People speak from different heights, so each sees only part of the mountain; noticing this helps you look higher to see the whole.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
But is the level of both the same?
No, no, the level is not the same either. The level is not the same. But both are speaking partial truths—in that respect alone they are one. The level is not the same either...
Osho, would you like to throw some light on politics, according to the three different levels of consciousness?
At the time of Gautam Buddha, perhaps around the whole world, the second level of consciousness came to its highest peak. In China, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu -- these were the people, contemporaries. In India, Gautam Buddha, Mahavira, Makhkhali Ghosal, Ajit Keshkambal, Sanjay Vilethiputta -- they were overpowering, giants. In Greece, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Pythagoras -- they touched the very peak of intelligence. All over the world, suddenly it was as if a tidal wave of intelligence came. Only idiots remained fighting; all the intelligent people were deep into finding ways how to decide what is right and what is wrong. In India it was a tradition for every philosopher to travel all over India, challenging others. Challenge was not inimical -- you have to understand that. On the second level there is no enmity, both challengers are seekers. It is a friendly phenomenon,…
But Osho, I have learned that there are four types of movement: physical movement, intellectual movement, emotional movement, and the fourth is wisdom. Perhaps, in the ultimate state of leisure, what is meaningful is that a person’s intellectual or emotional capacities be stimulated, so that he can shift from one plane and move to another?
This is exactly what I am saying: for human energies to move into higher dimensions, it is essential that one be freed from the lower. So I do not say that the old man’s answer to Confucius was right. I do not agree with the old man—though I have heard that Confucius agreed with him. Gandhi would have agreed with him; I would not. In my view, perhaps the old man saved his son from laziness, but then what? The boy would still die harnessed to the plough like an ox. And if the old man thinks that if the boy uses a tool he will become a machine, has he noticed that by yoking him like a bull he is turning him into a bull? That does not occur to him. Besides, using a machine is not possible for an animal; it is possible only for man. So rather…
Osho, but in that knowing, Maharaj-ji, can there not be sameness—that as another has known, I may know the same? And may that sameness become available to me.
If you look very closely, such sameness is possible only if I am exactly as the other was. Otherwise it can never be. See the full implications: when I am knowing, my whole personality, my total being, is knowing. Only if your whole personality is exactly as mine, could the event of our knowing be one and the same. And no two persons are ever the same. In fact, forget persons—that is a far-off matter. Pick up a stone from a Delhi street; search the whole earth and you will not find another exactly like it. Pluck a flower from a garden; comb all the forests and you will not find another just like it. Here, each and every thing has its own uniqueness. And that very uniqueness is its soul. In my view, this uniqueness is its soul. A machine has no soul, because a machine is not unique.…
Beloved Osho, putting together all your statements about one subject or question, there are not just contradictions, but such a richness of different viewpoints and angles from which you look at the question... So many colors. When you talk about a certain subject, something in me starts dancing, remembering some of the answers you have given before. What's happening?
Every time one realizes something of the truth, there is a dance in the heart. The heart is the only testimony for the truth. And it cannot testify through words. It can testify in its own way: trough love, through dance, through playing music: nonverbal -- it speaks, but it does not speak in language and logic. And this is a realization of a certain truth which many people go on missing. They think what I am saying is contradictory, because they are thinking -- and thinking is a logical process. And logic can never see beyond contradictions; it has no way to bridge contradictions. Logic is a divider, not a joiner. The whole of humanity is divided by the mind: the Christian from the Hindu, the Mohammedan from the Jew, the Indian from the American, the German from the Italian. Mind goes on dividing -- divisions within divisions within…