Osho,
At various times I have heard you describe your work as “an experiment to provoke God” and “a model city for the future.” then there was the world tour.
In the present context of accelerating global crisis, how would you describe your work now, and what is happening to those who have gathered around you here?

There are many things you have asked. The most fundamental thing is to remember that whatever is happening here is not work. To call it work implies tension, worry, and a fear of failure. It is not work, but a playful relationship with existence.

As far as the world of man is concerned, I don’t think there is much chance of converting the masses against their own past. They are creations of the past, and their past will come to its crescendo in the coming crisis. The masses will be drowned in that crisis. I feel sad about it, but the truth has to be said.

Only a few people in the world will be able to survive after this global suicide, and those will be the people who are deeply rooted in consciousness: alert, aware, loving, and ready to disconnect themselves with the past completely and unconditionally, and ready to begin the New Man and the new humanity with the freshness of a child. I have been enjoying the fact that there are many people in the world who are capable of going deep into themselves. Their only hope is a self-realized being.

It is too late to do anything to prevent the immense destruction that is going to happen. If we can protect only a few genuine human beings, that will be enough, more than enough. The past of humanity has been absolutely accidental; they have been doing things without knowing their consequences. Now we are suffering the consequences and there is no way to change those consequences.

For example, the whole ecology around the earth has been destroyed. Life does not exist as separate islands; not a single man is an island. Everything is interwoven. You have heard these two words, dependence and independence. Both are unreal; the reality is interdependence. We are all so interdependent on each other – not only men on other men, not only nations on other nations, but trees and man, animals and trees, birds and the sun, the moon and the oceans…everything is interwoven. And the past humanity has never thought about it, that it is a cosmos. They went on thinking in terms of taking everything separately. It was impossible for people in the past to think that man and trees are connected, that they are interdependent.

You cannot live without trees, and neither can trees live without you. But it is too late. Hundred-year-old, two-hundred-year-old, even four-thousand-year-old trees have been destroyed and cut to create more newsprint for all kinds of stupid newspapers, without ever giving any consideration to what you are doing. You will not be able to replace them.