Question :

Osho,

It seems that politicians talk like priests, and priests act like politicians. is there any separation between church and state?

 

 

They are not different people. They are the same type of people, with the same desire, the same lust for power. But they have chosen different areas.

 

The politician has chosen the mundane world. It has been an unspoken contract that he will not interfere in the religious realm and he hopes that religion will not interfere in his world. The contract has been good, and they both are trying to dominate humanity. One is concerned with the outside world, the other is concerned with the inside world. Their worlds don't overlap, so there is no conflict. In fact, throughout history they have been supporting each other. The priest has been blessing the politicians, the politicians have been praising the priests; and sometimes the situation becomes so ridiculous, unbelievable.

 

In the second world war, the German Christian archbishop was blessing Adolf Hitler and praying to God that Germany wins. And the same religion in England and the same kind of archbishop was praying for England, wanting victory for England and defeat for Germany. Their God is one, their religion is one, but the problem is that the German priest has a contract with the German politician and the English priest has a contract with the English politicians. Who bothers about God?

 

In fact, the priests are the most atheistic people in the world. They know perfectly well that there is no God. They know better than anybody, because that is their business. But they have to pretend that there is God. Without God they lose authority. It is in the name of God that they are archbishops, popes and shankaracharyas. If there is no God, then who are they? -- just ordinary people, suddenly reduced to nothing. So the lie has to be kept alive.

 

You can see in such situations that both archbishops know perfectly well that God is not the question. And nobody is bothered about God; the question is politics. Otherwise, they should have refused. Both should have said, "How can we ask for the victory of Germany or England? Our God is one. Our prayers will be so contradictory. Our religion is one, our foundation is one, our churches are one, our master Jesus Christ is one. How can we do what you are asking us?"

 

But nobody raised the question. They did it because neither God nor Jesus Christ means anything. What means something is your vested interest. The German archbishop has his vested interest in Germany, not in England. He has to support Adolf Hitler. The English archbishop has to support England and its politicians.

 

And these people go on paying their tribute in return.

 

The archbishop of England will crown the king. Just a formality, but at least in the eyes of the mediocre crowds he is more powerful because he crowns the king -- he is a kingmaker. He knows perfectly well that the king can throw him out any moment; he needs the king's support. And the support is given because the king needs the support of the priest. The masses believe in God. The masses believe in the bishop. The masses go to the church. If the king wants to remain a king, then there has to be a mutual contract between the priest and the king.

 

And this has been the same all along. Political ideologies have changed -- kings and queens have disappeared, presidents, prime ministers have appeared -- but the basic contract is still carried. The American president before taking the oath of the president goes to the chief priest to be blessed. After his blessing, he will take an oath in the name of God and become the president of the country. In this way he is politically powerful and he has the support of the religious masses. But the poor people don't have any idea what kind of contract has been going on down the ages, that this contract is possible because both priest and politician are desirous of power. Lust for power is their common ground, and it is easier to divide so that they don't conflict, since that conflict may destroy the possibility of being in power for both.

 

For example, in India, things have been very clear. For five thousand years the politician and the priest have been in the same business. In India Hinduism divided the society into four classes. The first class is of the brahmins, the priests.

 

They are the highest people. They own nothing. Brahmins are poor, but the ego is tremendously fulfilled -- they are the highest people. Even the king is lower because kings belong to the second category of people, the warriors, the kshatriyas. They have all the power, all the money, but they accept the priest as higher than themselves. They go and touch the feet of the priest because this way the masses who are following the priests and the religion are for the king. What humility, what humbleness! -- and it is sheer politics.

 

The third class is that of the businessman. The brahmin is poor because whatsoever he does cannot create wealth. He prays for people, arranges marriage. From birth to death, he does every kind of ritual; that is his profession, but out of that he cannot become rich. Poor people are all around. How much can you exploit them? They have been sucked for centuries, and the brahmin is only a parasite. But the poor masses don't have blood anymore.

 

So the third position in the society is given to the businessman, who is the richest -- richer than the warriors, richer than the brahmins. Because of his richness, he is accepted as just below the kings. In India, kings have been borrowing money from businessmen. There were no banks in the past; the business people had all the money. They were providing kingdoms with all the money they needed, on loan, on rent, on interest. The king needs money for the army, for new invasions; the king needs money for all his glory and show, marble palaces, golden thrones.

 

From where is he going to get it? The poor brahmin cannot give it to him; the poor brahmin is used as the support for the masses. Businessmen cannot be used for that purpose, because the masses are poor, and are always against the rich.

 

Even ten thousand years before Karl Marx, the poor was always the communist.

 

He may not know the word, but he can see that he is being exploited. He works hard from morning till evening. He works the whole year, and then too he is hungry. He produces everything, but everything is taken away by the businessman who has provided him with seeds. The businessman gave him money for his daughter's marriage. So all the poor people are in debt to the businessman; they cannot revolt, but they cannot love the rich man either. They can see what is happening. They are not blind.

 

The poor people are the fourth class, the lowest. And there is a good arrangement: no movement is possible from one class into another. The lowest, the fourth class -- the sudras, untouchables -- is prohibited from education, because with education he may start having ambitions. Then why should he go on cleaning people's toilets when he can become a teacher in a school? If he is well qualified to be a professor in the university, then why he should go on making shoes for people? It is better to prohibit him from the very beginning, so sudras are prohibited from education.

 

This fourth class is the biggest class, half of the whole population. They cannot marry into higher castes; they cannot sit on the same platform with higher class people. Even their shadows are dirty. If an untouchable passes by your side and his shadow touches you -- just his shadow touches you, not him -- you have to take a bath. He is reduced into an almost inhuman being. He supplies everything, he produces everything; he weaves the cloth, he makes the shoes, he cleans your streets. He does every kind of work that is needed by all these three classes.

 

The businessman is the mediator. He exploits, he accumulates money. He is happy, although he is third in the position. He can purchase the king, he can purchase the brahmin; who bothers that he is third grade? He knows perfectly well that money is the highest power. The king is indebted to him and the priest has to depend on him, so deep down he is absolutely contented. He is really on the top, but let others enjoy the idea that they are on the top. What does it matter? What matters is reality.

 

The poor brahmin is contented although he is poor; he is contented because he is the highest class. His ego is fulfilled. The king does not care about the priest because the sword is in his hand. He can make the priest do anything he wants.

 

It is just courtesy that he touches the feet; otherwise, he can cut off his head. The brahmin also knows it.

 

The king is not worried that he is second class even though he is king. He knows that it does not matter what class you put him in; he is the master. He can kill the priest. He can take all the money from the business people. It is just courtesy that he takes it on interest. And he never pays it; no king has ever paid back. There is no need. You cannot ask -- he has all power in his sword. For centuries he has been taking money and never paying it back, so whatever interest you want, he is willing to give. He is going to give neither the original money nor the interest.

 

Nobody has ever done that; it is just not done.

 

But the businessman can enjoy the idea that the king is indebted to him. Without him he cannot rule the empire. It is his money and his power, and naturally he takes advantage of it. Licenses will be given to him, he will have first chance in every opportunity, because the king depends on him for money. It is a beautiful and very psychological arrangement that all feel great, all feel on the top.

 

The sudra, who is the fourth, also feels deep down that without him the society will die. He is the producer of food, of clothes, of everything. So let these idiots think that they are on the top, but they are all dependent on him. They eat the food he grows, they live in the houses he makes, they wear the clothes he weaves. Without him, the businessman, the king, the priest -- all will have to commit suicide. So he may be poor, he may be dehumanized in every way, but he understands that this is all just formality. It makes no difference. He is the real power.

 

So everybody is deep down satisfied and that's why revolution never happened in India and cannot happen. In every country where revolution happens, it is the intelligentsia of the country which provokes it. They don't do the revolution, but they give the ideology. But in India, the brahmin is the intelligentsia. Every revolution will go against him; naturally, he cannot give the ideology of revolution. He will give ideologies that prevent any dream of revolution, of change. Of course, the king, the warriors, cannot be in favor of revolution because it is going to be against them. They will be thrown out of their thrones.

 

The businessmen cannot be for revolution, either, because all revolutions are against the rich.

 

And the poor man cannot even imagine revolution, because he has not been allowed any kind of education. He has been prohibited from any contact with the society of the three higher classes. He lives outside the town: he cannot live inside the town. The poor people's wells are not deep, they cannot put much money into making wells. The businessmen have big, deep wells and the king has his own; but even in times when rains have not come and his wells are dry, the sudra is not allowed to take water from any other well. He may have to go ten miles to fetch water from a river.

 

He is so hungry that it is almost difficult to manage one meal a day which has no nourishment in it -- how can he think of revolution? He knows that this is his fate. He has been told and conditioned by the priest that this is his fate: "God has given you an opportunity to show your trust. This poverty is nothing, it is a question of a few years. If you can remain faithful, great is the reward." So on the one hand, the priest goes on preaching to them against any change; and on the other hand they cannot conceive of change because they are undernourished.

 

And you have to understand one thing: that the undernourished person loses intelligence. Intelligence blossoms only when you have everything that your body needs, plus something more. That plus becomes your intelligence, because intelligence is a luxury. A person who has only one meal a day has nothing, no energy left for intelligence to grow. It is the intelligentsia that creates the ideas, new philosophies, new ways of life, new dreams for the future; but that intelligentsia is already on the top. In fact, India has done something of tremendous importance: no other country has been able to maintain the status quo in such a scientific way. And you will be surprised, the man who did it was Manu. His sutras are still followed exactly after five thousand years.

 

In this century only two persons have appreciated Manu outside India. One is Friedrich Nietzsche, the other is Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was a disciple of Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche was the philosopher of Nazism. Adolf Hitler was simply practicing what Nietzsche had preached. The relationship is exactly as between Marx and Lenin. Marx was the philosopher who gave the whole ideology of communism, and Lenin put it into reality. The same was the relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler.

 

It is not a coincidence that they both should appreciate a book written five thousand years before in India. Both appreciated because they could see what a grand master-planner Manu must have been to have made a system that is still alive. He prevented revolution for five thousand years, and perhaps he may prevent it forever. There may never be a revolution in India.

 

The Communist party is one of the oldest parties in India, but it has no power because to the Indian mind it has no appeal. The brahmin is not going to listen, because the communists don't believe in God; they are irreligious people, immoral people. The warriors are not going to listen because they have power of their own; anybody who has power is not going to listen to the communists because they want to distribute power and everything equally. Now if you have power, you would not like it to be distributed equally. The only joy in having power is that you are on the top and everybody else is below you; that you have succeeded in reaching to Everest and others are far below. You cannot accept the idea of distribution of power.

 

The businessman cannot be for communists because his money will be distributed equally. And the man who could have been interested in communism, the fourth class, is so unintelligent, is so much in the grip of the priest, that you cannot convince a poor man in India that he is poor because he has been exploited. I have tried; it is impossible. He will go on saying, "No. It is my fate, my karma, and please don't say anything which disturbs me because then I will have to suffer for it. It is only a question of a few years. If I can remain faithful in God and in the priest and in the scriptures, I will be freed and I will have all enjoyments." He cannot make a revolution, because revolution may destroy his paradise. Revolution is not appealing to him because he lacks a certain intelligence.

 

For centuries he and his forefathers have been only making shoes. They have never done anything else. They are not allowed to do anything else; the system is so strict that no movement is possible. A shoemaker's son, whatsoever he wants, cannot move into another profession. He will not be accepted anywhere.

 

These politicians and priests are ambitious for power. There is another ambition - - the ambition for money, because that is also a power.

 

So there are three power lines. One is that of the priest, that he has a direct relationship with God; that he knows and you don't know; that he is wise and you are ignorant; that he is virtuous, and that is why he is born a brahmin, and you have committed sins in the past, that's why you are not in the first class.

 

Everybody according to his actions.

 

The second power line is the political power which in the past in India -- and everywhere else, too -- was the power of the sword. And third is the power of money.

 

These are the only three powers; and these three kinds of people, rather than fighting with each other, have divided their areas, which is simply intelligent.

 

They have divided their areas and they don't interfere in each other's area. The great mass which is exploited by all the three in different ways remains enslaved, goes on working for others, lives poor, dies poor, never knows anything of beauty, of music, of poetry. These things are not for the poor masses.

 

My effort is to make it absolutely clear to the intelligent people of the world that these three are criminals. Anybody who has a will to power is a criminal. That is my definition of a criminal, anyone with the will to power. And why do I say the will to power is criminal? Because will to power simply means power over others. The others have to be enslaved and exploited. The others have to be reduced into subhuman species. The others had the same potential but they are not allowed to actualize their potential.

 

Will to power means that you want to become the master and reduce others into slaves. This can be done in several ways. One is through the knowledge which the priest has. After the British raj in India, there was a great struggle because the brahmins were not ready for their scriptures to be translated into any other language. They had to remain in ancient Sanskrit, which has never been a language of the people; it was the language only of the priests. But the country was under British rule and there was no way for the priests although they tried hard, saying that their scriptures should not be translated, that they would be destroyed. But Britain was intent -- this was the oldest civilization; there may be secrets in their tremendous number of scriptures -- so they started translating them.

 

Those translations of Sanskrit literature destroyed the whole wisdom of the brahmins, because before, nobody had ever understood what they were saying.

 

Sanskrit is a beautiful language, almost poetry. It has a magical quality to it. You can sing it, and even the prose sounds like poetry. So brahmins singing it, chanting it, nobody knows the meaning. Whatever the priest wants is the meaning.

 

Sanskrit is the language of God, and only the priests understand the language. So whatever transpires between God and man has to come through the priest, the brahmin. The same was the situation in other places. Rabbis never wanted their scriptures to be translated from Hebrew into the ordinary people's language.

 

About every religion it is the same. And the reason is that those scriptures are simply nonsense -- there is nothing in them! You dig the whole mountain, and you don't find even a rat. The knowledge was bogus, pretended, and the pretense could be carried for centuries only if masses were prevented.

 

You will be surprised to know that one of the Hindu gods, Rama, an incarnation of God, poured melted burning lead into a poor man's ears because he was caught hearing the chanting of the Vedas while hiding behind the trees where a ritual of brahmins was happening. There is no question of education; even hearing was not allowed, and this was the punishment. And Rama is worshipped as an incarnation of God.

 

Gandhi prayed continuously to Rama. I am simply amazed that a man like Gandhi, who talked continuously of non-violence, was a worshipper of Rama, who is always carrying a bow and arrows -- those are his symbols. The man who was so cruel... I don't think that poor man was doing anything wrong. Just out of curiosity about what happens in religious ceremonies, he was hiding behind the trees and listening. And of course there was nothing wrong in it, he could not understand what was happening; but because he did something against the social structure, Rama made that man deaf for his whole life.

 

But still Gandhi went on chanting every morning and evening the name of Rama. That was his last word when he was assassinated: "Hey, Rama! Oh, Rama!" The last word is addressed to that man who was not non-violent, who was not even human. There is no question of his being divine.

 

This is something that the movement of sannyas has to do: to expose that these three groups, lusty for power, have been conspiring against the whole of humanity. It is time that we should understand and destroy their contract. And that can be easily done: you just have to create more and more communes where there is no lust for power, where we are not against money, we are not against clothes, we are not against anything; where we want our sannyasins to live luxuriously, comfortably -- nobody is to exploit their labor and nobody is to dominate them -- and where the plumber is as much respected as the professor, there is no distinction at all.

 

I am surprised that people who come to visit the commune cannot see the simple fact that a plumber is as much respected as a professor. In fact, nobody knows who is a plumber and who is a professor, because one day the professor is a professor and another he is a plumber. And our plumbers are not uneducated, either. They can be professors any time.

 

This is for the first time that so many people are living with human dignity and without any effort at making them equal -- because that effort is aggression. That is where I differ from communism. My difference is totally different from other people's differences. They are against communism because their vested interests will be destroyed by communism. I am against communism because it is not enough communist. It is far behind.

 

This can be easily experienced. In Russia you can see that the people's individuality has been destroyed completely. Rather than giving them freedom, they are completely enslaved; and classes have not disappeared -- just their names have changed. Now there are the people who are in power, the power elite, and the people who have no power. Russia has two classes, and movement between those two classes is as difficult as it was in India.

 

For sixty or seventy years after the revolution, most of the same group has remained in power. People went on dying, new people went on taking their places, but those new people were not from the masses. For example, when Stalin died, Khrushchev had been waiting just behind him for all those forty years, knowing that the moment Stalin died he would become the most powerful man in the world. Of course, he hated Stalin, but even to utter a single word against him.... Everybody knew that Stalin killed all competitors, simply killed them.

 

In the revolution there were many leaders. The most important was Lenin. Stalin poisoned him, but the poisoning was done so slowly that it took two years for him to die. He was sick for those two years and Stalin functioned on his behalf, managing to put his own people in all strategic positions; because once Lenin died then his second man, Trotsky, would take over. That's why Lenin was kept alive; otherwise there was no need to give him small doses, just one dose would have been enough. He was kept alive so Trotsky could not come into power. And Stalin was only a secretary, he functioned on behalf of Lenin. He saw the moment it was time. He had changed all the strategic people, and Lenin was finished. And Trotsky did not have any hope of staying alive; seeing the situation, he escaped from Russia.

 

And he did well to escape because Stalin even killed his dog, he was such a revengeful man. And finally he killed Trotsky also in Mexico. He had escaped as far away as possible, but a professional killer was sent and he was killed. The people in line were Kamenev and Zinoviev. Everybody was killed, imprisoned, sent to Siberia and nobody ever heard what happened to those people.

 

Trotsky was the most important person, but he was so sure of his importance that he never bothered what was happening behind his back. Because he had done all this, Stalin was perfectly aware that the same thing could be done to him that he has done to Lenin, to Trotsky, to Kamenev, to Zinoviev, to all the people who were important, more important than him. And Stalin put his own people in, and the distance between him and those people was great. He always kept the distance the same. Nobody could think that he was a friend. Friends are dangerous in power politics because they are too intimate, too close, and dangerous.

 

Khrushchev was just a worshipper of Stalin. The day Stalin died and Khrushchev became the prime minister, in his cabinet he exposed his mind for the first time.

 

He said, "For forty years I have been burning. I have seen Stalin do things which nobody has ever done in the whole of history." He had killed almost ten million people after the revolution. Somebody from the back asked, "If this was the case and that man was a murderer, what were you doing? Why did you not say it before?"

 

Khrushchev laughed and said, "Comrade, you just stand up so that I can see your face, and please tell what is your name." Nobody stood. He asked twice, and then he said, "Do you now understand why I was silent? Have you got my answer? If you had stood up, you would have known what would have happened to me if I had spoken a single word against Stalin." But the same did happen to him.

 

There is a company of power elites who have been running the whole show and they have all the power. They have the power of the priest because they have destroyed religion completely, there is no question of anybody being a priest.

 

They have taken that role, also. Every book is published only by the government.

 

Every newspaper, every magazine, any information that is published is published by the government. The government is doing now what the priests had been doing before. The politician has taken over the area of the priest completely; now he is doubly powerful. He decides what is right and what is wrong, and he has taken the third power also in his hands, because everything is nationalized.

 

And what does it actually mean? When things are nationalized, everything goes into the hands of the politicians: all the factories, all the fields, all the money, everything -- people included, because people are no more people, they are commodities. So in Russia something very special has happened. For the first time all three have become one. That's why Russia -- the whole country -- has become a great prison, a great concentration camp.

 

We have to create communes around the world as models where people can come and see that power is not a need at all, that you can rejoice without being powerful, that you need not enslave anybody.

 

What you try to do by enslaving somebody can be done more easily just by being friendly, just by being more loving. There is no need of creating somebody as higher and somebody as lower. Everybody who is contributing to the commune in any way -- cleaning the toilets -- is as significant as being the vice-chancellor of the university, because both are doing something essential. In fact, the vice- chancellor can go on leave and there will be no trouble, but the toilet cleaner cannot go on leave; he is more essential, more fundamentally needed. He should be given more respect, too.

 

But nobody feels any inferiority, any superiority. Nobody bothers about it. The day's work is over and everybody is enjoying dancing, singing. Professors are there, therapists are there, cleaners are there. There is no class.

 

To me this is true communism: we have not imposed any equality. Everybody is unique, nobody is equal here; yet there is a subtle current of equality which does not make you similar. It leaves you unique, and yet all inequality disappears.

 

Here nobody is a priest, or everybody is a priest. Here nobody is for power, or everybody has power, there is no problem. If somebody wants to hang around his neck, "I am the president of this universe," nobody is going to object. People will really enjoy.

 

Nobody is going to say to him, "This is not possible, you don't belong. You are claiming to be the lord of the whole universe, and you do just cleaning in the toilets." Nobody is going to say that. He can go in the toilets, go on cleaning them with his sign board hanging around his neck -- still there is no contradiction.

 

People will take it as a joke. Anybody pretending to be powerful will be taken as a joke, an entertainment; that this man has gone a little crazy.

 

-Osho, "The Last Testament Volume 2, #6"