War

 

 

Morality is like photographs. Religion is like a mirror. If a child is facing it, it reflects the child; if an old man is facing it, it reflects the old man. It is always spontaneous, in the moment, responding to reality. A conscious human being is just like a mirror -- he reflects reality and responds accordingly. His response is moral.

 

So I am changing the whole emphasis from action to awareness.

 

And if more and more people can become aware, the world will be a totally different place. A man of awareness will not go to war. Although religious scriptures say that to sacrifice yourself for your nation, for your religion is virtuous, a man of consciousness cannot follow that dead idea. To him, the nation itself is an immoral idea, because it divides humanity -- and war is certainly immoral. You may find good names, good words -- sometimes it is religion, sometimes it is political ideology, sometimes it is Christianity, sometimes it is communism -- good ideas, but the reality is turning human beings into butchers.

 

You are killing people whom you have never even met. And you know perfectly well that just as you have left a wife behind, crying, who will be waiting for you, just as you have left your old mother and father back at home, hoping that their son comes back alive, just as you have left small children... the man you are killing has also a wife, has also children, has also an old father and mother. And he has done no harm to you; neither have you done any harm to him.

 

If the world becomes a little more conscious, soldiers will throw away their arms and hug each other, sit down together under a tree and gossip. The politicians cannot force all the armies to kill, to murder. Neither can the popes, the religious leaders convince anybody that for God's sake you have to kill. Strange... because God has created everybody. Whomsoever you are killing, you are killing God's creation. If it is true that God created the world, then there should be no war -- it is one family; there should be no nations.

 

These are immoral things: the nations, the religions, anything that discriminates against people and creates conflict.

 

A man of awareness will not be greedy, because he will be able to see that his greed will create poverty; and the people who will be starving and dying through poverty are his brothers and sisters. It does not matter whether they live in Ethiopia or in India; it does not matter whether their skin is white or black.

 

Authentic morality is a by-product of consciousness. And the art of consciousness is religion. There is no Hindu religion, there is no Christian religion, there is no Mohammedan religion; there is only one religion, and that is the religion of consciousness -- becoming so aware, so enlightened and awakened, that you have eyes to see clearly and can respond according to that clarity.

 

A man of consciousness cannot be deceived by words. Mohammedans say that if you die in a religious war... how can there be a religious war? War is basically irreligious. But Christians, Mohammedans, and all other religions say that if you die in a religious war, your reward will be great in the other world. For this immoral act of killing people, you will be rewarded. But beautiful words "religious war", cover it up.

 

A man of awareness sees deeply and penetratingly through your words. Neither your God can deceive him, nor your holy books can deceive him, nor your nations, nor your politicians. He lives according to his consciousness. He has an individuality, a very crystal clear individuality -- a pure mirror, unclouded by anything, with no dust covering it.

 

But for thousands of years just mere words, and sometimes such stupid, trivial causes, have been killing people. Christianity in the middle ages burnt thousands of women. They created a fiction -- the fiction of the devil. There is no devil. There is no God! But people have lived in unconsciousness, and whatsoever the leaders, the so-called saints, go on saying, people have been told to believe: if you don't believe you will suffer in hell; if you believe you will be rewarded.

 

People's intelligence has been destroyed. They have been kept retarded. Otherwise it would be impossible to burn thousands of living women for a strange reason -- that these women are having sexual intercourse with the devil. Now nobody is having sexual intercourse with the devil. Only in the middle ages, suddenly, the devil became so much interested in women, and that too, only in Europe...!

 

-Osho, "The Razor’s Edge, #19, Q1"