My effort is to take away all the barriers so that you can discover your original face; to remove all the masks so that you can discover who, in reality, you are. And the moment you realize yourself, that will be the moment of your gratitude towards me, because then you will understand why I was destroying everything that you thought was a connection. It was not a connection, it was a dependence.

I hate the word “ism.” I hate collectivities. I respect the individual. Collectivities are mobs, and the mob psychology has to follow the lowest denominator. Only individual peaks can become Everests. Collectivities become only flat ground. Do you want to be just a flat ground? Wouldn’t you like to be an Everest, reaching higher and higher towards the stars?

Whatever I am doing is out of my love.

I cannot see you dependent. I cannot see you being harassed, tortured, ordered, made to obey – no. Hence, I say to you: My way of life is not a religion. It is certainly a kind of religiousness. To be religious without being attached to any religion is the most beautiful experience of life. Then religiousness is a quality, not a faith.

Slowly slowly, I am taking away all excuses for your faith. I have taken away God, I have taken away paradise. I have taken away the fear of hell, taken away the greed for heaven. And I don’t want anybody after me to undo what I have done.

It all depends on you.

My guards, be on alert!

Osho,
You are a total stranger to me, yet a friend and lover. How can this be?

This is the only way it can be. We are all strangers to each other. The closer we come in friendship and love, the more we see the strangeness of the other, the uniqueness of the other, the unpredictability of the other.

When we are not friends and lovers, then just acquaintance is enough. You know the name of the person, you know his profession, you know his address. Do you think this is knowing the individual? You may know that he is a doctor, or a shoemaker, but those are functions; they don’t have anything to do with the reality of the being. The doctor can become a carpenter, can become a gardener. And one day, he will be retired from the hospital.

You may not know why retired people become so irritable, so angry; any excuse is enough for them to explode. Why are old and retired people in such agony, anguish? The reason is, they have lost their identity.

When they were doctors, professors, they had a certain identity. Others believed them to be doctors – to be professors, to be engineers, to be scientists – and they also believed they were doctors. Now that mask has slipped. Now they don’t know who they are.