Question 1
Osho,
You have described how the ability to communicate his experience is the essence of the master. yet in you something even more beautiful has happened.
Buddha conveyed his message to a select few thousand men in the local pali language -- in response to the failings of brahminism.
By comparison, you are talking to millions of men and women from every continent, from every race, from every religion, from every possible background. rather than being restricted to the shortcomings of brahminism, you draw from, and synthesize, every spiritual, psychological and scientific element ever conceived by man.
You were able to express existence in hindi so poetically that people said you were the finest hindi speaker alive. on top of that, you are able to do the same in a second, foreign language, to people from these widely differing cultures who are, for the most part, a generation away. you don't just express yourself in that second language, but manage to catch the fine nuances and colloquialisms of everyday speech that usually only natives have a grasp of.
Osho, is this supreme ability to communicate what makes you the master of masters?
The situation of the world has changed dramatically. Just three hundred years ago, the world was very big. Even if Gautam Buddha had wanted to approach all human beings, it would not have been possible; just the means of communication were not available. People were living in many worlds, almost isolated from each other. That has a simplicity.
Jesus had to face the Jews, not the whole world. It would not have been possible, sitting on his donkey, to go around the world. Even if he had managed to cover the small kingdom of Judea, that would have been too much. The education of people was very confined. They were not even aware of each other's existence.
Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu in China, Socrates in Athens -- they were all contemporaries but they had no idea of each other.
That's why I say that before the scientific revolution in the means of communication and in the means of transportation, there were many worlds, sufficient unto themselves. They never thought of others, they had no idea even that others existed. As people became acquainted more and more with each other, the world became smaller. Now a Buddha will not be able to manage, nor Jesus nor Moses nor Confucius. They will all have very localized minds and very localized attitudes.
We are fortunate that the world is now so small that you cannot be local. In spite of yourself, you cannot be local; you have to be universal. You have to think of Confucius, you have to think of Krishna, you have to think of Socrates, you have to think of Bertrand Russell. Unless you think of the world as one single unit, and all the contributions of different geniuses, you will not be able to talk to the modern man. The gap will be so big -- twenty-five centuries, twenty centuries... almost impossible to bridge it.
The only way to bridge it is that the person who has come to know should not stop at his own knowing, should not be contented to only give expression to what he has come to know. He has to make a tremendous effort to know all the languages. The work is vast, but it is exciting -- the exploration into human genius from different dimensions.
And if you have within yourself the light of understanding, you can create, without any difficulty, a synthesis. And the synthesis is not only going to be of all the religious mystics -- that will be partial. The synthesis has to include all the artists -- their insights -- all the musicians, all the poets, all the dancers -- their insights. All the creative people who have contributed to life, who have made humanity richer, have to be taken into account. And most important of all is scientific growth.
To bring scientific growth into a synthetic vision with heart and religion was not possible in the past. In the first place there was no science -- and it has changed a thousand and one things. Life can never be the same again.
And nobody has thought ever of the artistic people, that their contribution is also religious.
In my vision it is a triangle -- science, religion, art.
And they are such different dimensions, they speak different languages, they contradict each other; they are not in agreement superficially -- unless you have a deep insight in which they all can melt and become one.
My effort has been to do almost the impossible.
In my university days as a student, my professors were at a loss. I was a student of philosophy, and I was attending science classes -- physics, chemistry and biology. Those professors were feeling very strange; "You are here in the university to study philosophy. Why are you wasting your time with chemistry?"
I said, "I have nothing to do with chemistry; I just want to have a clear insight into what chemistry has done, what physics has done. I don't want to go into details, I just want the essential contribution."
I was rarely in my classes, I was mostly in the library. My professors were continually saying, "What are you doing the whole day in the library? -- because so many complaints have come from the librarian that you are the first to enter the library, and you have to be almost physically taken out of the library. The whole day you are there. And not only in the philosophical department, you are roaming around the library in all the departments which have nothing to do with you."
I said to them, "It is difficult for me to explain to you, but my effort in the future is going to be to bring everything that has some truth in it into a synthetic whole and create a way of life which is inclusive of all, which is not based on arguments and contradictions, which is based on a deep insight into the essential core of all the contributions that have been made to human knowledge, to human wisdom."
They thought I would go mad -- the task I have chosen can lead anyone to madness, it is too vast. But they were not aware that madness is impossible for me, that I have left the mind far behind; I am just a watcher.
And the mind is such a delicate and complicated computer. Man has made great computers but none is yet comparable to the human mind. Just a single human mind has the capacity to contain all the libraries of the world. And just a single library -- the British Museum library -- has books, which if you go on making them like a wall, one by one, they will go three times round the earth. And that is only one big library. Moscow has the same kind of library -- perhaps bigger. Harvard has the same kind of library.
But a single human mind is capable of containing all that is written in all these books, of memorizing it. In a single brain there are more than a billion cells, and each single cell is capable of containing millions of pieces of information. Certainly one will go mad if one is not already standing out of the mind. If you have not reached the status of meditation, madness is sure. They were not wrong, but they were not aware of my efforts towards meditation.
So I was reading strange books, strange scriptures, from all over the world; yet I was only a watcher, because as far as I was concerned, I had come home. I had nothing to learn from all that reading; that reading was for a different purpose, and the purpose was to make my message universal, to make it free from local limitations.
And I am happy that I have succeeded in it completely. I don't have anything which is local. I don't have a land, a mother country. I don't have a house to live in. I don't have any place on this earth anywhere. This is a very strange situation.
I am a world citizen, but in the world I don't have even a space to stand, anywhere.
I can remain here only four or five days more; then I have to move. But perhaps that is good. What I have known through books, this way I am coming to know in reality.
I have become a universal gypsy.
Because you love me, you call me "master of masters." It is out of your love.
As far as I am concerned, I simply think of myself only an ordinary human being who was stubborn enough to remain independent, resisted all conditioning, never belonged to any religion, never belonged to any political party, never belonged to any organization, never belonged to any nation, any race.
I have tried in every possible way just to be myself, without any adjective; and that has given me so much integrity, individuality, authenticity, and the tremendous blissfulness of being fulfilled.
But it was the need of the time. After me, anybody trying to be a master will have to remember that he has to pass through all the things I have passed through; otherwise, he cannot be called a master. He will remain just localized -- a Hindu teacher, a Christian missionary, a Mohammedan priest -- but not a master of human beings as such.
After me it is going to be really difficult to be a master.
- Osho, "The Transmission of the Lamp, #37"