Shamanism

Osho, why have you chosen this dead country as the field of your work?

Precisely for that! Because it is dead, it must be revived. What is the point of reviving those who are already alive? One treats the sick, not the healthy. This country is dead, and has been dead for centuries. It must be breathed back to life. And this country is a precious one. It ought not be dead. Its deadness is a costly loss. This country must live. It must be rejuvenated, for it holds a great treasure. If it is reawakened, light will spread to the whole world. But the country lies dead. It lies like a corpse upon its own treasure. It neither benefits from that wealth itself, nor allows anyone else to benefit from it. Life must be breathed into this corpse; it must be awakened—because no other land holds such a treasury. That is exactly my predicament. This country is dead, yet it holds a vast…

Osho, your words suggest that the coming ten years will be highly critical, catastrophic, and decisive for humankind. And perhaps your arrival is related to ensuring that, in the face of this impending calamity, humanity suffers the least possible harm and the core values of culture and religion are preserved as much as possible. Will you guide us in this direction?

Friends come to me and say, “Why don’t you do something so that ashes appear from your hand? Millions will come.” But they would be the wrong millions. Millions would come, but millions would be wrong. And among those millions, the few who are rightly close to me would be lost, they would be distracted. For those who are rightly close to me would not be able to survive before that crowd—the crowd would surge ahead. It would be a crowd of the ambitious, a crowd of the insane. Those who gather to see ash falling from a hand are mad; they should be in an asylum. They are diseased. And once you invite the diseased, they will not let the healthy remain. Economics has a simple rule: counterfeit coins drive genuine coins out of circulation. If there is a fake rupee in your pocket, you will try to spend…

I am not in search of another world, something that is beyond death; my effort is to transform this moment now and here into paradise. I am not for postponement. All those people who have been saying "If you are virtuous after death you will be rewarded," are being deceptive because who knows what happens after death? Nobody comes back to tell us. These people who are telling us have not known anything. They are just repeating like parrots. I say to my sannyasins never postpone -- postponement is a very subtle trick of the mind. Live the moment in its totality. Always remember this is the only moment yon have got, there is no other moment, there is no other world. This world is god, there is no other god. Once this vision settles in you it transforms your whole life.

Why is the west becoming more and more interested in meditation? And also, why is the east losing interest in its own spiritual treasures?

After a time, penniless but still submissive to the decrees from one high, he landed in the county poorhouse. One day the overseer sent him out to plow a potato field. A thunderstrom came up but was passing over when, without warning, a bolt of lightning descended from the sky. It melted the plowshare, stripped most of his clothing from him, singed off his beard, branded his naked back with the initials of a neighbouring cowman, and hurled him through a barbed wire fence. When he recovered consciousness he got slowly to his knees, clasped his hands and raised his eyes towards heaven. Then, for the first time, he asserted himself: "Lord," he said, "this is getting to be plumb ridiculous!" This is the situation of the East: "This is getting to be plumb ridiculous!" But the East goes on thanking God, goes on feeling grateful. There is nothing to…