Question – Why does Man need God?

Osho – It is out of fear. God is not needed at all. Man has lived in so much fear that he has needed some protection. There was fear of disease, there was fear of death — mostly it is death that makes man so afraid. He needs somebody who is beyond death to protect him.

God is not a discovery, it is an invention. Priests found it very convenient to exploit in the name of God. The Vedas say that they are written by God, and there are such stupid things in the old Vedas that if God has written them, then God is condemned along with the Vedas.

Christians say The Bible is written by God, and if The Bible is written by God — there are at least five hundred pages of sheer pornography in The Bible — then God is the greatest pornographer in the whole existence. If you look in the Hindu PURANAS you will find just pornography. Hindus have even made shivalinga a god. It is good that Sigmund Freud never came to know about shivalinga — that there are people who are worshipping phallic symbols in their temples without any idea what they are worshipping.

There is no God. All the arguments for God are refuted. Those who have really reached to the highest point of consciousness have never accepted the idea of God. Patanjali, the man who single-handedly created the whole science of Yoga, does not believe in God. Buddha, perhaps the greatest man who has ever walked on the earth was, as H.G Wells wrote about him, “the most godless person yet the most godly.”

There is not a single argument in favor of God. It is an absolutely useless hypothesis, and it will be good if we drop that hypothesis completely, because with that dropping, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity — all simply disappear. And their churches and their thousands of cardinals and bishops and popes, who are simply nothing but parasites on humanity, also disappear.

God is the greatest calamity. Yes, people should be godly — that means they should be truthful, they should be sincere, they should be loving, they should be conscious. That makes them godly, but that does not make them God.

I am destroying God and spreading godliness to every human being. It is better that it is spread far and wide as a quality, as a fragrance, rather than being confined to a statue in a temple and worshiped. When you can be it, why worship it?

Come back again. And try to see that journalism in India comes to the same level as it is in the rest of the world. It should not lag behind. It can be a great protector of freedom, of individuals against the vast machinery of bureaucracy. A single individual cannot do anything.

Source – Osho Book “The Last Testament Vol 4″

Question – Are you the beginning of a new religion?

Osho : I am certainly the beginning of something which is far more precious than any religion can be. I am also the end of all the old religions.

The old religions have not helped humanity to progress in consciousness, in being. On the contrary they have hindered man’s growth, his spirituality, in every possible way. The old religions became simply a facade of politics. In the name of religion, politics has reigned all over the world.

One thing that is most important to understand is that truth cannot be organized. The moment you organize it, you kill it.

Truth is an individual experience, and it can never become a collective phenomenon. Those who have attained the experience of it were individuals, not crowds, not mobs, not Hindus, not Mohammedans, not Christians, not Jews; but just individuals. Moses is an individual, just as Mahavira is; Gautam Buddha is an individual just as Jesus Christ is. They experience something in their aloneness, in their silence, in their innermost shrine of being. The church is not outside, it is within you.

But the Christians are looking for the truth in a church which is outside. They are looking for truth in a collectivity, in a crowd, and it is clear to anybody who has a little bit of intelligence that in two thousand years they have not produced a single Jesus Christ again; neither have the Buddhists been able to produce in twenty-five centuries another Gautam Buddha.

And it is not that people have not worked hard. People have worked tremendously hard; down the centuries millions of people have sacrificed themselves and everything they had to become enlightened. But nothing has happened; there seems to be something fundamental missing. They forgot one thing: that Gautam Buddha was not following anybody, and they are following Gautam Buddha; that Jesus Christ was not following anybody, and they are following Jesus Christ. That is the point where they missed.

You have to be just yourself, individual, not a carbon copy of anybody else. You have to assert your original face. Existence believes in originality, not in imitation. There are millions of Christians, but not a single Christ.

I am reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement — he said that the first Christian and the last Christian died on the cross two thousand years ago, the first and the last. Then what are these crowds doing? Almost half of humanity is Christian. What is this half of humanity doing if the first and the last Christian has already died two thousand years ago? They are simply deceiving themselves. The days of organized religion are finished.

I declare a totally different conception. I will not even call it religion because that word is associated with the old religions; I will call it only religiousness. I am the beginning of religiousness. Religion is bound to be Hindu, bound to be Mohammedan, bound to be Christian. Religiousness need not be Hindu, how can it be Hindu? How can it be Mohammedan? If love cannot be Hindu, cannot be Christian, if silence cannot be Jewish, then why should religiousness — a quality, a fragrance — have any adjective to it?

Yes, I am the beginning of something new, but not the beginning of a new religion. I am the beginning of a new kind of religiousness which knows no adjectives, no boundaries; which knows only freedom of the spirit, silence of your being, growth of your potential; and finally the experience of godliness within yourself — not of a God outside you, but a godliness overflowing from you.

The old religions are just corpses, stinking; still they are immensely powerful, because the whole past has given them prestige, authority. And nobody wants to leave power and authority. They go on manipulating humanity, exploiting human beings; they go on keeping you retarded. They don’t want you to evolve, because the moment you evolve and you become intelligent, you will be free from the bondage which is their vested interest.

Anybody who is intelligent cannot be a Hindu, cannot be a Mohammedan, cannot be a Christian, — because all these religions have done so many ugly actions in the past, they have killed millions of people, burned people alive in the name of God, in the name of love. They have been simply destructive; they have not enhanced beauty, they have not contributed to humanity in any way. They are parasites. They have sucked you for centuries, they have been living on your blood.

It is time that churches should be transformed into schools, into hospitals. Temples and mosques, synagogues and gurudwaras should be used for art galleries, music schools, for teaching painting and sculpture. And the priests should cease to exist. It is ugly; the priesthood should simply disappear from the earth, because man does not need anybody to mediate between himself and existence.

I am reminded of a great master, Lao Tzu. He used to go every day for a morning walk. One of his neighbors asked him, “A friend has come to visit me. He is a poet, a lover of beauty, and he is also very much interested in you. He wants to accompany you tomorrow morning on your morning walk.”
Lao Tzu said, “I have no objection, except a simple condition: that he should not speak while we are walking in the mountains.”
The friend said, “That’s acceptable.”

All three started the next day before sunrise. It was a beautiful calm and quiet early morning; and then the sun started rising above the hills, and with it the flowers started opening and the birds started singing. The poet forgot about the condition. He said, “How beautiful!” Just two words, and then he remembered. He didn’t say anything more.

Back home, Lao Tzu called the neighbor and said, “Your friend is too talkative; I cannot afford to have him again. And he is stupid too. I was there, listening to the songs of the birds, seeing the sun rising, listening to the wind passing through the trees, hearing the sound of running water. No mediator is needed. What can he add by saying, ‘How beautiful!’? He simply disturbed.”

Existence and you are enough. There is no need for any agent between you and existence to interpret, to say, “How beautiful!”, to take messages from you to existence and bring messages from existence to you. That’s what the priests have been doing down the ages; they have kept you away from reality. They have been standing between you and reality.

A truly religious person does not need anybody between himself and the sunrise, between himself and the stars in the sky, between himself and the fragrance of the flower. It is all divine, you just have to be open to it.

When the priesthood is dissolved, organized religions finished, then humanity will be one. Otherwise, they have created so many barriers between man and man. Every evening since I came here I have gone for a walk. The first day one man said, “Osho, this is not pranam that I am doing to you; this is salaam.” Pranam is Hindu, salaam is Mohammedan.
I said to him, “To me, both mean the same.”
The second day he said, “I have come again.”
I said, “That’s good, but don’t say what you said on the first day.”

Why create barriers? It is the same experience. A loving welcome… whether you call it pranam or whether you call it salaam, does it make any difference? But in his mind there must be great difference, that he wanted to indicate to me that he is a Mohammedan. Just to be human is enough. To be Mohammedan, to be Hindu, to be Christian is to be below your humanity, is to fall from your height, is to lose your dignity.

Yes, I am the beginning of something new. You can call it religiousness, but don’t call it religion.

Source – Osho Book “The Last Testament, Vol 5″

Question – Beloved Osho, What is Religion? What is your opinion on Organized Religion?

Osho – Anand Maitreya, religion is the highest flight of human consciousness — it is the individual search for truth. The inner truth cannot be made an object of common knowledge. Each one has to go within himself; each time, it is a new discovery. It does not matter how many people have attained awakening, realization; the moment you attain it, it will be absolutely fresh — because it cannot be borrowed.

The search basically consists of knowing your interiority. You have an outside, and no outside can exist without an inside: the very existence of the outside is proof of an inner world. The inner world consists of three layers: thoughts are the most superficial; feelings are deeper — and then is the being, which is your godliness. To know one’s own godliness, to know one’s own eternity, is the basic search of religion.

All your senses lead you outside: eyes open to look outside, ears hear what is happening outside, your hands can touch what is outside. Senses are the doors to go out — and always remember, the door that takes you out, can also take you in. It is the same door from which you go out of your home and through which you come back in; just the direction changes.

To go out, you need open eyes. To come in, you need closed eyes, all your senses silent. The first encounter is with the mind — but that is not your reality. Although it is inside your skull, it is not you — it is the reflection of the outside. All your thoughts are reflections of the outside.

For example, a blind man cannot think about colors because he has not seen colors — hence the reflection is not possible. The blind man cannot even see darkness; and because he has never seen light or darkness outside, there is no possibility of any reflection. The blind man does not know whether there is darkness or there is light — both words are meaningless. And if you analyze your thoughts, you will find they are all triggered inside you by outside reality — so they are basically of the outside, reflected in your inner lake of consciousness.

But because of these thoughts… and they are a tremendous crowd in you; they go on accumulating, they create a China wall. You have to go beyond your thoughts. And religion knows only one method — there are different names, but the method is one: it is watchfulness, it is witnessing. You simply watch your thoughts, with no judgment, no condemnation, no appreciation — utterly aloof; you just see the process of thoughts passing on the screen of your mind.

As your watcher becomes stronger, thoughts become less — in the same proportion. If the watcher is ten percent of your energy, then ninety percent of your energy is wasted in thoughts; if your watcher becomes ninety percent, then only ten percent remains in thoughts. The moment you are one hundred percent a watcher, the mind becomes empty. This whole process is known as meditation.

As you pass through the thoughts, you will come to the second layer which is inside you — of feelings, of your heart, which is more subtle. But by now, your watcher is capable even of watching your moods, your sentiments, your emotions, your feelings — howsoever subtle they may be. And the same method works in the same way as it worked with the thoughts: soon there will be no sentiments, no feelings, no moods. You have gone beyond the mind, and the heart. Now there is utter silence; nothing moves. This is your being; this is you.

The taste of your being is truth. The beauty of your being is the beauty of existence. The silence of your being is the language that existence understands. And just settled in being, you have come home. The wandering is finished. The struggle is finished. At ease, you sit silently within yourself. A great hidden splendor is revealed to you: you are not separate from reality, you are one with it. The trees and the moon and the stars and the mountains are all part of one organic unity; you are also part of that organic unity — you become part of God.

Religion is man’s highest achievement. Beyond religion, there is nothing — but there is no need either. Your being is so abundant, so overflowing with bliss, silence, peace, understanding, ecstasy, that for the first time, life becomes really a song, a dance, a celebration. Those who do not know religion, don’t know celebration.

But organized religion is a totally different affair, so I have to make it clear to you that authentic religion is always individual. The moment truth is organized, it dies; it becomes a doctrine, a theology, a philosophy — but it is no longer experienced, because the crowd cannot experience.

Experience happens only to individuals — separately. It is almost like love. You cannot have organizations of love — so that you need not bother; the organization will take care, the priest will love on your behalf. But that’s what has happened to religion. Each time a man discovers the truth, immediately one of the most cunning parts of humanity, the priests, surround him. They start compiling his words; they start interpreting his words; and they start making it clear to people that if you want to know truth, you have to go via them — they are agents of God. They may call themselves prophets, they may call themselves messengers; they may choose any name, but the reality is, they are self-appointed agents of God. They don’t know God, but in the name of God, they exploit humanity.

Organized religion is another form of politics. Just as I have always condemned politics as the lowest activity of human beings, the same is my attitude about organized religions. You can see it: the priests and the politicians have always been in conspiracy against humanity. They have been supporting each other. They have divided things between themselves so that your worldly life belongs to the politician, he is the ruler there, and your inner life belongs to the priest, he is the ruler there.

One sometimes feels so amazed… it seems unbelievable, that even in the twentieth century the pope could declare, a few months ago, that to communicate with God directly is a sin. You should go through the priest, the right channel — because if people start going directly to God, confessing to God, praying to God, the millions of priests will be unemployed. They don’t do anything; their whole function is to deceive you. Because you don’t understand the language of God, and you are not so evolved, just for some fee — a donation to their church or to their temple — they will do the job for you.

All those donations go in the pockets of the priests. They don’t know anything about God, but they are very learned — they can repeat scriptures like parrots. But their inner desire is not for God, not for truth — they are not seekers, they are exploiters.

I have heard… a priest bought two parrots and he taught them, with great hardship, beautiful statements of Jesus Christ. And everybody was really amazed — the parrots were so accurate. He made small beads for them so they were constantly praying, and he also found small bibles for them…. So they were always keeping their bibles open, and moving their beads. Although they could not read, they had already crammed everything. The priest would open the page and say, “Twelfth page,” and they would start reading it — not that they were reading; they had memorized it.

The priest was very pleased and he felt it would be good to have one more parrot. Rather than learning the bible and the beads, he could be taught to give whole sermons. He found a parrot, and the pet shop owner said, “Your wish will be fulfilled; this parrot is the most intelligent I have ever seen.” But he was not aware that it was a female parrot. And as the parrot was put in the same cage as the two parrots who were moving their beads and reading the bible, they both looked at the female parrot, and one parrot said to the other, “George, now drop those beads! Our prayers have been heard.”

Your priests are no more than parrots — and their prayers are for power, for prestige, for money. They are politicians in disguise; they are doing politics in the name of God — the politics of numbers. There are now seven hundred million Catholics; naturally the pope is the most powerful religious man in the world.

Every religion has been trying to increase its population by different methods. Mohammedans are allowed to marry four women so that they can produce four children per year. And they have been successful: they are the second largest religion after Christianity.

Organized religion is only a content-less, meaningless word; hidden inside is the politics of numbers. And you know perfectly well — as the election comes near, your politicians start going to see the shankaracharya. For five years, nobody goes to visit the shankaracharya, but when the election comes near, then the prime minister goes to visit the shankaracharya. He goes for a pilgrimage to the temples, high and deep in the mountains of the Himalayan range. For what? Suddenly, a great religious urge has arisen… which subsides as the election ends.

These people need votes; they have to pay respect to the leaders of religions. And a shankaracharya feels great that the prime minister is touching his feet. And the followers of the shankaracharya, the Hindus, feel that “our prime minister is a very religious person.”

When the pope comes to India, even the president and the prime minister with his whole cabinet, stand in line at the airport to receive him. For what? The third largest religion in India is now Christianity, and to pay respect to the pope means all the votes of the Christians will be yours.

Organized religions — whether it is Christianity or Hinduism or Mohammedanism — have not been seekers of truth. In two thousand years, what truth has organized Christianity added to the statements of Jesus? So what is the need of this organization? It is not increasing religiousness in the world, it is simply repeating what Jesus has said — which is available in books for anybody to read. In twenty-five centuries, how many Buddhists have searched for the truth, or have found the truth? — just a long line of parrots repeating what Gautam Buddha has found.

And you should be reminded that Gautam Buddha was not part of any organized religion; neither was Mahavira part of any organized religion, nor was Jesus part of any organized religion — they were individual seekers.

Truth has always been found by individuals. That is the privilege of the individual, and his dignity. Organized religions have created wars — just like politicians have done. Their names may be different… politicians fight for socialism, for communism, for fascism, for nazism, and organized religions have been fighting for God, for love, for their concept of what truth is. And millions of people have been killed in the clashes between Christians and Mohammedans, between Christians and Jews, between Mohammedans and Hindus, between Hindus and Buddhists. Religion has nothing to do with war; it is a search for peace. But organized religions are not interested in peace, they are interested in becoming more and more powerful and dominant.

I condemn the organized religions in the same way I condemn the politicians — they are nothing but politics. So when I said to you that religious people should be respected, honored — the politicians should go to them for advice — I was not talking about organized religions; I was talking only about religious individuals. And a religious individual is neither Hindu nor Christian nor Mohammedan. How can he be? — God himself is not Hindu, not Mohammedan, not Christian. And the man who knows something of the divine becomes colored with his divinity, becomes fragrant with godliness.

In the ancient East these religious people were our highest flowers, and even kings and emperors used to go to them to touch their feet and to be blessed — to ask their advice on problems which they were unable to solve.

If we want the world to remain alive, we have to bring back our ancient childhood days when the religious person had no interest of his own. That’s why his eyes were clear, his heart was pure love, his being was nothing but a blessing.

Whomsoever came to him was healed, his problems were solved; he was given new insights into rotten old problems.
Organized religions should disappear from the world — they should drop this mask of being religious. They are simply politicians, wolves hiding themselves in the skin of sheep. They should come into their true colors; they should be politicians — there is no harm in that. And all the time they are politicians, but they are playing the game in the name of religion.

Organized religions don’t have any future. They should drop their disguise and come truly out in front as politicians, and be part of the political world so that we can find the authentic religious individual — who will be very rare. But just a few authentic religious individuals can lead the whole world towards light, towards immortal life, towards ultimate truth.

Source – Osho Book “The Hidden Splendor’

Question – Osho, What is your opinion of scientology?
Osho – It is fantastic…I mean bullshit, utter bullshit! Be aware of such stupid things. They move in the world in the name of science because science has credit, so any kind of stupidity can pretend to be scientific. And people are very much impressed by words: scientology.

People are very much impressed by shining gadgets, instruments…. Man is so unaware and unconscious of himself that he falls a victim to anything! You just need to propagate it, advertise it – and our century has the most efficient media to advertise, to propagate things. Scientology is nothing but a kind of hypnosis – it can hypnotize you. And real religion is just the opposite: it is dehypnosis. You are already hypnotized, you don’t need any scientology anymore.

You need a process of dehypnosis, you need deconditioning, you need to come out of all kinds of ideologies. Scientology is an ideology. It talks in terms of science, and science has great appeal. Science is the modern superstition. The modern man is immediately impressed if you bring science in. So anything and everything has to be proved scientifically.

And there are quacks who even go on proving God scientifically, and who are trying to measure states of meditation – as if meditation can be measured. Whatsoever you can measure will be mind; no-mind cannot be measured. All your alpha waves, etcetera, are not going to help. They can only go to a certain extent in the mind. But meditation begins only where mind ends.

Mind is measurable, because mind is a machine. But no-mind is immeasurable, it has no limits. So all the nonsense that goes on in the name of measuring…and people are very much impressed. They are sitting before very shiny gadgets – it gives an impression of science – wires attached to the head, to the hands, just like a cardiogram. They are trying to figure out the inner silence. It is impossible! Whatsoever you come to record is mind. All waves are of the mind.

Meditation is wavelessness because it is thoughtlessness. Meditation cannot be recorded; there can be no cardiogram, there can be no machine which can record it. It is very elusive, it is very subjective, it cannot be reduced to an object. But because the Western mind is very objective, is trained in science, now there are quacks around who are cashing in on this attraction and this
training.

Scientology is one of those pseudo religions. The real religion has no need of any such thing. And scientology is destroying many people’s minds. Modern man is in a special situation: the old religions have lost their grip, their credibility, and the new religion has not yet arrived – there is a gap. And man cannot live without religion, it is impossible; religion is such a need. So if the true is not available, the false becomes prevalent, the false becomes a substitute. Scientology is a false religion, and there are many like scientology.

Real religion consists of becoming utterly silent, unconditioned, unhypnotized. It is going beyond mind, beyond ideology; it is going beyond scripture and beyond knowledge. It is simply falling into your own interiority, becoming utterly silent, not knowing a thing, and functioning from that state of not knowing, from that innocence. When you function out of innocence, your actions have a beauty of their own. That’s what virtue is – aes dhammo sanantano.

Source: from Osho Book “The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 2″

Question – Osho, What is God?
Osho – Prem Sukavi, GOD is not a person. That is one of the greatest misunderstandings, and it has prevailed so long that it has become almost a fact. Even if a lie is repeated continuously for centuries it is bound to appear as if it is a truth.

God is a presence, not a person. Hence all worshipping is sheer stupidity. Prayerfulness is needed, not prayer. There is nobody to pray to; there is no possibility of any dialogue between you and God. Dialogue is possible only between two persons, and God is not a person but a presence – like beauty, like joy.

God simply means godliness. It is because of this fact that Buddha denied the existence of God. He wanted to emphasize that God is a quality, an experience – like love. You cannot talk to love, you can live it. You need not create temples of love, you need not make statues of love, and bowing down to those statues will be just nonsense. And that’s what has been happening in the churches, in the temples, in the mosques.

Man has lived under this impression of God as a person, and then two calamities have happened
through it. One is the so-called religious man, who thinks God is somewhere above m the sky and
you have to praise him. to persuade him to confer favors on you, to help you to fulfill your desires, to make your ambitions succeed, to give you the wealth of this world AND of the other world. And this is sheer wastage of time and energy.

And on the opposite pole the people who saw the stupidity of it all became atheists; they started denying the existence of God. They were right in a sense, but they were also wrong. They started denying not only the personality of God, they started to deny even the experience of God.

The theist is wrong, the atheist is wrong, and man needs a new vision so that he can be freed from both the prisons. God is the ultimate experience of silence, of beauty, of bliss, a state of inner celebration. Once you start looking at God as godliness there will be a radical change in your approach. Then prayer is no more valid; meditation becomes valid.

Martin Buber says prayer is a dialogue; then between you and God there is an ”I-thou” relationship – the duality persists. Buddha is far closer to the truth: you simply drop all chattering of the mind, you slip out of the mind like a snake slipping out of the old skin. You become profoundly silent.

There is no question of any dialogue, no question of any monologue either. Words have disappeared from your consciousness. There is no desire for which favors have to be asked, no ambition to be fulfilled. One is now and here. In that tranquility, in that calmness, you become aware of a luminous quality to existence.

Then the trees and the mountains and the rivers and the people are all surrounded with a subtle aura. They are all radiating life, and it is one life in different forms. The flowering of one existence in millions of forms, in millions of flowers.

THIS experience is God. And it is everybody’s birthright, because whether you know it or not you are already part of it. The only possibility is you may not recognize it or you may recognize it.
The difference between the enlightened person and the unenlightened person is not of quality –
they both are absolutely alike. There is only one small difference: that the enlightened person is
aware; he recognizes the ultimate pervading the whole, permeating the whole, vibrating, pulsating.

He recognizes the heartbeat of the universe. He recognizes that the universe is not dead, it is alive. This aliveness is God! The unenlightened person is asleep, asleep and full of dreams. Those dreams function as a barrier; they don’t allow him to see the truth of his own reality. And, of course, when you are not even aware of your own reality, how can you be aware of the reality of others? The first experience has to happen within you.

Once you have seen the light within you will be able to see it everywhere. God has to be freed from all concepts of personality. Personality is a prison. God has to be freed from any particular form; only then he can have all the forms. He has to be freed from any particular name so that all the names become his.

Then a person LIVES in prayer – he does not pray, he does not go to the temple, to the church.
Wherever he sits he is prayerful, whatsoever he is doing is prayerful, and in that prayerfulness he creates his temple. He is always moving with his temple surrounding him. Wherever he sits the
place becomes sacred, whatsoever he touches becomes gold. If he is silent then his silence is
golden; if he speaks then his song is golden. If he is alone his aloneness is divine; if he relates then his relating is divine.

The basic, the most fundamental thing is to be aware of your own innermost core, because that
is the secret of the whole existence. That’s where the Upanishads are tremendously important.
They don’t talk about a God, they talk about godliness. They don t bother about prayer. their whole emphasis is on meditation.

Meditation has two parts: the beginning and the end. The beginning is called dhyana and the end is called samadhi. Dhyana is the seed, samadhi is the flowering. Dhyana means becoming aware of all workings of your mind, all the layers of your mind – your memories, your desires, your thoughts, dreams – becoming aware of all that goes on inside you.

Dhyana is awareness, and samadhi is when the awareness has become so deep, so profound,
so total that it is like a fire and it consumes the whole mind and all its functionings. It consumes
thoughts, desires, ambitions, hopes, dreams. It consumes the whole stuff the mind is full of.
Samadhi is the state when awareness is there, but there is nothing to be aware inside you; the
witness is there, but there is nothing to be witnessed.

Begin with dhyana, with meditation, and end in samadhi, in ecstasy, and you will know what God is. It is not a hypothesis, it is an experience. You have to LIVE it – that is the only way to know it.

Source: from Osho Book “I Am That”

Osho on Religion is freedom from Knowledge

Osho : I have heard a story. A wasp made its abode near a window outside a big building. In winter this wasp would sleep and rest, in summer it would fly, dance and collect the pollen of the flowers. It was very happy. But this wasp was a special one – it was a thinker. It used to think a lot and used to look down upon other wasps because there was no thinking in their lives. Their lives were full of desire.

They never did any thinking, they never contemplated, they never knew the scriptures. Sometimes it used to fly into that building also. It loved that building. The people visiting the building seemed to it of its own type because they were thinkers. Actually, this building was a big library.

Professors, teachers, writers, philosophers, poets used to come there. Usually people used to drive out the wasp but it always would come back. Gradually it started reading and writing. It started in the children’s department and soon it was studying big books of philosophy. It began to read big volumes of science and poetry. It became very proud and just could not tolerate the other wasps – they seemed very insignificant. It became very egoistic.

It was thinking day and night. It forgot all about dancing in the sun, flying in the air and visiting the trees. Now mostly it used to sit down engrossed in deep thoughts like, ”Who made this world? Why was it made? From where has this existence come and where is it going?” It used to think about these serious questions all the time.

One day it was reading a book on the science of aviation. It was written in that book of aerodynamics that the body of a wasp is heavier than its wings, so theoretically a wasp cannot fly because its wings are small and weak and the body is big and heavy. On reading this it became confused and puzzled.

Up to now it did not know that its body was big and its wings were small. It was the first time it had learnt this and, of course, whatever is written in the scriptures cannot be denied. It is not possible to go against what is said by the scientists.

It became very sad. That day it did not fly back to its hive, it arrived there by crawling. How was it possible for it to fly – to do something which was quite against science? It became very sad and stopped moving about altogether. It still saw the other wasps flying around, going to the flowers, but it thought that they were doing so out of ignorance – how can a wasp fly? Its wings are small and its body is big.

It was full of pity for those who were flying because they did not know the facts of science. If they knew they would have stopped flying. But one day a bird attacked the wasp, intending to eat it for breakfast. In its nervousness and confusion the wasp forgot all about the scriptures and flew away. It sat on a bush, rested a little and became calm and realized that it had flown!

”I was thinking that a wasp cannot fly but I have flown, so there must have been a block in my mind stopping my natural capacity for flying which melted in the moment of danger.” It had read about mental blocks in the mind in a book on psychology. So it started flying again from that day. It gave up the knowledge of scriptures from that day, and from that moment it again became the wasp – the natural wasp!

From that day it became free of knowledge and stopped looking down on other wasps. That day it experienced its true nature.

Religion is freedom from knowledge, and in that freedom is the ultimate knowledge. The scriptures are not meant to make you lame but to give you the capacity to fly. If the scriptures have made you lame, then it is sure that you have misunderstood them or you have interpreted them wrongly.

If the scriptures have made you sad, then you must have missed something in them or must not have understood them properly. The scriptures which have snatched away your natural capacity to fly or flow are not your friends – you have turned them into your enemies. A scripture is a scripture only if it gives you freedom. A scripture is a scripture if it makes you natural. A scripture is a scripture if it does not fill you with condemnation for others and is able to make you realize that the divine is hidden also within them.

In a rare TV interview, while he is in silence, Osho is asked: What is your vision for the future of Rajneeshism?

Osho : Rajneeshism is not a religion like Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, etc. The name should not be misunderstood. It simply shows a poverty of language–to be exactly true, Rajneeshism is a religionless religion.

In other words it is a kind of religiousness, not a dogma, cult or creed but only a quality of love, silence, meditation and prayerfulness. Hence it can never end.

It is not beginning with me. It has always existed and it will always exist. It is the very essence of human evolution, of culture consciousness.

Buddha, Jesus or Krishna are nothing but expressions of this spirit, but it was not possible in those days for religion to be manifested as well as it can be now. Because Jesus did not know about Buddha, Buddha did not know about Lao Tzu, and Krishna was also unaware of Lao Tzu, etc.

I have traveled all the paths and have looked at the truth from all the windows. What I am saying is going to last forever because nothing more could be added to it.

Buddha was not so sure of his religion. He said that his religion would last for 5,000 years, and that too only if he didn’t allow women to join his commune. And when women entered his commune he said, “Now the religion will only last 500 years”.

All of these people have talked about some aspect for truth and their disciples have understood it as the whole truth. I am talking about the whole truth so the future of my religion is infinite. All other religions will disappear into it as all the rivers disappear into the ocean.

Osho on Judaism – Hassidism

Osho : There is a reason: I am the only Jew in India!…

…In fact, there have been only two source religions in the world: Hinduism and Judaism. Both are dead. Jainism and Buddhism are offshoots of Hinduism but because the root is dead the branches are dead too. And Christianity and Islam are branches of Judaism, and because the root is dead the branches are dead too. These are dead phenomena. I am not much concerned with the past.

Yes, something beautiful has happened in Judaism, too, and that is Hassidism–and I have talked about it a lot. Just as I love Zen people in the tradition of the Buddha, I love Hassids in the tradition of Moses and I love Sufis in the tradition of Mohammed. These three are still alive in some small way because these three have never become established religions; they have always been anti-establishment, they have always been alternatives to the established religion, they have always been rebellious.

Hassidism is worth talking about, not Judaism–and I have talked about Hassidism. I have been approaching Hassidism with my own experience. I have been bringing Hassidism up to date, trying to make it part of the twentieth century. Hassidism is the essence of Judaism, the very fragrance of it.

And I have something of the Hassids in me, that’s why I sometimes call myself a Jew. The Hassids love life, they are life-affirmative. They don’t believe in renunciation, they believe in rejoicing. They believe in dancing, singing, celebrating–and that’s exactly my approach too.

My religion is something of a meeting of Zen, Sufism and Hassidism–and something more thrown in.