Terrorism simply symbolises that to destroy human beings, not matter, that there is nothing in human beings which is indestructible, that it is all matter — and you cannot kill matter, you can only change its form.

Once man is taken to be only a combination of matter, and no place is given for a spiritual being inside him, then to kill becomes just play. Terrorism has many undercurrents.

One is that because of the creation of nuclear weapons, the nations are pouring their energies into that field, thinking that the old weapons are out of date.

They are out of date, but individuals can start using them. And you cannot use nuclear weapons against individuals — that would be simply stupid. If an individual terrorist throws a bomb it does not justify that a nuclear missile should be sent. Now the governments are concentrated on destroying the old weapons, throwing them into the ocean, selling them to countries which are poor and cannot afford nuclear weapons.

And all those terrorists are coming from these poor countries — with the weapons that have been sold to their countries. And they have a strange protection: you cannot use nuclear weapons against them, you cannot throw atom bombs at them.

They can throw bombs at you and you are suddenly impotent. You have a vast amount of atomic bombs, nuclear bombs in your hands — but sometimes where a needle is useful, a sword may not be of any use. You may have the sword; that does not mean that you are necessarily in a superior position to the man who has a needle, because there are purposes in which only the needle will work — the sword will not be of any use.

Those small weapons from the old times were piling up, and the big powers had to dispose of them. They could drown them in the ocean, which meant so much money, so much manpower, so much energy would go to waste, that economically it was disastrous. But just to go on piling them up was also economically impossible.

How many weapons can you gather? There is a limit. And when you get a new way of killing people more efficiently, then the old simply has to be got rid of. It was thought that it would be better to sell them to poor countries. Poor countries cannot create nuclear weapons — it costs too much. And these weapons were coming cheap, as help.

They accepted them, but those weapons cannot be used in a war. In a war those weapons are already useless. But nobody has seen the possibility that those weapons can be used individually, and a new phenomenon — terrorism — can come out of it. Now a terrorist has a strange power, even over the greatest powers.

He can throw bombs at the White House without any fear because what you have is too big and you cannot throw it at him. And his weapons are the weapons sold by you! Terrorism is going to become bigger and bigger, because the Third World War is almost impossible. And the stupid politicians have no other alternative.

Terrorism simply means that what was being done on a social scale now has to be done individually…. If we can clean the basement of the human mind’s unconscious — and that’s what my work is. It can be cleaned away: the terrorism is not in the bombs in your hands; it is in your unconscious mind…. It seems all kinds of ignorant people have bombs in their hands and are throwing them at random. Individual violence will increase — it is increasing. And all your governments and all your religions will go on perpetuating the old strategies without understanding the new situation.

The new situation is that every human being needs to go through therapy, needs to understand his unconscious intentions, needs to go through meditation so that he can calm down, and look towards the world with a new perspective — of silence.

Osho. Abridged from Beyond Psychology, Osho Times International

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