Osho on Adolf Hitler and Self consciousness

 

 

Adolf Hitler killed millions of people, and those who have looked deeply into his mind are all convinced of one fact: that he was very much afraid of death. He was afraid of death, so much so that he never allowed anybody to be in his room in the night, not even the woman that he had fallen in love with once. Nobody was ever allowed to stay in the same room. He would lock the room, check everything, because while he was asleep somebody could kill him. Who knows? -- the woman he had fallen in love with may be just a spy. He never allowed anybody to come close to him, too close, he was so much afraid.

 

He got married only three hours before he was going to commit suicide; there was not even a chance for the honeymoon. In fact that was his honeymoon -- suicide. In the middle of the night the priest was called to marry him to the woman he had been in a kind of relationship with -- it could not have been of love, because a man like Hitler cannot love. They were married, and the next thing they did after marriage was that they killed themselves. Now there was no fear, he could allow the woman to come close -- he was going to commit suicide anyway. All was lost, the game was lost, the enemy had entered into the capital. He could hear the bombs exploding just close by; now there was no hope, he had failed. Now he could get married. For what? For twenty years he had been waiting, for twenty years the woman had been waiting, but he was so afraid of bringing anybody too close.

 

This man killed millions of people for stupid reasons. He killed Jews, MILLIONS of Jews, with this stupid idea: that it was because of the Jews that Germany -- the race, the country, the nation -- had fallen low; because of Jews the First World War had been lost. Now these are all stupid reasons, with no logic, no relevance. Jews had nothing to do with the First World War, they had nothing to do with the fall of the German race. Really, they had given the greatest geniuses that Germany has ever known: Karl Marx was a Jew, Sigmund Freud was a Jew, Albert Einstein was a Jew. In fact it was the Jews who were the cream, but he killed millions of Jews.

 

Deep down, it seems he was suffering from an inferiority complex. And deep down he was suffering from so much fear of death that he wanted to kill to convince himself that "If I kill so many people, if I can kill millions of people, then I am beyond death. I am so powerful."

 

A man who is afraid of death is dangerous, dangerous to himself and to others. And the fear arises out of a very fallacious beginning; the fallacy is that we think we are separate. But consciousness has that possibility. Man has been given such a potential power of being conscious that he has to be very careful how he uses it. Remember, if you move on plain ground there is no danger of falling; if you move in the mountains, if you go towards the peaks, there is great danger of falling. The higher you move, the danger becomes

 

more and more acute. Man is the only animal who is moving higher, at the peaks, towards the peaks. Consciousness is the mountain and we have to be very alert.

 

And that is the whole teaching of all the Buddhas and all the Krishnas and all the Christs, and that is the teaching of Kabir: be conscious, be so conscious that you don't create the self, be so alert that the self is not created at all. Self-consciousness is a dis-ease. Just consciousness is great freedom, liberation. By being just conscious, sooner or later you will become God-conscious. By becoming self-conscious, sooner or later you will lose even that small consciousness that lingers behind the self like a small tail; that consciousness will also disappear.

 

The ego will make you more and more unconscious. The ego will enclose you like a prison wall. It will not leave even windows in your being to look out through. It will make you a monad, a windowless, closed cell; you will be encapsulated by the ego. It is the ego that is the problem.

 

And hence I repeat again: the male mind is egoistic. You have to learn the way of the feminine, you have to become egoless, you have to learn the path of surrender. You have to learn how to melt into existence, how to become one with the rivers and the mountains and the clouds, how to feel affinity, attunement, at-onement. And then slowly, slowly you become a host. The day you are a host, the Guest comes.

 

God is not a hypothesis; religion does not propose any hypotheses. The hypothesis is part of the scientific world. A hypothesis means just an assumption to explain a few facts which cannot be explained without it. But a hypothesis is. always temporary: tomorrow we will find a better hypothesis, then we will discard this one. Hence science goes on discarding every day; better and better hypotheses are found and older ones are discarded. Now Newton is discarded because of Einstein, Sooner or later we will find a better hypothesis to explain the facts of the world. A hypothesis is just a way of explaining the facts; it is man-made. Facts are there and the mind wants to fix all those facts into a certain system because unless they are put into a certain system the mind feels uneasy, restless. Unless they are systematized, categorized, the mind feels very restless.

 

The mind is a great systematizer, it wants to systematize everything. Even when there is no system available, it invents one. The hypothesis is an invention of the mind, but all the time you know that it is only an assumption. You need not believe in a hypothesis, you only use the hypothesis.

 

God is not a hypothesis.

 

Then what is God? God is a hypostasis; it is an experience. It is not to explain anything, it is the experience of the unexplainable. I call it hypostasis; it cannot be changed, it is absolute, and it is not a belief. Those who believe in God, their God is a hypothesis; those who know God, their God is not a hypothesis but a hypostasis.

 

-Osho, "The Guest, #1"