She said, “I kept all of them in my mouth.”

I said, “That makes me feel very sad.”

She said, “Why?”

I said, “If we had brought Sarjano with us, he would have saved the two suitcases! Next time we come to the Himalayas never forget: Sarjano has to accompany us!”

The fourth question:

Osho,
Does it mean the same to wear a mala or a cross?

It does not mean the same – they are polar opposites. The people who have become interested in the cross are pathological. They are not interested in Christ, they are interested in the cross. If they were really interested in Christ they would have also been interested in Buddha, in Lao Tzu, in Krishna, in Kabir. But they are not interested in Christ, they are interested in the cross.

Hence I don’t call Christianity “Christianity,” I call it “Crossianity.” If Jesus had not been crucified there would have been no such thing as you find all over the world in the name of Christianity. These people became interested in death; this interest is morbid. They became interested in worshipping death. Jesus is secondary, the cross became primary. Because he was crucified, because he suffered, he caught their attention. There are people who are always interested in suffering, in misery, in death.

My interest is not death, my interest is life. I love life unconditionally. I celebrate death too, just because it is part of life – not as death but as part of life, as the finishing touch, as the crescendo, as the ultimate flowering of life. If you have lived rightly, your death is a beautiful phenomenon. But my interest basically, intrinsically, is life.

The mala represents life, the cross represents death. The mala represents a certain art of making life a garland. The beads are the moments. Each bead has to be perfect; each moment has to be lived in its perfection. And there is a thread running through them which is invisible, passing through each bead; that thread is of eternity. Each moment is threaded with eternity.

Unless your life knows what eternity is your life will be just a heap of beads or a heap of flowers, but it will not be a garland, it will not be a mala. It will not have any inner harmony – the beads will remain unrelated. It will be a chaos, it will not be a cosmos; there will be no order, no discipline. But the discipline should be invisible like the thread.