Osho – Beyond Psychology

A world beyond time

Question 1:

BELOVED OSHO,

YOUR VISION IS SO BEAUTIFUL, AND MOST OF ALL, SO SIMPLE. BUT WHEN
I THINK ABOUT WHAT MAN HAS TO CLEANSE HIMSELF OF, IT SEEMS TO
GET COMPLICATED. I THINK THE THING HARDEST FOR MAN TO DROP, FOR
YOUR VISION EVER TO BE, IS HIS SO-CALLED POWER — WORLDLY AND
SPIRITUAL. TO ME, SUCH PEOPLE WOULD RATHER SEE THEIR WORLD
BLOW UP THAN TO GIVE UP THEIR PRECIOUS POWER. IS THIS SO?

It is so. People are so unconscious that they can do anything to keep their power, their respectability — even if it means blowing up the whole world. They can risk anything to save their ego. And these are the people who naturally reach to the positions of power, because they are the only seekers of power.

No creative, intelligent person seeks power. No intelligent person is interested in dominating others. His first interest is to know himself. So the people with the highest quality of intelligence go towards mysticism, and the most mediocre go after power. That power can be worldly, political; it can be of money, it can be of holding spiritual domination over millions of people, but the basic urge is to dominate more and more people.

This urge arises because you don’t know yourself, and you don’t want to know that you don’t know yourself. You are so afraid of becoming aware of the ignorance that prevails in the very center of your being. You escape from this darkness through these methods — lust for money, lust for power, lust for respectability, honor. And a man who has darkness within himself can do anything destructive.

Creativity is impossible from such a person, because creativity comes from your being conscious, a little alert… light, love. Creativity is not at all interested in dominating anyone — for what? The other is the other; neither you want to dominate anyone, nor you want to be dominated by anyone. Freedom is the very taste of being just a little alert.

But these people are completely asleep. In their sleep they are making atomic bombs, nuclear weapons, not knowing what they are doing. Only one thing keeps them moving, and that is: more power, more power. And whoever comes in their way has to be destroyed. They don’t know anything else. They are barbarians who have not evolved into human beings. Yes, they can destroy the whole world; they are already prepared to do so.

They are all against me because I am exposing them.

And I am surprised: in this big world nobody else is there to join hands with me, because people are afraid of the powerful ones — they can destroy them. One is fearless only when he knows that he is indestructible; you can kill him but you cannot destroy his being. But such people have slowly disappeared from the earth. We have not nourished them. We kill them and then worship them.

This also has to be understood, why all the people that we have killed — for example, Jesus, Socrates, Al-Hillaj Mansoor, Sarmad — are immensely respectable after they have been killed. When they were alive they were condemned by everybody, not only by those who were in power but even by those who were not in power. Those who were not in power condemned them to show to the powerful, “We are with you.” And the powerful condemned them because these people were bringing a vision. If it succeeds, then there will be no domination in the world; then there will be human beings — everybody unique, flowering in his own way.

But all these people are worshipped when they are dead. That comes out of guilt. First people kill them… It is the powerful who kill them, and it is the powerless, the dominated, who support them — unwillingly, but very fanatically, because they want to show to everybody, “We are more against them than you are, and we are more in favor of the powerful than you are.”

But once the man is killed, crucified, poisoned, these are the people who start feeling guilty, because from the very beginning they were not ready to kill the man. They had no problem with the man; he was not destroying any of their vested interests. They simply supported the powerful because they were afraid that if they didn’t support, if they remained silent, they would be suspected of supporting the person who has been killed.

A disciple of Jesus was in the crowd when Jesus was crucified, and he was asked — because he looked different from others, was not from the same place, was a foreigner, and nobody recognized him — he was being asked again and again, “Who are you? Do you know this man who is being crucified?” And he said, “No, I have never heard about him. Just seeing that so many people are going this way, just to see what is happening, I have come.” Even he cannot admit that he is a follower of Jesus, because he knows the result will be another cross.

So finally, when these people are crucified, the people who had supported it unwillingly start feeling very guilty, “What have we done against an innocent man, who has done no harm to anybody? And whatever he was saying, he was right.” They can understand that these people in power are exploiting everybody.

It is a strange world. You know people now as kings and queens, and if you follow their ancestors, in the beginning, they were robbers. From where did they get their kingdom?

They are great robbers who have killed many people, accumulated money, land, declared themselves as lords of the land, and now they have royal blood. They are in the lineage of criminals — and not ordinary criminals, big criminals. But they have power, they have money — naturally their blood is special.

The ordinary people have known all along that they are being crushed, murdered slowly.

They labor hard and they cannot manage even one meal a day. They produce — but all that goes to those people who are in power. So when they support these people, it is unwillingly. That unwillingness, when the man is dead, turns into guilt; they start feeling that they have been participants in a criminal act. They have not done anything, but they were participants in a way; they were showing that they are in support of the powerful people.

To remove that guilt, worship arises. Worship is simply the removal of the guilt, to wash away the guilt. That’s how such big religions like Christianity… otherwise Jesus had not that genius to produce such a big religion. There were hundreds of rabbis far more intelligent, far more scholarly than him, he was just an uneducated young man, but the crucifixion changed the whole situation. Once they crucified him, they made him a god — god to all those people, who are millions, who had supported the crucifixion. They started feeling guilty.

And you can see it, if you look deeply. Jesus was killed by the order of the Roman emperor, by his viceroy, Pontius Pilate in Judea, with the agreement of the high priest of the temple of the Jews. Today Rome has been the citadel of Christianity for twenty centuries, but the order to kill that man had come from Rome. There was a day when the whole Roman civilization turned into a Christian civilization. Today the pope has only a small piece of land — eight square miles — but it is an independent country. It has been shrinking slowly; once he had the whole of Italy. He was higher than the state.

People were killed in Rome for being Christians. Christ was the first one, then whosoever turned Christian was killed in the same way; hundreds of people were crucified. And this whole crucifixion created so much guilt in people that a great religion came out of it. But such a religion can only be a psychological cover-up; it cannot be a true religion. It is simply covering up your guilt. The more fanatic a religious person is… you can measure by his fanaticism how guilty he is feeling, what he is hiding behind it.

But Christianity became the world’s biggest religion for the simple reason that not only Christ but many other people, who had turned Christian, were crucified without any trial.

And the masses were supporting the powerful people but deep down feeling hurt — what is happening is simply inhuman, should not happen. But they are poor, they have no power; they cannot do anything except worship.

A real religion is always of meditation.

A false religion is always of worship.

Worship is a psychological method of washing from your hands the blood that you can see on your hands. Even Pontius Pilate… the first thing he did after ordering the crucifixion of Jesus was to wash his hands, because he was not willing to kill this innocent man. He had talked to him, he had listened in disguise where he was talking to his disciples, and he had started loving something in that man. He is innocent. He says some crazy things but the way he says them is beautiful. He is uneducated but he speaks poetry. He does not know much, but whatever he knows he presents it with tremendous authority. And he is not doing any harm to anybody: if you don’t want to listen to him, don’t listen; if you don’t want to follow him, don’t follow. He is not preaching any dangerous ideas to people.

Pontius Pilate wanted him to be freed. He tried to persuade the priests that he should be freed because he seems to be innocent. But Jews were not ready to free him — and they committed a great mistake. They are responsible for creating Christianity. So all the bloodshed that Christianity has done, deep down, Jews are responsible for, and Christianity has taken revenge, tortured Jews, killed Jews, made them homeless. For centuries it has been going on.

Who are the people who became Christians? A few Jews who felt the innocence of the person but were afraid of the priesthood, the religious hierarchy in power. But many more people were crucified in Rome — and many more Romans became Christians.

It was a convention that every year the Jews were allowed to ask Pontius Pilate to save one life, because it was just before their religious holiday; it was a religious mercy and compassion.

Pontius Pilate was hoping that they would ask — because there were three people who were going to be crucified — that they would ask Jesus to be released, because the other two were great criminals. But the priests and the hierarchy of the rabbis shouted, “We want Barabbas!” — one criminal who had committed seven murders. Even Barabbas could not believe that he was being released, and this poor guy, Jesus — he knew him — they were not asking for him to be released. And he had not done anything!

Barabbas was saved. Christians don’t talk much about Barabbas but he is a tremendously powerful character, and very important, because the miracle happened to him, not to Jesus. It was expected that God would save Jesus. God missed his target. Barabbas could not believe it. When they released him he looked back again and again — there must be some mistake. He was such a criminal; there was not any crime that he had not done — rape, murder… And he was always drunk, he was a drunkard.

But the face of Jesus remained in his mind and tortured him. He also started feeling guilty, “I should not have been released. It was perfectly right for me to be on the cross.

That poor man… I have taken his place and he has taken my place.” He felt a soft corner for Jesus. And within six months he committed a rape, he committed a murder, and he was caught again.

But this was the rule, that once the Roman emperor releases somebody from crucifixion, he cannot be crucified again. So they had to find an alternative for such people, because those people are bound to do something if they are such diehard criminals. In Rome they had a dangerous coal mine; they used to send those people to that coal mine to dig coal. It has reached to such places that once in a while it used to collapse, and thousands of the people who were working under it would be killed. That was their way of avoiding crucifixion.

Barabbas was sent to the coal mines in Rome. Within three months the coal mine collapsed. There were at least three thousand people; only Barabbas remained alive, everybody else was dead. That was the second miracle! He could not believe what was happening! He had been hanged on the cross and then brought down. He could not believe it that day; he was completely ready to be crucified, and he knew that he had done so many criminal things that it was perfectly right; there was no question of his being released.

Now what had happened? Three thousand people had died and only he was saved. Even the emperor of Rome, the empress of Rome, became aware that this man seems to be a man of God — twice he has returned from death. So he was called to Rome. He had become so famous that people started touching him. He had become almost divine; just to touch him was a great experience. Even the empress wanted to touch Barabbas.

But the emperor said, “One test more; these two things may have been just accidental.”

And the last test was… Every year they had games in which criminals were thrown without any weapons before hungry lions, to fight with them. Barabbas was thrown before a hungry lion, and he managed a third time: he killed the hungry lion. Then even the emperor thought, “Now it cannot be an accident.” He had never seen before… All criminals were eaten by the lions! This was the first time that a man had killed the lion; unscratched, he was victorious.

He was freed, he was given citizenship. He was no longer a slave — because in those days there were two categories of people, slaves and citizens. He was given citizenship. That was a great honor, and especially for a criminal… but he had proved three times that he can come back from death.

Christians have so much difficulty in proving that Jesus is a man of miracles. Barabbas is a man of miracles. They prove hard that Jesus is the only begotten son of God. It seems there is some mistake — Barabbas seems to be the only begotten son of God!

But all these years he was carrying the innocent Jesus’ face, and feeling guilty that he was saved: “There has been some mistake. And I have been saved thrice!” He started meeting Christians in underground caves, where they used to meet so that nobody would know.

He listened for the first time to what Jesus used to say — and he became a Christian. The day he became a Christian he was caught and crucified, and then no miracle happened! It is a very strange story.

But the Roman people, who are now Italians, started feeling: Thousands of people are being crucified just because they are getting involved with Jesus and his teachings. The Roman empire disappeared, and the whole land of the Romans became Christian. And from there Christianity started moving all over the world.

A guilt feeling is very basic for being a Christian, for being a false religious person. Real religiousness arises not out of guilt but out of silence, out of love, out of meditativeness.

These people who are in power are almost on the brink of destroying the world, rather than lose their power. I can understand their logic — they may not be aware of it. Their logic is: We are going to die anyway, so what if the whole world dies? Our death is certain, so why should we bother about whether the world lives after us or not? We should live in power as long as we are here, and there is no need to be bothered about what will happen if the world explodes into a third world war.

The inner logic is: the day one is dead, the whole world is dead for him. You were not here one day; whether the world was here or not would not have made any difference to you. You will not be here one day; whether the world is there or has been blown up by nuclear weapons will not make any difference to you. What makes the difference to them is that they are in power, and they want to prove to the whole world that they are the most powerful people.

Now the competition has reached to a suicidal point, and America is in a hurry for the third world war to happen. Russia wants to delay it a little, because America has evolved certain microwave patterns around the whole country — billions of dollars have been put into it. You cannot see it, it does not obstruct anything; it only obstructs nuclear weapons.

If a nuclear weapon is fired at America, if a missile comes to America, it will be returned; it cannot enter the country. So America is feeling safe. That’s why this Libya episode happened.

The Soviet Union has not yet been able… they are working hard to create a protective armor around the country. Their country is big, vast; their finances are not as great as American finances, but still they are preparing — there is no other way.

Those two nuclear powers are preparing their protection. Then America can send missiles to the Soviet Union, and they will also be returned. Now, where they will fall, nobody knows — they will fall somewhere. But those two countries are protected, and the whole world is unprotected. So the whole world is in danger. Right now the Soviet Union is not ready with its protection; Libya was just a way to check whether Russia is ready or not. If they had been ready, the third world war would have been on.

The Soviet Union is ready to support Libya but is afraid to, for the simple reason that it does not yet have any protection for its own country; it needs some time. That’s why the Soviet leaders are talking about cutting the production of nuclear weapons in such a way, step by step, that by the end of this century all production completely stops — and the whole world is impressed by it.

America cannot accept it because it has put billions of dollars into the protective armor that will be useless… billions of dollars into nuclear weapons, and no chance to use them.

America is in a hurry; it wants any excuse. And the gap is not big; perhaps within one year the Soviet Union will be ready. So if the war has to happen, America wants it quickly.

Kaddafi’s daughter died because America bombed his houses — even his tent in the desert they did not leave — and Kaddafi was silent, taking no action. On the contrary, he said that if America bombs anywhere else, their whole strategy will be to bomb the place and blame Libya for it. Libya is a small country, but Libya is just an excuse to provoke the Soviet Union. And Kaddafi said, “Next time Libya is bombed then be certain, that will be the beginning of the third world war.” But why next time? The Soviet Union needs a little time.

If the world has some intelligent people in it, they should protest together to the U.N.:

“Now it is intolerable. Patience has a limit, and all nuclear weapons should be banned, should be thrown in the oceans, or some way should be found that they are made useless or turned into some creative force.”

Perhaps we are not far away now, not even ten, fifteen years… America is in such a hurry, and the hurry has a reason… before the Soviet Union completes its project of protection, because after that protection those two countries will be safe. Then everybody else will be killed who is not fighting, who has nothing to do with the fight, who is out of the war but they don’t have any protection. The returning nuclear missiles will fall all over the world.

The intelligentsia of the world has to create an atmosphere in the world that now it is a question not of the Soviet Union and America; it is a question of the whole world.

Because the whole world is going to suffer, the whole world should unite against both these nations and force both these nations to stop this mad race of nuclear weapons and power.

But there seems to be no protest, there seems to be no worry. The world goes on in a routine rut. It seems people don’t have any alertness, don’t have any clarity about the problem.

I can see clearly that there is more possibility of the world blowing up than being saved, because nothing is being done to save it and everything is being done to blow it up. And because I speak against it, America is against me, the Soviet Union is against me. This is a rare phenomenon; otherwise it happens that if America is against me, the Soviet Union will be favorable to me. And vice versa too is true. But both are against me, because I am not really against America or the Soviet Union; I am against this game of power, which is simply idiotic.

Question 2:

BELOVED OSHO,

WE HAVE EXPERIMENTED WITH COMMUNES IN BOTH THE EAST AND THE
WEST THAT DID NOT LAST. BUDDHA AND OTHER ENLIGHTENED MASTERS
CREATED COMMUNES THAT DID LAST.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?

Gautam Buddha and other masters never created communes the way we have created them. Buddha had followers, but not staying in one place… moving continuously.

Mahavira had followers, but not staying in one place… moving continuously. So nobody has created the way we created communes. Five thousand people living together is a totally different experience than five thousand Buddhist monks moving from one place to another place, only staying three days at one place. And even in that, man’s cunningness comes in.

Jaina monks have to move continuously, except during the rainy seasons. In India, before atomic experiments started, the seasons used to be very fixed. Even dates and days were fixed — on what day the rains will begin and on what day the rains will stop — and there were three clear-cut seasons, four months each. So for four months in the rainy season they had to stop. But that also does not mean that thousands of sannyasins will be stopping in one place, but wherever they are.

But the cunningness of man’s mind is such that I have seen Jaina monks who have lived their whole life in Bombay — somebody is there for fifty years… I enquired, “How is it being managed? — because it is against their basic rule and discipline. After three days they have to move.”

And I was told that in Mahavira’s time there were not such big cities as Bombay. Now the Jaina monk moves from one part of Bombay to another part of Bombay, and in this way he goes on moving around Bombay, inside Bombay, from one place to another place. But he remains in Bombay; he never leaves Bombay. Clever idea! From one suburb he will move to another suburb; that is another place. And in Mahavira’s time there were no such big cities these suburbs would have been different cities, different towns, so…”We are moving!” And they go on circling.

Bombay has a population of the daily population is nearabout ten million people. Forty million people come every day to work, from nearby towns, and they return in the evening. Sixty million people are living in the town. They are logically right, that there was no city in Mahavira’s time of such population. But the whole point is missed. The point was simply that you don’t become attached to a certain place, that you don’t start having friendships, likes, dislikes. In three days you cannot do much. One day you come, just one day you really stay, and the third day you have to move. It is not enough time to get into any politics, or any local problems. To avoid power politics, to avoid local problems, attachments, the device was created that you move after three days.

But after three days they go on moving in the same city — for fifty years, sixty years.

They have immense contact with people. They are almost residents of Bombay! The people who like them come to listen to them wherever they are.

Nobody had any commune the way we tried, and both the experiments have given great insights into human nature, so nothing has been a failure. We have learned much. So now I am not going to create a commune. I am going to create a totally different thing: a mystery school… forty, fifty people will be there to take care of the school, and two hundred, three hundred, five hundred people can come for a one month course, or a two month course, or a three month course, and move on. And slowly, slowly we can train people so that they can open mystery schools around the world. A school is a different thing. You come for three months to learn something, to go through some experiences, and then you are back in the world, to your work, to your job.

The commune experiment has made it clear that if five thousand people are living in a commune, they will have to do many things — make roads, make houses, make other facilities for five thousand people, and for the guests who will be coming for festivals.

These people will not have any time left for the real search they had come for in the first place. They will not have time for meditation. They will not have time to go within themselves, to find techniques and work upon them, because the work is such that you cannot just work five hours a day, five days a week; it will never be completed. You have to work ten, twelve hours a day seven days a week. You are tired — and moreover, what you are doing is only the necessary facilities for yourself. Soon you will have to start production; otherwise from where are you going to get your food, your clothes? So this is a vicious circle.

And when five thousand people are there, then there is bound to be power politics. Then you have to find group leaders, coordinators. It is not possible to give freedom to five thousand people: “Do whatsoever you like” — because they will all go swimming and trekking and playing their guitars, but then who will make the roads and the houses and do the farming? And how are your food and your clothes to be arranged? How long can we depend on donations? Sooner or later you will have to make factories and you will have to create something. Then this commune becomes just an ordinary world — so why make so much unnecessary trouble? Our basic reason was to give you an insight into yourself. That is completely forgotten in unnecessary trivia.

So my new phase of work is a mystery school. You work in the world, where roads are already there, houses are already there, you need not make them. Factories are already there… in thousands of years the world has created all that. So you can manage — five hours work five days a week is enough. On the weekend you can meditate, you can go into silence or you can go to some isolated spot and just relax. And in a year you will be able to earn so much money, save so much money, that you can come here for one month, two months, three months… as much as you can manage.

Then being with me has no connotations of work. Then being with me is simply joy, celebration, meditation, singing, dancing. Those three months are simply holiday. You forget the world for those three months. They are pure search for the truth. And after three months, whatever you have learned, continue it at home; there you have time. Five hours you work — you have enough time; you can get at least two hours for yourself.

Not only this… when you start living with me there is a possibility that you may start taking me for granted, that I am always here. Nine months being away will bring you closer to me, because distance creates longing, creates love, creates understanding. So each year you will be coming, then going. Whatever you can manage… you can come twice. You will not be a burden on anybody, and there is no need for anybody to dominate you; there is no need for any strict discipline — work needs that. There is no need for coordinators, so we can avoid the power trip.

But both our communes have helped to bring us to this point where we can start a mystery school. Without those two communes it would have been impossible. This is my way of looking at things. Even failures bring you closer to success, because each failure gives you insight into what went wrong, how it went wrong. So both the experiments have been immensely significant.

Now we are in a position to create a totally different kind of place, which is simply a festival all the year round. People will be coming and going. They will take whatever they learn and they will practice it in the world, and they will come again to renew, to refresh, to go further, deeper. Only a skeleton crew will be here to take care of you.

Question 3:

BELOVED OSHO,

I’VE BEEN HERE WITH YOU NOW FOR TWO WEEKS, AND FIND MYSELF NOT
THINKING OR TALKING ABOUT THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE I WAS WITH
BEFORE. IF FEELS AS IF I HAVE BEEN HERE FOR THREE MONTHS OR MORE,
SO MANY THINGS HAVE HAPPENED. HOW COME THAT TIME LOSES ALL ITS
MEANING WHEN WE ARE WITH YOU?

Time is a relative phenomenon. It is nothing absolute, so in different contexts it will have different meanings. You are in pain — time will look longer. Your tooth is hurting — seconds will look like minutes, minutes will look like hours. It depends how much the tooth is hurting! In pain you want to finish it, finish this pain, somehow to get rid of it.

You don’t want to prolong it, so time seems to be long.

Christians have never been able to explain why their hell is eternal, and they cannot explain it because the grounds on which they have made it eternal are foolish. If it is punishment, then it is absolutely impossible to prove that somebody has committed so many sins that his punishment is going to be eternal.

Bertrand Russell, one of the genius minds of our times, wrote a book, WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, and this is one of the points that he makes clear, “I am absolutely against the idea of eternal hell, because as far as I know, if all my sins in my long life” — and he lived long, almost a century — “can be accumulated, and even those sins which I have not committed but only contemplated, those sins which I have dreamed of but I have not really committed… Combine all of them and the hardest judge cannot give me more than four to five years in jail. Now, eternal hell? It is so absurd and illogical — that puts me off.” And he recounts other points. The Christians have not been able to answer, for the simple reason that they have based their argument on wrong things.

My answer would have been that because hell is the idea of suffering, immense suffering… it may be only for a single moment but it will appear as eternal, unending. It is a relative concept. And Bertrand Russell would have immediately understood it, because he wrote a book, THE ABC OF RELATIVITY. He understands the idea of relativity:

when you are joyous and happy with a friend, with a lover, time becomes short; it seems to go faster. Hours pass, and suddenly you see that so many hours have passed but it seems only a few minutes have passed. In pain time becomes long — it is very elastic. In pleasure it becomes very short.

But to be with me is something more than pleasure; it is peace, it is silence. It is something that is beyond the words. But my presence can make you feel it: time can disappear completely. It can be felt as if time has stopped. This is a beautiful experience.

Time stopping means you are entering into a world beyond time.

And that’s what I am trying to do.

To be available to you, to call you here to be with me, simply means that I want to give you some taste of that which is higher than pleasure. And in that moment, time comes to a standstill.