There is no other alternative

Beloved Osho, Do you see any possibility that the people who can really change the course of events in the world today will ever listen to what you’re saying, understand it, and try to implement it?

They will have to. There is no other alternative. It is a very strange situation: if they don’t choose me, if they don’t choose the transformation I am talking about, then they are choosing death for all humanity and all life. It is not a question of choosing between two ideologies. It is not a question of choosing between my philosophy and Karl Marx’s philosophy or Bertrand Russell’s philosophy. It is not a philosophical question. The question is existential.

On the other side, if man decides not to listen to me, not to change, then he decides for committing suicide. That’s why I say they will have to listen, they will have to understand, and they will have to go through the transformation, because nobody is ready to choose an ultimate death for all life.

If it was a question of choosing between two ideologies, it is just intellectual gymnastics. That’s why they are so much afraid of me. Slowly, slowly, the intelligent people around the world are becoming aware that it is necessary to do something so that man is saved, or be ready to die. And what I am proposing is the only alternative; no other alternative is proposed anywhere. There is no other possibility.

Man has looked into all the alternatives, has exhausted all the possibilities, and has tried to remain just the way he is, only changing ideologies, religions, scriptures, but he himself remains the same. What is the difficulty? You choose the holy Koran instead of the Holy Bible; you are the same person, only the book has changed. The question was not the change of the book, the question was the change of your total being. They have done everything up to now that was possible.

I am not giving you any ideology, not another holy book. I am giving you a simple alternative: you have to drop your whole past – your hatred, your distinctions of color and nation, your fights amongst religions, political ideologies – you have to drop it in toto. There is no question of choosing something from the past; you have to drop it completely. You have to become discontinuous with the past, and that discontinuity with the past will bring the transformation. You have not to do anything else.

Just as the snake slips out of his old skin, leaving it aside completely – he does not even look back – man has to slip out of his past, not even looking back. It is difficult, but not as difficult as death for all of life. The past is heavy, the past is deep rooted, but life and desire to live is far stronger.

So on the one hand is the whole range of many alternatives, but all life-denying. If you choose them, then you are choosing death.

I am the only person here who is life-affirmative, who does not want to reject anything from life, who accepts life as it is, with no grudge, no complaint, with no desire that it should have been better – who relishes it as it is. And there are no other life-affirmative ideologies around. So on the one hand there are many ideologies which are life-denying, life-negative. All those ideologies have led man to this point, where he is facing a total death of the planet.

I am against all those ideologies for the simple reason that I affirm life and I say that if you go deeper into your desire for life, you will find the eternal source of life. And if you choose life instead of death, then you will have to change all your other ideologies – political, social, religious – because they are all life-denying. They are complementary to each other.

Choosing me you have to drop your whole past; that is the fear. But there is no other way. It has never happened before that you had to choose a certain way of life or total destruction of all life from the planet.

That’s why I emphasize that they will have to listen. They will try not to listen, but the situation is such that ultimately they have to listen to me, and they have to understand it also. In fact they will listen only when they are ready to understand. And when they are ready to understand they know perfectly well that it is not a question of changing your idea, it is a question of changing your whole life, its attitudes, approaches, everything. But they will have to, because on the other side, if they don’t choose what I am saying, then they have to choose a global suicide.

So in a way, the nuclear weapons, diseases like AIDS, are all helping me. They will force humanity to understand me, otherwise it was not possible for them to listen to me or to understand or to transform. But the alternative is such that there is no way out. I am the only way out of this mess that their religions and their political philosophies have created in the world.

Osho, The Last Testament, Vol 2, Ch 19, Q 1

Video excerpt: youtu.be