Osho,
Why are people not listening to your message?

There are many things to be understood before we can enter into the question.

First, the word people…. There are no “people” as such. There are Americans, Russians, Indians; there are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans; there are socialists, communists, fascists – but where are the people? These are all crowds, these are not people.

A crowd can be in three different forms. The worst is the mob, and the worst is the most prominent in the world. A mob means an unorganized crowd. The greatest crimes have been committed by mobs, because a mob functions completely unconsciously. And in a mob nobody is responsible: you can do anything and you are not responsible.

I have seen mobs burning living people, and I have asked the people who were part of the mob, not just silent partners but active participants, “Are you aware of what you are doing? – burning living people, children, women, just because they happen to belong to another mob? They are Mohammedans, you are Hindus; the only difference is the label of the mob, because most of them have been Hindus before, and tomorrow one of you may be a Mohammedan. To change a label is not a difficult thing.”

How many Mohammedans had come to India in the beginning? – only five hundred. Now India is the world’s biggest Mohammedan country. Next to Hinduism, Mohammedanism is the biggest religion in India Half of India the Mohammedans have taken already – it has become Pakistan. Any day they will again demand the remaining part of India, for the same reason.

“Five hundred Mohammedans – how have they become millions? They were all Hindus, just their labels have been changed, forcibly – and you are killing them. And even if they are not Hindus, at least they are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, husbands, wives. And a mother is a mother: it doesn’t matter whether she is a Mohammedan, a Hindu, a Christian. The relationship between her and her child is the same, whoever she is.”

Do you know what those people said to me? They said, “We were not aware of all this. In fact, we were not doing it. Alone, on our own, we would never have committed such a crime, but when the whole mob was doing it, whether we participated or not made no difference; the people were going to be burned. And we don’t know how we started doing things which we were not intending to do. We had never thought about.