... can see it clearly, that you remember about God and about heaven and hell, and about the BIBLE and the KORAN and the GITA only when you are miserable. Have you ever seen somebody who is happy and rejoicing carrying a BIBLE? He will carry a bottle of wine; this is not the time for carrying a BIBLE. And who reads these Bibles, Vedas? Just old people who are coming close to death and are becoming...

... day to touch his feet - a great spiritual master. Seeing that so many people were going, I thought, "There is no harm. Perhaps this is somebody in whose eyes I can see the light, in whose gestures I can see the grace." And there I saw a half-dead, utterly stupid man. I asked him, "Before you die, answer me at least, what relationship is there between spirituality and starvation? And...

... have the experience of sixty days - what spirituality have you gained? Just give me some indication." He looked here and there - what indication could he give? I said, "The only indication is that within a few days you will die. But there is still time if you have courage - it needs great courage to disappoint the worshippers. When you have thousands of worshippers, it needs tremendous...

... to go. For a few days I can manage to keep you in my house. You can get well, and then go on any path you want. But right now you are going into death, it is not a path." The man thought for a moment, understood clearly that what I was saying was right. But to disappoint so many people... And it was not only a question of disappointing so many people, it was a question of losing respect in the...

... world." This is, in essence, the teaching of all the religions. Their kingdom is beyond death, a fiction. Torture yourself if you want to enter their fictitious paradise. And meanwhile let the priest enjoy the power, the money; let the priest enjoy the ego. In fact, seen in the light of psychological analysis, the whole humanity has been, up to now, sick. But because the sickness is so prevalent...

... rewarded after death, and if you don't listen you will be punished by hellfire for eternity. And people believed it. I have heard about Christian missionaries in the Middle Ages, shouting and beating on the table about what will happen to the sinners. And describing it in such detail that ladies will faint, children will start crying. Even men will start perspiring. "Hellfire. Somehow one has to...

... intensity, more clarity, more discipline, more love. And the same is true about after death. If there is life after death... I say there is, but I don't want you to believe it. There is no need to believe. Just live this life, and if any life happens after this life you will be able to enjoy. And if nothing happens, nothing happens. There is no harm; you simply are not. What was the problem when you were...

... not born? Everything was going perfectly well. One day you will die, and everything will go perfectly well. Either you will be - then you know how to enjoy - or you will not be, so there is no problem for you. My understanding is simple and clear. Something serious.... Paddy and Seamus are sitting in the pub, having a drink together. "A burglar got into my house at three o'clock this morning...

... fields." The poem says: "Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." It has a great insight. Whoever dies shows you one fact, that you are also going to die. Before death takes you, do something to find something so that you can defeat death. AT ANOTHER TIME JOSHU WAS ASKED: "A HAIR'S BREADTH OF DIFFERENCE - AND WHAT HAPPENS?" It is again an ancient Zen koan: A...

... you can hope - perhaps, it cannot be guaranteed - that you may become enlightened"... The world has changed in many ways. The most important way is that everybody is in a hurry, not knowing for what. Everybody is running, not knowing where and why. Everybody is collecting money, power, prestige, without ever thinking - what are you going to do with all this? Soon, death will knock on your doors...

... and everything will be taken away. That which can be taken away by death is worthless to accumulate. Accumulate something that death cannot destroy. There were times when people were interested only in the immortal. That which dies is already dead; it is only a question of time, whether it is today or tomorrow. The body dies, the mind dies, they are of interest no more. The interest has to go deeper...

... - is there something in you, hidden deep in your empty heart, which does not die? Discover it while there is time. The whole effort of a certain golden age that we have passed and completely forgotten... all the intelligent people were interested only in one thing: to find the eternal in man. So thirty years was not a question; nobody counted time. The calendar was not consulted. Nobody said to the...

... past lives, they have given man a tremendously speedy, hurried way of life. You have to fulfill so much that everything remains incomplete. You cannot complete anything because you are in such a hurry - another thing is waiting, lined up! People die with empty hands. All the Eastern religions - Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism - have given a totally different dimension, the whole eternity. You are...

... not confined into seventy years; birth and death are simply episodes in your eternity. Many times you have been born and many times you have died; still, the eternal principle of life continues. That has given the East a certain restfulness. There is no hurry, you can sit by the side of the master for twelve years. The master can take his own time - three years to look at you, three years to put his...

... misunderstand the statement that God is dead. It does not mean that he was alive. It does not mean that he was sick, it does not mean that he was on his deathbed, it does not mean that you have to go to the crematorium again. He has never been there. Existence knows nothing of God. It is only the crafty priests who had invented the fiction. With the death of the fiction, the profession of the priests becomes...

... me - it is cheap. You can believe and console yourself, and waste your whole life in believing. But you will die as ignorant as you were born. So when I say religion is dead, I mean religiousness is always alive - that is something individual - but religion is always dead. Religion is an organization; religiousness is a search. I want my people to understand the difference very clearly. Howsoever...

... you beyond death, can take you into the benediction that existence is. So when I said the religion is dead, I mean that I don't want you to become a religion. I want you to remain simply seekers, searchers. And it is a great excitement to seek, to search, to find on your own. Small things make you so ecstatic when you are the finder. For example, what happened to Archimedes? He had not found...

... silver was concerned. It was in his hands to control the price of silver; to bring it down or to bring it up was within his hands. But before he died he was almost bankrupt. Somebody else had become the silver king. Before his death I had gone to see him, and I told him, "Now you can relax. All that stupidity is gone; you are bankrupt. You could not enjoy all those riches, now enjoy bankruptcy...

...." And in his old age - he was almost eighty - he started crying. I said, "You have not lost anything, because when those things were there you were not happy, you were not rejoicing - so what is the loss?" He said, "I am not crying for all that. I am crying that death is coming near and I have not looked even for a moment into myself. And you have been telling me again and again...

..., OSCAR WILDE SAYS, "FOR ALL MEN KILL THE THINGS THEY LOVE. YET NOT EVERYONE HAS TO DIE." IT FEELS LIKE THIS INSIGHT DOES NOT ONLY APPLY TO SHEELA, IT SEEMS TO REFER TO EACH OF US. PLEASE FORGIVE OUR DEAFNESS, BELOVED MASTER, AND FROM YOUR COMPASSION, GO ON ENCOURAGING OUR SOULS TO GROW AND NOT FALL BACK AND DIE. Oscar Wilde is not an enlightened person, but a very keen observer of life, and...

... is dead. He wants to keep the domination and possession even after he is dead. He wants to make sure that his wife will not fall in love with somebody else, so the best way is that she dies with him. So women were forced to die - because it is not an easy thing: you can just try putting your hand in a small candle flame, and that will give you the idea. A living woman has to be forced into the...

...; just waiting for death to free them from all this nonsense that they have created themselves - the wife, the children.... They have messed up their whole life, and their house has become a madhouse. But homosexuality is not a way out; it is just a slight change, because homosexuals start becoming as jealous, as possessive, and destroy the other as much as heterosexuals. And it is good that Oscar...

..., I am in the wrong If I think I will die, I am still in the wrong. I have not had a birth nor will I die. Neither the breath is mine nor do I have any control over the breath. Neither life nor death is mine. Some mysterious drama is being enacted within me. Some one is sporting inside. Some one is speaking within me. Some one is passing through me. Some one is born within me Some one dies within me...

... from fuss is the creative activity of God! Friends, let us give love an opportunity to transform you from the very root. Love's potion can instil a new life in you a life which will never perish. For that reason alone is love free from fear even in the presence of death, because love knows no death. LOVE DEFIES DEATH In 1857, when Indians revolted against their rulers, the English speared to death a...

... silent sage who had not spoken a word for years; thinking him to be a spy, an instigator of rebels. The sage who had been silent for years laughed and said TAT TWAM ASI (Thou art that). The man who had speared him was also that -- the Absolute soul. Even at the moment of death he had embraced his murderer while love and fervent prayerfulness had shone in his eyes. No doubt he had discarded verbosity...

... a loving friend, death into salvation. Love changes darkness into brilliance, poison into nectar. Can there be a miracle more stupendous than love? More magical than the magic of love? Love can transform everything because it transforms our very visions, and the vision is a creative force. What we see is our world, and the world is what our eyes make of it. If there is love in the vision, there is...

... below the silence of their own inner being. They are still struggling with empty thoughts, hot air, nothing. And if you look into their lives, you can see it. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was so much afraid of death -- I don't think anybody present here is so much afraid. You cannot conceive, but even the word 'death' was tabooed, it was not to be uttered in his presence. Twice it...

... happened that somebody mentioned death and he fell from his chair into unconsciousness, his mouth foaming. Sigmund Freud flat on the ground. The great founder of psychoanalysis had not even enough courage to listen to the word 'death'. I do not want to be categorized with these people. Jung was expelled; in the movement of psychoanalysis he was second only to Sigmund Freud. Everybody thought that he was...

... going to be his successor. And he was profoundly intelligent. But he was expelled from the movement because he was interested in ghosts. Sigmund Freud told him, "Drop this. I cannot even tolerate those words." His interest was in what happens beyond death, so naturally he was interested in death, in ghosts, and this was the basic reason that he was thrown out. You would think he was a...

... courageous man but it is not so. All his interest in ghosts and death and what happens beyond life was only intellectual. He wanted to go to Egypt to see the old, dead bodies preserved as mummies. Twelve times he booked and twelve times he cancelled. His whole life he wanted to go, but when the day came to go, he would become so afraid of seeing a dead body that was three thousand years old, he would find...

... is not, it is just the surface. Your innermost reality is far away from your mind. It is closer to the universal existence. It is far closer to the farthest star than it is to your own mind. And the moment you transcend the mind the mind starts stopping on its own, because you are no more feeding it energy, you are no more giving it nourishment. It dies its own natural death. The greatest moment in...

... saints. Donkeys don't joke, they are all mahatmas. In their past lives they have been saints and mahatmas. That's why they have attained such a great status. These are the people who will go to heaven. If after death you are asked where you want to go, please remember to say, "Wherever you want to take me, take -- but I don't want to go where saints go!" Even hell will be better. You will...

... of looking at things. Everybody's father is going to die sooner or later. Your father's father must have died... and still he lived. You have not lived on your own, you have always needed somebody else to be your reason for living. That reason can disappear at any moment: the father will die, the mother will die, the wife can go with somebody else, the business can go bankrupt. If you make anything...

... has to live for his father, but nobody can live for himself, and unless you live for yourself you cannot find any joy, any bliss. You have degraded your life; you have lost your dignity, your self-respect. Your father had to live for himself and had to die for himself. You could not die for your father; how can you live for your father? And it is not insulting to your father that you have to live...

... friends are only helping you to fulfill your own longing. Then life has a health, and only the healthy person, the psychologically healthy person, can discover his spiritual being. The sick person cannot move, he is so much involved with his pathological desires - which are going to remain unfulfilled, which are going to remain like wounds. Otherwise, the death of your father would have helped you...

..., everybody is going to miss his father; then they will be the replacement. They are substitute fathers, but they are also mortal, so they can die any day. Even the pope can pop off at any moment. So the religions have created an eternal father - at least God will remain with you always; and all the religions define God as everywhere present - omnipresent; all powerful - omnipotent; all knowing - omniscient...

... also have felt a tremendous joy arising in you - the joy that only freedom can bring, a blissfulness that comes to you from your own inner core. And because you are knowing yourself, you know there is no death; hence, there is no need of any security, no need of any protection. Out of this aloneness arises love - you will be surprised when you hear it - because only a man who is full of joy can be...

... me continually, and now, seeing that death is very close, I should fulfill their desire. So I am going to see them, and I will be coming back soon - so don't stand back up in your erect position." Agastya died in the south, he never came back; and Vindhya is still waiting, bent over, for the master to come back. It must have been thousands of years ago when the master went to the south.... The...

... the sun that goes around the earth, but the earth that goes around the sun -- he was very old, seventy-five or eighty, almost on his deathbed -- he was dragged to the court of the pope. And the pope said, "Before you die, change that statement, because it goes against THE BIBLE. And anything that goes against THE BIBLE is automatically wrong, because THE BIBLE is the word of God." Galileo...

...-God -- particularly in the countries of the East where people are so poor, and they are going to become poorer and poorer every day. But the pope's interest is not that man should live comfortably without hunger. People should not die just because they cannot even get water, cannot get food. And you will be surprised to know that on one hand, the pope goes on talking against birth control methods...

... funeral. In fact, dying will be better than living amongst those corpses. The whole world will be stinking of death. The popes don't seem to be interested in saving humanity. Their basic interest is how to get more and more people into their religion, because that is going to be their power. It is pure politics. The whole Christian theology is based on such stupid ideas that to call it "religion...

... could not deny it -- it was so factual. But if you say it, that means you are against the pope. I am not against the pope. I am just in favor of truth. But perhaps this kind of thing begins with the virginity of Mary and the birth of Jesus. I have heard... it is a story of the future, because this Polack pope seems to be very slow to die. Popes ordinarily have died within an average of one or two...

... years at the most because by the time they become popes, they are always around the age of seventy-five, seventy-eight. And they must have been hoping that this Polack would also die -- but they don't know Polacks. He has completely forgotten about dying; and he is enjoying his popehood so greatly -- no other pope has ever done such things. He is continuously touring around the world, and the Vatican...

... important thing was that his personal physician was not called. Instead, the Vatican officials ordered immediate embalming and refused to let his personal physician examine the body -- even the dead body. They also refused a post-mortem. No death certificate was issued; even up to now, officially he is living because there was no death certificate issued for him. After they had embalmed him, an autopsy...

... night that he has been poisoned, feeling that he was going to die, he may have tried to write his will. Or he may have tried to write what had happened to him, what had been done to him. But all those papers mysteriously disappeared, along with his medicine bottle and the will. It has been thought that they mixed poison in his medicine bottle, and he drank the poison, thinking it was medicine. Once...

... the morning the embalmers would be needed, so every arrangement was made beforehand. It was not an accidental death. He was followed by Pope John Paul the Second, the Polack who prohibited all birth control methods except the rhythm method -- even though the Vatican actually owned a company which made birth control pills. He also dropped the church law forbidding membership in the Freemasons. And he...

... through: the very idea of renouncing life means respecting death. All your religions are worshipers of death. It is not a coincidence that you worship only the dead saints. When they are alive, you crucify them. When they are alive, you stone them to death. When they are alive, you poison them and when they are dead, you worship them -- a sudden change happens. Your whole attitude changes. Nobody has...

... that in your temples, in your churches, in your mosques, in your gurudwaras, in your synagogues... whom are you worshipping? And you don't see the stupidity of it all, that the living are worshiping the dead. The present is worshiping the past. Life is being forced to worship death. It is because of these anti-life religions that the question has arisen again and again down the ages: what is the aim...

... population is decreasing. And the government is worried, because for every three thousand people who leave or die, thirty thousand people are coming from other countries as immigrants into Germany. The government is afraid that just within a decade Germany will not be the land of the Germans. Their population is decreasing and immigrants are entering into the country. And here in India in 1947, when India...

... happening? And there was no possibility of any revolution for at least another twenty years. The situation was clear, but it needed intelligence. There was no question of memory, because the situation was new. India had grown to the point of four hundred million people, and Britain could see by the rate of growth that this country is going to die from hunger and starvation, and they did not want to be...

..., India will have one billion people -- that is one thousand million people, and that is the lowest estimate. The more progressive and more intelligent people have estimated that India will have one billion and eight hundred million people by the end of this century, almost the double population of today. Fifty percent of India is going to die by the end of this century, and when one in two persons, is...

... going to die, what do you think about those who will be left living amongst corpses? Their situation will be worse than being dead. The dead will at least be at rest. But to talk about birth control or the birth control pill goes against the memory, against the system, against the mind that has been told something for centuries but is not aware that a totally new situation has arisen. India has never...

... been the most populated country -- it was Life's aim is life itself China. By the end of this century India will have gone ahead of China. China is behaving more intelligently. But the real intelligent people you will find in Germany, in Switzerland, where population is decreasing. Increasing the population is increasing death. The situation is new; it needs new methods to face it. Intelligence means...

... completely forgotten how to live. If you go on living with corpses, worshipping corpses, you will lose contact with life and its sources. You have become a worshipper of death. All the religions are teaching death. That's why they all say that their paradise is beyond death. First you have to die, then everything else is possible. But the first step is death in every religion. No religion teaches you the...

... art of living. They teach you hope, promises, but all hope and all promises are after death and there is no guarantee because no dead man ever returns. It is time that religions should be taken to the place where they belong, the graveyard. They have been turning human beings into graves. And once we can get rid of religions, then we can start searching for religio. Religion prevents the search. You...

... fixed, and each group will have a fixed number. That is part of the Academy's secret work. Mahasattvas are bound to become enlightened before I leave my body, but there is one condition -- they should be in the Buddhafield. On their own they may be able, they may not be able; there is no guarantee. Bodhisattvas, if they remain in the Buddhafield, are certain to become enlightened before their death...

... kept secret all these leaves that are in the whole forest." My situation is just different. I have said the whole forest; only one thing I have kept secret, just one leaf. Buddha declared before his death that he would be coming again after twenty-five centuries, and that his name would be Maitreya. Maitreya means the friend. Buddhas don't come back; no enlightened person ever comes back, so it...

... after Buddha's death that I am changing the name of the Foundation so that it becomes Rajneesh Friends International. It is not only just a change of the name. It is going to change the very flavor of our whole movement. And you have to rise up so that what I want the movement to become, it becomes. So that the dream is realized. Don't let me down. Okay? Generated by PreciseInfo ™ ...

...! Death was so close to me that I could only remember God. I don't remember even for a single moment that sex was there, greed was there, enmity was there, anger was there. No, they had all disappeared." Eknath said, "You are not going to die -- get up! This was just an answer to your question. The day I became aware that death is, since that day my inner being has changed. How does it matter...

... too much too early, that these are two aspects of the same coin. Then it becomes a little acceptable to you. You can accept that one coin can have two aspects and they must be facing in opposite directions. You can accept the negative and the positive, you can accept the dark night and the bright day, you can accept life and death, as two sides of one coin. But when I am using the simile of the coin...

... I am not really being true to the reality; I am compromising -- compromising with your Aristotelian mind. Sooner or later, when you become more accustomed, when you start seeing the paradoxicalness, I will not say to you that they are two aspects, two sides of one coin. The negative is the positive and the positive is the negative. Life and death are not two sides of one coin -- life IS death. But...

... that will be a little more difficult to accept, although the truth is so. The day you were born you started dying. The process may be completed in seventy years, that is another thing -- that it takes time -- but time matters not. The day you were born you started dying -- IMMEDIATELY. It is not the other side of the coin, it is the same side of the coin. Life is death, and day is night, and love is...

... hate, and friendship is enmity. Then it becomes more difficult. But if I look at your difficulty, then I cannot take you into the world of truth. I have to persuade you slowly slowly, so first I say, "These are two aspects of the same coin." The day I feel that now you are ready to accept the paradox without questioning I will say, "Life is death." I will not say that God and the...

... alert that this earth is going to die, your life will be transformed. Jesus used to say again and again: "Watch, beware! The Day of Judgment is very close by. In your life, this very life you will see it happening!" It has not happened up to now, but it was a device Jesus was creating a situation in which people could become aware that the time is very short and much has to be done, and we...

...; Just a moment before when he had come he was so strong, so young -- and just a moment afterwards when he was going down the steps of the temple of Eknath he was shaking and trembling. He had to take the support of the wall. He went home, he gathered his family, and he said, "Only seven days are left and I am going to die. Tell all my friends and all my enemies to come -- I would like to forgive...

... he was chanting the whole day and asking again and again, "How far is the sunset? -- because Eknath has said, 'The moment the sun sets, you are finished!' Exactly at sunset I am going to die." And the sun was coming down every moment, coming closer and closer to the western horizon. Just a few minutes more...and Eknath arrived. The whole family started crying and weeping. Eknath said...

... whether death is to come in seven days or seventy years? Once you become aware that this life is going to slip out of your hands, it has already slipped! Then you have to prepare for the other shore, then you have to prepare for something beyond." The third world war is coming closer, but I am not interested in avoiding it or bringing it. Who cares? My whole interest is in you, and I want you to...

..., because Russia is preparing, America is preparing; they go on piling up atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, death bombs, and they go on inventing new ways for killing humanity instantly. So it is a very very real danger. Why not use it as a device? It can shake you up, it can wake you up. And if millions of people become meditators, there is a possibility the world war may not happen. But that is not my...