This is the second part of the post “Religious Scriptures as Bait – Their Words, My Meaning“, from the same talk.

You can see clearly now why I had to use religious language, and why now I am continually telling you to flush God down the toilet, to forget all about heaven and hell, and that the law of karma is nothing but boo boo.

“I am no longer showing any respect to Jesus, or Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna.

“I am just treating them as a headmaster treats his children. If they behave rightly then they will not be punished, that’s all.

“If they don’t behave rightly, then I am going to give them real hits that they will never forget.

“Now I have no need for any camouflage. I can stand fully naked, as I am, open to you.

“There is no desire anywhere in me to say a single word that I cannot authenticate on my own authority.

That’s why I am saying my religion is godless, religionless.

“It looks strange to say a religionless religion, but the word religion in itself is beautiful.

“People have used it, abused it – that’s why I said I hate it. The original meaning of the word is really beautiful, but who cares about the original meanings?

“The original meaning of the word religion is ‘to bring all the parts together, to make it whole.’

As man exists he is many, a crowd.
Religion means to put the crowd in such a harmony that it becomes one individuality.

“Literally so, because individuality literally means indivisibility: that it cannot be divided, that you are no longer fragments of a jigsaw puzzle, that every fragment is put where it should be and the puzzle disappears.

“The puzzle was there because fragments were in places where they are not supposed to be.

“Where your heart is supposed to be, it is not there. Where your intellect is supposed to be, it is not there. Where your emotions are supposed to be, they are not there.

“Everything is misplaced; your house is in a chaos.

Religion means to create a cosmos within a chaos.

“The word is beautiful in its original sense; hence I still use it.

“But to avoid misuse and the wrong associations, first I say religionless and then I say religion.

“All that you have understood about religion up to now, all that religions have been saying, I am denying in the word religionless.

“And all that has to be said and has not been said, I am saying in the word religion.

“Those who are in search of truth will understand it, love it, enjoy it, will be nourished by it, because it is no longer intellectual entertainment; it is spiritual nourishment.

“I am pouring my heart into you.

And now the time is ripe.
Before it is too late I have to convey all that I have been waiting for years to convey.

“I had to avoid a thousand and one things because they would have created immediate trouble. I said a thousand and one things because that was the only way to catch hold of my people.

“But now, allow me to relax so I can simply say whatsoever comes on its own. Not even I know what the next sentence or the next word is going to be.

“That’s why many times I simply stop in the middle of the sentence. I have to wait. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, I look at the clock.

“Whenever I look at the clock you can understand that I am waiting for the word and it is not coming….

I had to speak in the name of religion, in the name of God. It was compulsory.

“There was no alternative: it was not that I had not tried it. I had tried it, but found it simply closed people’s doors. But I could see a simple way out.

“Even my father was puzzled, more so than anybody else, because he knew me from my very childhood – that I was an atheist, a born atheist; that I was against religion, against the priests.

“When I started speaking in religious conferences, he asked me, ‘What is happening? Have you changed?’

“I said, ‘Not a bit, I have just changed my strategy; otherwise it is difficult to speak in the Hindu world conference. They won’t allow an atheist on their stage. An amoralist, a godless person, they won’t allow.

But they invited me – and in the name of religion, I said everything against religion.’…

“I moved around the country going into religious conferences and catching hold of people.

“Once I had my own group in that city then I never bothered about their conferences; then my group was holding its own conferences, its own meetings. But it takes time.

“Now I am not searching for anybody. I have found the people who are enough for my work to spread worldwide. That’s why I want to complete the circle.

Now I want to say things which I wanted to say in the beginning but which were difficult to say because nobody was ready to listen.

“Now I have my people, whose hearts are open to absorb me, to take me in.

“And before I depart from the body, I would like to pour all that I have in you.

“It is almost like lighting one candle with another candle. You can go on lighting one candle with another candle: you can light millions of candles.

“The first candle does not lose anything, remember. It is not that it has lost so much light because now a million candles are burning. No, it has not lost anything, it has gained.

“It was a lonely candle in a dark world. Now, millions of candles are showering their light all over the space. Their light is the same. Their flames are different.

Each sannyasin has to be a flame unto himself, but the light of all the sannyasins will be the same: the light that I want to be spread all over the earth – because that is the only hope.

“Without it humanity cannot last more than fifteen years. But if we can create the light I am talking about, if we can make this whole world afire – and we can.

“I started the journey alone. People went on coming and joining me; now there are thousands of sannyasins. And do you see? – I have not been on the road very long, just twenty-five years.

“The difficulties that I have been facing you will not be facing. The problems that I had to face, you will not be facing.

“One day, alone, I started. Now my candle is burning in thousands of candles.

Each candle has the same potential: it can light up millions of candles.

“In the coming fifteen years everything will become intense: the danger will become intense; the challenge will become intense; the possibility of ultimate destruction will become intense.

“And the possibility of ultimate transformation will become intense.

“In these fifteen years everything is going to take the most intense form possible, because a planet that has been working for millions of years to create human consciousness has come to a space where either death or total transformation will be the only alternatives.

“Old religions are just dead. They don’t give any option; they are dying with the dying society, and there is nobody except you.

“You should understand the gravity, the significance, the responsibility.

There is nobody on the whole earth like you, nobody who has dropped all the old rubbish and who is ready to become a new kind of man.

“Don’t be worried that you are such a small minority. The day I started I was alone.

“Even at that time I did not think that I was a minority, because truth is never a minority.

Truth is always the whole – not even the majority but the whole, one hundred percent.

“My grandfather used to ask me, ‘You are thinking to transform the whole world alone?’

“I said, ‘With just a small candle I can burn the whole forest. An atom bomb is not needed; one just has to choose the right timing.

“If the wind is blowing toward the forest, then just a single candle and the whole forest will be afire. So don’t think that I am alone, and what can I do?’

“My grandfather was not alive when I started initiating people into sannyas, otherwise he would have been immensely happy that what I had said to him had happened.

“You are not a small minority, don’t think in those terms. A single sannyasin – even a single sannyasin – is not a minority, because the truth that burns in him and the light that he holds in his hands, the torch that he holds in his hand, is enough to create the whole face of the earth.

“It is going to happen – and not with God’s help, because God’s help has been coming for thousands of years and you see what has happened.

This time, without God – at least give it a try this time without God, without heaven, without hell, without all that crap!

Just give a chance to pure humanity, to the ordinary, natural human being.

And I say to you it is going to happen – no God can prevent it.”

END

Excerpted and abridged from:

Osho, From Personality to Individuality, Talk #14 – The Only Hope: The Enlightenment of Humanity

This Osho talk is also featured in the February 2024 issue of YES OSHO Magazine (in Hindi)