Perspective

Osho, after what you have experienced over the last thirty-two years, living in India and abroad, have there been any significant changes in your views about India, America, religion, sex, India’s problems and their solutions?

Much has changed. Because I am not a stagnant, rotting pond; I am a flowing Ganga. Every moment I am moving forward. The famous Greek thinker Heraclitus has said: you cannot step into the same river twice. Sooner or later, somewhere under some constellation in eternity, I am bound to meet Heraclitus. Then I would like to tell him: you cannot step into the same river even once. For the river is flowing. When you touch the river’s upper layer, the lower layer is already moving; and by the time you reach the lower, the upper has gone. The seed is the same—but it has become a tree, laden with leaves, with flowers in bloom. In my life I have never evolved in opposition to anything. What I have said, I have only refined. Therefore, certainly, I will not say now what I said thirty years ago. Thirty years ago…

You can see my people. I have got one million people to prove this. They have dropped repression but they have not gone to overindulgence. On the other hand, by dropping repression their energy is freed; they have become immensely creative, and they have become meditative. Sannyasins who have been with me for ten, twelve, fifteen years have almost lost all interest in sex. They are no more interested in it because the same energy can give them so much joy, that sex seems to be just a wastage. And the second day is a hangover -- dull, dissipated, weak, while the same energy can reach to higher peaks of meditation and can give you spaces that you have never known, heights that you have never flown, light, clarity that has never been your experience.

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…

Osho, you say you don’t speak for the crowd, that you won’t speak merely to please them. But people are saying that whenever someone speaks against Gandhi or against the Congress, people like it, and that’s why such large crowds gather.

For all of India—more so for Gujarat, of course, but certainly for the whole of India. There isn’t much distance between us and him yet; the generation that lived close to him is still alive. And for India’s future, decisions will have to be taken in some relation to Gandhi—whether in support or in opposition. Gandhi will remain significant for the next hundred years in India—that’s my understanding—whether for or against is another matter. Therefore Gandhi should be thought about very clearly. That was one reason. Second, it seems to me that not only in India but outside India too, reflection on Gandhi has begun—sometimes it even seems that people outside India are thinking more. In this country, reflection has almost stopped. So Gandhi is just a beginning. I would say we should also try to reawaken reflection on Mahavira and the Buddha. But there is a great distance between…