Osho – In India people worship God in such ways that one feels sorry for them

Osho – In India people worship God in such ways that one feels sorry for them. Once I was staying with a woman; she was a great lover of Krishna, so much so that she had stopped sleeping with her husband – how can you love two persons? That is a betrayal. She believed that her true husband was Krishna. Her poor husband was really in a very mad state. He could not say that she was wrong because he was also brought up in the same Krishnaite tradition.

He could not say it, although he was a doctor, well educated. But in India education makes no difference to people, not at all. Their conditioning is so old and so ancient and so deep rooted that education remains just on the surface.

Scratch any educated Indian and inside you will find the whole rotten past. So intellectually he knew that the wife was crazy but only intellectually; deep down he himself was afraid that she might be right, because Meera used to think the same way: that Krishna is her true husband. She left her own husband.

At least this woman had not left her husband, she simply had stopped sleeping with the husband.
She used to sleep in another room; she would lock the room from inside. She would sleep with
Krishna’s statue. When I stayed in their home I watched the whole game. In the morning she would sing songs to wake up Krishna. Now Krishna needs to wake you up! But she would sing songs to wake Krishna up. And then Krishna would be up and then the whole morning routine: he would take a bath, he would be given a bath, and then breakfast… the whole day was devoted to Krishna. And it was just a statue made of silver – there was nobody there!

But she used to talk to Krishna. And if you could have seen her you would have been impressed because she would cry tears of joy and she would dance in utter ecstasy – at least on the surface it would look like that. And the more repressive she became about her sex – because she was not having any sexual relationship with the husband – the more and more obsessed she became with Krishna. Then she started dreaming that Krishna was making love to her in the night. Once she even got falsely pregnant – just hot air in her belly and nothing else.

When I talked to her…. It was really cruel of me, but I am a cruel man – I have to be. I had gone
for only three days; I stayed there for seven days just to bring her to her senses. And finally she
understood the point – she was an intelligent woman. She presented the statue to me and she said, ”Now you take it from here, otherwise I can again get entangled into this stupidity. I have wasted my whole life. And I can see the point that I am just living in my own dream. There is no Krishna, nobody comes to make love to me, it is all my dream. It is just sexual repression.”

And this whole nonsense of waking him up and giving him a bath and then breakfast and then lunch and then Krishna retires for the afternoon sleep and then tea – and everything, as if she were really serving a real person! The statue remained with me for many days; I think I gave it to Mukta. Mukta must have it even now. But the woman was freed, freed from that stupid monologue.

It is madness. It is the same madness, even a little worse, because when you love a real person
there is at least somebody real, good or bad, frustrating or not frustrating. But when you start longing for the divine it is simply living absolutely in the abstract.