Laws about land should help people live freely and safely together, not be used by politicians to block or bully communities.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, a few months back you said, "if this is bad land use, then your land use laws are bogus, and they should be burned." walden kirsch, kgw television channel 8 news, has said, "the oregon supreme court ruled this morning that rajneeshpuram is indeed a legal city. This is extremely important to the people who created the city for their comfortable existence, and to practice their religion, rajneeshism." what do you have to say about it?
I do not care what the Supreme Court decides. This is the only legal city in the whole world. There is no crime here, no rape, no theft, no murder. Even in the middle of the night any woman can go anywhere in the darkness without any fear. It is not a question -- whether this city is legal or not. I have known many cities. People are living there side by side, but they are not together. Those cities are just like a crowd, not a living organism. This city is a totally new phenomenon. It is a living organism. People are not just a crowd here; they have chosen to be part, a living part of the whole. There are no families in this city, this whole city is a family! You cannot find this phenomenon anywhere else. Families are small units keeping themselves separate from other families,…
ANSWER: Those people who are talking about land use laws, we have invited them that, "You come here. For fifty years the land was lying dead. You never raised the question that one hundred twenty-six square miles land is lying dead." Not a single politician bothered about it. Those one thousand enemies of Oregon, they did not bother. We have made it productive. We have been inviting the governor, the attorney general, and these people seem such cowards. They won't come here. Just come and see how we have used the land. If it goes against your laws, then change the laws, because man is not made for laws. Laws are made for man. Just see if we have misused the land in any way. We are ready to correct. We are willing in every way to change. But they don't come.
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHY SHOULD RELIGION AND STATE REMAIN SEPARATE? The inquiry into truth is almost like that. You look all around the world and finally you find it in your own boutique. And it is not something that is in any way against democracy. Inquiry for truth or inquiry for great consciousness or inquiry for greater love -- in what way are these things against the state? And if these things are against the state then you should teach in every school hatred, unconsciousness, lying, deceiving, cheating; that will be true education. Then every politician should declare that he is a cheat, hypocrite, deceiver, mean, because these are qualifications for being a good politician, and these are qualifications for being in power. A man of love, a man of truth, a man of sincerity is disqualified.
Beloved master, for the first few days after sheela and her gang escaped, everyone felt greatly relieved. Now, as the horror stories unfold, people are reacting by not coming to work/worship, or working without being there. There is suspicion, anger, resentment, and mistrust of those who were associated with sheela and who have remained. Where do we go from here?
They destroy your reason, they destroy your inquiry, they destroy your intelligence. They give you borrowed, centuries-old rubbish and call it knowledge. You call the BIBLE holy and every day you worship it, with great respect, without knowing that this is the most pornographic book in the whole world. If the Supreme Court of America is really fair, the BIBLE should be X-rated. But the same is the situation of other religious scriptures. All are pornography. I want you to be free from any ideology so that you can be yourself and you can search and you can go into the unknown. That inquiry into the unknown is such an ecstasy, such a great excitement -- the only pilgrimage. There is no need to go to Israel, no need to go to the Kremlin, no need to go to Varanasi. These are not real pilgrimages. The only pilgrimage is the…
Beloved Osho, something is happening in my heart. It pounds when you are near. It is happening to many of us. What is happening?
The central government was being wishy-washy, always saying "We are giving you this land and that land." It went on for seven years continually. They would not allow us to purchase more houses in Poona either, because they were afraid that if thousands of people who belong to me started living in Poona, they would take it over. And certainly, it would have happened. Even the Poona ashram was not in the name of the Foundation. We paid prices ten times more than anybody else, yet the government did not put those houses in our name. It was a very strange situation: we were paying the taxes, we were paying the electricity bills -- and the houses were not in our name! We had given the money to the previous owners, but the houses remained in the name of those owners. They were afraid that if a great commune happened,…