"What they are doing is the politics of numbers: gather as many numbers as possible into your fold; that becomes your strength and your power.

"Hypnosis was a danger to the priesthood, and Christianity is absolutely based from the very beginning on the priesthood. Jesus does not declare himself to be enlightened, nor has any other Christian after him declared him to be enlightened. He declares something nonsensical: that he is the only begotten son of God. God is a hypothesis, and hypotheses are not Indians who go on producing children. Hypotheses are barren; they produce nothing.

"Just the other day I received from Germany…. There was a Protestant conference of Christians, and they invited our sannyasins, hoping to refute our sannyasins and their ideas. But the whole thing backfired.

"There is nobody in the world who can refute my sannyasins because we are proposing neither beliefs nor hypotheses. We are simply living life. Our philosophy is not something beyond the clouds; it is something rooted in the earth, it is something as scientific as anything can be.

"This question had arisen there, and there was great difficulty because the sannyasins said, 'Osho is enlightened and Jesus Christ is not.' And the priests of Protestant Christianity could not produce any evidence that Jesus was enlightened; there is no statement anywhere. All that he was proclaiming was that he is the only begotten son of God. In fact that is a definite indication of unenlightenment.

"He does not know himself and he is pretending to know God. And his prayer is just like our Vimal – twenty minutes and the religion is finished! Then the remaining time you are free to do everything irreligious, and then again for twenty minutes you refresh yourself for your irreligiousness. The statements that Jesus has made are so ordinary because he was simply repeating the old prophets.

"The sannyasins have informed me that it was a strange situation when they confronted the high priests of Protestant Christianity. They looked at each other: what to do? Enlightenment has not been a Western experience, and the reason why it could not happen in the West is Christianity.

"Christianity never wanted you to be directly connected with existence."