Osho Rocks!

Never mind the fact that he looks somewhat like Osama bin Laden. He is wonderful. Here are some Osho quotes from the books I bought:

On witches:

"Christianity burned living women in thousands, calling them witches. The word `witch' is not a bad word; it simply means a wise woman. But Christianity converted the word, gave it a wrong connotation, created courts all over Europe, a great investigation to destroy witches, because witches are directly connected with the devil. This was the strategy to destroy those wise women.

The real fcat was that if those women remained alive, Christianity would have looked very poor as a religion. They knew far deeper truths than Christianity, far more refined religious flights, methods of hypnosis and meditation - which always go together. By destroying the witches, Christianity was trying to destroy hypnosis and meditation both. It was a question of survival.

... Christianity destroyed living human women. And the courts tortured those women, forced them to confess before the court that yes, they had a sexual relationship with the devil.

There is no devil anywhere. After those witches, the devil has not approached any woman. And strangely enough, it was only in Christian countries that the devil was having sexual relationships with women - in no other country."

On goals and self:

"Every desire leads not to the goal it has promised you; it leads to just the opposite of it. You want to be special? you have already accepted your ordinariness. One who is special does not want to be special; he's not even aware that he is special. Whatever you want, one thing is certain - you are not that. And from where are these desires and wants coming? - imitation. All around, you see people: somebody is so rich, somebody is so intellectual, someone is a wrestler, someone is a boxer. And you are nothing - it hurts. It hurts because of your wrong conceptions about life.

So you have to note down a few things in your being: one, you cannot be anybody other than who you are. If you try to be somebody other than who you are, you will never be somebody else, but you will miss being that which you were destined to become. It is almost as if a roseflower wants to become a lotus. His whole energy will be in how to become a lotus; he will forget all about the roses. All his energy will become misdirected. He will never become a lotus because he has no seeds, no potentiality to be a lotus. Only one thing is certain: now he will not become even a flowerting bush of roses.

And who said that a lotus is better than a rose? They are both beautiful and they are both needed. Even the smallest blade of grass is much needed as the biggest star in the sky. This whole universe is one organic unity. Here nothing exists that is not needed ..."

On Freud and modern psychology:

"I have called the psychology that is based on meditation the psychology of the buddhas. Modern psychology is the psychology of people who are asleep.

It has to be understood; the people who came to Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, were all sick people - obviously, otherwise why should they come to the psychoanalyst? They were seriously sick, their minds were falling apart. Sigmund Freud came into contact only with sick poeople - that gave him the impression that man himself is sick, In a way he is logical because everybody he examined, everybody he analysed, everybody he treated was sick. And these were high-class people, bourgeois - professors, scientists, very rich people - because a psychoanalyst's time is the costliest thing in the world today. All these people werre basically living an insane life, but because everybody else is also living the same insance life you don't become aware of it.

If Sigmund Freud denied that there is any possibility of a soul in man he cannot be blamed. He never came across a Gautama Buddha, he never came across a man who had gone beyond mind.

The trouble was that these people who have gone beyond mind have no reason to go to Sigmund Freud. And Sigmund Frud is afraid to go to such people because they are against the very foundation upon which he has raised a whole empire - certainly there was a great vested interest."