(Interview With Marianne Heuwagen, Suddeutsch Zeitung, Germany)
Question: Why did you enter your long stretch of silence and why did you break out of it at this point in time?
Osho: I have never lived with any plan in my life. It has been something spontaneous, moment to moment. As I feel, I do it. I felt to be silent, I went into silence. I may have remained my whole life silent. There is no way to say why I started speaking again. The same spontaneity. Three and a half years silence and suddenly one day I felt that much has remained to say. I have not yet said that for which I am here. So better say it now, because who knows about tomorrow?
But it is all spontaneous. There is no reason of going into silence or coming out of silence. But those three and half years created a beautiful gap.
I was speaking for thirty years continuously. I think I deserve at least three years silence after thirty years continuously speaking.
And those thirty years I was speaking in a very strange situation, because humanity is divided. Every person is born in some religion. I had to say something. I had discovered something within myself but I could not see that it fits with any traditional, conventional, religion.
But everybody is already part of a conventional religion. Who is going to listen to me?
Hence, as a device, I started speaking on Gautam Buddha. I was speaking my own experience. The name of Gautam Buddha and his words was just an excuse. But Buddhists started listening. Even great Buddhist scholars came to me and said, "We have never thought that these simple statements of Gautam Buddha contain so much."
And I was laughing within, because they don't contain anything. I have used them and made them to mean whatsoever I wanted to mean them.
I have found the way how to catch people. I was speaking on Krishna, I was speaking on Mahavira, I was speaking on Jesus. I spoke almost on all the religions for thirty years, and slowly slowly people who became more and more intimate to me begin to see the device, that I am saying something which is not there in those old scriptures. I had to use those old scriptures, because without that screen it is very difficult to find people to listen.
And soon these people became available to me. Then I started having my own individual camps where I was speaking directly, with nobody in between. And that's when I started initiating people into sannyas.
Sannyas was simply that they are now ready to listen me without any device. They are willing to open their heart. That much trust has grown in them.
These three and half years silence has given me another opportunity that is just a byproduct. The silence was not meant for it.
There were many people who were just hanging around me because of their intellects were convinced. My arguments were important to them although I was insisting that truth cannot be found by arguments. But they became addicted with my words, with my explanations. These three and half years, by and by they left, seeing that now I am not going to speak and silence they could not understand.
Only those remained for whom it did not matter at all whether I speak or I am silent. Just my presence, and something transpires between my being and their being. It is a wordless communion.
Now I am speaking exactly the purest truth possible, as pure as it can be put into words, because now the people who are around me can even understand my silence. So there is no question of misunderstanding my words. That is impossible.
So a totally new phase.
And I have experienced so much that to die without conveying it in some way or other will be a shame.
Question: Is your conveying what you have experienced also the reason why you are so available to the media nowadays?
Osho: Yes, because there are millions of people around the world who may not ever come in contact with me. But through the media many of them may get some glimpse. Few of them may even come.
And my message is not limited to any particular group of people. It is for all human beings as such.
So I wanted to reach to all the nooks and corners of the world. And I am a contemporary man, so no need for me to go everywhere when media can take the message. That is far more easier.
-Osho, "The Last Testament, Vol 4, #4"