If you want to invent a self you will have to ask others; that's the only way to invent it - to gather opinions of what people think about you. That's what we go on doing our whole lives. That's why we are so afraid of people's disrespect. That becomes our bondage. We want to be respectable, because if we are respectable then people's opinion about us is beautiful. They praise us and we can have a better self. If we are not respectable people condemn; and then you will not ever have a beautiful self, you will have an ugly self. Your self consists only of the opinions of others; it is a patchwork. A has said something, and B has said something else, and C something else, and so on, so forth. You collect all these things, these paper cuttings. Then you make an image out of them - you fix them together, you glue them together.

From the very beginning the child starts collecting this rubbish. The mother says something, the father, the brother, the neighbors: if it is gratifying he starts feeling proud, if it is not gratifying he starts feeling depressed. To avoid depression he goes on flattering everybody that he meets. The flattery is nothing but an arrangement: "I will flatter you so that you can give me a good certificate. I will flatter you more if you are willing to give me an even better certificate." But all these certificates are just from the outside, and nobody knows you, who you are - not even you yourself.

So what others say about you is almost irrelevant to your reality. They only know your appearance, and appearances can be very false. The person who looks very gentle on the outside may be very egoistic inside. That gentleness may be just a camouflage, a protection, an armor. The man who looks very clever on the outside may be just the opposite - he may be utterly stupid. The stupid person has to pretend cleverness; it hurts to know, "I am stupid." The man who goes on bragging about his knowledge is bound to be ignorant. But who wants to be known as an ignorant person?

-Rajneesh

I am trying to bring order, real order. Their anger, their annoyance, is natural. If I am right, then they are wrong. And not only that they are wrong, but their whole tradition is wrong, their scriptures are wrong. They have lived up to now in illusions, without taking any note of the reality.

I am bringing a new vision, a new religion into the world - the religion which is wide enough to contain the world and God, both together, a vision big enough to contain the soul and the body both.

Up to now, the materialist was thought to be irreligious. He lived half, he lived the body part; and the spiritualist lived the other half, the soul part. And both were ugly, because both were incomplete.

Both had wounds because both needed the other to be whole and the other was missing. Both were unbalanced, both were neurotic.

Man can become sane only when man becomes whole. How to make man a perfect circle, a wholeness? The only way is to bring materialism and spiritualism closer and closer, so close that their boundaries disappear, that matter becomes divine, that God becomes matter. In that state only will man be able to be sane.

-Rajneesh

I am not creating disorder. The society is in disorder. The society is already dying, it is rotten. You have become accustomed to its rottenness; that's why you can't see it. Just look around. What kind of society is this? Everybody is against everybody else; everybody is at each others' throats.

Everybody is jealous, violent, angry, full of hatred. Everybody is trying to dominate and kill the other in some way or other. And everybody is suicidal. Nobody seems to be dancing with joy, nobody seems to be in a state of celebration.

What more disorder can there be? The whole country is suffering from violence, hooliganism, murders; the whole country is in chaos. And these people think that I will destroy the order of the society I am trying to bring real order. The real order comes from the within; it comes out of understanding.

The real discipline is not that which is imposed from the outside.

-Rajneesh

Bring earth and heaven closer; let God and his world be joined together. Let your body and your soul be one - a song sung in togetherness, a dance where body and soul meet and merge.

I am a materialist-spiritualist. That is their trouble: they cannot conceive of it. They have always thought that materialism is something diametrically against, opposite to spiritualism, and I am trying to bring them closer. In fact, that's how it is. Your body is not opposed to your soul; otherwise why should they be together? And God is not opposed to the world; otherwise why should he create it?

There is tremendous harmony between the creator and his creation. In fact, when you attain to the space in which I am, you will see the creator has become his creation, he is not separate at all.

He has become the trees and the birds and the animals and the mountains and the rivers and the people: God has become his world.

This is my fundamental: that I am in tremendous love with existence, because it is God's manifestation, in all its forms. There is nothing lower and nothing higher, all is one. And the "lower" and the "higher" have to be bridged because, down the centuries, you have been taught that the "lower" is far away from the "higher", so they have become unbridged. A gap has come into your being; that gap has to be bridged.

-Rajneesh

To me, the brahmin and the untouchable are the same. I don't believe in any castes. I don't believe in any distinctions between people - black and white, Hindu and Mohammedan, Christian and Jew.

And that is creating great turmoil in their minds. What am I doing? It seems blasphemous; it seems that I am betraying their tradition.

I am not betraying their tradition; I am simply destroying it! It needs to be burned, it needs to be thrown to the dogs, this whole tradition.

-Rajneesh