Osho,
You have talked about the superiority/inferiority dialectic as the basis of authoritarian and fascist relationships. It is one of the miracles of being with you that in spite of having been constantly persuaded of our unworthiness by our parents, teachers and priests, you are able to shed light on all our unconscious habits without ever making us feel bad about it. You allow us to be aware of our potential for enlightenment in a way that does not make us feel superior, and yet simultaneously you never make us feel inferior because we are not enlightened. In groups, too, while you are present, we can reveal our notions of inferiority but because you are there and simply not part of the egotistic inferiority/superiority game, dependency and spiritual slavery cannot happen. But what happens in groups where you are absent? Surely, if the therapist has a trace of ego, then doesn’t this kind of psychological fascism inevitably emerge?
You have seen something so significant that everybody must be made aware of it.
There is only one possibility for sanity to exist in relationships so they don’t turn into inferiority and superiority games, so they don’t become sado-masochistic tortures. And that only possibility is in the presence of an unconditional love. Love is the greatest alchemy.
It transforms base metals into gold. Your ingredients are the same – the murderer and the Gautam Buddha are not different as far as their ingredients, their intrinsic potentialities are concerned. It is just that man is not a one dimensional machine.
Man is not one-dimensional; otherwise, his whole world would be sheer boredom.
And man’s search is basically to be one with existence – separation hurts.
In our other loving relationships, in small measures we are searching for the same unity. In love with a woman, in love with a man, in love with a friend, in love with some creative activity – dance, music, poetry – we are trying to have a certain synchronicity with existence.
[pullquote-right]“Our situation is that of a small child in the forest who has lost his mother and is searching in the forest, not knowing where to go. This situation allows many exploiters… this helplessness is used by those who are in power, by those who have money. The helplessness is used to convert you into a slave, into dependence.”[/pullquote-right]
Hence, all the religions have developed particular programs. They begin with God – and with God, your relationship cannot be anything else but that which exists between a puppet and a puppeteer, between the slave and the owner. With God, you cannot expect more than that, because he is the creator; he has made you – he can at any moment destroy you too. Neither did he ask you whether you wanted to enter into life, nor will he ask you whether you are in favor of destroying the world.
All the gods of all the religions are dictatorial. They are fascist.
I don’t have any God; hence I don’t have any program for you in which you will be transformed slowly into a slave.
I am fulfilled – nothing more can be added to my experience. That’s why the people who are with me will not feel in any way inferior.
Nobody is inferior. People may be in different spaces, but nobody is inferior and nobody is superior. They are all made of the same stuff you call God. How can somebody be superior and somebody be inferior? We belong to the same existence, our roots are nourished by the same existence.
Existence makes no distinctions, no discriminations between the sinners and the saints. My approach is existential.
Hence, nobody is superior and nobody is inferior here. Naturally, by destroying this complex of inferiority and superiority, we are removing the very possibility of any kind of fascist mentality, fascist personality – because to me, it is inconceivable that a fascist can ever be religious.
And your so-called religious people are more or less all fascist fanatics. They are not in search of truth; they think they have found it already – in their scriptures which are dead, in the old superstitions which even they know have no basis in reality.
Just a clarity of vision dispels all darkness out of which all the monsters are born.
Here with me, whether you are a man or a woman, whether you are white or black, it does not matter; nobody even takes note of it. It is enough that you are a human being. And it is your freedom to choose your own lifestyle; it is your basic right how you want to blossom. Those who love you can help in taking care of the garden in which you are growing – watering your roots, showering their warmth.
It has now been scientifically proved that even the plants know who are their friends and who are their enemies. They have developed something like a cardiogram which is attached to the tree, and if a man comes with the idea to cut a branch of the tree or to uproot the tree – he just has the idea – suddenly the graph that is being made by the cardiogram on the tree starts trembling. It loses the rhythm it had… now you can see how fear is felt by the tree.
And remember that the tree has telepathic sensitivity; otherwise she could not know the thought in the man’s mind. He has not done anything – visibly, nothing has happened. And when the gardener comes – with his warmth, with his love – suddenly the graph becomes the most harmonious. Now the tree is no longer afraid, the tree is immensely blissful.
Loving warmth is not only a poetic phenomenon. It is a reality of great importance.
Now the flowers will be bigger, the fruits will be juicier; the tree will respond. Except for man, perhaps there is no ingratitude in this whole existence. The tree cannot give anything more – she cannot give money, she cannot give gold – but she can give beautiful flowers, as big as possible, to a loving heart. She can give juicier fruits.
Love has never been thought of as food, but it is a very subtle kind of food. And now psychologists have concluded that if a child gets everything necessary – all chemicals, all hormones, food, exercise, fresh air, rest, everything that is necessary for life – still he will die in three to six months unless there is someone to pour love. He will not feel that life is worth living without love; he will simply shrink and die. And in thousands of labs around the world, many animals have died in these experiments.
Ordinarily, it is understood that these experiments are being done on animals first and that unless we have found safe principles we do not apply them to human beings – this has been the idea prevalent in the masses. Even the medical professionals – doctors, physicians – also believe in it. But the truth is something very different.
Just a few days ago…. For almost two years, a group of senators in America were investigating about a certain amount of money… not a small amount of money; two hundred million dollars is there in the books, but where has it been spent, where has it gone? The cabinet went on denying any knowledge of it, the president went on denying. The suspicion was that the government of America today is the greatest terrorist. And the money is going to the terrorists in a small country in the middle portion of the Americas, between South America and North America.
Just like Cuba, another small country has become communist. It is their right, whether they are right or wrong. Nobody else has to decide it. If they want to live a wrong kind of life, then too, they have the absolute freedom to live it; only they should not harm anybody else. They should not interfere in the lives of others.
Two hundred million dollars had been given to guerrillas, terrorists, to destroy that small Central American country because it had gone into the hands of the communists. And after two years of continuous struggle, only now has the president accepted that, “Yes, that money has gone to the terrorists.”
And the whole world is silent, nobody has criticized it!
Governments are to save people from terrorism, and here governments are supplying money and arms and food to terrorists. And then they go on lying….
I have looked into the scriptures of all the religions, I have looked into the ideological literature of all the political parties and I am amazed: they go on piling up lies upon lies. And the whole of humanity is asleep – not only does nobody object, but nobody even suspects.
Here with me, you are gathered for a special purpose: the search for the truth, the search for the purest kind of love, the search for a life which is a dance of sheer joy.
Nowhere else in the world are people gathering for the same reasons. They are gathering for the purpose of creating more hatred; they are gathering to create more wars; they are gathering to create more destructive activities in human life. Naturally, we have a sick world, an insane world.
[pullquote-left]“Love has never been thought of as food, but it is a very subtle kind of food. And now psychologists have concluded that if a child gets everything necessary – all chemicals, all hormones, food, exercise, fresh air, rest, everything that is necessary for life – still he will die in three to six months unless there is someone to pour love.”[/pullquote-left]
Here, it is impossible to feel any superiority or inferiority.
I have tried my best to convince you of only one thing: that enlightenment is your nature; that it is not something achieved, you bring it with your birth. All that you have to do is not to create it but just to open the hidden secret of your life.
The moment you start feeling your inner light, your whole perspective starts changing. You will feel compassionate towards human beings even if they are doing stupid things. And you will feel immensely joyous, celebrating, even though you don’t have anything to celebrate. Nothing is needed to celebrate – only excuses… my birthday is just an excuse! But if you want to celebrate, you will find a thousand and one excuses.
It is your life, and whatever becomes of it is your creation.
Remember, there are hidden signatures on it. You cannot disassociate yourself from what you create, from the way you live, the way you respond.
Once you are overflowing with love and blissfulness, you cannot, even in your dreams, act in a way which is humiliating to another. Because the other is not really the other, it is just part of us.
We are one consciousness filling the whole universe.
But a little experience will help… and you will start seeing the same light in others. And to see light within yourself and light within others is to live the whole year round surrounded with a festival of lights.
In the outside world, there are people who want to dominate and there are people who want to be dominated. The responsibility is not one-sided. There are people who want to be enslaved, because slavery has one thing about it: it takes all responsibility away from you. Then the responsibility is of your owner. You are just instrumental – whatever he says, you do, but you don’t feel any burden. So most human beings deep down want to remain slaves.
Slavery in religion means you remain a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian. And you are afraid also, because your slavery is based only on beliefs. So everybody is trying to protect his flock from coming in contact with others.
Just the other day I received a message from friends in Germany. The German parliament has passed a resolution that I cannot enter Germany. Sannyasins are protesting it because it is absolutely against the German constitution, against German law. There is not a single precedent! Not only in Germany but all over the world, there is not a single incident prohibiting a man who has never before entered your country. How can you judge that he is going to be dangerous?
So they asked five hundred world-famous, prominent intelligentsia from different fields – professors, scientists, poets, painters, dancers, actors. Up to now they have received one hundred and fifty letters of strong support, an absolute protest against the government.
They have also received a few letters which are in support of the government. A few points in those letters were so hilarious that they have sent me those few points. One point was: One Protestant high priest has supported the government because he thinks I am a Catholic, and Germany has to be saved from the Catholic religion.
Such fear shows deep doubts. You are not certain about your Protestant theology; you are afraid somebody may make punctures in the balloon of your faith.
Here with me, there is a religious fragrance but no religion as such. That gives you total freedom. That makes you proud of yourself and grateful for all that existence has done for you. Remember, pride is not ego.
Ego is something without content. For example, a man who cannot even draw a straight line thinks himself a great painter – that is ego, there is no content. But if Picasso thinks he is a great painter, that is simply a fact, and if he is proud of his genius there is nothing wrong in it. In fact, people should be helped to find some pride in their individuality because that pride will make their eyes shine, their faces luminous; that pride will make them unique individuals, with no more question of inferiority and superiority.
And secondly, anybody who is proud is always grateful. Because the genius of Picasso or Yehudi Menuhin is not their own; they are only vehicles. It is the beyond that comes through them – in music, in dance, in painting, in scientific research, in poetry, in thousands of ways, but the real genius will know it for sure, that it is coming from the beyond.
He is proud that he has been chosen, he is not proud in comparison to you. Ego is a comparison: you are higher, you are superior, but there is comparison. You cannot be superior living alone in a forest – superior to whom? You cannot even be inferior – inferior to whom?
The man of pride has a deep feeling of gratitude that existence has chosen him, although he is not worthy. It is a strange phenomenon. The more worthy you are, the more you feel you are not worthy enough. You have been given so much and you cannot do anything in return.
Here, there will be people with pride. I would like my sannyasins to be proud, even of the fact that they are sannyasins, that they have been courageous enough to move against all orthodoxies, traditions, conventions, all that is rotten, and come out into the fresh, into the young, into the new. You are blessed. But your blessedness will be full of gratitude.
That is the distinction to be remembered between ego and pride.
I destroy the ego and I create the pride. Ego is something like a cancer that simply eats you and eats others. Pride, self-respect is a creative phenomenon. It fulfills your own potential and it also shares with the world all the treasures that you have brought into the world. So here the situation is totally different.
I would like it to be so in the whole world, but they are so afraid. Their fear that I can destroy their morality, their religion, their past, is a clear-cut indication that they are already uprooted from the past. They are just hoping against hope that somehow all this old garbage can be carried. Because we have respected it as golden for centuries. Now, to suddenly drop it as garbage by the side of the road hurts the ego, because it means the ego has been wrong for centuries.
A sannyasin needs the courage to drop the fear – because unless he drops the fear, the ego cannot be dropped. And without dropping the ego, the whole load, the whole luggage, all rotten, has to be carried. Your whole energy is wasted in carrying the dead.
Just think of yourself carrying your father, your grandfather, your forefathers, all on your back and going towards Marine Drive. Do you think you will ever reach Marine Drive? Because the people lined up on your back is going to be endless; all your skyscrapers will look like pygmies. The load is going to be so tremendous that you will not be able to carry it without the help of Suraj Prakash – you will need trucks, transport vehicles. And your whole life will be simply wasted carrying these dead people.
And we are all carrying them. That’s why life becomes serious, burdensome, heavy, juiceless, dry. Otherwise, there is no reason. You can be lush green with red flowers.
And there is no need for any comparison. Why not have all the people of the planet be emperors? What is the problem? It is a question of understanding the world – and if you understand yourself, to understand the world is not difficult, it is the simplest thing.
And once you have understood that to be an emperor or to be a slave is your decision, who is going to choose to be a slave? When you can put your whole energy into creating something that will give you satisfaction, that will give you a deep sense of fulfillment, a sense that you have not been here unnecessarily, you have contributed something; you have made the world a little more beautiful – a few more flowers you have added to it.
If everybody is adding a few more flowers, this whole world can again become a garden.
There is no need to fight. There is no need for you to be superior to anybody, because I am giving you something which is far higher than superiority. I am making you unique individuals.
Osho, Sermons in Stones, Talk #12
