From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 28. SCIENCE PLUS RELIGION – THE DYNAMIC FORMULA FOR THE FUTURE
He had only one friend, who was a capitalist, Friedrich Engels. And he had to be friendly towards
Engels because who was going to feed him? His obsession was to create the whole philosophy of
communism, in its entirety, so there would be no need for anybody else to add anything. He was a
Jew – and somehow it is very difficult to get rid of your conditioning. Although he became an atheist,
denied God, denied soul, a Jew is a Jew – he wanted to make communism absolutely complete.
Before the museum library was open, he was standing there at the door. The librarian would
come after him; before he came, Marx was waiting. And the whole day he was in the library. The
library would be closed, and the librarian would be persuading him, ”Now please, you stop. Come
tomorrow.”
And Marx would say, ”Just wait a few minutes more; something is still incomplete. I have to complete
this note.”
In the beginning they used to be nice to him. Finally they found this was not going to help: they had
to forcibly throw him out of the library. Four people would take him out, and he would be shouting,
”Just a few minutes more! Now, are you mad, or what? What are you doing? Tomorrow I will have
to work hours to find those few sentences that I could write just now. Just wait!”
But the library has to be closed at a certain time, and those people have to go to their homes. They
are just servants. They don’t care about your communism and what philosophy you are writing. And
you have been doing this for twenty years, thirty years, forty years! Forty years continuously! And
sometimes it used to happen that he would not eat. The food would be with him, because he used
to come with his tiffin carrier so that he did not have to go home or to a hotel and waste time.
So he would be just eating and referring to encyclopedias and books: with one hand he would be
continually writing, and with the other hand he would be eating. And sometimes he forgot to eat; and
as he became older, many times it happened that he was taken not to his home but to the hospital,
because he was found unconscious: hungry, continuously reading, writing, reading, writing.
One feels sad that nobody reads this poor Karl Marx’ book, Das Kapital – nobody! I have not come
across a single communist who has read it from the first page to the last. Perhaps I am the only
person who has read it from the first page to the last – just to see what kind of madman this Karl
Marx was. And he was certainly a madman – so obsessed with economics, with exploitation, that
he forgot the whole world.
He forgot small things. He was moving into the higher realms of mathematical theorizing, and he
forgot simple mathematics, simple economics. He was a chain-smoker; he was reading, writing –
and smoking. His wife, his physician, his friend Engels, they were all worried that this smoking would
kill him.
One day he came home with big boxes of a certain cigarette that had just come on the market. His
wife could not believe it: ”Are you going to open a shop? Are you going to sell cigarettes? So many
big boxes!”
And he was so happy. He said, ”You don’t understand. I have found this new cigarette, just
introduced on the market. And the cigarette that I was smoking was costing double. Now with
From Ignorance to Innocence 415 Osho