OSHO Speaks
I remember while you were in the police station in Crete, those two young smiling Greek women, dressed in black like typical Cretan women, coming to the window, holding your hand and saying in very broken English, "Osho, we love you. We are Cretan, we want you to stay here."
It seems that as the governments become increasingly strident in their attacks on you - in spite of the increasingly obvious love the common man has for you - one of the most important parts of your work will be to show how the bureaucracy, far from representing the common man, is in fact in complete opposition to him."
"I certainly remember those two young women holding my hand and trying to convey to me that "We, the people of this island, want you to stay here. We love you."
The question you have raised has occurred to me many times in my life, again and again. The bureaucracy is not for the people, it is against them. It uses them, it exploits them, it manipulates them; it makes them believe that it is serving their purposes. But the reality is just the opposite.
They define democracy as the government of the people, for the people, by the people. It is none of these things. It is neither by the people, nor of the people, nor for the people.
The people who have been holding power down the centuries have always been able to persuade people that whatever is being done, is done for their sake. And the people have believed it because they have been trained to believe.
It is a conspiracy between religion and state to exploit humanity.
The religion goes on preaching belief and destroys the intelligence of people to question, makes them retarded. And the state goes on exploiting them in every possible way -- still managing to keep the people's support, because the people have been trained to believe, not to question. Any kind of government -- it may be monarchy, it may be aristocracy, it may be democracy, it may be any kind of government.... Just the names change but deep down the reality remains the same.
In Japan before the second world war, Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, was believed to be the direct descendant of the God Sun, and whatever he was saying was not human, it was divine; his order had just to be followed. For centuries Japanese people have believed in him as a Sun God, And they have died in hundreds of wars, willingly, joyously, because they are dying for God himself. What more blissful and beautiful a death could one aspire to?
Japan is a small country but no other country has been able to conquer it -- even countries like China, vast countries. China is the greatest country as far as numbers are concerned, as far as land is concerned, but a small tiny Japan was able to defeat the Chinese because the people had this fanatic belief that God is behind them, so victory is theirs. And more or less the same has been the situation all over the world.
That day when those two Cretan women, holding my hand with great love, said to me, "We are not against you. We love you and we want you to stay here," they represented the real consciousness of the people. And then I saw at the airport, three thousand people -- it must have been the whole population of Saint Nicholas -- came to show their support, and to show that they are not with the brutality and nazi actions of the police against me, that they are for me.
Yes, it has to be one of my works to awaken people to the real situation: you are being exploited in different names. The exploiters even call themselves public servants, to tell you that they serve you. For thousands of years they have been "serving," -- and the people are in immense misery, ignorance. They don't have anything to their life; they are born, they somehow live, and they die. Nothing happens to them which could be called ecstatic, which could be called an experience.
Empty from birth to death, nothing flowers, nothing blossoms...and they have all the potential of being a song of joy. But these bureaucracies, religious and political, would not allow it. They are so afraid of joyous people.
It was a strange feeling for me in the beginning.
I had never thought that people should be so afraid of joyous people.
Slowly slowly, I became aware that joy has many implications:
A joyous person is not retarded.
A joyous person is intelligent.
A joyous person knows the art of life; otherwise he cannot be joyous. And a joyous person is dangerous to all those vested interests which go against humanity.
Those interests want humanity to live in hell forever. They have managed in every possible way to keep you in misery. They destroy everything that you can rejoice in, and they give you ample opportunity to be miserable. A miserable person is not a danger to this rotten society.
Yes, it has to be one of my basic works to make people aware that the powerful ones -- either religious or political -- are not your friends. They are your enemies. And unless the common humanity goes through a rebellion against all types of bureaucracies, man will remain stuck, not evolving, not reaching to the heights which are his birthright."
