Veneration

If you are an ordinary human being, why do you accept this form of veneration from your followers?

What kind of veneration? Just because I am sitting in a chair higher than you...? Tomorrow I can tell them to dig a ditch... then will I be adoring you all? Are you some kind of idiot or what?

Osho, are you in favor of hero-worship? Does hero-worship bring understanding or exaggeration?

Third, I oppose it because hidden within the feeling of worship is the notion that someone else will do something for me. That through worship, something will be done for me. If I worship Rama, Rama will do something for me. If I call out to Christ, Christ will do something for me. In this world, no one can do anything for anyone else. And those who get the idea that someone else will do something for them become deprived of what they themselves could have done. They fall into deep laziness and negligence. All devotees, all worshipers, ultimately fall into inertia; they themselves do nothing. They say, “There is God, there is the guru, there is the tirthankara, the avatar—when he does it, it will happen.” Unknowingly, what they could have done becomes impossible, because their mind clings to a prop: someone will do it. Fourth and finally, I…

Osho, what is the relationship between meditation and patience?

If you sit to meditate to remove mental restlessness, you will keep looking back again and again: “Has it gone yet?” And the irony is that when you begin to meditate, restlessness will increase. Because what has been repressed will start surfacing; catharsis will begin. The rubbish you have kept hidden within and never allowed to express—meditation will break open those doors too. It will clean the house. Dust piled up for years, for births, will rise again; there will be gusts and storms. For a while even the little peace you had will be lost. Then you will panic: “I came for peace, and even what I had is gone.” Without patience, you could even become unhinged, because meditation brings such a great storm. The disease is not from a day or two; it’s from lifetimes. Meditation will break through all the layers to reach your innermost core. In…

Beloved Osho, if you are only a fallible, ordinary man, and not a great master, why are we called "the chosen few" who are going to be messengers of rajneeshism for the world at large? Doesn't this fulfill our egos?

Perspiration is a natural way to keep the heat from entering you. You perspire, and the sunrays are prevented by your perspiration. The sunrays become engaged -- they are foolish -- they become engaged in evaporating the perspiration. They forget you, they leave you alone, and your temperature remains the same. You have holes all over your body: seven million small holes, with glands ready to perspire any moment. If Mahavira never perspired, I can think only of one thing -- that we should forget the idea that we have invented plastic. Mahavira's body must have been a plastic body; only a plastic body cannot perspire. Plastic is very stubborn. Now the scientists of the whole world are worried: so much plastic is being thrown into the ocean, into the rivers, into the earth, and there is no way for plastic to dissolve into earth or into water. It is…