Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 8. HE ALONE WINS WHO DOES NOT WANT TO WIN
It is strange but significant that Ravana feels grateful to Rama after being killed at his hands on the
battlefield, and he thanks him profusely from his deathbed. Similarly, all those who were killed by
Krishna felt grateful to him. This feeling of gratitude arose from the very depth of their souls, because
they felt free of a prison whose walls were as strong as granite, and they also felt they could begin
their journey afresh, from abe. But to us it appears that they are simply finished. If you want to know
my view about it, I will say that Krishna gave them a fresh opportunity to begin their life anew, and
live it in a right way. He gave them a clean slate to write on.
In Krishna’s view, in my view, nobody dies; there is no way to die. Death is a lie. It does not mean
that you should go on a killing spree and kill people with abandon. Of course, the day you come
to know that no one dies, you will acquire the right to kill, because then killing will have altogether
a different meaning. But then you, on your part, should have the readiness to die, because this
readiness alone will prove that you really know that death is a misnomer and that nobody really dies.
Krishna has this readiness in full measure. Every now and then he enters the den of death with a
smile on his face. That is the only test. He is yet a child, and he fights and wrestles with a terrible
snake known as Kalia. As a child he fights with the most powerful demons. What does it all mean?
It means that no one dies and that death is a lie, an illusion. It means that although death has an
appearance, it has no reality. And if we know that death is a lie then we can realize the need to
change our bodies.
Try to understand it in another way. If somebody’s kidney fails to function, the surgeon transplants
another kidney in its place, and we don’t object to it. But in a way your body has been changed.
Your lungs go out of order and are replaced by lungs of plastic; that too amounts to a partial change
of the body. At the moment we change the body in parts, but very soon we will be able to change
the whole of the body. There will be no difficulty. Up to now it has been the job of nature to change
our bodies, but now science is taking over from nature. Science had not developed so much in the
times of Krishna, so he had to kill a wicked person and ask nature to provide him with a new body
so that he could begin his life afresh. In the future, however, it will be quite possible to change the
whole body of a seasoned criminal who refuses to change his ways in any other way. We will not
punish him, we will simply change his whole physical frame. It will be done in a laboratory for human
beings. And then we will understand Krishna fully. At the moment we don’t have the full facts in our
hands.
Therefore, I do not accept the allegation that Krishna destroyed the wicked; he just transformed
them. In other words, Krishna started them on a new journey of transformation. He sent them back
to the workshop of nature with a request to remake them with new bodies, new eyes and new minds,
so that they could begin life once again from the beginning.
Question 5
QUESTIONER: DO YOU THINK THAT THE PAST CONDITIONING OF THE SUBTLE BODY AND
ITS MIND CHANGES WITH THE CHANGE OF THE GROSS BODY?
They don’t change on their own, but It makes a great difference if one has the rare opportunity of
dying at the hands of a person like Krishna. And this opportunity comes once in a long while as a
result of great meritorious karmas.
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 148 Osho