https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/69278Priest
The priest always HAS a strong hold, because the priest is the most ancient institution in the world. They say the most ancient profession in the world is that of the prostitute. I don't agree. The most ancient profession is that of the priest, because without the priest who will create the prostitute? How will the prostitute come into existence? It is through the priest.
The priest is the source of an kinds of ugly institutions.
And if you have been a priest yourself, then of course it goes very deep in you. And joining the Hare Krishna movement is not going to help -- it will be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, it will lead you towards more stupidity.
The priest creates something in you which he calls "conscience." And by creating conscience he destroys your consciousness. Conscience is nothing but a state of hypnosis. By repeating certain things again and again, the priest creates a deep hypnotic state in you, and then you are under the spell. [....]
The priests and the angels and the archangels and the gods, and even your so-called God, they have all done tremendous harm to you. In the name of religion so much crime, so much calamity, so much misery has happened to man as has not happened from any other source -- even politicians are secondary.
And certainly every religion tries its best to force its ideology into the heart of the child. So the hold is certainly strong. But once you understand it, once you get unidentified with it, there is no trouble because it is something imposed on you. It is like a dress -- you can drop it any moment. But if you think your dress is not a dress but your skin, then it becomes difficult. That's where you get identified with it.
Don't get identified with your conscience. And that's the whole purpose of meditation: to make you aware that you are not your mind. The priest can only reach your mind, he cannot reach your being -- fortunately he cannot pollute your being, he can only pollute your mind. And meditation means creating a distance between your mind and yourself.
The moment you ARE aware that the mind is a separate thing, created by others -- the priests and the politicians and the parents and the teachers -- that it has nothing to do with you, you can slip out of it very easily. [....]
The conscience that the priest has created has not become your soul. It has just become your mask. It has given you a pseudo personality, it has made you a hypocrite. [....]
The priest has not really changed anything, he cannot; he has only imposed a certain layer of hypocrisy on you. So it is not difficult to get rid of it. It is just a layer of dirt; you can clean it any moment you decide to. [....]
In the past it has been said again and again by the priests that if you renounce you will attain to bliss. I tell you just the opposite: if you become blissful there is renunciation. And that renunciation has a beauty of its own -- because in your rejoicing, all that is non-essential starts dropping away -- because you can see it is non-essential. The very seeing is the transformation. If after seeing you have to do something for transformation, then your seeing was incomplete, was not entire, was not total, was not real.
-Osho, "Guida Spirituale, #7, Q2"
