Chapter 30

[NOTE: This is a typed tape transcript and has not been edited or published, as of August 1992. It is for reference use only. The interviewer's remarks have been omitted where not relevant to Osho's words]

INTERVIEW BY EPOCA MAGAZINE, ITALY

ANSWER: All people around the earth have proved gullible. Otherwise there will not be Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Jainas, communists.

All these religions prove only one thing: that people are gullible. And so gullible that they can believe in a God nobody has seen. They can sacrifice their life to a God who does not exist, who has never answered anybody's prayer, who is the greatest lie on the earth.

They are so gullible that they can believe that there are holy books written by God. The VEDAS are holy, Hindus believe. Even very educated, educated in the West, still believe that Vedas are written by God. And if you look in the Vedas you will be surprised, that if God writes such rubbish things, then either he is not God or rubbish things are real literature.

For example, there are mantras in Rig Veda. A brahmin is praying to God that "I have been following the rules and the regulations of the religion in detail. Now it is time for me to ask for reward, and I ask that this year only on my fields your clouds will rain, and on nobody else' fields." Now in the first place, how God can write this? And to which God he is referring now? This is just stupid human beings. They are asking him prayers that the milk of my cows will be better in more quantity and the milk of my enemies' cows should simply disappear. Are these religious feelings?

The gullibility is very deep. And the same is the situation of all the religions.

They can believe any nonsense if it is written in their holy book. The very idea of a holy book makes me nauseous, because Jews say the OLD TESTAMENT is the holy book, because God knows only Hebrew. Hebrew is the holy language.

Hindus say Sanskrit is the holy language, and God knows no other language.

And the same is true about three hundred religions in the world.

Anybody who has a little sense can see, how can you choose between three hundred books, which one is the true one? They all can be false, but they all cannot be true. And they are contradictory. So obvious contradictions from each other, that it is unbelievable that people don't see it.

The people are gullible around the earth, and the politicians have exploited them. For thousands of years they are giving them hope that soon there is going to be a utopia, a world where there will be nobody poor, nobody hungry, nobody humiliated. Every being will have its own individuality, integrity; and for thousands of years they have been talking about it, and nobody has asked that when it is going to happen? For thousands of years it has not happened.

And we don't see that you are doing anything else. You are simply repeating the old tricks, playing on people's hopes and consolations.

So it is not only a question of American people, and their gullibility. The whole humanity is in the same boat.

Secondly, it is also not only the American government that went against the commune. Any government anywhere in the world is bound to go against the commune, for the simple reasons, and the reasons are the same all over, the fear of somebody doing better than you. The fear of somebody creating an alternative society, in comparison with which their own society looks out of date. If you have guts, then you change your society. If you don't have guts, then it is easier to destroy a small commune. That seems to be the easier path. And no government is ready to change the society, for the simple reason because to change the society, the government will have to change itself; which is almost an impossible task.

The government, its bureaucracy, its fascist attitudes, its exploitation of the people, exploitation of people's fear; it will have to change all that. It will have to see the real needs of the people. They don't need nuclear weapons, nobody is hungry for nuclear weapons. They need houses, they need clothes, they need food, they need work. But all the money of the nation goes into the service of death and war. The politician can see that if all that power, money, intelligence, can be diverted to the real needs of life, this very earth can become a paradise.

But if this very earth becomes a paradise, two things will become absolutely outdated; the politician and the priest. If the earth is already a paradise, then what you can promise people for tomorrow? The earth has to remain a hell, so that you can promise something for tomorrow. If the earth is already a paradise and people are living happily, enjoying moment to moment, who bothers about the priest, and who cares about what happens after death?

One Christian monk was asking me, "What happens after life, when one dies?"

I said, "Have you ever looked what is happening to you while you are alive. If you cannot see what happens to life when you are alive, forget the idea. You will not be able to see what happens to life when you are dead. Learn the art of living; and automatically you will learn the art of dying. Because art of dying is simply the final lesson of art of living. Just as death is the end of life, culmination of life, it is not separate from life, it is just the highest peak of life."

But religions have not been teaching people art of living. Neither they are teaching people art of dying. They are simply giving people opium. So it is not a question of America, India, Germany, England or China. There may be little bit differences of details but human mind is almost the same. I will be treated everywhere in the same way. To accept me is to accept a total revolution. The easier part is to reject me. And because people are so gullible, to reject me becomes very easy.

You can confuse people about my ideologies, for example I said that there should be no marriage. And my statement is absolutely clear, that I want people to live out of love together, not out of law. Not because of the fear of society, not because of any respectability. But for the sheer fact that they love each other.

Now they can distort it, they have been distorting it. They call it free sex. I have never used the word myself. But the politicians, the priests the journalists, the whole establishment changes my beautiful concept into a single word, free sex.

And I don't know how free sex comes in it. Do they want that sex should be paid? That means they are all in favor of prostitution. That is the only sex that is not free.

And the sex that happens between wife and husband when they are no more in love is not free. The husband, thinking of his respectability. The wife is thinking of the family, of the children. These are the considerations. The sex is not free.

And these are all financial considerations. And there is no love. So in fact, in the name of law it is simply prostitution and nothing else. But they can, they have the power, they have approaches to the people, they can say anything and people start believing in it.

I have been condemned, I have been continuously saying that there is no God and I am not a God. A man who says there is no God, how can he say that he is God? Jesus cannot deny God, because if he denies God, what will happen to the only begotten son of God? The pope cannot deny God, because if God is denied, then what is the position of the pope? He is no more the infallible representative of the God.

I have been denying there is no God, I have been saying I am not a God. But the vested interests go on propagating that I am self-imposed God, self-appointed God. And that makes me laugh, that people listen to these things and they never ask who had appointed Rama to be God. Was he a elected God? Was there some election? Was there a board, a committee who interviewed him and appointed him a God? Who appointed prophet Mohammed that he is the prophet, and the real prophet and the last prophet of God? These categories they should apply to their own Gods. They are all self-appointed. It is Jesus who says, I am the only begotten son of God. It is Mohammed who says, I am his last prophet. It is Krishna who says that I am the full incarnation of God.

These are self-appointed Gods. I am saying, there is no God, and I am saying I am not a god at all. I am just a human being as you are, with a very little difference, that my eyes are open and my eyes are closed, which is not much of a difference. You can open your eyes the moment you decide; it is your decision. If you want to keep them closed, nothing can be done about it.

I have been explaining to them that the word Bhagwan does not mean God, because it has been used for Gautam Buddha, who denies the existence of God. It has been used for Mahavira, and twenty-three other Jaina tirthankaras who all deny God. But Bhagwan has been used for them. It is a historical proof.

Thousands of years are a testimony to it, that people who have denied god have been called Bhagwan. That certainly proved that Bhagwan cannot be synonymous with God. And it is not. It simply means "the blessed one;" it simply means "one who has arrived home." It means one who has achieved godliness, who has experienced this existence not as matter, but as consciousness. But I go on explaining for thirty years, and they go on still calling me self-imposed god.

All their gods are self-imposed; only I am not self-imposed because I am not calling myself God at all.

This is the gullibility of the people. And it is same all over the world. And my effort is to destroy it. The gullibility has been supported by faith, by belief; all the religions of the world have been telling you that you simply believe. You have faith. All that you have to do is destroy doubt. This is the way of gullibility. The moment your doubt dies, your intelligence dies with it.

A believer is always a blind person. A man who has faith is no more a human being. He has lost inquiry, seeking, finding, on his own. And truth is something that can only be discovered by individuals. And it is untransferable. Even if you discover it, you cannot explain what it is. It is beyond knowledge. And you cannot give it to somebody, because it is not a thing. All that you can do is, show the path that you have traveled. Hence, Buddha was very rational when he said that, "What I teach is not a faith; it is a way." I can guarantee that I have found it; but I will not say to you that "You believe me." I guarantee only so that you are inspired to inquire. If one man can find, you can also find it.

And the purpose of the commune is, where many people are on different stages of the path, you can see people behind you, you can see people ahead of you, you can see people far away on the peaks, you know that you are not groping in the dark. The people who is just a feet ahead of you can help you. The person who is just a feet behind you, you can give him a hand.

That's why I call sannyasins are not my followers, but my fellow travellers. It is a communion of friends, who have joined in a search which reveals the ultimate joy, ultimate life, ultimate blissfulness. But the basic thing is that you should not believe, you should not have any faith. It sounds strange, because for thousands of years, doubt has been condemned. And I respect doubt as I respect nothing.

Doubt is not something negative. Doubt is not disbelief. It is not "no". Doubt simply means, I am yet on the way, not in a position to say yes, not in a position to say no. And I will not say yes or no until I have arrived, until it is my own experience.

Doubt is a tremendous courage. One wants to say yes too soon, to finish the journey. One wants to say no too soon, not even to go on the journey. Doubt is the basis of agnosticism, and I am an agnostic. Agnostic means who says, "I am seeking, I am searching. And unless I experience, I am not going to say yes or no.

I am not going to have any belief, or any disbelief. I will remain open. And that is the most difficult thing in the world, to remain open. And truth comes only to open-hearted people. Truth never comes to Hindus, truth never comes to Christians. Truth comes only to those who don't have any conditionings. Because only then truth can reveal itself in its all purity.

I teach doubt, and that is being exploited by the vested interests, that I am making people irreligious, that I am destroying their faith. I am simply trying to make them seekers again, to give them life, energy, inspiration, to encourage them that you are capable to know yourself. Why you should borrow a truth from Krishna or Christ? They never borrowed their truth from anybody.

This is such a simple thing. Buddha never borrowed his truth from anybody.

Mahavir never borrowed his truth from anybody. Why you should borrow? Why you become a second class citizen? Why can't you declare your humanity first class? Why you should purchase second class rotten truths, which have moved through thousands of hands?

You should be yourself.

And this is the danger for the establishment. They don't want anybody to be himself. They decide what you should be; so you are always in control. And I want you always to be independent, never in control in anyway. They want you to be obedient and I teach you disobedience. You are intelligent enough; you can see what is right and what is wrong. If something is right, obey. But you are obeying your own intelligence. And if something is not right, disobey. Because your intelligence is not supporting it.

They confuse people about these things. They say that I am teaching doubt, disobedience, rebellion, revolution; this will destroy the whole society. I am teaching that there should be no marriage. I am teaching that the children should belong to the commune, that will destroy the whole family which has been for centuries the unit of the society. And I am hammering on the unit, because that is the only way to destroy this society. The family is the brick. If we can destroy the family, the society will collapse. And this society needs to collapse, because it has tortured us for thousands of years. It is time for a new human being and a new humanity to arise. And we have lived with it, and we have not found anything. It is time to experiment something new. They don't have any idea for anything new.

Perhaps I am the only person who is talking about the new man, about the new humanity. That's why I am against all those people who are conditioned by the old society, the old religion, old concepts. But one thing is certain, that they may postpone the new man a little more, but they cannot stop it. Because the old humanity is almost dead. It cannot dance, it cannot laugh, it has forgotten how to live. It simply vegetates. So I know that they can distort my vision, and present to people absolutely wrong notions about me. But this they cannot do long. Soon I will have thousands of intelligent people around the world, speaking for me, and my only hope is, the young generation. And it is getting ready.

(Tape side B) Sannyas was simply to make a point to the world, that I am not alone. You cannot crush me. If you crush me remember, there are one million sannysins around. You crucified Jesus. He had only twelve disciples, and all idiots. I have one million people with me, and all the best, the most intelligent people. Crucify me, and you will see that the whole world turns towards me.

But even if they don't crucify me, what I am proposing is so clear, so rational, that they cannot deceive people long enough. They may be able to deceive the old people, but they cannot deceive the intelligent people and the young people.

And because I have made the point, now I have opened sannyas for people, even if they don't want to wear red, or the mala, still they can be sannyasins, because there were so many sympathizers just afraid of the red because of their job, their wife, their husband, their parents. And so many problems. Just for these problems, why wait? Come in the temple, where you will see one million red- robed sannyasins. And that will be enough for you to become red sooner or later.

Otherwise you will feel an outsider; and nobody likes to feel outsider. Everybody wants to be an insider; to be in the very innermost circle.

So I have opened the doors, so that people can enter with the idea that now there is no need for mala and no need for red. But they don't know me and my devices.

Once they are inside, they will start feeling jealous of people who have the red and who have the mala. And soon they will be asking for the mala and for the red.

If we can create just two hundred enlightened people, which is not a big number, we can change the whole map of humanity. No power can prevent us.

Q: YOU HAVE MENTIONED THIS NUMBER BEFORE, TWO HUNDRED ENLIGHTENED PEOPLE WHICH WOULD CHANGE THE MAP(*) OF THE WORLD. I WOULD LIKE YOU TO SAY MORE ABOUT THIS (INAUDIBLE). IN OTHER WORDS, YOU THINK THAT TWO HUNDRED ENLIGHTENED PERSONS WILL CHANGE THE PROPORTION BETWEEN NEGATIVE ENERGY AND POSITIVE ENERGY IN THE WORLD? OR WHAT?

A: Man's consciousness has to be understood. We are at a point which can be called conscious. Sigmund Freud discovered below it another layer, which he called unconscious. Carl Gustav Jung a little deeper than unconscious another layer which is collective unconscious. And each was vaster than the other. Our conscious is only one tenth of the unconscious. Our unconscious perhaps may be hundred times smaller than the collective unconscious. Jung stopped there, but in the Eastern psychology we have gone a little further. We have discovered beyond the collective unconscious the rock bottom, cosmic unconscious.

The collective unconscious contains all kinds of consciousnesses; animals, birds, trees. All that is living. And all that you have passed somehow in your past lives, your whole evolution. The unconscious carries only your individual unconscious. But the cosmic unconscious carries the unconscious of the whole cosmos, the whole existence. But these are the steps below your conscious mind, going deeper and deeper underground into the roots. And no tree lives just by roots. Exactly the same is the situation above, which western psychology is absolutely unaware.

The Eastern psychology has discovered going above the conscious there is superconscious. Above the superconscious there is collective superconscious and above the collective superconscious is the cosmic superconscious. Cosmic superconscious is what we mean by enlightenment, to achieve it, to reach to it.

As a man moves from conscious to the superconscious, it is not only his consciousness that goes higher; the whole level of humanity goes a little higher - of course very thin, because it is spread on such a vast scale. Whatever we see in humanity today is not the work of the masses. It is the work of few individuals who have reached higher levels of consciousness.

As a person reaches to collective superconscious, he raises waves around the whole world. And the person who reaches to the cosmic superconscious, you can call it enlightenment, illumination, godliness; this height immediately affects the whole consciousness of humanity. Of course, the humanity is so big that everybody does not become enlightened. But perhaps everybody starts moving towards superconscious, and those who are seeking and searching may start moving towards collective superconscious.

When I say two hundred enlightened people are enough to raise the whole world consciousness as a sudden and radical change - that their consciousnesses suddenly start going higher, of which they were not aware; things they have not seen, they have not dreamed, clarities that were not available to them; and their stupidities, conditionings, they stop carrying any longer. They drop them immediately. The clarity has come and they can see that they have been carrying unnecessary burden.

This is how it works: two hundred enlightened people will be enough to raise the consciousness of humanity, at least fully to the superconscious level. And that's enough to prevent war, to prevent violence, to prevent all kinds of crimes, to prevent all kinds of prejudices - not that the whole humanity will become enlightened, but moving from conscious to superconscious is not a small change.

It is of tremendous value, it is ten times more powerful than your conscious. If you can see only hundred feet, suddenly you can see thousand feet, suddenly your eyes have become a source of seeing things in their clarity, in their depth.

The experiment has been tried before also, but has never succeeded. The reason was that the world was too big. We are in a good situation. Technology has reduced the world into a very small village. Buddha never left Bihar, a small province in North India. Even if he wanted to, there was no way. Socrates never left Athens. The world has become small because now we have technology, which makes the whole world, as far as space is concerned, very close. You can have your breakfast in London, and your lunch in Paris, and your tea somewhere in Bombay, and your supper in Calcutta. And you can go to sleep in Tokyo and you can wake up in New York. In twenty-four hours you can go round the world.

Because the world has become small, it is possible now to do what was not possible before. Buddha tried, he managed at least one dozen people to become enlightened, but they could affect only the consciousness in a small area of the world. It is as if you burn one candle in the room. You can burn ten candles in the room; the room will be a little more lighted, but the whole world will not be affected by it. The candles are needed to be around the world, and my sannyasins have to become torches, not just candles. And if we can create - and we can create - in every country now we have sannyasins, even in communist countries, we can manage. Two hundred is just the minimum number; more is possible. And these people, just by their very presence, will raise the whole conscious level of humanity; will give them clarity, vision, insight, and will make them capable of dropping all nonsense that they have been carrying up to now.

Then the politicians cannot exploit them, neither the priests can exploit them. All their gullibility will disappear.

And these enlightened people have nothing to do, just their presence is a catalytic agent. Just as the sun rises and birds start singing and the flowers start opening and spreading their fragrance, whenever there is an enlightened being birds start singing, flowers start opening, and there is great fragrance released.

Q: IT SEEMS THAT WHEREVER YOU GO, YOU SHOW PARTICULAR TALENT TO PROVOKE AND TO IRRITATE PEOPLE. WHY DO YOU DO THAT?

A: It is absolutely necessary. Life is a dialectic. If you want friends, create enemies, otherwise you can't have friends. If you want people to understand you, irritate few people to misunderstand you. They are part of my work. They may not know it, that they are helping my work. I can be nice to all, but then there will be no work possible. It is not difficult for me to be nice to all. It will give me respectability, but the work will suffer, and I am ready to sacrifice all my respectability to the work.

And you can see it. I have created enemies in the world; I have created friends in the world. Stronger the enemies become, stronger my friends become. You cannot have only friends, otherwise they will be just lousy; they will not be of any use. They will not be ready to do and die.

Just in America when they caught me, I provoked them. They are innocent, they don't know that they played the game that I had proposed; that they have been befooled, that they could not ignore me - if they had ignored, they would have been in a better position. But I went on hammering on them, and finally they freaked out. And that's what I wanted; their freaking out and my being in jail for twelve days, I gathered the whole sympathy of America. People who had never known me started thinking about me, why the government is so much against a single individual? What he has done? There must be something great that the government is afraid, that the government wants to repress it. The government must have been thinking that they will get sympathy because they are throwing away a commune which is basically a higher quality of communism. But they were wrong.

People out of their way came to tell me that, "We are with you, Bhagwan," that "It may take time, but you will be victorious. And these are simple people, criminals in the jail, who don't know much about me, just they have seen me on the television. And they were so happy, that they said that, "It doesn't feel like jail anymore. It is a blessing to be with you for two days. When you are gone, we will miss you."

I have not come across a single person in those twelve days who was not sympathetic, who could not see the cruelty and the ugliness and inhumanity of their own government. It is simply my strategy. I irritate a few people, which I am bound to irritate because whatever I am going to say is going to be against the vested interests of many people - they will be irritated. But their irritation creates the movement. And life has a law of balance. It always balances everything.

So if I have enemies, I know soon friends will be coming. And enemies have never done anything. What happened to the enemies of Buddha? What happened to the enemies of Jesus Christ? What happened to the enemies of Socrates - you cannot even remember their names. Enemy disappears, but the friends and their worth remains an implement of humanity for centuries. So there is no need to be worried about the enemy. His work is to create the friend.

That's all. And more fanatic he is, more staunch friends he will create.

This is the dialectics of consciousness - that's how the mind functions. The enemies may sometimes think that they are doing harm. When they sentenced Socrates to death by poisoning, the judge said to Socrates that, "I would like to give you few alternatives. If you can leave Athens, we will not kill you, but you will have to make a promise not to come back to Athens. Second, if you insist to live in Athens, then you have to promise that you will not teach anything anymore to people. You will remain silent. Otherwise we are compelled to give you poison."

Socrates said, "As long as I am alive, I will teach my truth. Otherwise, what is the point of living. I have lived my whole life in Athens; I have my friends and my enemies in Athens. Now at this old age, to create again everything from the scratch, seems too much. I cannot leave Athens. And I would like to tell you that Athens will be remembered by my name, not by your name. If I leave Athens, Athens is out of history. I cannot do that. Athens has been so beautiful to me, so I prefer the third. I will take the poison. But remember, Athens will always be associated with my name, with my philosophy.

And all have disappeared. Whenever you think of Athens, there is only Socrates; as if only he had lived there. And his philosophy; as if only he was the philosopher who taught there. So enemies cannot do anything, even if they kill they help. It was possible that if Socrates was not given poison, and the people had ignored him, we may not have remembered him; we may have forgotten him. But his death became a mark that cannot be erased.

So enemies can do no harm; even while they are thinking they are doing harm, they are serving the purpose. And the death of Socrates meant his friends became strongly consolidated. They carried the school and the teaching in Athens. Plato became the teacher, who was the most loved disciple of Socrates.

And the school continued. After Plato, Aristotle became the head, who was the most loved disciple of Plato. And these three men, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, that's the whole population of Athens.

There have been millions of people, they are all washed away. They were just signatures on the sand; but these three people have remained. And they have influenced all the centuries down, even today.

Okay.