My Message is Universal – Osho

What you talk about can mean so much to so many people. Your message has spread, it has to bring about a spiritual explosion. That seems to be the only hope there is for us today. How do you intend to let your ideas grow and spread and blossom, to flower into something more universal, more accepted, more usual? 

You are asking the impossible. My ideas are universal. That is the reason they cannot be accepted. People’s minds are not universal; they are very local. First, the nation, the religion, the language – perhaps a sect of the religion, perhaps a dialect of the local language. They are very much confined. Otherwise, Sikhs asking to have an independent country would not be possible.

On the contrary, there should be intelligent people around the world asking for one world. That is going to solve the problems. The world is already dissected into so many small parts that if you go on dissecting it more, your capacity to solve the problems becomes less and less.

So the first thing: my message is already universal – that is one of the problems. If it were Hindu, at least I would have been at ease with four hundred million Hindus. If it were Catholic, I would have been at ease with seven hundred million people. But my message is universal – neither Hindu, nor Mohammedan, nor Christian, but purely existential; not based on the past but based on my own experience.

Secondly, you are asking if I can speak, can bring my message to the people in such a way that it becomes more acceptable, that it becomes more usual. It cannot become – at least, as long as I am alive, it cannot become usual. You have so many usual doctrines, usual religions, usual ideologies.

My approach is going to remain unusual, because the usual approaches have all failed. Something unusual has to be tried.

I know you love me and you want my message to reach people, but your love is blind. You don’t see the implications of what you are saying. You are saying, “Can’t your message be more acceptable?”

That means I will have to compromise. I will have to think of the blind people all around me and adjust to their ideas. It is betraying the truth. Every compromise is a betrayal.

My message will remain universal even if I am the only person who trusts in it, because its universality does not mean numbers of followers. Its universality means that it is the foundational doctrine of existence. And I cannot conceive how it can be more acceptable.

The only way is to knock on as many doors as possible, to shout from rooftops hoping that somebody may not be deaf, somebody may not be blind. But I cannot compromise on any point, because it is not a business.

Who am I to compromise on behalf of truth? And a truth compromised becomes untruth. A truth is absolutely uncompromising.

But that has been always the case. All the masters in the past had to face it. They are always ahead of their time. It seems to be something in the very nature of life, that the people who are going to be decisive about human consciousness will always come ahead of their time – because it takes one hundred years, two hundred years for people to understand them. If they come in their own time, then by the time people have understood them, they will be out of date. They have to be ahead of their time so that by the time human mind, human consciousness reaches the point where they can be understood, their message will be available.

So the greatest work for sannyasins is to keep the message pure, unpolluted by you or by others – and wait. The future is bound to be more receptive, more welcoming. We may not be here but we can manage to change the consciousness for centuries to come.

And my interest is not only in this humanity; my interest is in humanity as such.

Keep the message pure, twenty-four carat gold. And soon those people will be coming for whom you have made a temple – although it is sad when you are making the temple; nobody comes. And when people start coming, you will not be here. But one has to understand one thing: we are part of a flowing river of consciousness.

You may not be here in this form, you may be here in another form, but keep it in mind never to ask such a question that I should be more acceptable, more respectable, more in agreement with the masses. I cannot be.

And it is not stubbornness on my part. It is just that truth cannot compromise. It has never done it; it would be the greatest sin.

-Osho

From Sermons in Stones, Discourse #12

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