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Osho - Why are you against the Christian Pope? Isn't the Pope
infallible
Question: Osho, Why are you against the
Christian Pope? Isn't the pope infallible? Why do you call him, again and
again, "Pope the Polack"?
Osho: I am not against anyone in the whole
world, for the simple reason that I have no vested interest in anything at
all, not even in my own life. My purpose is fulfilled. If I die this very
moment, there will be no complaint, because I will not be leaving anything
incomplete. Enmity arises when somebody hinders you in your ambition. But I
don't have any ambition. I don't want to be the pope.
There will be cardinals all around the earth who are against the pope
because they all want to be pope. He himself was a cardinal and must have
been ambitious to be the pope. He must have prayed to God, about the pope he
hoped to succeed, "Let this old guy die soon." And he did die really very
soon: he was only pope for ten or twelve months. It is something worth
noticing. Down through all the centuries popes have been dying like flies.
It seems that once you become a pope the whole existence is against you.
I think it must be because of all these cardinals and bishops and ministers
and priests; they are all hoping one day to become the pope, that is their
only ambition. They all must be praying, "God, call this man back home." And
although there is no God, so many prayers cannot go unheard. You will be
surprised-without God, how can prayers be heard? There is no need for God.
Just so many people desiring your death can create enough energy to kill
you.
So even though there is no God -- Buddha has no God in his religion, but he
says to his sannyasins, "After each prayer, never forget to distribute your
virtue." It is worth understanding. He says, "When you pray or meditate you
attain to a certain virtue, a purity, a compassion, a certain quality of
love, a spiritual fragrance. Don't hold it, immediately disperse it. Give it
back to the universe from where it has come to you."
So the last thing in every meditation, according to Buddha, is: "Whatsoever
my meditation has given to me -- the bliss, the joy -- I give it back to the
whole universe." There is no God, no distributing agency. But there is no
need: your wishing it is enough. Existence is not dead; it is alive, it is
overflowing with life. It may not have ears to hear you, it may not have any
understanding of your language, but it has life energy to feel you, to
absorb your deeply -- felt prayer.
I am reminded of one thing.
In India, for thousands of years, the snake has been worshipped.
There are snake charmers all over India who play a certain tune on a special
kind of flute, and snakes start coming out of their holes almost intoxicated
with the tune. They dance in front of the snake charmer who is playing on
his flute. When Britishers came into India for the first time, they could
not believe it, because they had come with the idea -- scientists had found
-- that snakes don't have any ears.
But what to make of this? If they don't have any ears -- and certainly they
don't have any ears, in their physiology ears are missing -- but they are
hearing music; not only hearing it, they are dancing to the tune of it. And
not just one snake, all the snakes are affected by certain tunes, and they
all dance according to the tune. And they have no ears! It was reported back
to England: "How can we say that they don't have any ears? -- because
certainly they hear the music.
Not only do they hear, they under stand; not only do they understand, they
follow it.'' It took long research to find out how, because certainly they
don't have any ears. The scientists were puzzled: without ears you cannot
hear. But it was a solid a fact -- and it was happening all over India, no
just in one place. Every year in India there is a month when spring comes;
in that month there is a day devoted to the snake. It is the most beautiful
time: the flowers, the fragrance, and the air -- everything is vibrant with
youth, beauty, color.
One day is devoted to the snake. Nobody kills the snake because the snake is
thought to be almost divine, and they are given milk, they are worshipped,
and they dance all over the country. In each village you will find places
with tents, crowd gathered, snakes dancing. Finally the scientists
discovered that the snake has no ears but that its whole skin is sensitive
to sound. It has no specific organ for hearing, but the vibrations of music
touching its skin give it a certain feel, and it starts moving, dancing,
swaying.
It is not hearing -- or I would like to put it in a different way: it is
hearing with its whole body.This is a stupid thing to say -- that the snake
is not hearing because it has no ears like you. The reality is that you have
only very small ears, and the snake's ears are spread all over the body.
That would be a more scientific and logical way of saying it: that it hears
with its whole body. Naturally it hears far better than you, far deeper than
you.
It risks its life, because coming out of the holes is dangerous, but it is
not afraid. When the music calls it, then there is no fear in it. Then
amidst the crowds it comes, moving; and remember, because it is not afraid,
it never attacks. And on this particular day it has never been heard that
any snake attacked anybody. Even cobras, the very dangerous snakes, are
dancing in the marketplaces. They are wild people; but anger and fear are
connected. If they are afraid then immediately they can strike back. But
they are not afraid.
They have forgotten all fear, anger -- everything. They are in a
self-forgetfulness, so intoxicated with the music that they risk their life.
In the same way existence hears. It has no ears; it has no personality, no
eyes, no hands. That's why I say there is no God. But I don't say there is
no godliness. In fact I deny God because I want you to understand godliness.
Because of God, people have completely forgotten the reality of godliness.
It is a quality spread all over existence.
Don't expect God to be in your own image -- that He has ears, and eyes, and
nose, and mouth. Don't be stupid.
This whole existence is alive. And this aliveness I call godliness,
divinity: No person, but only a presence which is overflowing. Gautam Buddha
is right when he says, "When you attain to some peace, some silence, some
joy, distribute it." There is an arithmetic in it, because the more you
distribute it, the more you become capable of getting it. People are very
miserly.
It is reported that one man came to Buddha and said, "I follow all your
teachings and I try my best to do everything, but one condition is
troublesome. Can I make just a small exception?" Buddha said, "Tell me what
the exception is." He said, "I can distribute my virtue to the whole
universe but not to my neighbor. So you have to give me permission to let my
joy be distributed to the whole universe except my neighbor. That guy, if I
have any
chance, I will kill."
Buddha said, "How can you distribute to the whole universe if you are
excluding your own neighbor? No, this exception cannot be allowed. You will
have to include your neighbor too; otherwise you are not really
distributing. You have not understood the fundamentals of it." It is said
about a Buddhist nun who had a golden statue of Buddha -- and in Buddhist
temples in Japan and in China, there are hundreds of statues.... People
loved that man, Gautam Buddha, so immensely, that there is one mountain in
China which has a temple with ten thousand Buddha statues. The whole
mountain has been carved into statues.
The whole mountain has become a temple. Ten thousand Buddhas! Now, this nun
was traveling as Buddhist monks and nuns travel, from one place to another.
She had her golden Buddha, and in the morning she would pray to Buddha and
she would burn fragrance in prayer. But she was very miserly so she was very
much concerned because the fragrance went with the wind; it reached other
Buddhas who were also in the temple.
And that was her problem, that these Buddhas.... sometimes her golden Buddha
missed completely; the wind took the fragrance to other Buddhas. The nun was
very inventive. She found a bamboo, a hollow bamboo, and she made a certain
wooden pot, covered, with a hole for the bamboo. She would burn the
fragrance inside the pot, cover it and put the other end of the bamboo to
the golden Buddha's nose. Just a poor human mind!
She was very happy because now the fragrance was going just to her Bud&a;
and all those Buddhas -- who knows who has made them? And she thought,
"Anyway they are not mine." But it created trouble: soon her Buddha's face
became black. She was very puzzled. She asked the chief monk of the
monastery where she was staying what to do. The monk could not believe it.
He said, "What have you done to your golden Buddha? Such a beautiful statue
and you have destroyed the face. What have you done?"
She said, "Now I have to tell you the whole thing; this is how it happened.
Now that the smoke goes directly to his nose it has made his whole face
black." The master of that monastery must have been a man of understanding.
He said, "This is bound to happen. When you start possessing even a Buddha,
what else can you dispossess? A nun is supposed to have no possessions --
and you are not even able to let your Buddha be free.
You are not even able to understand that all these statues are of the same
Buddha, so wherever the fragrance reaches, it is reaching to Buddha. "And
even if it doesn't reach these statues, even if it reaches outside to the
stones, they are hidden Bud&as... because someday some sculptor comes and
chops and hammers the rock and just takes out a few unnecessary pieces
clinging to it, and the Buddha who was hiding in the stone appears again. So
even if your fragrance goes to a stone outside -- to the milestone -- then
too it is reaching a hidden Buddha.
So don't be worried: wherever it goes, it goes to him. Otherwise this is not
the blackened face of your Buddha, this is your face blackened." Buddha has
no God, but he wants you to share your joy immediately. Don't hold onto it
even for a single moment. It will reach, it will vibrate into the existence.
Hence, each single man becoming enlightened takes the whole universe a
little higher than it was before. This is the only contribution that you can
make.
All your contributions -- good paintings, good statues, poetry -- are not
real contributions because they don't help human consciousness to go higher,
and that is the only richness in existence. But a single human being
becoming enlightened may not do anythinghe may not create a statue, he may
not be a painter, he may not be a poet, a singer -- it doesn't matter: he
has already contributed. The greatest gift he has given to the world without
anybody even knowing about it: he has raised you higher than you were.
The whole evolution of consciousness has depended on only a few people;
others are beneficiaries. They have not done anything to be what they are,
where they are.What have you done to be a conscious human being? I don't
think that you can remember that you have done anything to be a conscious
human being, but you are a conscious human being. Of course your
consciousness is very small, a very momentary phenomenon; you can become
unconscious in a second.
Somebody hits your face, slaps you, and your consciousness disappears; you
become unconscious. Then whatever you do, you are doing it in
unconsciousness. Later on, when consciousness comes back and you cool down,
you may repent; you may feel this was not right. Who did it? Many murderers
in the courts all over the world have appealed on the grounds that they have
not committed the murder. No magistrate, no court or jury has listened to
them.
But I say to you that almost ninety-nine percent of them are telling the
thruth -- they have not done it. While they did it they were absolutely
unconscious. Now, something a man does in unconsciousness he cannot be held
responsible for when he is conscious. If a man, completely drunk, kills
somebody, then the court accepts it, that you cannot make him responsible:
he was drunk, he was not in his senses.
But what is anger? It is far more intoxicating than any alcohol can be. What
is jealousy? What is hatred? They are far more addictive. You can be easily
taken out of your drug addiction; any institution like Alcoholics Anonymous
can help you. But to make you unaddicted to your jealousy, to your ambition,
to your competitiveness, to your anger, rage, your potentiality for
violence, no Alcoholics Anonymous can be of any help. But a few, a very few
people, enlightened people, have simply pushed you upwards.
They have distributed themselves. They are not hoarders -- they cannot be.
In the same way the reverse also happens. My feeling about why popes die so
quickly is that so many cardinals, so many bishops -- and they are in
thousands all around the world; I think monks, Catholic priests, bishops,
cardinals, in all, number almost one million. Now, one million people
continually praying -- of course to a God who does not exist.... But this
prayer itself, this desire, this ambition to become the pope is enough to
kill the poor man.
So almost within one year, two years, three years, the pope dies. I am not
in any way concerned with the pope -- he is not in my way. I am going
nowhere, so nobody can be in my way. I am simply sitting in my room: there
is no possibility of the pope crossing my way. Yes, the American government
still categorizes me as a tourist. That is strange. A man who is sitting in
his room the whole day for four years is a tourist! Compared to me, all the
Yankees are tourists.
But I go to the bathroom, I go to the swimming pool, I come to this meeting
room -- if this is considered tourism, certainly I am a tourist. I am not a
resident, it is so obvious, I am touring so much: the whole day touring and
touring. I can understand their viewpoint, why they categorize me as a
tourist after four years of my sitting in my chair. The pope -- you ask me,
why am I against him? I am not against him, but it may have appeared to you
that I am against him.
The reason is that I simply state whatever is the fact, with no enmity, with
no desire to harm anybody. But if the fact is such that somebody is exposed,
then the responsibility is the fact's, not mine. Just not to hurt somebody I
cannot lie. I have been criticizing the pope for the simple reason that such
people are the greatest frauds on the earth. Their God is a fraud, their
messiah is a fraud; and they are representatives of these two frauds. They
are representing someone who has no existence at all. And they are
representing Jesus Christ, who is mentally sick.
Now, what can I do about it if somebody is mentally sick? However politely
you say it -- you can make it sweet: "Darling, you are mentally sick" -- the
fact remains a fact. It will be a great day in human growth when these
people are taken for exactly what they are, and they should be treated
accordingly. You ask me: is the pope not infallible? Just the idea of
infallibility is idiotic. Nobody has ever been infallible. Even the
enlightened person is not infallible.
Of course if he falls, he falls in an enlightened way -- that is a different
thing -- but he is not infallible. And if he is enlightened he will accept
the fact, because who can know more clearly than he that existence is so
mysterious, so vast -- no beginning, no end, unbounded. To say that you are
infallible -- does it mean that you have understood the whole mystery, you
have demystified existence? now there is no question that you cannot answer?
-- now all your answers are going to be exactly factual, true?
The enlightened person knows that in his own being now there is no darkness.
Hence, he is called enlightened.
He is full of light and he is full of blissfulness. All anguish has
disappeared. He has found what everybody is looking for, knowingly or
unknowingly. He has arrived. The feeling of arrival, that now there is
nowhere to go, this contentment.... But it has nothing to do with
infallibility.
Buddha committed mistakes, Mahavira committed mistakes; and I am sitting
before you -- in coming to Oregon, do you think I have not committed a
mistake? I am proof enough that being enlightened does not mean you are
infallible. You can fall into the Big Muddy Ranch. And now it is so
difficult to get out of it. The more you try to get out of it, the more you
are going into the mud.
This is so clear that there is no need for me to quote what mistakes
Buddha
committed, what mistakes Mahavira committed: I have committed mistakes, and
I go on committing them; but that does not endanger my
enlightenment. It has
nothing to do with it. I make the best possible use of my mistakes. That's
what we are doing in the Big Muddy Ranch -- trying! -- that's why I say,
trying, in an enlightened way, to make something good out of it.
If we have fallen into it, it may be our mistake, but it is fortunate for
the Big Muddy Ranch, so let's make the best of it. And we are trying hard to
make the best of it. But all these people have been claiming infallibility.
I am, in many ways, a crackpot. I should not be saying such things -- that I
commit mistakes. This is not in tune with my profession; it is against it.
That's why people of my profession hate me, because they say, "These things
you should not say. Even if you come to know that you have committed a
mistake, try to cover it.
Try to make it appear as if it is not a mistake. That's what they have been
doing for centuries. But I cannot do it. I am simply helpless: I cannot
deceive. These people have been doing that. Mahavira was claiming that he
was omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. Now this is sheer nonsense. He had
no idea even that when he died his followers would be immediately divided
into two sects; otherwise he would have made some arrangement, or at least
told them, "Be aware, this is going to happen. Don't let it happen.
He had no idea that this was going to happen. And it was so apparent that
even an unenlightened person who had a little bit of intelligence could see
it already happening when Mahavira was alive. I will have to explain it to
you.
Mahavira is the twenty-fourth messiah of the Jainas. Before him, two hundred
and fifty years before, was the twenty-third messiah; the gap was only of
two hundred and fifty years. The name of the twenty-third messiah was
Parshvanath. He used to wear white robes, and his followers used to wear
white robes.
When Mahavira declared himself to be the twentyfourth in the line, there
were seven other competitors who also declared themselves.
Gautam Buddha had
also competed in the beginning-because Jainism was an established firm, and
if you can get an established firm.... For ten thousand years it had
existed, and had gone deep into the soil. It had tremendous power -- roots,
money, people. Buddha was hesitant to start a new business from the very
scratch. First he tried to compete with Mahavira. If he could be accepted as
the twenty-fourth tirthankara, then things would be comfortable and more
easy.
This is simple, pure economics. Rather than opening a new shop, with no
credibility, with no past.... Where are you going to get customers?
Customers are already divided; they have their chosen shops. Who is going to
come to you? So seven other people of the same caliber tried hard, but
Mahavira was really a difficult guy: it was impossible to defeat him in any
competition, particularly as far as asceticism was concerned. I don't think,
among his contemporaries, or afterwards or before him, there was anybody who
could have competed with him.
He easily used to fast for one month or two months. In his twelve-year
period of spiritual sadhana, it is said he ate only for one year: one year
out of twelve. Not solidly for one year, then an eleven-year fast, no: a
three-month fast, then a few days of eating; a four-month fast, then a few
days of eating; a one month fast, then one day of eating. The average in
twelve days came to one day of eating and eleven days of not eating. Now,
none of the seven competitors were capable of doing this.
Why are you against the Christian Pope?
Continued.....
Related Osho Links:
Osho on Sufi Mystic Mulla
Nasruddin
Osho - Many of your Jokes I don't get
Osho Quotes on 'Life is a Cosmic Joke'
Beloved Osho, What is the secret of a Joke
Osho - Religion has been
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Osho - Laughter should become a part
of Sadhana
Mulla Nasruddin Jokes 1,
Nasruddin Jokes 2 ,
Nasruddin Jokes 3
Osho - Why do you tell jokes? and why
don't you laugh at your own Jokes
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