Osho - Why are the so-called religious people against you

Question - Osho, Why are the so-called religious people against you?

Osho - Somesh, THEY ARE NOT RELIGIOUS they are only so-called religious, hence they are bound to be against me. The so-called religious people have always been against the religious people; it is nothing new. It is the most ancient thing in the world. They worship a religious person only when he is dead because then there is no problem.

Jesus alive is a problem. He disturbs you in many ways, in thousands of ways. In his presence you start feeling that all that you are is just holy cowdung, nothing else. It hurts, it hurts the ego. The so-called religious person starts looking so stupid. He is stupid, but when he is living with other so-called religious people he looks like a saint. He is a rabbi, he is a pundit, he is a priest; he is respected by people. The moment he comes close to a really religious person, immediately he is nothing. That negative nothingness is felt. Now he can see that he is like darkness. Encountering a Buddha you are encountering a mirror, a perfect mirror.

I have heard about a woman who was very ugly. She was very much against mirrors, obviously, so much so that whenever she came across a mirror she would immediately destroy it -- even other people's mirrors! People were afraid to let her come close to their mirrors. She would immediately hit the mirror with anything available. And her logic was the same, her argument was the same. She used to say, "These mirrors make me look ugly. I am not ugly -- these mirrors are wrong!"

Somesh, the so-called religious people are bound to be against me. The argument is the same: I am functioning like a mirror. The moment your mind disappears and you become a no-mind, you are a mirror. Whosoever comes to you is bound to see HIS reality. And people live such unreal lives, such unauthentic lives, that how can they forgive me? Impossible. They have to be angry.

They would like to destroy me the way they destroyed Jesus, the way they destroyed Socrates, the way they destroyed Mansoor. They would like to destroy me too, because once they have crucified me they will be at ease again. Again they are beautiful because there is nobody to reflect them. The mirror is no more there, so they can believe in whatsoever they want to believe.

They are against me because I am trying to expose them. I am trying to bring to their notice their real, original faces. They are hiding behind masks and I am pulling their masks away. And they are hiding because they feel their ugliness. They have found a cheap way to feel beautiful: to wear a mask. That is the meaning of the word "personality": it comes from PERSONA; PERSONA means a mask. You can wear a beautiful mask and you can deceive others. And slowly slowly, when many people are deceived by you and they start thinking this is your real face, you become auto-hypnotized; by your OWN deception you create a self-deception. First you deceive others, then their eyes reflect your face -- the mask -- then you think, "This is my real face."

When you come to a Master his work is to pull the mask away, to loosen the hold of the mask on you. And you have believed in it for so long, and you have rationalized in every possible way, "This is my real face, that whosoever is going to show you the real face, you will be angry with him. It is not accidental that ALWAYS it has been the same; it seems to be the very law of existence that people like me are bound to be crucified in some way or other. I have to destroy much in you. In fact, that is not your reality, but unless your unreal is taken away you will not be able to make any distinction between what is real and what is unreal. You will not be able to know what is essential and what is non-essential.

The DESIDERATA IS right: one should know exactly what is essential. But to know the essential as essential, first you have to become aware of the non-essential because that is where you are living: a non-essential life, a superficial life. You are acting, you are not really living. You are playing games; you are acting certain roles. You are not living a true life. Of course you have many ways to rationalize whatsoever you do; you have to rationalize it, otherwise you will become aware of its falseness. You have to give it all your support, all kinds of arguments.

The Christian will give a thousand and one arguments why to be Christian is right. Why is he so self-defensive? Why is the Hindu so self-defensive: "I am right! I am the only spiritual person in the world. My tradition is the greatest spiritual tradition. My country is the most holy country -- even gods desire to be born here"? And every country thinks in the same way and every religion in the same way. These are rationalizations, supports, props for something false. The real needs no support, no crutches. And my work is to take away your crutches.

It was somewhat disconcerting to the minister's wife to hear him exclaim, "Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus! " every time he reached orgasm, and she finally asked him about it.
"It is perfectly proper, my dear, and in accordance with the Bible," he assured her. "Don't you remember where it says, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord'?"

People are ready to bring all kinds of rationalizations for whatsoever they are doing. You can always find something in the scriptures to support you. The so-called religious are to be pitied. I feel sorry for them because they ARE thinking they are religious; they are pretending only. Going to the church, going to the temple has nothing to do with being religious.

Religiousness is sensitivity, it is awareness. How can you become more sensitive by going to a church and listening to some stupid priest or minister who knows nothing, who lives almost as double a life as you live, in fact even more, who wears thicker masks than you are wearing? Your masks are thin; sometimes your real faces even show. Your masks are very thin. But the priest, the saint, the rabbi, the pope, has to wear a very thick mask. He has to believe in himself and he has to live a double kind of life -- one at the front door, one at the back door. And the front door life is just hypocrisy -- he knows it.

That's why every so-called religious person feels guilty -- guilty because he knows that he is doing something wrong, but he cannot stop doing it because that something wrong is wrong only because others say it is wrong. He has not experienced its wrongness. He does not know on his own what is right and what is wrong. He has no light of his own. He has believed others that this is wrong, but his own biology says that this is right. NOW he 1S m a jam, a real jam. If he follows his natural instinct, guilt arises that "I am doing something wrong."

Even a man like St. Augustine says, "My Lord, help me, because I go on doing that which should not be done and I never do that which should be done." Now, this simple statement is of tremendous significance. At least Augustine is sincere and honest; in many ways he was an honest man. If he had not been trying too hard to be a Christian he would have become enlightened. He missed enlightenment for the simple reason that he was trying too hard to be a Christian. Rather than being himself he was trying too hard to follow the Ten Commandments, to follow in the footprints of Jesus. And, of course, when you follow somebody else this is going to happen again and again: you will do something which should not be done, and again and again you will not be doing the thing that should be done. And that creates a division, a split.

If you do what should be done, what is told by the others, then your nature suffers. Then you have to repress, and nothing that is repressed is going to remain repressed forever. It will assert itself again and again, it will start surfacing, because it is accumulating momentum, energy.

Ruth was too shy to confess, so the priest offered his help.
"Did he do this?" asked the padre, kissing her.
"Yes, Father, and worse."
"YOU mean he did this?" he said, touching her breasts.
"Yes, Father, and worse."
Finally he had intercourse with her. "You mean that is what he did?"
"Yes, Father, and worse, too!"
"What worse could he do?"
"He gave me the clap, Father!"

The so-called religious person is bound to be repressive, and those repressions will create perversions. All sexual perversions are created by the so-called religious people. The amazing thing is that they are the people who are against all perversions -- and they are the creators! They are the culprits, the criminals. For example, they condemn homosexuality, and the source of homosexuality is religious, because religions always separated men and women. For monks there were different monasteries, for nuns there were different monasteries called nunneries, and they were not allowed to meet, mingle, merge with each other. Now if you put many people of the same sex enclosed behind walls for long periods... and there are monasteries in which you enter once and then you cannot leave; you enter for your whole life. Now, thousands of men living together and thousands of women living together without any way to transform their sexual energies, without knowing anything of Tantra, because they are afraid of knowing anything of Tantra....

Tantra is the only science which can transform your energy; there is no other science which can transform your sexuality. Just as when you want to know something about atoms you have to know physics and if you want to know something about chemicals you have to know chemistry, the same way, if you want to understand sex, without Tantra there is no other way, no possibility that there will ever be another way. Tantra has to be understood, but these people are afraid.

Because I have been talking about Tantra, the religious people are against me. They never told their people how to transform their sexual energy, so it was bound to be that the nuns would become lesbians and the monks would become homosexuals. Homosexuality has its roots in religion -- it is a religious phenomenon.

Father Sanchez, a priest in Venezuela, went to the Caracas hospital with a stomach tumor. As a gag they told him he was pregnant and that his child had to be delivered by Caesarean section. He was given the baby of an unmarried girl who had died in childbirth.
The priest brought up the baby as his son. Years later, on his deathbed, Father Sanchez called the boy to him.
"There is something I must tell you," said the priest. "You have always called me father, but now that I am about to die I have to tell you the truth. I am not really your father, I am your mother."
"Then who is my father?" asked the boy.
"The Archbishop of Caracas!"

Because I call a spade a spade, the so-called religious people are against me. I can understand their anger and I have no reaction to it. I have only compassion. I can understand why Jesus prayed to God at the last moment on the cross, "Forgive these people because they know not what they are doing." The same is my feeling: they know not what they are doing. And they are so unconscious that they are bound to behave in this way. And you all have to understand it, and you all have to be very compassionate, because what can they do? For centuries they have been told lies, for centuries they have been brought up on lies and they have accepted them as truths. And I say it is not truth; what you are believing is a lie.

Every belief is a lie. Truth has to be experienced, not believed. Truth liberates, but it has to be your own experienced truth; anybody else's truth is bound to create bondage for you. To help a prisoner who has lived always in a prison to be free is a difficult task, but it is a beautiful challenge too. I have accepted the challenge and I am trying to do whatsoever I can. And of course, the more I succeed in doing it, the more the crowd, the mob will become against me. But I have to do my work and I enjoy doing it. Even if I am crucified for it, that will be perfectly okay as far as I am concerned. That will be a perfect reward for my work!

Source - from Osho Book "Guida Spirituale"

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