Politicians [and] religions don’t want you to become one

Excerpts

Almost every person is split – for such silly and stupid things you cannot believe. You will not allow a saint just a little bit of smoking?

No, saints are not allowed to do that. But once in a while it is really playful, making rings of smoke. There is no sin involved in it.

You will not allow your saints to have marijuana – just a little bit? He will lose his sainthood and he will be put into jail. But what is wrong in marijuana? I don’t see that he is harming anybody, and a little bit of marijuana may do some good to him. At least in those moments he will not be a hypocrite.

This has been my experience in India, because in my childhood days in India no drug was prohibited, and particularly those in the same family as marijuana. In India it is called bhang, but it is the same family and the same drug. At each festival, on each festive occasion, in marriages bhang is used, and I have watched – people under the influence of bhang are so real, so authentic….

Osho RP 12

I have seen one of my principals shouting four-letter words. We had never known that part of him, and when we told him later on, he said, “You must be joking! I cannot use such words.”

But I said, “I have collected many eyewitnesses – I knew that you would say this to me. They are waiting outside.”

He looked through the window, there were ten other people standing whom I had collected. He said, “Disperse them! You are right; somehow a vague memory is still with me. I have used those words you are mentioning, but I have always been repressing them.”

This was a good experience, to know some repressed part, to become aware of it. Through awareness it can be dropped.

In Eastern religions, for thousands of years drugs have been used just to make you aware that you are not your personality that you go on projecting in the world, that you are much more. The personality is just the tip of the iceberg. Deeper down is your bigger reality – nine times more than your conscious mind.

Drugs can certainly be used to make people psychologically healthy. They can be used to make people again ONE, to destroy their split. What psychoanalysis does in three, five, seven years with thousands of dollars wasted, thousands of hours wasted, drugs can do within hours. But religions are against them. Politicians are against them. Governments are against them.

Why so much antagonism? I can understand there may be some bad side effects, but we have so much scientific knowledge today that all those elements which have bad side effects can be removed from the drugs. Rather than forcing millions of people into jails around the world, rather than wasting money on all these prisoners, the better and wiser way will be to give the money and the project to the scientists. LSD can be more purified, can be more ecstatic, without having any side effects. But nobody is ready to do it.

Why are they not ready to do it? The governments are afraid that if people are not split, they will have so much energy that they will not be controllable. To enslave a split person is easy, because he is fighting with himself; he has no time to fight with anybody else.

Politicians don’t want you to become one.

Religions don’t want you to become one because if you become one, who is going to be guilty? Who is going to confess to the priest? Who is going to bother about God and church and all kinds of nonsense? No, they want you to remain psychologically split. They want you to remain in this sickness where only guilt arises. But guilt leads you to religion, to God, to prayer.

To cut the roots of guilt is to destroy all hocus-pocus religions which are dominating man.

Osho, From Death to Deathlessness, Ch 25, Q 1 (excerpt)

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