So don’t be worried. How many emperors have existed in twenty-five centuries around the world? But nobody’s name comes even close to Gautam the Buddha. Just that one name stands like Everest – everyone else looks like a pygmy. What was the power of the man? He did nothing except use a single method: transform his silence into sound, into word.

That’s what happens inside the awakened man. He is in silence. He makes silence bring its potential to actuality; it becomes sound. He gives it meaning because only meaning can be the bridge.

You listen to the word. In you also, again the same process has to happen. You understand the meaning through the mind, but you let the sound slip deeper. Meaning remains in the mind. Sound reaches to the heart. And if you allow the sound also to disappear then you reach your being, which is silence. What happens in the master’s case has to be reversed. It is a code language – you have to uncode it.

And it is not only a question of simply repeating what I am saying. It is a question of living it. Your life should be a proof of it; then nothing else is needed.

The whole human evolution has happened through the word. And each master leaves the world with pregnant words which in the right hands can go on being a tremendous energy of transformation.

We are not here to kill anybody or destroy anything. We are here to create something and the most essential, the most central, is the consciousness of man. Yes, when consciousness is created, many things will disappear on their own accord; you have not to destroy them.

This is the beauty of the whole work: nothing is destroyed but thousands of things disappear, and finally there remains only one – the experience of the eternal. Even you disappear into it. But even to call it “experience” is not right, it simply is. What I am teaching is an existential revolution.

Osho,
I have watched a cat play with a mouse before killing it to eat. As if it’s a game, the cat seems to get so much pleasure out of torturing the poor mouse. I have often found myself intervening on the mouse’s behalf.
Is cruelty an inherent quality of existence or a part of our biology, or what?

Cruelty is a misunderstanding. It arises in us because of the fear of death. You don’t want to die, so before anybody else kills you, you would like to kill him because the best method of defense is attack. I am quoting Machiavelli – his great-granddaughter is a sannyasin. Machiavelli influenced immensely the political mind in the West.

The same kind of man, five thousand years ago, was born in India; his name was Chanakya. He has influenced the Eastern political mind in the same way.