There should be no hierarchy. Whatever one is doing, you may be a doctor, a professor, a president of a corporation, a farmer, a gardener – these are functions, they are not definitions of your individuality. The moment you come out of the classroom you are no longer a professor; you are a professor only while you are “professing,” you are a teacher only while you are teaching. The moment the function ceases, you are simply a human being. The function is not you. What you do is not your being.

This is my approach, and it is working. It was just because I was silent for three and a half years, and I was not in contact with the day-to-day activities of the commune, that Sheela could get into a power trip. But that too has been of immense significance for the whole commune to learn something – how people can go on becoming more and more attached to power and how power goes on corrupting them. And it is a vicious circle: power corrupts you, then corruption needs more power; otherwise you will be exposed, More power needs more corruption…

Osho,
What prevented the sannyasins from dealing with it earlier on their own?

There were many problems. First, the sannyasins have not gathered here for any political reason. They have come to me – to be just in my presence, in my silence, and to learn how to be silent and more conscious.

But meanwhile they are living in a political world that can harm them and so they must become political and…

No. It is better to get harmed than to become political, because that is more harmful than any other harm can be. And somebody, somewhere in the world, has to take the initiative not to be political, to be available to be harmed, and not ready to harm anybody.

These people have not come here to harm anybody. They have just come to live silently, and to seek, search, whatever is their reality. So because they were all focused on that program, it was possible for Sheela and her group to go on doing things and nobody bothered about it. If it was a political group, then there would have been conflicts, there would have been elections and there would have been fights, and she would have been thrown out long ago. But because these people are not in any way power oriented, and they were thinking that whatever Sheela is doing she is doing on my instructions – that’s what she was telling them.

Certainly she was receiving a few instructions from me, but it was at her discretion what instruction to use, what not to use, and it was in her hands to arrange any instruction that I had not given.

I have come to know just today that she was doing exactly what Nixon was doing: she has bugged houses, and you will be surprised – my house, my bedroom!