I said, “That itself is exactly my crime – that I was teaching people this very secret.” Your government, and no other government in the world, wants people to understand this secret, because the moment people understand this secret, all the power governments have over you will disappear. Jails will become useless, guns will become meaningless, unused cartridges will become like used cartridges; no fire will be able to burn you nor will any sword be able to cut you. That is why those who are sitting on your chest through the power of the sword and of fire never want you to recognize who you really are – because that will destroy their whole power. Your recognition of yourself is their death. And it is not surprising that over the centuries whenever someone has tried to remind you of yourself, the governments, the vested interests, have come in the way.

The crime that Socrates was charged with before being poisoned was that he was teaching people to be immoral. He was only teaching people to know who they were. But the peddlers of morality felt that if people come to know who they are, “what will happen to our trade?”

So never ask anyone: “How are you?” Only ask, “Have you come to recognize the changeless?” The number of such people who know the changeless should increase in this world. They alone are the salt of the earth. They alone are the essence. Only their existence is meaningful.

Only those who have known existence have become free of their debt to existence.

Osho,
You say that religiousness flowers only in the East and people from the West come to India in search of religiousness. Then why didn’t those same countries welcome you? Why did they insult you like this?

Because of you. At least, they didn’t try to kill me by throwing a knife at me; in India you did. They didn’t try to disturb my meetings by throwing stones; in India you did. And when one’s very own cannot understand, then to expect that much from others is not right.

For the past two thousand years you have been in slavery. Your slavery and poverty has given the West the idea that you are worthless, that you are not even alive – you are a community of dead people.

And those who went to the West before me – Vivekananda, Ramateertha, Yogananda and other Hindu sannyasins – none of them were insulted in the West; no doors were closed for them, because they resorted to lies. They compared Jesus with Buddha; they compared the Bible with the Upanishads and the Gita. They glorified Western people even further. You were slaves, you were poor; your sannyasins proved you to be even spiritually poor. They diminished your spiritual heights and placed them alongside the ordinary valleys of the West.