INTERVIEW BY THE RAJNEESH TIMES, GERMANY
12 December 1985 pm in Kulu/Manali, India
THE STRUCTURE IN THE COMMUNE HAS CHANGED A LOT SINCE SHEELA LEFT. IT SEEMS MUCH MORE MATURE NOW. BUT AT THE SAME TIME, THAT SPIRIT OF THE MYSTERY SCHOOL IS MISSING, WHICH WAS ALIVE IN EACH COMMUNE OF YOUR SANNYASINS. DO WE HAVE TO GO ON OUR OWN NOW?
I don't want any structure, because all structures create a certain kind of slavery. And that's what was being done by Sheela and her gang. She was creating structures; structures can function better. Slavery always functions better.
An independent and free mind is always a problem, because he thinks. He may not agree with you. But freedom is more valuable than any functional, practical gains. Everything can be sacrificed to freedom. Freedom cannot be sacrificied to anything.
So now there will be no more any structures. Each commune should try to live intelligently, rather than following a certain structure unintelligently. Now sannyasins will have to learn to live intelligently, and yet in agreement, in harmony. Intelligence does not mean necessarily conflict. It is only a lower kind of intelligence that always brings conflict. Higher the intelligence, more harmonies. It seeks more the points of meeting, creating a cosmos out of a chaos.
And remember one thing, that a structure gives you a solidity, a stability. You feel as if you have a backbone. But it kills your soul. It makes you robot like. You work more, you produce more. In economic terms it is perfectly good. And that's what Sheela was trying to do.
When there is no fixed structure, when you move day to day with your intelligence, creating momentary temporary structures which can be changed any moment, they don't have any ultimacy about them, it will look like a chaos, because so much change will be going on. But remember, it is always out of chaos that stars are born. We don't want to make our communes assembly lines, mechanical, where machines are produced. We want to produce a new man.
That's where I differed from Sheela. As I started speaking, I found that she has done absolutely the opposite of what I have been teaching for thirty years.
I am for individuality, I am for freedom, I am for the beauty of a chaos.
I am not very favorable to the deadness of an ordered world, obedience of an army. I hate it; because these are the problems that humanity has suffered all along. I would love my sannyasins to be intelligently disobedient. And if they are obedient, they have to be intelligently obedient. Not just because the order is there it has to be followed. Unless the order fits with you, unless the order rings some bells in your heart, unless it becomes something of your own, it is meaningless. It is better to rebel than to follow.
Sheela destroyed small centers while I was in silence and isolation, and she created big communes. Her mind was that of a materialist.
I want my small centers back, because in a small center you can have more freedom, more independence. In a big commune, necessarily, you have to bring some kind of a structure, some kind of obedience, some kind of order, otherwise it becomes too difficult to manage. And basically, I value the individual. So bring back the small centers -- and they were functioning perfectly well, and nobody was ordering them. They were working out of love.
While I was in Poona, thousands of centers around the world were working without any order, without any structure. Each had its own uniqueness its own individuality, and it was upon themselves what to make of it, how to make it. She dissolved all those small, beautiful centers and created big communes simply so that more money can be generated.
My interest is not money. My interest is how more consciousness can be generated. But her whole effort and her whole clique was concentratedly working at one goal: how to create more money. And this was necessary, that small centers should be dissolved, people should move into bigger communes, and there should be strict discipline, strict orders, and everybody should be dependent on the commune for everything. Naturally, more money can be produced. But what we are going to do with the money? Money is not a value. It is useful, but it is not something that has to be worshipped, that you have to make a goal of it.
So my situation now is that if you feel bigger communes are difficult to maintain -- they will be difficult -- without structures, without somebody dictating everything from higher up and you have simply to follow... now there will be nobody else to do it.
I have never ordered anybody to do anything and I have never dictated anybody -- that is against human dignity. So I would like that if your bigger communes are becoming difficult to run disperse them, let your small communes sprout up again in different places. And we have nothing to do by generating money. We have to generate more consciousness and more living and loving people. For that bigger communes are not needed. You unnecessarily create trouble by collecting too many people in one place. Somehow or other everybody's freedom will be cut.
Everybody is unique and wants to live in his unique way. Now they all cannot be fixed in the same pattern. So it is a moment of transition in which you may find it a little difficult because Sheela was running things absolutely against me. Whatever she did was absolutely against me. She tried to create an organized religion -- I have always been against organized religion, she even created a small holy book of Rajneeshism -- I had to burn it because I don't want any holy books.
There are good books and there are bad books but there are no holy books. But she has no understanding of any higher qualities of consciousness. She belonged to a very pragmatic, practical, lower stage of mind. So she was good at work, she was just like a rough uncut ugly stone that you use in the foundation when you make a building. It has its use but it remains underground.
I had chosen her because in Rajneeshpuram we were just putting the foundation of a commune and I was completely aware that sooner or later I will have to change her because once the basic foundation is complete she is useless, and dangerous. Because she can only become a foundation, she can go on making big walls of those ugly stones and it will become a prison not a temple.
I was going to change her in anyway, but in my whole life this has been my experience that existence has been very compassionate to me. She escaped before I had to change her. She must be thinking that she has been very clever because she has accumulated money in Switzerland -- that's why in Germany she has created these six communes, destroyed all small communes. And Germany has a tendency -- you have to be aware of that -- Adolf Hitler does not happen from nowhere. It comes from your consciousness, it is something in your unconscious that creates that monster.
Why she concentrated on Germany? She could see that Germany can be structured, people can be enslaved, disciplined... they love me. In the name of my love they will be ready to do anything.
And all the money she was siphoning into Switzerland and it is just a guess -- American government thinks twenty million dollars she has in one bank account. Her own secretary who left her two years before because she had cancer and had to go for treatment in California remembers that at the time she left she had forty-three million dollars in two bank accounts. And she left two years before. So there is every possibility that she may be having something nearabout sixty, seventy or eighty million dollars in her own name.
But this is what I was saying. That money is not a value. Now she will rot in a jail her whole life and the money will rot in a bank. And you all worked for that money and for Sheela unnecessarily. It was a sheer wastage.
So now make it a point that no more of anything that Sheela may have left in your minds should remain in the communes, in the sannyasins -- it has to be cleaned.
So if big communes can be run without destroying people's freedom, individuality -- good. If you feel it is difficult, make smaller communes, smaller centers and let people live according to their own ideas. That's my whole message to the sannyasins.
Now whatever Sheela has done has to be undone. And it has been in a way a blessing in disguise. It has been a good learning. It should not happen again.
from: Osho_The Last Testament Vol5, #05
12 December 1985 pm in Kulu/Manali, India
THE STRUCTURE IN THE COMMUNE HAS CHANGED A LOT SINCE SHEELA LEFT. IT SEEMS MUCH MORE MATURE NOW. BUT AT THE SAME TIME, THAT SPIRIT OF THE MYSTERY SCHOOL IS MISSING, WHICH WAS ALIVE IN EACH COMMUNE OF YOUR SANNYASINS. DO WE HAVE TO GO ON OUR OWN NOW?
I don't want any structure, because all structures create a certain kind of slavery. And that's what was being done by Sheela and her gang. She was creating structures; structures can function better. Slavery always functions better.
An independent and free mind is always a problem, because he thinks. He may not agree with you. But freedom is more valuable than any functional, practical gains. Everything can be sacrificed to freedom. Freedom cannot be sacrificied to anything.
So now there will be no more any structures. Each commune should try to live intelligently, rather than following a certain structure unintelligently. Now sannyasins will have to learn to live intelligently, and yet in agreement, in harmony. Intelligence does not mean necessarily conflict. It is only a lower kind of intelligence that always brings conflict. Higher the intelligence, more harmonies. It seeks more the points of meeting, creating a cosmos out of a chaos.
And remember one thing, that a structure gives you a solidity, a stability. You feel as if you have a backbone. But it kills your soul. It makes you robot like. You work more, you produce more. In economic terms it is perfectly good. And that's what Sheela was trying to do.
When there is no fixed structure, when you move day to day with your intelligence, creating momentary temporary structures which can be changed any moment, they don't have any ultimacy about them, it will look like a chaos, because so much change will be going on. But remember, it is always out of chaos that stars are born. We don't want to make our communes assembly lines, mechanical, where machines are produced. We want to produce a new man.
That's where I differed from Sheela. As I started speaking, I found that she has done absolutely the opposite of what I have been teaching for thirty years.
I am for individuality, I am for freedom, I am for the beauty of a chaos.
I am not very favorable to the deadness of an ordered world, obedience of an army. I hate it; because these are the problems that humanity has suffered all along. I would love my sannyasins to be intelligently disobedient. And if they are obedient, they have to be intelligently obedient. Not just because the order is there it has to be followed. Unless the order fits with you, unless the order rings some bells in your heart, unless it becomes something of your own, it is meaningless. It is better to rebel than to follow.
Sheela destroyed small centers while I was in silence and isolation, and she created big communes. Her mind was that of a materialist.
I want my small centers back, because in a small center you can have more freedom, more independence. In a big commune, necessarily, you have to bring some kind of a structure, some kind of obedience, some kind of order, otherwise it becomes too difficult to manage. And basically, I value the individual. So bring back the small centers -- and they were functioning perfectly well, and nobody was ordering them. They were working out of love.
While I was in Poona, thousands of centers around the world were working without any order, without any structure. Each had its own uniqueness its own individuality, and it was upon themselves what to make of it, how to make it. She dissolved all those small, beautiful centers and created big communes simply so that more money can be generated.
My interest is not money. My interest is how more consciousness can be generated. But her whole effort and her whole clique was concentratedly working at one goal: how to create more money. And this was necessary, that small centers should be dissolved, people should move into bigger communes, and there should be strict discipline, strict orders, and everybody should be dependent on the commune for everything. Naturally, more money can be produced. But what we are going to do with the money? Money is not a value. It is useful, but it is not something that has to be worshipped, that you have to make a goal of it.
So my situation now is that if you feel bigger communes are difficult to maintain -- they will be difficult -- without structures, without somebody dictating everything from higher up and you have simply to follow... now there will be nobody else to do it.
I have never ordered anybody to do anything and I have never dictated anybody -- that is against human dignity. So I would like that if your bigger communes are becoming difficult to run disperse them, let your small communes sprout up again in different places. And we have nothing to do by generating money. We have to generate more consciousness and more living and loving people. For that bigger communes are not needed. You unnecessarily create trouble by collecting too many people in one place. Somehow or other everybody's freedom will be cut.
Everybody is unique and wants to live in his unique way. Now they all cannot be fixed in the same pattern. So it is a moment of transition in which you may find it a little difficult because Sheela was running things absolutely against me. Whatever she did was absolutely against me. She tried to create an organized religion -- I have always been against organized religion, she even created a small holy book of Rajneeshism -- I had to burn it because I don't want any holy books.
There are good books and there are bad books but there are no holy books. But she has no understanding of any higher qualities of consciousness. She belonged to a very pragmatic, practical, lower stage of mind. So she was good at work, she was just like a rough uncut ugly stone that you use in the foundation when you make a building. It has its use but it remains underground.
I had chosen her because in Rajneeshpuram we were just putting the foundation of a commune and I was completely aware that sooner or later I will have to change her because once the basic foundation is complete she is useless, and dangerous. Because she can only become a foundation, she can go on making big walls of those ugly stones and it will become a prison not a temple.
I was going to change her in anyway, but in my whole life this has been my experience that existence has been very compassionate to me. She escaped before I had to change her. She must be thinking that she has been very clever because she has accumulated money in Switzerland -- that's why in Germany she has created these six communes, destroyed all small communes. And Germany has a tendency -- you have to be aware of that -- Adolf Hitler does not happen from nowhere. It comes from your consciousness, it is something in your unconscious that creates that monster.
Why she concentrated on Germany? She could see that Germany can be structured, people can be enslaved, disciplined... they love me. In the name of my love they will be ready to do anything.
And all the money she was siphoning into Switzerland and it is just a guess -- American government thinks twenty million dollars she has in one bank account. Her own secretary who left her two years before because she had cancer and had to go for treatment in California remembers that at the time she left she had forty-three million dollars in two bank accounts. And she left two years before. So there is every possibility that she may be having something nearabout sixty, seventy or eighty million dollars in her own name.
But this is what I was saying. That money is not a value. Now she will rot in a jail her whole life and the money will rot in a bank. And you all worked for that money and for Sheela unnecessarily. It was a sheer wastage.
So now make it a point that no more of anything that Sheela may have left in your minds should remain in the communes, in the sannyasins -- it has to be cleaned.
So if big communes can be run without destroying people's freedom, individuality -- good. If you feel it is difficult, make smaller communes, smaller centers and let people live according to their own ideas. That's my whole message to the sannyasins.
Now whatever Sheela has done has to be undone. And it has been in a way a blessing in disguise. It has been a good learning. It should not happen again.
from: Osho_The Last Testament Vol5, #05
