What is communism?

According to you, nobody is able to impart the truth. Is what you say not true then?

What I am telling you is only an indication and should not be regarded as true in itself. Truth is far removed from indication. It is not the indicator you have to see, but where it directs you. While you are looking in that direction what you will perceive is the truth. There is no way to speak that truth. No sooner has it been uttered than it becomes false. The truth can never be expressed; however, it can become one's experience.

Question: BELOVED OSHO, ARE YOU IN FAVOR OF COMMUNISM? Now this is pure fiction; just to compete with the Jainas there had to be twenty-four. But Hindus at that time had the idea of only ten avataras. Seeing that Jainas and Buddhists had twenty-four, they immediately changed their number; so any scripture that is written after Gautam Buddha and Mahavira says, "We also have twenty-four avataras." But then, to defeat this competition forever, they managed this idea of thirty-three million gods. Marx is another gift of the Jews to the world -- and really a Jew! And the reason that he is the founder of communism is not any compassion for the poor. No, not at all -- it is jealousy of the rich. This you have to understand clearly, because that will change the whole attitude. His father was poor, his father's father was poor.

Question: OSHO, WHY ARE YOU AGAINST COMMUNISM? They all start almost at the same time, but from there, from the very impregnation, opportunities are different. Nobody knows those who have died, what kind of people they were. Somebody may have been an Albert Einstein, somebody a Ravi Shankar, somebody a Michelangelo. Nobody knows about those poor people who simply died in the first race and were not given any other chance. And then small things in the life of the child.... You cannot make them equal. For example, when Napoleon Bonaparte was six months old, his nurse, who was taking care of him, had just left him for a moment and a wild cat jumped onto Napoleon, put both his paws on his chest, and looked into his eyes. Immediately the nurse came back and chased the cat away, but Napoleon, for his whole life, remained afraid of cats.

Another friend has asked; let me take that question as well.

In this country the stark selfishness you see everywhere lies behind the teachings of the so‑called religious. Each person absorbed in his own little worries, with no concern for anyone else. Behind this are not the hands of “bad” people but of the so‑called good, for they teach: each individual should seek his own liberation, cancel his own sins, accumulate his own merits. There is no such thing as society; we are not connected; we are all traveling separately. This notion has turned India’s social life into a madhouse, an ugliness—a very filthy pit—because everyone is busy with his own worry. His own worry. The day Jesus was crucified—perhaps you don’t know—there was a man in the same village with a toothache. Jesus is being crucified—the most loving of men is about to be hung on the cross—and a man has had a toothache since the night before. From morning…

Question: BELOVED MASTER, WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT COMMUNISM? I am interested in the idea of the commune because a commune will help people to get rid of many psychological hang-ups which our upbringing has been giving to us. The upbringing is so rotten, so old-fashioned! For five thousand years there has been no change. Everything else has changed -- from the bullock cart we have come to the jet plane -- but as far as human life is concerned the same old rotten family remains. With man we are very orthodox; hence we have better machines but not better human beings. We have better EVERYTHING -- just man is not better; and the reason is that about man we are very orthodox and conventional. A commune will change the idea of the family; it will make the family very flexible.