#False Miracles

[crimium]

Mandela's Leftovers Vol. 1 - False Miracles

Merry Christmas, everyone! Today I have a special gift to share.

Today, I'd like to go over some of the unused, extra, and prototype content that I made for my game, False Miracles. Think of it as sort of a look-back on everything I've done this year.

Well, let's get started!

Concept Art / Character Concepts

Aero

Aero was the first character I ever designed specifically for False Miracles. He was meant to be a personification of the Frutiger Aero aesthetic, specifically inspired by Windows Aero design from Vista/7.

This was the first drawing I made of Aero, for a discord server art contest. I drew this around the time I was still making Aquatopia, so my art style was a bit different.

This is the rough sketch of their cut-in portraits. I decided to give him a more silly atmosphere, so I give them that :3 face, lol. Also, some people have said that his shoes look like crocs. That wasn't intentional, but perhaps I'll roll with it if it's the majority opinion.

Adrian Pélagique

I designed Adrian after I designed Aero. Frutiger Aero as an aesthetic often portrays both technology and aquatic life. While Aero was the technological side of things, Adrian was meant to represent the Aquatic aspect of it.

This is a drawing I made of him on a school whiteboard around the time I was developing the demo. He's probably my favorite to consistently draw.

This is the sketch of his cut-ins. It was also the drawing where I designed him. For many of the characters, I was improvising their design while drawing their cut-ins. At this point, Adrian did not have a color-scheme yet.

Þ (Thorn)

Thorn was designed after I designed Adrian. Another aspect of Frutiger Aero is nature and plants. So, Aero, Adrian, and Thorn are kind of like the Fruitger Aero personification trinity, lol.

This is a drawing I did of Thorn recently, I imagine this is her casual attire, when she's not gardening. Her fashion sense is inspired by my grandma.

And, her cut-in rough sketches. Like Adrian, her design was created on the spot.

Nisali Adriel

Unlike the last few characters, Nisali is not inspired by the Frutiger Aero aesthetic, because she's actually a character I created long before I created False Miracles, for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I still play her as a character in D&D regularly, actually!

This was the earliest design I could find for her, from a character sheet from around 2021-2022? Her design and clothes are quite different. Note she doesn't have her wings. If I remember correctly, they used to be retractable?

and here's the sketches of her final design. This is also the design I use in D&D campaigns where I play as her. Quite a bit has changed!

Onyx "Roadkiller" Schäfer

While Roadkiller isn't necessarily inspired by Frutiger Aero, they still have that 2000s air to them, and I think that aids the game. I wanted to design a character of rebellious nature, taking inspiration from alternative fashion.

I believe this is the first proper drawing I made of them. Not much changed from this and their final design, although they did not have a color scheme yet.

This is the cut-in rough sketches. I notice that I left some of the details that required line-less art out of the rough sketch, so I could do it later. I also had their tongue out in their boss attack pose, but got rid of it for some reason. I don't remember why lmao

Skyler Woods

People who've been following me for a while probably knew about this character before False Miracles. I featured them as the main character of an old album of mine called "Into the Woods" which is very old now, lol.

Some old art I made of them in like, 2022? Meant for a sequel album to Into the Woods that I never ended up making.

Eventually I repurposed them for False Miracles as a sort of tribute to my old work. I also like them as a character, and wanted to use them more. Perhaps they can appear in all my work as a sort of sign that what you're looking at is made by me, or something.

Other / Misc

The sketch I made for Magu's sprite. Magu is a guest character, and was created by @d6ggyb0x. So if you want more of Magu, go follow him!!

This is art of Skyler and Thorn when they were younger. I'd imagine this is what they looked like in High School.

Originally, I wanted there to be alt-color palettes for you to choose from. These are ones I made for the demo, that I never ended up implementing.

Unused Assets

These are graphics that I planned on using in-game, but never did.

Unused Achievements

These are icons for achievements that I never ended up implementing due to time constraints. The first one was for clearing all Story Mode routes, and the other two were for clearing a match without using lives or bombs.

Unused Border

Originally, I wanted to include mini-games or something like that, sort of like Plants Vs. Zombies. This would've been the graphic used for those, since you wouldn't be competing against a CPU in some of them. This was scrapped pretty early on, because I thought it might've been too much of a task to implement. Maybe I might try something like this in the future.

Unused Staff-roll images

These were two graphics I wanted to use in the staff roll. Instead of the scrolling city, I wanted this image to pan from the grass up to the sky. It's a picture I took myself, but when I tested it out, the image quality was too low when zoomed in. So I never used it. The ball would've bounced around the screen, but I threw it out because I thought it might be too distracting.

Unused Music

These are songs that I wanted to be in the game, but I threw out before release.

*Note: The songs you hear were originally composed in Online Sequencer, but were remade in LMMS like the other songs to be accurate to the final version of the game.

Aquarium ~Vibraphone Version~

This was an unused version of Adrian's theme. The version you hear in game would've played normally, but when Adrian sent over a boss attack, it would switch to this version.

This would've been a cool concept, but ultimately with how limiting Scratch is as an engine, would've been a nightmare to implement. So I didn't use it.

Photosynthesis

This was originally meant to be Thorn's theme. When I was first creating Thorn as a character, I imagined her with a more bratty, childish attitude, but as I started designing her more and more and started writing for her, she changed to a more motherly, optimistic and friendly character, so ended up making a new theme for her. This one is okay, but in retrospect, I'm kind of glad I never used it. I think Serenity fits Thorn much better.

Looking back on this year, I'm really happy with how much I was able to accomplish this year. There were times where I thought I would never even finish this project, but I'm glad I did it. Thank you so much for sticking around. Happy Holidays, and I hope you have a Happy New Year!!

-Crimium

[fisheito]

here i am again

[mekatrio]

still in disbelief over this post i saw cuz how do u play 4 whole games of ace attorney maybe more and not see the problem with the concept of "decisive evidence"........

[goldfish-or-smthing]

trying to have a "do you believe in miracles" mindset about tedependent and not a "its the hope that kills you" mindset

[metanarrates]

mikage idealizes the past he spent with tokiko and mamiya but he can't even remember mamiyas face correctly anymore. god.

[pantsaretherealheroes]

buck and margaret buckley in 6x10

[biblebloodhound]

Have Some Spiritual Discernment (Deuteronomy 13:1-5)

"It is the nature of false prophets to create a conscience where there is none, and to cause conscience to disappear where it does exist." Martin Luther

Prophet, by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1902 Prophets or interpreters of dreams may promise a miracle or a wonder, in order to lead you to worship and serve gods that you have not worshiped before. Even if what they promise comes true, do not pay any attention to them. The Lord your God is using them to test you, to see if you love the Lord with all your heart. Follow the Lord and honor him;…

[nothingtherefornow]

Another point against that last person salty argument, marinette has been shown that even if she has issues with someone, she still willing to try to help them.

Ie, SABRINA AND CHLOE

Tu m'enlèves les mots de la bouche ^^

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Michael Shermer

Published: Apr 9, 2023

On this Easter 2023, let us reflect on what is arguably the greatest miracle ever performed—the raising from the dead the body, life, and person known as Jesus of Nazareth. This miracle is believed by over 2.6 billion people—a third of humanity—to be true. Is it? Was Jesus really raised from the dead? Like the apostle Thomas, I have my doubts.

First, let me note that what we’re talking about here is the claim of an empirical objective truth: that there was a man named Jesus who was put to death by crucifixion and resurrected from the dead three days later, after which he ascended to heaven. The claim being consider here is not just a literary truth, as when U.S. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a deeply religious man, in his 1896 Democratic National Convention “Cross of Gold” speech, famously pronounced “we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Nor is this claim merely a metaphorical or mythic truth, in which readers might be inspired to “bear your own cross” or admonished not to be “crucified” by your enemies, or warned not to “resurrect” bad habits, or encouraged to become “born again” through good habits, or to forgive those who sin against us as God forgives us for our sins through the death and resurrection of his only begotten son.

Nor does this have to do with the proposition that Jesus died for our sins, which is a faith-based truth claim with no purchase on valid knowledge. Such a central tenet of the Christian faith cannot be tested or falsified. It cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed. It can only be believed or disbelieved based on faith or the lack thereof. It is in the realm of religious truths, which are different from empirical truths. Such literary, mythic, and metaphorical truths play a central role in human culture and learning through the arts, literature, and religion, but that is not how most Christians think about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. They believe it is literally true. I know because I have debated a number of theologians and biblical scholars on this and related topics, and when they speak of the death and resurrection of Jesus they are not channeling Joseph Campbell’s “power of myth”. They accept the apostle Paul’s challenge (in 1 Cor. 15:13-19) that: “if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”

The proposition that Jesus was crucified may be true by historical validation, inasmuch as a man named Jesus of Nazareth probably existed, the Romans routinely crucified people for even petty crimes (recall that the two other people crucified with Jesus that day were impenitent thieves), and most biblical scholars—even those who are atheists, such as the renowned University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Religious Studies professor Bart Ehrman—assent to this fact. In between these propositions is Jesus’s resurrection, which is not impossible but would be a miracle if it were true. How big a miracle would it be?

Let’s begin our analysis with the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, and Section XII of his book Philosophical Essays Concerning the Human Understanding, titled “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy.” Here Hume distinguishes between “antecedent skepticism”, such as Descartes’s method of doubting everything, that has no “antecedent” infallible criterion for belief, which means we can’t really know anything; and “consequent skepticism,” the method Hume employed that recognizes the “consequences” of our fallible senses but corrects them through reason so that we can have confidence that we can know some things with confidence. As he advised: “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”

Let’s call this the principle of proportionality, better known as the ECREE principle—extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Carl Sagan made famous the principle, but he was quoting the lesser-known sociologist of science Marcello Truzzi (thereby confirming the observation that pithy and oft-quoted statements migrate up to the most famous person who said them). Let’s see how this principle cashes out for a miracle like the resurrection and whether or not we should believe it.

How extraordinary a claim is the resurrection? Let’s put some numbers on it. Demographers estimate that throughout all of human history approximately 100 billion people have lived before the 8 billion people alive today. Not one of those 100 billion people has died and returned from the dead, except maybe one—Jesus of Nazareth. So the claim that one person out of those 100 billion people who died came back from the dead would be extraordinary indeed. How extraordinary? 100 billion to 1. That is about as extraordinary a claim as one will ever find. Is the evidence proportional to the conviction? No. Not even close.

According to the University of Wisconsin-Madison philosopher Larry Shapiro in his 2016 book The Miracle Myth, “evidence for the resurrection is nowhere near as complete or convincing as the evidence on which historians rely to justify belief in other historical events such as the destruction of Pompeii.” Because miracles are far less probable than ordinary historical occurrences like volcanic eruptions, “the evidence necessary to justify beliefs about them must be many times better than that which would justify our beliefs in run-of-the-mill historical events.” But, says Shapiro, it isn’t. In fact, it’s not even as good as ordinary historical events.

What about the eyewitnesses? Maybe, Shapiro suggests, they “were superstitious or credulous” and saw what they wanted to see. “Maybe they reported only feeling Jesus ‘in spirit,’ and over the decades their testimony was altered to suggest that they saw Jesus in the flesh. Maybe accounts of the resurrection never appeared in the original gospels and were added in later centuries. Any of these explanations for the gospel descriptions of Jesus’s resurrection are far more likely than the possibility that Jesus actually returned to life after being dead for three days.”

The principle of proportionally also means we should prefer the more probable explanation over the less, which these alternatives surely are. And this is a splendid example of Bayesian reasoning, in which the priors of non-Christians is low for their credence that the resurrection really happened, and to date no new evidence has come forth to change those priors, and so our credence in the verisimilitude of the resurrection remains low. Here’s a model example of Bayesian reasoning from the aforementioned biblical scholar and historian Bart Ehrman in his book Jesus, Interrupted:

Our very first reference to Jesus’ tomb being empty is in the Gospel of Mark, written forty years later by someone living in a different country who had heard it was empty. How would he know? Anyhow, suppose that it was empty. How did it get that way? Suppose…that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in Joseph’s own family tomb, and then a couple of Jesus’ followers, not among the twelve, decided that night to move the body somewhere more appropriate. … But a couple of Roman legionnaires are passing by, and catch these followers carrying the shrouded corpse through the streets. They suspect foul play and confront the followers, who pull their swords as the disciples did in Gethsemane. The soldiers, expert in swordplay, kill them on the spot. They now have three bodies, and no idea where the first one came from. Not knowing what to do with them, they commandeer a cart and take the corpses out to Gehenna, outside town, and dump them. Within three or four days the bodies have deteriorated beyond recognition. Jesus' original tomb is empty, and no one seems to know why.

Is this scenario likely? Not at all. Am I proposing this is what really happened? Absolutely not. Is it more probable that something like this happened than that a miracle happened and Jesus left the tomb to ascend to heaven? Absolutely! From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one.

The number of gospel inconsistencies and incompatibilities doesn’t help the credence of the resurrection. For example, the gospels do not agree on: how many women came to the tomb (1, 2, or 3 plus “others”); when they came (“while it was still dark” or “just after sunrise”); why they came (“to look at the tomb” or “to anoint the body with spices”); who they saw (one angel, two angels, a man dressed in white, or Jesus himself); what was said, who said what, who else came (Peter, or both Peter and John); who saw the resurrected Jesus first (Peter or Mary Magdalene); or what they did as they left the tomb (“they said nothing to anyone” or “they ran to tell his disciples”).

Matthew seems to imply the stone was rolled away in the presence of the women who came to the tomb, while Mark, Luke, and John say the women arrived to discover the stone had already been rolled away. Matthew and Mark have the resurrected Jesus on his way to Galilee by the time the women arrive at the tomb, while Luke and John have the risen Messiah in Jerusalem on the night of first Easter Sunday. The Q document, thought to be the source for Matthew, does not even mention the resurrection. The Gospel of Thomas, discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in December 1945 and dated to the early 2nd century CE, also fails to mention the resurrection. The earliest reliable written testimony of the resurrection of Jesus is by Paul and the anonymous author of Mark’s Gospel. It is important to note, in the context of the propensity of human memory to forget, conflate, confabulate, edit, redact, and falsify events that happened in the past, that the earliest Gospel of Mark was circa 66-70 CE, many decades after the events in question, with the rest of the gospels written even later.

So the extraordinary resurrection miracle claim hangs on just two early testimonies, from two ancient authors, neither of whom actually saw Jesus rise up from the dead, and neither of whom touched him, or sat down with him for a face to face conversation. We have nothing written by the Romans—or the Jews for that matter!—about Jesus, the content of his preaching, why he was killed, or what they thought about claims that he had been resurrected. You would think some Roman would have exclaimed “Et tu Again, Jesus?” or some Jew would have snapped “Oy Vey!” And the accounts from Josephus, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus that Christians cite in evidentiary support, were from the 2nd century, and they reference Christ the Messiah, not Jesus, and they too don’t mention the resurrection.

What’s more, in his book The Case Against Miracles, the biblical scholar John W. Loftus notes that “we have no independent corroboration of the Star of Bethlehem at the birth of Jesus, or that the veil of the temple was torn in two at Jesus’ death (Mark 15:38), nor that darkness came ‘over the whole land’ from noon until three in the afternoon (Mark 15:33), or that ‘the sun stopped shining’ (Luke 23:45), nor that there was an earthquake at his death (Matt. 27:51, 54), or another ‘violent’ one the day he arose from the grave (Matt. 28:2).” Could such notable events as these really have occurred without any corroborating evidence? Surely some Roman scribe would have made a note about a three-hour midday eclipse of the sun, not to mention the other miracles. No such extra-biblical evidence exists. Here, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

What about the 500 people the apostle Paul says saw the risen Jesus? People often interrupt this to mean that there were 500 independent eyewitness accounts of seeing Jesus after the crucifixion. Not so. We have one account saying there were 500 witnesses, by an evangelist who was highly motivated to write a history in support of his new-found religion—recall that Paul was previously Saul, who converted to Christianity from Judaism after his vision on the road to Damascus.

To that end, a challenge to the resurrection miracle that I often employ is that Jews do not accept it as real, neither in Jesus’ time nor in ours. Think about that: Jews believe in the same God as Christians. They accept the Old Testament of the Bible like Christians do. They even believe in the Messiah. They just don’t think Jesus of Nazareth was him. Jewish rabbis, scholars, philosophers, and historians all know the arguments for the resurrection as well as Christian apologists and theologians making the arguments, and still they reject them. Why? If the arguments and evidence for the resurrection is so solid, in time the community most expert in that field would reach a consensus about it. They haven’t. Christians believe it. Jews don’t. Ben Shapiro explains why here, in our conversation on his Sunday Special show.

Finally, it is important to put the resurrection into historical context, which Bart Ehrman does when he notes that in an ancient view of the divine realm “gods could sometimes be or become humans, and humans could sometimes be or become gods.” Ehrman outlines three models of “divine men” that were common in the ancient world:

Sometimes it was understood that gods could and would come down to earth in human form to make a temporary visit for purposes of their own.

Sometimes it was understood that a person was born from the sexual union of a god and a mortal; thus, that the person was, in some sense, part divine and part human.

Sometimes it was understood that a human was elevated by the gods to their realm, usually after death, and at that point divinized, made into a god.

As Ehrman documents, there are many stories in ancient myths about gods temporarily assuming human form to meet, speak, and interact with humans, and that these stories in many ways are similar to later Christian beliefs about Christ being a preexistent divine being who came to earth as a human, only later to return to the heavenly realm.

Perhaps this is why Jesus was silent when Pilate asked him (John 18:38) “What is truth?”

[crimium]

Midpoint 20 Releasing Tomorrow

Hi everyone! It's Crim.

Tommorow, October 20th, I'm releasing a small album called "Midpoint 20" for free download. Here's the bandcamp page:

Wow!!! Four tracks!!! That's actually like really small!!!!

When the time comes, you'll be able to download it at https://crimiummusic.bandcamp.com/album/midpoint-20.

It releases on October 20th at 9:30 AM. I hope you look forward to it!!

[alittlebitoftruthcan]

‘You told us to rejoice whenever we see other people becoming sincere seekers, and it is indeed a moving experience to see new people become sannyasins and begin to meditate. But how are we to feel when we see really beautiful, sincere young people giving up everything to follow destructive, false, so-called messiahs who are only using these followers for their own material and political gain? I am thinking of a man named Moon who is gaining more and more adherents every day. He is also making more and more enemies in the West, who criticize him and his methods most vehemently. But his poor blind disciples use this persecution as proof that he is a new Jesus.’ It is a very complicated phenomenon and you will have to be very subtle about it. The first thing—it is none of your business. If somebody follows Moon or Muktananda it is none of your business. You should not have any attitude about it, because who are you to decide? Whether Moon is right or wrong, how can you decide? And why should you decide? You are not following him. You should keep out of it. Because there is no way to decide from the outside. The same thing was said really against Jesus also. And the people who were against Jesus, they were also saying the same thing to people: ‘Why are you going with this man? He is a false messiah.’ That’s what Jews were saying against Jesus. They still say—they may not say loudly because they have been forced to be silent, crushed down the centuries, but they still say. Who is going to decide? And how? The same people are saying against me—you following me. People will say that you have fallen into the hands of a dangerous man. He has brainwashed you, he has destroyed you, you are hypnotized, and so on, so forth. So the first thing is, never be concerned about these things. Don’t waste your time. If somebody feels good to be with Moon, it is his business to decide. And you say ‘sincere, beautiful people…’ If they are really sincere they will understand sooner or later that this messiah is false. If their sincerity cannot reveal to them the falsity of their messiah, then who is going to reveal? So let them go wholeheartedly. If they are moving with a wrong person, sooner or later they will realize. And if they don’t realize, then too it is for them to choose. In fact, the more you criticize Moon and others, the more you make it impossible for the disciples to see themselves. The more you criticize, the more they become defensive. And logic is a double-edged sword. When you start being too much against, then Moon says, ‘Look, the same happened to Jesus, the same is happening to me. People are against me. It has always happened to great prophets that people are against them.’ By your being against him you are proving that he is important, you are giving him too much significance. If Jews had not bothered about Jesus, there may not have been any Christianity. I’m not saying that Jesus was wrong or right, I’m simply saying there would not have been any Christianity. But too much against him created a defensive attitude in his followers. They started fighting, arguing. Be indifferent. If you cannot rejoice then do at least one thing—be indifferent. If you can rejoice, good. Somebody who is following Moon at least is seeking—maybe seeking in wrong directions, maybe—but still seeking. Better than those people who are not seeking. Rejoice. Moving with a wrong person, but moving. Groping in the dark, far away from the door, but groping. Better than those who are sitting in the dark and not groping at all. Better than Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jains, Buddhists, who are just sitting silently. Their groping has stopped. They think they have found. Just by birth you become a Christian. Christianity is not your choice—just an accident by birth. Just by birth you have become a Hindu. It is better at least that somebody is trying to move on his own. There is danger, but the whole life is danger. It is better to be a follower of Moon, alive, than to be a follower of a dead Christ. And I am not saying that he is right or wrong—he may be wrong—but at least the person has the courage to follow, to choose. If he is wrong, sooner or later his own experience will prove it—that he is wrong. But those people who are simply sitting in the darkness, they will never come to know whether they are wrong or right. The real trouble is with these people. You have taken it for granted that you are a Christian. How can you be a Christian? There were only a few Christians who followed Jesus alive. They risked their life. The greatest risk was this: that there was no way to decide whether they were following the right person or wrong—that was their greatest risk. Had they been with the old church—if they had remained Jews there was no risk. Things were settled by the tradition. For centuries down, everything was settled, every dogma was settled. These people started looking for themselves; they were trying to open their eyes. I am not worried whether Jesus was right or wrong, but I say these people are more alive people. Yes, even with a Muktananda it is good to move. And if you are a sincere seeker, how long can Muktananda or Moon deceive you? How long? Your sincerity is your only protection, nothing else. Go on—one has to grope long, one has to knock on many doors before one comes to the right door. There is no other way. So don’t criticize. There is no need; it is none of your concern. If you want to follow Moon, then you have to think about it. Others are following—let them think. Why should you take their responsibility? Why should you have any power over others? If somebody decides to follow a fool, that’s his decision—and he has the freedom to follow the fool. Forced—even if you are following the greatest wise man in the world, a Buddha—then too it is ugly, because it kills your freedom. With your own choice if you follow a fool, it is beautiful. My emphasis is on your freedom. And people who are against Moon, why are they against Moon? The same reason why people were against Jesus—because if Moon’s influence grows then more and more Christians will be disappearing. They will become ‘Moonites.’ These people are against Bhaktivedanta, the Hare Krishna movement leader, because more and more people are becoming Hindus; Christians are disappearing. These people are against Maharishi Mahesh Yogi because more and more people are dropping their Christian prayer and starting TM. The same happens everywhere. Here people are against me because if you come with me, by and by you will not be a Parsee, and you will not be a Hindu, and you will not be a Christian—you will become a pure human being, a simple human being with no adjectives. So those who live with the adjectives, how can they just watch it? They are afraid, their establishment is eroding. They will try in every way. But I will suggest to them that if they really want that no one should come to me, they should remain indifferent. The more they are against me, the more they make me important. Their very against-ness helps many people to become interested in me. The best way for them will be not to be bothered by me, be indifferent. Let people come and let people find. If they find more nourishment with me than they were finding in their old church, in their temple, in their mosque, then it is for them to choose. If they don’t find any nourishment with me, they move away, they go on searching. But if people are against me then you start becoming defensive. Then your eyes become dogmatic, then you are in an arguing mood. You have to prove somehow that your master is right and is the only true master in the world. Then even if sometimes you see flaws in me, errors, mistakes, you bypass them. How can your master have any mistake, flaw in his life?—impossible. And you go on hiding. And by and by you become almost determined by the people who are against me. They talk against me, you have to talk for me. They help me in a way. This is my suggestion: there is no need to be worried—the world is vast, and everybody is free to choose, should be free to choose. If somebody feels that he is attaining something with Moon—and Moon may be wrong, as far as I know he is wrong—but even then if somebody follows him I am not going to distract the person. This is my attitude—that he is wrong. Even if he is wrong somebody may be benefited by him. Life is very mysterious—you learn by your errors also. I know many people, like Muktananda, who have nothing to give. It is a miracle that Muktananda can also become a guru. But still if somebody is following Muktananda, I will not say don’t follow him. I will say go headlong. Because that is the only way to find out, to figure it out. I will say, ‘Go headlong with open eyes; maybe this is how your life is going to grow.’ Nothing is wrong in it. Why be so much afraid? One learns from fools as much as from wise people, and one learns from pseudo-gurus as much as from authentic gurus. They are part of one phenomenon. In fact, you get that which you deserve. Now there are a few people who deserve Muktananda. What to do? They have earned Muktananda through their lives; many lives of karmas and they have earned Muktananda. Now who am I or who are you to prevent them? Why? They deserve, that is their growth, they have to pass through it. One day Mulla Nasrudin came to me and he was very much worried and he said, ‘I would like to become a guru myself.’ I was intrigued. I said, ‘There are good opportunities. Why not? You try.’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s what I’m thinking. If Muktananda of Ganeshpuri can become a guru, why not I?’ And then he said, ‘Osho, there is one request. You supply me with my first disciple.’ A man was sitting by the side who suffered from an inferiority complex and he had seen psychoanalysts—Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians—and he had defeated all of them, and he went on suffering with inferiority complex. In fact he had become more skilled in it. The more he had been psychoanalysed, the more he had become skilful about it. In fact, he was enjoying it. So I told Nasrudin, ‘You take this man. Try—this man suffers from inferiority complex.’ Nasrudin took him away, sat with him, looked into his eyes, meditated a little, closed his eyes, and then told him finally, ‘I have good news for you. You have no inferiority complex, you really are inferior.’ Now there are people who really are inferior. They deserve Muktanandas, Moons, and that type of people. There are stupid people. What to do? Stupid gurus are also needed. Stupid gurus cannot disappear from the world unless stupid people disappear. It is a subtle economic law. Your demand has to be fulfilled, somebody from somewhere has to supply goods that you need. People think as if it is only just Moon or people who are exploiting. No, you want to be exploited, you cannot rest unless you are exploited. People think that followers are innocent. This is nonsense! You cannot exploit an innocent man. They are cunning, the followers are cunning—then they are exploited by more cunning people. An innocent person cannot be exploited by a cunning person, because innocence is so pure; in that purity he will immediately see that this whole thing is nonsense. You cannot exploit an innocent person, you can exploit only a cunning person. I was staying in a town. Mulla Nasrudin deceived somebody. He said he could double rupees just by magic, and he showed the trick. He doubled a one hundred rupee note. It was just a trick but the person was impressed. So the person brought all, whatsoever he had. He was not a very rich man, but whatsoever he had—ornaments, gold, precious stones, money—whatsoever he had he put before Nasrudin. Then he played the game and he disappeared with the whole lot. Now the man came to me and said, ‘Why do you allow such cunning people with you?’ I said, ‘You are cunning—that’s why he could exploit you. You wanted your money to be doubled without any effort—that’s why he could exploit you. If you were innocent, how could you be exploited? Your logic and his logic were not different. What were you expecting from him? He exploited your greed. He exploited because you were ready to be exploited. Can’t you see the whole nonsense of it?’ I told him, ‘If it is in my power, then I will send you both to the jail, because you are a participant. He alone is not responsible. In fact, his responsibility is secondary to you. If you were not ready how could he exploit you?’ So don’t call those people sincere, innocent, who are exploited by cunning people. No, they must have some cunningness in themselves; they must be looking for shortcuts for nirvana. Then anybody can exploit you. Somebody comes and says, ‘This will do. Just a mantra—you have to repeat it twenty minutes in the morning, twenty minutes in the evening, and you will attain to perfect bliss.’ Now he is delivering something so cheap—you call it Transcendental Meditation or something, whatsoever you want—and if he asks a hundred dollar fee what is wrong in it? And you say this man is exploiting. He is not exploiting your innocence; innocence cannot be exploited. An innocent man will understand—‘How is it possible? Just by uttering ‘Rama, Rama, Rama’, twenty minutes in the morning and evening and you become enlightened?’ Be reasonable, and if you are unreasonable and he asks a hundred dollar fee, he is asking simply something that fits with your logic. And you pay the hundred dollar fee, and then you think that he has been exploiting you! Nobody can exploit you unless you are ready to be exploited, nobody can deceive you unless you are ready to be deceived. The responsibility is yours, so be alert, be reasonable. Don’t be a fool, otherwise somebody is bound to—somebody is bound to become your guru. And then don’t go on shouting and crying and making a fuss about it that you have been exploited. You wanted to go to nirvana very cheap. Always remember—you fall into bondage because you want to become a slave. You cannot remain free, that’s why you fall into a sort of bondage. But it is you, otherwise nobody can imprison you. You are afraid of freedom, you are afraid of growing, you are afraid of facing life as it is. So from somewhere or other, sometimes from Korea—Moon comes from Korea; sometimes from India—Muktananda comes from India; sometimes from Japan… and of course these people have to come from the East because the East has the credit of being religious, spiritual. Just in the same way, if an engineer comes from Germany he has more prestige in India; a doctor comes from England, he has more prestige in India. The Indian doctor may be as educated as the English doctor, but the English doctor has prestige—he comes from the world of science, he has an aura. It is just as if you have a watch, an Indian-made watch, HMT watch—it is an ordinary watch, made in India. If you have a Swiss-made watch, it has an aura: imported. The same happens as far as religion is concerned. In America you need imported gurus and India has nothing else to export. So we are exporting in bulk. They carry an aura. Here it is difficult for them to find disciples. But they come from the East, the world of the rising sun, they come from the fabulous East, the land of Buddhas, Mahaviras, Krishnas—they carry an aura. Just very ordinary people with no talent, with no genius, with no intelligence, but they can just sit there and things start happening. And then you think they are doing something. You are hankering that something must happen to you and nothing is happening. The West is very much bored; something should happen. Now you have everything that you always needed, desired; all material things are there. Now for the first time the West is becoming aware that something spiritual is needed, a spiritual need is being felt. It always happens—whenever a society becomes very rich and affluent, only then the religious need is felt. A poor country cannot become religious howsoever it may pretend. It has never been so, it cannot be. I am not saying that a poor man cannot become religious. Individuals can be exceptions—a Kabir, a Nanak—but poor societies cannot be religious; their basic needs are unfulfilled. Religion is a very high need. It is as if you are hungry: who thinks in that moment of listening to beautiful music? When you are hungry you need bread, you don’t need music. Beethoven won’t do, Mozart is meaningless when you are hungry. When you are hungry, starved, naked, what to do with Shakespeare, Goethe, Kalidas?—it makes no sense. When your basic needs are fulfilled—your body is healthy, you have a hygienic world to live in, a good house, good clothes, good food, nourished—suddenly you feel that you need something of the aesthetic world—music, art, poetry. You become interested in Picasso and Van Gogh, and you become interested in Pablo Neruda—and a thousand doors open. When your aesthetic needs are also fulfilled, when you are getting bored by Beethoven also, Mozart also, then suddenly another door opens—the door of the Buddha, Krishna, Christ. That is the highest need. When every lower need is fulfilled then spirituality arises. The West has fulfilled its lower needs. Now suddenly a desire has possessed it; a passion for the ultimate is being felt all over the West, particularly in the new generation—a tremor, a longing for the unknown. It is a very critical moment. In this moment there will be many people who will exploit this need, because the West is like a child—a child in the world of spirit. They don’t know what is what. They just have a need, that’s all they know. And whosoever comes and says, ‘I can fulfill your need,’ whosoever is clever enough at least to pretend, you will follow him. But this is natural. Sooner or later you will be finished with Moons and Muktanandas. Because sooner or later you will see that they promise but they never deliver. How long can this go on? And then only will you become interested in true masters—Krishnamurti or Gurdjieff or Raman. Then you will start getting interested. But this is natural. In the beginning it has to be so. You don’t know what real roses are, so people who bring paper roses and plastic roses—you don’t know what real roses are, you don’t have any comparison—you simply purchase them. But how long can it go on? That’s why I decided not to go to the West. Right now it is a supermarket. And there are so many people standing on their soap-boxes and shouting and selling and advertising, that it is futile. I decided rather to wait here because people who have been with Moon, with Muktananda, with this and that, and are finished, and have come to know that these people have nothing to give, are bound to come towards the East in search. I decided to wait for them here, not to go there. Because when a seeker comes, travelling so far, then his desire is very authentic, then he is risking much. He is risking his whole life. And it is better that he should have passed through the super-market, so he knows. If sometimes somebody comes to me directly I am not much interested in him because I know it is better he should pass through the right channel—Muktananda, Moon, etc. When he passes through all of them and then he comes to me, there is a sudden contact, an immediate contact. So in a way they help. Here are many people who have been in all sorts of movements in the West. This is good, a good training. You have some background, you have a certain gestalt, to judge. So the first thing… YOU TOLD US TO REJOICE WHENEVER WE SEE OTHER PEOPLE BECOMING SINCERE SEEKERS, AND IT IS INDEED A MOVING EXPERIENCE TO SEE NEW PEOPLE BECOME SANNYASINS AND BEGIN TO MEDITATE. BUT HOW ARE WE TO FEEL WHEN WE SEE REALLY BEAUTIFUL, SINCERE PEOPLE GIVING UP EVERYTHING TO FOLLOW DESTRUCTIVE, FALSE, SO-CALLED MESSIAHS WHO ARE ONLY USING THESE FOLLOWERS FOR THEIR OWN MATERIAL AND POLITICAL GAIN? Let them go. Help them to go there. Tell them to go to the very end. Sincerity, their search—if it is true they will come out, and they will come out more mature, less childish. They will come out more experienced. Nothing to be worried. Never prevent anybody if he is really going somewhere. Let him go. There is only one way to learn and that is through experience; there is no other way. And if you think that he may be lost, then he deserves to be lost, then that is what he needs right now. Nothing happens without your deserving it. Whatsoever happens you deserve it. Nobody can exploit you unless you were in need to be exploited. Nobody can make you a slave unless you were ready to become a slave and you were afraid of freedom. Nothing happens to you for which you were not hankering, for which you were not desiring, consciously or unconsciously. So it is your life and it is your freedom. It happened one night, the phone rang at four A.M. ‘What do you want?’ I shouted into the instrument. ‘Nothing,’ was the reply. ‘Then why did you call me in the middle of the night?’ ‘Because the rate is cheaper.’ That’s why I stopped keeping the phone in my room since then, because there are absurd people. Because the rate is cheaper—that may be the only reason they phone in the middle of the night. You go with Moon because the rate is very cheap. You go with Muktananda because the rate is very cheap. What do I mean? I mean they promise you something and they don’t ask you to be transformed. The rate is very cheap. They say God can happen to you without any change on your part; just do this mantra for twenty minutes. When you come to me it is not a question of twenty minutes, it is a question of your whole life. You have to change from the very roots. I ask for a radical change. You have to drop your old values, your old morality, your old concepts, your old world view. You have to almost die with your past, only then your future starts sprouting. I ask you to be crucified so that you can be resurrected. I am like a death, and that is what the meaning of sannyas is—you die in me and a totally new person is born. I’m not saying that your life will become easy. No, it may become more difficult. I’m not promising you rose gardens. One thing only I can promise and that is if you are ready to take the risk, there may be many more difficulties, but you will start growing. I can only promise growth. Growth is always hard, painful; you have to destroy and dismantle many things in you, and you have to learn new ways of being, new styles of life. It is painful. I don’t say you will become rich, as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says: ‘If you meditate you will become successful, you will become rich.’ I don’t say that. In fact you may become more of a failure if you go with me. And you may never be rich if you go with me. Because if you go with me you will become less and less ambitious. If you go with me you will become less and less aggressive, less and less violent. Ambition is violence, the very effort to succeed in the world is violent. You may be a loser as far as the outside world is concerned. I cannot say anything about it. You may turn out to be just a beggar. But one thing I can say: you will be growing in, you will be enriched within, you will become more blissful. I don’t say more successful, I say more blissful. You will become more restful, you will be more relaxed. But I don’t say that you will have money and success and things like that. With me you will have to lose much, and with me the gain will be so inner that only you will know and nobody else will know. So you cannot exhibit it, you cannot show it to anybody. The gain is going to be very inner and very subtle and the loss is going to be very gross and very outer. Everybody will know that you are losing. Just the other night one Indian sannyasin came and said, ‘My whole ambition is gone and I am becoming indifferent to all success. I don’t even feel like struggling any more. I want to be in a deep let-go.’ I said, ‘Perfectly good. That’s how it should be.’ He was disturbed about one thing. He said, ‘But something is happening, and that is I am not even interested in meditation any more. I feel happy, silent, but I am not interested in meditation any more.’ I said, ‘That’s what one should expect finally—drop that too.’ About this he was a little puzzled—whether to drop meditation or not—because only through meditation has he come up to this point where he is feeling at home… so much so that all his desiring is disappearing. He wanted to cling to meditation. When I said, ‘Drop that too,’ his last barrier was broken. Now if you look at this person it will be difficult for you to see what is happening. In fact he may have looked more radiant to you before than he will look right now, because now he is so silent, his whole energy is so silent. You will not find him laughing; at the most he can smile—in fact that too he will have to do by an effort. Not because he is unhappy, he is simply happy. You laugh because of unhappiness. Twenty-four hours of unhappiness, you gather unhappiness, then you have to do something to get out of it—you laugh. But if a man becomes really happy then the very need for laughter disappears. It will be difficult to judge from the outside that something has happened inside in him—and a great transformation IS happening inside him. This is what sannyas is—he is disappearing from the world. For this transformation very few people are ready, and those who are not ready, they also need somewhere to go, somewhere to seek. They also need a guru, a master. Good, nothing wrong in it, but remember the dictum that you get only that which you deserve. They will find somebody. One politician used to come to me, and I asked him, ‘Why do you come to me?’ He said, ‘Just for your blessings. I have been trying hard, but for twelve years I have remained a minister and I couldn’t succeed in becoming a chief minister. Now every minister has his own guru, and I know only you, so I come to you.’ I said, ‘You have chosen a wrong guru. Go to Satya Sai Baba. You have chosen a wrong guru—because if you come too often here there is every possibility you will not even remain a minister. Don’t listen to me, to what I am saying, and don’t come close to me. It is dangerous.’ Since then he has disappeared. He must have got the point. With me you will fail in the world—of course very few people are ready to fail in the world. With me you can succeed in the inner—but very few people are mature enough even to desire for that. So there are so many grades of growth, so many types of people, so many centuries living together. Now a person who goes to Sai Baba and a person who comes to me are not contemporaries, cannot be. The person who goes to Satya Sai Baba because miracles are happening must be living somewhere two thousand years back, when these things were thought to be spiritual. These are just ordinary magical tricks. A Buddha is not known to have done anything like that. It would have been foolish. Two thousand years have passed: a few people have remained in that primitive state of mind. They go there. They cannot see simple things. There is no need to discuss about it—any ordinary magician on the street can do these things. But when a magician is doing these things you think he is just a magician. And when a religious person is doing these things you think these are miracles. They are the same things. Now Bangalore University has appointed a small committee of twelve people, and they have asked Satya Sai Baba to help them. They want to see the miracles done before the committee so they can see whether there is any scientific validity or not. He didn’t answer. Three letters were written from the Vice Chancellor—he would not answer. And when the Vice Chancellor released his letters to the press, then Sai Baba was very angry. Then he answered in a public talk, and answered in such an unspiritual way that it is unbelievable, ridiculous. He said: ‘These people are trying to fathom me. It is as if an ant is trying to fathom the ocean. These people are trying to pull me down. It is as if dogs are barking and thinking that stars will fall.’ Now this is very non-religious language, profane, not even gentlemanly. And if really you are doing miracles then why be afraid? Let them come. It will be a good opportunity for you to prove. Why not allow them? They will become your followers. They will beat the drum for you all over the world, that you are really a siddha, a miracle man. Why not allow them? Why are you afraid? They simply want to watch. Only one thing I have to suggest to the Vice Chancellor of Bangalore University is that their committee is not of the right people. In their committee there are professors of philosophy and psychology and science—physics, chemistry. These people cannot judge a magician, these people have no background. What has it to do with physics? These are simple people, very innocent people. They have lived in mathematics. The committee needs a Gogia Pasha, a K. Lal. Only then can these people be brought down to earth. A Gogia Pasha, a magician, is needed in the committee because he will know what Satya Sai Baba is doing. Every magician knows what he is doing. Professors won’t be of any help, professors are very poor people. What can they do? They don’t have any concept of magic. If you are going to find out the truth of a magician, take magicians with you. Only they will know. It is a very tricky world, the world of magic. Very great skill is needed. To deceive is not so easy; it is an art, a great art. But people are there; even if you expose Satya Sai Baba, that doesn’t matter—another Baba will arise because these people have a need. They will say, ‘Yes, that Baba was bogus, but this Baba is true.’ You go on exposing, it makes no difference, because you don’t understand that there is a basic need in people. Unless people are raised in their consciousness, Satya Sai Babas will continue. You can expose one Satya Sai Baba, another will be born. You can expose that one, another will be born, because people are in a real need. They don’t know any higher religion than that. All are not contemporaries. People coming to me are a totally different type of people. In fact they are a little ahead of their time; they will not be understood. That’s why when you go into Poona people cannot make out what you are, what you are doing. They cannot figure it out, because you don’t belong to this century. You have come a little earlier than your time. They cannot believe how a sannyasin can move with a girl, hand in hand—impossible. I am giving you something which will be possible only in the twenty-first century—one hundred years more are needed… when religion will not be anti-life, when religion will be life-affirmative… when religion will not be anti-love, when religion will be a tremendous release of love… when religion will not be anti-sex—because to be anti-sex is to be anti-life… when religion will be a total acceptance of all that life gives, of all the benedictions that life makes available. Then religion will be just a deep gratitude towards God. Whatsoever he has given, one has to move into it, love it, experience it, transcend it—but no anti-attitude. So when you go into Poona town people cannot believe that you are sannyasins; they have their own notions of the past. A sannyasin has to be anti-life, you are not. Now one of my old sannyasins, Paritosh, goes to the racecourse. What to do? And not only that, he is winning there. But good! I approve of it. I am not here to destroy your life, your enjoyment, your delights. I am here to enhance them, I am here to help you to become more flowing. To me, sannyas is not to take life very seriously—take it playfully. The racecourse is also part of life. And if you enjoy, it is perfectly good, nothing is wrong in it. So whatsoever one is following, remember, it may be a need to him. Let him go, help him, at least he is trying to find something. Some day we can hope he will find a place where he can bow, where he can surrender, and where he will not be exploited. And of course, if you start arguing, then people become defensive. It is just part of the ego of the disciple to defend the master. If somebody says anything against me, you simply feel it is against you. And it is natural, because you belong to me, I belong to you. If somebody is saying something against me you feel hurt, you start defending. And if he goes to exaggerations in his criticism, you go to exaggeration in your defence, and both become false. I have heard: The Puerto Rican couple had been married only three months when the wife gave birth to a bouncing baby girl. The proud grandmother was accosted on the street one day by one of her neighbours. ‘Hey, I see your Rosita just had a baby after only three months,’ smirked the neighbour. ‘You surprised?’ asked the new grandmother. ‘My Rosita is such an innocent. How would she know how long to carry a baby?’ Never argue, it is useless. Then you make the other person defensive, and then—extremes. Many people are simply going here and there because of curiosity. That too is good. Not to be curious is not to be alive. That too is good. But curiosity is not enough for spiritual growth. There are three words in the East: curiosity we call KUTAHEL. It is childish, you don’t put anything at stake. You just ask why the trees are green and then you forget about it. If nobody answers it you don’t go on thinking about it. Who created the world? Not that you are really interested—just a floating idea in the mind; not that you are ready to put your life for this question, that you have to find the answer. It does not matter. Then enquiry we call JIGYASA. Enquiry means now your curiosity is not just curiosity; it is taking deep roots in you, it is becoming a part of your life. You are not asking for asking’s sake, you really want to go into it. And then there is a third word, MUMUKSHA, for which no English equivalent exists. Curiosity is just amusement, enquiry becomes more scientific, mumuksha literally means the desire, passionate desire to know the truth. Curiosity will not take you anywhere else, you will remain a newspaper reader, that’s all. Every day you read the newspaper but it is just curiosity. Then you throw it. Enquiry can make you a scientific worker, a philosopher, a logician, but still it will not make you a religious person, a spiritual being. When your enquiry becomes so passionate—by passionate I mean when it becomes a question of life and death—when you cannot rest at ease unless you know the truth; when you are ready to die for it, for your enquiry, only then can you find a real master. So there are three types of masters: people who fulfil your curiosity, people who fulfil your enquiry and people who fulfil your mumuksha, your passionate desire to know the truth. It depends on you. Curiosity-mongers can go to Muktananda, Moon—that will do. They are never ready to commit, they are just spectators. And of course they get into many troubles. I have heard: A Jew was standing on a manhole cover jumping up and down and shouting, ‘Sixty-nine, sixty-nine, sixty-nine!’ A German came along and asked, ‘What are you doing?’ The Jew jumped off and took the German by the arm. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you try it for a while.’ The German got on the manhole cover and as he started to jump the Jew grabbed the cover away and the German fell down the sewer. ‘Ha!’ exclaimed the Jew as he replaced the cover and starting jumping again. ‘Seventy! Seventy! Seventy!’ Curiosity is just like that. Somebody shouting, ‘Sixty-nine! Sixty-nine! Sixty-nine!’ and just in your mind an idea arises: ‘What does he mean? What is sixty-nine?’ Now you are no more… you have nothing to do with it. If you are really a little alert you will bypass. Let him say ‘Sixty-nine! Sixty-nine!’ Let him shout. Why should you get into it? But man is a monkey. If somebody is shouting, suddenly you become curious. What is the matter? That is how things are going. A Muktananda goes on shouting, ‘Kundalini! Kundalini! Kundalini!’ What is kundalini? Sixty-nine becomes seventy. So first you get caught and then it becomes very difficult to get out, because then it becomes an involvement with the ego. The seven-year-old was being taught the proper way to ask a girl for a dance. A half hour later he asked the teacher, ‘Now, how do you get rid of her?’ It is very easy to ask a girl to dance with you; the real problem arises in how to get rid of her. It is very easy to fall in love, the problem arises when you want to get out of it. You had never really thought of all the implications. When you go to somebody you may be just going for curiosity’s sake. Some friend goes there, your neighbour goes there and they say, ‘Baba is incredible!’ So you have to go—sixty-nine! Then you have ambitions, then you have illnesses, then you have a pending law suit against you in the court, then you have a thousand and one problems. And when you go to the Baba and there are people who say that he is a miracle, he can create things out of nothing, then your desire becomes aflame. ‘If he can create things out of nothing, maybe he can help me for my court case, or he can help me for my disease to disappear, or he can help me for my ambition, for my success in life.’ Then you are caught. And then others start saying that you are going to a false messiah. Then you defend, it becomes your ego problem. You?—how can you go to a fake messiah? When you go there the messiah has to be true. You cannot go; you are such an intellectual person, so intelligent. How can you be caught by a false messiah? Impossible. Then you try to prove that he is not false. Now you are getting into a trap on your own. And one day it will be very difficult to get out because then you will be swallowing your own thing that you have spat. You have been saying that he is the greatest master, then one day you want to leave. Now how to leave? It goes against your own assertions; ego becomes involved. One thing only I would like to say: go wherever you want to go, don’t get egoistically involved. Remain alert, watchful. If you can learn something, learn. If you find that there is nothing to learn, then be ready to leave. There is no need to leave with a grudge. There is no need to leave him only when you start being against him. There is no need to be an enemy—simply leave. Because to be too much in attachment is bad, and to be too much full of hatred is bad also. You go to a person; whatsoever you can learn you learn. If you feel that this is the home, you have arrived, then good for you. If you feel this is not, then leave, and thank him for whatsoever he has done for you. Maybe he has not done anything, but at least he has made you aware that you can become a victim of somebody who has nothing to give. Next time you will not become a victim so easily. Thank him for that. Three logicians were standing under one umbrella. ‘This is terrific,’ said one of them. ‘None of us are getting wet.’ ‘That is because it is not raining,’ said one bystander. There are many people who think they are happy because of the Baba, because the Baba’s blessing is making them happy. They think Baba is like an umbrella. But first look whether it is raining or not. This is my experience: if a hundred persons come to a Baba, fifty will become hangers-around. Fifty will leave, because those fifty will not feel any fulfilment, and these fifty will feel some sort of fulfilment��not because of the Baba; it is simple statistics. If a hundred ill persons come, almost fifty percent will be helped. Not because of the Baba; if they had not come then too they would have become healthy. They simply become healthy because it is not raining. You go on distributing anything—just water. You try it. You can just go and sit under a tree and start distributing water to people. Within a week you will see many people are hanging around you. What has happened? Many will start saying that you are a miracle: ‘I had a headache for many years, that disappeared.’ Somebody says he had a stomach ache and it has disappeared. And you will be surprised, but by and by you will see that things are working so you will become more confident. When you become more confident, things will work more. And these people who will hang around you because they have been helped, they will create an aura around you. Whenever a new person comes, they will say, ‘Certainly it is going to happen, absolutely it is going to happen. Look—to all of us it has happened. This man had a headache, and this man had a stomach ache, and this man was suffering from this and that man was suffering from that. We have all been helped.’ This creates a sort of deep suggestibility. When so many people have been helped then why not you? You become hopeful, faith arises, and then the water works. These are simple auto-suggestions that work. And then things go on growing. It is just like a snowball rolling on snow. Just by rolling more snow collects around it—it goes on bigger and bigger and bigger. Human stupidity is tremendous, and man has lived down the ages in such ignorant, stupid ways, unintelligent ways, that it seems natural. Nobody understands how things work. Still science has not been able to know exactly how things work, but the basic things are known. How do things work?—they work through faith. Nobody is working, nobody is doing anything, just your own faith. Jesus is true. He again and again says… People come to him—they are healed and they want to thank him, and he says, ‘Don’t thank me. Your faith has healed you.’ He is a true man. He says, ‘Don’t thank me. I have not done anything. Your faith has healed you.’ And these Babas also don’t understand. They are as much mystified as you are mystified by what goes on happening. Mulla Nasrudin had been out speaking all day in an election campaign and returned home late at night, tired and weary. ‘How did your speeches go today?’ his wife asked. ‘All right, I guess,’ the Mulla said. ‘But I am afraid some of the people in the audience did not understand some of the things I was saying.’ ‘What makes you think that?’ his wife asked. ‘Because,’ whispered Mulla Nasrudin, ‘I don’t understand them myself.’ Just watch how your mind functions: how your mind tends to be superstitious, how your mind tends to be egoistic, how your mind tends to be defensive, rationalizing. Just watch that. The real work is to be done inside your mind. Don’t be worried about Moon and others, you just think about your own mind, and by and by clarity will come to you. Understanding the mechanism of the mind, one becomes freed of that mechanism. Becoming aware, one goes beyond the mind, and that state of beyond the mind is the state of freedom. Then you cannot be exploited, then nobody can enforce you into any sort of imprisonment. Then nobody can deceive you, befool you.

Osho (The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol. 1)

[dawning-day]

16 19 22 23 24 34 35 60 🏒

16 - vancouver - kingfishr (vibes wise i do like mitch for this. however as my official answer this has to be barky i would end up on the news if this is how i manifested a mm16 canucks trade)

19 - loser, baby - hazbin hotel soundtrack (dylan strome <3)

22 - i love you, i'm sorry - gracie abrams (dew1 (sorry))

23 - the black dog - taylor swift (mac t (he's got that dawg in him)

24 - land where i land - novo amor (dew2 (SORRY))

34 - close enough to feel you (am34)

35 - us. feat taylor swift - gracie abrams (sammy (and i do i do miss him))

60 - family tree - ethel cain (woll)

[shamballalin]

Arousing the Sleeping Soul Meditation ~ Awakening the Spark of Your Eternal Universal Life Force Energy ~ Repost

Awaken to the Eternal Universal Life Force Energy within you. It is your Dharma, your mission in this life. All is One. Reclaim your personal power, your Eternal Spark of God’s gift to you. There is no one else on Earth like you. You may be in complete agreement with this fact. You may not have anyone in your life to reflect the reality of this fact back to you. Either way, many others have told…

[unjest]

I'm so fascinated by ghost's first meeting. "Ah yes this robbery looks interesting, Imma join in and get some too bc no one will realize... I'm not supposed to be here... Wait why is that guy calling me out..." lmao

thats p much exactly how it went lol. ghost kinda just joined in because they were in the area and were just sooo used to being able to just kinda wander into situations without being acknowledged that when badger called them out (AFTER the heist was over btw) they were like. WUH. HUH????

[coolspork]

I'm gonna be so real rn if weed (or ANY substance for that matter) is making it so you're too intoxicated to do basic hygiene upkeep of both yourself and your living space, you may need to reassess your relationship with it. It may not chemically cause addiction like nicotine or other chemicals in recreational drugs, but your brain can become dependent on anything

[eli-kittim]

Who is the False Prophet of Revelation?

Eli Kittim

Binary Patterns

The Bible often uses binary patterns by introducing two important figures who turn out to be one single individual. For example, a binary pattern can be seen in the Old Testament’s (OT) presentation of the two Messiahs in Judaism: one is a high priest, the other is an anointed king of the Davidic line (cf. Zech. 4:14). The two Messiahs can also be found in the Apocryphal literature, such as in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Damascus Covenant. However, in the New Testament (NT), these two Messiahs are morphed into one priestly/kingly figure: Jesus, the Son of God (cf. Heb. 4:14 and Mt. 2:1–2).

The same is true of the two witnesses in the NT. In order to understand the identity of the two witnesses in Rev. 11:3-12, we must first trace them back to the Hebrew Bible from which they emerge (Zech. 4:14). So when we trace the identity of the two witnesses back to the OT and the context in which they appear, we find that they represent the two Messiahs of Rabbinic Judaism. But these two figures later became coalesced, commingled into one, in the figure of Jesus Christ, who’s given the titles of king and high priest in the order of Melchizedek, who is also a king and priest (Heb. 7:13-17). Therefore, the two witnesses appear to represent the coming Messiah: Jesus Christ (cf. Mal. 4:5; Rev. 6:2)!

The Earth & the Sea

First Jn 5:6 uses the symbols of “water and blood” to represent the divinity and humanity of Jesus, thus indicating that he’s both God and man. The “water” symbolizes the divinity of Jesus, while the blood symbolizes his humanity. Thus, water symbolizes the spirit, while blood symbolizes the flesh.

Now let’s look at the serpent of Gen. 3, which is later identified as the devil or Satan, who is also known as “the great dragon.” Revelation 12:9 says that he will be incarnated on earth:

“And the great dragon was thrown down,

that ancient serpent, who is called the devil

and Satan, the deceiver of the whole

world—he was thrown down to the earth,

and his angels were thrown down with him.”

Isaiah 27:1 alludes to the “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12) by portraying their ruler (i.e. the serpent/dragon) as residing “in the sea”:

“In that day the LORD with his hard and

great and strong sword will punish

Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the

twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon

that is in the sea.”

Just as 1 Jn 5:6 uses the symbols of “water and blood” to represent the spiritual and human domains, so the description of the two Beasts in Rev. 13—-one “rising out of the sea,” the other “out of the earth”——may be used in a similar fashion to describe the spiritual and earthly realms, respectively. In other words, the reference may be to a single individual who possesses two natures: a human & a spiritual one. Let’s not forget that in heaven, within the Throne Room of God, a sea is explicitly mentioned in Rev. 4:6 (cf. Gen. 1:7).

The Unholy Trinity

According to Rev. 13:4, the whole world “worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast” (i.e. the Antichrist). Yet notice that the second Beast (i.e. the False Prophet), who came out of the earth mimicked Christ because he “had two horns like a lamb … [but] spoke like a dragon” (Rev. 13:11). The point is that just as the two messiahs and the two witnesses represent one person, so the False prophet and the Antichrist may be one and the same person as well. The Book of Daniel doesn’t mention two Antichrists but rather one, namely, the “little horn” (Dan. 7:8; 8:9-12).

First Jn 4:1 associates false prophets with unclean spirits which have been unleashed in the world. Rev. 16:13 reads:

“And I saw, coming out of the mouth of the

dragon and out of the mouth of the beast

and out of the mouth of the false prophet,

three unclean spirits like frogs.”

The Dragon, the Beast, and the False prophet seemingly represent an unholy Trinity in which these three persons are one being, just like the Holy Trinity represents one being, not a plurality of beings. The Devil, the Beast, and the False prophet appear to be three manifestations or three modes that represent Satan, his spirit, and his incarnation.

False prophets in the OT

Surprisingly, we don’t find the phrase “false prophet” in the OT, but there are nevertheless references to many false prophets. The Septuagint (LXX) talks about the priests and the false prophets (ἱερεῖς καὶ ψευδοπροφῆται), and often links them together. The term ἱερεύς in this context refers to a priest, one who offers sacrifices to a god, an idol, or an evil spirit. So the LXX suggests that the false prophets are priestly insofar as they encourage the worship of idols (cf. Zech 13:2). Jeremiah 34:9-10 (LXX) associates false prophets with divination, enchantments, clairvoyance, dreams, sorceries, and with lies. Similarly, in the NT, false prophets are magicians, sorcerers, & illusionists (cf. Acts 13:6). This is reminiscent of 2 Thess. 2:9-11 in which the Antichrist “will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie.” Likewise, in the Hebrew Bible, the false prophets are prophesying lying wonders and working miracles (see Exod. 7:8-13; Jer. 6:13). In the NT, they even rise from the dead (Rev. 13:3) and perform “great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to earth” (Rev. 13:13) in order to deceive if possible even the elect (Mt. 24:24).

False Prophets in the NT

Both Mt. 7:15 & Mt. 24:11 warn that there will be many false prophets (ψευδοπροφῆται) who will deceive the world. Matthew 24:24 speaks of false Christs (ψευδόχριστοι) and false prophets who perform “great signs and wonders.” Second Pet. 2:1 associates false prophets with false teachers who secretly introduce destructive heresies, even those that deny Jesus’ lordship. Similarly, 1 Jn warns of deception and commands Christians to “test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. … This is the spirit of antichrist” (1 Jn 4:1–3). Thus, false prophets have the spirit of Antichrist. The apostle Paul calls them “false apostles” (2 Cor. 11:13) and “false brothers” (Gal. 2:4).

The most notorious false prophet in the Bible is the one referenced in the Book of Revelation. In Rev. 19:20, the signs that the False prophet performs in the presence of the Antichrist may be analogous to the signs that Jesus performs in the presence of the Holy Spirit who anoints him with power (see Lk 4:18; Acts 10:38). In fact, the relationship between the False prophet and the Antichrist seems to be analogous to the relationship between the first and second person of the Trinity in which the Word is not only with God but the Word is God, meaning that the Word & God are one and the same (see Jn 1:1). Thus, the reference to the Devil, his son (the Antichrist), and the unclean spirit (personified in the figure of the False prophet) may signify an unholy trinity of three persons who nevertheless share one being (Rev. 16:13). Let’s not forget that the great dragon——“that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan”——is thrown down to the earth and takes the form of a man, as mentioned in Rev. 12:9. And just as Jesus, who is God incarnate, is called a prophet in Mt. 21:11, so the dragon, or Satan incarnate, may be dubbed the False prophet in Rev. 16:13. Matthew 7:15 warns of false prophets who come in “sheep’s clothing,” but who are “ferocious wolves.” This is echoed in Rev. 13:11 where the second Beast (False prophet) looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon.

Conclusion

Curiously enough, it’s the False prophet who works miracles, not the Antichrist. But if the Antichrist is far more important, and if the False prophet is subordinate to the Antichrist, surely the Antichrist must have more power than him. Yet, in the Bible, the opposite seems true, which doesn’t make any sense. That’s why it seems far more plausible that they are one and the same person, just like the two witnesses and the two OT messiahs are one and the same person. So, the reference to the two beasts from the earth and the sea may be an allusion to a single individual who possesses two natures: a human & a spiritual one. Notice also that the second beast is not mentioned until after the resurrection of the first beast, “whose mortal wound was healed” (Rev 13:12), “and has come to life” (Rev 13:14). In other words, the second beast may simply represent the first beast after his resurrection. Therefore, it seems far more plausible to assume that the False Prophet is the Antichrist, who is also known by many other titles, such as “the man of lawlessness,” “the son of destruction” (2 Thess. 2:3), and the "Little horn" (Daniel 7:8, 20; 8:9-12, 23-26)!