The first question

Question 1

OSHO,

WHAT IS YOUR MESSAGE?

Pritam,

MY MESSAGE IS VERY SIMPLE Live life as dangerously as possible. Live life totally, intensely, passionately, because except for life there is no other God.

Friedrich Nietzsche says God is dead. That is wrong because God has never been there in the first place. How can he be dead? Life is, always has been, will always be. Allow yourself... and I repeat again, allow yourself to be possessed by life.

The so-called religions of the past have been telling you just the opposite. They say, "Renounce." I say, "Rejoice." They negate life, I affirm it. They say life is something wrong, illusory, and they create an abstract idea of God which is nothing but a projection of their own minds. And they worship that projection. It is so unintelligent, so utterly stupid that one wonders how millions of people have believed in such sheer nonsense. That which is, is denied for that which is only an abstraction of the mind. God is only a word, but they say God is real. And life is a reality.... You feel it in your heartbeat, it pulsates in your blood, it is all over the place -- in the flowers, in the rivers, in the stars. And they say this is all MAYA, all illusion. They say that it is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. And they create a God -- and of course, everybody creates a God in his own image. So there have been thousands of gods.

It is your imagination. You can make a God with four heads, you can make a God with a thousand hands. It is up to you, it is your game. And these people have been telling an poisoning the minds of others. They say, "BRAHMA SATYA" -- God IS true, and "JAGAT MITYA" -- the world, life is untrue.

I say to you, life is the only truth there is. There is no other God than life. So allow yourself to be possessed by life in all its forms, colors, dimensions -- the whole rainbow, all the notes of music. If you can manage this simple thing... It is simple because it is only a question of let-go. Don't push the river, let the river take you to the ocean. It is already on the way. You relax, don't be tense and don't try to be spiritual. Don't create any division between matter and spirit. Existence is one, matter and spirit are simply two sides of the same coin. Relax, rest, and go with the river. Be a gambler, don't be a businessman, and you will know more of God because the gambler can risk. The gambler is non-calculative, he can put all that he has at stake. But the thrill of the gambler when he stakes every thing and waits;... what is going to happen now? In that very moment a window can open. That very moment can become a transformation of the inner gestalt.

Be a drunkard, drunk with life, with the wine of existence. Don't remain sober. The sober person remains dead. Drink the wine of life. It has so much poetry and so much love and so much juice. You can bring the spring any moment. Just give a call to the spring and let the sun and the wind and the rain enter into you.

It is because of THIS message that the spiritualists are against me because they think I am denying God. I am not denying God. For the first time I am bringing God into a real perspective, I am making him alive, I am bringing him closer to you, closer than your very heart. Because he's your very being, nothing separate, nothing far away, nothing there in the sky, but herenow. I am trying to destroy the very idea of there and then. My whole vision is of HERE AND NOW because there is no other space than the here, and no other time than the now.

The spiritualists are against me because they think I am making people materialists. And the materialists are against me because they think I am taking people into meditative drunkenness.

The Shankaracharya would not agree with me because he says, "God is true and everything else is false." I cannot agree with him. And Karl Marx will not agree with me because he says, "Religion is the opium of the people," that religion is something utterly false, that there is no God, no spirit, no life except matter, that what you think is your consciousness is an epiphenomenon -- just a by-product. The moment you die everything dies.

I tell you you are born and you will certainly die but something in you was before your birth, and something in you is there which will remain after your death. And that something is life. Life is eternal.

Twenty sannyasins walk into the World Trade Center in New York singing, "Drinking from your wine, Osho, drinking from your wine!"

The front desk receptionist calls for the manager to come quickly. He tells the sannyasins that they must be wearing formal dress to enter so one of the sannyasins goes over to the desk and gets the "Rules of the House." He finds out that priests and people of religious orders do not have the same dress code. He presents this rule to the manager who is thereby forced to allow them entry.

The twenty sannyasins walk into the bar on the one hundred and thirtieth floor still singing, "Drinking from your wine, Osho..." A couple of drinks later, the same sannyasin notices a fat old Texan sitting on the stool next to him. He raps him on the back and they get talking. Fatso happens to import fine scotch whisky into the States. He listens in amazement as this sannyasin tells him that he is a connoisseur and that he knows of a wine that just keeps getting you.higher and higher -- it is made in India and brewed by a Master called Rajneesh.

"Faarrr out!" drawls the Texan, and he calls the bartender and pays for everybody's drinks.

A short time later, twenty sannyasins walk out of the bar, singing, "Drinking from your wine, Osho, drinking from your wine..."