/lit/ - Literature

The greatest fear in the world is of the opinions of others. And the moment you are unafraid of the crowd you are no longer a sheep, you become a lion. A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom

>>15060802
U.G. Krishnamurti is a shadow of an unenlightened intellectual giant. U.G. Krishnamurti is not even an intellectual giant, but he goes on preaching the same words, the same language, and tries to hide the fact.

Just the other day I saw an article about him in a newspaper. He was asked by the interviewer, "When and where did you become enlightened?" And his answer was, "I don't know when and where."

Enlightenment does not happen in time or in space. "When" and "where" are time and space. It happens when you are nowhere, no one. It happens when there is eternity, no time. But his answer may impress many people -- people are very gullible.

I am taking his case for a particular reason -- because the whole of the Western intelligentsia has become immensely interested in Zen, but their interest remains intellectual. They have written great books, and we will be discussing in this manifesto almost everyone who has written books on Zen.

My effort is to make you really clear that all these intellectuals may have written very beautiful books... I appreciate their scholarship, I appreciate their articulateness of expression, but they are not men of Zen, to say nothing of masters of Zen. Hence this manifesto is absolutely needed to make the whole world clear that Zen is not a mind affair. It is a no-mind space.

I told you that all the religions are saying, "Drop the ego." Zen goes beyond the ego and beyond the self. Except Zen, no religion has come to the point of going beyond the self, beyond the atman, beyond your spirit, beyond your individuality. It is absolutely a single man's contribution to human consciousness -- Gautam the Buddha's.

Zen is the ultimate flowering. Slowly, slowly improving the image of Gautam the Buddha, each master has contributed something, a new dimension to it. Gautam Buddha is the only person in the whole history of mankind who said, "Just dropping the ego will not help. It can be easily dropped

Alan Watts was a trained Christian missionary. That training continues to affect his effort to understand Zen. And finally, when he came a little closer to Zen, the Christian church expelled him. That brought a crisis in that man's life. He was not yet a man of Zen, and he had lost his credibility as a Christian. Under this stress he started drinking wine, became an alcoholic and died because of alcoholism. If you know this man you will understand why he is saying what he is saying.


>Osho,
>Alan Watts once described the universe by saying, "It is as if God is playing a game." If there is no God, who is playing and what is the game?

Alan Watts was a nice guy but the statement he made was stolen from Hindu mythology. That's what he was doing his whole life, but in the West it appeared as if he was giving original insights.

Basically he was trained as a Christian priest and, like every Christian priest, acquired certain knowledge about all the religions so that he could prove Christianity to be the best, the highest, the truest religion. But Alan Watts, seeing the Hindu religion, could not say that the Christian religion was the highest religion that had happened on earth. That's why I say he was a nice guy. He was an honest man.

He renounced his priesthood and remained almost a beggar his whole life. But he was tremendously impressed by Eastern religions - emphatically with the Hindu idea of God playing a game. In Hinduism it is called leela. That is one of the contributions of Hinduism to world thought. All other religions believe that God is creating the world; it is a serious affair. Only Hinduism makes it non-serious. Hinduism says it is just a play, a game of hide-and-seek. It is God who is hiding, it is God who is seeking; it is God in men, it is God in women. To Hinduism, existence is made of the stuff called God, and it is not a creation - because creation has implications which Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism are incapable of answering.

>>14214743
too bad.

Osho,
Are you especially against Christianity?

I hate to favor Christianity with any special attention but unfortunately it deserves it. It is the ugliest manifestation of religion on the earth, for many reasons.

First: Christianity is the only well-organized religion. The better organized a religion is, the less is the possibility of it being a religion. Truth, by its very nature, cannot be organized. To organize truth is the same thing as to kill it. Truth is alive when organization is only functional, loose, and Christianity's organization is very tight, bureaucratic, hierarchical. Because of this kind of organization, it has become more a game of power politics than the flowering of religious qualities.

In the past two thousand years Christianity has done more harm to humanity than any other religion. Mohammedanism has tried to compete with it but has not been successful. It came very close but Christianity still remains on the top. It has slaughtered people, burned people alive. In the name of God, truth, religion, it has been killing and slaughtering people - for their own sake, for their own good.

And when the murderer is murdering you for your own good, then he has no feeling of guilt at all. On the contrary, he feels he has done a good job. He has done some service to humanity, to God, to all the great values of love, truth, freedom. He feels excited. He feels that he is now a better human being. When crimes are being used for people to feel better human beings, it is the worst that can happen to anybody. Now he will be doing evil, thinking it is good. He will be destroying good, thinking it is good.

This is the worst kind of indoctrination that Christianity has put into people's minds. The idea of the crusade, of the religious war, is a great contribution of Christianity. Mohammedanism learned it from Christianity; they cannot claim the originality of the idea. They call it jihad, holy war, but they came five hundred years later than Jesus. Christianity had already created in people's minds the idea that a war too can be religious.

Now, war as such is irreligious - there cannot be anything like a crusade, a jihad, a holy war. To call war holy, then what is left to be called unholy? This is a strategy to destroy people's thinking. The moment they think of a crusade, they don't think there is anything wrong: they are fighting for God against the Devil. There is no God and no Devil - you are simply fighting and killing people. And what business is it of yours? If God cannot destroy the Devil, do you think you can? If God is impotent and cannot destroy the Devil, then can this pope do it? Can these Christians do it? Can Jesus do it? God has lived with the Devil for eternity.