Hindus are very wise because in thousands of years of encountering buddhas, jinas – conquerors of life, enlightened, awakened people – they have realized many truths. One of the truths you will see all around. No Buddha is depicted as old, no Mahavira is depicted as old. No statue, no picture exists…Krishna, Rama, Buddha, Mahavira – nobody is depicted as old.

Not that they never became old: they became old. Buddha became old when he was eighty years. He was as old as anybody would become when he is eighty, but he is not depicted as old. The reason is inner: because whenever you came near him you would find him young and fresh. So the oldness was just in the body, not in him. And I have to demolish you because your body may be young, but your inner being is very, very old and ancient – a ruin, just like the Greek ruins of Persepolis and others.

Inside you, you have a ruin of being. It has to be demolished – I have to be a furnace, a fire, a death to you. That’s the only way I can help and bring a cosmos within you, an order. And I am not working to enforce any order upon you because that won’t help. Any order enforced from without will be just a propping up thing for the old ancient ruin: it will not help.

I believe in an inner order. That happens with your own awareness and rebirth. That comes from within and spreads outwards. It opens just like a flower, the petals move outwards from the center to the periphery. Only that order is real and beautiful which opens within you and spreads all around you. If order is enforced from without, if a discipline is given to you – “Do this and don’t do that” – and you are forced to be a prisoner, that won’t help because it won’t change you.

Nothing can change from the outside. There is only one revolution, and that is that which comes from within. But before that revolution happens you must be destroyed utterly. Only on your grave will the new be born. That’s why there is chaos around me: because I am a chaos, and I am using chaos as a method.

The second question:

Osho,
In doing sadhana on Om, is it better to repeat it like a mantra or to try to hear it as an inner sound?

The mantra “om” has to be done in three stages. First, you should repeat it very loudly. That means it should come from the body – first from the body because the body is the main door. First let the body be saturated with it.

So repeat it loudly. Move to a temple or into your room or somewhere where you can repeat it as loudly as you like. Use the whole body to repeat it, as if thousands of people are listening to you without a microphone, and you have to be very loud so that the whole body trembles, shakes with it.