They were afraid that if I start speaking again, then I will create a totally different atmosphere like that which existed in India. In India nothing like this happened in thirty years, and thousands of people were there. In just four years it happened in America. I was silent; Sheela and her gang could make people surrender, believe. That is the criterion. And people have listened to it being said for thousands of years, that that is the basis of all religion. So it was very easy. It was according to their conditioning that they believed her, surrendered themselves totally, blindly.

So they were afraid that once I start speaking people will be in a totally different atmosphere. They will doubt, they will argue, they will want to be convinced. Just simple surrender will not be possible, and no fascist mind would like that.

She was trying to persuade me not to speak because it may endanger my health. I said, “Don’t you be worried about my health. I know my health. Now it is being endangered by not doing anything, remaining in isolation. I have recovered perfectly and I would like to speak. You make the arrangements and tomorrow I am going to speak.”

The moment I started speaking, the whole commune was excited, ecstatic, except Sheela and her gang. They were sad because their whole power was gone. Their power was that they were representing me, and whatever they wanted they were telling people that, “This is what Osho wants.” And there was no way for the sannyasins to check it, whether I wanted it or not.

So first, even when I was in silence, they tried to kill three persons who were intimate to me and for whom I was available even in my silence – my physician who used to come to check me, my dentist who was looking after my teeth, and my caretaker who was carrying my food, my tea, my fruit juice. First they tried to poison these three people. They poisoned my caretaker, but we could not imagine…

Did he become sick?

She became sick. She had just taken a cup of tea in Sheela’s house and she came home and her heart started beating so fast that the doctors could not believe it. She is perfectly healthy, there is no disease; there is no reason for her heart to beat so fast. It took three hours for them to bring her heartbeat to its normal rate. But nobody suspected.

It was out of the question that anybody would poison her. She had been taking care of my body for fifteen years, even when Sheela was not yet there. She had come years before Sheela.

Then they poisoned my doctor, my physician. In the same way, he took a cup of coffee, but because he is a physician, one of the best minds, having all the best qualifications from England – the youngest doctor to be accepted in the Royal Society of England – he immediately suspected poisoning.

He was hospitalized, but the poison that was used was undetectable. Two, three days rest and he came out. But he started becoming weak after that. He had never been sick and never weak like that.