Addiction is not always bad.

The very idea that you have to get rid of the ego is wrong. Drop that very idea! ...

 

Addiction is not always bad.

 

Q: For more than ten years I have been following you from place to place. I can’t believe that I am back in India. Am I brainwashed, addicted, or what?

OSHO:

You are certainly brainwashed.

I use a dry cleaning machine, I am not old-fashioned. And naturally you are addicted. Who will not be?

Addiction is not always bad. If you are addicted to beauty, to poetry, to drama, to sculpture, to painting, nobody tells you to drop the addiction. Addiction has to be dropped only when it makes you unconscious. Alcoholics are told to drop the addiction, but here my teaching is of consciousness—be addicted to it more and more.

 

And what is wrong in being brainwashed?—wash it every day, keep it clean. Do you like cockroaches? When I brainwash people, I find cockroaches. Cockroaches are very special animals. It has been found scientifically that wherever you find man you find cockroaches, and wherever you find cockroaches you find man. They are always together, they are the oldest companions.

 

What have you got in your brain? So just washing it is perfectly right. But people have given it a very wrong connotation; those are the wrong people.

 

Christians are afraid of somebody brainwashing Christians, because then they will not be Christians. Hindus are afraid because then those people will not be Hindus. Mohammedans are afraid, communists are afraid.

Everybody is afraid of brainwashing.

 

I am in absolute favor of it.

 

There used to be an old saying: “Cleanliness is next to God.” Now there is no God, so there is only cleanliness left.

 

Cleanliness is God.

 

And I am not afraid of brainwashing because I am not putting cockroaches in your mind. I am giving you an opportunity to experience a clean mind, and once you know a clean mind you will never allow anybody to throw rubbish and crap into your mind. They are the criminals.

 

Brainwashing is not a crime—who has made it dirty? Dirtying other people’s minds is a crime, but all over the world all the religions, all the political leaders, are using your mind as if it is a toilet. These ugly fellows have condemned brainwashing; otherwise, brainwashing is a perfectly good job.

 

I am a brainwasher.

 

And those who come to me should come with the clear conception that they are going to a man who is bound to brainwash, clean their minds of all kinds of cockroaches. Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian—they are all against me for the simple reason that they go on putting in their cockroaches, and I go on washing people’s minds.

 

It is just an up-to-date religious laundry.

 

OSHO