My vision is of the whole

Question 1:

The history of the world has been like a pendulum. It has never been the whole world progressing together in all the dimensions of life. At the time of Gautam Buddha, the East was at the very peak of its glory, richness, wisdom, and the West was still barbarian. There was no progress, no evolution.

After Buddha, the East started declining and the West started progressing. Just at the beginning of this century the West was at the peak and the East was just a poverty-stricken, uneducated, uncultured, backward section of the world.

It is possible that the East may again rise and the West may decline. But it is not my vision, it is simply the historical mechanics of a pendulum. My vision is of the whole - neither of the East nor of the West - because every growth of the part is bound to create a very monstrous situation.

For example, half of your body grows, and the other half remains retarded - it won't be a very comfortable, restful, beautiful situation. And it can be changed: the other half can start to grow, and the first half starts declining.

The mechanics of economic power, richness, have to be understood. Whenever a country becomes very rich, a few significant things happen. One, it loses interest in richness - obviously. It has it. The whole interest of the mind is in the longing, in the tomorrow. Whatever you have got, the tendency is to forget all about it. You see only things which you don't have; you don't see things that you have.

So a poor country thinks about riches; a rich country starts forgetting about riches. And it seems psychologically valid too - that when you have it, what is the need to think about it?

So the first thing: whenever any section of the world becomes economically dominant, it starts losing interest in the very power for which it was striving for centuries. And secondly, the moment a section of humanity becomes very rich, dominant over the other sections of the world, it starts feeling empty, because now the old longing is no longer there, and man cannot live without a longing. Man cannot live without a hope. Man cannot live without tomorrow.

I am not counting the awakened ones; I am talking about the common man. To live he needs desire, longing, future. His eyes have to be fixed on a faraway star. But when you are standing on it, all around there is darkness. You have achieved it. And the greatest failure in the world is to be victorious, because at that moment you understand that you have been chasing a shadow. By being victorious you have not gained anything.

So the moment a section of the world - and it has been this way up to now - the eastern hemisphere or the western hemisphere, whichever becomes rich, comes to a point which is the dead end of the road, it starts thinking of things it has never dreamed about.

The riches, the wealth, the power, have deceived... they were looking so beautiful from far away, but as you came closer you found out it is not so. The oasis was only an appearance. It had no existence. It was an hallucination created by your thirst, by your longing, by your desire.

Then the mind turns one hundred and eighty degrees. It becomes antagonistic to the same things for which it has lived up to now. It starts thinking of renouncing the world, renouncing the riches, renouncing desire, living a simple life - a life of silence, a life of meditation - and forgetting all about this nonsense.

This had happened in Buddha's time in the East. The East was known as a golden bird - and it was; otherwise it would have been impossible for thousands of sannyasins of different denominations to live just by begging. If the country was poor, who was going to give these people food, clothes, shelter? And they were there in thousands. Buddha alone moved with ten thousand sannyasins.

Mahavira moved with ten thousand sannyasins. There were eight teachers in the small state of Bihar alone, and they all had thousands of followers. They all had come from royal families - disgusted, disillusioned, disappointed.

Naturally, they were so much against wealth, against comfort, against luxury, they forgot completely that they were not being objective; these are subjective reactions. You had hoped for much and found nothing. That does not mean that comfort is useless. It simply means you have asked too much - something which is not in the power of comfort to supply to you. You had asked too much - something which money cannot give to you. You were thinking that when you have all the money you will relax, you will enjoy. But the way it works is that while you were earning money, you were also earning tensions, side by side.

As you were progressing towards your goal of desire, you were becoming more and more tense, more and more violent. At any cost, the goal has to be achieved. Even if the means are not good, it doesn't matter; the goal has to be achieved. You did everything right or wrong to reach to your goal, hoping that after that you will be able to relax in silence, in peace, and you will have a meditative life.

But you miscalculated.

You do not understand the arithmetic of life. For sixty years a person runs after desires, remains tense, dreams of wealth, thinks only of wealth, and then suddenly at sixty he has achieved it, but the mind has learned a habit. Sixty years is a long time. You may have achieved the wealth, but the mind goes on playing the old game, the old routine, the old dreams. And you don't know how to get rid of them - those mental agonies have been created by your desire for wealth, desire for a beautiful woman, desire for a beautiful house - so you turn bitter. It is a reactionary attitude; you react. You think that it is because of those things that you are caught up in a tense life and you are not able to get out of it.

Your mind says, "Renounce all this." It is the same mind who has been telling you all these years, "Achieve, achieve more." Now that achievement has happened, the mind gives you a new clue, "Abandon all this. Renounce the world, renounce its wealth, renounce its comforts; become a renunciate." That was the old meaning of sannyas.

And when kings and their sons stepped down from their thrones and became beggars - thinking that if it is not at one end, richness, then it must be at the other end, poverty - poverty became something spiritual. This is how the East started declining, because when poverty becomes spiritual then nobody bothers about creating more wealth, better technology. People started becoming more and more poor. The last step was to become a beggar, and the beggar was not an ordinary beggar:

he had renounced his throne, he had become a beggar by choice. It was not out of compulsion. It was not because of the circumstances, it was his reaction.

I call all the religions of the world reactionary; they just move from one polarity to another. So in India at the time of Gautam Buddha... that is twenty-five centuries ago, the East was rich, the West was poor.

The East was well-cultured. You will be surprised to know that the printing press was invented in China three thousand years ago. Currency notes have been used in China for four thousand years. When Marco Polo came back with currency notes and other things to show to the pope and to the kings of Europe, saying, "We are lagging far behind; the Chinese think the Western people barbarous," do you know what the pope did? He took a note and burned it, and said, "Do you say this is money?" And then he brought out a silver coin and dropped it on the floor, making a sound, and said, "This is money. So who is barbarous?"

Marco Polo said, "You don't understand their logic. How many golden or silver coins can you carry with you? It is only possible if the country is poor that you can have gold and silver coins. But when people are carrying millions of dollars, they cannot carry gold coins."

And four thousand years ago, China conceiving currency notes... it must have been a rich, very rich, country, because poor countries cannot even think of it. The poor man will think that it has to be a gold coin, because he does not understand the whole meaning of money. The meaning of money is the exchange value. What does it matter whether it is gold or paper? If it serves for the exchange of things, it is money.

And the notes that have survived from four thousand years ago are exactly the same as the notes that you have: the best paper, the best printing, with the promise of the emperor. They are promissory notes - that if you want, you can come to the treasury and exchange the notes for gold coins. So you need not be worried that you are just being taken for a ride - instead of real gold, you are being given paper notes. The treasury was there, and the treasury had to keep exactly the same amount of gold and silver as the notes they had issued. So anybody, anytime, could take gold or silver - whatever he wanted. Then people became satisfied: "There is no problem; these are promissory notes."

The pope behaved like an idiot by burning the note. That was his argument. He thought that this is absolute proof that this is not money. Real money is a silver coin or a gold coin.

Marco Polo tried to say, "First I was also amazed - paper money? But when I understood their idea I was amazed. Those people are really far advanced. There is no need for anybody to carry a load of gold - which is dangerous - when you can carry a small note in your pocket and nobody will know."

Everybody in the court of the pope laughed at Marco Polo. They thought, "He is a fool. He thinks they are culturally ahead of us."

He said, "I absolutely know they are" - and he produced a printed book, three thousand years old.

In the West printing happened only three hundred years ago. And printing in Chinese is very difficult because it is nonalphabetical. Printing in any other language is a simple phenomenon. Still, three thousand years ago they had printing presses.

In Indian scriptures there are descriptions, detailed descriptions, of airplanes and the description of something that looks like atomic bombs. Perhaps atomic bombs were used five thousand years ago in the Mahabharata war, the great Indian war. After that there has been no Indian war. The experience was so horrible that India became antiwar, antiviolence. It cannot happen out of the blue that only India has developed the philosophy of nonviolence. Things are interconnected. It cannot be that you just start developing a philosophy... unless it has some roots somewhere.

India suffered so much in the great Indian war that it was necessary to develop a philosophy and a way of living which excluded war completely, even violence, completely.

Gautam Buddha and Mahavira, who are both great teachers of nonviolence, were both born as princes in warrior families and were trained as warriors, but seeing what had happened to the great warriors in the past, they turned to the opposite.

Man's mind never stops in the middle - either to the far east or to the far west - in the middle is death because whenever a pendulum stops in the middle, the clock stops too. The pendulum goes on moving from one extreme to the other - that is the way the clock works. It gives momentum to the mechanism.

In the whole world, nobody has developed a philosophy of nonviolence to such an extreme. That is a proof to me that these people must have experienced an extreme violence; otherwise their philosophy is impossible.

Mahavira sleeps in the night only on one side; he does not change sides. And he sleeps on the floor, on a bare stone floor. He does not use any comfort, and he even does not allow himself to change his position in the night. His idea is that some ants, some insects, may have crawled there, and if he moves they will be killed. So it is better to remain in the same place which he has cleaned; then he knows that nobody is killed.

Jaina monks carry a small broom, a strange kind of broom. It is made of very soft wool, so whenever they sit anywhere... They don't have anything else, just the broom; that is the most important thing for them. Wherever they sit, first they clean the place with the soft wool which cannot kill any insect - and only then will they sit. In the night they clean the place with that soft broom, and then they go to sleep.

Now such extremes... In the night they will not eat. Electricity was not available, and in the dark any insect could fall into the food, and unknowingly you may kill or eat the insect. In the night they will not drink - even in the hottest summer. These are extremes. Mahavira will not take a bath, will not brush his teeth, for the simple reason that taking a bath... the water has very tiny living cells and they will be killed. And the saliva and the teeth - they have tiny, living cells which will be killed.

Now this extreme nonviolence is possible only if a person has experienced something like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there are detailed descriptions of what happened in the great Indian war - how many million people died, what kind of weapons were used - only the names are different, but you can figure out which weapon is parallel to some other weapon we have today.

In Gautam Buddha's time the East had reached to the very peak, and the decline began - because after the peak, where are you going to go? You cannot stop. Life knows no stopping except in death, so when you have come to the peak you naturally start descending. And you philosophize it. You say, "Because all these riches have not given anything - they are all empty, they are allurements which distract people from their real search - so disown them, renounce them." Those people became beggars.

And when the geniuses of the country become beggars, then the mediocre people can simply worship them. The wealth, the technology, and everything is created by a few geniuses. The whole society is enriched - that's another thing - but the whole society does not participate in creating, in inventing. And when the genius has come to a point that it is useless... The whole East became filled with an idea that is anti-comfort, anti-life - it has to be, because all desires have to be dropped; only then will you find peace.

The natural result was poverty and starvation. And the Eastern mind managed to explain away that poverty, that starvation: all these are tests to see how deep is your renunciation.

They dropped all training for warriors. They stopped manufacturing all kinds of arms. This was the fetter that for two thousand years... Small tribes came and invaded India; there was no resistance.

They came, they looted and they went away - and this went on for two thousand years. And India did not resist; naturally it was becoming poorer and poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the West was on the other end; it was poor...

You can see the fact - nobody takes note of simple things - that in India all the religious founders are kings: Rama, Krishna, Mahavira, Buddha. They are all either kings or they were going to be kings after their father's death. In the West, all the religions - the three religions - are not founded by any king. They are founded by poor people, and when a poor person is founding a religion it cannot be the same as the rich man's religion. Christ is a poor man - uneducated. He cannot be compared with Gautam Buddha in any way. Mohammed is uneducated. He cannot be compared with Buddha in any way. Moses is not a king.

The whole West was poor. But when the East became nonviolent, invading the East became easy, without any difficulty. They were almost inviting you to invade them, because they had dropped all kinds of security. All the Eastern countries sooner or later came under Western countries, under their empires. And the West exploited the whole East to the last drop of blood. And on that exploitation it managed to create its own wealth, its manufacturing factories.

In Dacca, which is now the capital of Bangladesh, there was a centuries-old art. They made the thinnest material for making clothes so when it was hot summer you were almost without clothes, it was so thin. And it was all made by hand. When Britain started producing cloth in Lancashire, the man could not compete with the machine. And it is an ugly chapter in history that thousands of people's hands were cut off by Britain. Those artists who could produce finer material than their mills could produce in England... their hands had to be cut off so the market had no competition.

The West started rising, and new factors added to the rise of the West. One was science.

Christianity, or as we go deeper, Judaism, is responsible for many things. It was Judaism who gave the idea of prophets to the world. In the East there was no idea of prophets or messiahs or saviors.

It was because of this idea... but remember, this kind of idea can exist only in a poor society. In India there are now enough Christians; their number is the third greatest majority. First is Hindu, second is Mohammedan, third is Christian - but they all are from the poorest of the poor.

A rich man does not need a savior or a prophet.

In India, the idea has never appeared. In India there was a totally different idea, and that was the incarnation of God. And you will be surprised... the word for "God" in India is ishwar - the word ishwar comes from a Sanskrit root, aishwarya, and aishwarya means luxury - the most luxurious one. God has to be the most luxurious one, at the very top. Everything is his, so his name is ishwar - the most luxurious one. He comes down once in a while. He does not send messengers. He does not send prophets and saviors - he himself comes down. It is a rich world, and he is the richest man in that world. There is a certain similarity; in the East man and God are different only in degrees. So he himself comes. God may have more - man may not have that much - but he cannot pretend to be a savior.

In the West, Judaism gave the idea of the savior, of the messenger, of the prophet. That has to be understood in its roots. That means the society is so poor that to conceive of God's incarnation is not possible. The society is so poor that at the most a messenger can be sent to it; it needs a savior, a prophet. But these are all to give solace to the poor man.

Jesus could have never become what he became in the West if he had been born in the East. All the avataras were from the royal families; they had to be. It was a rich society. Who would have listened to a carpenter's son? People would have simply laughed. "Has God gone crazy! There are great kings, great scholars, great seers - and he has chosen a carpenter's son to be his only begotten son!" The very idea would not have been possible, but in the West it was possible.

The West was poor in those days, really poor. It needed solace, and it was easier for the West to accept a poor man because he belonged to them. Christianity became the biggest religion in the world because Jesus was a poor man. If he was not a poor man, Christianity would not have become the greatest religion... it is impossible.

Christianity spread the gospel of the blessedness of those who are poor, those who are meek, those who are humble, those who are downtrodden. And it had appeal because that was the major part of the society.

After Jesus the second most important man is Karl Marx, who is also a Jew, just as Jesus is a Jew.

He carries the same idea further without knowing it, to its logical end. He cannot accept a God for the simple reason that if there is a God then the world should not be poor, then people should not be exploited. "What does God go on doing? He should prevent it." His rejection of God is because the world is so poor that we cannot afford a God.

India was so rich in the old times that they could afford thirty-three million gods - that was the population of India, so why be miserly? One god for every man! But Marx could not accept even a single God, because his very existence is contradictory to the poverty and exploitation in the world.

If God cannot do anything for the poor, then he may as well not exist; it doesn't matter whether he is or he is not.

Marx went further, saying that the small group of rich people should not remain rich; their riches should be distributed to the poor. And he knew perfectly well - anybody can understand it - that you can distribute the riches of the few people to the poor, but you cannot make, in that way, the whole society rich. But he was simply angry. His father was a rabbi. They lived in poverty, and he could see that even his father, who was a simple and humble man serving God, had to suffer poverty.

Richness cannot be allowed to a few people, even if it means only distributing poverty equally.

And you will be amazed - these are amazing facts - that just as Christianity became the biggest religion, communism became the biggest political ideology. Just as Christianity is almost half of humanity, the remaining half is communist. Both are offshoots of Judaism.

Because of this immense poverty, the West became more and more violent in conquering those people who were enjoying riches. And all the Western countries - England, Spain, Portugal, France - spread their empires all over the world and sucked as much as is possible, so all the money gathered in the Western capitals.

And this was the time when a new factor appeared - which always comes with riches - and that was science. When you have riches your physical needs are fulfilled; then your mind starts enquiring about objects, the objective world. And three hundred years ago, when science was born, it multiplied the riches of the West.

It has to be noted that the church was against science, and it tried to prevent, on every step, science from growing. This has some significance, and the significance is that if science and technology grow, poverty will disappear - and the church depends on the poor. In fact, "Blessed is the church if the whole world is poor" - because the rich person, the rich society, is beyond the church's power.

Only the poor man wants a savior God. Here, he is poor; he wants at least to guarantee that in the afterlife he will be allowed into paradise. And it gives real consolation that only the poor will enter into paradise. Riches you can enjoy here, but these same riches will make you fall into the eternal darkness of hell.

The church was basically against science, but science is an enquiry into truth. It was difficult, with the church obstructing it on every inch, but still science overcame, and now the West is in a condition to think of meditation, to think of peace for the soul, to think of eternal life. It can turn its eyes from the object to the subject - and that will be the beginning of the decline of riches, of power. And that has started in a way. That's why you see that Japan and other small Asian countries have tremendous power, riches, technological expertise, and the per capita income of Japan has gone higher than the United States.

It is a very symbolic fact. It may carry far-reaching effects. And what is happening in Japan will spread into other Far Eastern countries. Now the whole East is tired of poverty, is tired of religion. It wants science, it wants technology. From the East, the talented students come to the West, to the universities, to learn medicine, engineering, electronics, and all kinds of technical subjects.

It was an amazing experience that well-known Western doctors, engineers, electronics people and other technical experts were coming to me in India for meditation. Naturally they had friends in India, colleagues they had studied with in Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard, and their Indian colleagues were simply amazed, because they had never thought about meditation. They discouraged these people, saying, "What are you bothering about? You are successful professionally; you should put your energy into your profession, rather than wandering in search of your soul. Nobody has seen it, nobody knows about it... whether it exists or not. Don't waste your time."

And these people told me, "This is strange... we come from far away to understand meditation but our friends here have always insistently discouraged us."

The West, as it becomes more and more meditative - if it goes in the old way, not the way I am proposing - will become poor; it is the natural consequence if it goes the old way, the way the East has followed. If it follows the old way... then renounce the world, take the vow of celibacy, move into a monastery, become a beggar. And all these things have nothing to do with your spiritual growth; it is just a mechanical shift.

In India, one of the doctors who used to take care of me before Devaraj came, never stayed with me more than two or three minutes. And Vivek used to be surprised... because he would come, and he was in such a hurry - almost nervous, perspiring, in an air-conditioned room. It looked as if I was the doctor and he was the patient! And he would ask a few questions and he would say, "I will go out and I will give the prescription to Vivek." And then he would almost run out of the room.

He never came to any lectures, he never came to any celebrations, although he promised many times, saying that his wife wants to come, so maybe this time he is going to come on the celebration day. But they never appeared.

And Vivek used to ask me, "What is the matter? Why is he so nervous?"

I said, "You don't understand: he is a very successful doctor, the topmost in the city, and he is afraid not to get in any way impressed by me, hypnotized or something. He does not want to get involved in any way except as my physician, and even that was only because it added to his qualifications that he was my personal physician." But he would almost escape - he could not even walk, he would almost run and jump out of the room - and Vivek had to follow him into another room, and there he would write the prescription or anything that he wanted to instruct her about.

The fear was that it is dangerous... One of his friends, Ajit Saraswati, was my sannyasin. They were colleagues and they had studied together; both had studied in the West. And then Ajit specialized in gynecology, and finally he became a sannyasin. He used to tell the doctor, "You need not be afraid - nobody is made a sannyasin forcibly. You can at least come to listen to what is happening there or come to see what is happening in a meditation there."

But to Ajit Saraswati he said, "I am simply afraid. I am at the top of my profession. I am earning well.

My children are getting educated, and I don't want to disturb things. Everything is going so good that I don't want to get into anything that can distract me, and Osho is dangerous: he can distract me. He can pull me into meditation and into sannyas."

In India he never brought his wife to see me. She wanted to see me. He brought her to see me in America - just for one day - because here there was not so much fear. Nobody would know in the city that his wife has also been going to the dangerous man. He came to America, but here also he was the same. Just for one and a half minutes at the most... and he was satisfied that his wife had seen me. But I stopped my car on the afternoon ride, so he had to come close, and I could see his fear. He introduced his wife, and I said, "It would be good... you have come from so far. Just to stay here for one day is not right; be here for a few days."

He said, "I will come next time; this time I am so much preoccupied with other things. But I will come.

One day I will come." But the way he was saying it was as if it is something dangerous, that one day he will have to come!

In India, people are interested in riches, technology, more factories, but I don't see people interested in meditation or in spiritual growth. Twenty-five centuries of poverty have erased the whole idea of spiritual growth. They want to be rich, they want to be a dominant country in the world. So what is happening is simply the movement of the pendulum.

Rudyard Kipling, one of the most famous British poets, has said, "East is East and West is West..."

There is no need to say it. But he had lived in India - he was the British Empire's court poet - and he was emphasizing it: "East is East, West is West, and never the twain shall meet." His lines have become very famous, but I want to say that even though it has been so in the past, it should not be so in the future.

You are asking about my work and this changing situation. No, I will not be happy with this, that the West becomes poor and the East becomes rich. It does not make any difference whether the West is rich and the East is poor, or the East is rich and the West is poor: man remains half.

I want the whole world to be rich.

I want once and for all to get rid of the idea of East and West.

In my vision the whole world is one.

We should stop this pendulum. And the only way to stop this pendulum is to spread meditation to the West - but don't forget the East. Spread meditation to the East too, because that can be the only common joining factor: spiritual growth. Otherwise they will go on moving like night and day for eternity.

And as I see it, half of the world in some way represents half of man. If the old way is followed then the same split will continue, and the same changes. But I am talking about Zorba the Buddha. I am talking about a world, a man, who is meditative but who is not against riches, who is for spiritual growth but who does not think poverty is spirituality. Poverty is simply poverty. And if you can have both worlds together, why not have both worlds together? Why choose?

I have lived in comfort - I have never done anything in my life - but that has not disturbed my meditation. So when I say it, I say it with authority: you can live in comfort and in meditation.

Meditation is inner comfort, and comfort is outer meditation. Let them become one. A man perfectly fulfilled outside and perfectly fulfilled inside will be the total man, and less than the total man is not going to be of much help for more evolution of humanity.

Question 2:

It is not a question of being the ultimate actor; I am always total in everything. Whatever I am doing is total, but for you many things may not seem to be total because you don't have any experience of them.

But laughter is in some way unique; when you laugh, you are also total in it. A laughter which is not total will be phony, a pretension, just a performance. So when you laugh, you also laugh totally.

That is the only act you do totally - so you know that laughter is total. If you see me laughing, it is a natural conclusion that it is a total act, because it corresponds with your experience.

You cannot laugh partially. Try, and you will fail. You can laugh only totally. That is a unique quality about laughter. That's why I had made a meditation of it - because of its unique quality: in laughter you are total without anyone saying to you, "Be total."

You can cry without being total. Tears can come to your eyes without being total, but a full laugh...

for a moment you forget to be partial. The laughter takes you completely, all over. It is not only that you are laughing, you become the laughter.

Because of your own small experience, if I laugh you naturally can conclude that this act is total.

Every act is total - but that is not your experience, so you can only assume that it may be total; you cannot be absolutely certain of its totality.

Laughter certainly is very special. Your whole body laughs. Each atom, each cell of your body laughs, participates in it.

I have always been against seriousness. I have never compared them, but you can see why I am against seriousness. Seriousness can never be total. It is always partial, the very other extreme of laughter. It goes on becoming narrower and narrower and narrower. The more serious you are, the more narrow you become. The more you go towards laughter, the more wide and the more open, the more vulnerable, the more total, you become.

Laughter has something religious.

Seriousness is sick and irreligious.

So remember that whenever you feel something in me, try to find out... There must be some parallel in your experience; that's why you are coming to a certain conclusion.

If people could laugh totally every day for at least one hour, without any reason, they would not need any other meditation. That would be enough, because while you are laughing you cannot think.

While you are laughing you cannot be in the past, you cannot be in the future: you have to be here now. Laughter can open a door to the ultimate.