Copyright 1987, 2009 OSHO International Foundation, Switzerland.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.
This book was compiled and edited as a special edition on a request by Osho.
The material in this book is selected from various talks by Osho. All of Osho s talks have been published in full as books, and all talks are available as original audio recordings.
The audio recordings and the complete text archive can be found via the online OSHO Library at
Preface
Editors note:
When Osho spoke with his secretary about creating a book from selections of his talks titled, The Greatest Challenge: The Golden Future; he gave detailed suggestions concerning subjects and issues he had spoken about that should be included. He specifically wanted the compilation to address the challenges of over-population and global warming, globalization and war, poverty and ecological devastation challenges that we face today in an increasingly urgent way. This new edition expands on the material originally presented in that publication. Here is an excerpt from the original notes given by Osho:
The future should not be just a hope and opportunity; those are just lousy words. The future should be absolutely ours it should be a golden future. We have lived with the idea of a golden past which was never golden! But we can create a future that is really golden.
Now is a great moment. We can manage to have one world. This crisis is a golden crisis, because people change only under conditions of such deep stress. As long as the situation is tolerable, people will tolerate it but now we are at a point where the situation is not tolerable. There is no more time for commissions and their reports.
The problems are very simple. It is just that it has to be made clear to the whole humanity that these problems are your creation, and you are still creating them. A great awareness has to be spread: These are the problems you are supporting. Withdraw your support.
And some practical steps should be takenfor example, if someone wants to be a world citizen, the United Nations should provide world citizen passports, not connected with any nation. Just small steps can have a large impact immediately, they will create an atmosphere. This crisis has been created by religions and nationalities, and it has come to the point where they cannot exist anymore.
If anything is to be done for the future, now is the time. Otherwise the greatest evolution of consciousness in the universe will disappear and that is not only a loss to the earth, but to the whole of existence. In a million years we have been able to create some possibility of consciousness. But now we dont have time to wait for nature to go on developing in its slow way. It has eternity, but we dont have.
If we are going to solve the future and dissolve the problems, then we have to look for the roots in the past. It is our whole past, in all its dimensions, that has brought about this dangerous situation and nobody talks about that, because no generation before this has ever bothered about the future. Man has always been living the way he wanted, and forced each new generation to live in the same way. This is no longer possible. We have to take a quantum leap to teach the new generation not to live the same way we have lived. Only then can the future be shifted.
Introduction
This small book is unashamedly addressed to the intelligent people of this threatened planet. It is one mans vision for a viable humanity; it is one mans diagnoses of the psychological and social sicknesses that divide human beings, within and without, into warring factions. In this selection of texts from his talks, Osho outlines the changes he sees as critical if there is to be any future and in particular, the golden future he knows is within our grasp.
The fact that the very survival of the planet is at stake is doubted by no one yet, nothing changes. Every attempt to turn away from greed and exploitation, and build a sustainable future, is with met with resistance at every turn and nothing changes. That we are sacrificing the very existence of the most beautiful flowering of this universe in childishly immature conflicts is widely understood yet nothing changes. That action is needed now, is accepted by global experts everywhere and nothing changes.
The clock keeps ticking, and the news keeps repeating itself, and even worsening War, famine, AIDSchemical weapons, holes in the ozone layer, nuclear weaponsglobal warming, overpopulation, loss of speciesgreed, violence, economic meltdown
The tragic fact is that if the intelligent people of the earth dont stop this process, just who do they think will? The people in power, who currently benefit from todays insane world? The same tired politics, institutions, churches and masters of the universe who got us into this mess in the first place?
It is now or never. It is time for the intelligentsia everywhere to raise its voice against all these stupidities.
In this book, Osho offers a unique perspective on change where it has to come from in order to be effective, why our efforts to bring about change have failed in the past, and what to expect by way of opposition from those whose interests are in maintaining the status quo. And he lays out a series of proposals for the practical steps we must take if we are to truly begin to heal the wounds of the planet, and build a new foundation for creating a paradise right here, right now on earth.
Many of his proposals are radical these are radical times, and they call for radical solutions, It is not a question of whether you agree with Osho or not, it is a question of having the guts to ensure that at least his contribution is on the agenda. If the ideas are obviously wrong, then it will be easy to point out how and why, and we can all learn in the process. If the ideas are right, then we will need to find the courage to say so. Time is running out, and everything we love is at stake. Pretending you didnt hear a word is not an acceptable excuse.
This planet is the inheritance of every one of us. Either we all benefit or we all lose it is one earth, and one humanity. It our search for survival we must leave no stone unturned. We must examine every option openly, honestly, without prejudice, without superstition, without bias in fact, simply and scientifically.
Oshos vision is one set of options you will find nowhere else.
If it should turn out that we do lose this planet without having thoroughly investigated every avenue before us, Homo sapiens will have been the misnomer of the universe.
John Andrews