of me. And my whole effort is that while I am alive I should detach myself completely from the energy field and see whether my people can manage it.
And that’s what I am doing every day. I am giving more and more responsibility to my people. I am sending people from one commune to another. If twenty people are ready here, I send them to Germany. If in Japan they need people, I send them there. Twenty people go to Germany and from that commune twenty people come here. So in both ways it is a great exchange program. My twenty people there will try to create the energy field, and those twenty people here will learn how energy fields are created and how one should preserve them.
Soon I want a belt of energy around the earth. And as far as I am concerned, that energy belt is the only hope for life to exist beyond this century. Otherwise, the politicians have already arranged for global death.
Osho,
How can the energy field continue with no children being born? I understand your views on that subject and I agree with them, I just wonder how it can continue if everyone just gets older and there are no young people coming up?
They will be coming. I am telling my people not to produce children. There are enough young people all around the world – why bother creating children and waste your energy in raising them? I need all that energy for my energy field. So right now I cannot spend any amount of energy in giving birth to children and rearing them.
And what is the use when all over the world there are millions of young people frustrated with the old society, searching for a new way of life? It is so easy: when you can get ready-made young people, it is simply uneconomical to produce children. And we are going to get hold of all the youth because there is no competition around.
The young man has fallen away from the old generation, and the old people are trying hard to bridge the gap. Their priests are learning psychology, doing research work, getting Ph.D.s in psychology, in psychiatry and philosophy, to somehow figure out what has happened – why this generation gap goes on becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. But they are not going to be able to bridge it, for the simple reason that they are still trying to bridge it so that they can keep the young people in the old fold. The young people need a milieu of freedom, love, responsibility, joy. They are not concerned with your God, whether he exists or not. They are not interested in your heaven and hell.
The whole old mind is so out of date that just by changing words and paraphrasing old things into new language, they are not going to manage to fulfill the needs of the young people. In fact, they are the cause of creating this whole frustration, anxiety, anguish in young people all around the world.
I am the alternative. I will tell my people to produce children only when we cannot get any from the ready-made market. And I don’t think that is going to happen. The ready-made market is so big, and people are continuously bringing new children into the world, not knowing that they are bringing people for me! They would stop if they knew that Pope the Polack and Mother Teresa-type people are all working for me, preventing people from using birth control methods, the pill, by teaching people that abortion is a sin. They don’t know – unknowingly, they are my agents, they are working… And you need not worry, for centuries new people will be coming in.
And when we have enough energy field that the whole earth is surrounded by a certain belt of energy, then I can tell to my people: it is time, you produce. Certainly, your children will be far better. They will come out of your meditativeness, out of your love; they will not be accidental.
But not now. The way I have got all these people from ready-made shops… I am going to continue my business the same way.
Osho,
I know that you have said that you don't worry about what the community in Oregon thinks about you – that they worry about you, you don't worry about them. I finally came to the conclusion that the polarization was a kind of public Dynamic Meditation that you were carrying on to try and increase tension for a long time, so that after a while it would relax.
I will go on finding new ways to create more and more madness in the Oregonians, because that is one of my ways of working. That’s what I have been doing in India, and I am going to do it in America. Wherever I am, my way of finding friends is to create enemies. Then a clear-cut polarization happens. If there are no enemies outside, your friends become lousy, lazy, dull, dead. A certain hostility around is absolutely necessary for you to be alert, to be stronger, to be together. This happens naturally. I can create any kind of opposition – if one dies, another; there is no trouble in it. And since we are not troubled and we are always the beneficiaries of it, why should we stop it?
That’s why I refused point blank the question of a journalist who asked if there was any possibility of coexistence. I said, “Never. Either we, or they.” It is a question of either-or. It is not politics in which nations coexist. Jews and Christians coexist, with all their hostility repressed; they are not friends.
Now the pope is trying to make some arrangements with the Jews, trying to forget all those two thousand years of hostility. But neither can the Christians forget that Jesus was crucified, nor can the Jews forget what has been done to them continuously for two thousand years. This is a political way: you keep your hostility repressed and I keep my hostility repressed, because somehow we are here. We have to be here, so we coexist.
I don’t like that word at all. I have my own word, I call it parallel existence: we will exist the way we want to exist, you exist the way you want to exist. There is no question of coexistence, it is parallel existence – two lines running parallel, never meeting.
The only way is for you to convince us that you are more joyful, more dancing, more blissful. I am not concerned about theories, that you convince us about God; I am concerned about people. You have to prove that you are more joyful than we are, you are more blissful than we are, you are more peaceful than we are. Then certainly we will mix with you. What is the need to remain separate? Or, sooner or later, you have to recognize – in fact, even in their hostility people have recognized it, reluctantly – the fact that these people here are certainly happy, far happier than they have ever been. Their theology has not helped; it has helped them to become more miserable. Their Jesus Christ has not come to save them, their politics and their politicians have failed them, their leaders are just professional liars.
They have to see that there is a small oasis amongst them where no politics exists, no competition exists, no jealousy exists, where the people are working so hard for twelve and fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, with no holiday. Since I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe that on Sunday he stopped working, so I cannot give any holiday! People are working fourteen hours a day and looking so happy and so radiant and so joyful and so dancing – how long can they ignore that fact?
It is something existential, not theoretical. It is not like Protestant Martin Luther arguing with the Catholic pope, it is not Hindus arguing against Buddhists. It is a totally different kind of argument. We are not saying anything; we are showing them something, and sooner or later they will have to see it. They will have to hear our laughter, they will have to see this desert again becoming green, bringing flowers. For fifty years it has been a dead land. They will see birds coming again, animals coming.
I don’t think that they are more stupid than the animals. Go in the commune in the night and you will find deer standing on the road, not caring at all about you. They know my sannyasins – nobody is going to hurt them. People have to get out of their cars to push them away.
In my own garden I have one hundred peacocks. They don’t allow even me in the house. They are blocking my way all over the place – not only blocking, if they are somewhere else they rush toward the car just to stand in front. I enjoy it. That means they have understood that nobody is going to harm them, and they love the play. I move the car slowly, they go on moving backwards slowly, but they will not go out of the way. I don’t think Oregonians are more stupid than the peacocks and the deer and the swans that we have. Nobody is worried here, not even animals.
When I came to this place the junipers were small, almost dead – dying. Now they are lush green, have become thicker, bigger. Just four years more and you will see all these hills green and all this valley full of laughter.
Oregonians cannot resist the temptation to come here, to see the people, to understand the people. That’s why I don’t believe in coexistence. My denial was not understood by the journalist who had asked, because the moment I said “Never,” she immediately left the mike. She should have asked what my implications were, what I mean by never, why I was saying never. Perhaps she had come to hear that word, and once she got it her prejudice was fulfilled and she immediately left. If she had asked my implications she would have understood: we coexist only with enemies.
I would like to be one with the Oregonians, not coexist – that word is ugly. But that woman was so prejudiced she could not stay a single moment. She did not give me a chance to explain what I meant. That’s what I was going to do, but when I looked she was gone. So I said it is better to let her go; that will create more hostility and it will do something good!
In my life, everything has done good to me. I have never come across any situation which has not been a blessing, finally. So I have learned to trust life and its ways.
Osho,
So much original music has come out of this place; do you think that there will ever be literature coming out of here?
Soon everything will be coming out of here, and everything that will come out of here will have a different flavor to it. Because… We have sculptors here, but right now they are making houses, roads, and other things which are of more basic necessity. Once we are finished with the infrastructure of the commune, all our sculptors will be free, all our painters will be free, all our poets will be free – and you will see something of a totally new quality coming in every direction, every dimension.
I have around me here the most intelligent group you can find – the most talented people who can do anything – you just have to give them time, the opportunity, and they are ready to do anything.
Do you see my watch? Piaget was asking half a million dollars for it. I sent one of my sannyasins to Switzerland to learn how to make watches. Within two weeks he was back, and since then he has made four or five watches and he has been teaching other sannyasins. Another sannyasin has made this watch; it is far better than the Piaget, far more accurate, and it is made of real stones, not of diamonds. It is not fake – real, authentic stones.
One of the idiots from Portland said on television that I was wearing a fake watch. He does not understand language. These stones are not fake; these stones are as real as any diamonds. If he cannot distinguish between diamonds and stones, that simply means he should accept his ignorance about jewelry. But he cannot make my watch fake! It has been made with so much love that to me these stones are far more precious than any diamonds can be. I will not sell this watch for ten million dollars; no price will be accepted for the watch. It cannot be sold: love cannot be sold and purchased.
Hearing the man calling the watch fake, I could see how people are blind. If I was saying that these are diamonds and later on you find they are not, then certainly it is a fake watch. But I am saying these are stones. And if you cannot understand any difference between stones and diamonds, it shows your state of knowledge or ignorance. To me it makes no difference. These stones are so beautiful, I don’t see any reason why diamonds should be costlier than these stones. These stones have cost nothing, and my sannyasin’s work was a meditation for him.
We have all kinds of people here. We have made all the houses ourselves; we have made the big Gurdjieff Dam, and soon we are going to double it, because there is still space and we can go deeper into the mountains. We have made all our roads – and sometime I can take you to my own road which my people have made especially for me. Perhaps I am the only man in the whole world who has a road for himself. No traffic, no need to follow any rules of the road. I can go the British way or the American way or the Russian way – it makes no problem; the whole road is available.
And my people who made the road had never made roads, but they learned it immediately. You need just a little intelligence to learn anything. My people are doing all kinds of computer work. They have become so expert that now they are selling their expertise in the outside world. My people had never made any houses; now they have become so expert that they are making houses for others in Germany, in Switzerland, in England – cheaper, better, more comfortable, more contemporary.
Novels will be coming, dramas will be coming; everything that man can do we are going to do, and better. We just have to settle down.
And we are settling down – even against the Oregon government, the Oregonians; nothing makes any difference – we are settling down, we are settled. Nobody can throw us out of here.
Osho,
Would you personally like to ever travel again?
No, because there is nothing outside. Here, yes – I went to the disco yesterday. I enjoyed it!
Did you dance?
Yes.
Osho,
I read in the Osho Times from one of your interviews this past week that you said that you didn't have the energy to make love to a woman anymore – you didn't have the energy for those gymnastics. But now that you're going to the disco…
I have energy for women also. I just wanted my men sannyasins not to be worried – because if I am interested in any woman, then her boyfriend is finished! It is just to solace them. I have enough energy, there is no problem. So all my male sannyasins have been immensely happy. The women sannyasins look a little sad, but I find other ways to make them happy. There is no problem.
Osho,
What happened to your glasses?
That was just because of these lights. My eyes were feeling teary. Continuous exposure for two hours in the morning or two and a half hours, and two and a half hours in the evening, my eyes started feeling teary. That’s why I used those glasses; I don’t need them now that they have managed to put the lights a little farther away. I think they need still to adjust them because I can feel the strain on the eyes a little. Otherwise, my eyes… Just look at my eyes.
People think they get hypnotized… I don’t know. Journalists avoid looking into the eyes – perhaps they may get hypnotized… And for me it is such a simple job that I don’t need to exert too much energy – just a little smile toward a woman is enough! I don’t have to chase her and go through all the dramas and traumas; there is no need. In my whole life I have never met a single woman who was not ready the moment I looked into her eyes. Where else was she going to find such a simple man who has not even asked her name, who has not asked her address? And on the next railway station I get down and we shall never meet again. The introduction has not happened, but I have made love to the woman. I am not British – they will not do anything without an introduction!
But to me everything is love. Talking to my people is making love to them. My words reaching into their hearts create orgasmic reactions in their being. Just coming and going, dancing with my people, just for a second stopping to dance with someone, and that’s enough. That woman is not going to sleep the whole night. You can ask the woman – she is going to dream continuously of the dance. I had already made love.
To me, love is nothing in particular to do with sex. There are a thousand and one ways of making love. Sex is the lowest, the animal heritage. And I would like my people to rise above biology. Only then will they be really free. Then you can find thousands of ways of making love. Just sitting silently together, doing nothing, but full of love for each other, and there is a certain meeting which is happening between the two energies. So I am continuously making love to my people in every possible kind of way.
Don’t be worried about my energy. And don’t be worried about my eyes – they are perfectly okay. And I am a non-serious man, so I have the freedom to say anything that comes to my mind without ever bothering about the consequences. My whole life’s experience is such that nothing has ever gone wrong, so I have become absolutely certain that nothing ever goes wrong. You just have to trust existence, and whatever happens is right.
Meet my people and ask them: everybody will say I have made love. Talking is a way of making love, dancing is a way of making love – but these are higher qualities of love. Animals cannot understand it; you can go on playing the flute and the buffalo will go on chewing the grass. She will not even stop to look at what you are doing. The flute makes no sense to her. But play the flute to the lover, and something immediately starts transmitting from your song and showering on your beloved.
And my people are searching all possibilities, finding all possibilities of being in love. Sex is only one of them, and the very lowest of the kind. In fact everybody should have a film of himself making love and see it once in a while. Then he will see what kind of gymnastics – and what happens to the woman’s face, distortions, and you call it orgasm? She is having a fit. And the man is trying so hard, huffing, puffing!
Everybody should have a film of his own lovemaking just to see it whenever the desire arises. Just see the film and that will be enough. That is the very lowest type of thing that is available to all animals. Man can manage to have many other dimensions, many other levels. And the higher you reach toward enlightenment, new dimensions open up.
For a man who has passed through the door to the other side, everything is love. My whole day, twenty-four hours, I am making love to existence in different ways. If I am taking a shower I enjoy it as much as making love to a woman. So what is the difference? I am contacting existence through water. It is not necessarily that I should make the contact with existence through a feminine body.
Eating, I am making love, because I eat with such joy. And I don’t see any difference: my joy is the same. So twenty-four hours a day I am in love; it does not matter what I am doing. That you can take as a criterion of the man who has gone beyond enlightenment: whatever he does is love, whatever he says is love. If he does nothing, that is love. If he remains silent, that is love.
Now, should we start dancing?