9 Say goodbye to politics \-- not to science

< Previous | Contents | Next >

‌CHAPTER 9

Say goodbye to politics – not to science

27 March 1988 pm in Gautam the Buddha Auditorium

Question 1 BELOVED OSHO,

THE WORLD OF TOMORROW IS A WORLD THAT WILL SEE A SIGNIFICANT PLAY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. THIS IS BOUND TO AFFECT THE LIVES OF PEOPLE AS IS ALREADY HAPPENING DRAMATICALLY, SOMETIMES FOR THE BETTER, SOMETIMES ADVERSELY.

DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD SAY GOODBYE TO ALL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY; IF NOT, HOW DO WE PREPARE FOR THE FUTURE CITIZENRY? WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE?

Satish Seth, your question is in fact a way of putting forth the whole idea of Mahatma Gandhi in a roundabout way, but you cannot deceive me. There is no way to go back to nature, and that’s what your question is: whether we should go back to nature and say good-bye to science and technology.

You have not used the words “back to nature.” But in effect, if you say goodbye to technology and science, that will be the outcome. And there cannot be anything more dangerous than the idea of going “back to nature.” It is true that there have been many things in science and technology which make many thinkers around the world feel that it is time to say Stop. They have brought us nuclear warfare, they have brought us to a possibility of total destruction of life on this planet.

But still I say there is no way of going back. That does not mean I say yes to everything that science and technology have done. Man in every sphere has worked unconsciously. He knows not what he is doing. He goes on groping; sometimes he finds diamonds and sometimes he finds ordinary

stones and sometimes he finds nothing. And up to now he has not been able to transform science from something accidental to something intentional.

That is my proposal: that science should be intentional. It should not grope in the dark, it should have a sense of direction. All those discoveries that are going to be harmful to humanity or to the ecology of the earth should be immediately dropped. All efforts that are being made to create more destructive weapons for war should be stopped.

And the same people, the same scientists and technologists, can be given a sense of direction; then this earth can become a paradise. It is not that they have given only that which is harmful they have given you electricity; otherwise the earth was completely dark. They have given you tremendously sophisticated medicine, surgery; otherwise many people who are alive would have died long ago. This is because of scientific growth.

For example in India, just fifty years ago, out of ten children born, only one used to remain alive more than two years. Nine were bound to die. Within fifty years the situation has been changed, completely reversed. Now, out of ten children only one child dies and nine children live.

Science can be very life-affirmative. It can create new dimensions of joy, new dimensions of comfort; it can give man more health and longer life, which can have tremendously significant implications. For example if we can give a longer life to Albert Einstein, if rather than the normal seventy-five years he can live for three hundred years, perhaps he can reach an understanding of new mysteries an understanding which may not be possible to reach the way we are doing things now. Now, those who are experienced are retired not only from their jobs, from life itself. And those who are inexperienced are welcomed with bands! Now teach them, waste time, and still you may end up with an idiot politician or a clerk in a post office. There is no guarantee that you can find another Albert Einstein in this accidental way.

And even if you can find a man of the same caliber, by the time he reaches the point where Albert Einstein has left physics, he will have to begin from ABC. The XYZ of physics will always remain a faraway horizon. And this is the situation in all dimensions of life. It may be science or art, poetry or drama, literature or music.

But the problem is not with the scientists and the technologists, Satish Seth; the problem is with the politicians.

As far as I can determine, Satish Seth himself is a government employee in New Delhi. All the scientists and technologists are employed by stupid politicians, because they have the power and they have the money to invest. And their interests are very mundane. I have never come across a politician and I have been around the world who is interested in Kalidas, who is inter-ested in Mozart, who is interested in Rabindranath, who is interested in Michelangelo.

Their interests are so stupid: their interest is how to be more powerful, to dominate. Deep down the same desire is still burning that was in Alexander the Great, in Genghis Khan, in Tamerlane, in Joseph Stalin, in Adolf Hitler, in Benito Mussolini the same desire. Every power seeker is against life. And these power seekers don’t have the intelligence even to understand a painting of Picasso, or a novel of Dostoevsky, or a poem of Rabindranath Tagore.

These people dominate education according to their vested interest: how to create more slaves, how to create more obedient people. Not people who have individuality, not people who can think, but people who are just robots: when you say “left turn,” they turn left; they don’t even ask why. They are not trained to ask why, they are trained to obey.

And science has become so sophisticated... it is not the time of Galileo when a scientist could do something alone, on his own, in his own house. Now it is so complicated, it requires millions of dollars to do any research work. The scientist has to surrender either to a political investment or to a capital investment, but he is no longer free.

Naturally, we cannot condemn him.

There are hundreds of inventions lying in patent offices around the world in every country which are not being used, because their use goes against the vested interests. For example one of my sannyasins from Australia has invented a very small instrument that you put on your hand, and within five minutes it will show how much sugar is in your blood. No need to take the blood out, then send it to the laboratory so they can check it. And if you are in a city like Poona, one lab says one thing, another lab says another thing... I tried three labs and came to three results! My personal physician, Doctor Amrito, said, “What to do?”

I said, “Just find the common factor among the three. Somewhere near that...”

That small mechanism will destroy millions of labs around the world, will make them useless, and the technicians who are employed there will become unemployed. Now nobody is ready to produce this instrument; everybody is ready to take the patent and then hold it! And the patent will remain in the files and you will never know that a tremendously useful thing exists, that you could have had in your own home, in every home, and there is no need to take the blood out.

And it could manage many things; it could tell not only how much sugar the blood has, it could tell whether the blood is carrying AIDS virus.…

Naturally, no government is ready to declare how many people in its country are homosexuals and how many people are suffering from AIDS, because it is a question of prestige. I have been informed by my sannyasins because many of my sannyasins are scientists, in many different countries that they have been ordered, doctors and surgeons, that “even if you find a person who is suffering from AIDS, give him a negative certificate.” The reasons are clear: “We don’t want to let the world know that our country has homosexuals, that people are suffering from a deadly disease.”

And once you say that you are suffering from AIDS, terrible are going to be the consequences. The man will be hated by his own family, by his own children, by his own wife, by his own parents, by his own friends. But that is not the problem for the government. The government’s problem is that you will have to admit him into the hospital, and no doctor wants to treat a man who is suffering from AIDS because every possibility is that the doctor will also start suffering from AIDS.

Even perspiration carries the virus. That’s why I have given you a new greeting, “Yaa-Hoo!” Never shake hands, because who knows? If the other hand has a little perspiration on it you are unnecessarily getting into trouble! It is better to say “Yaa-Hoo” and run away clean, hygienic. Stop hugging people.

Nurses are not ready to serve a patient who has AIDS, because it is not just a question of sexual involvement. His saliva will carry the virus... Never, even out of compassion if you find a small child with a runny nose, don’t touch, because even children are born now with the AIDS virus from their very birth. The runny nose is a very dangerous thing.

And they are working out that there may be other possibilities for the virus to spread. Anything that comes out of the body carries it. It is very dangerous to eat in a restaurant; one never knows who has been washing the plates.

No government wants to be involved in such difficult situations. No doctor wants his hospital to be involved. So the best way is simply to give the person a negative certificate. But this is very inhuman, because if that man has a negative certificate... Perhaps in the whole world this is the only AIDS-free place. But we became worried when it came to light that people were bringing certificates which doctors are giving out of fear that otherwise they will have to treat them. And in a few poor countries doctors are even selling negative certificates. We had to order a machine, to be installed in the ashram, so that we can check every certificate to confirm whether it is authentic or not.

There are hundreds of inventions which have been made by scientists which governments will not allow. Neither will the capitalists, the industrialists allow them, because the inventions will destroy them; they will go bankrupt.

For example, I met a scientist in Calcutta who says he has worked for his whole life, and he is a well- known scientist in Calcutta University that petrol has a limitation; sooner or later petrol is going to be finished. And our whole life is now becoming more and more dependent on petrol cars and trains and airplanes, everything needs petroleum. That scientist has been working for his whole life on how the same quantity of petrol that now takes a car fifty miles, can take it five hundred miles. And according to him he says he has registered the patent he has found a way so that a certain quantity of mercury mixed with petrol will give the petrol the power to work twenty times more efficiently.

But no oil emperors will allow such a thing to happen; otherwise their empires will dissolve. No invested parties who are dependent in any way on selling petrol will like such an invention although that invention is immensely helpful to humanity, to the future, because we are exhausting our sources.

And the scientist had tears in his eyes when he said to me, “I am a poor man; what can I do? I cannot produce it, I don’t have that much money to arrange for mercury and all the other things that are needed to create that small instrument. It can be put in every car, in every railway train, in every airplane, and it will give twenty times more efficiency, but nobody seems to be interested.”

And this is not an isolated case. There are many medicines which have never come into the market because those medicines will stop the use of many other medicines immediately; they will prove very inefficient in comparison to the new medicines.

So the fact has to be realized that it is not a question of scientists and technologists who are dangerous to the world. The question is of the politicians, the governments, who are playing into the hands of power groups. And their interests are not for man or for the future humanity. Their whole interest is how they can become powerful.

Even the poorest countries, where people are dying in thousands of starvation, are purchasing the latest atomic weapons. One cannot believe that this is a sane world. Seventy-five percent of all energy, money, power, is wasted for war. Right now there are five nuclear nations. Just five years ago, there were only two nuclear nations. And by the end of this century there will be twenty-five nations in the club. Even the poorest nations are trying to become nuclear.

The scientist is absolutely helpless. Either he has to stop working and die, starving, or he has to do things which he never wanted to do.

It was Albert Einstein who wrote to President Roosevelt... seeing that Germany and Japan had been continuously winning for five years and there was no way to prevent them, he said, “I am ready to help make the atomic weapons which can prevent the war immediately.”

Roosevelt was very happy, he accepted the offer of Albert Einstein and gave him all the facilities he wanted. And Albert Einstein was not creating the atom bomb to destroy anybody just the threat would have been enough, that America has atomic weapons. Now it is better to surrender; otherwise the death of millions of people will be the result. Germany surrendered. Japan was considering the fact: What to do? because they could not manage to fight with an enemy who had atomic weapons. Their weapons were all primitive.

Japan was going to surrender that same week, but the American politicians... Roosevelt was no longer president; Truman was president. He was in a hurry to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now it has been revealed through the correspondence between him and Albert Einstein that he wanted to use the atomic weapons as quickly as possible to see what was their actual value, whether they could destroy as many people as Albert Einstein said they could. He wanted to test them by killing two big cities like Bombay, or New York... Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And he destroyed those two cities. Even his own army experts said to him, “It is absolutely stupid to kill them. They are thinking about it, negotiations are on, our generals and their generals are meeting every day on conditions for how to settle and stop the war. It is only a question of one more week at the most. Japan is aware of the situation. Just as Germany has surrendered, Japan is going to surrender; there is no question.”

Truman was in a hurry: if Japan surrenders, then there will be no possibility in the near future to test the bombs to see what they can do. How many people can be killed within minutes?

And Albert Einstein wrote to Truman saying that “There is no need to use the atom bombs, just that you have them is enough. Germany has surrendered and Japan cannot stand long. It is going to surrender. I pray to you: please don’t use them!”

But once you have given the power into the hands of the politicians, who cares? Truman never replied to the letter. And Albert Einstein died with such frustration: “I am the cause of unnecessarily killing two hundred thousand people.”

A journalist asked him the day he died, “If another life is given to you, I hope you will still work to explore more and more deeply into physics and the power that matter contains.”

Einstein said, “Never. If I am born again, I will ask God to make me a plumber, but never a physicist. One time is enough.”

The plumber cannot do harm; at the most his plumbing may not be good and your bathroom may leak, but he cannot kill Hiroshima or Nagasaki. His statement that “I would like to be a plumber”... the lowest category one can ever aspire to; I have never come across anybody who is ambitious to become a plumber. This is sad, a very sad commentary on the whole situation of science.

Satish Seth, people like Mahatma Gandhi condemn science and technology. They don’t condemn politicians because they themselves are politicians. It hurts to know... Mahatma Gandhi was continuously teaching the philosophy of nonviolence, and he was asked by Louis Fischer, “If your country becomes independent, what are you going to do with the great army that you have, and the factories and the arms?”

Gandhi said, “I am going to throw all the arms into the ocean, close all the factories that create arms, and order all the armies to go to the fields and work as farmers, gardeners. This country is going to be nonviolent.”

Asked, “If somebody invades you, what will you do?” he said, “If somebody invades us we will welcome him and we will say, ‘You can also settle here.’ Nobody has come in this world to live forever, and this whole earth is one. If you are tired of living in your own country you can live here.”

It was so beautiful, in theory, but when India became independent no arms were thrown into the ocean, no factories were closed. On the contrary, Mahatma Gandhi blessed the first three airplanes, three bomber planes, which were going to bomb Pakistan. He came out of his home in Delhi, in the park of the Birla house, because the army had asked for his blessings and the first three planes came as close as possible to the house to receive his blessings.

What happened to the philosophy of nonviolence? All was forgotten. And after independence India has been putting seventy percent of its energy, money, power, into becoming a world power the great desire to be a member of the nuclear club.

Fifty percent of Indians are going to die of starvation by the end of this century. And the end is not very far this is 1988. Only twelve years more.

When India became independent, its population was four hundred million. Today its population is nine hundred million. We are great producers! In the whole world, nobody can compete with us as far as production is concerned. In just forty years we have produced five hundred million people, and by the end of this century, the year 2000, India will be the biggest nation in the world, for the first time.

Up to now China had that distinction, but now they have become more intelligent. They are using birth control methods and are far happier.

But in India... Satish Seth, you should ask the politicians and your shankaracharyas; they are all against birth control. Simply the fear that if you say that birth control should be enforced, the world will condemn you that you are not a democracy. The people will not vote for you.

Indians have only one entertainment which needs no money, no standing in a queue, no purchasing a ticket in the black market: just go home and your wife is ready! And India is the only country where the wife cannot say no. The wife has been taught for centuries just to be a servant, a slave, and the man has turned the woman into a factory that goes on producing children.

A man was reading the newspaper and suddenly he said to his wife, who was cooking food, that “This newspaper says that in every five persons, one is a Chinese.”

The woman said, “My god I have been telling you again and again to stop. Now we have four children, and the fifth child will be a Chinese!”

After the year 2000 the fifth child will be an Indian. India has defeated China absolutely. But that status will not be possible to keep for long. If by the year 2000 we can reach the number of one billion people, then half of the country is going to die of starvation.

But Indian politicians are not interested at all. Just to conceive the idea... all around you there will be corpses, not even enough people to carry them to the cemetery or to the funeral pyre. The only people who will be benefited by it will be the vultures. Right now they are benefited only by the Parsees...

One should go and see the place in Bombay where the Parsees leave their dead a beautiful place, surrounded with ancient trees. And all over the trees, thousands of vultures. You cannot conceive that there could be anywhere in the world a place where so many vultures are always meeting. That conference continues because the Parsees go on dying and they have only one place; no other city allows them.

In fact they are not spread far; only Bombay is their world and a few branches here and there Poona and Lonavala and Khandala and Surat, at the most this small area. The vultures are so happy with Parsees.…

Even vultures will be at a loss: how to dispose of five hundred million people?

But rather than putting your scientists and your technologists to create more productive scientific farming and cultivation, your stupid politicians are teaching people that “You spin wheels, and just by spinning wheels all problems will be solved.”

I cannot conceive how just by spinning wheels, all problems will be solved. Ask your shankaracharyas; they say, “There is no problem; just worship every day, repeat the name of Rama, do the transcendental meditation...”

Even then it is not going to help. Except with a life-affirmative science and technology, this country is doomed. The whole world is doomed.

Science up to now has been aimless. But don’t blame it all the religions of the world have been trying to prevent science; it goes against their scriptures. The stupid idea is that anything that is written in their scriptures should not be proved wrong.

When Galileo wrote that the sun does not go around the earth but vice versa, the earth goes around the sun he was very old, seventy-eight and almost on his deathbed he was dragged to the court of the pope. And the pope said to him, “You have to change this statement, because the BIBLE says the sun goes around the earth and the BIBLE is written by God. Do you think God can commit a mistake? God, who has made the sun, who has made the earth? He knows more, or you?”

Galileo said, “Certainly he knows more. And it is absolutely right that I should correct it, but I should remind you: my correction is not going to make any difference.”

The pope said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “I mean that the earth will still continue to go around the sun. Neither does it care about you nor does it care about me nor does it care about your God.”

He changed it in his book, but in a footnote he made the statement: “I can’t help it; it is beyond my capacity to force the sun to go around the earth, I am just stating a fact that I have discovered: the earth goes around the sun.”

And since then, for these three hundred years continuously, on every point religion has been against science. And sometimes it is so stupid that you cannot believe...

I was staying in Raipur for a few months I was a professor in Raipur. Just for a few months, because more than that nobody can tolerate me.

One of the most respected Hindu saints, Karpatri, was delivering a lecture in the college, so I had to listen. It was just a few days after the government had finished a big dam, and the electricity from that dam was going to faraway villages. This great saint Karpatri was saying and in the university, and not a single professor objected to it, not even from the science department he was saying, “Once the water goes through a dam and the electricity is taken out, it becomes impotent. So tell the people not to use that water for cultivation. It will destroy their crops, because the real thing has been taken out.”

I looked at the head of the science department... and they were all listening with no objection! I had to stand up. I said, “It is not my business, I am not a farmer; neither am I a scientist. But I want to tell you that electricity is not something that is being taken out and the water becomes impotent? I am amazed that the whole university and the professors are silent because nobody wants to be against a saint. But I cannot tolerate it. You have to prove to me how much you know about electricity and how much you know about water. Have you ever cultivated?”

And that was the reason I was transferred immediately: “This is a disturb-ance; a great Hindu saint has been insulted.” Because he could not answer, and he was spreading nonsense!

The real problem is to create more consciousness in the world so that mediocre and stupid people don’t enter into politics, so that they are not chosen. I have never voted in my life and I don’t think I will ever vote, because what is the point? Voting for one idiot against another idiot... they are both idiots.

And these are the people who are the real problem. Satish Seth is himself concerned with a government department dealing with science and technology. If he has courage enough, he should make it clear that neither science is dangerous nor technology is dangerous; the danger is in the idiots in whose hands lies all the power that science has. And they want only destruction, war.

Adolf Hitler in his autobiography has a beautiful statement: “If you want to become a great hero you need to create a great war.” Without war, heroes are not created; that’s true. Have you ever heard about any hero without a war?

Just in this small campus, it is another thing. There are heroes Niskriya is a hero but there is no war. He is a simple and innocent person; he is looking here and there... “What is the matter?”

But in your whole history, whenever you find a hero you will find it is because of a war. If war disappears from the world, heroes will disappear also. They will be only in the films, actors. That is perfectly good.

You are saying, “The world of tomorrow is a world that will see a significant play of science and technology.”

Why the world of tomorrow? We are also seeing the “significant play of science and technology.”

Just two years back, for three days the electricity failed in the New York area. And you cannot conceive of the trouble somebody is hung up in a hundred-story building; just coming down and going up is enough to finish his life. But one needs water, one needs food; the children are crying... And there is no way, because phones are not working. The whole electrical system has failed. In those three days, New York knew the most primitive times in a very horrible way, nightmarish.

Your whole life now is dependent on science: your medicine, your light, anything that you can think of, from the needle to the airplane; everything is a product of science. Just because you have become accustomed, you don’t think of it. You think as if airplanes grow in the forest, far away deep in the Himalayas, in secret places. These railway trains come from other planets.

When the first railway train started its first journey just a ten-mile journey, from London to another station the whole church, the archbishop of England declared... and every church was crowded and everywhere there was such terror, because the archbishop said, “God never created railway trains. This must be an invention of the Devil.” Moreover, those old trains and their faces looked like devils, dangerous.

And the train was giving breakfast and lunch free, no ticket, but nobody was ready to get in. People were being persuaded, the scientists who had created it were persuading people. But even their wives and their parents were crying, “You should not go into it! What you have done is so much against God... and first just give us a proof: if this train starts and never stops, then what will you do?”

Now there was no way to guarantee it. The archbishop was saying, “Before you enter into it, just for one lunch and one breakfast, don’t waste your life! This train will start, certainly, but it is never going to stop. If you are tired of life finished say goodbye to your family and go. Take a BIBLE with you.”

The train was meant to carry two hundred people, but only eight persons could be persuaded to enter the train. And these eight persons were daredevils. At the very last moment people were telling them, “Come out, there is still time! You will repent, you are doing something against God.”

But there are always a few people courageous enough to do something even if it is against God. The train started, thousands of people waited on both the sides of the train, watching sadly. And praying for these eight persons who have gone astray, that God should be merciful to them, they are idiots.

Now, you don’t take any BIBLE with you and you don’t go to the church first to pray to God that “this train I am going on should stop.” In fact the prayer is that it should start!

I have been traveling for years; never have I found any train to be on time. One day it happened. I was in Allahabad waiting on the platform and the train came right on time so unbelievable!

I said, “This proves that miracles happen. Jesus must have walked on water. If a train can come in India at the right time, then every miracle is possible.”

So I went to the driver to thank him. I told him, “I am proud of you, you are a great son of India.” But he looked ashamed, and he said, “Don’t make me more ashamed.”

I said, “I am praising you! This is the first and I think the last experience in my life that a train has come on time.”

A crowd gathered, the stationmaster came, the guard came, and finally I asked the driver: “Why are you feeling so ashamed?”

He said, “In fact this is yesterday’s train. And you are making me feel like committing suicide.” The stationmaster came to save him, and the guard, and they said, “Don’t harass him.”

I said, “I was not aware that this is yesterday’s train. Then why do you publish these timetables?” And the stationmaster said, “We have to publish timetables to know how much a train is late!”

I said, “That is right; if there were no timetables then you wouldn’t know which train you are traveling on, where you are going, and why you are going...”

I knew for the first time that the timetable is the most religious thing, almost spiritual.

Everything that you see all around your clothes, your shoes... you can take a look and you will find that it all owes itself not to the God who made the world four thousand years before Jesus Christ’s birth. All this that you see is three hundred years of labor, immense intelligence and genius, that science has poured into the life of the world.

There is no need to wait for tomorrow. You can see it today. And if you cannot see it today, you will not be able to see it tomorrow either, because tomorrow never comes. When tomorrow comes

it always comes as today. So it is better to see it today it was also tomorrow, yesterday. So what is great in waiting for tomorrow?

And you are saying, “This is bound to affect the lives of people.”

It has already affected them. You seem to be a very simple-hearted fellow. How have you reached Poona, and never thought for a moment that science is affecting life? Have you come in a bullock cart from New Delhi to Poona?

Everything that we are, our education, our body, our life... even small things make changes that you don’t take note of.

Only recently psychologists became aware that the invention of the car has destroyed marriage. Nobody has ever thought that the car... what has the car to do with marriage? The car has created a new thing the boyfriend, the girlfriend. Before the car there used to be wives and husbands, not boyfriends and girlfriends. The car is the cause.

But how has the car managed it? Without a car, just sitting in a bullock cart, how far can you go? With a car you can go far away, where people are not acquainted with you and they don’t bother whether the girl you are with is your wife, or you are her husband. Without a car it was almost impossible. In a bullock cart, wherever you go, you cannot go far enough. And every day you have to come back also; you don’t have your whole life... just for one life and one wife and one love affair... With the car it became possible: in the morning one girl, in the evening another girl. People have appointments, dates; otherwise who bothers about a calendar?

The car changed the whole fabric of society. But where the car has not reached you can see the difference. In a small Indian village you cannot have a girlfriend. They will beat you, and you will never again think of having a girlfriend! In small villages no girlfriend, no boyfriend exists. You cannot even talk to somebody’s wife or somebody’s daughter. It is a very strange trouble; you cannot talk even with your own wife because she will not allow you to talk, and you cannot talk with anybody else’s wife. That’s why every language is called the “mother tongue,” because the child never hears the father.…

In a small village, where science has not entered, you cannot marry according to your own desire and love. Your parents arrange the marriage, you are not even asked. Every decision is made by others. Even stars, faraway stars make arrangements for your marriage, but you are not asked. You cannot talk with your wife in front of your elders, you cannot play with your own child in front of the elders that is absolutely uncivilized in the eyes of those villagers.

In Indian villages you see your wife in the night when everybody is asleep. Then too, there is no possibility for a film dialogue. You cannot make any noise silently, nobody should know. And everybody knows, they are all waiting and listening to what is happening! Because in one house, and under one roof, there are a dozen persons, old people, young brothers, uncles, the father... So it is very rare that you manage to see your own wife, how she looks. In the day you cannot see her.…

That’s why in Indian villages there is no need of divorce. You have not even seen your wife, there is no question of getting fed up. You are still curious to know, “Who is this woman?” Trying to meet in

some place, when the elders are not around... but they are always around. Divorce is possible only because villages are disappearing, because of scientific growth.

And in big cities nobody knows anybody. You are imprisoned in small, box-like places called apartments, with the same wife every day. Both try to change the hairdo, the clothes, the perfume still you know who is behind that hairdo, who is behind that lipstick. You know that real woman. And all that show... soon you get finished, and you start looking here and there and the car helps. You can go far away and come back in time and nobody will know.

In fact when you have gone, your wife has also gone, so real families have two cars. And these cars have made it possible for you to go to the beach with somebody’s wife, whose husband has gone with somebody else’s wife, and everybody is enjoying and life is great! But all is because of the car.

You are talking about tomorrow, and I am seeing it today, the whole play that science has dramatically created.

Your statement is, “... Sometimes for the better and sometimes adversely.”

That “adversely” comes from your politicians. If the politicians don’t force the scientists to create things against life, no scientist has any reason to create something against life. His intelligence, his genius, will prevent him. His creativity will prevent him.

Science has to be freed from the hands of the governments. A world academy is needed for creative science, art and consciousness.

And this world academy should not be a bogus institution like the League of Nations, or the U.N. This academy should be a world institution, and all the universities of the world should be affiliated to it. All the governments of the world should have to give their share to the world academy but they will not have any power; the world academy will have the power to decide what to produce, what not to produce.

Governments have to be transformed into functional institutions like the post office, which is very innocent. It cannot do much harm at the most it can open your love letter and read it. So let them read! The government can run post offices, railways, airplanes, but it cannot dominate and should not be allowed to dominate science, art and methods of creating more consciousness in humanity.

All education and all educational institutions should be part of the world academy and each child should learn two languages: one, his mother tongue and by chance English has become the international language; there is no reason why it should not be accepted as such. So one international language, and the other, your mother tongue. The mother tongue should be optional. You have to study it, but you need not pass it. The international language should be compulsory, because we want to create one world, slowly slowly dissolving differences of language, religion, race, color.

And the world academy of science and arts will slowly develop as the world government, too. There is no need of nations: they don’t serve any purpose except war. And scientists are absolutely certain that if power comes into the hands of science, then not only five billion people which is now

the population of the world but twenty-five billion people can live joyously, with more health, longer life. There is no need for anybody to starve.

In fact, nations are out of date. Governments are simply dragging themselves, and because of these nations and governments man is suffering immensely.

You are saying, “Do you think we should say goodbye to all science and technology? If not, how do we prepare for the future citizenry? What is your advice?”

I would say:

Say goodbye to all politics.

Say goodbye to all governments.

Not to science, not to technology they are the future of man, of a golden future. Paddy applies for a new job and has to fill out a long employment application form.

When he comes to the question, “What did you like least about your last job?” he writes: “Everything was in chaos, there was no sense of direction at all.”

Further down the form, half an hour later, he comes to the question, “What did you like best about your last job?”

Paddy writes down:

“I was in charge.”

These people who are in charge and creating the chaos should be retired. They are retarded, they need retirement. They should be given teddy bears to play with.

I have heard that a scientist, a surgeon, and a politician were talking together. The scientist said, “If God created the world, then certainly it is a work of science and God is a scientist.”

The surgeon said, “It is true, but you must remember that Adam, the first man, and Eve, the first woman, prove that God was a surgeon. Because he created Eve by surgery, taking a rib out of Adam while he was asleep. And he must have been a great surgeon, because there was no anesthesia, no chloroform, and he took the whole rib out of Adam. That proves him to be a great surgeon.”

“Before that,” the scientist said, “all was chaos.”

And the politician said, “Aha! Who created the chaos? God created the world, that’s okay but who created the chaos out of which he had to create the world? That proves God is a politician!”

We have to say good-bye, certainly but to the politician, to the governments. A world purely in the hands of well-educated, intelligent scientists, artists, painters, musicians, dancers, will be a paradise.

Now this is the time for a little prayer. Perhaps Satish may not be aware about our prayers. We have totally new and fresh prayers which have never been done before.

“Now I want complete silence!” says Mrs. Goodbody to her class. “I want it so quiet, you can hear a pin drop.”

A deep silence descends over the classroom.

After two minutes, little Ernie shouts out from the back of the room, “For God’s sake, let it drop!”

A big black guy goes into the grocery store and asks for half a cabbage. The assistant says, “I am sorry, sir, but we don’t sell half cabbages.”

The black guy insists that he wants half a cabbage, so the assistant says, “Just a minute, sir, I will ask the manager in the back room.” He goes into the back room, but does not notice that the black guy is following him. The assistant says to the manager, “There is a big nigger in the shop and he wants half a cabbage.”

Then he hears a noise behind him and, realizing that he has been followed, adds quickly, “And this colored gentleman wants the other half!”

Luigi is guide at the Vatican. One day he is conducting a party of tourists around the papal palace, the home of Pope the Polack.

“If you look-a to your-a left,” says Luigi, “you see-a a large-a window. That’s-a the pope-a’s study.” “Gee,” says one of the tourists, “I do wish we could catch a glimpse of His Holiness the pope himself.” “Right,” says Luigi. Stooping down he picks up a large stone and hurls it through the window.

A face immediately appears behind the broken glass, red with rage and shouting incoherent Polish. “There you are!” exclaims Luigi, “that-a always gets the old-a goat.”

Paddy has been getting very fat from drinking so much beer. One day his wife, Maureen, complains about it. “Why don’t you go to the new health clinic?” she asks. “I hear you can lose as much weight as you want there.”

So Paddy goes to the clinic and pays ten dollars for a ten-pound weight reduction course.

He is shown into a small room and there is a pretty redhead. “If you can catch me,” she tells Paddy, “you can screw me.”

Half an hour later Paddy comes out ten pounds lighter and with a happy grin on his face.

Maureen is so pleased with her new, more streamlined husband, that she sends Paddy back the next day for the fifty dollar, fifty-pound weight reduction course. When he has paid the money, Paddy is shown into a room and the door slams shut and locks behind him.

Paddy looks round expectantly then he notices a huge gorilla standing in the corner. Paddy feels a bit confused, but then as the gorilla starts to walk towards him, he notices a sign around the creature’s neck, it reads:

“If I catch you, I will screw you!” And the last thing:

Niskriya has asked, Question 2 BELOVED OSHO,

WE LOVE THE GREETING OF TWO ARMS RAISED, BUT IT FEELS MORE APPROPRIATE FROM THE DISCIPLE TO THE MASTER, AND WE WOULD LOVE YOU TO RESPOND TO US WITH YOUR BLESSING.

It seems, Niskriya, you are right. And anyway I more often forget who is master here and who is disciple. This will remind me also that I am the master and you are the disciple. So I accept your proposal.…

Okay, Maneesha? Yes, Osho.

< Previous | Contents | Next >