Osho,
Why are there so few American sannyasins? I recall you saying that America would be a very spiritual country because they had already mastered material abundance and found it did not satisfy. Why are they so sleepy? Please comment.

America has no roots. It is just a three-hundred-year-old country; it is passing through its childhood. Compared to a country like India which has been there for at least ninety thousand years, America is a just-born baby. So wait a little; babies don’t tend to be spiritual.

Secondly, America has promoted itself as being really rich. That is not true. Thirty million Americans are in utter poverty; millions of black people are not first-class citizens, and the people to whom the country belongs, the Red Indians, are kept in reservations. Those reservations are not very much different to the concentration camps in Germany – in fact, they are more dangerous.

In Germany, the concentration camps were made of barbed wire; you could not escape. The American reservations are open. If you want to go out, nobody is preventing you. They have created some psychological barbed wire – invisible. The Red Indians are being paid for doing nothing. Naturally, when a man has nothing to do and gets enough money, he gambles, he drinks, and he produces more and more children, because each child brings with him more money from the government.

This is a very psychological slavery; the Red Indians will not want to be freed. If they are free, and the country belongs to them, then what about their gambling, rowdiness, fighting, killing, rape? What about their addiction to drugs? They are not ready to work again; America has crippled them psychologically, spiritually. But the land belongs to them, the country is theirs, everybody else is a foreigner here. Thirdly, the politicians of America would not like the country to become spiritual. They want bigger armies, air forces, navies; they want more nuclear experts. They are not interested in spirituality; spirituality is dangerous to them, because if the American people get involved in meditation, silence, serenity, they will refuse to kill anybody – war or no war. They will simply be able to see that the third world war is going to be a total war in which nothing of life will remain.

American politicians would not like people to have such clarity of vision.

American religious leaders pretend to provide spirituality to the people, but what they are giving they don’t have themselves. The priests are against, have always been against, real spirituality. This has to be understood. Jesus was crucified by the rabbis – the priests. Buddha was opposed by the brahmins – the priests. Attempts on the life of Mahavira were made by the priests. Strange…it seems whenever they find a man who is genuinely spiritual, they want to kill him. There must be some reason behind it.

The reason is that if real spirituality spreads, religion will disappear. Religions are substitute spirituality, saccharin. And if you can get real sugar, who bothers about saccharin? And the latest findings say saccharin creates cancer!