Osho : Adolf Hitler killed millions of people, and those who have looked deeply into his mind are all convinced of one fact: that he was very much afraid of death. He was afraid of death, so much so that he never allowed anybody to be in his room in the night, not even the woman that he had fallen in love with once. Nobody was ever allowed to stay in the same room.
He would lock the room, check everything, because while he was asleep somebody could kill him. Who knows? – the woman he had fallen in love with may be just a spy. He never allowed anybody to come close to him, too close, he was so much afraid.
He got married only three hours before he was going to commit suicide; there was not even a chance for the honeymoon. In fact that was his honeymoon – suicide. In the middle of the night the priest was called to marry him to the woman he had been in a kind of relationship with – it could not have been of love, because a man like Hitler cannot love.
They were married, and the next thing they did after marriage was that they killed themselves. Now there was no fear, he could allow the woman to come close – he was going to commit suicide anyway. All was lost, the game was lost, the enemy had entered into the capital. He could hear the bombs exploding just close by; now there was no hope, he had failed. Now he could get married.
For what? For twenty years he had been waiting, for twenty years the woman had been waiting, but he was so afraid of bringing anybody too close. This man killed millions of people for stupid reasons. He killed Jews, MILLIONS of Jews, with this stupid idea: that it was because of the Jews that Germany – the race, the country, the nation – had fallen low; because of Jews the First World War had been lost.
Now these are all stupid reasons, with no logic, no relevance. Jews had nothing to do with the First World War, they had nothing to do with the fall of the German race. Really, they had given the greatest geniuses that Germany has ever known: Karl Marx was a Jew, Sigmund Freud was a Jew, Albert Einstein was a Jew. In fact it was the Jews who were the cream, but he killed millions of Jews.
Deep down, it seems he was suffering from an inferiority complex. And deep down he was suffering from so much fear of death that he wanted to kill to convince himself that ”If I kill so many people, if I can kill millions of people, then I am beyond death. I am so powerful.”
A man who is afraid of death is dangerous, dangerous to himself and to others. And the fear arises out of a very fallacious beginning; the fallacy is that we think we are separate.
But consciousness has that possibility. Man has been given such a potential power of being conscious that he has to be very careful how he uses it. Remember, if you move on plain ground there is no danger of falling; if you move in the mountains, if you go towards the peaks, there is great danger of falling.
The higher you move, the danger becomes more and more acute. Man is the only animal who is moving higher, at the peaks, towards the peaks. Consciousness is the mountain and we have to be very alert. And that is the whole teaching of all the Buddhas and all the Krishnas and all the Christs, and that is the teaching of Kabir: be conscious, be so conscious that you don’t create the self, be so alert that the self is not created at all.
Self-consciousness is a dis-ease. Just consciousness is great freedom, liberation. By being just conscious, sooner or later you will become God-conscious. By becoming self-conscious, sooner or later you will lose even that small consciousness that lingers behind the self like a small tail; that consciousness will also disappear.