RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS
The Wild Geese & Water 12
Twelth Discourse from the series of 14 discourses - The Wild Geese & Water by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
The first question:
Osho,
Catholicism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, which are the most “religious” of religions, seem most concerned about purity, cleanliness and sexual abstinence. Yet, they preside over the most unhygienic, malnourished and miserable peoples of the earth. Is there a connection?
Devaraj, there is certainly and absolutely a tremendous connection.
Our life grows around the center of our vision, of our philosophy; we start looking at things according to a certain perspective. Once that perspective becomes a settled thing, our reality shrinks. Then the whole of reality is no longer available to us; only that part of reality remains available which fits with our prejudices, our ideologies, our philosophies, our religions.
Almost everybody on the earth is living a partial life, nobody is living a whole life; hence the earth is not holy. The so-called religions, all of them, in different ways, have caused a certain blindness. People see only that which is allowed by their minds to reach their consciousness. It is one of the established scientific facts now that only two percent of reality reaches through our senses to our consciousness. That two percent reality, against ninety-eight percent, is nothing. And we think of that two percent as if it is the whole of life. Things go upside down – life becomes a chaos.
Buddhism has chosen the color yellow for the bhikkus – for the Buddhist monks and nuns. And you will be surprised why they have chosen the color yellow. They have chosen the color yellow to represent death – yellow is the color of death. When a leaf dies, it becomes yellow; before falling to the ground, to its grave, it becomes yellow. When a person dies, he starts becoming yellow. As you become older you start losing your redness, your aliveness, you start becoming pale.
Yellow is the color of death. Buddhism’s whole conclusion is that life is not worth living. The only purpose that life can be put to is: how to renounce it? How to get out of it? All the three religions born in India – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism – talk about the wheel of life and death. Existence is looked at as a wheel of life and death, and unless you drop out of this wheel you will go on moving in circles. All these three religions have made the goal of their search only one single thing – how not to be born again.
Now, this life-negative approach is bound to affect you, it is bound to influence your very gestalt, your very style, your functioning. In the East, if you see poverty, malnourishment, starvation, sickness, the reason is clear: all the three religions which have dominated the East are against life. Why should one bother too much about the body? The body is the enemy – you don’t feed the enemy, you don’t nourish the enemy, you don’t take care of the enemy. It is better that the enemy dies. You would like to torture the enemy, not to make him healthy. And all these three religions of the East have been teaching methods, how to torture yourself. They call it tapascharya – austerity, but deep down it is nothing but slow suicide, it is a crime against life and existence.
Then a vicious circle is created. You don’t take care of the body, you don’t take care of the environment of the body, you don’t give it right nourishment. You suffer, and that suffering proves that your religions are right, that life is suffering. Then you become even more and more disinterested with all that the body contains, life contains, implies. Naturally that creates more suffering, and your mahatmas are proved even more correct. This is a vicious circle, but the basic point is that from the very beginning you have accepted a belief, a prejudice, without ever inquiring.
The religions all over the world prevent people from inquiry. Before a child can inquire we give him beliefs, we force beliefs on him. And once a person has beliefs, his inquiry can never be detached, his inquiry can never be pure. His inquiry is already contaminated – he has a priori conclusions.
A very famous Hindu psychologist, Dr. Bannerji, once came to see me. He is the head of the department for Psychical Research at Rajasthan University. He had come to see me because he was working on a project; the project was whether there is only one life, or many lives.
Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism – all the three religions born outside of India – believe in only one life. And the three religions born in India believe in thousands of lives, in fact, the actual number is eight hundred and forty million lives. The difference is immense – one life and eight hundred and forty million lives – is not a small difference!
So he was working on the project: Who is right? He told me, “I am a man of science” – and he has many degrees; he has been educated in the West.
I asked him a simple question, “This is beautiful work that you are doing, but before you ask me anything I would like to ask you one thing only. Then I am ready, you can ask anything you want. My question is: Do you believe that there are many lives or there is only one life?”
He said, “Of course, I believe that there are many lives, man is born again and again.”
I said to him, “Then the inquiry is pointless. If there is already a belief, if you are already prejudiced, then your inquiry is not scientific, you are not open. You will collect only that data which supports your prejudice. In the same way a Christian working on the same project, or a Mohammedan working on the same project, will find that there is only one life. And you will find that there are many, many millions of lives. It is not a question of inquiry at all. To inquire one needs an open mind.”
But each child is burdened with beliefs. Parents are in such a hurry that before the child starts thinking on his own he has to be poisoned because who knows, he may not agree with his parents, with his tradition, if he starts thinking on his own. And I can see that their concern is relevant: if a person starts thinking on his own, all traditions will disappear from the world. Once you start inquiring on your own you will accept only that which you have experienced. You will not accept anything which has simply been given to you by others, handed over to you by generations for thousands of years.
Everybody begins life on the wrong step; the very first step goes wrong. Once you accept something, then you have colored glasses on your eyes and everything looks the same color.
These religions have certainly something to do with the “…unhygienic, malnourished and miserable peoples of the earth.” Their basic approach is anti-life. But to teach anybody an anti-life philosophy will not be right because even a child will start asking embarrassing questions. Why should one be anti-life? Life is so beautiful! All that is beautiful is beautiful because it is alive. And life is created by God – why should he create something which has to be discarded and renounced?
Hence, these people don’t teach anti-life attitudes directly; they go indirectly, in roundabout ways: they teach you anti-sexual attitudes. That is an indirect way to put negativity in your mind and heart against all that exists. But it is a very cunning way because nobody can immediately see that life and sex are synonymous. Unless you are very intelligent, you will not see the point that all life exists through sex, comes through sex. You are born through sex, your parents were born through sex. The whole of life is sexual.
The flowers that you think beautiful – and your poets go on praising – are sexual expressions of the trees, that is their sexuality. Those beautiful roses are not meant for your garlands; those beautiful roses have something to do with the sexuality of the rosebush. When the cuckoo starts calling from a distant, faraway place, it sounds so beautiful, but it is not calling you – neither your poets, nor your musicians. The cuckoo is not interested in your poetry, in your music, etcetera. That call of the cuckoo is sexual. And remember, the call is coming from the male cuckoo, not from the female. Females don’t call. It is the male cuckoo who is trying to allure the female, attract the female.
Have you seen? A very rare phenomenon. Look around. You will always find the male more beautiful, more musical, more decorated than the female – except in man. The beautiful peacock with all its rainbow-colored feathers is the male; compared to it the female looks very ordinary. All the songs are sung by male birds, not by female birds. The reason is that the female is beautiful just by being female – that’s enough. The male has to show, to manifest, to decorate.
In the ancient days this was the case with men too. You must have seen the statues of Krishna and the pictures of Krishna. You can see it. Krishna must be very ancient. His long hair, and he is using all kinds of ornaments; his beautiful silk dress; his posture, that of a dancer. He looks very feminine.
Never think for a single moment that shaving your beard and your mustache is a new thing. Krishna must have been doing it five thousand years ago because he seems to have no mustache, no beard. He was decorated in every possible way, with the flute and the song.
It was only later on, when marriage became an established thing, that the woman started decorating herself because the woman is one thing, and the wife is totally different. The woman is beautiful just by being a woman. The same woman, once she becomes your wife, loses all attraction. To hide that, she starts decorating herself – to keep herself attractive to the husband. This is part of the marriage system that has put things upside-down. Now the male is not interested in decorating himself. In fact, he is miserable because he got caught with a woman! He is afraid.
That’s why all these religions have been created by men. The root cause of all these religions is basically the fear of the wife. How to renounce the wife? You have to create a great fog, a philosophical jargon around it; otherwise the wife is not going to leave you so easily. The people became very tortured by the wives – and the simple torture is that she loses attraction. Once she is your possession she loses attraction, and that is the greatest torture.
And the moment she starts losing attraction she starts becoming suspicious of you, jealous of you. She starts spying on you: “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” She starts nagging you, she goes on finding some fault with you to dominate you. First she used to dominate without domination, her beauty was enough, her being a woman was enough. Now it is no longer enough, something else has to be added.
How to escape from the woman? And you caught yourself in the mousetrap. It is always the mouse who goes into the trap; the trap never chases the mouse, remember. But once inside the trap the mouse becomes religious. He starts thinking, “Life is a bondage, a suffering, imprisonment. How to go beyond life?” Hence all religions are created by these suffering, henpecked husbands.
Just the other day an old man asked a question, “Two of my sons have become your sannyasins…” He said that he is seventy years old and has not the courage now, or the energy, or guts enough to fight society. He wants to become a sannyasin, but he cannot. But Hindu scriptures say that if even one person in the family becomes a sannyasin, then seven generations will be delivered, will attain moksha. “So is it true about your sannyasins, too, or not?” the old man has asked.
These religions have been teaching that if the husband leaves the wife, “Don’t be worried – you will attain to moksha, the wife will also attain moksha.” In fact, she should attain first because she is the basic cause of it. She started the whole thing in the first place, otherwise there would have been no God and no moksha. She should enter first, the husband should really follow.
But they have been saying, “The husband has left you – don’t be worried. This life is short; it will be difficult and painful without the husband, but you will have tremendous rewards afterward. Not only you – seven generations will all become enlightened, without any effort on their part.”
So the poor old fellow has asked, “Not only one, but two of my sons have become your disciples – so what about me, what about the seven generations?” As far as my sannyas is concerned, it is individual. It has nothing to do with your seven generations. Truth is always individual, but the people who were going against life had to create some consolations around themselves.
And when it became a deep-rooted idea in the minds of people that life is ugly, sex is ugly, existence itself is a bondage – as if life is a punishment, not a reward, not an act of grace; as if you have been thrown into life for some crime that you must have committed somewhere in the past – then naturally these things are bound to happen. People will become malnourished: why go on taking care of the body? The body is the cause of your bondage. Why be hygienic? For what?
In fact, the Indian ascetic is very unhygienic. The more unhygienic he is, the more he is respected. The highly respected ascetic is called paramahansa – the great swan. This is the highest category of saints in India. And the definition of a paramahansa is that he can eat from the same plate as a dog, or he can eat just sitting by somebody’s side who is defecating. He will remain unconcerned. He does not make any distinction between food and shit – it is all the same.
That’s why I say Morarjibhai Desai is fifty percent a paramahansa because he makes no distinction between water and urine. In fact, urine is far better – he calls it the “water of life.” Fifty percent paramahansa – just fifty percent more is needed and he and his seven generations will be delivered.
Why should one be hygienic? For what? And remember, when sex is repressed, many things are repressed automatically. Sex is such a significant phenomenon because it is the source of all life. It has to be so significant because if you repress it you will repress many other things. For example, the person who is sexually repressed will become uncreative because creativity itself is a kind of sexual activity.
In my observation, if a person is totally creative, he will transcend sex without repressing it because his whole energy will become creative. He will not need to go into sex; not that he will prevent himself – the very need will disappear. He now has a far higher bliss happening to him. The lower is bound to disappear when you have the higher in your hands.
Try to understand my arithmetic: never drop the lower, try to attain the higher. When the higher is there, the lower is bound to disappear on its own accord. And when the lower disappears into the higher, then life becomes more beautiful, more healthy, more whole.
A real poet while producing, creating, composing, forgets all about sex. A real sculptor absorbed in his work forgets all about sex. Even if a naked woman passes by he will not look at her, his concentration is so total in his own creativity. A real dancer disappears in his dance; his ego, his sex, are dissolved in his dance.
But if sex is repressed, then just the contrary will be the result: your creativity will be repressed, and creativity repressed means many things. Its implications are very great because it has multidimensionality to it. If your creativity is repressed, your science and the scientific endeavor will disappear.
What happened to India? This is the most religious country in the world. The absolute proof of its being the most religious country is that this is the most unscientific country too. What happened to India’s intelligence? It is very strange to know that arithmetic was discovered in India. But Einstein was not born in India. Arithmetic reached its crescendo somewhere else, not in India. The first great astronomers were Indian, but Eddington, Einstein – the peaks – didn’t happen here. Something went wrong.
India is the most ancient country in the world; all other countries are just small children compared to India’s life history. It has been there for at least ten thousand years; certainly it may have been longer. In ten thousand years, India has produced great talented people, great geniuses, but the idea of life-negation caught hold of all those geniuses. They all became uncreative, they all escaped from life; they moved to the mountains, to the caves. They did not become great scientists, poets, painters, dancers; all these things were left to the mediocre. Otherwise there was no reason why India should not have become the most affluent society in the world. It should have become the richest country, but for the simple reason that creativity disappears when you repress sex.
If your sex life is flowing joyously, you have tremendous interest in everything you are doing; otherwise you become disinterested, everything seems to be meaningless. You go on doing things because they have to be done – just a drag, just a burden you go on carrying. It is a duty, it has to be fulfilled, but it is not joy.
So nobody in India will seem joyous, will seem utterly interested in creativity. And creativity contains everything: science, art, music, poetry, literature – everything becomes repressed. And even if some rebels start doing something creative, then their creativity will show some obsession with sex because they are part of this society. Even if they are rebels rebelling against this society, their rebellion is also not pure; their rebellion is basically a reaction. So they created the statues and beautiful temples of Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri. But if you see those temples you can see immediately they have been made by very sexually perverted people.
If you go to Khajuraho and see all kinds of sexual sculptures, you will be surprised – who were these people? What kind of mind did they have? Whatsoever they were fantasizing, they have put with great effort into stone; it must have been centuries of work. You will see all kinds of obsessive statues, almost having the quality of insanity in them. For example, one woman is doing shirshasan – headstand – and two people are making love to her. One woman is being made love to by many people; you will be surprised how many people can make love to one woman. All kinds of things are being done – all the openings of her body are being used.
Now what kind of people made these statues? And it must have taken years of work. They must have been fantasizing these things. They were rebels, certainly, going against the puritan society. But their rebellion is not meditative. Their rebellion is just a reaction, and the reactionary always moves to the opposite extreme.
Homosexuality is depicted, lesbianism is depicted. You cannot say anything which is not available in Khajuraho. All else that has been done by people like de Sade or Masoch, all are there, and much more – and in the name of religion because it is a temple. Even the rebellious people had to pretend that this is religion. In the name of Tantra, ninety-nine percent is nothing but sexual indulgence. But it has to be put behind a garb of religiousness, spirituality, great words: Shiva and Shakti, yin and yang.
If you reduce it to its reality, it is nothing but man and woman. But when you call it yin and yang, it sounds great; Shiva and Shakti, and it sounds like something sacred. Of course, they were going through rituals which made it look sacred, but the ultimate result was nothing but just ordinary sexuality. But the introduction was long and religious; the preface was to function as a facade. Ninety-nine percent of Tantra is nothing but pure sexual indulgence behind beautiful names.
On the one hand creativity was repressed, science disappeared, art disappeared. And even the art that remained is predominantly sexual.
Kalidas, one of the greatest artists of India, who can only be compared with Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and people like these – if you look into his words you will be surprised. If he goes into the garden and sees apples, those apples are not apples but breasts. Now, this man must be perverted. What will you call a man who sees a woman with beautiful breasts and sees apples? – you will call him starved, hungry. The same is true of Kalidas, there is no difference in it. So many breasts are hanging in the tree… Stupid, ugly, perverted, insane, but this was thought to be literature. All religious scriptures are full of all the kinds of perversion that you can imagine, that you can fantasize.
So, on the one hand everything great is repressed because people lose interest. If life is meaningless, then the only thing worth doing is how to get rid of it. Why waste your time in composing music? Why waste your time in writing poetry? Why waste your time in sculpture? Get rid of life, renounce life. The only thing worth doing is to torture yourself as much as you can because that is the only way to attain moksha.
So the whole energy became self-torture – and when people start torturing themselves, they are nothing but masochists. They cannot be hygienic, they cannot be scientific, and they are bound to be miserable.
Remember that sex is the lowest pleasure. According to me, sex – the pleasure – is the seed. If sex is allowed natural growth, respected, valued, then transformation happens, metamorphosis happens. Sex starts growing into a foliage of art, music, poetry, dance, and a thousand other creative dimensions. Sex is only a seed, or the roots, but if supported, nourished, watered, taken care of, then many branches grow, much foliage comes; many green leaves moving in all directions, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun. This is what the world of art is, the world of aesthetics. If you allow the world of aesthetics to reach its highest peak, then flowers come.
Sex is pleasure, the lowest; art is happiness. Sex is animal; art is human. Sex is biological. The second step, higher than sex, is love. The man who has accepted sex respectfully, lovingly, will be able to transform it into love. And on the foliage, on the branches of love, the flowers of bliss happen. That is the highest stage; that is spirituality, true religion.
But these so-called religions crippled humanity from the very base. They destroyed the very root.
In Japan they have a certain art form. I will not call it an art form because it is murderous; it is called bonsai. In Japan, there are trees four hundred years old and six inches tall: trees which would have been one hundred, two hundred feet high in the sky, reaching toward the stars. Aspirations of the earth – which would have bloomed, which would have grown so vast that thousands of people could have taken shelter under their shade, hundreds of bullock carts would have rested underneath them, they are only six inches tall. And it is called an art form. It is not art, it is not form; it is deformation. It is ugly, it is murderous.
It is like keeping a child just one foot tall, or six inches, just keeping him undernourished so he cannot grow. That has been done to humanity too. The whole trick is they plant the tree in a pot without any bottom, and they go on cutting the roots. When you go on cutting the roots the tree cannot grow. There is a certain proportion between the roots and the tree: the tree can only go so high if the roots go very deep. In fact, Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “If you want to reach heaven, you will have to reach hell as far as your roots are concerned.”
I perfectly agree with the man. He is a little mad, but once in a while he has great insights. If you want to reach the stars, your roots will have to go to hell itself; only then will there be proportion. A big tree cannot remain standing with small roots – roots like seasonal flowers have. They go on cutting the roots; the tree cannot grow. It goes on becoming old, but it grows not. It grows old, but it does not grow up. And that’s what has happened to humanity in a subtle way. We have been cutting the root.
Sex is the root. You cut the root, then man grows old – grows in age, but does not grow up. Psychologists in the First World War became aware of the fact that the average psychological age of human beings is not more than twelve years – a very sad fact. A person may be ninety years old or even more, but his psychological age is only twelve years. What has happened to his psychology? If his physiology is growing, why is his psychology not growing with it? Something must have been done to his psychological roots.
Sex has been cut – that is the root. He has lost joy in life. He has become guilty; he has become burdened with the idea of sin. And the more a person becomes burdened with the idea of sin – and sex is the most sinful act – then his psychology starts shrinking.
And why twelve years? There must be some reason. It is somewhere between about twelve and fourteen that your sex starts growing, you become sexually mature. So before that age of sexual maturity, fourteen, something must have been done to you so you never even reach sexual maturity, you remain immature. You can see this immaturity all over the world. You can see it in your films, what people are going to see there. If there is no murder, no rape, no sexuality, no obscene scenes, the picture flops – otherwise the house is full.
Who are these people? What have they gone to see there? Something is missing in their life, and they want at least to see it projected onto the screen – some vicarious satisfaction. Who are the people who are reading Playboy and such magazines, which are sold by the millions? – religious people.
Everybody is religious in the world. Somebody is Hindu, somebody is Mohammedan, somebody is Christian – whosoever is purchasing these Playboys belongs to some religion. Of course, he cannot read Playboy, cannot see the nude women, in front of others, so he hides it. That shows his religion: if he hides it in the Bible he is Christian; if he hides it in the Gita he is Hindu; if he hides it in the Old Testament he is a Jew. Just look where he is hiding it – that will show his religion.
Why so many obscene magazines, obscene movies, blue movies? Why so much interest in murder, rape? You can read Indian newspapers every day and you can see; so many rapes are committed every day, and the country is so religious. It must be religious – those rapes prove it! It is a religious country. It is not a contradiction, mind you. Those rapes prove that it is a religious country, perhaps the most religious in the world. So many murders. Every kind of ugliness happens every day, and religious people are doing it.
These are the same people who go to the temples, to the mosques, to the churches – the same people who are ordinarily very religious. In fact, to compensate for what they are doing, they become even more religious. They go on pilgrimage because the priests have created such cunning devices: they say to the Hindus, “If you go to the Ganges and take a dip in the Ganges, all your sins are washed away.”
Now the Ganges is the dirtiest river in India, maybe the dirtiest in the whole world because it is the only river where dead bodies are thrown in. It is thought to be a great privilege if somebody’s body is thrown into the Ganges, if somebody dies in the Ganges. If he cannot die in the Ganges, then at least throw the body in – his benefit will be great. A dip in the Ganges and all the sins of your past are washed away. Just think how many people in millions of years must have taken a bath in the Ganges – it must be full of sins, over-full. Avoid it!
I have never taken a dip in the Ganges. I have stayed on the bank of the Ganges many times. And when I was staying near the Ganges, in Prayag or in Varanasi or in Patna, the people I was staying with would say to me, “It would be good. Why don’t you come to take a dip in the Ganges?”
I said, “No, that I cannot do. It is so full of so many people’s sins that I don’t think it will wash mine away. More is the possibility that I will gather others’ and come back. And, in fact, I don’t have any sins to wash away, so why should I bother? It is risky! It is better to have your own sins, why borrow them? Even if you have, it is perfectly good; they should at least be yours. I’m not interested in other people’s sins.”
But the priests have always been very crafty and cunning. This is a simple device: you go to the Ganges, take a dip, and you are finished with all your sins. So you are again ready to commit all those sins with fervor, with gusto, and you know there is no problem – you can go any time again and take a dip in the Ganges. There is no problem in it.
People go… The Mohammedans to Kaaba; they become hajji. Hajj means pilgrimage to Kaaba. Now even smugglers go to Kaaba and they become hajji. The greatest smuggler in India is Haji Mastan – you see how religious this country is? – even smugglers are religious. His name is Haji Mastan, one who has done the pilgrimage to Kaaba. Every Mohammedan should do at least one pilgrimage to Kaaba, and that finishes all his sins; then he becomes pure.
And of course, when you are pure, what are you going to do? You will again start writing the same things that you were writing before. Now, again finding the slate clean, you can write in a better way because now you are more experienced.
These so-called religions have something basically wrong with them. They have been a calamity to humanity. Certainly, they are the cause of people’s misery. First, they console people: “Your misery is determined by your past lives’ bad karmas, so don’t commit bad karmas any more, otherwise you will be punished again in your future life.”
Now you cannot do anything about the past life, except suffer. At the most you can suffer as patiently as possible, and that patience is very much praised. Suffer patiently – it has to be suffered, so why make an unnecessary fuss about it? It is inevitable. You committed the crime in the past, now it is a by-product. Just as a shadow follows you, your karmas follow you. This is the approach of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism; these three religions have this explanation.
And the other three religions – Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism – say it is because Adam and Eve committed a sin and you are suffering because of their sin. So unless you do something to undo that sin that your forefathers committed… What was their sin? – disobedience. So be obedient. Obedient to whom? They were disobedient to God. Now you are no longer in the Garden of Eden so you cannot meet God directly; you have to depend on the Polack pope – he is the mediator. You obey the Polack pope. If you obey him totally, then there is a possibility God may forgive you and you may be allowed back into the Garden of Eden.
So the only thing left for you is to obey the church, the dogma, the religion into which you are born. Howsoever nonsensical it is, howsoever stupid, superstitious it is, you are not to ask any questions. You have simply to obey. And if your obedience is total you will be rewarded. Not now – after death.
All these religions are clever in that way. Their rewards will always be after death. That’s a very simple device. Nobody comes back to say whether he has been rewarded or not. At least people like Jesus should come back and tell the truth – whether they have been allowed back into the Garden of Eden or not. But nobody comes; nobody can come, so it remains shrouded in mystery. And only the pope, the shankaracharya, the imam, the ayatollah, these people know the secret, nobody else. So you follow obediently whatsoever they say – then you will be allowed.
The devices are different but the goal is the same. Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas, Buddhists, Jews – their devices are different, but if you look at the goal, the goal is the same. Follow the priest – and the priest is following the tradition. It means basically: follow the past, follow the dead past. And when you follow the dead past, how can you be happy? Life is now, and your mind is always hanging somewhere in the past. There cannot be any attunement between you and existence; there is always going to be a discord.
Life creates new situations for you to respond to, and you go on repeating parrotlike answers that others have imposed upon you. They never fit, they cannot fit. Life is never repetitive, and your answers are always given by somebody in the past. Moses gave the answers for the Jews. Now what does Moses know about this moment? Three thousand years have passed. In fact, for forty years people had followed when he was alive, and he simply went on roaming in the desert, groping in the dark.
And then too, he took a wrong turn – unforgivable! If he had taken a right turn, now the Jews would have owned all the oil of the world. Just a little angle. Forty years of wandering in the desert, and all the torture, and where did they reach? – Jerusalem! Teheran would have been far better; Baghdad would have been far better.
The Jews cannot really forgive Moses. They should not – he is the cause of their whole misery. And he gave them the idea: “You are the chosen people of God.” For this idea they have suffered for three thousand years – for nothing else. It is not anything else that is wrong with them but this idea, this ego that Moses gave them, that they are the chosen people of God.
Once you have such egoistic attitudes you are bound to be in trouble. Nobody wants you to be the chosen people of God because others are themselves the chosen people of God. Then there is going to be a clash.
Adolf Hitler was the chosen person of God, Nordic Germans were the chosen people of God. Now, the clash. There can only be one people, the chosen people; God cannot make this mistake: he cannot choose two people. So the Jews have to be destroyed, annihilated from the earth. The Jews have suffered for this simple reason: this ego that Moses gave them.
And what is his gift? – those Ten Commandments. Nobody follows them, but those Ten Commandments are still torturing people. In fact, he was not the chosen person of God.
The story is…
God was trying to find a customer. He asked the French, “Would you like to have a few commandments?”
And the French said, “No. First show us a sample.”
And he said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
They said, “Stop! If we don’t commit adultery, then what are we going to do? We don’t want such commandments.”
He asked the Hindus and he asked others, but nobody was willing. And then he asked Moses, “Would you like to have a few commandments?”
And Moses, being a perfect Jew, said, “How much does it cost?”
And he said, “Free! It costs nothing.”
Moses said, “Then I will have ten!”
That’s how he got those Ten Commandments. And they are torturing the Jews for three thousand years.
It is time to get rid of all that. It was his trip, why should you be on his trip? Do your thing! Why go on doing Moses’ thing, or Abraham’s thing, or Manu’s thing, or Mahavira’s thing? Can’t you be a little bit more intelligent to manage your own life? The very idea that your life has to be managed by somebody else creates stupidity. You are bound to become stupid; you have given the power to somebody else to dominate you.
Now Hindus are still being dominated by Manu. Thousands of years have passed, and all that Manu has given is sheer ugliness. He has given the idea of the sudras, the untouchables – he is the cause of millions of people’s misery. He has given the idea that the woman is lower than the man. He has given the idea that the brahmins are the highest caste, and everybody has to listen to and obey the brahmins.
Hindus have lived in slavery because of Manu; they have lived a very subhuman kind of life because of Manu. Who is this Manu? Why should one bother about him? It was his joy to write a certain scripture, but there is no binding on you to follow him. Why can’t you write your own scripture?
That’s my message to each of my sannyasins. You are not to follow me. I am doing my thing, you have to do your thing. It is just a coincidence that by chance we have met. If we can enjoy each other, good; if we don’t enjoy each other, good-bye. More than that is dangerous!
It is just a meeting of travelers on the same path. For a few miles we can be together as long as you enjoy me, I enjoy you. Otherwise a crossroad comes and we say good-bye, and we say to each other, “See you soon. If existence permits, if existence is willing, it may happen again – some other road in some other life, on some other planet we may meet. But this time it has been joyous to be together for so long.” And we are grateful. But there is no binding.
My basic message is for the individual, and the freedom of the individual. These religions have created misery for the simple reason that they have taken away your intelligence. When you obey, your intelligence is destroyed. When you cannot say no, your yes is impotent; it means nothing, it is bogus. And all these religious people are living bogus, borrowed lives. People are malnourished, people are poor, living in unhygienic conditions, people are living in psychological slavery. Unless we destroy all these religions, there is no hope. Certainly we need a certain kind of religiousness in the world, but religions are not needed.
Religiousness is a totally different phenomenon. Religiousness is like love. Love is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Mohammedan. Religiousness is also neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian. The moment love becomes Christian, beware, it is not love. The moment somebody says, “My friendship is Hindu,” beware. It is not friendship, it is just Hindu chauvinism trying to catch hold of your neck in the name of friendship. Beware of Christian love because this Christian love has killed thousands of people, burned people alive – it is Christian love. And they are burning for your own sake.
Devaraj, you ask me, “Catholicism, Mohammedanism and Hinduism, which are the most ‘religious’ of religions, seem most concerned about purity, cleanliness and sexual abstinence.” They are really concerned about sexual abstinence. The concern for purity and cleanliness is secondary. In fact, it is part of their sexual abstinence.
They call sex dirty. Because sex is dirty, then sexual abstinence is pure. They have nothing to do with purity, and there is nothing dirty in sex. What can be dirty in sex? But these people have created the idea that the sex center is exactly between the two dirty centers, so it must be dirty, doubly dirty.
But it has nothing in it – no dirt. There is no question of the sex center being dirty at all. But these people have been calling the whole body dirty. And when they call the body dirty, they create a certain logic to show that they are true. The body consists of bones, of blood, of pus; the body is dirty. But one strange thing: all the scriptures of the world say that the woman’s body is dirty, as if man’s body is made of gold – instead of bones, diamonds and emeralds; instead of blood, perhaps nectar. Nobody condemns man’s body because the scriptures were written by men. And the man’s body is also part of the woman’s body because it has come from the woman’s womb. It is the same body. But the woman’s body is dirty.
These male chauvinist pigs have been riding on humanity’s chest for so long, you have completely forgotten that you are being used as a donkey. And they have been there so long that you think they are part of you. They have to be thrown, completely thrown away.
There is nothing dirty in blood, there is nothing dirty in bones, there is nothing dirty in the body. The body is one of the most beautiful phenomena of nature; one should be grateful to existence rather than calling it dirty. It is one of the most amazing miracles. For seventy to a hundred years it keeps alive, it keeps rejuvenating itself, it perpetuates itself. Its every mechanism is a miracle. People go to see the pyramids in Egypt, then the Taj Mahal in India. In fact, their body contains far greater miracles than those ugly pyramids.
You cannot even conceive how your body is working. You are not aware of it – how it transforms your bread into blood. You have heard about alchemists, that they were trying to transform baser metals into gold; your body is doing far better. It is transforming all kinds of crap that you go on throwing inside you, into blood, into bone. Not only into blood and bone, it makes your brain out of that crap! Out of your ice cream, Coca-Cola, it goes on making your brain; a brain which can create a Rutherford, an Albert Einstein, a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. Just see the miracle.
A brain, such a small thing, enclosed in a small skull – a single brain can contain all the libraries of the world. Its capacity is almost infinite. It is the greatest memory system. If you want to make a computer of the same capacity you will need miles of space to make that computer function. It is encaged in your small skull. And yet, although science has developed so far, they have not been able to transform ice cream into blood. They have been trying, but they cannot find the clue – what to do? How to transform ice cream into blood? It is a faraway thing to make anything like brain out of ice cream! Perhaps it may never happen. Or even if it happens, it will happen through the brain, it will again be a miracle of the brain.
These people go on calling the body ugly, dirty. Their idea of purity has nothing to do with purity. You can look around the world. They have different ideas of purity. It depends on their religion, on their climate, and other things.
The Indian cannot conceive of any Westerner as clean because he is always thinking of toilet paper. The moment he sees a Western person he becomes concerned; his dirtiness is so clear to him. And the Westerner cannot conceive the Indian as pure because he is always looking at his nails. And particularly Devaraj! He is always looking at nails. He is a doctor, and he is very concerned because just a little bit of shit in the nails and you are dirty. And you are eating from the same hands, and you are preparing food from the same hands.
If you ask Devaraj he will say, “It is better to keep your dirt to yourself rather than to go on distributing it so generously. When you prepare food you are distributing it to the whole family; and if you are preparing food in a hotel, then you are distributing to thousands of people. That dirt in your nails carries amoebas, the greatest enemy of man – the amoeba.” Devaraj is an amoeba expert; he is known as the amoeba king. He is continuously researching, working; he is a great researcher. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Medicine in England. His whole concern is how to keep people clean.
But cleanliness is a totally different idea to different people. To the Hindus it is one idea; to the Jainas it is a different idea. For example, the Jaina muni will eat refined butter only for some time – four hours, six hours – after that it is unclean. The Jainas will not drink in the night, will not eat in the night – it is unclean because a mosquito may fall in. Some insect may creep into the food and there will be violence, bloodshed. So they will eat only in the day. The people who eat in the night are all unclean, dirty people.
And the same Jainas will defecate anywhere. The whole of India is being used as a toilet. That’s perfectly okay; there is no problem in it. They are simply making the soil richer, they are giving it manure.
And about manure also, there are different ideas. One of my friends in a Zen monastery in Japan was very puzzled because he was staying with a professor there, and when he saw his garden he could not believe it. Fresh shit was being spread on the vegetables! Fresh! That was their idea of cleanliness – it had to be fresh! He could not believe what was happening. Then he escaped because he was eating those vegetables.
Now Devaraj goes on looking into vegetables. All the Indian vegetables that you purchase from the market are bound to be unclean. Not fresh shit, but stale shit! He does not allow me – because he is my physician – he does not allow me to eat any vegetable from the market. My own sannyasins grow vegetables, and they have to pass the tests of Devaraj, only then…
One day, a sannyasin made cheese for me. First it went to Devaraj and he said, “It is contaminated!” – exactly the word, contaminated. When I heard contaminated, I thought, is it poisoned? Or what is the matter? It was contaminated because her nails were a little long and there was a slight possibility of amoebas. And he worked hard and he found that the cheese was not right, it was impure – it was “contaminated.”
Jaina munis – a few Jaina munis, a sect – use a small strip or piece of cloth on their noses. That is their idea of remaining pure, to have filtered air. Otherwise, who knows? In the air, every kind of thing goes on floating. So their noses are covered, their mouths are covered, so nothing unfiltered reaches. Moreover, there is one more idea in it: when you breathe out your breath is warm, and that warm breath can kill a few small, live cells floating in the air. Again bloodshed, violence – and you will suffer in hell.
Now, if you watch people’s ideas about purity, cleanliness, you will go crazy. If you follow all their ideas, life will become impossible. Then the only clean thing will be suicide.
But these ideas have been developed only as part of a program. The program is to make you sexually afraid. In Jaina scriptures, making love to a woman is violence. Why is it violence? – because when the genitals meet, there are many small, alive people inside the woman’s genitals, small cells of life. They will be killed. It is a massacre! And when the man, making love, comes to an orgasm; millions of live cells will be released. They will live only two hours; now, he is the cause of their death. Millions of live cells – each live cell would have become a man or a woman, given the right opportunity. Now it has been calculated that a man will make love to a woman in his forty years of love-making, at least four thousand times. Now, each time millions of cells will die – just calculate how many people you have killed! Is there any hope for you?
This sexual abstinence creates all kinds of side effects. It is basically repressive: repressive of joy, repressive of intelligence, repressive of life and all that helps life to become a dance, a celebration.
This earth will remain miserable unless we get rid of all life-negative attitudes, whosoever may be the cause of it. This very earth can become paradise, but people have to be taught life-affirmation. And that’s my whole work. I am teaching you a life-affirmative religiousness, a life of dance, joy, beauty, creativity, sensitivity, celebration.
Unless this new religiousness takes possession of the whole intelligence of humanity, then we are coming very close to the boundary where we will have to commit a global suicide. If life is such a misery, then why go on living? What is the point of it all?
The last question:
Osho,
Can you tell me a few Polack jokes?
I am a Polack and leaving for the West tomorrow.
The pope tried to cross the railway track
before a rushing train.
They put the pieces in a sack
but couldn’t find the Polack’s brain.
Why does it take seven Polacks to carry a coffin at a funeral?
Six carry the coffin and one carries the radio.
Poland has just bought five hundred million tons of sand from Saudi Arabia. The Polish government has decided to drill for its own oil.
The tall Polack policeman took pity on the dwarf Polack standing next to him at the urinal of a public toilet. “Why do you keep twitching your eyes?” he asked. “Trouble with your nerves?”
“No, you are splashing me!” said the dwarf.
A Polack drunk staggers out of a bar. He sees a taxi parked just outside. Opening its door, he lurches in, loses his balance and hits his head against the door at the other side. The door flies open, and the Polack rolls out of the other side of the taxi.
Getting to his feet he peers at the taxi driver and says, “Shay, man, you shure are fasht! How much do I owe you?”
Enough for today.
Osho,
Catholicism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, which are the most “religious” of religions, seem most concerned about purity, cleanliness and sexual abstinence. Yet, they preside over the most unhygienic, malnourished and miserable peoples of the earth. Is there a connection?
Devaraj, there is certainly and absolutely a tremendous connection.
Our life grows around the center of our vision, of our philosophy; we start looking at things according to a certain perspective. Once that perspective becomes a settled thing, our reality shrinks. Then the whole of reality is no longer available to us; only that part of reality remains available which fits with our prejudices, our ideologies, our philosophies, our religions.
Almost everybody on the earth is living a partial life, nobody is living a whole life; hence the earth is not holy. The so-called religions, all of them, in different ways, have caused a certain blindness. People see only that which is allowed by their minds to reach their consciousness. It is one of the established scientific facts now that only two percent of reality reaches through our senses to our consciousness. That two percent reality, against ninety-eight percent, is nothing. And we think of that two percent as if it is the whole of life. Things go upside down – life becomes a chaos.
Buddhism has chosen the color yellow for the bhikkus – for the Buddhist monks and nuns. And you will be surprised why they have chosen the color yellow. They have chosen the color yellow to represent death – yellow is the color of death. When a leaf dies, it becomes yellow; before falling to the ground, to its grave, it becomes yellow. When a person dies, he starts becoming yellow. As you become older you start losing your redness, your aliveness, you start becoming pale.
Yellow is the color of death. Buddhism’s whole conclusion is that life is not worth living. The only purpose that life can be put to is: how to renounce it? How to get out of it? All the three religions born in India – Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism – talk about the wheel of life and death. Existence is looked at as a wheel of life and death, and unless you drop out of this wheel you will go on moving in circles. All these three religions have made the goal of their search only one single thing – how not to be born again.
Now, this life-negative approach is bound to affect you, it is bound to influence your very gestalt, your very style, your functioning. In the East, if you see poverty, malnourishment, starvation, sickness, the reason is clear: all the three religions which have dominated the East are against life. Why should one bother too much about the body? The body is the enemy – you don’t feed the enemy, you don’t nourish the enemy, you don’t take care of the enemy. It is better that the enemy dies. You would like to torture the enemy, not to make him healthy. And all these three religions of the East have been teaching methods, how to torture yourself. They call it tapascharya – austerity, but deep down it is nothing but slow suicide, it is a crime against life and existence.
Then a vicious circle is created. You don’t take care of the body, you don’t take care of the environment of the body, you don’t give it right nourishment. You suffer, and that suffering proves that your religions are right, that life is suffering. Then you become even more and more disinterested with all that the body contains, life contains, implies. Naturally that creates more suffering, and your mahatmas are proved even more correct. This is a vicious circle, but the basic point is that from the very beginning you have accepted a belief, a prejudice, without ever inquiring.
The religions all over the world prevent people from inquiry. Before a child can inquire we give him beliefs, we force beliefs on him. And once a person has beliefs, his inquiry can never be detached, his inquiry can never be pure. His inquiry is already contaminated – he has a priori conclusions.
A very famous Hindu psychologist, Dr. Bannerji, once came to see me. He is the head of the department for Psychical Research at Rajasthan University. He had come to see me because he was working on a project; the project was whether there is only one life, or many lives.
Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism – all the three religions born outside of India – believe in only one life. And the three religions born in India believe in thousands of lives, in fact, the actual number is eight hundred and forty million lives. The difference is immense – one life and eight hundred and forty million lives – is not a small difference!
So he was working on the project: Who is right? He told me, “I am a man of science” – and he has many degrees; he has been educated in the West.
I asked him a simple question, “This is beautiful work that you are doing, but before you ask me anything I would like to ask you one thing only. Then I am ready, you can ask anything you want. My question is: Do you believe that there are many lives or there is only one life?”
He said, “Of course, I believe that there are many lives, man is born again and again.”
I said to him, “Then the inquiry is pointless. If there is already a belief, if you are already prejudiced, then your inquiry is not scientific, you are not open. You will collect only that data which supports your prejudice. In the same way a Christian working on the same project, or a Mohammedan working on the same project, will find that there is only one life. And you will find that there are many, many millions of lives. It is not a question of inquiry at all. To inquire one needs an open mind.”
But each child is burdened with beliefs. Parents are in such a hurry that before the child starts thinking on his own he has to be poisoned because who knows, he may not agree with his parents, with his tradition, if he starts thinking on his own. And I can see that their concern is relevant: if a person starts thinking on his own, all traditions will disappear from the world. Once you start inquiring on your own you will accept only that which you have experienced. You will not accept anything which has simply been given to you by others, handed over to you by generations for thousands of years.
Everybody begins life on the wrong step; the very first step goes wrong. Once you accept something, then you have colored glasses on your eyes and everything looks the same color.
These religions have certainly something to do with the “…unhygienic, malnourished and miserable peoples of the earth.” Their basic approach is anti-life. But to teach anybody an anti-life philosophy will not be right because even a child will start asking embarrassing questions. Why should one be anti-life? Life is so beautiful! All that is beautiful is beautiful because it is alive. And life is created by God – why should he create something which has to be discarded and renounced?
Hence, these people don’t teach anti-life attitudes directly; they go indirectly, in roundabout ways: they teach you anti-sexual attitudes. That is an indirect way to put negativity in your mind and heart against all that exists. But it is a very cunning way because nobody can immediately see that life and sex are synonymous. Unless you are very intelligent, you will not see the point that all life exists through sex, comes through sex. You are born through sex, your parents were born through sex. The whole of life is sexual.
The flowers that you think beautiful – and your poets go on praising – are sexual expressions of the trees, that is their sexuality. Those beautiful roses are not meant for your garlands; those beautiful roses have something to do with the sexuality of the rosebush. When the cuckoo starts calling from a distant, faraway place, it sounds so beautiful, but it is not calling you – neither your poets, nor your musicians. The cuckoo is not interested in your poetry, in your music, etcetera. That call of the cuckoo is sexual. And remember, the call is coming from the male cuckoo, not from the female. Females don’t call. It is the male cuckoo who is trying to allure the female, attract the female.
Have you seen? A very rare phenomenon. Look around. You will always find the male more beautiful, more musical, more decorated than the female – except in man. The beautiful peacock with all its rainbow-colored feathers is the male; compared to it the female looks very ordinary. All the songs are sung by male birds, not by female birds. The reason is that the female is beautiful just by being female – that’s enough. The male has to show, to manifest, to decorate.
In the ancient days this was the case with men too. You must have seen the statues of Krishna and the pictures of Krishna. You can see it. Krishna must be very ancient. His long hair, and he is using all kinds of ornaments; his beautiful silk dress; his posture, that of a dancer. He looks very feminine.
Never think for a single moment that shaving your beard and your mustache is a new thing. Krishna must have been doing it five thousand years ago because he seems to have no mustache, no beard. He was decorated in every possible way, with the flute and the song.
It was only later on, when marriage became an established thing, that the woman started decorating herself because the woman is one thing, and the wife is totally different. The woman is beautiful just by being a woman. The same woman, once she becomes your wife, loses all attraction. To hide that, she starts decorating herself – to keep herself attractive to the husband. This is part of the marriage system that has put things upside-down. Now the male is not interested in decorating himself. In fact, he is miserable because he got caught with a woman! He is afraid.
That’s why all these religions have been created by men. The root cause of all these religions is basically the fear of the wife. How to renounce the wife? You have to create a great fog, a philosophical jargon around it; otherwise the wife is not going to leave you so easily. The people became very tortured by the wives – and the simple torture is that she loses attraction. Once she is your possession she loses attraction, and that is the greatest torture.
And the moment she starts losing attraction she starts becoming suspicious of you, jealous of you. She starts spying on you: “Where have you been? What have you been doing?” She starts nagging you, she goes on finding some fault with you to dominate you. First she used to dominate without domination, her beauty was enough, her being a woman was enough. Now it is no longer enough, something else has to be added.
How to escape from the woman? And you caught yourself in the mousetrap. It is always the mouse who goes into the trap; the trap never chases the mouse, remember. But once inside the trap the mouse becomes religious. He starts thinking, “Life is a bondage, a suffering, imprisonment. How to go beyond life?” Hence all religions are created by these suffering, henpecked husbands.
Just the other day an old man asked a question, “Two of my sons have become your sannyasins…” He said that he is seventy years old and has not the courage now, or the energy, or guts enough to fight society. He wants to become a sannyasin, but he cannot. But Hindu scriptures say that if even one person in the family becomes a sannyasin, then seven generations will be delivered, will attain moksha. “So is it true about your sannyasins, too, or not?” the old man has asked.
These religions have been teaching that if the husband leaves the wife, “Don’t be worried – you will attain to moksha, the wife will also attain moksha.” In fact, she should attain first because she is the basic cause of it. She started the whole thing in the first place, otherwise there would have been no God and no moksha. She should enter first, the husband should really follow.
But they have been saying, “The husband has left you – don’t be worried. This life is short; it will be difficult and painful without the husband, but you will have tremendous rewards afterward. Not only you – seven generations will all become enlightened, without any effort on their part.”
So the poor old fellow has asked, “Not only one, but two of my sons have become your disciples – so what about me, what about the seven generations?” As far as my sannyas is concerned, it is individual. It has nothing to do with your seven generations. Truth is always individual, but the people who were going against life had to create some consolations around themselves.
And when it became a deep-rooted idea in the minds of people that life is ugly, sex is ugly, existence itself is a bondage – as if life is a punishment, not a reward, not an act of grace; as if you have been thrown into life for some crime that you must have committed somewhere in the past – then naturally these things are bound to happen. People will become malnourished: why go on taking care of the body? The body is the cause of your bondage. Why be hygienic? For what?
In fact, the Indian ascetic is very unhygienic. The more unhygienic he is, the more he is respected. The highly respected ascetic is called paramahansa – the great swan. This is the highest category of saints in India. And the definition of a paramahansa is that he can eat from the same plate as a dog, or he can eat just sitting by somebody’s side who is defecating. He will remain unconcerned. He does not make any distinction between food and shit – it is all the same.
That’s why I say Morarjibhai Desai is fifty percent a paramahansa because he makes no distinction between water and urine. In fact, urine is far better – he calls it the “water of life.” Fifty percent paramahansa – just fifty percent more is needed and he and his seven generations will be delivered.
Why should one be hygienic? For what? And remember, when sex is repressed, many things are repressed automatically. Sex is such a significant phenomenon because it is the source of all life. It has to be so significant because if you repress it you will repress many other things. For example, the person who is sexually repressed will become uncreative because creativity itself is a kind of sexual activity.
In my observation, if a person is totally creative, he will transcend sex without repressing it because his whole energy will become creative. He will not need to go into sex; not that he will prevent himself – the very need will disappear. He now has a far higher bliss happening to him. The lower is bound to disappear when you have the higher in your hands.
Try to understand my arithmetic: never drop the lower, try to attain the higher. When the higher is there, the lower is bound to disappear on its own accord. And when the lower disappears into the higher, then life becomes more beautiful, more healthy, more whole.
A real poet while producing, creating, composing, forgets all about sex. A real sculptor absorbed in his work forgets all about sex. Even if a naked woman passes by he will not look at her, his concentration is so total in his own creativity. A real dancer disappears in his dance; his ego, his sex, are dissolved in his dance.
But if sex is repressed, then just the contrary will be the result: your creativity will be repressed, and creativity repressed means many things. Its implications are very great because it has multidimensionality to it. If your creativity is repressed, your science and the scientific endeavor will disappear.
What happened to India? This is the most religious country in the world. The absolute proof of its being the most religious country is that this is the most unscientific country too. What happened to India’s intelligence? It is very strange to know that arithmetic was discovered in India. But Einstein was not born in India. Arithmetic reached its crescendo somewhere else, not in India. The first great astronomers were Indian, but Eddington, Einstein – the peaks – didn’t happen here. Something went wrong.
India is the most ancient country in the world; all other countries are just small children compared to India’s life history. It has been there for at least ten thousand years; certainly it may have been longer. In ten thousand years, India has produced great talented people, great geniuses, but the idea of life-negation caught hold of all those geniuses. They all became uncreative, they all escaped from life; they moved to the mountains, to the caves. They did not become great scientists, poets, painters, dancers; all these things were left to the mediocre. Otherwise there was no reason why India should not have become the most affluent society in the world. It should have become the richest country, but for the simple reason that creativity disappears when you repress sex.
If your sex life is flowing joyously, you have tremendous interest in everything you are doing; otherwise you become disinterested, everything seems to be meaningless. You go on doing things because they have to be done – just a drag, just a burden you go on carrying. It is a duty, it has to be fulfilled, but it is not joy.
So nobody in India will seem joyous, will seem utterly interested in creativity. And creativity contains everything: science, art, music, poetry, literature – everything becomes repressed. And even if some rebels start doing something creative, then their creativity will show some obsession with sex because they are part of this society. Even if they are rebels rebelling against this society, their rebellion is also not pure; their rebellion is basically a reaction. So they created the statues and beautiful temples of Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri. But if you see those temples you can see immediately they have been made by very sexually perverted people.
If you go to Khajuraho and see all kinds of sexual sculptures, you will be surprised – who were these people? What kind of mind did they have? Whatsoever they were fantasizing, they have put with great effort into stone; it must have been centuries of work. You will see all kinds of obsessive statues, almost having the quality of insanity in them. For example, one woman is doing shirshasan – headstand – and two people are making love to her. One woman is being made love to by many people; you will be surprised how many people can make love to one woman. All kinds of things are being done – all the openings of her body are being used.
Now what kind of people made these statues? And it must have taken years of work. They must have been fantasizing these things. They were rebels, certainly, going against the puritan society. But their rebellion is not meditative. Their rebellion is just a reaction, and the reactionary always moves to the opposite extreme.
Homosexuality is depicted, lesbianism is depicted. You cannot say anything which is not available in Khajuraho. All else that has been done by people like de Sade or Masoch, all are there, and much more – and in the name of religion because it is a temple. Even the rebellious people had to pretend that this is religion. In the name of Tantra, ninety-nine percent is nothing but sexual indulgence. But it has to be put behind a garb of religiousness, spirituality, great words: Shiva and Shakti, yin and yang.
If you reduce it to its reality, it is nothing but man and woman. But when you call it yin and yang, it sounds great; Shiva and Shakti, and it sounds like something sacred. Of course, they were going through rituals which made it look sacred, but the ultimate result was nothing but just ordinary sexuality. But the introduction was long and religious; the preface was to function as a facade. Ninety-nine percent of Tantra is nothing but pure sexual indulgence behind beautiful names.
On the one hand creativity was repressed, science disappeared, art disappeared. And even the art that remained is predominantly sexual.
Kalidas, one of the greatest artists of India, who can only be compared with Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and people like these – if you look into his words you will be surprised. If he goes into the garden and sees apples, those apples are not apples but breasts. Now, this man must be perverted. What will you call a man who sees a woman with beautiful breasts and sees apples? – you will call him starved, hungry. The same is true of Kalidas, there is no difference in it. So many breasts are hanging in the tree… Stupid, ugly, perverted, insane, but this was thought to be literature. All religious scriptures are full of all the kinds of perversion that you can imagine, that you can fantasize.
So, on the one hand everything great is repressed because people lose interest. If life is meaningless, then the only thing worth doing is how to get rid of it. Why waste your time in composing music? Why waste your time in writing poetry? Why waste your time in sculpture? Get rid of life, renounce life. The only thing worth doing is to torture yourself as much as you can because that is the only way to attain moksha.
So the whole energy became self-torture – and when people start torturing themselves, they are nothing but masochists. They cannot be hygienic, they cannot be scientific, and they are bound to be miserable.
Remember that sex is the lowest pleasure. According to me, sex – the pleasure – is the seed. If sex is allowed natural growth, respected, valued, then transformation happens, metamorphosis happens. Sex starts growing into a foliage of art, music, poetry, dance, and a thousand other creative dimensions. Sex is only a seed, or the roots, but if supported, nourished, watered, taken care of, then many branches grow, much foliage comes; many green leaves moving in all directions, dancing in the wind, in the rain, in the sun. This is what the world of art is, the world of aesthetics. If you allow the world of aesthetics to reach its highest peak, then flowers come.
Sex is pleasure, the lowest; art is happiness. Sex is animal; art is human. Sex is biological. The second step, higher than sex, is love. The man who has accepted sex respectfully, lovingly, will be able to transform it into love. And on the foliage, on the branches of love, the flowers of bliss happen. That is the highest stage; that is spirituality, true religion.
But these so-called religions crippled humanity from the very base. They destroyed the very root.
In Japan they have a certain art form. I will not call it an art form because it is murderous; it is called bonsai. In Japan, there are trees four hundred years old and six inches tall: trees which would have been one hundred, two hundred feet high in the sky, reaching toward the stars. Aspirations of the earth – which would have bloomed, which would have grown so vast that thousands of people could have taken shelter under their shade, hundreds of bullock carts would have rested underneath them, they are only six inches tall. And it is called an art form. It is not art, it is not form; it is deformation. It is ugly, it is murderous.
It is like keeping a child just one foot tall, or six inches, just keeping him undernourished so he cannot grow. That has been done to humanity too. The whole trick is they plant the tree in a pot without any bottom, and they go on cutting the roots. When you go on cutting the roots the tree cannot grow. There is a certain proportion between the roots and the tree: the tree can only go so high if the roots go very deep. In fact, Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “If you want to reach heaven, you will have to reach hell as far as your roots are concerned.”
I perfectly agree with the man. He is a little mad, but once in a while he has great insights. If you want to reach the stars, your roots will have to go to hell itself; only then will there be proportion. A big tree cannot remain standing with small roots – roots like seasonal flowers have. They go on cutting the roots; the tree cannot grow. It goes on becoming old, but it grows not. It grows old, but it does not grow up. And that’s what has happened to humanity in a subtle way. We have been cutting the root.
Sex is the root. You cut the root, then man grows old – grows in age, but does not grow up. Psychologists in the First World War became aware of the fact that the average psychological age of human beings is not more than twelve years – a very sad fact. A person may be ninety years old or even more, but his psychological age is only twelve years. What has happened to his psychology? If his physiology is growing, why is his psychology not growing with it? Something must have been done to his psychological roots.
Sex has been cut – that is the root. He has lost joy in life. He has become guilty; he has become burdened with the idea of sin. And the more a person becomes burdened with the idea of sin – and sex is the most sinful act – then his psychology starts shrinking.
And why twelve years? There must be some reason. It is somewhere between about twelve and fourteen that your sex starts growing, you become sexually mature. So before that age of sexual maturity, fourteen, something must have been done to you so you never even reach sexual maturity, you remain immature. You can see this immaturity all over the world. You can see it in your films, what people are going to see there. If there is no murder, no rape, no sexuality, no obscene scenes, the picture flops – otherwise the house is full.
Who are these people? What have they gone to see there? Something is missing in their life, and they want at least to see it projected onto the screen – some vicarious satisfaction. Who are the people who are reading Playboy and such magazines, which are sold by the millions? – religious people.
Everybody is religious in the world. Somebody is Hindu, somebody is Mohammedan, somebody is Christian – whosoever is purchasing these Playboys belongs to some religion. Of course, he cannot read Playboy, cannot see the nude women, in front of others, so he hides it. That shows his religion: if he hides it in the Bible he is Christian; if he hides it in the Gita he is Hindu; if he hides it in the Old Testament he is a Jew. Just look where he is hiding it – that will show his religion.
Why so many obscene magazines, obscene movies, blue movies? Why so much interest in murder, rape? You can read Indian newspapers every day and you can see; so many rapes are committed every day, and the country is so religious. It must be religious – those rapes prove it! It is a religious country. It is not a contradiction, mind you. Those rapes prove that it is a religious country, perhaps the most religious in the world. So many murders. Every kind of ugliness happens every day, and religious people are doing it.
These are the same people who go to the temples, to the mosques, to the churches – the same people who are ordinarily very religious. In fact, to compensate for what they are doing, they become even more religious. They go on pilgrimage because the priests have created such cunning devices: they say to the Hindus, “If you go to the Ganges and take a dip in the Ganges, all your sins are washed away.”
Now the Ganges is the dirtiest river in India, maybe the dirtiest in the whole world because it is the only river where dead bodies are thrown in. It is thought to be a great privilege if somebody’s body is thrown into the Ganges, if somebody dies in the Ganges. If he cannot die in the Ganges, then at least throw the body in – his benefit will be great. A dip in the Ganges and all the sins of your past are washed away. Just think how many people in millions of years must have taken a bath in the Ganges – it must be full of sins, over-full. Avoid it!
I have never taken a dip in the Ganges. I have stayed on the bank of the Ganges many times. And when I was staying near the Ganges, in Prayag or in Varanasi or in Patna, the people I was staying with would say to me, “It would be good. Why don’t you come to take a dip in the Ganges?”
I said, “No, that I cannot do. It is so full of so many people’s sins that I don’t think it will wash mine away. More is the possibility that I will gather others’ and come back. And, in fact, I don’t have any sins to wash away, so why should I bother? It is risky! It is better to have your own sins, why borrow them? Even if you have, it is perfectly good; they should at least be yours. I’m not interested in other people’s sins.”
But the priests have always been very crafty and cunning. This is a simple device: you go to the Ganges, take a dip, and you are finished with all your sins. So you are again ready to commit all those sins with fervor, with gusto, and you know there is no problem – you can go any time again and take a dip in the Ganges. There is no problem in it.
People go… The Mohammedans to Kaaba; they become hajji. Hajj means pilgrimage to Kaaba. Now even smugglers go to Kaaba and they become hajji. The greatest smuggler in India is Haji Mastan – you see how religious this country is? – even smugglers are religious. His name is Haji Mastan, one who has done the pilgrimage to Kaaba. Every Mohammedan should do at least one pilgrimage to Kaaba, and that finishes all his sins; then he becomes pure.
And of course, when you are pure, what are you going to do? You will again start writing the same things that you were writing before. Now, again finding the slate clean, you can write in a better way because now you are more experienced.
These so-called religions have something basically wrong with them. They have been a calamity to humanity. Certainly, they are the cause of people’s misery. First, they console people: “Your misery is determined by your past lives’ bad karmas, so don’t commit bad karmas any more, otherwise you will be punished again in your future life.”
Now you cannot do anything about the past life, except suffer. At the most you can suffer as patiently as possible, and that patience is very much praised. Suffer patiently – it has to be suffered, so why make an unnecessary fuss about it? It is inevitable. You committed the crime in the past, now it is a by-product. Just as a shadow follows you, your karmas follow you. This is the approach of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism; these three religions have this explanation.
And the other three religions – Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism – say it is because Adam and Eve committed a sin and you are suffering because of their sin. So unless you do something to undo that sin that your forefathers committed… What was their sin? – disobedience. So be obedient. Obedient to whom? They were disobedient to God. Now you are no longer in the Garden of Eden so you cannot meet God directly; you have to depend on the Polack pope – he is the mediator. You obey the Polack pope. If you obey him totally, then there is a possibility God may forgive you and you may be allowed back into the Garden of Eden.
So the only thing left for you is to obey the church, the dogma, the religion into which you are born. Howsoever nonsensical it is, howsoever stupid, superstitious it is, you are not to ask any questions. You have simply to obey. And if your obedience is total you will be rewarded. Not now – after death.
All these religions are clever in that way. Their rewards will always be after death. That’s a very simple device. Nobody comes back to say whether he has been rewarded or not. At least people like Jesus should come back and tell the truth – whether they have been allowed back into the Garden of Eden or not. But nobody comes; nobody can come, so it remains shrouded in mystery. And only the pope, the shankaracharya, the imam, the ayatollah, these people know the secret, nobody else. So you follow obediently whatsoever they say – then you will be allowed.
The devices are different but the goal is the same. Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jainas, Buddhists, Jews – their devices are different, but if you look at the goal, the goal is the same. Follow the priest – and the priest is following the tradition. It means basically: follow the past, follow the dead past. And when you follow the dead past, how can you be happy? Life is now, and your mind is always hanging somewhere in the past. There cannot be any attunement between you and existence; there is always going to be a discord.
Life creates new situations for you to respond to, and you go on repeating parrotlike answers that others have imposed upon you. They never fit, they cannot fit. Life is never repetitive, and your answers are always given by somebody in the past. Moses gave the answers for the Jews. Now what does Moses know about this moment? Three thousand years have passed. In fact, for forty years people had followed when he was alive, and he simply went on roaming in the desert, groping in the dark.
And then too, he took a wrong turn – unforgivable! If he had taken a right turn, now the Jews would have owned all the oil of the world. Just a little angle. Forty years of wandering in the desert, and all the torture, and where did they reach? – Jerusalem! Teheran would have been far better; Baghdad would have been far better.
The Jews cannot really forgive Moses. They should not – he is the cause of their whole misery. And he gave them the idea: “You are the chosen people of God.” For this idea they have suffered for three thousand years – for nothing else. It is not anything else that is wrong with them but this idea, this ego that Moses gave them, that they are the chosen people of God.
Once you have such egoistic attitudes you are bound to be in trouble. Nobody wants you to be the chosen people of God because others are themselves the chosen people of God. Then there is going to be a clash.
Adolf Hitler was the chosen person of God, Nordic Germans were the chosen people of God. Now, the clash. There can only be one people, the chosen people; God cannot make this mistake: he cannot choose two people. So the Jews have to be destroyed, annihilated from the earth. The Jews have suffered for this simple reason: this ego that Moses gave them.
And what is his gift? – those Ten Commandments. Nobody follows them, but those Ten Commandments are still torturing people. In fact, he was not the chosen person of God.
The story is…
God was trying to find a customer. He asked the French, “Would you like to have a few commandments?”
And the French said, “No. First show us a sample.”
And he said, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
They said, “Stop! If we don’t commit adultery, then what are we going to do? We don’t want such commandments.”
He asked the Hindus and he asked others, but nobody was willing. And then he asked Moses, “Would you like to have a few commandments?”
And Moses, being a perfect Jew, said, “How much does it cost?”
And he said, “Free! It costs nothing.”
Moses said, “Then I will have ten!”
That’s how he got those Ten Commandments. And they are torturing the Jews for three thousand years.
It is time to get rid of all that. It was his trip, why should you be on his trip? Do your thing! Why go on doing Moses’ thing, or Abraham’s thing, or Manu’s thing, or Mahavira’s thing? Can’t you be a little bit more intelligent to manage your own life? The very idea that your life has to be managed by somebody else creates stupidity. You are bound to become stupid; you have given the power to somebody else to dominate you.
Now Hindus are still being dominated by Manu. Thousands of years have passed, and all that Manu has given is sheer ugliness. He has given the idea of the sudras, the untouchables – he is the cause of millions of people’s misery. He has given the idea that the woman is lower than the man. He has given the idea that the brahmins are the highest caste, and everybody has to listen to and obey the brahmins.
Hindus have lived in slavery because of Manu; they have lived a very subhuman kind of life because of Manu. Who is this Manu? Why should one bother about him? It was his joy to write a certain scripture, but there is no binding on you to follow him. Why can’t you write your own scripture?
That’s my message to each of my sannyasins. You are not to follow me. I am doing my thing, you have to do your thing. It is just a coincidence that by chance we have met. If we can enjoy each other, good; if we don’t enjoy each other, good-bye. More than that is dangerous!
It is just a meeting of travelers on the same path. For a few miles we can be together as long as you enjoy me, I enjoy you. Otherwise a crossroad comes and we say good-bye, and we say to each other, “See you soon. If existence permits, if existence is willing, it may happen again – some other road in some other life, on some other planet we may meet. But this time it has been joyous to be together for so long.” And we are grateful. But there is no binding.
My basic message is for the individual, and the freedom of the individual. These religions have created misery for the simple reason that they have taken away your intelligence. When you obey, your intelligence is destroyed. When you cannot say no, your yes is impotent; it means nothing, it is bogus. And all these religious people are living bogus, borrowed lives. People are malnourished, people are poor, living in unhygienic conditions, people are living in psychological slavery. Unless we destroy all these religions, there is no hope. Certainly we need a certain kind of religiousness in the world, but religions are not needed.
Religiousness is a totally different phenomenon. Religiousness is like love. Love is neither Christian, nor Hindu, nor Mohammedan. Religiousness is also neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian. The moment love becomes Christian, beware, it is not love. The moment somebody says, “My friendship is Hindu,” beware. It is not friendship, it is just Hindu chauvinism trying to catch hold of your neck in the name of friendship. Beware of Christian love because this Christian love has killed thousands of people, burned people alive – it is Christian love. And they are burning for your own sake.
Devaraj, you ask me, “Catholicism, Mohammedanism and Hinduism, which are the most ‘religious’ of religions, seem most concerned about purity, cleanliness and sexual abstinence.” They are really concerned about sexual abstinence. The concern for purity and cleanliness is secondary. In fact, it is part of their sexual abstinence.
They call sex dirty. Because sex is dirty, then sexual abstinence is pure. They have nothing to do with purity, and there is nothing dirty in sex. What can be dirty in sex? But these people have created the idea that the sex center is exactly between the two dirty centers, so it must be dirty, doubly dirty.
But it has nothing in it – no dirt. There is no question of the sex center being dirty at all. But these people have been calling the whole body dirty. And when they call the body dirty, they create a certain logic to show that they are true. The body consists of bones, of blood, of pus; the body is dirty. But one strange thing: all the scriptures of the world say that the woman’s body is dirty, as if man’s body is made of gold – instead of bones, diamonds and emeralds; instead of blood, perhaps nectar. Nobody condemns man’s body because the scriptures were written by men. And the man’s body is also part of the woman’s body because it has come from the woman’s womb. It is the same body. But the woman’s body is dirty.
These male chauvinist pigs have been riding on humanity’s chest for so long, you have completely forgotten that you are being used as a donkey. And they have been there so long that you think they are part of you. They have to be thrown, completely thrown away.
There is nothing dirty in blood, there is nothing dirty in bones, there is nothing dirty in the body. The body is one of the most beautiful phenomena of nature; one should be grateful to existence rather than calling it dirty. It is one of the most amazing miracles. For seventy to a hundred years it keeps alive, it keeps rejuvenating itself, it perpetuates itself. Its every mechanism is a miracle. People go to see the pyramids in Egypt, then the Taj Mahal in India. In fact, their body contains far greater miracles than those ugly pyramids.
You cannot even conceive how your body is working. You are not aware of it – how it transforms your bread into blood. You have heard about alchemists, that they were trying to transform baser metals into gold; your body is doing far better. It is transforming all kinds of crap that you go on throwing inside you, into blood, into bone. Not only into blood and bone, it makes your brain out of that crap! Out of your ice cream, Coca-Cola, it goes on making your brain; a brain which can create a Rutherford, an Albert Einstein, a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu. Just see the miracle.
A brain, such a small thing, enclosed in a small skull – a single brain can contain all the libraries of the world. Its capacity is almost infinite. It is the greatest memory system. If you want to make a computer of the same capacity you will need miles of space to make that computer function. It is encaged in your small skull. And yet, although science has developed so far, they have not been able to transform ice cream into blood. They have been trying, but they cannot find the clue – what to do? How to transform ice cream into blood? It is a faraway thing to make anything like brain out of ice cream! Perhaps it may never happen. Or even if it happens, it will happen through the brain, it will again be a miracle of the brain.
These people go on calling the body ugly, dirty. Their idea of purity has nothing to do with purity. You can look around the world. They have different ideas of purity. It depends on their religion, on their climate, and other things.
The Indian cannot conceive of any Westerner as clean because he is always thinking of toilet paper. The moment he sees a Western person he becomes concerned; his dirtiness is so clear to him. And the Westerner cannot conceive the Indian as pure because he is always looking at his nails. And particularly Devaraj! He is always looking at nails. He is a doctor, and he is very concerned because just a little bit of shit in the nails and you are dirty. And you are eating from the same hands, and you are preparing food from the same hands.
If you ask Devaraj he will say, “It is better to keep your dirt to yourself rather than to go on distributing it so generously. When you prepare food you are distributing it to the whole family; and if you are preparing food in a hotel, then you are distributing to thousands of people. That dirt in your nails carries amoebas, the greatest enemy of man – the amoeba.” Devaraj is an amoeba expert; he is known as the amoeba king. He is continuously researching, working; he is a great researcher. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Medicine in England. His whole concern is how to keep people clean.
But cleanliness is a totally different idea to different people. To the Hindus it is one idea; to the Jainas it is a different idea. For example, the Jaina muni will eat refined butter only for some time – four hours, six hours – after that it is unclean. The Jainas will not drink in the night, will not eat in the night – it is unclean because a mosquito may fall in. Some insect may creep into the food and there will be violence, bloodshed. So they will eat only in the day. The people who eat in the night are all unclean, dirty people.
And the same Jainas will defecate anywhere. The whole of India is being used as a toilet. That’s perfectly okay; there is no problem in it. They are simply making the soil richer, they are giving it manure.
And about manure also, there are different ideas. One of my friends in a Zen monastery in Japan was very puzzled because he was staying with a professor there, and when he saw his garden he could not believe it. Fresh shit was being spread on the vegetables! Fresh! That was their idea of cleanliness – it had to be fresh! He could not believe what was happening. Then he escaped because he was eating those vegetables.
Now Devaraj goes on looking into vegetables. All the Indian vegetables that you purchase from the market are bound to be unclean. Not fresh shit, but stale shit! He does not allow me – because he is my physician – he does not allow me to eat any vegetable from the market. My own sannyasins grow vegetables, and they have to pass the tests of Devaraj, only then…
One day, a sannyasin made cheese for me. First it went to Devaraj and he said, “It is contaminated!” – exactly the word, contaminated. When I heard contaminated, I thought, is it poisoned? Or what is the matter? It was contaminated because her nails were a little long and there was a slight possibility of amoebas. And he worked hard and he found that the cheese was not right, it was impure – it was “contaminated.”
Jaina munis – a few Jaina munis, a sect – use a small strip or piece of cloth on their noses. That is their idea of remaining pure, to have filtered air. Otherwise, who knows? In the air, every kind of thing goes on floating. So their noses are covered, their mouths are covered, so nothing unfiltered reaches. Moreover, there is one more idea in it: when you breathe out your breath is warm, and that warm breath can kill a few small, live cells floating in the air. Again bloodshed, violence – and you will suffer in hell.
Now, if you watch people’s ideas about purity, cleanliness, you will go crazy. If you follow all their ideas, life will become impossible. Then the only clean thing will be suicide.
But these ideas have been developed only as part of a program. The program is to make you sexually afraid. In Jaina scriptures, making love to a woman is violence. Why is it violence? – because when the genitals meet, there are many small, alive people inside the woman’s genitals, small cells of life. They will be killed. It is a massacre! And when the man, making love, comes to an orgasm; millions of live cells will be released. They will live only two hours; now, he is the cause of their death. Millions of live cells – each live cell would have become a man or a woman, given the right opportunity. Now it has been calculated that a man will make love to a woman in his forty years of love-making, at least four thousand times. Now, each time millions of cells will die – just calculate how many people you have killed! Is there any hope for you?
This sexual abstinence creates all kinds of side effects. It is basically repressive: repressive of joy, repressive of intelligence, repressive of life and all that helps life to become a dance, a celebration.
This earth will remain miserable unless we get rid of all life-negative attitudes, whosoever may be the cause of it. This very earth can become paradise, but people have to be taught life-affirmation. And that’s my whole work. I am teaching you a life-affirmative religiousness, a life of dance, joy, beauty, creativity, sensitivity, celebration.
Unless this new religiousness takes possession of the whole intelligence of humanity, then we are coming very close to the boundary where we will have to commit a global suicide. If life is such a misery, then why go on living? What is the point of it all?
The last question:
Osho,
Can you tell me a few Polack jokes?
I am a Polack and leaving for the West tomorrow.
The pope tried to cross the railway track
before a rushing train.
They put the pieces in a sack
but couldn’t find the Polack’s brain.
Why does it take seven Polacks to carry a coffin at a funeral?
Six carry the coffin and one carries the radio.
Poland has just bought five hundred million tons of sand from Saudi Arabia. The Polish government has decided to drill for its own oil.
The tall Polack policeman took pity on the dwarf Polack standing next to him at the urinal of a public toilet. “Why do you keep twitching your eyes?” he asked. “Trouble with your nerves?”
“No, you are splashing me!” said the dwarf.
A Polack drunk staggers out of a bar. He sees a taxi parked just outside. Opening its door, he lurches in, loses his balance and hits his head against the door at the other side. The door flies open, and the Polack rolls out of the other side of the taxi.
Getting to his feet he peers at the taxi driver and says, “Shay, man, you shure are fasht! How much do I owe you?”
Enough for today.