From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 15. THEY SAY BELIEVE; I SAY EXPLORE
health. Strange... when he was in power, so burdened with so many anxieties and tensions, he was
physically perfect.
The moment power is gone, all the anxieties are also gone; now, they will be somebody else’s
business. His psyche is unburdened, but in that unburdening all his sickness falls on his body.
The politician suffers, as far as his physiology is concerned, only when he loses power; otherwise
politicians tend to live long, physically well. Strange, but the reason is that their whole sickness is
taken by their psyche, and when the psyche takes on the whole sickness, then the body can live
unburdened. But if the psyche releases all its sickness, where is it going to go? Lower than the
psychic is your physical existence – all sickness falls on the body. Politicians out of power die very
soon. Politicians in power live very long. It is a known fact, but the cause is not well known.
So the first thing to be understood is that the political man is psychologically sick, and psychological
sickness tends to become spiritual sickness when it becomes too much, when the psyche cannot
hold it any more. Now, be careful: if the politician is in power, then his psychic sickness is bound
to spread to his spiritual being, because he is holding his psychic sickness, so it does not fall
downwards. It is his power, he thinks it is his treasure; he won’t allow it to fall down.
I am calling it sickness. To him it is his whole ego trip. He is living for it; there is no other purpose for
him. So when he is in power he holds his sickness tightly, but he does not know anything about the
spiritual realm, so those doors are open. He cannot close those doors; he has no idea that there is
something more than his mind. When he is in power, his psychological sickness, if it is too much,
after a certain point overflows his psyche and reaches to his spirituality. If he is out of power then he
tends not to hold all that stupidity. Now he knows what it was, now he is aware that it was nothing
worth holding. And anyway there is nothing to hold; the power is gone, he is a nobody.
Out of desperation, he relaxes – perhaps I should say, relaxation comes to him automatically. He
can sleep now, he can go for a morning walk. He can gossip, he can play chess, he can do anything.
Psychically he finds himself loosening. The doors that he had kept closed between his psyche and
the body start opening, and his body is bound to suffer now: he may have a heart attack, he may
get any kind of sickness; everything is possible. His psychic sickness will flow to the weakest part of
his body. But in power it flows upwards, towards his being, of which he is unaware.
And what is the sickness?
The sickness is the inferiority complex.
Anybody who is interested in power is suffering from an inferiority complex; deep down he feels
himself worthless, inferior to others.
And certainly in many ways everybody is inferior You are not a Yehudi Menuhin, but there is no need
to feel inferior because you never tried to be, and it is not your business. Yehudi Menuhin is not you
either; so what is the problem? – where is the conflict?
But the political mind suffers from a wound of inferiority, and the politician goes on scratching the
wound. Intellectually he is not an Albert Einstein – he compares himself with giants – psychologically
From Ignorance to Innocence 197 Osho