Question – What has grown around you has been presented by newspaper as a cult, as a sect, and I wonder if you can now explain what it is and what is the function of sannyasins in this movement.
Osho – It is simply a movement, neither a cult nor a sect nor a religion but a movement for meditation, an effort to create a science of the inner. It is a science of consciousness. Just as the science is there for objective world, this movement is preparing a science for the subjective world. The scientist will study everything, and we are going to study the scientist.
Otherwise he will be left alone. He will be able to know everything except himself, and that will be real shame, that Albert Einstein knows so much about electrons and neutrons and protons that only twelve persons in the whole world can understand it, but he knows nothing about himself. This is a very ugly state.
So my work is a movement not to create a religion but to create religiousness. I take religiousness as a quality, not as a membership of an organization but an inner experience of one’s being. And it is going to happen. It is happening. Now nobody can call my movement a cult, sect or religion. My movement is purely a scientific approach towards the inner world. And it is individual.
The question arises, then why so many sannyasins are together? To be together does not mean that you lose your individuality. You can be together in many ways. You can be together as friends, because you are working in the same dimension. You can be together because your search makes you understand each other better than anybody else. But you are not part of any organization. Hence I have called it a mystery school where you learn meditation.
And if you feel that your meditation grows in this togetherness, be here. If you feel you can manage it alone in a better way, then that is perfectly good. You can do it anywhere else. So there is no binding, there is no expectation, there is no imposition. Only I am available here. If you ask for help, if you ask for some problems that you are facing which I have faced… dark nights that will come on the way which I have passed… I can encourage you.
That’s the real function of a friend, to help you, to encourage you to be yourself. So everybody is independent and yet deeply connected with love, with the same search for truth, with the same inquiry. And with the same experience ripening on different levels, different stages to different people. But it is not an organization and you don’t become a Rajneeshee like a Christian or a Catholic. You remain simply yourself, just the way I remain simply myself. So this place is to give you freedom and help you to experience the summum bonum of life, the ultimate peak of blissfulness. Okay Videha?
Source: from Osho Book “The Last Testament Volume4”
