According to Osho, humanity is rushing toward its ultimate graveyard, yet the catastrophe is not fated: we can halt and redirect by transforming our inner being. Earth is existence’s rare flowering of consciousness; everyone can awaken to Buddha-nature. The forces of life outweigh death, so with urgent collective awareness and love, survival—and victory—is possible.
We’re headed the wrong way, but we can turn around by waking up inside, choosing life, and working together.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, do something! Man is sinking day by day into the abyss of sin. Man was never as bad as he is today. What on earth has happened to man?
Bitterness seems to dissolve into the air, Darknesses keep surging and surging, Lightning ripples close to the nests, Life is a steadfast, mighty mountain—yet Even the devils of oppression dash against it, Storms of fire and blood crash against it, They smash their mouths, are thrown back, get shackled, How many autumn onslaughts ravaged the garden of the world, How many raids did death make upon life. Sometimes storms rose from Greece, sometimes from Rome, From the valley of the Nile a bloody flood at times boiled up, The fires sometimes blazed from Persia’s fire-temples— Life kept being tempered and refined in the flames, The more it was ravaged, the more it was adorned. Life kept being tempered and refined in the flames, Life has kept on being refined; all the fires kept burning, the flames kept pouring down. Life kept being tempered and refined in the flames, The more…
Question: OSHO, WHY IS HUMANITY TODAY BECOMING MORE AND MORE MISERABLE? He even promised that he would be coming back. I think he must have lost courage -- once crucified is enough! Now again he will be crucified, this time in the Vatican, because this time he will be coming as a Christian. And the pope will be the person who will decide: "This man has to be crucified -- he is a pretender, an anti-Christ. He is not our lord, because when our lord comes he will come with glory, sitting on a cloud. That's how the lord has to come. And this man is born out of a woman, and not even out of a virgin." They are looking for the cloud the lord will be coming on, and the lord has escaped! But the hope.... Politicians go on giving hope and nothing materializes.
Beloved Osho, one of the titles of the master's press is a "history of the future". It is a book that puts together all the views of the known prophecies about our future, and tries to show what our world will be like in two hundred years. Since your views of the human race and this planet are very specific, we would love to include your views of what man will go through and of how he will go through it.
I said, "You must be an idiot! That I knew from the very beginning, but what is the crime of the poor television set?" He said, "I became so enraged. It is absolutely unjust." But I said, "It may be unjust or just, the television set is not concerned in it." He said, "It is not a question of the television set. I was so angry, I wanted to destroy something." In a Californian university, for one year they have been studying... that whenever there is a boxing match -- which is the ugliest thing you can conceive of, people hitting on each other's noses.... Boxing proves Charles Darwin is right: man has come from animals and still has animal instincts in him. The report of the California university is very significant: whenever there is a boxing match, crime rates go fourteen percent higher immediately, and they remain at that…
Question: OSHO, TO ME THE FUTURE OF THE EAST APPEARS BLEAK WHICHEVER WAY ONE LOOKS AT IT -- EITHER POVERTY AND STARVATION THROUGH FATALISM, OR WESTERNIZATION THROUGH CAPITALISM -- FOR IS IT NOT NECESSARY FOR THE EAST TO BECOME WEST BEFORE PEOPLE AGAIN BECOME INTERESTED IN THEIR INNER SEARCH? IS IT NOT NECESSARY FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE EAST TO BECOME MATERIALLY RICH BEFORE THEIR SPIRITUAL POVERTY AGAIN BECOMES EVIDENT? BUT THE BURDEN OF THE WEST ALREADY LIES HEAVY ON THE WORLD: THE ATOMIC BOMB; VIOLENCE THROUGH FRUSTRATION; THE AUTO-MATIZATION OF THE SOUL; THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FORESTS AND THE POLLUTION OF THE AIR AND SEA SO THAT IT IS UNCERTAIN WHETHER THE ENVIRONMENT CAN MAINTAIN ITS DELICATE BALANCE. CAN THE WORLD SUPPORT ANOTHER WEST? The mechanization of all that you are surrounded with has made you aware that you are also nothing but a machine.
Osho, your words suggest that the coming ten years will be highly critical, catastrophic, and decisive for humankind. And perhaps your arrival is related to ensuring that, in the face of this impending calamity, humanity suffers the least possible harm and the core values of culture and religion are preserved as much as possible. Will you guide us in this direction?
Friends come to me and say, “Why don’t you do something so that ashes appear from your hand? Millions will come.” But they would be the wrong millions. Millions would come, but millions would be wrong. And among those millions, the few who are rightly close to me would be lost, they would be distracted. For those who are rightly close to me would not be able to survive before that crowd—the crowd would surge ahead. It would be a crowd of the ambitious, a crowd of the insane. Those who gather to see ash falling from a hand are mad; they should be in an asylum. They are diseased. And once you invite the diseased, they will not let the healthy remain. Economics has a simple rule: counterfeit coins drive genuine coins out of circulation. If there is a fake rupee in your pocket, you will try to spend…