Heaven

Osho, can heaven be brought down to earth? Can there ever be, in the future, a healthy, unambitious, unexcited, and loving society? Experience from the past suggests that here and there a few rare individuals attained liberation while the rest of society remained the same. You are certainly unique; your experiment is original and revolutionary. You say humanity, too, has matured. This time, can we hope for something new?

But how long can they obstruct? If even eight people sit—those eight are my sannyasins—if even eight sit, the train will start. Once it starts, the number of passengers will keep growing. Today the whole world rides; no one worries whether the train will stop or not. No one asks how to stop it, where the horses are, the oxen, who is driving, whether there are ghosts inside, whether the devil’s hand is in it. The engine even looks a bit devilish, like Yama’s messenger—thundering along with such force—who knows what will come of it? In the last five thousand years humanity has discovered all the needed pieces—slowly. Something from Buddha, something from Patanjali, something from Mohammed, something from Christ, something from Moses, something from Lao Tzu, something from Zarathustra—countless explorers discovered countless fragments. What remains is to seat those fragments together. That is what I am trying to do.…

Osho, “Run along—this is heaven, not a urinal!”—saying that, why did Saint Peter send that Jain nun back to India? Do they think of India as a urinal?

Saint Maharaj! Where is the question of understanding here? India is a urinal. This is a well-known fact. An eternal fact. There’s nothing to understand. When Saint Peter looks down from above, what would he see in India? People standing everywhere—along the roadsides, against house walls—showering the waters of life. Some are watering tree trunks; some sit on the banks of rivers and streams with their sacred thread wrapped around their ear. The truth is, the residents of heaven recognize India precisely by this method, because there are no lines drawn on the earth, no map colors filled in—this is India, that is America, this is Japan. Wherever they see people peeing everywhere, they conclude: this is the sacred land of India, where even gods yearn to be born! The land of rishis and sages—ah, blessed! See how they go about sprinkling the waters of life! But in recent years,…

What is your idea of heaven?

There is no heaven and there is no hell. They are not geographical, they are part of your psychology. They are psychological. To live a life of spontaneity, truth, love and beauty is to live in heaven. To live a life of hypocrisy, lies and compromises, to live according to others, is to live in hell. To live in freedom is heaven, and to live in bondage is hell. You can decorate your prison cell beautifully, but that makes no difference, it is still a prison cell. And that's what people have been doing, they go on decorating their prison cell. They give it beautiful names, they go on painting it, putting new pictures on the walls, arranging the furniture in new ways, purchasing more and more things -- but they live in prisons. Your marriage is a prison, your church is a prison, your nationality is a prison. How…

Is there really a hell?

Heaven and hell are only two sides of your mind. The religions that were born outside India have remained with these two ideas, heaven and hell. They could not rise above them. Judaism, Christianity, Islam -- all the three religions born outside India, have no idea of something transcendental. In India we have a third word MOKSHA, NIRVANA. Hell is a wrong psychology, ill, abnormal, neurotic, pathological; heaven is a right psychology, normal, healthy. But there is a beyond where you are no more a mind, when both sides of the mind have been dropped, where you are a no-mind, where you are neither negative nor positive, where you are neither dark nor light, where you are neither this nor that -- where you are just a witness to all, to misery and bliss, to all, just a witness, where you are not identified with either misery OR bliss, where…