Osho,
All the pain and suffering of the past, present and future world that I hear you talk about leaves me with such a sadness because this world is so beautiful. As long as I am not awakened, I feel that somehow I am part of that unconscious cruelty and stupidity, and I really want to get out of it.
Sometimes I feel that I have done so much over the years, and tried so hard, and that now it is time to relax and wait – to just allow things to happen. But I wonder, Osho, did I really do enough?

It is true that the suffering and misery of the world is enormous; and at the same time the world is so beautiful, so divine. What is creating this contradiction? The contradiction does not exist in the world itself, the contradiction exists in man’s mind. Man has introduced misery and suffering in the world; otherwise the world was absolutely innocent. And why does the mind introduce so much misery and suffering? There are reasons that need to be understood.

Mind has been trained slowly slowly, for millennia, to be more efficient, to be more competitive, to be more ambitious. These things look very innocent in themselves, but they have produced as a by-product the whole misery and suffering that you see around you. All our cultures, religions, political ideologies and, more importantly, our educational systems are based on a fundamental principle and that is, how to be more successful than others.

A small child has no idea what will be the outcome of all this. But the moment you start struggling for success, which has almost become the very aim of life, you are creating suffering all around. Your ambitions are not so innocent – because they give you inclinations to be richer than others, to be more powerful than others, to be more prestigious than others…. The whole thing is based on comparison with the others.

And to be rich you need an ocean of poverty around you; otherwise you cannot be successful as a rich man. The poverty of millions is an absolute necessity. To be successful in gaining power, you have to destroy millions of people – their pride, their dignity, their very humanity. You have to reduce them into different kinds of slavery – economic, political, psychological, spiritual. Only then can you be in power.

You have to keep the world constantly in a state of war, either cold or hot. Adolf Hitler, in his autobiography, had many insights. One of his great insights is that the great men of history are produced only in times of war; peace produces nothing. It is almost a truism; just think of all the great heroes of history. They are produced by war, not by peace. In times of peace you enjoy life, you relax; in times of war the people who are cunning, clever, and who are ready to use any means to be victorious become great leaders. Their paths to leadership are through the blood of millions.