INTERVIEW WITH THE WORLD PRESS
The Last Testament Vol 2 09
Ninth Discourse from the series of 30 discourses - The Last Testament Vol 2 by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
Leslie Porter,
Vogue, United States
Osho,
Hello. I have many questions to ask you about many different things and the first is: “How are you?”
I am always the same, just fine.
Just fine? Okay.
How do you think the world sees you?
To me everything is very simple; I never do anything that is not spontaneous. I just live in the moment: no attachment to the past moment, no projection for the future moment. I am always here now. These two words here now contain the whole of existence.
And after Albert Einstein, they are not even two words. It is one reality – space and time are four dimensions of the same reality. Time has three dimensions, space has one dimension; here has one dimension, now has three dimensions. But within these two words, everything is included. Einstein had to make a new word, because to express it exactly it is not good to use two words – that gives a sense of duality. So he invented the technical word, spacio-time.
I have also made my own word: nowhere – just one word, not even a hyphen between now and here.
Osho,
In a few words, could you comment on the word that I am going to give you? For example, what does love say to you?
It means three things. Love can exist as just a physiological relationship – then we call it sex, and most people go on believing that that is love. It is only the beginning.
The second thing that can be called love is something deeper, psychological – what poets talk about, what musicians sing about. It has nothing to do with sex, it is just a magnetic attraction between two persons. Something transpires between two persons – they suddenly feel as if they are made for each other. Something almost gives them the sense, “Without the other I am half, incomplete; with the other I’m complete.” A sense of completion is the second quality; a sense of being entire, the whole circle.
The first is very momentary, very superficial; the second is very deep, but needs great sensitivity. It is not available to everybody. The first is available to everybody: it is available even to animals, birds, trees, so there is nothing special in it as far as man is concerned. A man who has known love only as sex has remained below human dignity.
Humanity begins with the second. Only a few poets, a few musicians, dancers, a few sculptors have sensed it. In the whole of history, very few people around the world have lived it because it needs tremendous courage to dissolve yourself with somebody else – a moment when the other is no longer the other, a moment when you can feel a tremendous at-one-ment.
It happened in Ramakrishna’s life: he was a man of immense sensitivity. They were crossing the river Ganges in a boat, and just in the middle of the river he started shouting, “Don’t beat me! Don’t beat me!” The people who were around him were all his disciples, and nobody was beating him.
Tears were flowing from his eyes and they asked, “What are you saying? Nobody is beating you.”
But he was in a convulsion, as if somebody was hitting him hard. The disciples could not understand it. He fell down almost unconscious in the boat. They reached the other shore, and there they saw a man who had been beaten to unconsciousness. A crowd had gathered. The most significant thing was that as the man’s clothes were torn – his back had blood marks – they uncovered Ramakrishna’s back and found the same marks, and in the same way blood was flowing.
That is the height of the second quality of love, where you can feel such oneness that if the other is dying, you will feel like dying. Everybody hankers for the second quality, but it needs a certain training in sensitivity. For example, a person who is violent in his life – full of anger, jealousy, possessiveness – will not be able to experience the second quality. And he will remain frustrated his whole life because he could not get what he wanted. But nobody else is responsible for it; he never prepared to receive something higher, you have to deserve it.
In the first love there is no question of deserving: it is biological. You are already gifted because nature wants to continue reproducing; it has not left it to you. Nature has not left many things to man. For example, breathing has not been left to you. You may forget, you may get involved in some work and forget to breathe – in sleep you are bound to forget, then there is going to be no morning for you. So nature has kept the breathing under its own control.
Sex is the continuity of life, it cannot be left to you; it is in the hands of biology. But because it is in the hands of nature you feel a certain compulsion, a certain slavery, and that’s why sexual partners are continually fighting. They are not aware why they are fighting; why they fight the man they love, the woman they love. The reason is that each feels deep down, “The other is my trouble, my problem.” Jean-Paul Sartre has a very significant statement: “The other is hell.”
But as far as sex is concerned, the other remains the other. The other disappears only in the second stage, and I don’t think even Jean-Paul Sartre reached the second stage. He was a man of tremendous intelligence, but not of great sensitivity. They are different things: intelligence is of the head, sensitivity is of the heart. And in fact our whole education is to sacrifice the heart for the head. So the people who get your Nobel Prizes, none of them gets the Nobel Prize for the heart, they get the Nobel Prize for the head.
Your universities teach nothing about the heart, they only go on training and sharpening your head. For the head, the other is hell; for the heart, there is no other and that is heaven. Only very few poets and painters and that type of crazy people have known love. But that love also is psychological and your mind is not something stable; it is one thing today, it is something else tomorrow.
So with the change of the mind, with the change of your psychology – which is continuously changing – your love has to change continuously. That is a great problem. It is not necessary that the person you love will also change in synchronicity with you. He may lag behind, he may go further, he may stop moving – all the possibilities are there. And with his changing psychology…
A child may fall in love with another child: we call it childhood love. But as they grow older that love because a beautiful memory, it has no significance. A young person falls in love with another person: the child psychology is gone, its love is also gone. In fact, you will never get a more beautiful experience of friendship than you got in your childhood. Never again that joy of friendship – because as you become older, friendship is no longer your need: your need becomes more and more sexual.
Only rarely does a person who is young have a poetic sensibility, but that sensibility also changes. In fact, the more delicate a phenomenon is, the more the possibility of change. Retarded people – who remain below the age of fourteen as far as their minds are concerned – can remain faithful to their wives, to their husbands, their whole life. They stopped growing when they were fourteen, and at that very time their love also stopped – came to a full stop, the terminus. Now they will go on repeating the same thing their whole life.
But more intelligent people will find it difficult. Hence, as man becomes more civilized, more intelligent, one cannot live with one woman, with one man forever. If he tries to do that, both become sad, both become bored, both become frustrated with each other. That is the point when the other starts becoming hell.
People are afraid of reaching the second stage because it is just like a breeze: it comes and goes. When it comes it fills you totally. It gives you so much contentment that you cannot think there is anything more, and you cannot think that it can ever change. That’s why lovers go on promising each other – but their promises are not going to be fulfilled. Then they will feel guilty. Of course when they had given the promise it was not a lie, they were really, authentically feeling it. But it was the feeling of that moment.
After a time your psychology develops, your maturity develops; you start loving new things, new people. Your vision of beauty changes – your attitude in all its dimensions goes on changing. It is almost impossible for the other person to change exactly with you. Neither is it possible for you to change exactly with the other person. And that’s where the whole of society is living in tremendous suffering. We have forced people to live together because they had promised something. They don’t deny it, but what can they do? In that moment the promise was true, and then everything changed. Now they don’t feel anything for the other person – and it is not only that they don’t feel anything, they feel they are strangers.
You can look at husbands and wives and inquire, “Do you know your wife? How long has is it that you have not looked into her eyes? How long has is it that you have not given a moment to look at her or to listen to her?” Perhaps years have passed.
It is one of the strangest things that husbands cannot remember the face of the wife with whom they have lived for thirty years. Just ask them, “Close your eyes and try to remember your wife, her face,” and everything goes vague. For thirty years they have not looked at her. They have really tried not to look at her; they were afraid to look at her. There was a day when they wanted to look at her for the whole twenty-four hours.
Psychological love is a changing phenomenon, and unless humanity accepts its changeability gracefully we will never allow human beings to rise to the second level – because those who rise to the second level suffer more. Poets suffer more, farmers don’t suffer that way, woodcutters don’t suffer that way, fishermen don’t suffer that way. Painters suffer, musicians suffer, because they go on changing. They continuously need something new. Now, the other person cannot make that available. And the other person has his own individuality, her own individuality. They start growing farther and farther and farther away from each other. And society goes on forcing them to live together because, “Marriages are made in heaven.”
Osho,
Do you do any art work?
My whole work is art! I don’t do anything else except art work.
Do you dream? And what kind of dreams do you have?
No, I cannot dream.
You don't dream?
No.
Osho,
So you're enlightened, and I would like to know if there's another enlightenment after enlightenment.
No.
Just one, that's it, okay.
And if you were to go on vacation where would you go and what would you do?
I can just kiss from here! You may be on another planet, it makes no difference. What people call kissing is so unhygienic, so ugly: mixing saliva with each other, touching each other’s tongues, exploring each other’s mouth with the tongue – that is just not possible for me. There is no need. Just looking at a person with loving eyes is enough; you have touched.
Physical touch is a lower phenomenon. Just looking at a person with love, with compassion, with friendship, with respect, is enough. Eyes can reach any distance. Silence can say much, which words cannot do.
In India when we salute each other we don’t even shake hands. That is too physical. Unhygienic too – no medical person can support it. We salute each other with both hands folded. And it has a spiritual significance: we are giving you the same respect as we give to God. That’s the way people go into a temple, with folded hands. That’s the way they respect their elders. The same respect is shown to strangers. And two hands folded together represent what I was saying, the merger of two into one.
In the first kind of love, which is sexual, kissing is part of it, but in the second love, which is psychological, kissing is not a part of it. It is more an energy phenomenon than a material one.
Everybody has an aura of energy. Now it can even be photographed. In the East we have been talking about it for five thousand years, and perhaps the idea is even more ancient, but we had no way to prove it. Now there is a certain kind of photography – Kirlian photography – which has been developed in the Soviet Union by a photographer who has made such sensitive plates that when he takes a picture your energy aura also comes onto it. It differs from person to person. For example, a person who has never known anything more than sex, his energy aura is just two inches around his body. And the aura of a person who has known something of the second love is almost six inches around his body.
And there is a third love of which I was just going to speak, which is spiritual, which is not even psychological, which is more like lovingness, rather than love. There is no passion in it; it is more like a fragrance than a flower. You can catch hold of the flower, but you cannot catch hold of the fragrance. It is not like the flame of a candle, but the light of the flame.
In that third stage of love, the person has almost a twelve-inch aura around his whole body. People who know the third love can just sit silently together and their energies meet. You will think they are not even sitting close – as lovers sit very close to each other – they may be sitting with a gap between them. They can allow a gap of at least two feet when sitting together and yet their energies are touching, their energies are kissing. And that is a far bigger touch, not local; a kiss is a local touch. They can touch each other’s bodies totally, without touching the physical body at all.
And that love does not change because it is not dependent on the beloved, on the object of love. It is not dependent on the changing mind; it is something concerned with your eternal being. You may change, your body will change, your mind will change, but your love cannot change. It remains the fragrance of your being. Only at that point have two persons truly met.
It rarely happens between lovers – very rarely – but it happens between masters and disciples very often. That’s why I say that the relationship between a master and a disciple is a love affair of the highest category. And it is the goal that can fulfill. Those who have not known it have lived incompletely.
In that state whatever you do is art: you cannot do otherwise. The way you walk, the way you sit, the way you talk – even just the gesture of your hand has something artistic to it, something creative in it. That’s why I say I don’t paint, I don’t compose music, I don’t write poetry, but if you look deeply at what I am doing with my disciples – they are my canvas. I’m painting living beings. They are my poetry, they are my sculpture. I’m working continuously so that they can be released from all bondage and they can taste freedom, love, beauty.
I don’t paint on ordinary canvases and I don’t write poems on paper, but on living beings. And each of my sannyasins is my poetry. And each of my sannyasins will carry my gestures, my attitudes, my approaches. And he will make it even richer because he is a living person. He may give it more polish, he may give it more beauty; he has to do it. It will be his gratitude toward the master, it will be his thankfulness.
So, from morning ‘til night I am continuously creating. But to see my creativity you need to be part of it. You cannot be just a spectator. You have to be an insider, not an outsider, because it is so subtle and so delicate, so invisible, that unless you enter it with an open mind, without any prejudice, you will not be able to experience it. Just a little experience will open the door.
Osho,
Is that why you started talking again?
That’s true.
And what happened when you weren't talking? Do you miss not talking?
I was working in my silence.
What were you working on?
My people were sitting in silence with me.
I wanted to see how many people could understand my silence. I wanted those people who were hanging around my words to go away, because they were wasting their time. They should be somewhere else; this is not their place. They had become enchanted with my words, my theories, but it was an intellectual approach. So when I became silent they went on hanging around for a few days, then slowly they thought, “Now he’s not going to speak again, what is the point?” They could not understand silence.
The moment I saw that all those people had left, I started speaking again. Now these are the people who remained for three and a half years – not even asking, not even a single person asking me to speak. They were perfectly happy just with my presence.
It was of my own accord that I started speaking. If I had remained in silence for the remainder of my life, these were not the people to leave me. That’s why I am speaking to them – because these are my people. Now my talking is heart-to-heart.
And they don’t bother what I am saying, whether I am contradicting myself or not; it is none of their concern. They know me, they cannot be deceived by my words. They know me, and knowing me is such a deep relationship – who cares what I am saying?
Osho,
What do you think of Kahlil Gibran's saying, “When you have solved all the mysteries of life, you long for death, for it is but another mystery of life.”? “
Three words one has to understand clearly. One is the known; another is the unknown; and the third is the unknowable. The known was one day unknown; the unknown will one day become known. But the unknowable was unknowable before, is unknowable now, will remain unknowable forever. Only the unknowable is the mystery.
Science can deal with the known, with the unknown; science has no way even to conceive of the unknowable. And that is where religion becomes significant. That is religion’s area: the unknowable. And all the religions in the past have betrayed. They started trying to make the unknowable known – that was their betrayal. They all started trying to prove God. Once God is proved by arguments, he’s no longer God.
Karl Marx used to say, “I will believe in God only if you can put him in a test tube in the lab, dissect him, find all the qualities, all the constituents. Only then will I believe in him.”
One of his followers in India, Anand Roy – a very significant philosopher who had participated in the Russian revolution – was a friend of Lenin, a close friend. I asked him – because he was continuously writing about Karl Marx, his philosophy, and he was of tremendous reasoning, rationality, he could prove… I asked him just one thing: “In your book you write about Marx’s statement that he will believe in God only if God is in a test tube observed by scientists. I want to ask you, will that be God that scientists can dissect, can find out of what he is constituted? That will be something else: it won’t be God.”
But all the religions in the past have been trying to prove that which is unprovable. They have been trying to demystify existence, and I call it a betrayal. Let science do its work – that is science’s work, to demystify existence. Anything that is not known has to be made known, that’s the whole scientific approach, and, “We will not leave anything unknown in existence.” And it is possible to conceive that perhaps one day we will have exhausted the unknown.
But what about the unknowable? The scientist himself is unknowable. He knows everything, but he does not know who the knower is. In fact, he denies the knower – and that is so stupid.
I asked one of the Indian scientists, Khorana, who got a Nobel Prize, “You are a Nobel prize-winning scientist. Have you ever bothered that you go on searching, discovering new areas, but who is the seeker? Who is the searcher? Have you ever thought about yourself?”
He said, “I don’t have time for that.”
I said, “But this is strange, because whatsoever you can find cannot be more valuable than you, the finder. Whatever you can know, howsoever valuable it is, cannot be more valuable than the knower. It remains an object of knowledge.
“And you say you don’t have time for yourself? That is not a scientific answer. That is trying just to avoid the subject. You cannot avoid it. I, at least, will not allow you to avoid it. You have to say something definite. You have to say whether you exist or not. If you exist, then what are you – just matter, or something more?”
He said, “You are putting me in trouble, because if I say I am just matter, it simply does not feel right. How can matter discover matter? How can matter know the mysteries of matter? Matter has no consciousness. I can understand, so I have to accept that there is something more than matter. But please don’t insist, because science is not willing to accept the knower. Science’s whole approach is: unless something is experimented through scientific methods in a scientific lab, it cannot be accepted.”
I said, “Naturally, then the scientist will remain unknowable forever.”
And that is the arena, the area, of religion. And this unknowability of consciousness, this mysterious phenomenon in you – in everybody – is the most precious thing. Nobody can know it, but everybody can taste it. Nobody can reduce it into a theorem, but everybody can dive deep into it, its bliss, its serenity, its silence, its tremendous ecstasy. Nobody can explain it, but everybody is capable of experiencing it.
One of the great philosophers of Europe – perhaps the best of this century – was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has a statement in his book, one of the rare books in the whole history of books: the name of the book is Tractatus Philosophicus. He never wrote treatises, he wrote only maxims. One of the maxims in that strange book is that one should not speak about something which cannot be spoken of.
I wrote him a letter – he was alive, now he is dead – “The moment you say one should not speak about something which cannot be spoken of, you have already spoken. You have said something, you have described a certain quality – that nothing can be said about it. That, too, is an attribute, and if you have said this much, then try a little harder. You yourself have broken your rule. You accept that there are things which cannot be spoken of – your statement certainly proves that you accept that there are things which cannot be spoken of. Certainly there must be some way to know those things which cannot be spoken of, otherwise how have you come to that conclusion?”
I say that there are things which cannot be explained, cannot be reduced into theories, theologies, philosophies – but which can become part of your experience, which can become the very light of your life, which can become the very center. It is not demystifying them, it is in fact entering into the mystery and becoming yourself a mystery.
That’s why in the East we have called saints “mystics.” We have not called them saints. Saints is a Christian contribution to the world, a very ugly word. It comes from the original root sanction. A saint is one who has been sanctioned, given a certificate from the pope. This is stupid: the pope himself is not a saint and he is issuing certificates – posthumous certificates.
Joan of Arc was made a saint three hundred years later. One infallible pope burned the poor woman – who was a rare woman in the whole history of man – burned her alive, declared that she was a witch. But people could see the ugliness of the whole thing. The woman was a genius – so young, so beautiful, yet so courageous. She alone was fighting for the freedom of the country – and she won. The whole country loved the woman, but that was the trouble. She became a competitor to the pope; she had to be destroyed.
She was burned alive, but by and by over three hundred years, the pope became condemned by people who realized the qualities of the woman. Her diaries were discovered. And she was such a beautiful, authentic, sincere human being, that after three hundred years another pope became afraid that if she was not given the sanction and made a saint, she would create a division in Christianity. To avoid that division she was declared a saint.
In the East we don’t use that word. We call these people “mystics,” and that exactly describes their world: the world of mystery. They are not demystifying it, they don’t give you any ideas about it. They hold your hand and take you on the journey. They do not give you any proof – they give you eyes to see.
And that’s the function of the master: not to give you a philosophy – just dead words, what are you going to do with them? The authentic master will give you some taste of reality. He will hold your hand, he will take you into unknown territories where you may be afraid to go alone. But the trust in the man, the love for the man, will not allow you to escape.
Osho,
Have you talked to the pope lately?
I have not talked to him but I have talked about him enough. And I don’t think he will be ready to talk with me, because I have been continuously condemning him and he knows about it. And I don’t see that anything that he is doing is right, so there is no meeting point either. Whatever I am doing is immoral in his eyes. What he is doing is criminal in my eyes.
Right now he is in South Africa, where he is not even touching the real problems. Eighty-five percent of the people are black, it is their country. The fifteen percent of white people are ruling over them. The country is very rich: it has diamond mines, it has gold mines, it has silver mines – it is really one of the richest lands in the world. But the people are dying, starving. The people are the poorest because all those mines are captured by the fifteen percent of white people, so all the riches are under the white people’s power.
You will be surprised to know that South Africa has one of the biggest armies in the world. That fifteen percent need it; otherwise, eighty-five percent of the people dying, and you are continuously exploiting their country… All of the fifteen percent – the white people – are immensely rich. And you will be surprised to know that even in the twentieth century, eighty-five percent of the people don’t have even the voting right; only the fifteen percent of white people vote. Naturally the question does not arise of any black people being in power. It is their country, it is their wealth, and they are continuously being shot dead, continuously being killed, burned. The pope is not touching the real problem.
And those eighty-five percent have the highest birthrate in the whole world: three percent per year. They are already overpopulated, and they are continuously reproducing and becoming more and more poor – because what inheritance can they give to their children? They don’t have anything.
The pope is preaching to them that birth control is sin, that abortion is a great sin. The government is trying to introduce birth control, abortion, and the pope is speaking against birth control, against abortion. He is going to be responsible for all the poverty that will happen. He will be responsible for all those starving, dying people. And he is not touching the real problems because that will disturb the vested interests, the white people.
So, no question about freedom, no question about voting power, no question about the white people leaving the country and going back to their own countries. Or, even if they want to leave, their own countries – they belong to different nations from all over Europe: Spanish, English, British, Dutch – their own countries are not going to accept them because they have been there for three hundred years, and their own countries are also in trouble with overpopulation.
My suggestion is that fifteen percent of the land of South Africa should be given to the white people, and fifteen percent of the wealth of the country should be given to the white people. And eighty-five percent of the land and eighty-five percent of the riches should go to the black people. The country should be divided. A simple solution – already they live separately, so there is not much problem; the black people are not allowed even to enter the areas where white people live. It is so simple.
I can understand the difficulty of the white people, that they have no home. Three hundred years is a long time, they cannot leave this country. Absolutely right, I accept it. It seems to be perfectly human that they should be given a place there, but they cannot have more than fifteen percent. They cannot have one hundred percent of the land, one hundred percent of the riches, with eighty-five percent of the people starving and dying.
And this idiot pope goes there and talks to those people. He’s not telling the white people – the white people are already practicing birth control, the pill, abortion, everything. He’s not talking to the white people.
Have you sent someone there to talk to the people?
No.
No?
Because I have tried for thirty years in India.
The poor people have many problems. One of the problems is that they are uneducated, illiterate. They cannot understand anything beyond their tradition, the tradition they have inherited. And their tradition is all superstition, stupid – for example the idea that God gives you children. Now, it is very difficult to convince those people. For thirty years I was trying hard to tell them that God cannot be so stupid as to give you so many children that you cannot even give them food. God cannot be so unkind.
If he is a compassionate God, as you call him, he should send each child with a piece of land, with some trees, some cows, something they can live on. He simply sends children naked, with not even any underwear! And he goes on seeing your children dying – in India, nine children out of ten used to die – and this is your God.
And there are people like the pope and Mahatma Gandhi – who was against birth control, against abortion, against inoculation, because it is against nature. Without inoculation many small children were suffering from smallpox and dying, but they would not accept inoculation. Birth control is just beyond their ideas: it means you are talking immorality, you are talking anti-religiousness.
In thirty years of talking to them, all the reward that I got were stones thrown at me, shoes thrown at me, knives thrown at me, poison given to me twice. That was the reward. And they will not go against their tradition.
Osho,
What happened to you when you physically died for seven hundred years, between your rebirths?
No. I never think of the future.
You never think of the future?
No, I think only of the present.
How's the present?
And I want to make the present as intelligent, as beautiful, as comfortable for my people as possible. I want my people to be as meditative as possible in the present. The future will take care itself; intelligent people will find a way. Who am I even to think about the future? That is a subtle strategy of dominating, even when you are dead.
Just the idea of creating a successor means I will continue to dominate you through my successor. That’s how the dead are dominating the living: Jesus, Moses, Buddha are still dominating people. This is ugly. The dead dominating the living is simply unacceptable to me.
Buddha lived twenty-five centuries ago. He knew nothing of electricity, he knew nothing of railway trains, he knew nothing of population growth. He did not know that there would be a time when people would die if they didn’t stop reproducing. In Buddha’s time the whole world’s population was only two hundred million. I think Oregon’s population must be almost two hundred million now – that was the whole population of the world.
Buddha had no idea that his country would be almost eight hundred million people, otherwise he would not have talked nonsense. But we cannot criticize him: whatever he did, whatever he said was relevant in his time. One thing that he did do wrong is that he made a tradition, created laws and regulations for the future. That to me is dictatorial, not democratic. Who am I for the future? Right now I am alive: you can argue against me, you can decide against me, you can doubt my ideas, but when I am dead…
The whole emphasis of all the religions is to believe, to have faith; so people go on believing and having faith in ideas which are simply out of date, which are dangerous to believe in. For example, Buddha preached celibacy. Now, celibacy is absolutely unnatural. Perhaps at the age of eighty-two he may have been celibate – in fact, what else are you going to do at the age of eighty-two?
Osho,
Do you have a girlfriend?
I have many. You are welcome, there is no trouble in it. I don’t think anybody has as many girlfriends as I have – thousands!
Thousands!
I am against celibacy. It may be good for an impotent person; it may do some good for him – at least a consolation that he is celibate. But impotence is rare, and impotence is a sickness. The impotent person has never done anything worthwhile. He has never created anything; he has not even been able to become a saint, which would have been the easiest thing for him to do.
Buddha and others talking about celibacy have created sexual perversion throughout the world. Now there are homosexuals and there are lesbians and there are people who are making love to animals and there are all kinds of perversions. And for all these perversions, who is responsible? – those people who talked about celibacy.
When I said to the Indian masses that celibacy should be condemned as a crime because it goes against nature… You can go to any medical college, you can go to any medical board and ask them, but such is the ignorance that even doctors try to be celibate – particularly in India, where celibacy seems to be a great spiritual thing.
Even doctors – even they cannot understand that it is something natural to your physiology, your chemistry, your biology. Your body does not understand that you have taken a vow of celibacy. There is no way to convey the message to the body, the body will go on in the same way.
You may be Hindu, you may be Christian, you may be Mohammedan; it doesn’t make any difference, you will all feel hunger. The body knows nothing about you being a Mohammedan and this is the month of Ramadan, the sacred month when one should not eat in the day. The body feels hungry. There is no way to communicate the idea that in the month of Ramadan, for the whole month a Mohammedan cannot eat in the day, he can eat only in the night.
At least Mohammedanism allows eating in the night. So people eat as much as they can in the night. And they eat again early in the morning before sunrise, so that they don’t feel hungry the whole day. This is just unnecessarily disturbing people. The whole night they could not sleep, they were just eating and eating and eating, preparing for the whole day, because in the day they will not be able to eat.
But there is a religion in India, Jainism. On its sacred days, ten days per year, you have to fast and you cannot eat in the night. According to Jainism you cannot eat in the night any day of the year: eating in the night is sin. When the sun sets, Jainas cannot eat. Not only that, but those who are very orthodox will not drink water.
It was such a trouble in my childhood, because I was born in a Jaina family. In India it is so hot, and summer nights are so hot, and you cannot even drink water. I simply refused. I said, “I am willing to go to hell – that will happen after death. There is time – I will do something. But right now I am going to drink. I don’t want to suffer this night in hell.”
In those ten days you cannot eat at all, for ten days continuously. And I know that in those ten days Jainas think only of food, nothing else. Day and night, their dreams are full of food.
You were asking about dreams. Jainas’ dreams in those ten days are full of food. Christian monks, Hindu monks, their dreams are full of sex. Whatever you repress in the day becomes your dream in the night. I don’t repress anything, that’s why there is no possibility of having a dream. My night is a dreamless silence.
You don't miss struggling or pain or anything?
There is none.
You don't miss it?
No problem. As far as I am concerned, there is nothing that I miss and I never repress anything. For example, I don’t think anybody would have said to you that you are welcome to be my girlfriend. I don’t think… But I don’t repress anything. The idea came to me, rather than seeing you in my dreams, I said it. I am finished with it. Now you cannot come in my dreams. My life is simple and open. Dreams are possible only if you repress. If you don’t repress, dreams disappear. And the disappearance of dreams is such a beautiful experience – the whole night is such a joy, such bliss.
In India, Mahatma Gandhi was doing exactly what the pope is doing now. He was telling people, “Go back.” In his ideology the spinning wheel is the ultimate invention of humanity, after that whatever has happened has to be dropped – in fact, everything has happened after it! The spinning wheel must have been invented two or three thousand years ago; everything of any value has happened afterwards. But in his ideology the spinning wheel is the full stop, and we have to go back to that stage.
These people don’t understand at all. How can you manage eight hundred million people just with a spinning wheel? I have calculated: if a person spins eight hours a day, then he can cover his whole body for the whole year. He can have his bed sheet, his blanket, his pillow covers – but eight hours every day will be needed. What about his wife, what about his children, what about his old parents, what about his sick mother? He can manage only for himself. And what about food? What about the other necessities of life? Just clothes are not enough, you cannot eat them. And if he is just spinning for eight hours, when is he going to earn his bread? When is he going to earn enough money for his mother dying of tuberculosis?
But Mahatma Gandhi has appeal because he is in tune with tradition. I am saying something which goes against their tradition. Gandhi says to people, “You need not worry; God takes care, he is compassionate,” and people are absolutely willing to accept the idea because that idea has been conditioned in their minds for thousands of years.
And when I say, “There is no God and nobody is taking care of you. You have to take care yourself,” it hurts them in two ways. First, they are not willing to drop their traditional idea of God. Fear arises. Secondly, to accept responsibility for everything needs guts. It is very easy to transfer to a father figure in heaven, “He will take care.” Even if there is nobody it does not matter, but you are consoled for the moment.
I am stirring your fear, your insecurity, your death. And there is nobody to take care. It is all empty, you have to find your own way. There are no super-highways made for you by others that you have simply to walk on.
Truth is something like a bird flying in the sky, which leaves no footprints behind. So if one person reaches truth you cannot follow him. He has not left any footprints in the sky. You can try to understand the man, you can try to imbibe his vibe. You can sit in silence with the man and let something transpire in silence. You can love the man, you can be open to the man so his love can flow toward you. Perhaps in these mysterious ways he may be able to take you by the hand into the unknown. Otherwise there is no road. He cannot say, “Just go five miles right, then turn to the left and you have arrived.” It is not that easy.
After trying with Indians for thirty years I decided that it was just futile. I dropped the whole idea. I started working only with those who are capable of understanding me. In 1970 I stopped traveling in India; for thirty years I had been traveling continuously. In 1970 I stopped traveling and began the movement of sannyas.
Osho,
And four years ago today you arrived on this ranch.
Four years ago I arrived here. In four years we have made this desert an oasis.
Yes.
Just go on coming, and every time you will find great changes happening continuously. When we had come there was only one house here, and that too dilapidated. Now we have houses for five thousand sannyasins, fully equipped with air-conditioning, everything. And this is against the government, against the people of Oregon, against all kinds of allegations, cases.
But we don’t bother: we go on fighting cases in the courts and we go on doing what we want to do. And we know that finally we are going to win and we are going to make these 126 square miles a lush, green place; a place that tourists from all over the world will be coming to see, because it will be so full of laughter and so full of love.
Well you have eighty-one thousand acres, here.
Yes.
That's a lot.
Eighty-four thousand acres – nobody else has that much land.
Yes, it's a lot. So you're rich and famous.
We are – and we are going to become richer and richer and more famous. Because of us, Oregon is now famous all over the world. This small commune, Rajneeshpuram, is the world capitol. We are going to make it a world capital. Every country is represented here, every race, every religion is represented here.
Lawyers, doctors…
Every profession, every kind of people – and all educated, all intelligent, so there is no need for me to think for their future. I just have to make their present as beautiful and as intense and total as possible, so that out of that totality and intensity their future will be born.
Osho,
Have you been to the university lately? – that place down the road?
No, I never go anywhere. People listen to me, and if they find something is valuable they take it to the university, they take it to the fields – to the commune, its work. But I never direct anybody in any way. I never give any instructions. I am available with all my vision, if you feel that it triggers something in you, do it. But you are doing your thing, not my thing. You are doing it because it has triggered your heart. You are following your heart, I am just accidental.
You are not to believe in me. You have to be just available to me, as I am available to you. And all these people here are not my followers. As far as I am concerned, they are all my friends, my lovers, my fellow travelers. So, whatsoever they can take and materialize, they go on doing. They are doing beautifully. I see the commune growing every day, becoming greener every day.
I will go on sharing my vision to my last breath. And now it is up to them. That’s why I said my sannyasins are my poems, my sannyasins are my music, my sannyasins are my paintings. My sannyasins are my future.
I need not bother about the future, it is already here. It is all around the world – one million sannyasins around the world, hundreds of communes around the world. And every commune trying to maintain exactly the same standards, the same comfort, the same food, the same luxury, the same medical facilities.
I want my communes to become a model to the whole world. I don’t want to argue with them – this is my argument. My commune is my argument: “Man can live so beautifully, so relaxedly, so creatively – why can’t you live like that?” Just because you have not tried, just because you are clinging to old ideas which are no longer workable.
You have to learn only one thing, and that is to be contemporary. Very few people are contemporary. Somebody is living two thousand years back, somebody three thousand years ago. A strange world, where you will not find contemporary people. And I can have appeal only to the contemporaries.
So I stopped going to the graveyards and talking to the graves and disturbing the dead. What is the need? Let them rest in peace. I have found my people, and they are coming in hundreds every day. And my appeal is only for the intelligent: the unintelligent simply cannot have any communication with me, my thing goes over his head. But he has his popes and bishops and churches – he can go there.
My whole effort is to make the intelligent people so tremendously significant that they cannot be ignored anymore; that the world has to take notice of them; that the world has to learn that there is something that they are missing and that these people have. So my argument is very existential – rather than talking philosophically to them, which I have done for thirty years. It does not make any sense.
Now I am trying to produce an existential proof that whatever I am saying is realizable. You can come and see that it is not just an ideology, not just a utopia, that it can be a factual reality.
Okay.
Vogue, United States
Osho,
Hello. I have many questions to ask you about many different things and the first is: “How are you?”
I am always the same, just fine.
Just fine? Okay.
How do you think the world sees you?
To me everything is very simple; I never do anything that is not spontaneous. I just live in the moment: no attachment to the past moment, no projection for the future moment. I am always here now. These two words here now contain the whole of existence.
And after Albert Einstein, they are not even two words. It is one reality – space and time are four dimensions of the same reality. Time has three dimensions, space has one dimension; here has one dimension, now has three dimensions. But within these two words, everything is included. Einstein had to make a new word, because to express it exactly it is not good to use two words – that gives a sense of duality. So he invented the technical word, spacio-time.
I have also made my own word: nowhere – just one word, not even a hyphen between now and here.
Osho,
In a few words, could you comment on the word that I am going to give you? For example, what does love say to you?
It means three things. Love can exist as just a physiological relationship – then we call it sex, and most people go on believing that that is love. It is only the beginning.
The second thing that can be called love is something deeper, psychological – what poets talk about, what musicians sing about. It has nothing to do with sex, it is just a magnetic attraction between two persons. Something transpires between two persons – they suddenly feel as if they are made for each other. Something almost gives them the sense, “Without the other I am half, incomplete; with the other I’m complete.” A sense of completion is the second quality; a sense of being entire, the whole circle.
The first is very momentary, very superficial; the second is very deep, but needs great sensitivity. It is not available to everybody. The first is available to everybody: it is available even to animals, birds, trees, so there is nothing special in it as far as man is concerned. A man who has known love only as sex has remained below human dignity.
Humanity begins with the second. Only a few poets, a few musicians, dancers, a few sculptors have sensed it. In the whole of history, very few people around the world have lived it because it needs tremendous courage to dissolve yourself with somebody else – a moment when the other is no longer the other, a moment when you can feel a tremendous at-one-ment.
It happened in Ramakrishna’s life: he was a man of immense sensitivity. They were crossing the river Ganges in a boat, and just in the middle of the river he started shouting, “Don’t beat me! Don’t beat me!” The people who were around him were all his disciples, and nobody was beating him.
Tears were flowing from his eyes and they asked, “What are you saying? Nobody is beating you.”
But he was in a convulsion, as if somebody was hitting him hard. The disciples could not understand it. He fell down almost unconscious in the boat. They reached the other shore, and there they saw a man who had been beaten to unconsciousness. A crowd had gathered. The most significant thing was that as the man’s clothes were torn – his back had blood marks – they uncovered Ramakrishna’s back and found the same marks, and in the same way blood was flowing.
That is the height of the second quality of love, where you can feel such oneness that if the other is dying, you will feel like dying. Everybody hankers for the second quality, but it needs a certain training in sensitivity. For example, a person who is violent in his life – full of anger, jealousy, possessiveness – will not be able to experience the second quality. And he will remain frustrated his whole life because he could not get what he wanted. But nobody else is responsible for it; he never prepared to receive something higher, you have to deserve it.
In the first love there is no question of deserving: it is biological. You are already gifted because nature wants to continue reproducing; it has not left it to you. Nature has not left many things to man. For example, breathing has not been left to you. You may forget, you may get involved in some work and forget to breathe – in sleep you are bound to forget, then there is going to be no morning for you. So nature has kept the breathing under its own control.
Sex is the continuity of life, it cannot be left to you; it is in the hands of biology. But because it is in the hands of nature you feel a certain compulsion, a certain slavery, and that’s why sexual partners are continually fighting. They are not aware why they are fighting; why they fight the man they love, the woman they love. The reason is that each feels deep down, “The other is my trouble, my problem.” Jean-Paul Sartre has a very significant statement: “The other is hell.”
But as far as sex is concerned, the other remains the other. The other disappears only in the second stage, and I don’t think even Jean-Paul Sartre reached the second stage. He was a man of tremendous intelligence, but not of great sensitivity. They are different things: intelligence is of the head, sensitivity is of the heart. And in fact our whole education is to sacrifice the heart for the head. So the people who get your Nobel Prizes, none of them gets the Nobel Prize for the heart, they get the Nobel Prize for the head.
Your universities teach nothing about the heart, they only go on training and sharpening your head. For the head, the other is hell; for the heart, there is no other and that is heaven. Only very few poets and painters and that type of crazy people have known love. But that love also is psychological and your mind is not something stable; it is one thing today, it is something else tomorrow.
So with the change of the mind, with the change of your psychology – which is continuously changing – your love has to change continuously. That is a great problem. It is not necessary that the person you love will also change in synchronicity with you. He may lag behind, he may go further, he may stop moving – all the possibilities are there. And with his changing psychology…
A child may fall in love with another child: we call it childhood love. But as they grow older that love because a beautiful memory, it has no significance. A young person falls in love with another person: the child psychology is gone, its love is also gone. In fact, you will never get a more beautiful experience of friendship than you got in your childhood. Never again that joy of friendship – because as you become older, friendship is no longer your need: your need becomes more and more sexual.
Only rarely does a person who is young have a poetic sensibility, but that sensibility also changes. In fact, the more delicate a phenomenon is, the more the possibility of change. Retarded people – who remain below the age of fourteen as far as their minds are concerned – can remain faithful to their wives, to their husbands, their whole life. They stopped growing when they were fourteen, and at that very time their love also stopped – came to a full stop, the terminus. Now they will go on repeating the same thing their whole life.
But more intelligent people will find it difficult. Hence, as man becomes more civilized, more intelligent, one cannot live with one woman, with one man forever. If he tries to do that, both become sad, both become bored, both become frustrated with each other. That is the point when the other starts becoming hell.
People are afraid of reaching the second stage because it is just like a breeze: it comes and goes. When it comes it fills you totally. It gives you so much contentment that you cannot think there is anything more, and you cannot think that it can ever change. That’s why lovers go on promising each other – but their promises are not going to be fulfilled. Then they will feel guilty. Of course when they had given the promise it was not a lie, they were really, authentically feeling it. But it was the feeling of that moment.
After a time your psychology develops, your maturity develops; you start loving new things, new people. Your vision of beauty changes – your attitude in all its dimensions goes on changing. It is almost impossible for the other person to change exactly with you. Neither is it possible for you to change exactly with the other person. And that’s where the whole of society is living in tremendous suffering. We have forced people to live together because they had promised something. They don’t deny it, but what can they do? In that moment the promise was true, and then everything changed. Now they don’t feel anything for the other person – and it is not only that they don’t feel anything, they feel they are strangers.
You can look at husbands and wives and inquire, “Do you know your wife? How long has is it that you have not looked into her eyes? How long has is it that you have not given a moment to look at her or to listen to her?” Perhaps years have passed.
It is one of the strangest things that husbands cannot remember the face of the wife with whom they have lived for thirty years. Just ask them, “Close your eyes and try to remember your wife, her face,” and everything goes vague. For thirty years they have not looked at her. They have really tried not to look at her; they were afraid to look at her. There was a day when they wanted to look at her for the whole twenty-four hours.
Psychological love is a changing phenomenon, and unless humanity accepts its changeability gracefully we will never allow human beings to rise to the second level – because those who rise to the second level suffer more. Poets suffer more, farmers don’t suffer that way, woodcutters don’t suffer that way, fishermen don’t suffer that way. Painters suffer, musicians suffer, because they go on changing. They continuously need something new. Now, the other person cannot make that available. And the other person has his own individuality, her own individuality. They start growing farther and farther and farther away from each other. And society goes on forcing them to live together because, “Marriages are made in heaven.”
Osho,
Do you do any art work?
My whole work is art! I don’t do anything else except art work.
Do you dream? And what kind of dreams do you have?
No, I cannot dream.
You don't dream?
No.
Osho,
So you're enlightened, and I would like to know if there's another enlightenment after enlightenment.
No.
Just one, that's it, okay.
And if you were to go on vacation where would you go and what would you do?
I can just kiss from here! You may be on another planet, it makes no difference. What people call kissing is so unhygienic, so ugly: mixing saliva with each other, touching each other’s tongues, exploring each other’s mouth with the tongue – that is just not possible for me. There is no need. Just looking at a person with loving eyes is enough; you have touched.
Physical touch is a lower phenomenon. Just looking at a person with love, with compassion, with friendship, with respect, is enough. Eyes can reach any distance. Silence can say much, which words cannot do.
In India when we salute each other we don’t even shake hands. That is too physical. Unhygienic too – no medical person can support it. We salute each other with both hands folded. And it has a spiritual significance: we are giving you the same respect as we give to God. That’s the way people go into a temple, with folded hands. That’s the way they respect their elders. The same respect is shown to strangers. And two hands folded together represent what I was saying, the merger of two into one.
In the first kind of love, which is sexual, kissing is part of it, but in the second love, which is psychological, kissing is not a part of it. It is more an energy phenomenon than a material one.
Everybody has an aura of energy. Now it can even be photographed. In the East we have been talking about it for five thousand years, and perhaps the idea is even more ancient, but we had no way to prove it. Now there is a certain kind of photography – Kirlian photography – which has been developed in the Soviet Union by a photographer who has made such sensitive plates that when he takes a picture your energy aura also comes onto it. It differs from person to person. For example, a person who has never known anything more than sex, his energy aura is just two inches around his body. And the aura of a person who has known something of the second love is almost six inches around his body.
And there is a third love of which I was just going to speak, which is spiritual, which is not even psychological, which is more like lovingness, rather than love. There is no passion in it; it is more like a fragrance than a flower. You can catch hold of the flower, but you cannot catch hold of the fragrance. It is not like the flame of a candle, but the light of the flame.
In that third stage of love, the person has almost a twelve-inch aura around his whole body. People who know the third love can just sit silently together and their energies meet. You will think they are not even sitting close – as lovers sit very close to each other – they may be sitting with a gap between them. They can allow a gap of at least two feet when sitting together and yet their energies are touching, their energies are kissing. And that is a far bigger touch, not local; a kiss is a local touch. They can touch each other’s bodies totally, without touching the physical body at all.
And that love does not change because it is not dependent on the beloved, on the object of love. It is not dependent on the changing mind; it is something concerned with your eternal being. You may change, your body will change, your mind will change, but your love cannot change. It remains the fragrance of your being. Only at that point have two persons truly met.
It rarely happens between lovers – very rarely – but it happens between masters and disciples very often. That’s why I say that the relationship between a master and a disciple is a love affair of the highest category. And it is the goal that can fulfill. Those who have not known it have lived incompletely.
In that state whatever you do is art: you cannot do otherwise. The way you walk, the way you sit, the way you talk – even just the gesture of your hand has something artistic to it, something creative in it. That’s why I say I don’t paint, I don’t compose music, I don’t write poetry, but if you look deeply at what I am doing with my disciples – they are my canvas. I’m painting living beings. They are my poetry, they are my sculpture. I’m working continuously so that they can be released from all bondage and they can taste freedom, love, beauty.
I don’t paint on ordinary canvases and I don’t write poems on paper, but on living beings. And each of my sannyasins is my poetry. And each of my sannyasins will carry my gestures, my attitudes, my approaches. And he will make it even richer because he is a living person. He may give it more polish, he may give it more beauty; he has to do it. It will be his gratitude toward the master, it will be his thankfulness.
So, from morning ‘til night I am continuously creating. But to see my creativity you need to be part of it. You cannot be just a spectator. You have to be an insider, not an outsider, because it is so subtle and so delicate, so invisible, that unless you enter it with an open mind, without any prejudice, you will not be able to experience it. Just a little experience will open the door.
Osho,
Is that why you started talking again?
That’s true.
And what happened when you weren't talking? Do you miss not talking?
I was working in my silence.
What were you working on?
My people were sitting in silence with me.
I wanted to see how many people could understand my silence. I wanted those people who were hanging around my words to go away, because they were wasting their time. They should be somewhere else; this is not their place. They had become enchanted with my words, my theories, but it was an intellectual approach. So when I became silent they went on hanging around for a few days, then slowly they thought, “Now he’s not going to speak again, what is the point?” They could not understand silence.
The moment I saw that all those people had left, I started speaking again. Now these are the people who remained for three and a half years – not even asking, not even a single person asking me to speak. They were perfectly happy just with my presence.
It was of my own accord that I started speaking. If I had remained in silence for the remainder of my life, these were not the people to leave me. That’s why I am speaking to them – because these are my people. Now my talking is heart-to-heart.
And they don’t bother what I am saying, whether I am contradicting myself or not; it is none of their concern. They know me, they cannot be deceived by my words. They know me, and knowing me is such a deep relationship – who cares what I am saying?
Osho,
What do you think of Kahlil Gibran's saying, “When you have solved all the mysteries of life, you long for death, for it is but another mystery of life.”? “
Three words one has to understand clearly. One is the known; another is the unknown; and the third is the unknowable. The known was one day unknown; the unknown will one day become known. But the unknowable was unknowable before, is unknowable now, will remain unknowable forever. Only the unknowable is the mystery.
Science can deal with the known, with the unknown; science has no way even to conceive of the unknowable. And that is where religion becomes significant. That is religion’s area: the unknowable. And all the religions in the past have betrayed. They started trying to make the unknowable known – that was their betrayal. They all started trying to prove God. Once God is proved by arguments, he’s no longer God.
Karl Marx used to say, “I will believe in God only if you can put him in a test tube in the lab, dissect him, find all the qualities, all the constituents. Only then will I believe in him.”
One of his followers in India, Anand Roy – a very significant philosopher who had participated in the Russian revolution – was a friend of Lenin, a close friend. I asked him – because he was continuously writing about Karl Marx, his philosophy, and he was of tremendous reasoning, rationality, he could prove… I asked him just one thing: “In your book you write about Marx’s statement that he will believe in God only if God is in a test tube observed by scientists. I want to ask you, will that be God that scientists can dissect, can find out of what he is constituted? That will be something else: it won’t be God.”
But all the religions in the past have been trying to prove that which is unprovable. They have been trying to demystify existence, and I call it a betrayal. Let science do its work – that is science’s work, to demystify existence. Anything that is not known has to be made known, that’s the whole scientific approach, and, “We will not leave anything unknown in existence.” And it is possible to conceive that perhaps one day we will have exhausted the unknown.
But what about the unknowable? The scientist himself is unknowable. He knows everything, but he does not know who the knower is. In fact, he denies the knower – and that is so stupid.
I asked one of the Indian scientists, Khorana, who got a Nobel Prize, “You are a Nobel prize-winning scientist. Have you ever bothered that you go on searching, discovering new areas, but who is the seeker? Who is the searcher? Have you ever thought about yourself?”
He said, “I don’t have time for that.”
I said, “But this is strange, because whatsoever you can find cannot be more valuable than you, the finder. Whatever you can know, howsoever valuable it is, cannot be more valuable than the knower. It remains an object of knowledge.
“And you say you don’t have time for yourself? That is not a scientific answer. That is trying just to avoid the subject. You cannot avoid it. I, at least, will not allow you to avoid it. You have to say something definite. You have to say whether you exist or not. If you exist, then what are you – just matter, or something more?”
He said, “You are putting me in trouble, because if I say I am just matter, it simply does not feel right. How can matter discover matter? How can matter know the mysteries of matter? Matter has no consciousness. I can understand, so I have to accept that there is something more than matter. But please don’t insist, because science is not willing to accept the knower. Science’s whole approach is: unless something is experimented through scientific methods in a scientific lab, it cannot be accepted.”
I said, “Naturally, then the scientist will remain unknowable forever.”
And that is the arena, the area, of religion. And this unknowability of consciousness, this mysterious phenomenon in you – in everybody – is the most precious thing. Nobody can know it, but everybody can taste it. Nobody can reduce it into a theorem, but everybody can dive deep into it, its bliss, its serenity, its silence, its tremendous ecstasy. Nobody can explain it, but everybody is capable of experiencing it.
One of the great philosophers of Europe – perhaps the best of this century – was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has a statement in his book, one of the rare books in the whole history of books: the name of the book is Tractatus Philosophicus. He never wrote treatises, he wrote only maxims. One of the maxims in that strange book is that one should not speak about something which cannot be spoken of.
I wrote him a letter – he was alive, now he is dead – “The moment you say one should not speak about something which cannot be spoken of, you have already spoken. You have said something, you have described a certain quality – that nothing can be said about it. That, too, is an attribute, and if you have said this much, then try a little harder. You yourself have broken your rule. You accept that there are things which cannot be spoken of – your statement certainly proves that you accept that there are things which cannot be spoken of. Certainly there must be some way to know those things which cannot be spoken of, otherwise how have you come to that conclusion?”
I say that there are things which cannot be explained, cannot be reduced into theories, theologies, philosophies – but which can become part of your experience, which can become the very light of your life, which can become the very center. It is not demystifying them, it is in fact entering into the mystery and becoming yourself a mystery.
That’s why in the East we have called saints “mystics.” We have not called them saints. Saints is a Christian contribution to the world, a very ugly word. It comes from the original root sanction. A saint is one who has been sanctioned, given a certificate from the pope. This is stupid: the pope himself is not a saint and he is issuing certificates – posthumous certificates.
Joan of Arc was made a saint three hundred years later. One infallible pope burned the poor woman – who was a rare woman in the whole history of man – burned her alive, declared that she was a witch. But people could see the ugliness of the whole thing. The woman was a genius – so young, so beautiful, yet so courageous. She alone was fighting for the freedom of the country – and she won. The whole country loved the woman, but that was the trouble. She became a competitor to the pope; she had to be destroyed.
She was burned alive, but by and by over three hundred years, the pope became condemned by people who realized the qualities of the woman. Her diaries were discovered. And she was such a beautiful, authentic, sincere human being, that after three hundred years another pope became afraid that if she was not given the sanction and made a saint, she would create a division in Christianity. To avoid that division she was declared a saint.
In the East we don’t use that word. We call these people “mystics,” and that exactly describes their world: the world of mystery. They are not demystifying it, they don’t give you any ideas about it. They hold your hand and take you on the journey. They do not give you any proof – they give you eyes to see.
And that’s the function of the master: not to give you a philosophy – just dead words, what are you going to do with them? The authentic master will give you some taste of reality. He will hold your hand, he will take you into unknown territories where you may be afraid to go alone. But the trust in the man, the love for the man, will not allow you to escape.
Osho,
Have you talked to the pope lately?
I have not talked to him but I have talked about him enough. And I don’t think he will be ready to talk with me, because I have been continuously condemning him and he knows about it. And I don’t see that anything that he is doing is right, so there is no meeting point either. Whatever I am doing is immoral in his eyes. What he is doing is criminal in my eyes.
Right now he is in South Africa, where he is not even touching the real problems. Eighty-five percent of the people are black, it is their country. The fifteen percent of white people are ruling over them. The country is very rich: it has diamond mines, it has gold mines, it has silver mines – it is really one of the richest lands in the world. But the people are dying, starving. The people are the poorest because all those mines are captured by the fifteen percent of white people, so all the riches are under the white people’s power.
You will be surprised to know that South Africa has one of the biggest armies in the world. That fifteen percent need it; otherwise, eighty-five percent of the people dying, and you are continuously exploiting their country… All of the fifteen percent – the white people – are immensely rich. And you will be surprised to know that even in the twentieth century, eighty-five percent of the people don’t have even the voting right; only the fifteen percent of white people vote. Naturally the question does not arise of any black people being in power. It is their country, it is their wealth, and they are continuously being shot dead, continuously being killed, burned. The pope is not touching the real problem.
And those eighty-five percent have the highest birthrate in the whole world: three percent per year. They are already overpopulated, and they are continuously reproducing and becoming more and more poor – because what inheritance can they give to their children? They don’t have anything.
The pope is preaching to them that birth control is sin, that abortion is a great sin. The government is trying to introduce birth control, abortion, and the pope is speaking against birth control, against abortion. He is going to be responsible for all the poverty that will happen. He will be responsible for all those starving, dying people. And he is not touching the real problems because that will disturb the vested interests, the white people.
So, no question about freedom, no question about voting power, no question about the white people leaving the country and going back to their own countries. Or, even if they want to leave, their own countries – they belong to different nations from all over Europe: Spanish, English, British, Dutch – their own countries are not going to accept them because they have been there for three hundred years, and their own countries are also in trouble with overpopulation.
My suggestion is that fifteen percent of the land of South Africa should be given to the white people, and fifteen percent of the wealth of the country should be given to the white people. And eighty-five percent of the land and eighty-five percent of the riches should go to the black people. The country should be divided. A simple solution – already they live separately, so there is not much problem; the black people are not allowed even to enter the areas where white people live. It is so simple.
I can understand the difficulty of the white people, that they have no home. Three hundred years is a long time, they cannot leave this country. Absolutely right, I accept it. It seems to be perfectly human that they should be given a place there, but they cannot have more than fifteen percent. They cannot have one hundred percent of the land, one hundred percent of the riches, with eighty-five percent of the people starving and dying.
And this idiot pope goes there and talks to those people. He’s not telling the white people – the white people are already practicing birth control, the pill, abortion, everything. He’s not talking to the white people.
Have you sent someone there to talk to the people?
No.
No?
Because I have tried for thirty years in India.
The poor people have many problems. One of the problems is that they are uneducated, illiterate. They cannot understand anything beyond their tradition, the tradition they have inherited. And their tradition is all superstition, stupid – for example the idea that God gives you children. Now, it is very difficult to convince those people. For thirty years I was trying hard to tell them that God cannot be so stupid as to give you so many children that you cannot even give them food. God cannot be so unkind.
If he is a compassionate God, as you call him, he should send each child with a piece of land, with some trees, some cows, something they can live on. He simply sends children naked, with not even any underwear! And he goes on seeing your children dying – in India, nine children out of ten used to die – and this is your God.
And there are people like the pope and Mahatma Gandhi – who was against birth control, against abortion, against inoculation, because it is against nature. Without inoculation many small children were suffering from smallpox and dying, but they would not accept inoculation. Birth control is just beyond their ideas: it means you are talking immorality, you are talking anti-religiousness.
In thirty years of talking to them, all the reward that I got were stones thrown at me, shoes thrown at me, knives thrown at me, poison given to me twice. That was the reward. And they will not go against their tradition.
Osho,
What happened to you when you physically died for seven hundred years, between your rebirths?
No. I never think of the future.
You never think of the future?
No, I think only of the present.
How's the present?
And I want to make the present as intelligent, as beautiful, as comfortable for my people as possible. I want my people to be as meditative as possible in the present. The future will take care itself; intelligent people will find a way. Who am I even to think about the future? That is a subtle strategy of dominating, even when you are dead.
Just the idea of creating a successor means I will continue to dominate you through my successor. That’s how the dead are dominating the living: Jesus, Moses, Buddha are still dominating people. This is ugly. The dead dominating the living is simply unacceptable to me.
Buddha lived twenty-five centuries ago. He knew nothing of electricity, he knew nothing of railway trains, he knew nothing of population growth. He did not know that there would be a time when people would die if they didn’t stop reproducing. In Buddha’s time the whole world’s population was only two hundred million. I think Oregon’s population must be almost two hundred million now – that was the whole population of the world.
Buddha had no idea that his country would be almost eight hundred million people, otherwise he would not have talked nonsense. But we cannot criticize him: whatever he did, whatever he said was relevant in his time. One thing that he did do wrong is that he made a tradition, created laws and regulations for the future. That to me is dictatorial, not democratic. Who am I for the future? Right now I am alive: you can argue against me, you can decide against me, you can doubt my ideas, but when I am dead…
The whole emphasis of all the religions is to believe, to have faith; so people go on believing and having faith in ideas which are simply out of date, which are dangerous to believe in. For example, Buddha preached celibacy. Now, celibacy is absolutely unnatural. Perhaps at the age of eighty-two he may have been celibate – in fact, what else are you going to do at the age of eighty-two?
Osho,
Do you have a girlfriend?
I have many. You are welcome, there is no trouble in it. I don’t think anybody has as many girlfriends as I have – thousands!
Thousands!
I am against celibacy. It may be good for an impotent person; it may do some good for him – at least a consolation that he is celibate. But impotence is rare, and impotence is a sickness. The impotent person has never done anything worthwhile. He has never created anything; he has not even been able to become a saint, which would have been the easiest thing for him to do.
Buddha and others talking about celibacy have created sexual perversion throughout the world. Now there are homosexuals and there are lesbians and there are people who are making love to animals and there are all kinds of perversions. And for all these perversions, who is responsible? – those people who talked about celibacy.
When I said to the Indian masses that celibacy should be condemned as a crime because it goes against nature… You can go to any medical college, you can go to any medical board and ask them, but such is the ignorance that even doctors try to be celibate – particularly in India, where celibacy seems to be a great spiritual thing.
Even doctors – even they cannot understand that it is something natural to your physiology, your chemistry, your biology. Your body does not understand that you have taken a vow of celibacy. There is no way to convey the message to the body, the body will go on in the same way.
You may be Hindu, you may be Christian, you may be Mohammedan; it doesn’t make any difference, you will all feel hunger. The body knows nothing about you being a Mohammedan and this is the month of Ramadan, the sacred month when one should not eat in the day. The body feels hungry. There is no way to communicate the idea that in the month of Ramadan, for the whole month a Mohammedan cannot eat in the day, he can eat only in the night.
At least Mohammedanism allows eating in the night. So people eat as much as they can in the night. And they eat again early in the morning before sunrise, so that they don’t feel hungry the whole day. This is just unnecessarily disturbing people. The whole night they could not sleep, they were just eating and eating and eating, preparing for the whole day, because in the day they will not be able to eat.
But there is a religion in India, Jainism. On its sacred days, ten days per year, you have to fast and you cannot eat in the night. According to Jainism you cannot eat in the night any day of the year: eating in the night is sin. When the sun sets, Jainas cannot eat. Not only that, but those who are very orthodox will not drink water.
It was such a trouble in my childhood, because I was born in a Jaina family. In India it is so hot, and summer nights are so hot, and you cannot even drink water. I simply refused. I said, “I am willing to go to hell – that will happen after death. There is time – I will do something. But right now I am going to drink. I don’t want to suffer this night in hell.”
In those ten days you cannot eat at all, for ten days continuously. And I know that in those ten days Jainas think only of food, nothing else. Day and night, their dreams are full of food.
You were asking about dreams. Jainas’ dreams in those ten days are full of food. Christian monks, Hindu monks, their dreams are full of sex. Whatever you repress in the day becomes your dream in the night. I don’t repress anything, that’s why there is no possibility of having a dream. My night is a dreamless silence.
You don't miss struggling or pain or anything?
There is none.
You don't miss it?
No problem. As far as I am concerned, there is nothing that I miss and I never repress anything. For example, I don’t think anybody would have said to you that you are welcome to be my girlfriend. I don’t think… But I don’t repress anything. The idea came to me, rather than seeing you in my dreams, I said it. I am finished with it. Now you cannot come in my dreams. My life is simple and open. Dreams are possible only if you repress. If you don’t repress, dreams disappear. And the disappearance of dreams is such a beautiful experience – the whole night is such a joy, such bliss.
In India, Mahatma Gandhi was doing exactly what the pope is doing now. He was telling people, “Go back.” In his ideology the spinning wheel is the ultimate invention of humanity, after that whatever has happened has to be dropped – in fact, everything has happened after it! The spinning wheel must have been invented two or three thousand years ago; everything of any value has happened afterwards. But in his ideology the spinning wheel is the full stop, and we have to go back to that stage.
These people don’t understand at all. How can you manage eight hundred million people just with a spinning wheel? I have calculated: if a person spins eight hours a day, then he can cover his whole body for the whole year. He can have his bed sheet, his blanket, his pillow covers – but eight hours every day will be needed. What about his wife, what about his children, what about his old parents, what about his sick mother? He can manage only for himself. And what about food? What about the other necessities of life? Just clothes are not enough, you cannot eat them. And if he is just spinning for eight hours, when is he going to earn his bread? When is he going to earn enough money for his mother dying of tuberculosis?
But Mahatma Gandhi has appeal because he is in tune with tradition. I am saying something which goes against their tradition. Gandhi says to people, “You need not worry; God takes care, he is compassionate,” and people are absolutely willing to accept the idea because that idea has been conditioned in their minds for thousands of years.
And when I say, “There is no God and nobody is taking care of you. You have to take care yourself,” it hurts them in two ways. First, they are not willing to drop their traditional idea of God. Fear arises. Secondly, to accept responsibility for everything needs guts. It is very easy to transfer to a father figure in heaven, “He will take care.” Even if there is nobody it does not matter, but you are consoled for the moment.
I am stirring your fear, your insecurity, your death. And there is nobody to take care. It is all empty, you have to find your own way. There are no super-highways made for you by others that you have simply to walk on.
Truth is something like a bird flying in the sky, which leaves no footprints behind. So if one person reaches truth you cannot follow him. He has not left any footprints in the sky. You can try to understand the man, you can try to imbibe his vibe. You can sit in silence with the man and let something transpire in silence. You can love the man, you can be open to the man so his love can flow toward you. Perhaps in these mysterious ways he may be able to take you by the hand into the unknown. Otherwise there is no road. He cannot say, “Just go five miles right, then turn to the left and you have arrived.” It is not that easy.
After trying with Indians for thirty years I decided that it was just futile. I dropped the whole idea. I started working only with those who are capable of understanding me. In 1970 I stopped traveling in India; for thirty years I had been traveling continuously. In 1970 I stopped traveling and began the movement of sannyas.
Osho,
And four years ago today you arrived on this ranch.
Four years ago I arrived here. In four years we have made this desert an oasis.
Yes.
Just go on coming, and every time you will find great changes happening continuously. When we had come there was only one house here, and that too dilapidated. Now we have houses for five thousand sannyasins, fully equipped with air-conditioning, everything. And this is against the government, against the people of Oregon, against all kinds of allegations, cases.
But we don’t bother: we go on fighting cases in the courts and we go on doing what we want to do. And we know that finally we are going to win and we are going to make these 126 square miles a lush, green place; a place that tourists from all over the world will be coming to see, because it will be so full of laughter and so full of love.
Well you have eighty-one thousand acres, here.
Yes.
That's a lot.
Eighty-four thousand acres – nobody else has that much land.
Yes, it's a lot. So you're rich and famous.
We are – and we are going to become richer and richer and more famous. Because of us, Oregon is now famous all over the world. This small commune, Rajneeshpuram, is the world capitol. We are going to make it a world capital. Every country is represented here, every race, every religion is represented here.
Lawyers, doctors…
Every profession, every kind of people – and all educated, all intelligent, so there is no need for me to think for their future. I just have to make their present as beautiful and as intense and total as possible, so that out of that totality and intensity their future will be born.
Osho,
Have you been to the university lately? – that place down the road?
No, I never go anywhere. People listen to me, and if they find something is valuable they take it to the university, they take it to the fields – to the commune, its work. But I never direct anybody in any way. I never give any instructions. I am available with all my vision, if you feel that it triggers something in you, do it. But you are doing your thing, not my thing. You are doing it because it has triggered your heart. You are following your heart, I am just accidental.
You are not to believe in me. You have to be just available to me, as I am available to you. And all these people here are not my followers. As far as I am concerned, they are all my friends, my lovers, my fellow travelers. So, whatsoever they can take and materialize, they go on doing. They are doing beautifully. I see the commune growing every day, becoming greener every day.
I will go on sharing my vision to my last breath. And now it is up to them. That’s why I said my sannyasins are my poems, my sannyasins are my music, my sannyasins are my paintings. My sannyasins are my future.
I need not bother about the future, it is already here. It is all around the world – one million sannyasins around the world, hundreds of communes around the world. And every commune trying to maintain exactly the same standards, the same comfort, the same food, the same luxury, the same medical facilities.
I want my communes to become a model to the whole world. I don’t want to argue with them – this is my argument. My commune is my argument: “Man can live so beautifully, so relaxedly, so creatively – why can’t you live like that?” Just because you have not tried, just because you are clinging to old ideas which are no longer workable.
You have to learn only one thing, and that is to be contemporary. Very few people are contemporary. Somebody is living two thousand years back, somebody three thousand years ago. A strange world, where you will not find contemporary people. And I can have appeal only to the contemporaries.
So I stopped going to the graveyards and talking to the graves and disturbing the dead. What is the need? Let them rest in peace. I have found my people, and they are coming in hundreds every day. And my appeal is only for the intelligent: the unintelligent simply cannot have any communication with me, my thing goes over his head. But he has his popes and bishops and churches – he can go there.
My whole effort is to make the intelligent people so tremendously significant that they cannot be ignored anymore; that the world has to take notice of them; that the world has to learn that there is something that they are missing and that these people have. So my argument is very existential – rather than talking philosophically to them, which I have done for thirty years. It does not make any sense.
Now I am trying to produce an existential proof that whatever I am saying is realizable. You can come and see that it is not just an ideology, not just a utopia, that it can be a factual reality.
Okay.