The only eternal thing you have in the world

Sooner or later science is going to replace many of your parts. Then it will be very simple. If something goes wrong, you go to the workshop and your parts can be replaced. Your heart is not functioning well – you go to the garage and a plastic heart can be implanted in you. Slowly slowly, all the parts will become plastic, because plastic is the most immortal thing in existence. It goes on living and living. You cannot destroy plastic. There is no natural process for plastic to dissolve into the earth.

That is creating a problem for ecologists, because so many plastic bottles and jugs and toys are gathering under the earth, in the riverbeds, in the ocean. There is a danger that because plastic is never reabsorbed by the earth like everything else, it creates a hindrance to the natural rhythm and cycle of nature. Sooner or later there will be so much plastic that it will hinder all natural processes. Plastic is very immortal!

Osho, Come, Come, Yet Again Come, Ch 3, Q 2 (excerpt)

Plastic flowers are very permanent flowers. In fact, scientists are worried that plastic is one of the things the earth cannot absorb. And now so many plastic things are being thrown into the ocean, into the earth, that they are destroying the whole ecology. Plastic is something eternal.

A tree grows out of the earth, a man grows out of the earth; you put the tree back into the earth and it will disappear into its basic elements. But plastic is man-made. You can put it into the earth and after many years you can dig and find the plastic exactly the same, nothing has changed.

It is because of the American idea of using a thing once and throwing it away. It is cleaner, but it is dangerous. The whole bottom of the ocean around America is full of plastic things: plastic bags, plastic syringes; everything is plastic: plastic covers, plastic toys.

And those layers of plastic have created something strange. Millions of fish have died because the plastic has made the water poisonous. Its aliveness has gone, it has become dead. And the fear is growing every day that more plastic thrown into the oceans, into the rivers, into the earth, will make everything dead; everything will be plastic.

Osho, God is dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth, Ch 5, Q 1 (excerpt)

Now all over the world the scientists are concerned, “What are we going to do with the plastic?” — because at the bottom, all the seas are full of plastic. Plastic is so cheap that it is disposable, you need not use it twice. Even for an injection a plastic syringe is used only once and then thrown away; it is cheaper, simpler, less dangerous.

But all that plastic goes on into the earth, into the ocean, and it cannot mix. It is one of the most strange things that man has made — it cannot dissolve back into earth, it remains.

It is the only eternal thing you have in the world.

Osho, The Osho Upanishad, Ch 10, Q 1 (excerpt)