Osho – Even to cut a flower is uncivilized behavior, what to say about people like Genghis Khan, who killed forty million people; Tamerlane, who killed thirty million people; Nadir Shah, he again killed forty million people, and statistics are not available about many others. Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible … no data is available, but they must have killed more people than Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah. Data is available on Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and they were not very far away from our present time, just forty years ago. They killed millions of people for no reason at all.
This destructiveness is a death-oriented ideology and it is so deeply rooted in our minds that it keeps us below the animals. Man, Milarepa, is not yet civilized. His civilization will begin by dropping war, by dropping nations. What is the need of nations if you are not going to fight? Nations are needed for wars. Why create these stupid lines on the map of the world?
The world is one. There are no natural lines dividing nations. Then why do you go on? There is a deep desire to dominate and there are so many people in the world to dominate: they need many nations. Otherwise just a single government, a functional government for the whole world will be enough. What is the need of so many laws, if man is civilized? What is the need of so many courts, jails, so many legal advisers, if man is civilized? A civilized man will not commit murders, a civilized man will not rape women … but we keep this whole paraphernalia of courts, laws, constitutions, legal experts; for whom?
Man is still a criminal. And these jails, these judges and these laws prevent nothing. Jails go on growing, judges go on increasing — more and more of them; more courts, more legal experts, thousands of colleges around the world producing legal experts every year. But even they cannot manage, for the criminals increase at a faster rate, and they don’t have a college, they are not educated.
Something is basically wrong, something is missing. What is missing? I call it meditation. Only meditation can make humanity civilized, because meditation will release your creativity and take away your destructiveness. Meditation will bring your compassion and will take away your cruelty. Meditation will make you responsible to your own being and then you cannot be a criminal.
To be a criminal needs great unconsciousness. Meditation destroys your unconsciousness, opens the doors of light and suddenly what you were doing in the darkness starts disappearing.
A civilization can be based only on meditation. The only people who have been civilized were people who were in touch with their own being: a Gautam Buddha, a Socrates, a Pythagoras, a Lao Tzu; these people are civilized. Only individuals once in a while have been found civilized, but the collective mass is still far below the standard of civilization.
It has to happen! And Milarepa, those who are with me, they have to create the foundation for a civilization, for a civilized humanity, by becoming themselves civilized.
Source – Osho Book “Sat Chit Anand”