the-osho-upanishad-38

Osho,
Why is it so difficult for the world to accept you as you are?
There are many implications. First, the world never accepts anybody as he is. This is something very fundamental about the world and the way it treats individuals.
The individual is small; the individual is born helpless, a child. The world is always big; it has all the power to create or to destroy. The child has no idea who he is – and certainly he needs an identity. The world gives him an identity. The world starts making him, manufacturing him according to its own needs.
The world does not exist for the individual. The whole effort is how to make the individual exist for the world.
The world is always there when the individual comes. All its vested interests are there: its religion, culture, civilization, its way of living, its system of beliefs. And to make the individual function as a cog in the wheel, the world programs the child just like a computer is programmed.
The child is not accepted as a divine guest to be respected, to be loved, to be allowed to grow, to find his own identity. The child is accepted as a commodity: the whole question is how to make him more useful to the already-existent interests.
The whole education system, the priest, the politician, the leader, the so-called wise people – they are all conspiring against the individual. Their conspiracy is to kill the individuality, the freedom, the intelligence – any possibility of revolt. There should not be left in the individual any seed of saying no. He should be programmed in such a way that he becomes an obedient servant.
Hence obedience is so much praised: parents like the obedient child, teachers like the obedient student, the society likes the obedient citizen. Those who are not obedient are thought to be misfits, they are condemned. Nobody wants to be condemned, and when the whole world is on one side, a single individual feels so tiny – a dewdrop against the whole ocean – that he cannot think himself to be right; the ocean must be right.
A strange split is created in the individual. If he follows the ocean, the collectivity, then he goes against his self-nature, he commits suicide. He will live a posthumous life. He will breathe, he will walk, but he will not be himself. He will be simply programmed, conditioned – “His Master’s Voice,” a record which goes on repeating the same song. The song is not his own; it has been handed over to him. The society wants him to repeat it.
The society hates the individual. The society wants you to mix with the crowd, to fit with the crowd. Stop being yourself; just be a carbon copy of the ideal that the society has determined is how a person should be. It has not asked you how you would like to be – the ideals are determined by others. You are simply victims. Every individual on the earth is a victim of the crowd.
So the first thing to understand is that it is not only me, my individuality, that the world finds difficult to understand. It is not in the very program of the minds of human beings to accept any individual. This is the fundamental approach of all cultures, all civilizations: to destroy the individual in favor of the collective mind.
We have created a world of slaves. There are Hindus, there are Mohammedans, there are Christians, there are communists. But you will not find somebody who is simply himself and not a communist, not a Catholic, not a Hindu – because these are the names of the crowds.
As far as I am concerned, things become more complicated – to accept me is difficult, very difficult. Now because what I am saying is difficult – my teaching is very simple, very obvious – the difficulty arises from the side of the crowd. To accept me means to reject their whole ages-long conditioning. To accept me means to reject their religions, their scriptures, their so-called leaders, their saints, their whole way of life. And they have cherished it up to now as the most significant thing, as the rightful path.
And to drop all that heritage just for one individual… Although it appeals to your reason, it appeals to your heart, to drop thousands of years in favor of one individual is certainly difficult.

I am reminded of one of the great philosophers of this age, Bertrand Russell. He lived long, almost a whole century. He passed through many phases, he saw the world moving through many phases: one hundred years is a long time.
He was brought up as an orthodox Christian. He belonged to the noble families of England; he was a lord. But as he started studying philosophy in the university it was impossible not to see that Christianity is a very third-rate religion, because he became acquainted with Gautam Buddha.
He remembers in one of his memoirs:
He rejected Christianity. He wrote a book, Why I Am Not A Christian, and in the book he gave all the reasons why he was dropping Christianity. The book must have been in existence now for sixty years, unanswered. No Christian theologian has been able to answer that book, because his arguments are so simple and clear-cut. Intellectually, he tried to deprogram himself from Christianity; that book was an exercise in deprogramming himself.
Just one night when the book was finished… He was happy that he had finished with something superstitious, ugly, which had been the cause of so much bloodshed for two thousand years, which instead of teaching love had only created more hate in the world.
Bertrand Russell was tremendously impressed by Gautama the Buddha. Certainly, Gautama the Buddha had a refinement of arguments and the courage to go with his intelligence, not with tradition. Jesus still believed in God. Gautam Buddha also had the tradition of believing in God but his intelligence did not allow it.
It is a simple argument: if God creates man then there can be no freedom; the choice is between God or freedom. The choice is not between God or no God, the choice is between God or freedom – because if God creates humanity, we are simply puppets, manufactured. And God seems to be whimsical.
For no special reason he created the world at a certain moment – and before that, for eternity, what was he doing? And what was the cause that motivated him to create the world at a certain point? And if he is simply whimsical, crazy – the idea just comes to his mind to create so he creates – if the idea comes to destroy, who is there to prevent him? He can destroy it at this very moment.
Gautam Buddha said, “I cannot accept God because I cannot accept that consciousness is manufactured. I cannot accept that there is a whimsical creator, because that implies a whimsical destroyer. Then what is the point of my being virtuous? If even the creation of the world is whimsical, and all its laws are just in the hands of God, then perhaps up to now good people have been going to paradise and from tomorrow they will start going to hell. What can you do? To whom are you going to protest? God is not visible, not available.”
And Gautam Buddha also said, and he pondered over it – if in the first place it is God who creates man, then he creates anger, sex, greed, jealousy, violence in man. And then there are religious priests and saints and mahatmas who condemn it. Looked at straightforwardly, they are condemning God.
George Gurdjieff used to say that all mahatmas, all saints are against God, because God creates sex and these people teach celibacy. You have not created sex, you have not created ambition, and all the mahatmas of all the religions are together in condemning it. Certainly they are against God.
Gautam Buddha said, “Rather than accepting this position, I choose to reject the very idea of God and his creation.”
Bertrand Russell was immensely impressed. Gautam Buddha lived five hundred years earlier than Jesus Christ, but he had the courage to reject God in favor of freedom, in favor of evolution, in favor of man’s own efforts to transform himself, to bring more consciousness and more being.
That night he thought, “Certainly Gautam Buddha was a far greater human being than Jesus Christ. But can I write this?” He closed his eyes, and then he wrote in his diary, “Rationally I understand that Gautam Buddha is a far superior human being, but my conditioning… Although I have rejected Christianity, somehow in the darker corners of my unconscious it is still lingering. I cannot put Gautam Buddha above Jesus Christ. At the most I can put them as equals, understanding clearly that Jesus is just a pygmy before Gautam Buddha. Rationally I understand, but there is the irrational part, which is dominated by thousands of years of conditioning.”
The world finds it difficult to accept me.
There have been individuals in the world – the world has found it difficult to accept them, but the whole world was not against them. A part of humanity was always ready to accept them, because they were supportive to that part and its programming. For example, Christ is not accepted by the Jews, but now almost half of humanity is Christian – they accept him. Mahavira may not be accepted by the whole world, but he is accepted by a small section of humanity, the Jainas. Karl Marx may not be accepted by the whole world, but almost half of the world is communist and accepts him.
All these individuals were in a better position than me: at least a certain section of humanity, a certain crowd, was accepting them. I am standing absolutely alone. The Hindu cannot accept me, the Mohammedan cannot accept me, the Christian cannot accept me, the communist cannot accept me, the capitalist cannot accept me. It is a unique situation.

One of the richest men in India was Jugal Kisore Birla. He heard me on the radio and he was very much impressed, so he inquired about me and said he wanted to meet me. When I was in Delhi he invited me, and I went to his palace. He was old.
He said, “I can give you a blank checkbook. And you can always take as much money as you want out of the bank, you need not ask me. You just have to promise me two things: propagate Hinduism in the world, and second, create the idea that cow slaughter is the biggest sin.”
I said, “You have got the wrong person, but your blank checkbook is saved. You wait, you may find someone. I cannot propagate Hinduism, because I can see that Hinduism is one of the oldest religions. Being the oldest, it needs much renovation, it is almost in ruins. Being the oldest, it does not have contemporary values.”
He said, “What do you mean by contemporary values? Hinduism has all the values.”
I said, “It is so simple. You call Yudhishthir as Dharmaraj, ‘the king of religiousness’; he is a gambler. Not an ordinary gambler: he gambles his whole kingdom, he gambles all his properties, and finally he gambles his own wife. In the first place it is so ugly, that he is a gambler. In the second place, he has no respect for a human being, his wife. He treats the woman just like any commodity. And still Hindus call him ‘the king of religion.’ I cannot. It is impossible for me, I will have to condemn him.
“Hindus have not been courageous enough to go on refining their religion. They have carried the old exactly as it was, without changing anything. In fact, the more ancient something is, the more valuable it is in the minds of Hindus.
“Parasurama, one of the incarnations of the Hindu god, obeyed his father and killed his mother. His father was suspicious – perhaps every husband is suspicious – and he had a beautiful wife. And Parasurama, who kills his own mother just because the father is suspicious, the father is jealous, is accepted as one of the incarnations of God. In the first place, jealousy is wrong, suspicion is wrong. In the second place, if your suspicion is right, then divorce is the way, not beheading the woman.”
And I asked Jugal Kisore Birla, “If the mother had told Parasurama to cut off the head of the father, what do you think would have been the situation? Would Parasurama still be accepted as an incarnation of God? The god is a man, the father is a man, the son is a man – this is a man’s world; to kill the woman is okay.”
And this man Parasurama was a brahmin, the highest Hindu caste, and the suspicion was that the mother was having a love affair with a warrior. You cannot find such stupidity in the whole history of the world, that because the mother was suspected… And it was only a suspicion, there was no certainty; the mother was never asked. There was no proof. Not only did he kill his mother, the story is that he killed all the warriors on the earth – because it was not known who the warrior was, “So finish all of them. Whoever he is, he will be finished.” Such a violent man! I don’t think there has ever been such a killer. Single-handedly, without any atom bombs or hydrogen bombs or nuclear weapons, he destroyed the second highest caste, the kshatriyas, the warriors.
But you find kshatriyas all over the world – where have these come from? There was a system, and in the Hindu scriptures there is no condemnation of it: the system was that any woman could go to any Hindu mahatma, Hindu sage, and ask for a child. And it was just sheer courtesy that the mahatma would make love to the woman. So whenever you come across a kshatriya, a warrior, he is not pure; the brahmin blood has destroyed their purity completely.
And the whole doing was because of Parasurama: he killed the men; now all the women were left without their husbands. And just to continue the race they had to go to the brahmin mahatmas. All those women were prostituted by the brahmins, and still there is no condemnation.
I am just waiting for a summons. In the newspapers, the news has come that a summons is on the way from a court in Kulu Manali because I have said that in Hindu scriptures you cannot find truth. This has hurt somebody’s feelings so much that now I have to be present in court. And these idiots don’t think at all that it is better not to provoke me – because all your Hindu scriptures are nothing but pornography. Searching for truth in Hindu scriptures… You cannot find truth in any scriptures, Hindu or Mohammedan or Christian.
So I told Jugal Kisore Birla, “You just forgive me. I am perfectly in agreement with you that cow slaughter should be stopped, but what about other animals? What about bulls?” The cow is the mother of the Hindus. And the bull, the father, is being slaughtered. So I asked him, “What about the father?”
He said, “What father?”
I said, “Your father.”
He said, “He is dead.”
I said, “I mean the bull.”
He said, “You are a strange man.”
I said, “I am not a strange man, you are strange people. In calling the cow your mother, you yourself are accepting that the bull is your father. You cannot deny that. And what about other animals? No Hindu is bothered about any other animal, so it is not respect for life, it is just superstition. The cows should be saved, just as every other animal should be saved. Life should be respected, and life should not be destroyed in any form.”

With me, the trouble is that I am absolutely honest.

I was in Amritsar. And because I had spoken on one of their basic texts, Japuji, the Sikhs were very happy – because nobody other than Sikhs had ever spoken on it, and spoken with such a deep analysis. They invited me into their gurdwara, and the chief of the gurdwara asked me, “We will be very pleased if you speak on our other gurus too.”
I said, “That is impossible. I can speak, but you will not like it.”
He said, “Why?”
I said, “I can speak on Nanak. I feel a deep affinity with the man. But the remaining nine of your masters, none of them are masters, just politicians – and continually fighting and killing. Have you seen any picture of Nanak with a sword? But the other nine…”
Sikhs have ten masters. The other nine have swords; so much so, that to be a Sikh you have to have five things: “the five K’s” it is called. In Punjabi, the sword is called katar – one K, katar. Another K is kesh, hair. The third K is a very strange thing that I have never been able to understand why. I have asked the Sikh priests, “All the K’s are okay, but the third K…”
They said, “Leave it.”
I said, “I cannot leave it because it is an essential part.” The third K stands for kachchha. Kachchha means underwear.
I said, “This is strange; to be a religious man you have to wear underwear! I don’t see any relationship between religion and underwear. But if you want me to support such things, I cannot. Neither is kesh important, nor is katar needed. And kachchha certainly is not needed.” Strange people.
So they said, “You cannot speak on our other masters?”
I said, “They are not masters. And such things I will have to criticize.”

Mohammedans have been coming to me with their Koran so many times: “Speak on the Koran.” And many times I have tried to look into it, to see if something can be found worth speaking on. But I have failed to find anything worth speaking on.
The religions of the world cannot accept me, because to accept me is not a simple matter. First they have to reject whatever has been there in their minds, their idea of religion. There is the difficulty.
The politicians of all types are worried because their basic game is the same: how to dominate people. And my whole effort is how to make people so strong, so freedom-loving that nobody can dominate them, so intelligent that nobody can exploit them. Naturally no politician is going to be in favor of me.
Many parliaments of the world have passed resolutions so that I cannot enter into their countries. I have never been in their countries, I have not said that I want to enter their countries, but they are taking precautions “in case.” Even the German government, which was the first to give orders to all its embassies that I should not be allowed in Germany… Not only that, my jet airplane should not be allowed to land at any German airport, even for refueling; I am not even getting out of the plane! I never thought that Adolf Hitler had left such cowards behind him. These are the grandchildren of Adolf Hitler – so impotent. Adolf Hitler must be tossing and turning in his grave at what kind of politicians his country has.
And they all go on lying. Here in the parliament, the opposition leader asked, “Has the government made it a condition for Osho that no foreign disciples should be allowed to come to him?” And the minister concerned said in the parliament that no such condition has been made. Any foreign disciples will have the same opportunity to come to India as other tourists have. But I am receiving letters from sannyasins that they are being refused at Indian embassies.
In Athens they refused. Because the sannyasin had read the statement of the minister, she went to the embassy in red clothes. They immediately rejected her application and said, “No sannyasin can go to India.”
Just two days ago, one sannyasin came from Australia and he said, “Two other sannyasins – who were not wearing red, who were not wearing the mala – were rejected. They asked, ‘Why are we being rejected?’ and the ambassador insisted, ‘You are sannyasins.’ They said, ‘We are not sannyasins; we don’t know who Osho is.’ But the ambassador said, ‘I know the very vibe of sannyasins.’”
They have taken a written statement from the man, because I have informed my sannyasins all over the world: whichever embassy refuses you, take a written statement that they are refusing you and that the cause is that you are sannyasins. Then we can sue them in those countries, and we can sue the government in this country – “Your ministers in the parliament are lying and deceiving the whole country. You say one thing in the parliament and you order your embassies to do just the opposite.”
These politicians cannot accept me. They have neither any understanding of human nature, nor do they have any understanding of human consciousness. They have no understanding of human evolution, nor do they desire that man should evolve. Man should remain retarded so that they can remain leaders. It is easy to be a leader in a retarded crowd. When people are intelligent, things become different.

I was a professor in a university. Doctor Radhakrishnan had become the president of India. Before becoming the president of India, he was the vice-chancellor of Varanasi Hindu University; so all educationists felt glorified in his glory and his birthday was made Teacher’s Day: “A teacher has become the president of India.” In my university also, there was great celebration. The vice-chancellor was presiding, and there were great speeches in praise of Radhakrishnan. They had asked me to speak also. They had no idea that I don’t believe in hypocrisy.
I asked the vice-chancellor, “Just a single question I would like to raise before the students and the professors: A professor becomes the president of the country and all the professors are feeling very gratified, their ego is satisfied. I don’t agree that this day should be called Teacher’s Day. We should wait for a president to become a teacher, to renounce the presidency in favor of being a teacher. Then we should celebrate that day as Teacher’s Day. This is President’s Day – you are celebrating it because a teacher has become president, but the value is in being a president, not in being a teacher. A president should become a teacher – that will certainly glorify the teacher. A president should say, ‘To be a president is nothing in comparison to being a teacher.’”
There was a great silence. The vice-chancellor looked at the chancellor, the chancellor looked at the deans – “Somebody should answer.”
I said, “Is anybody going to answer, or do I have to answer myself?” And I had to answer myself: “This is not a teacher’s day. Wait. And I don’t think it is going to happen ever, that a president will renounce the presidency in favor of being a university teacher.”
Radhakrishnan was very angry. One of my friends, who was a member of the parliament, met him; he was very angry. Zakir Hussain was very angry. He was vice-president of India and he had also been a vice-chancellor of Aligarh University; both were teachers. When I passed through Delhi, I said, “If they are still angry I would like to meet them.”
Radhakrishnan simply said that he was feeling very sick, but Zakir Hussain met me, and I asked him, “What is the sickness of Radhakrishnan? – because this morning he was at the airport to receive some president of a foreign country; this afternoon he was in the parliament. And suddenly, just to see me, he has become sick. Then tell him that I will stay here in Delhi – if I am his sickness, then I am not going away from here. And you should be sick also, because if you have any guts you should renounce your vice-presidency and become a teacher, and we will celebrate the Teacher’s Day.”
Zakir Hussain said, “But there are difficulties.”
I said, “There are no difficulties, there is only one difficulty: that Radhakrishnan’s term is going to be finished and you are going to become the president. That is the only difficulty.” And that’s what happened. And when Radhakrishnan retired, the whole country completely forgot the man whose presidency had become a celebration in every school, college and university all over the country. From the day he was out of power, nobody knew where he was. People came to know only when he died; then just a small item was in the newspapers that Doctor Radhakrishnan died last night. Nobody bothered about his death.

The politicians are power hungry. My whole approach is that power-hungry people are psychologically sick people, they are suffering from an inferiority complex; they are feeling a wound deep in themselves. They want to be in power to convince themselves that they are something, and to convince you that you cannot take them as ordinary, they are extraordinary people. And remember, this is the most ordinary desire – to be extraordinary. A very ordinary, common desire found in everybody. The only extraordinary person is one who has no desire to be extraordinary, who is completely at ease with his ordinariness.
It is difficult for the religious people, for the political people, for the rich people, because I am continually teaching that now science has enough technology, that there is no need for anybody in the world to be poor.
This point is a little subtle to understand. Poverty can be erased, but the problem is that there are sick people who want to be rich, and if nobody is poor how they can be richer? How can they compare themselves? Poverty can be destroyed, but the people with money who are in power are preventing in every way that poverty should not be destroyed – because once poverty is gone, their richness is gone too. It is a comparative thing.
Every year, America goes on dumping billions of dollars worth of food in the ocean. For the last year, Europe has been dumping so much food every six months that each time it costs two hundred million dollars to dump that much food. This is not the value of the food; it is the cost of dumping it, the labor charge. And the world is dying from poverty!
Who are these people? It is not that only in the East people are dying, so why should they bother. In America thirty million people are dying on the streets, and America goes on dumping its food – mountains of butter – and people are dying on the streets.
There is something to be understood: something is sick in the psychology of people. The rich people can remain rich only if there are poor people around; poor people are absolutely needed for a few people to feel rich. Ugly people are absolutely necessary for a few people to feel beautiful; otherwise all ugliness can disappear, all poverty can disappear – science has provided the technology for both. But that technology is not being used. It is prevented from being used by a few people whose whole enjoyment is in somebody being poor, in somebody being ugly.

In Kolkata, I used to stay in a house; the man was very beautiful, and always happy because he was always succeeding in being richer and richer. But one day when I landed in Kolkata – he had come with his wife to receive me – he looked very sad.
I said, “This is not like you. What has happened?”
The wife told me, “I will tell you. He will not tell you. He has suffered a great loss; he has just lost five lakhs, fifty thousand rupees.”
I asked him, “What is the matter? Is she right?”
I asked the wife, “Tell me the whole story. How has he lost five lakhs?”
She laughed, she said, “It is such a hilarious thing: he was hoping to gain ten lakh rupees in a certain business and he gained only five lakhs. I am saying to him, ‘You have gained five lakhs,’ and he says, ‘You be silent, I have lost five lakhs – ten lakhs were certain.”

There are these kinds of people, who are losing money which is only in their minds. They have gained five lakhs – that is nothing; that is not making them happy. They are miserable because they have lost a projected profit that was just their idea; they have not lost a single rupee. He has made a profit of five lakhs, but that does not make him happy.
The rich people don’t want poverty to disappear from the world. Yes, they would like to open schools for poor children, hospitals for poor people, for orphans, for aboriginals. They will give Nobel Prizes to Mother Teresa. These Nobel Prizes are given to keep the world poor, to keep the world full of orphans.
Their difficulty in accepting me is very clear: to accept me they will have to change the whole world, the whole world outlook, and that seems to be too big a thing. It is easier for them to destroy me rather than to change themselves. But even if they destroy me, they will have to change themselves sooner or later.
It may take a little time, but truth is going to be victorious.

Osho,
The art and the culture in the West are born out of the mental perversions and suffering provoked by the Christian religion. In the West, we don’t know the art of celebration. What can we do to change this paranoid pattern?
Christianity has to be declared dead. Just as Jews one day had to crucify Jesus, we have to crucify Christianity. It has created a very perverted, morbid mentality in all dimensions of creativity. And the reason is that the religion is based on the crucifixion of Jesus. It is a religion of death; that is the source of perversion. It is not a religion of life.
In a Christian church, when Jesus is hanging on the cross it creates a certain sadness; the sadness of a graveyard, the sadness of a young and innocent man being crucified. You cannot sing a beautiful song, you cannot dance; it will be simply out of tune with the whole atmosphere of the church.
Christianity has made its impression on painting, music, other forms of art. They are all sad, morbid, sick, pathological. Unless Christianity disappears the West cannot be free to dance, it cannot be free to celebrate.
Christianity teaches that this life is a life of sin. You are all sinners, you are born in sin – now with this background, how can you sing? Feeling guilty, how can you dance? Psychologically, it is an impossibility.

The attorney general of America declared a few days ago in a press conference… He was asked why Osho had not been jailed. He said three things, which are very significant to remember.
The first thing he said: “Our priority was to destroy the commune.” But why should their priority be to destroy the commune? The commune was in a desert; the nearest American town was twenty miles away. We were almost an independent country. Nobody was going to visit the American towns. We were so blissful with our meditations, with our work, with our dances, with our singing, with transforming the desert into an oasis – and we had succeeded.
That land had remained a desert for centuries. It had not seen a single flower; the day I reached there, there was not a single bird. It was one hundred and twenty-six square miles of land; it was not a small space. Just barren, dead. We made it alive.
Five thousand sannyasins made houses, roads, cultivated the land. We were producing our vegetables, our milk products. Five thousand people were meditating in the morning, listening to me in the morning, being with me in the morning; in the day they were working. Five thousand people were eating together in one kitchen; even the lunch or suppertime was a celebration. And then people were dancing late in the night, playing their guitars – we were not concerned with America at all.
We were not part of America at all, we had nothing to do with America. Why does the attorney general of America say, “Our priority was to destroy the commune”? The priority was to destroy our celebration, our smiles, our dances, our laughter. They had never seen such a thing.
Their churches are sad and serious. We were also meeting, but our meeting was a meeting of laughter, joy. And it was hurting their pride very badly that in the desert… At first they were thinking that we were going to fail. We succeeded; that was a wound. They were wondering what were we going to do in the desert? We created a school for children, we created a hospital, we created a university, and people were coming from all over the world.
America had no place which could be called a holy place, like Arabia has Mecca and Medina, or Israel has Jerusalem, or India has Kashi or Girnar. America is without any holy place. We had created the first holy place in America, where people were coming on pilgrimage. And Americans started coming to see it, and they could not believe that people could be so happy, so loving, so peaceful.
In five years’ time, five thousand people, nobody had hurt anybody, no fight had broken out. There was no government, yet there was no insecurity. There were no small family units; it was one big family – my idea of the future family, the commune. And people had the best of food. There was no currency, because you could not purchase anything in the commune. All your needs were fulfilled by the commune; money had disappeared. I myself have not seen what a dollar bill looks like.
The whole Christian Church of America was against us because their very foundation was shaking. We don’t believe in God, we don’t believe in Jesus Christ. We don’t believe in any religion, and yet we are so happy – and we had created a paradise of our own.
The attorney general has unconsciously spoken the truth: “Our basic priority was to destroy the commune.”
Secondly, he said, “Osho had not committed any crime, and we had no proof, no evidence for anything against him, so how could we jail him?”
And thirdly, “Even if we could jail him, we would not have done it because we never wanted him to become a martyr. Jailing him would have created a tremendous wave of sympathy around the world.”
They had seen it. For just twelve days they had kept me in jail and they had seen that all over the world, America included, there was such tremendous sympathy that they simply wanted me to get out of America.
But his statement makes many things look very weird. He admits that he is the highest law authority in America; he admits I had not committed any crime – they had no proof, no evidence – yet I was fined four hundred thousand dollars. For what have I been fined? I am thinking to sue the attorney general of America, because if he is right, then that money should be returned.
But they had to fine me, just to show the world that they had not kept me in jail for twelve days without any reason. They were not ready to go to trial, so before the start of the trial the attorney general called my attorneys: “Why don’t we negotiate rather than going into trial?”
They had a list of one hundred and thirty-six crimes that I had committed, and he was saying that I had not committed a single crime – can you think of bigger criminals in the world? They invented one hundred and thirty-six crimes, and they said to my attorneys, “If you want to save Osho’s life, it is better that you accept any two crimes and then there will be no trial. For those two crimes we will fine you a small fine, and you can take Osho out of America immediately – within fifteen minutes. We don’t want him in America more than fifteen minutes.”
Now I can understand why they did not want me to be there more than fifteen minutes – because all those crimes were bogus; I could have gone to a higher court, because this was blackmail. They threatened my attorneys: “If you want to save his life, you simply accept two crimes. And just a little fine… And for five years he cannot enter America.”
My attorneys came to me with tears in their eyes – because after these twelve days they were no longer professional attorneys, they had almost become my disciples. They could not sit on chairs in front of me. Even when they came to see me in the jail they would sit on the floor. I would say, “This is not right. You are not my disciples; you are professional people. You have never known me before.”
They said, “It feels strange. It feels better just to sit on the floor.”
I said, “But why do you have tears in your eyes?”
They said, “We have tears in our eyes because we have to accept two crimes which you have not committed, and we have to accept them because we don’t want your life to be at risk. It is sheer blackmail.”
They said, “We have never seen in our lives…” And they were the topmost attorneys in America. “We have never seen such a thing, that the government threatens that ‘If you go to trial then his life will be finished, so don’t go for a trial.’ Because they know that in a trial they cannot prove anything against you. But the pride of the government, the pride of the country has to be saved. So we have accepted the two crimes.
“We had come to fight for you, and we have tears in our eyes because we are not fighting; on the contrary, we are knowingly agreeing with lies. We can prove that these are absolute lies but your life is far more valuable to us. So please don’t disagree with us in the court, otherwise we will be in a very difficult position.”
So I let them accept two crimes. And this was again a lie, that it would be a “small fine.” Four hundred thousand dollars is not a small fine – and for two bogus crimes which have never been committed, nobody has done anything. And then five years with no entry in America, so that I cannot go back and fight, that what they have done is blackmail.
And ten years’ suspended jail sentence… I only came to know here what a ten years’ suspended jail sentence means. I said, “What does it mean?” It means that if I go into America after five years, then any small crime and the judge can send me into jail for ten years – there will be no trial. So the police just have to bring me before the court saying that I have committed such and such crime and there will be no trial, and the judge has permission to put me into jail for ten years. So in fact they have prevented me from entering America for fifteen years.
Now the attorney general is saying that I have not committed any crime and they don’t have any proof.
And they said that I had to be out of America within fifteen minutes. They did not give me even one day to remain in America, because even in one day things could be different – I could go to a higher court. So directly from the jail to the airport – just exactly within fifteen minutes, I was out of America.

These are the politicians. How can they accept me? Their fear that humanity might become a celebration is very valid, because it is out of human misery that they are in power. If you are not miserable, their power is gone. If you want the West to become a place of celebration, Christianity has to die. And it is not much of a death because it is really a dead corpse that you are carrying on your shoulders. It is rotten, but your attachment…

In India we have a beautiful story about Shiva. He loved his wife Parvati so much that when she died he would not believe that there was not a physician somewhere in the universe who was not capable of curing her. Everybody tried to persuade him, “You are mad. In your attachment, you are blind – she is dead; now no physician can do anything.”
But he wouldn’t listen. He took his wife on his shoulders and went around India searching for a physician who could cure her. By and by the rotten body started falling – a hand fell, another hand fell, a leg fell, and it was stinking – but so is attachment. Blind, utterly blind! There are twelve places, still marked with temples of Shiva, where one of the parts of his wife had fallen.
Finally when her head also rolled away, only then could he be brought to his senses: “Now it is enough. Even if you can get a physician there is just the head, and that too is no longer a head – just a skeleton. You cannot even recognize who this is. Now come back home.” It took twelve years for him.

Christianity is dead. All religions are dead. But our attachment is ancient, old, and we are still carrying them. And under their weight we are dying.
Just to save yourself, let these dead ideologies be in the grave. You cannot dance with dead bodies on your shoulders, and it won’t look right either – everybody having a dead body on his shoulder and everybody dancing, it will be a very weird scene, very ghostly.
Let the dead disappear. Be clean of the past – that’s what I mean when I say let the dead disappear.
Be fresh in the present, and celebration will arise out of you just as new leaves come in the spring.