Thinking Is Dangerous
Osho
Waking Times
Thoughts are always subversive. Only people who do not think are not subversive. Thinking is a crime. Jesus is crucified, Socrates is poisoned, Gautam Buddha is stoned. These people have not harmed anybody. They were the most loving, most compassionate human beings possible — but they committed a crime, and the crime’s name is thinking.
No society wants any of its members to think. Thinking is dangerous. The society wants robots who simply do whatever is told to them, who cannot say no — that is impossible for them. They are machines. It is not accidental that every developed society is replacing man by machines. Machines are obedient, never subversive. Have you ever heard of any machine being a revolutionary or a rebel? It has not happened up to now that we had to crucify a machine.
Machines are very respectable people. I am not a machine. And there is no way of thinking, other than being subversive. Thinking means you doubt; thinking means you are not ready to accept what is being told to you. You want to decide on your own. Thinking means to be rational, to be logical; and humanity up to now has been superstitious…
Yes, I am subversive. And only the subversive people are responsible for all the progress of the world. Whatever you have — all civilization, all scientific growth, all technology — is the contribution of subversive people. It is not the contribution of the superstitious.
So I am happy to declare that I am subversive, absolutely subversive. To belong to that category is a great honor. Jesus Christ belongs to it, Socrates belongs to it, Galileo belongs to it, Gautam Buddha belongs to it. These are the real human beings. Others are only part of the crowd, cogs in the wheel.
The society decides what is right, and they never question. The society decides what is wrong, and they never question. What is the difference between animals and man? Each human being has to be subversive if he wants to be a human being. That’s the definition given by Aristotle: man is a thinking animal. Thinking is equivalent to subversiveness…
Socrates lived a long life; then they poisoned him. Jesus preached for three years continuously, and then they crucified him. I was only in Greece for two weeks when they arrested me. And they threatened that they would burn the house, dynamite the house, if I didn’t leave the house immediately. These are the same people who had poisoned Socrates two thousand years before…
Do you think crucifying Jesus was the answer? The crucifixion created Christianity. Was poisoning Socrates the answer? Nobody is respected more in the whole history of Greece than Socrates. People have completely forgotten the names of those who had decided to poison him. But Socrates’ name will remain immortal as long as human beings are on the earth…
It seems that there has been a conspiracy, going on for centuries, of mediocre people against the genius. And of course the mediocre people are in the majority — they have all the power. They have the government, they have the military, they have the police, they have the nuclear weapons.
The genius has nothing except his intelligence, and intelligence is basically revolutionary; it cannot be otherwise. Its very quality, its intrinsic quality, is rebellion — rebellion against darkness, rebellion against untruth, rebellion against slavery, rebellion against everything that prevents man from becoming his total, grown-up self.
Osho – The Path Of the Mystic, chp 1
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