While lecturing the Sunday School children about hell and the nature of sin, Father Murphy asks little Ernie, “Do you know where little boys and girls go when they do bad things?”

“Yes,” says little Ernie, “they go in the bushes.”

Osho,
Lately you have been showering such unbearable and overwhelming friendliness on us, that it drives me totally bananas.
I get an uncontainable urge to stand up and cuddle you.
How do you manage to be both such a friend and such a master to us? Isn’t a master supposed to stand aloof and cool, like a buddha?
Why does all this intimacy, even so delightful, scare me so much?
Will I forget the moon, bite your finger, and take you for granted once more?

This is from the private secretary of Niskriya, Sarjano.

Sarjano, nobody can drive you bananas, you are a born banana. And you are saying, “I get an uncontainable urge to stand up and cuddle you.”

Whenever such an urge arises, just stand up and cuddle Niskriya. He pays you!

You are asking me, “How do you manage to be both such a friend and such a master to us?” A master is not a master if he is not a friend too. But vice versa is not true. A disciple is a disciple and cannot claim friendship to the master, for a simple reason: because the disciple has to rise to the heights – only then he can cuddle the master.

I have given you a substitute. He is not a master, he is a simple human being and he would love being cuddled.

A master is always a friend, but his friendship has a totally different fragrance. It is less friendship and more friendliness. Its intrinsic part is compassion. He loves you because he cannot do anything else. He wants to share his experience because he can see you are searching for it, you are thirsty for it. He makes his springs of purest water available to you. He enjoys and feels grateful if you receive his gifts of love, of friendliness, of truth.

But rarely have you come across such a master, because the old style was for the master to be very serious and to keep a distance. To allow intimacy, to allow friendliness…he was afraid that his truth and his finding might be lost in the crowd.

I am a beginning and an end: the beginning of a new kind of master and an end of the old style of masters. Certainly I am not like Gautam Buddha; I have left him twenty-five centuries back. If I am just like Gautam Buddha, that means consciousness has not evolved higher than where Gautam Buddha left it.

I say unto you, consciousness has grown higher, reached bigger peaks, deeper depths than Gautam Buddha.