INDPRIDE

Just a quality, not any organized church. No holy scripture, but the whole of life holy, and everybody coming to a consciousness which transforms his actions, his being into religious qualities -- sachchidanand."

(Excerpts from Sat Chit Anand, Chapter 17)

Osho,
Why do you always laugh at the pope? Are you against him for any personal reasons?

I have no antagonism against anybody in the world for personal reasons. I laugh at the pope for absolutely impersonal reasons. First, he pretends to be the only infallible man in the whole world, which is absolutely absurd, because the whole history of popes shows that is not right.

One pope burned Joan of Arc because she had become so powerful, so respected by people, that the pope started feeling jealous. She had freed France from slavery. And certainly a young girl with such courage had never been seen in the whole of history. It was obvious that she would have tremendous love and respect from the people. She had brought freedom to them as a gift.

The pope was very jealous. In fact, he felt that people had been paying more attention to her than to him. He declared her a witch and once the pope declared any woman a witch, the only punishment was to be burned alive. And Joan of Arc was burned alive. It was very shocking to the whole of Europe.

And slowly, slowly the sympathy towards her became so strong that after three hundred years, another pope came along who saw that it was impossible to remain as the highest and the most important person unless something was done about Joan of Arc, because her glory had become far greater than it was before she was burned.

And the pope decided that it was a mistake to think of her as a witch. "She is a saint," he declared. "From now onwards, she will be known as Saint Joan of Arc." And her grave was opened -- just burned bones were there. Those bones were taken out after three hundred years, worshipped, taken to the special graveyard where only saints have their graves, and the pope himself came for this great moment to confer sainthood on those dead bones. The woman had been burned three hundred years before. On what grounds can the pope say that he is infallible?

Such cases are many. If one pope decides she is a witch and another pope decides she is a saint, both cannot be right. Both can be wrong, but both cannot be right. If one is right, then the other is wrong. The idea of infallibility is laughable. It is sheer arrogance. And the pope declares that he is the direct representative of Jesus.

The truth is that the tradition of popes started three hundred years after Jesus' crucifixion.

There is a gap between the beginning of the tradition of the popes and Jesus. The gap is of three hundred years. How could Jesus have appointed them to be his representatives?

But nobody asks them, because they are surrounded with Christians who simply believe whatever they say...........

..............One pope forced Galileo to change in his book his lifelong research proving that the earth moves around the sun. "Change it, otherwise you will be punished by being burned alive. Because the Bible says -- and the Bible can never be wrong. Because it is the written word of God himself.... You have to change it and write that the sun goes around the earth."

Galileo was very old and sick. He said, "There is no problem. I will change it. Just one thing you have to remember: my changing it does not make any difference. The earth will still go around the sun. Neither the earth reads my books, nor the sun reads my books. If you say.... I am not a stubborn person and I don't care which one moves. This is my research. Even if I change it, tomorrow somebody is going to discover it again; because this is the fact."

But for the pope the question was totally different.

If one thing is found wrong in the Bible, then the whole Bible comes under suspicion.

Who knows? If one thing is wrong, other things may be wrong also. And if God can write wrong things -- is fallible -- where does the pope stand?......I am not against the pope, I am against the whole ideology that the pope represents. I am against the idea of God, I am against the idea of the son of God. I am against the idea that any human being is pretending to have a direct phone connection to God.

The whole Christian theology is so poor that if you understand religion a little bit, as an experience, you will be surprised that Christianity is counted as a religion at all. There is nothing religious in it. No meditation -- not a single pope has been enlightened. Even the man who created the whole of Christianity was not enlightened.

Christianity was not created by Jesus. He remained a Jew his whole life. He was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew.

He never knew that he was a Christian. And he was not trying to create a new religion at all. There is not a single statement by him to that effect. He was continuously trying to prove himself a Jewish prophet for whom the Jews had been waiting for thousands of years, the awaited great prophet after Moses.

And the Jews were angry because of this. If he had created a new religion, there would have been no problem. If he had wanted to create a new religion, the Jews might have laughed at the whole thing, that a son of a carpenter whose birth is suspicious.... Holy ghosts don't exist, at least in Judaism -- some hooligan may have done the trick. They would have laughed, but because he was continuously harassing them to accept him as their prophet -- that was impossible.

Sometimes it is good to understand things from their background psychology. Why was it so difficult for the Jews to accept Jesus as their last prophet? Obviously he was not educated, he was not even a rabbi, he had no learning about the Jews' scriptures. At the most, he was suffering from megalomania. But these were superficial reasons to reject him.

The deeper reason is: the last prophet was their hope. And the hope was that the last prophet will redeem them from their misery, from their suffering. Jews have suffered more than any race in the world. And they were living with the hope that the last prophet will come one day and the coming of the last prophet will be the end of the dark night.

And they have believed -- because of Moses -- that they are the chosen people of God. And the chosen people of God having a carpenter's son as their last prophet, of whom it is well known that he is not the son of his own father.... Because he was born after the marriage but before nine months, so certainly he was not the son of Joseph!

Mohammedans never refer to Jesus as the son of Joseph. They also don't believe in the holy ghost.

The holy ghost has been invented by Christianity, just to cover up an old slander.

Mohammedans call Jesus, ibn Marian: Jesus, the son of Mary. This seems to be more sincere. They don't bring anything else into it, they simply drop Joseph out. One thing is certain -- that he is the son of Mary. The Arabic for Mary is Marian. And in Arabic, everybody has to write his name and his father's name. Because the father is uncertain they write Jesus' mother's name: Jesus Ibn Marian -- the son of Marian.

The Jews were hoping for a prophet, a great prophet who is going to deliver them from all their suffering. And Jesus was not doing anything to redeem them from all of their suffering. They could not accept him, because to accept him would have destroyed their hope. And that hope was the only thing they were living for. It is a very strange phenomenon.

Hymie Goldberg was on a ship -- his first journey -- and was suffering from sea sickness. The captain came to him and told him, "Don't be worried, because never in the whole history of shipping has anybody died of sea sickness."
Goldberg said, "Please don't say such a thing, because death is the only hope that I am living for, hoping that I will die. This sickness -- and you are telling me.... You think you are consoling me, but you are taking away my only hope."

Nobody wants to destroy their hope, because life is so empty.

We are filling it with hopes. The poor man is thinking he will become rich. The uneducated person is thinking if he cannot become educated, at least his children will become educated. But everybody is living through hope, because the present is absolutely empty. They can only imagine a fulfilled future.

Jesus did not give that fulfillment. That was given by the hope that one day the prophet will come. Of course, they will never accept anyone, because no man is capable of redeeming you from suffering; it is not only Jesus. Nobody else after him has tried, because seeing the result.... Otherwise, the Jews will crucify the other fellow also, because you cannot redeem anybody from his suffering.

It is a simple thing: everybody creates his own suffering and only he is capable of redeeming himself. You cannot throw the responsibility on some prophet who will come and redeem you from all misery, all anguish. And the Jews are utterly tired, but hope is the only light in their dark night. And Jesus wants to take away that hope also? This was the underlying psychology. They could not accept Jesus.

It is a strange thing that the founder of Christianity was a Jew who never knew anything about Christianity. He never founded it.

Christianity was founded by a man who was against Jesus.

His name was, in the beginning, Saul. And he was so much against Jesus that he was traveling towards Jerusalem to convert back people who had become Christians. Jesus was gone, he was dead. This man Saul was moving.... He was a fanatic Jew, and he wanted to change back those Jews who had been converted into Christians.

But something happened on the way. My own understanding is that it was a sunstroke, because he was a very violent and angry man, too hot. And the sun was too hot and he was passing through the desert, day and night moving towards Jerusalem. And one day, just in the middle of the day, when the sun was hottest and he was burning with a deep desire to convert back all the Christians, he got a double sunstroke. He fell into a coma.

And in his coma, he saw Jesus Christ. The reason is very simple: if you are so much against Jesus Christ you will be continuously thinking only of Jesus Christ. In that coma he saw Jesus Christ coming in all his glory. It was just a dream, but that transformed the man. He changed his name to make it a point that, "I am no more the same person." From Saul, he became Paul. And this Paul was the founder of Christianity. He was the first pope! A very strange pope.

I think between Paul and the Polack Pope, there is not much difference -- they are all living in a coma. But they have nothing to do with Jesus. I have a certain love for Jesus, although I cannot say he was an enlightened man -- but very close. He was just with the wrong kind of people. Always choose your company very intelligently.

He finally came to his senses after the crucifixion. He did not die on the cross, he escaped to India. His grave is here in Kashmir. I have been to his grave. It is strange that no Christian takes note of that grave. If they take any interest in the grave it will show that Jesus died here, and they believe that after resurrection he simply went to paradise. If they mean it symbolically -- Kashmir is known as the paradise of the earth -- that's perfectly true. He had come to paradise, but he did not fly towards the sky.

And he lived a long life -- one hundred and twelve years. But he had learned the lesson: one crucifixion is enough. And here in this country, everybody knows so much of spirituality that you cannot teach. At the most, you can become a disciple. There is no possibility of anybody becoming a master or a prophet or a savior. Here everybody, even villagers, nine hundred million people are spiritual prophets. Everybody knows the scriptures like parrots.

So coming to Kashmir with his small group of friends and fellow travelers, he simply remained silent, just working on those few people he had brought. The village is still in existence, because he used to call himself "the shepherd." In Kashmiri the word for "shepherd" is pahalgam. The village is called Pahalgam, the village of the shepherd. And you can see by the noses of the people you find in Pahalgam that once they were Jews. In fact, the whole of Kashmir was once Jewish.

It was a tribe.... Moses was taking them to Jerusalem, to Israel, not knowing himself where Israel was. For forty years they wandered in the desert.

The great prophet, Moses.... Almost seventy-five percent of his followers died in that forty-year tedious journey in the desert.

And I don't think they ever found Israel. What they found was a helplessness. Finally Moses was too old and not willing to search -- it is enough, he has searched enough. They settled on some land.... It was just to give a sense to his people. And they were no more his people, they were the third generation. And there was almost no relationship between Moses and the people he had brought.

Those who had come out of Egypt with him had died long before. And the young people were not very interested in his leadership, in listening to him. One tribe of the Jews had got lost in the desert. Just as an excuse, because he was feeling uneasy with his people.... They were new and young and they knew nothing about Moses or his miracles: that he had separated the ocean, that he had gone to see God and God gave him ten commandments -- they had not seen all this, they came afterwards.

Moses was not comfortable with them. So he said to them, "You settle and I will go look for where our one tribe has got lost." And that one tribe had reached Kashmir. In fact, Kashmir was a far better place than Israel. And when that last tribe found Kashmir, they really believed that this was the true holy place, so beautiful that there was no comparison in the whole world.

You will be surprised to know that Kashmir was Jewish, but Mohammedans forced all the Jews of Kashmir to be converted to Mohammedanism. But their faces, their noses, are so prominently declaring that they are not Mohammedans, they are not Hindus -- they are Jews.

And a strange coincidence: Moses died in Kashmir, and Jesus also died in Kashmir.

Both graves are in Pahalgam, just near a forest, and the family that still looks after those two graves is Jewish. That family has been looking after those two graves for generation after generation. Those are the only two graves in India on which the inscription is in Hebrew.

But Christians will not take note of it. I used to talk to Stanley Jones, one of the very famous Christian missionaries. And he said, "I can understand why you insist that I come with you, you want to show me. But we want to be clear with you, we don't want to see the grave of Jesus, because that will destroy our whole idea that Jesus was directly called by God to heaven."

People protect their superstitions and are not ready to encounter reality. And continuously for eighteen hundred years these popes have been protecting all kinds of Christian superstitions which don't correspond to reality.

I am not against them, I am not against anybody in the world personally. But I am against all kinds of prejudices, all kinds of nonsense, all kinds of rotten ideologies that go on existing in the name of religion.

I simply want religion to be purified. I want there to be no religions in the world, but only religiousness....

Everybody has to become the truth, the consciousness, and the bliss.