The event of terrorism is certainly related with what is happening in the society. The society is falling apart. Its old order, discipline, morality, religion, everything has been found to be wrongly based. It has lost its power over people's conscience.
Terrorism simply symbolizes that to destroy human beings does 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.
The nations are irrelevant because of nuclear weapons. If the whole world can be destroyed together within minutes the alternative can only be that the whole world should be together. Now it cannot remain divided; its division is dangerous, because division can become war any moment. The division cannot be tolerated. Only one war is enough to destroy everything, and there is not much time left for man to understand that we should create a world where the very possibility of war does not exist.
Terrorism has many undercurrents. One is that because of nuclear weapons, the nations are pouring their energy into that field, thinking that the old weapons are out of date. They are out of date, but individuals can start using them.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. One individual terrorist throws a bomb — it does not justify that a nuclear missile should be sent.
What I want to emphasize is that the nuclear weapon has given individual people a certain freedom to use old weapons, a freedom which was not possible in the old days because the governments were also using the same weapons.
Now the governments are concentrated on destroying the old weapons, throwing them in 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 same 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 — either drown them in the ocean…. That meant so much money, so much manpower, so much energy had gone to waste; 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 it, but these weapons cannot be used in a war. In a war these weapons are already useless. But nobody has seen the possibility that these 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 these are the weapons sold by you! But the phenomenon was not conceived of, because human psychology is not understood.
My understanding is that the way he has lived, man needs every ten to twelve years — a war. He accumulates so much anger, so much rage, so much violence, that nothing short of a war will give him release. So, war after war, there is a gap of only ten to fifteen years. That gap is a kind of relaxation. But again you start accumulating, because the same psychology is working — the same jealousy, the same violence.
And man is basically a hunter; he is not by nature vegetarian. First he became a hunter, and for thousands of years he was just a meat-eater, and cannibalism was prevalent everywhere. To eat human beings caught from the opposing tribe you were fighting with was perfectly ethical. All that is carried in the unconscious of humanity.
Religions have imposed things on man very superficially; his unconscious is not in agreement. Every man is living in a disagreement with himself. So whenever he can find a chance — for a beautiful cause; freedom, democracy, socialism — any beautiful word can become an umbrella to hide his ugly unconscious, which simply wants to destroy and enjoys destruction.
Now the world war has become almost impossible; otherwise there would have been no terrorism. Enough time has passed since the second world war; the third world war should have happened nearabout 1960. It has not happened. This has been the routine for the whole of history, and man is programmed for it.
It has been observed by psychologists that in wartime people are more happy than in peacetime. In wartime their life has a thrill; in peacetime they look bored. In wartime, early in the morning they are searching for the newspaper, listening to the radio. Things may be happening far away, but they are excited. Something in them feels an affinity.
A war that should have happened somewhere between 1955 and 1960 has not happened, and man is burdened with the desire to kill, with the desire to destroy. It is just that he wants good names for it.
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. It will grow. It can only be prevented if we change the very base of human understanding — which is a Himalayan task; more so because these same people whom you want to change will fight you; they won't allow you to change them easily.
The hunter was satisfied in the war. Now the war has stopped and perhaps there is no possibility for it.
The hunter is back; now we cannot fight collectively. Each individual has to do something to release his own steam.
Things are interconnected. The first thing that has to be changed is that man should be made more rejoicing — which all the religions have killed. The real criminals are not caught. These are the victims, the terrorists and other criminals.
It is all the religions who are the real criminals, because they have destroyed all possibilities of rejoicing. They have destroyed the possibility of enjoying small things of life; they have condemned everything that nature provides you to make you happy, to make you feel excited, feel pleasant.
They have taken everything away; and if they have not been able to take a few things away because they are so ingrained in your biology — like sex — they have at least been able to poison them.
Friedrich Nietzsche, according to me, is one of the greatest seers of the Western world; his eyes really go penetrating to the very root of a problem. But because others could not see it — their eyes were not so penetrating, nor was their intelligence so sharp — the man lived alone, abandoned, isolated, unloved, unrespected.
He says in one of his statements that man has been taught by religions to condemn sex, to renounce sex. Religion has not been able to manage it; and man has tried hard but has failed, because it is so deeply rooted in his biology — it constitutes his whole body. He is born out of sex — how can he get rid of it except by committing suicide?
So man has tried, and religions have helped him to get rid of it — thousands of disciplines and strategies have been used. The total result is that sex is there, but poisoned. That word poisoned is a tremendous insight. Religions have not been able to take it away, but they have been certainly successful in poisoning it.
And the same is the situation about other things: religions are condemning your living in comfort. Now, a man who is living in comfort and luxury cannot become a terrorist. Religions have condemned riches, praised poverty; now, a man who is rich cannot be a terrorist. Only the "blessed ones" who are poor can be terrorists — because they have nothing to lose, and they are boiling up against the whole of society because others have things they don't have.
Religions have been trying to console them. But then came communism — a materialist religion — which provoked people and said to them, "Your old religions are all opium to the people, and it is not because of your evil actions in this life or in past lives that you are suffering poverty. It is because of the evil exploitation of the bourgeois, the super-rich that you are suffering."
You live in fear, not in joy. 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; the terrorism is in your unconscious.
Otherwise, this state of affairs is going to grow more bitter. And it seems all kinds of blind people have bombs in their hands and are throwing them at random.
The third world war would have released people for ten or, fifteen years. But the third world war cannot happen because if it happens it won't relieve people, it will only destroy people.
So 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 therapies, needs to understand his unconscious intentions, needs to go through meditations so that he can calm down, become cool — and look towards the world with a new perspective, of silence.
OSHO