People have gone far away from their reality

Beloved Osho,

In the Pune years, I remember you so often using the phrase, “Be in the marketplace, but not of it.” I thought this meant that when I was away from you, I would need to constantly remind myself that I was no longer part of the marketplace mentality – I was a sannyasin.

Recently, dropped into the so-called normal reality of bargain-hunting and flat-finding, of supermarkets and skinheads, I realized your people aren’t part of the marketplace; that now there is no need to remind ourselves – we are very obviously and irrevocably a race apart.

Only weeks ago, my question was about helping your vision to be realized. Now, after my recent experience of the world, and seeing its treatment of you, I don’t even have the energy to talk to people about you. Does this mean they are too far gone – or am I?

The way the world has treated me is absolutely natural, you should not feel offended by it. If they had been respectful, understanding, and loving towards me, that would have been a shock. Their treatment is absolutely expected.

You have not gone far away, they have gone far away and they have been going on and on for millions of years. The distance between the real man and the man that exists in the world has become almost unbridgeable. They are so far away from their own reality, they have forgotten the way back home.

They have forgotten what was the purpose of their being here.

People have gone far away from their reality, and to remind them of their reality hurts them. Their treatment of me is nothing but an expression of their wounded heart. They don’t want to see those wounds; they don’t want to be reminded of anything else which they have tried so hard to forget, to forgive. Somehow they have managed a certain identity in the world… and here comes a man who shatters it completely.

It is natural they should be angry with me. It is natural they will stone me. It is natural they will do everything that they have always done with people like me. That does not mean that you have to lose hope, that you have to become pessimistic, that you have to stop even talking about me. That way you are not helping them, and that way you are not helping yourself either.

Their behavior should not be taken into account at all. They are absolutely asleep. We are trying something which goes against their sleep, and naturally they feel disturbed and react. This is absolutely acceptable. But how long can they react? It is a question of a great challenge.

Losing hope means you have lost the game.

I am not going to lose the game.

To my very last breath I will go on doing the same, whatever their reaction. It is only by bringing their reaction to the surface that there is a possibility of change. It will take time, because millions of years have taken them away from themselves. You should have patience with them. They need your compassion, they need your patience.

They will come home; they want to come home, but it goes against their ego to recognize that they are not at home already. It goes against their ego to recognize that they are false, that they are phony.

But their reaction – their throwing stones at me, or throwing knives at me, or putting me in jails, or crucifying me – is going to change them. This is the only way that they will start thinking about what they are doing and why they feel offended. You feel offended only when something truthful about you is told, something which you have been hiding. You are never offended by lies.

Truth is the greatest offender.

Their very disturbance, their fear that I will destroy their morality, I will destroy their religion, I will destroy their tradition, shows one thing: they don’t have religion, they don’t have morality, they don’t have any tradition. They are managing to believe that they have, but it is only a belief which can be easily destroyed; otherwise what happened in Greece?

I was just a tourist for four weeks in a country thousands of years old. The Greek Orthodox church is the oldest church in the world – the Vatican is not that old. Jesus and his sayings were first translated into Greek; that’s why he became ‘Christ’, and his followers became ‘Christians’. These are Greek words.

Now, this country – which for two thousand years has been perpetually propagating Christianity, teaching every child a conditioning – is afraid of a tourist who is going to be there for only four weeks. The archbishop was disturbed so much that he threatened that my house would be burned, that I would be stoned if I was not removed immediately from the country, because my presence would destroy the morality of the country, it would destroy the religion of the country, the family, the church, the tradition – just in four weeks!

If I can manage to do that in four weeks, then whatever I am destroying deserves to be destroyed. It simply means that it is phony. People are not really in it – they are just pretending. Only pretensions can be destroyed in four weeks; realities cannot be destroyed. But the archbishop of the oldest church of Christianity is so much afraid, and he goes on saying things which are absolute lies. But that’s what I have been telling you again and again – that all your religions are based on lies, and hence they are afraid.

The archbishop was sending telegrams to the president of the country, to the prime minister, to other ministers, and he was saying that I had been sent specially from hell to destroy the Christian Orthodox church in Greece. Can you believe a sane man saying something like that? And he holds the highest post, so even the president is afraid, the prime minister is afraid, and they have to do something criminal because that man can provoke the masses against them.

But I enjoyed the whole thing for the simple reason that it shows that truth has really a strength and power of its own. Truth has an authority which lies cannot have. You may have been conditioning people with those lies for centuries, but just a ray of light, just a small truth, can destroy that whole structure.

Truth has an authority which lies cannot have. You may have been conditioning people with those lies for centuries, but just a ray of light, just a small truth, can destroy that whole structure.

So there is no need to be hopeless. Talk to people – and if they are offended, rejoice. It means whatever you have said has disturbed their conditioning, and they are trying to protect it. You cannot disturb an unconditioned man. You can say anything about him, but you cannot disturb him.

Now my sannyasins are in the world, and I have told them to mix with the world so that they can spread the truth more easily. You are fortunate – just our people, a small minority in the world of five billion people, is enough to create a wildfire. But don’t be in a hurry and don’t be impatient. And there is no need ever to be in a state of losing hope. Truth is intrinsically indefatigable, intrinsically impossible to defeat.

It may take time, but there is no scarcity of time. And there is no need that the revolution should happen before our eyes. It is contentment enough that you were part of a movement that changed the world, that you played your role in favor of truth, that you will be part of the victory that is going to happen ultimately.

Osho, Beyond Psychology, Ch 1 Q 1 (excerpt)