Existence is available if you are silent, listening to it…. The sound of the running water, the wind blowing through the pine trees, the smell of a rose; the beauty of some face; the ecstasy of dropping all ideas, becoming a child – innocent, enchanted by everything life is made of. He knows nothing about it, but he feels it.

A just-born baby…. You bring the rose close to him, he will see it, he will certainly find fragrance. But he cannot have in his being, anywhere, words. He cannot say to himself, “What a beautiful red rose.” He does not know that beautifulness has a name, that there are words which call this a flower, a rose.

He knows nothing about colors, he cannot say it is red, but he finds it redder than you find it. He finds it livelier than you find it. He discovers immense beauty, fragrance, fragileness – but he has no words. He does not say anything within himself, he is utterly silent, absorbing all that the roseflower can give to him.

Rajneeshism is basically a transformation of you to the child again.

The word ism is not really applicable, but what to do? Language is a kind of imprisonment. Some word has to be used and all words will be wrong. So I said, “Okay, call it Rajneeshism. But as far as the ‘ism’ idea is concerned, include Rajneeshism completely out of any other ‘ism’ that has existed before.”

It would be easier to call it something totally new, but then nobody would understand what it is. So until we have enough people to understand, we will have to carry a wrong label on it. Once they have understood, the label will be removed. Once we have our own world around this earth, “ism” is not going to be part of our way of life. So if you think Rajneeshism is also an “ism,” throw it away. You have not understood anything. Your approach is still intellectual; otherwise, such a question would not have arisen.

You can see – no dogma is preached, no belief system is given. You are not required to accept anything. The atheist can become part of my communes, the theist can become part, the communist can become part, the capitalist can become part. We don’t discriminate against anybody. Our basic approach is such, that whosoever becomes part of us, we deprogram. And the process of deprogramming is the same; whether you deprogram a Communist or a Catholic or a Protestant does not matter.

It is just like surgery. If a communist has cancer, goes through surgery, do you think the surgery will be different than the surgery when a Catholic has cancer? Will there be a Catholic surgery? Hindu surgery? Mohammedan surgery? You can understand perfectly well that surgery doesn’t take any account of who you are, but it knows how to remove the cancer. And I am continuously hammering on your cancer to destroy it.

All “isms” are nothing but spiritual cancer; and if you think of Rajneeshism also in the same intellectual terms, I am going to hammer on it too. But it is not an “ism,” it is not a cancer: it is a surgical method. We just had to give it a wrong name, because no right name exists in any language.