Hypocrisy

A friend has asked: “You oppose hypocrisy, yet here people are bowing their heads before your chair! This is sheer hypocrisy! Then what is the difference between this hypocrisy and bowing before the idol in a temple?”

It is a question of the mind. If someone bows before an idol in the temple with the same feeling with which they bow here, then that too is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not in bowing before an image; hypocrisy is when only the mind is bending and the heart feels no experience. If even a stone is worshiped with love, the stone is divine. And if even God is worshiped like a stone, then it is all hypocrisy. But the one who has asked thinks he is asking a very intelligent question. He imagines he has asked something that cannot be answered. I am certainly an opponent of hypocrisy. Do you understand what hypocrisy means? Hypocrisy means bowing where the heart is not, where there is no attunement with the heart, where no duet of the heart has been struck. Because mother said, father said, the family said—so you…

Question: OSHO, I AM A HYPOCRITE. WHAT SHOULD L DO? Narayandas Diwari, IT IS GOOD, it is beautiful that you recognize, that you confess that you are a hypocrite. This is the beginning -- the beginning of sincerity, the beginning of truth. Hypocrisy cannot remain long now any more. Hypocrisy can remain only if it goes on pretending that it is not hypocrisy. It exists by pretending to be that which it is not. Once you recognize that you are wearing a mask, the mask has already started slipping. You have become aware that this is not your face. The mask can remain on your face only so long as you go on believing, pretending, deceiving others and yourself that it is your real face. And the problem is: if you deceive others you will start deceiving yourself finally.

Do you consider india hypocritical in this respect?

Yes. It is a country now of hypocrites. Whenever a country reaches to the peak, to the flowering -- when it is healthy and young, fearless of everything -- then truth can be taken as truth. In India's golden days we created Khajuraho, Konark, Puri. It was rare daring. There is no comparison to it -- not only in India but in the whole world. A temple of God that has sculptures of maithun, of sexual intercourse There is no pornographic attitude toward the sexual intercourses. It is so meditative, so celestial. But those were the days when the country was healthy. Young -- taking life as it was, celebrating life in its totality. Today it is a dying country, an old country just struggling to be alive somehow. The India that exists today must die dn a way in order to be reborn. Only then will hypocrisy go. I;very…

Beloved Osho, you said last night that when you find a place to settle you will begin exposing the hypocrisy of the world's governments and politicians one by one. I am not exposed yet. Have I missed my chance?

The ambition that is created is that you have to become someone in the world; you have to prove that you are not an ordinary person, you are extraordinary. But for what? What purpose does it serve? It serves only one purpose: you become powerful, others become subservient to you. You are an extraordinary person. They are poor fellows -- Mahatma Gandhi class; they can only be clerks, they cannot become anything more. They don't have guts. You have castrated the whole humanity in different ways, and this castration is very political. So those who are in power go on remaining in power from generation to generation. Now in India, after forty years of the freedom struggle, one family has been dominating. It has become a dynasty, not a democracy. And it is impossible to remove them because in forty years they have managed everything so that they cannot be…