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Question 1
OSHO,
WHAT PLACE HAS MYSTICISM IN YOUR RELIGION?
My religion is pure mysticism.
There is nothing else in it.
The other religions have no place for mysticism in them. They cannot have, for the simple reason that they have answers for every question -- bogus answers, without any evidence, with no argument. But for the gullible humanity they are consoling. They demystify existence.
All knowledge demystifies existence.
I don't teach you knowledgeability.
On the other hand all the religions do just that: they make you knowledgeable. They have a God as the creator. They have messengers of God bringing all the answers from the original source, indubitable, infallible.
These religions could exploit humanity for a simple reason: man feels a kind of inner unease when there are questions and there is no way to find the answer. Questions are there -- man is born with questions, with a big question mark in his heart -- and it is good.
It is fortunate that man is born with a question mark, otherwise he would be just another species of animal. Buffaloes have no questions -- they accept whatever is, unquestioningly -- they are really faithful, religious. Trees have no questions, birds have no questions; it is only man and man's prerogative, his privilege. In the whole of existence he alone is capable of asking a question.
The old religions have been trying to destroy your privilege. They have been forcing you down to the level of the animals. That's what they call faith: "undoubting faith." They want you to be buffaloes, donkeys, but not men -- because man's only special quality that defines him as separate from animalhood is the question mark. Yes, it is a turmoil. Certainly to live without any questions is peaceful, but that peace is a dead peace, it has no life in it. That silence is the silence of a cemetery, of the graveyard.
I would prefer man to be in a turmoil, but alive.
I would not like him to become a graveyard. That peace, that silence is at a great cost: you are losing your life, you are losing your intelligence, you are losing all possibility of discovering an ecstatic
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