For centuries it has been a good contract – not made knowingly, but made certainly by your unconscious mind, and your prophets and messiahs and tirthankaras, avatars – that a distance is needed. So your prophet is always something so far away from you, you need not be afraid. You can adore, you can love, you can play whatsoever mind games you want to play with him: he is beyond your grasp.

I am totally different. If you say you love me, I can come down and catch hold of you wherever you are. I will not wait. Somebody loves me – and you say you love me deeply; I will chase you to the very end of the sky. And particularly more so, because for two months I have been celibate. So your fear is right!

And you are hiding? That is the whole game of love. You are not hiding out of fear. Out of the corners of your eyes you are waiting to be found. Just the human, purely human joy of being found, somebody searching for you, chasing, and you are hiding…. It is not out of fear that you are hiding. It is out of love, and love makes you afraid because it brings you to a point where you have to drop your ego. That is a death. And only after the death of the ego will you know the real taste of love – never before it.

Please, come out of your hiding. I am a lazy man – you may go on waiting in your hiding place, and I may never come. Anyway I don’t know your address, your name. You have to be a little more daring. So go to the pub, have some strong drinks; the fear will disappear, and you will come rushing towards me like a bull. If anybody is to be afraid, it is me!

Osho,
Why are so many of your sannyasins German?

The whole credit goes to Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler led the strong German spirit – particularly the youth – into such a hell, into such suffering and misery, into such utter failure, that the German mind since then has been searching for somebody who is just the opposite of Adolf Hitler.

They have found the anti-Adolf Hitler in me.

It is not just a coincidence. Nature follows certain laws. If the second world war was a long nightmare, the reason was that the Germans followed a man who was giving them hope, the promise of a better world. And by the end of his life Adolf Hitler started proclaiming himself the reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet, Elijah. He was not only a political leader, he was a religious prophet; and Nazism was not only a political creed, but a new religion preparing the way for the superman to come.

You have been cheated, deceived. Now for centuries the spirit of German youth is not going to forget or forgive Adolf Hitler. They want someone who is just the opposite of Adolf Hitler. I am not a prophet. I am not a reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. My foot! I don’t care a bit about these Old Testament prophets – most of them are idiots, fanatics. The German youth finds in me a friend, not a leader. They are fed up with leaders.