What is charisma?

Beloved Osho, what is charisma? All sorts of people have it, both aware people and unaware people. Its such an intangible quality, I can say when someone is charismatic but can't define what it is.

Sudha, charisma is a mystery. It happens only to those people who have centered their being, concentrated their energies, who are no longer falling apart, who are consolidated, who have become one -- the very meaning of the word, "individual." Every individual has charisma. But individual means that which is indivisible. You cannot divide that person into fragments; you cannot say to that person that "this part is wrong in you, this part is right in you." You cannot create a schizophrenic psychology in that person; he's one and whole. This very phenemonon of being one, centered and whole, creates a magnetic pull. Now, you cannot see a magnetic pull. You can see the magnet, you can see the small pieces of metal which are moving towards the magnet, but you cannot see magnetism, you cannot see any power. All power is invisible. All energy is invisible. Charisma is the…

Beloved Osho, I wonder why you are not available to people like me who come from as far as puerto rico and would like to meet you, even if it is only for five minutes. The main reason is to find out the kind of charisma that you have. Not even the greatest politicians have been able to accomplish what you have.

I don't see people for the simple reason that I don't have any charisma! I keep you away so you don't discover it. I keep myself closed in my room. I don't have any charisma, so you need not take the trouble of coming for five minutes. You will not find anything. I am just as ordinary as you are. My only charisma is that I accept that I am ordinary and you do not accept it. Deep down you go on believing you are extraordinary, special -- the only begotten son of God!

Osho, spiegel, the biggest news magazine in germany, has finally started a series on you, your sannyasins and the ashram. The writer says many nice and incredible things about you and even compares you with the polack pope. He says: "the masses who surrender to the charisma of john paul ii do nothing different than that which the poona pilgrims do in their surrender to Osho. Only the churches and their sect experts cannot agree with that." Osho, do you feel offended or pleased by this statement?

I am amused! The Polacks I have always loved. The Pope is secondary, the Polack is the real thing. The Polack is the elephant and the Pope is just the last part of the elephant, the tail part! I am certainly not a pope, I cannot be -- I am not that serious a man, I am not that religious either. I am very ordinary! To be a pope one needs to be very extraordinary. As far as charisma is concerned, I have none. I am just as ordinary as anybody else in the world. The whole idea of charisma is anti-human, it divides people. And the whole strategy of creating a charisma is nothing but the process of conditioning. If you go to see a naked Jaina monk you will not see any charisma because you are not conditioned for that. You will simply see an ugly, disgusting-looking person,…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, YOU OFTEN TALK TO US ABOUT GRACE. IT SEEMS TO BE SUCH A BEAUTIFUL WORD BUT MY UNDERSTANDING OF ITS MEANING FEELS LIMITED. I KNOW THAT IT IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE. COULD YOU SPEAK SOME MORE ABOUT IT? Deva Anupo, grace is one of the great mysteries of life. It is not something physical, not psychological but something spiritual. It is not within your power to create it. Any created grace will be false, phony. Grace comes as a flowering of your being. The moment your meditation reaches to the deepest core, to the very center of the cyclone, a tremendous silence, peace and blissfulness arise within you. Grace is the total effect of all these qualities: silence, peace, love, compassion, blissfulness, ecstasy. When these things arise in you, their flame, their fire starts radiating from your physical body. They are so much they start overflowing.

Question: OSHO, IS J. KRISHNAMURTI ENLIGHTENED? I am not reacting to anything. Whatever I am saying, I am saying not as a reaction to something but as my experience. If it goes against something, that is a separate matter; that is a side effect. For Krishnamurti, what he is saying is the side effect; his original concern remains to destroy those people and what they did to him. He is ninety years old but those shadows are around him; and because of those shadows he has not been able to flower into a charismatic being. That's what I saw today: he has no charisma at all. Ninety years is a long life. And beginning his career at nine -- since the age of nine he has been in the spiritual world for eighty-one years continually. Perhaps nobody ever before has been in the spiritual world that long. But eighty-one years...