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Your life works to the degree you keep your agreements.

Werner Erhard

Until you've completed your relationship with your parents, all your relationships will be about your parents.

Werner Erhard

‘Bhagwan, when you were talking about Werner Erhard, the businessman who discovered that personal growth sells better than encyclopedias, you said that the business of growth is just an American name for God. The San Francisco Examiner Chronicle, reporting this, noted that you did not comment on the personal growth marketing of your own Rajneesh International Meditation University here. What is the difference and what part does the university play in the life of the commune?’ The difference is great. He was a door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias. Our university is not going door-to-door to sell anything to anybody. Our university is a well. Those who are thirsty can come and drink out of it. It is available, but we are not persuading anybody. On the contrary, I am making every effort to offend them, to make them angry, become our enemies. Do you think this is business tactics? In business, the customer is always right. Here the situation is totally different: the customer is always wrong. From whatsoever source he comes, he is always wrong—and he comes on his own, in spite of all that I go on doing continuously to prevent him from coming. Nobody in the whole world has offended so many people as I alone have done, singlehandedly. But even after all this turmoil that I create, and offensiveness and antagonism in their minds, a few daring people come. These people can be relied upon. Just their coming is significant. Certainly, my university is not part of the marketplace. Werner Erhard was part of the market world. He was taking his EST from one hotel to another hotel around the country, then outside the country. And he was neither a philosophical man, nor religious; he had registered EST as a corporation, a business corporation. He was paying income tax for all his incomes. Our university is not a business. We don’t have to pay any taxes for the university. The degrees that our university gives are of no use in the marketplace, because we don’t want our degrees to be recognized by any government or by any university or any other institution. We refuse to be recognized by them, because just the fact that we let them recognize us means they are somebody higher than us, somebody more authoritative. We don’t accept any government’s recognition, because no government is worthy of it. Our university is absolutely a free phenomenon. Those who want to come, come knowing that whatever we have to offer is of no use in the marketplace. In fact it may make their market world more difficult for them, because a person who comes here for three months or four months to do a course in the university… we are not giving him growth the way Werner Erhard was giving. He started from where you are. Our work is first to destroy whosoever you are—whosoever, without any condition. We destroy you first, dismantle you first, and unless we have deprogrammed you completely there is no growth possible. We don’t teach you any growth. To be deprogrammed… you start growing on your own accord. Werner Erhard was teaching you techniques of growth, but if you are a monster and you are being taught techniques of growth, you will become a bigger monster. Werner Erhard never offended anybody. That’s simply the way of the businessman: never offend anybody. Everybody was happy with him. The government was happy, the churches were happy, the politicians were happy—not only in this country, but in other countries too. He used to go to India to pay respect to the so-called Hindu mahatmas. Muktananda was his guru. He even went to pay his respects to Morarji Desai, when he was the prime minister of India. And by mistake he even came to me, thinking I also belong to the same category of mahatmas that he has known all his life. He must have been shocked. When he was sitting in front of me, I could see how difficult it was for him just to sit there. And when I told him he can ask anything, he simply said, ‘No, I don’t have any questions.’ Laxmi had given him my latest books, just as a present. He went into the hotel—which was not far away, just a few minutes walk—and gave those books to one sannyasin, Hridaya, without even looking at them. Some great fear must have arisen in him. Reading those books might disturb his mind. And certainly I was not the person that he had expected. I would have destroyed his whole EST first. I have to begin from scratch. First I have to demolish the old building completely, I don’t believe in renovation. Howsoever beautifully you renovate a building, it still remains the old rotten thing; just painted here and there, a little bit supported, but it is just the old rotten building that you have given a facelift. No, it is better to live in an A-frame, but new, fresh, young. Werner Erhard is a businessman, there are no two opinions about it. And nobody can compare me with Werner Erhard. Our whole approach is totally different. Our approach is first to deprogram the person completely, and then leave him alone to himself. Don’t give him another program. Leave him alone, empty, just a pure nothingness. And out of that nothingness grows everything that existence wanted to grow in that man. We bring the person close to existence, from where he has been taken away. Once we see that you are communing with existence, our work is finished. We don’t give you growth, we simply take away all nonsense that is surrounding you and which perhaps you think is growth. Growth comes of its own accord, you just have to be utterly open and vulnerable. I am not a businessman. I could have been and then I would have defeated all the businessmen in the whole world. But I have chosen to offend everybody, ready for their hostility from every nook and corner of the world. A businessman tries to be respectable, and I have been trying my whole life to be notorious. Unless you understand me, you will not be able to see why I unnecessarily create hostility in people. I am not a businessman. I have nothing to sell to them. If they are courageous enough to come nearer to me, I am going to burn their whole personality. I’m going to take their whole skin off their body and then leave them alone so they can grow fresh from the very beginning. That growth will not be in any way a credit to me. That growth will be a credit to the person who dared to come, who dared to pass through the fire, who dared to risk his whole life. The whole credit goes to him.

Osho (The Last Testament, Vol. 1)

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Create your future from your future, not your past.

Werner Erhard

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Werner Erhard: Life is a game

“Life is a game. In order to have a game, something has to be more important than something else. If what already is, is more important than what isn’t, the game is over. So, life is a game in which what isn’t, is more important than what is. Let the good times roll.” —Werner Erhard.

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#Werner Erhard

California is the peak of Western culture. People are finished with life, that’s why there are so many cults: Hare Krishna, Moonies, EST, Esalen—all kinds of strange things. You have just to be a little bold and you can make a cult out of anything. Primal therapy, or scream… Nowhere ever in the whole world was anybody so inventive as to make a scream a religion! But in California you can do anything. Hugging therapy! And people are doing it, and paying for it, for hugging therapy! Hugging strangers—you are doing the hugging and somebody else is collecting the fee. You both are giving the fee to a third person, and you are doing the work! It is really great. I was reading a news article some five, six years back. I don’t remember exactly what the therapy was called but I remember the picture that was in the magazine. It was of a naked man going on all fours with his tongue drooping out like a dog, barking. And you have to pay for it! You do the whole job… And people were getting high on it. What else to do? When you have paid two hundred and fifty dollars for being a dog and barking, then it is better to say that you ‘got it.’ Now people are tired of this too. Esalen is dying, EST is finished. EST has been trying—Werner Erhard came to see me in Poona because at that time it had started falling. In California nothing lasts more than ten years. Every fashion… these are all fashions, but no fashion can last long. So Werner Erhard was in search of something—and he found it. In the East he saw the hungry people so he brought back home the ‘Hunger Project,’ and he started claiming that within ten years there would not be a single hungry human being on the earth. People were donating, and nobody bothered to ask, ‘What are you saying? Have you calculated how many people there are? Have you calculated how many hungry people there are? Have you calculated in ten years how many more hungry people will be there? And how many collections can you have?’ But all those collections simply disappeared. Hunger is there; it has not disappeared—it has doubled! But these so-called new cultists are not any better than the politicians. Henry Kissinger was saying exactly the same thing when he was in power, that within ten years there would not be a hungry child around the globe. And nobody asks these people, ‘Now five years have passed; at least half the hungry people should have disappeared, because otherwise how, within another five years, are things going to change? Hungry people have doubled. Hunger has not disappeared; Henry Kissinger has disappeared! Who knows where this guy is? And who cares! Werner Erhard cheated people in every possible way. And the beauty of this is, you cheat people in every possible way. Werner Erhard is a Jew, but he changed his name to a German name because it would be difficult for a Jew to exploit Christians; for that a German name is far better. In some way everything imported is always better. I used to think that this stupid idea existed only in India, but that is not the case. In America nobody bothers with the American guru, but imported from India?—he must be a great guru. Of course India cannot export cars and high technology, but it can export great gurus. And it goes on exporting them—and they all end up in California. When Sheela was looking for a place for your commune, I told her, ‘Beware of California; just keep away from California.’ She said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘You don’t ask why; you just keep away. Just forget that California exists.’ I don’t want to be counted amongst Indian gurus because I am neither an Indian, nor am I a guru. But what can you do with these crackpot media people? They start calling you something and that’s what you become. Where is Werner Erhard now? With hunger disappearing has he also disappeared? Authentic people?—he left his father, mother, his wife, his children, without even telling them that he was going away. He simply escaped, moving thousands of miles away, changed his name, may have changed his hair-do, clothes, and became Werner Erhard. And his parents, his wife, his children were all dependent on him, they were starving. And he was proposing a hunger project—‘within ten years, hunger will disappear from the world.’ These people are not different from politicians—and cannot be, because this is also a power trip. Things that they are telling people not to do, they have been doing exactly those same things.

Osho (From Misery to Enlightenment)