How can religion be both acceptance and rebellion?

Osho, you say the same thing in countless ways. But when I listen to you, it feels as if I am hearing it for the first time. And I feel so much joy that I don’t feel like going back home. What should I do—what can I do—so that I can just keep listening to you!

You will feel as if you have been made to rise out of season, before time—as if you were not yet to go and yet had to go. And if you go in that way, your home will become even more desolate than before. I do not want to make your home desolate; I want to make your home a temple. I want that when you go home, your home’s new form is revealed. I do not want to tear you away from home, from the world, from family life. That is the newness of my sannyas: I do not want to sever you from the world; I want to join you to the world in such a way that your connection with the world becomes a connection with the Divine. Let the world no longer be a barrier between you and the Divine; let it become a means. If…

Question: Second question: Osho, is religion rebellion? Religion is rebellion; a sect is not. A sect is status-quo-ism. A sect means: religion has died. Rebellion has died; it has become an organization. The breaths of revolution have stopped; a corpse lies there. The privacy of every sannyasin must be protected. At no price should he let the inner flame of rebellion be diminished. Revolution is collective; rebellion is individual. Revolution is future-oriented; rebellion is in the present. Revolution says: tomorrow, when we are organized and when we change society, then the golden age will come, then we will create a new world. Revolution looks toward tomorrow. Remember, society looks toward yesterday; the revolutionary looks toward the coming tomorrow. The rebel lives in today—he has no anxiety about the yesterday that has passed, nor any concern about the tomorrow to come. Tomorrow will come of itself.

Question: BELOVED MASTER, WHAT IS THE RELIGION OF A REBELLIOUS SPIRIT? His whole life is a pilgrimage, always moving closer and closer and closer to the ultimate reality; that realization that releases one from all bondage, all frustration, all misery, all anguish, and allows one to taste freedom, truth, beauty, love and an outburst of creativity -- creativity in the multidimensions of life. The rebellious man has a golden touch -- whatever he touches becomes gold, it does not matter what. He may play on a bamboo flute and it becomes pure gold, twenty-four carat. He may dance alone under the starry sky, and his dance is more meaningful, more significant than all the paintings in the world, all the statues and all the holy scriptures. His creativity may simply be expressed in his silence. But his silence will not be an ordinary silence -- just an absence of noise.

Deva means divine, vidroha means rebellion -- divine rebellion. Religion is rebellion, and if it is not rebellion, then it is not religion. It is never conformity, it is never convention. Christ is religious because he is a rebel. Christianity is not religion because it is nothing but conformity. Buddha is a rebel, but Buddhism is not. And only a person can be a rebel, only the individual has the capacity to attain to that. The collectivity, the mob, the crowd, can never be rebellious. The very nature, the very psychology of the mob is to conform, to compromise. To the peaks of rebellion only individuals can rise and soar. Whenever the mob goes into rebellion, it is not rebellion but revolution.

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS YOUR NOTION OF REBELLION AND OF A REBEL? A rebel is one who throws away the whole past because he wants to live his own life according to his own longings, according to his own nature -- not according to some Gautam Buddha, or according to some Jesus Christ, or Moses. The rebel is the only hope for the future of humanity. The rebel will destroy all religions, all nations, all races -- because they are all rotten, past, hindering the progress of human evolution. They are not allowing anybody to come to his full flowering: they don't want human beings on the earth -- they want sheep. Jesus continuously says, "I am your shepherd, and you are my sheep...." And I have always wondered that not even a single man stood up and said, "What kind of nonsense are you talking?