Zen: Zest, Zip, Zap and Zing, Chapter 13 (Godliness: An Experience of Immediate Joy):
Prior and After context on Osho on Mother Theresa.
I stick to all the adjectives, and I will add a few more: that she is stupid, mediocre, idiotic! And if anybody needs to be forgiven it is she, not I, because she is committing a great sin. She is saying in this letter, “I am fighting through adoption the sin of abortion.” Abortion is not a sin; in this overpopulated world abortion is a virtue. And if abortion is a sin then the Polack Pope and Mother Teresa and company are responsible for it because they are against contraceptives, they are against birth control methods, they are against the pill. These are the people who are the cause of all the abortions, they are responsible. To me they are great criminals!
In this overpopulated world where people are hungry and starving to be against the pill is just unforgivable! The pill is one of the most significant contributions of modern science to humanity - it can make the earth a paradise. But certainly in that paradise there will be no orphans, and then what will happen to Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity? And in that paradise who will listen to the Polack Pope? People will be so happy, who will bother about these people? And who will think about a paradise after death? If paradise is herenow then there is no need to invent, project, dream, fantasize a paradise beyond.
The paradise beyond has been fantasized about because we lave lived in hell on the earth. And this hell is very helpful to the priests, to the so-called religious, to the saints, to the popes, to all kinds of ayatollahs and shankarcharyas - all kinds of hocus-pocus people. They are all against the pill. If they have something against the pill, then make it a powder! If just the pill is the problem, then grind it! Find some other way. These are the people who are the reason for orphans, abortions - and then they serve them. It is rally a beautiful job they are doing!
I have heard about two brothers; they used to do a business. Their business was: one brother would enter a village in the night and put coal-tar on people’s windows, doors, and in the morning he would leave. In the morning would come the other brother, shouting in the streets of the village, “I clean coal-tar! If somebody wants their windows to be cleaned, I am here!” And of course he had great work - the whole town needed him! By the time he had finished, the other brother would have destroyed another village’s windows, doors, then this other brother would arrive. They were doing a lot of work and earning enough money!
This is what these people are doing. Be against the pill, be against contraceptives, be against sterilization, be against all birth control techniques, and then naturally there will be abortions, then there will be orphans and beggars. Then serve them and earn great virtue, because without service you will never reach heaven. These poor people are needed as stepping-stones for you to go to heaven.
The Last Testament, Vol. I, Chapter 27 (War Is Meaningless):
Osho preceded this by saying that a man turns to masturbation when he is denied love, and in response to the Interviewer’s question of whether he implied Hitler wouldn’t have attacked the Jews if he had a Jewish girlfriend, he said yes.
Osho: Everybody cannot be a Picasso and everybody need not go to Everest – and it would be silly! We have to respect people as they are, without any demands on them.
Interviewer: But you don’t either: you attacked Mother Teresa recently.
Osho: I attack Mother Teresa because she is doing so much harm to humanity.
Interviewer: In what way?
Osho: These are the people… Mother Teresa is only symbolic; I call her Mother Teresa the Terrible. These people – Teresa or Pope the Polack or Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi – all these people in a very subtle way… I never suspect their intentions; their intentions may be good, but their actions are dangerous. These are the people who are keeping the world poor.
Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor.” Now this is something absolutely wrong. The poor are not the blessed, they are the cursed, the condemned. But he consoles them by saying that they are blessed.
Interviewer: But you are selectively using that verse. The full verse is: “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth.”
Osho: Those who inherit the earth can never be poor, so he was using the word poor purely metaphorically.
Just wait a minute, just wait a minute. You are quoting wrongly, I was quoting rightly: “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God,” – not earth.
Interviewer: There are two versions – the King James version says the earth.
Osho: There are not two versions!
Interviewer: The King James version says the earth.
Osho: It is the kingdom of God, basically, in Hebrew. The kingdom of the earth is already possessed by the rich, it is already inherited. Jesus can only promise something in the faraway future, after death. All the religions have been playing that game, of promising people things beyond death. There is no evidence of anything beyond death, whether the poor enter into paradise or the rich enter. It is more probable that the rich will enter.
There is no possibility for the poor in paradise, if there is no possibility for them here on earth! And these people… Teresa collecting orphans, what is she doing? Creating more poverty in the world. She is against abortion, she is against birth control, she is against the pill: these are sins, naturally. If these things are allowed, orphans will disappear – and with orphans disappearing, who is going to give the Nobel Prize to Mother Teresa?
I condemned her; she wrote a letter to me. In the letter she said, “I will pray to God to forgive you.” Now the sentence looks perfectly nice, but not to me. It is nasty.
I wrote back to her, “In the first place I don’t believe in any God, so who are you to pray to a God who does not exist? At least you should have asked me. Secondly, who are you to pray on my behalf? I have not given you the authority. And I have not committed any sin, that God should forgive me. If he meets me, he will have to ask forgiveness from me, because what he has done to the world is enough!”
All these Tamerlanes, Genghis Khans, Nadirshahs, Alexander the Greats, Ivan the Terribles, Adolf Hitlers,
Mussolinis, Joseph Stalins – who is responsible for all these people? Who is responsible for Ethiopia dying? Who is responsible for half the world being poor and on the verge of death? Who is responsible for nuclear weapons?
If God is the creator, and if he is omnipotent, omniscient, he knows everything – past, present, future – then he knows that there will be Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And even knowing that, he creates the world? He knows that there will be a nuclear war, and people are piling up nuclear weapons. Even the day he created the world, he knew that one day there would be a nuclear war, and millions of people would suffer tremendous torture and death. “And this is your God,” I told her.She never replied. I again wrote to her, “Reply – because otherwise I am going to sue you in the court. Who can ask for my forgiveness from God, on my behalf, without my permission?”
These people are simply trying to increase their numbers. All those orphans become Catholics; all those poor people, aboriginals, become Christians. The hospitals, the schools, the food – these are all strategies. Islam had the strategy of the sword. Christians have the strategy – because the world has changed, ways have changed – they come with bread and butter in one hand and a Bible in the other. Mohammedans used to come with a sword in one hand and the Koran in the other hand. But it is the same – just to purchase you. They are using people’s poverty to make great numbers of Christians, because numbers have power. It is simply politics, nothing else; there is no religion in it. The pope before this Polack who is now the pope, was a homosexual – it was well known all over Italy.
Further he goes on to say homosexuality is immoral. I’ll address it in a separate note here Osho on Homosexuality.
The Last Testament, Vol. II, Chapter 33 (To Be Enlightened Is To Know Myself):
Interviewer: I’ve heard you have little respect for people like the pope, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi and a host of others. Is there anyone that you can name?
Osho: No.
Interviewer: I just wanted to get it straight.
Osho: I don’t look up to anybody and I don’t want anybody else to look up to me.
Interviewer: So it’s one plain.
Osho: It is just one horizontal existence, no vertical hierarchy. And you said that, “You have very little respect.” That is wrong. I don’t have any respect, not even very little. I have very great disrespect, because these people are criminals. And their crimes are far bigger than the people you go on hanging or giving them electric chairs. These people are real criminals.
For example, Mother Teresa. You reward this woman with Nobel Prize. Universities go on giving her D.Litts. Countries go on pouring on… awards on her. And what she is doing? All she is doing is collecting orphans and converting them into Catholicism.
One of the men went to Mother Teresa’s one of the centers in Calcutta. The secretary asked, “What do you want?” He said, “I want to adopt one child.”
Seeing that he is a white man, must be a Christian, she said, “We have seven hundred orphans. You can choose any. But first fill this form.”
In that form he had to fill his religion, and he filled Protestant Christianity. And the girl said, “You just wait. I will have to ask Mother Teresa about it.”
And back came Mother Teresa herself and said, “We are sorry, we don’t have any orphans here. When we have, we will inform you. Just leave your address.”
Just a minute before, there were seven hundred, but because he is not a Catholic…
He wrote letters to the newspapers. According to his letter, I criticized Mother Teresa in a public meeting. She wrote a letter to me that, “The real reason is that the children who are brought up in a certain atmosphere — religious, psychological — they should be given to a family where they are not misfits. That’s why we had refused.”
I asked her that, “All these children have come from either Hindu, Mohammedan or other Indian religions. None of them has come from Catholic religion. On what grounds you are teaching them Catholicism? You should teach a Hindu child Hinduism and give it to a Hindu family if you are sincere and honest.”
And in her letter she has written also that, “For you I will pray to God that he forgives you.”
So I said, “About the second statement, you have to take your words back. Otherwise I will sue you in the court. I don’t believe in any God in the first place. And who are you to pray on my behalf? I have not given you my attorney authority. And what I have done that God has to forgive me?
“In fact, if he meets, he has to ask me to be forgiven, because it is he who has created this world ugly. It is he who has created Adolf Hitler, who killed ten million people, Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini. He has to give explanations why these people were created by him, if he is the creator.
“I have not done anything wrong. Just to question you, is it a crime? And your answer is just bogus.”
And these people go on teaching in a poor country like India against birth control methods, against the pill, against abortion, for the simple reason because if there is abortion, if there is birth control, if the pill is available freely to poor people, from where Mother Teresa is going to have more orphans? The supply of orphans is needed urgently for more Catholics.
That’s why I call this woman is a criminal. And anybody who is teaching around the world — and she is one of them — celibacy is teaching homosexuality or lesbianism, and the ultimate result is AIDS. And these are the people responsible for it.
Nobody can be celibate scientifically. And I am simply amazed. There are millions of scientists around the world, doctors around the world, and nobody says clearly that celibacy is impossible. Because it is part of your biology, and biology is not in the control of your mind. It is not that when you want to perspire you can, or you can decide that, “I take the vow that I will not perspire any more.” It is not within your mind. Your body has its own program, which is absolutely determined from your birth.
So all your celibate saints are simply hypocrites. There has been no celibate ever, and there cannot be any celibate in future. So the ultimate result of talking celibacy and teaching that it is something holy, sacred, causes homosexuality, sodomy, masturbation, nocturnal emissions and thousands of perversions.
Even Mahatma Gandhi at the age of seventy was suffering from nocturnal emissions. And you are teaching a young boy fourteen years of age that, “You have to be celibate” when he is full of sexual energy. Near about eighteen the boy comes to his peak of sexual energy. He can have from three to five love affairs in the night. But after forty-two even one is enough. And after fifty-two, once in a week.