From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 2. THE OTHER CHEEK: THE MASOCHIST’S SLAP-UP FEAST
putting mud packs on her stomach, on her head, on her back. I said,’ What is going on? Continually
– twenty-four hours a day? Millions of people are moving around but nobody is doing these things
that you go on doing.” So while I was in the house I would take away her mud packs, ice cold packs,
hot packs – but the moment I would leave the house, because I had to go to the university she would
immediately try to do her thing.
For two years I had to go out of Jabalpur for my M.A. degree. In those two years she killed herself –
not even two years, just one year it took. I had not even completed my course there: after just nine
or ten months I was informed that she had gone mad and that now she was hospitalized. I went to
see her; she could not even recognize me. And it was her doing I told her husband, ”You see now.
You were also supporting her. And you were all against me, saying that I was taking her instruments
and things, and she was trying to find them in different places....” She had different kinds of mud
from different mines. She would go miles to find a special kind of mud. ”You would tell me,’You throw
them all out, and this is not good.’ For just nine months I was away, and she went mad. The doctors
said that she couldn’t survive; she had destroyed her whole system.”
In India naturopathy became associated with yoga, naturally, because that is a traditional thing. So
to clean yourself... now what uncleanliness is there? And if you are really going to clean yourself,
you are going to die because then everything is unclean. Inside there is blood and mucus and meat,
flesh, this and that; everything is unclean – so clean yourself!
She was continually cleaning herself. You can clean your lower intestines with an enema, but you
cannot clean the upper part with an enema. Yoga has a method for it: you swallow a thirty-foot-long
cloth just like a thin rope. You go on swallowing it so it goes inside you – it is thirty foot long so it is
going to go right inside – and then leave it as long as you can. Then take it out so it brings all the
mucus and anything that is impure inside. I was preventing her from doing this, but once I was gone
she was completely free, so she cleaned herself... and died. Then I told her husband, ”Now you
clean yourself and follow her.”
Other people will find macrobiotics.... You just eat rice; that rice is the only right thing. These
people are basically finding some way that they can convince themselves that they are not torturing
themselves but that they are doing something good to themselves.
I told you that these people like Adolf Hitler – these are sadists. Then there are masochists.
Masochists don’t do much harm, they only do harm to themselves. Sadists do tremendous harm
because their joy is in torturing others. But the greatest harm is done by sado-masochists.
Mahatma Gandhi is a sado-masochist. First he tortures himself; that torturing himself gives him the
authority to torture you. He knows the path, he knows the way: he has done it all. He was also a
faddist about naturopathy and mud packs and enemas, and only eating this and not eating that....
And the same fads had to be followed by everybody. Of course he was far ahead of the disciples, so
he had the authority. The disciples knew that they had limitations, but they would do the best they
could. The master of course is the master.
I have no philosophy of non-violence, but I have a way of life which you can call reverence for life.
And this is a totally different perspective.
From Ignorance to Innocence 23 Osho