Osho,
Because of your genius in combining and then going beyond the material and the spiritual, and because you seem to have an abundance of both worlds, I think that many non-sannyasins and sannyasins feel jealous of you. People resent and don’t want to feed abundance. If they feed anything, they feed poverty. If you were sitting in a cave, naked, cold, and meditating, it would be one thing, but you are not. Sannyasins who never dreamed of having a Rolls Royce seem to yearn for one more than for the state of meditation even after spending years with you. You seem to be sparking greed for the material, rather than a yearning for the beyond – or at least that’s the message that’s being received by some. Could you comment.

It is part of my whole device to change the very structure of human consciousness.

The past has revered poverty, asceticism, masochistic attitudes. A man was respected if he was renouncing all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable. He was respected for torturing himself; the greater the torture, the greater the respect. The whole human past is masochistic, and all the religions have contributed to this insanity.

My effort is to change such a vast past and its influence. So it has been only a device. I have not been creating desires for materialistic things in people; they are there without anybody’s creating them. Yes, they have been repressed so deeply that people have even forgotten that they had them. I am not creating them; I simply want to remove the cover-up, the repression, and to make the person realize that he wants a Rolls Royce more than enlightenment. This realization will be a basic step towards enlightenment, because it will make him aware of his own reality, his greed.

There was no need for ninety-three Rolls Royces. I could not use ninety-three Rolls Royces simultaneously – the same model, the same car. But I wanted to make it clear to you that you would be ready to drop all your desires for truth, for love, for spiritual growth to have a Rolls Royce. I was knowingly creating a situation in which you would feel jealous.

The function of a master is very strange. He has to help you come to an understanding of your inner structure of consciousness: it is full of jealousy. And all the traditions and the whole past have done just the opposite. The so-called saint, in all the traditions, lives in such a way that you will never feel jealous of him. Note that point.

You will feel sympathetic towards him, respectful towards him; but respectfulness is not your reality, sympathy is not your nature. The saint is torturing himself, that is not his nature either. He is being unnatural to gain respect, to fulfill his ego. He is not interested in spiritual growth; he is interested in respectability, in being worshipped like a god. And he is ready to do anything for it.

He is living in an illusion, and he is creating a great illusion in people who come to him. He helps them to feel that they are religious, that they are spiritual, because they respect a saint, they worship a saint. Although they are not yet ready to do such ascetic disciplines for themselves, they hope some day…this is their ideal. They are completely forgetting that they are jealous human beings. And the saint is helping them to forget their jealousy; he is helping them to repress it.