Osho,
Are you a messiah, a prophet, or a reincarnation of God?

I have never expected that one of my sannyasins would ask such a bullshit question!

I am simply myself. I am not a messiah, because there is no God to send messengers to the world. Moreover, I don’t want to be crucified. To prove that you are a messiah of God, crucifixion is absolutely necessary. Not that I am afraid of death, but I would like a comfortable, luxurious death. Not carrying the cross on my own shoulders, not even on your shoulders – the cross will be carried on a Rolls Royce limousine.

I am not a prophet either. I don’t know what is going to happen in the next moment. I don’t know even what I am going to say in the next moment. The future does not exist for me. That’s exactly the meaning of the future: that which does not exist. And the prophet is one who prophesies, predicts. This is the most cunning business in the whole world.

And how can I be an incarnation of God? God is invented by those people who want to be incarnations of God. Their God is phony – American, plastic. And all those prophets, messiahs and messengers of God, incarnations of God, what have they done to the world?

Look…in five thousand years, all these people have turned the earth into a big madhouse. What kinds of things have they been telling you to do? What kind of belief systems have they imposed upon you? They have humiliated you, degraded you, turned you into a subhuman species. All these messiahs, prophets, gods – they have made life impossible, love impossible, laughter impossible. They have made the whole earth a big graveyard.

And they have all been fighting with each other. Millions of people have been killed because of these few criminals. Somebody is a Christian – that means he is conditioned by the ideology of Jesus Christ. That man, Jesus, was a crackpot! He was trying to save the whole world; he could not save himself. He was telling people things which are absurd.

He was telling the people, “Blessed are the poor.” As a corollary he must have said, “Blessed are the ugly, blessed are the blind, blessed are the deaf, blessed are the crippled.” All the blessed people are in the hospitals. The most blessed of all are in Ethiopia. There is going to be a tremendous fight on the day of judgment to decide who is the most poor – because of course, if the poor are the blessed, then the poorest is the Blessed One.

Forget it! No American can enter paradise. Nobody who has at least two meals every day can enter paradise. You are all going to be defeated by Ethiopians, by Indians. The western world has no hope!