Question – Beloved Master, Who are you?
Osho – I am not a messiah, nor a prophet, nor a savior. I am simply a human being, with a little difference that you are not awake and I am awake. You can call me the awakened one. I emphatically deny the role of the messiah, the prophet, the savior, for specific reasons.
My understanding is that nobody can save anybody else — the very idea is insulting. And if somebody can save somebody, he can also drown him, because both the capacities come together. I am not a prophet, representing God, his message. As far as I am concerned existence is divine, but there is no God as a person. It is a quality of creativity, but not a creator. So the people who are creative are more religious than the people who go on praying in the churches, in the temples, in the synagogues to a God above in the heaven which does not exist. They are simply befooling themselves.
I am not a messiah especially sent by God. In the first place there is no God to send anyone. In the second place, for the argument’s sake, if there is a God who can create the whole creation, he need not have these mediocre messiahs to change people. He can do it himself. All these people who have been trying to be messengers of God, incarnations of God, the only begotten son of God… may not be bad people. They may be good people; their intention may not be bad. I never suspect their intention, but they are utterly wrong. And because of these people, humanity has suffered tremendously.
I want human beings to understand that they have the capacity to fall in their consciousness to the lowest level or they can rise to the highest pinnacle of consciousness. They can have friends. Gautam Buddha, Hazrat Mohammed, Jesus Christ should be understood as great friends. Their advice may be of immense value, but the moment they become leaders, the moment Jesus becomes the shepherd and his followers become sheep, it is ugly; it is absolutely inhuman.
When Mohammed becomes a prophet of God, he raises himself above humanity. That is just an egoistic trip. When Buddha allows himself to be worshipped, that his word has to be taken in deep faith, he is harming humanity. I don’t belong to their category at all.
I am a simple, ordinary human being just like you. But I am aware and you are not. This is not much of a difference — you can become aware. I am conscious and you are not. I can show you the path just like a friend, but you have to follow the path. I cannot take you to paradise because there is none. These are all fictions created to exploit humanity — the paradise, the hell — because it is a simple psychology that man can be controlled by two things, fear and greed. For fear there is hell; for greed there is heaven.
It is very easy to manipulate human beings between these two poles. Nobody wants to be in hell for eternity — everybody wants to be in heaven and have all the pleasures eternally. Naturally, if you want heaven and you do not want hell, you have to follow these people who are proclaiming themselves to be the only son of God, the only prophet of God.
Humanity has suffered for thousands of years. No prophet, no messiah, no savior has been of any help; on the contrary, they have created every kind of trouble for man. They have created different religions, and this has to be emphatically noted — that truth cannot be organized. It is not something that a crowd attains; it is something absolutely individual.
One goes to his own innermost being alone, absolutely alone, and finds it. Everybody is born to become a fully conscious being. That is my term for religiousness. To me, whatever wrong you do, you do because you are unconscious. And whatever good you do, you can do only when you are conscious. So I reduce your whole religion and your whole morality to two simple principles: behave unconsciously and you will be doing some harm; behave consciously and you will be doing some good, beautifying life.
These people try to put themselves high above human beings for the simple reason that people have lived in a spiritual slavery. They don’t want to have freedom; they want a savior to save them. They want a prophet to bring a message from God to them. They are not at all interested in taking the pilgrimage themselves, so they are happy that somebody else is doing it for them on their behalf. And the people who are pretending to be all these things are enjoying great ego numbers. They may have been good people, but deep down there is a subtle current of ego which cannot be denied.
I don’t have any ego.
I just want to be in the crowd, in the people, just like them. And perhaps this is the only way to help them. When somebody is so high that you cannot reach even to his feet, you start thinking this is an experience for special people. You are not the only begotten son of God, you are not the last prophet, you are not an incarnation of God. But this distance gives them a chance. What can they do? You are crawling on the earth — the distance is too much, it will take lives for you to come close to them. It looks logical, and at the same time they can enjoy the speciality which even kings and emperors cannot enjoy.
The future of religiousness is the future of people like me who have no ego trip, who are not creating any distance; on the contrary, who are destroying all distances and becoming as simple and ordinary as everyone. Then I can take your hand in my hand. And if I know the way, we can walk on the way hand in hand.
And remember, finally, that you will not be obliged to me; on the contrary, I will be obliged to you that you allowed me to hold your hand, because I was so full of my experience, my ecstasy, my religiousness, my truth, that I wanted to share it. By sharing it grows.
The more you share your inner experiences, the more you find them. It is an inexhaustible source.
Source – Osho Book “The Sword and the Lotus”