According to Osho, a person who carries the AIDS virus cannot be healed. His response is unequivocal: no cure. The implication is to shift from seeking a remedy to embracing prevention, personal responsibility, and compassionate care. Rather than clinging to hopeful illusions, one should act wisely to protect oneself and support those affected.
He says there’s no cure, so focus on preventing infection and caring kindly for people who have it.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: OSHO, WOULD YOU PLEASE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT AIDS? When your sexuality starts shrinking you are really hoping that something will happen and you will go into eternal silence, into eternal disappearance. Your resistance is not there. AIDs has no other symptoms except that your resistance goes on dropping. At the most you can live two years if you are fortunate and don't get accidentally infected. Each infection will be incurable, and each infection will be weakening you more and more. Two years is the longest the AIDS patient can live; and he may disappear sometime before that. And no treatment is going to help, because no treatment can bring back your will to live. What I am doing here is multidimensional. You are not fully aware of what I am trying to do; perhaps you may become aware only when I am gone.
Beloved Osho, aids confronts us with the immediacy of our death. Our seriousness seems to create more disease and paranoia. Instead of feeling like victims, how can we respond through celebration?
It did not answer even Jesus Christ, who was simply nuts -- calling himself the only begotten son of God. He was just a bastard. Every bastard can claim that he is the only begotten son of God, because the ordinary father is not his father. His father lives high above in the sky. Even Jesus Christ's prayer on the cross was not answered. In deep frustration he shouted at the sky, "Have you forsaken me?" Still, no answer. If that is the situation of the only begotten son, what about other poor human beings who are just born out of their father and mother, mortals? This book is holy? Then magazines like PLAYBOY, PLAYGIRL should start calling themselves holy magazines -- of course, in color... glossy. You say, "AIDS confronts us with the immediacy of death...." It is good that you become aware that death is there, absolutely certain.…
Osho, in your approach to yoga and meditation, physical contact has had a special importance—as you used to conduct it earlier in India; I don’t know about Rajneeshpuram. If that approach continues, then in view of the new danger that has arisen—AIDS—are you thinking of bringing any changes to the methods of yoga and meditation?
There is only one remedy—declare celibacy illegal, and round up every monk and get him married—“Come on!” Otherwise it may happen that AIDS will kill man before a nuclear war does. And even if an AIDS patient is kept completely protected, he cannot live more than two years. That is the longest possible span. And how will you keep him completely protected? In the end he will have to work, meet people. And the capacity of an AIDS patient to fight any disease becomes zero. If he catches a cold, even the cold will not get cured. If he gets a fever, the fever will not go away. No medicine works on him. Because this is how medicine works: when we give medicine to a man, his body cooperates with the medicine. With the combined strength of both, the disease is driven out. The body of an AIDS patient does…
But in hell I can see all the beautiful people of the world. Lao-Tzu will be there. Chuang-Tzu will be there, Gautam Buddha will be there -- because he did not believe in God, he was an atheist. Bertrand Russell will be there, Socrates will be there, Plato and Heraclitus, all great painters -- Van Gogh, Picasso -- all great thinkers -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaspers*. Hell will be a real company, and very colorful. Omar Khayyam will be there, and all kinds of juicy people -- the whole of Hollywood. All actors, all actresses, all great showmen, all carnivals, circuses -- hell must be from end to end a tremendous rejoicing. But I don't want to choose, I want them to mix. I want only one place where saints can become again alive, can start breathing, can start dancing, can start loving, can become spiritual playboys.
But the opinion of the scientists is that there will be no possible cure for AIDS. The man has simply lost the will to live, and he has become vulnerable -- absolutely vulnerable -- to any kind of infection, and his body will not create antibodies to fight with any infection. So he can die by anything. Even ordinary cold and it will be difficult for a AIDS patient to get rid of it. It is something more than a disease. It is something as if the major part of humanity is losing the will to live. There seems to be no meaning in life. It seems to be just a drag. Boredom, meaninglessness, anguish, anxiety, despair -- these are the modern subjects of the philosophers of the whole world to discuss. God is no more discussed, heaven and hell no more discussed. Anguish, despair, meaninglessness, boredom.