From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 5. ECSTASY IS NOW – WHY WAIT?
The answer is simple: because they renounced the kingdom, the greatest reward has to be theirs.
A poor man can renounce whatsoever he has – but what has he? He cannot become a tirthankara,
the suprememost Master. Even in paradise he will be living somewhere outside the town. He won’t
get in because they will ask him, ”What have you renounced? In the first place what have you got to
renounce?”
So of course the kings will be very close to the palace of God; then will come the richest, the superrich
people; then the middle class people; then the lowest strata and then will come those who had
nothing to renounce – they were already without anything. In fact they should be by the side of God
already because they don’t have anything. But they will be outside the boundary lines of paradise;
they will not be able to show what their bank balance is in the other world.
All the Hindu avataras are kings: Rama, Krishna... Buddha is a king. It is strange that these people
are drawn only from kings, but if you understand the structure, the strategy of the priest, it is clear:
they have renounced the most, naturally they are promised the most. Nobody knows whether they
get anything after death or not, but the idea became so ingrained for the simple reason that it has a
grain of truth in it: in this life everything is momentary.
To me, nothing is wrong if it is momentary. In fact, because it is momentary it is so exciting, so
ecstatic. Make it permanent, and it will be dead.
In the morning, the rose flower opens up, so fresh, with fresh dewdrops still on its petals, so fragrant.
You cannot conceive that just by the evening these petals will be falling into dust, and the rose will
disappear.
You would like it to remain permanent, but then you need a plastic flower; a real flower won’t do.
A real flower has to be momentary. To be real it has to be momentary; only plastic things can be
permanent.
Plastic is a new discovery. It was not known to Buddha, Mahavira, Mohammed, Jesus, but I can say
to you that paradise must be made of plastic.
If there is any paradise, it cannot be anything but plastic, because plastic has the quality of not dying,
it is deathless.
Now scientists are worried – particularly the environmentalists are very worried – because plastic
is so cheap that you go on disposing of it. Glass was not so cheap; you were saving the bottles
or returning the bottles and getting your deposit back. Plastic is so cheap that everything made of
plastic is disposable: use it once and dispose of it. But you don’t know where it is going. It is getting
collected in the oceans, in the riverbeds, in the lakes under the earth, and there is no way for nature
to dissolve it because nature is not prepared, was not made to absorb plastic.
If God has made this world, he certainly is not all-knowing. At least one thing he did not know: that
plastic was going to happen one day. He has not made anything in nature, any chemicals, which can
dissolve plastic, so plastic goes on accumulating. Soon it will have accumulated so much that it will
destroy the fertility of the earth, it will poison the waters. Nothing can destroy it, and it will destroy
everything.
From Ignorance to Innocence 59 Osho