“Governments are against me because I am against them. Religions are against me because I am against religions. Political leaders are annoyed with me because I say they are mediocre, because I say only psychologically sick people become interested in power politics. People who suffer from an inferiority complex are the people who seek power, prime ministership, presidency.

“These people need to be in psychiatric hospitals, and they are running the world.

I am against all religions because I am for religiousness, and religions are barriers to creating a humanity with a quality of religiousness.

“A Christian is not needed, nor a Hindu, nor a Mohammedan. These are the barriers to religious progress. What is needed is truthfulness, sincerity, silence, lovingness… a life of joy, playfulness… a life of deep search, inquiry into one’s consciousness. And these qualities have nothing to do with Christianity or Judaism or Jainism or Buddhism.

“Meditation is needed, but meditation is nobody’s monopoly.

“Naturally, all religions are against me, annoyed. Because I am the first man in the whole of history who is saying that religions are the barriers preventing humanity from becoming religious. “They are not the vehicles of God, they are the enemies of God. Popes and Ayatollah Khomeinis and shankaracharyas – these are not the representatives of God; they may be representatives of the devil. Because these are the people who have divided humanity, and who for centuries have been continuously creating conflicts, bloodshed, wars, crusades, jihad, holy war, and all kinds of nonsense.

In the name of religion, these people are oppressing humanity.

“I am against nations because I don’t see any need for there to be nations. Why can’t the whole planet earth be one single humanity? – which would be saner, more scientific, more easily controllable. Right now things are such that you can only say we are living in an insane world. Every three months the common market in Europe is dumping so much food in the ocean… mountains of butter! Last time they had to destroy so much food that the destruction cost was two hundred million dollars – it is not the cost of the food, it is the cost of destroying it. And just nearby in Ethiopia, one thousand people were dying every day.

What kind of humanity are we living in? Half of humanity is dying in poverty.

“Every six months, America goes on throwing billions of dollars worth of food into the ocean, but they will not give that food to Ethiopia or to India or to any other country where people are starving and dying. Nobody cares about human beings; everybody cares about money.

“These money–minded people cannot be called sane: that food has to be destroyed; otherwise the market prices will fall, and they don’t want their prices to fall. They want their prices to remain stable, so the food has to be destroyed.

If the whole world is one, things can be very simple.

“At one time Russia was burning wheat in its trains instead of coal because coal in Russia is costlier, and they had an overproduction of wheat. In India, people were dying because wheat was not available. Coal we have enough of, but you cannot eat coal. If the world were one, then the coal from India could go to Russia and the wheat from Russia could move towards India.

“There is no need to destroy mountains, exactly mountains of butter. And why did they have to destroy it? Before, they had been selling it to Libya. In Libya, butter was available at half the price of butter in Europe. The butter was coming from Europe, but they were selling it at a throw–away price, just to get rid of it. Otherwise they would have to arrange dumping it and that takes money. Just to save that money, they were giving it to Libya.

“But President Ronald Reagan started going insane against Libya for no reason at all, bombed the poor country, bombed Kadaffi’s three houses, killed one of his daughters – for no reason at all – and pressured Europe so that all the supplies that they were giving to Libya would be stopped. Mountains of butter collected in Europe. Now you need space, cold storage… so the old butter had to be thrown into the ocean for the new butter to come in.

There is no need of nations. These are the hangups of the past.

“And if there are no nations, there is no need for armies. Right now, seventy percent of the budget of every country goes to the military; seventy percent to the military which does nothing except left, right, left, right, polishing their guns, their shoes, their buttons – that’s all they do. And all over the world, seventy percent of the budget goes to the military and whole countries have to live on thirty percent of their budget.

“If the nations disappear, one hundred percent of the budget is available for the whole country – because the armies are useless. Right now there is no problem of there being any war with any planet. With whom are you going to fight? So what is the need to polish your guns every day? To polish your boots, and morning and evening, left and right? All these idiots who are doing this can be put into creative work.

I don’t want any nations in the world. The world is one single humanity.

I don’t want religions in the world.

“Religiousness is enough, more than enough. As religions disappear, millions of monks and nuns who are just parasites. They do nothing. That is another army that is sitting on the chest of humanity. They should disappear. They have renounced the world, but for their food, for their clothes, for their housing, the world has to work. It is a very strange thing: they will earn the virtue of having renounced the world; they will enter paradise. You will go to hell, because you provided food, clothes, shelter to these saints. And they have been simply condemning you! Strange logic.

These people should go to hell – who have not been doing anything except condemning, calling everybody a sinner, creating guilt in everybody, destroying everybody’s integrity and self–respect. But these people will go to paradise.

“With religions disappearing, all these people can be put into creative work. There is no need of monasteries, there is no need of churches, temples, mosques. All these houses of God – and there are millions of men who don’t have any houses, who live their whole life on the street. The houses of God are empty – there is no God. All these houses of God can be made available to the homeless. All these monks can be put into creative work, all the armies can be put into creative work.

And when there are no more nations, all dirty politics will have to disappear.

“Different arrangements can be made for managing the whole world – a world government based on merit, not dependent on votes. In the whole world there are thousands of universities. The world government can be left in the hands of the universities, and all the universities should choose their best people for the world government. An education minister should be a man who really understands education and who can bring new forms of education into the world.

“Many departments of government will have to disappear, there will be no need. For example, the defense ministry – defense against whom?

“The universities could choose the most meritorious people – the Nobel prize winners, the great vice–chancellors, the great artists, the painters, the poets. There could be a different kind of government which is not dependent on the vote of a sleepy humanity, of those who don’t know what they are doing.

“And we can make this world really a Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve will not have to go back to the Garden of Eden. And one day you will hear a knock on the door – God wants to come in! Because you have managed to create a far better garden than his old one. But we can keep that garden too, as a museum piece.

“Naturally, Raman Maharshi, Meher Baba, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti belong to a different category.

I belong to my own category. There is no category to which I can belong; I have to create my category.

“Naturally they are all against me because I am going to take away all their powers, all their conspiracies against humanity. Naturally, they are together against me.

“And they are a little puzzled: what to do with a single man? It looks awkward to them also. All the governments of the world, all the religions of the world have to decide against a single individual. Certainly that single individual must have something significant; otherwise there would be no need of so much fear, paranoia.

“I am for man’s spiritual growth, but I understand spiritual growth in its whole context. It is not something separate, one dimensional; it is a multi–dimensional phenomenon. It needs a revolution in society. It needs a revolution in society’s economic, political structures; it needs a tremendous and radical change in everything that has been dominating us up to now.

We have to create a discontinuity with the past. Only then a new man – a really spiritual man, a man of cosmic dimensions – can be born.

“I am certainly blessed because I am the first who is opposed by all. This situation has never happened before, and will never happen again. And you are also blessed because you are fellow travelers with a man who is not just an old dead saint, a goody–goody.

“I want you to be the very salt of the earth.

“Too many goody–goody saints have created so much diabetes. We need a different kind of saintliness.

I have called that different kind of saint Zorba the Buddha.”

END

Excerpted from: Osho, Sermons in Stones, Talk #1 – I Belong To My Own Category

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