What is lacking in the Christian churches that attracts young people to new religious movements?

Osho, the dutch television has asked me to participate in a program. One of the questions on which they want me to speak is as follows: what is lacking in the christian churches that is attracting so many young people to the new religious movements?

Again he felt for a moment very hesitant: "But if everybody is seeing the clothes, then there is no fear really. Only I am not seeing, but that is not the point. I already know," he thought, "that I am naked. I know my nakedness and everybody is seeing so there is no fear." He went into the chariot. Everybody, millions of people, saw he was naked, but just before the chariot it was continuously announced that these clothes are divine and can be seen only by those who are born of their own others. So everybody was shouting, clapping, dancing... it was such a rejoicing,. Just a small child sitting on his father's shoulders told the father, "Daddy, the king seems to be naked." The father said, "Shut up! When you will grow then you will see. You are just a child, you don't understand." But again and again…

Mm, I can see it. It always happens when one becomes part of a traditional religion, because whenever a religion becomes established, it dies. Then everything becomes just a dead routine, a repetition. In the beginning you will feel very much enthusiasm because you don't know in what you are moving. In ignorance there is always enthusiasm. By and by, when you become alert about what you have done and what is happening, enthusiasm is gone. But then you are caught and you don't know what to do because going back is not going to be of any meaning. Going back to your old life is as meaningless as this, so what is the point of going back? One continues; one simply carries it. A religion is alive only for a very few moments.

This kind of thing is more emotional than meditative. It can give you a changed life because you start living with a new idea -- that you have embraced christ. You don't know christ! And the only way to embrace christ is to become a christ; there is no other way: not by becoming a christian but by becoming a christ... because christ is not a person but a state of consciousness. You cannot just embrace christ. For example, you can embrace me, but that will not make you me. You will have to go slowly, slowly into your mind, into the working of the mind, into the games of the mind... and they are millions. Only slowly, slowly, the more awareness is attained, the fewer are the games, the more awareness, the fewer deceptions.

A single session of your dynamic meditation has left within me a greater bliss and sense of being than twenty years of having had to listen to the stories of the new testament and to pray to an almighty and distant god who stayed an unexperienceable godot to me. Is it possible that the teachings of jesus just might not be helpful to all seekers -- yes, might even be poisonous to them, or to some?

Have you watched sometimes? You see a beautiful flower. You may appreciate it, it has an aesthetic quality. You appreciate it and you move ahead. You may see a beautiful face -- even the face of a Cleopatra: the lines, the proportion, the marble-like body -- but that too is aesthetic. And sometimes you come across a few things or a few beings that inspire not only aesthetic appreciation, but awe. What is awe? Facing some thing or some being, thinking stops. Your mind cannot cope with it. You can cope with a Cleopatra, you can even cope with an Einstein -- howsoever abstruse, abstract, difficult, you can cope with it. Just a little more training of the mind may be needed. But when you come across a Jesus or a Buddha the mind falls flat, it bogs down. SOMETHING is too much for it. You cannot think about anything,…

Question: Second question: Osho, why has the man of this century become irreligious? Understand this: religion lives from the future. The pandit-priest lives off the past. Therefore the pandit-priest and religion never truly meet. In my view, the pandit-priest is the most irreligious person in the world. He has only one concern—that his shop keep running. He drags in the old by any excuse. There is unrest in the world—he says, “Perform a yajna—a great Shatachandi—for world peace!” What has your fire sacrifice to do with world peace? How many have you performed already—has world peace come? Leave the world; bring peace to a single neighborhood and show us! Leave the neighborhood—those five hundred Brahmins who gather to burn up ten million rupees in a ritual, there is such turmoil among them—constant quarrels over who grabs how much.