According to Osho, scientific breakthroughs and headlines don’t cure the deeper roots of illness: society’s repressive, fear-based morality and the medical establishment’s cowardly silence about it. Enforced celibacy, sexual shame, and misinformation distort natural energies, create perversions and psychosomatic damage, and so new diseases (like AIDS) arise despite ‘progress.’ Until conditioning is challenged and honest, life-affirming education prevails, pathology will keep reinventing itself.
New diseases keep showing up because we live against our nature and stay scared and misinformed, not because science fails.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
It seems that whenever success is announced, new diseases like heart failure, cancer and aids appear. Why is this so?
The people who are working, researching new medicines go on declaring new successes in their fields. But their successes in their scientific research work has nothing to do with what humanity is continuously doing; they are unrelated. For example, homosexuality has created AIDS. Scientists are not responsible for it. The medical profession is not responsible for it, but in some way it has supported the basic cause that creates homosexuality. For example, no medical person, no Nobel prize winning medical man has the guts to say that celibacy is unnatural, and sooner or later it is going to create troubles. The problem is that the scientist is also an ordinary human being; he is a Catholic, he is a Hindu, he is a Mohammedan. In his lab while he is doing his work he is not a Catholic, he is not a Mohammedan. But outside his research work he is…
Question: OSHO, WOULD YOU PLEASE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT AIDS? Where is Werner Erhard now? With hunger disappearing has he also disappeared? Authentic people? -- he left his father, mother, his wife, his children, without even telling them that he was going away. He simply escaped, moving thousands of miles away, changed his name, may have changed his hair-do, clothes, and became Werner Erhard. And his parents, his wife, his children were all dependent on him, they were starving. And he was proposing a hunger project -- "within ten years, hunger will disappear from the world." These people are not different from politicians -- and cannot be, because this is also a power trip. Things that they are telling people not to do, they have been doing exactly those same things.
Beloved Osho, aids confronts us with the immediacy of our death. Our seriousness seems to create more disease and paranoia. Instead of feeling like victims, how can we respond through celebration?
It did not answer even Jesus Christ, who was simply nuts -- calling himself the only begotten son of God. He was just a bastard. Every bastard can claim that he is the only begotten son of God, because the ordinary father is not his father. His father lives high above in the sky. Even Jesus Christ's prayer on the cross was not answered. In deep frustration he shouted at the sky, "Have you forsaken me?" Still, no answer. If that is the situation of the only begotten son, what about other poor human beings who are just born out of their father and mother, mortals? This book is holy? Then magazines like PLAYBOY, PLAYGIRL should start calling themselves holy magazines -- of course, in color... glossy. You say, "AIDS confronts us with the immediacy of death...." It is good that you become aware that death is there, absolutely certain.…
Question: OSHO, ARE YOU AGAINST GOD AND JESUS CHRIST TOO? IT FREAKS ME OUT. AIDS may not be a new disease, it may be only a late discovery. It may have been happening before, because it has no symptoms. It is a strange kind of disease, without symptoms. To call it a disease is not right -- it is really a slow death, a very slow death. So you cannot find symptoms. You can only watch a man's life: if he is losing his resistance to diseases then he has AIDS. This is a very complicated phenomenon.
AIDS is a religious disease. It has been created by monasteries and nunneries where you put only man in one place and women in another place and you don't allow them to meet with each other and force them to remain celibate. Naturally, it is absolutely unscientific to be celibate. You cannot be, because your body has its own program and it does not listen to your ideology. It does not know you are a Christian monk or a Hindu monk. It does not know that you are taken the vow of celibacy. It goes on creating male sperms in your body, so what you are going to do with those male sperms? And they are in a hurry to get out, because their life is not long. Q:* BHAGWAN, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE TWO PEOPLE WHO WERE DIAGNOSED AS...? A:* Yes. We have respect for them, love for them.