Osho,
While using hypnosis in the service of meditation, I have noticed that the line between therapy and meditation is dissolving. As witnessing can become easy and natural in hypnosis, it seems to provide the ground for a quantum leap into no-mind.
Would you please speak on the transformation of hypnosis into meditation?

It is one of those crimes that Christianity is responsible for. There was a day when hypnosis was a recognized door towards meditation, but in the Middle Ages Christianity condemned hypnosis alongside witchcraft. That condemnation still lingers on, even in the minds of those who are not Christians but who are influenced without their knowing by Christian ideas.

Why was Christianity against hypnosis? You will be surprised to know it was against hypnosis because it leads directly to meditation. Neither the priest is needed nor the church is needed. Not even God is needed. And this was the trouble: if meditation succeeds in the world there are not going to be any religions anymore, for the simple reason that you will be in direct contact with existence and yourself. Why should you go through brokers and all kinds of agents who know nothing, except that they are knowledgeable, except that they have been disciplined for years in how to influence people and win friends?

It is not something religious that they are doing. What they are doing is the politics of numbers: gather as many numbers as possible into your fold; that becomes your strength and your power.

Hypnosis was a danger to the priesthood, and Christianity is absolutely based from the very beginning on the priesthood. Jesus does not declare himself to be enlightened, nor has any other Christian after him declared him to be enlightened. He declares something nonsensical: that he is the only begotten son of God. God is a hypothesis, and hypotheses are not Indians who go on producing children. Hypotheses are barren; they produce nothing.

Just the other day I received from Germany…. There was a Protestant conference of Christians, and they invited our sannyasins, hoping to refute our sannyasins and their ideas. But the whole thing backfired.

There is nobody in the world who can refute my sannyasins because we are proposing neither beliefs nor hypotheses. We are simply living life. Our philosophy is not something beyond the clouds; it is something rooted in the earth, it is something as scientific as anything can be.

This question had arisen there, and there was great difficulty because the sannyasins said, “Osho is enlightened and Jesus Christ is not.” And the priests of Protestant Christianity could not produce any evidence that Jesus was enlightened; there is no statement anywhere. All that he was proclaiming was that he is the only begotten son of God. In fact that is a definite indication of unenlightenment.