Birthday of polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus

Born on 19^th February 1473 in Poland, Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath, active as a mathematician, astronomer, and Catholic canon, who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.

The publication of Copernicus’ model in his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, was a major event in the history of science, triggering the Copernican Revolution and making a pioneering contribution to the Scientific Revolution.

Copernicus was born and died in Royal Prussia, a region that had been part of the Kingdom of Poland since 1466. A polyglot and polymath, he obtained a doctorate in canon law and was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classics scholar, translator, governor, diplomat, and economist. In 1517 he derived a quantity theory of money—a key concept in economics—and in 1519 he formulated an economic principle that later came to be called Gresham’s law.

Osho talks about Copernicus and his theory about Earth and says, “All the religions of the world were disturbed by Copernicus. He created one of the greatest revolutions in human consciousness. Before him, all religions believed that the earth was the center of existence. Not that they knew — it was part of human ego to believe that the earth is the center of the whole universe. It was part of an ego-trip. If the earth is the center of the whole universe, then man is the center of all life. How can it be otherwise? When man lives on earth, how can the center be anywhere else? And when Copernicus said that the earth is not the center; in fact, the earth is a very very distant, mediocre place, not at all important, very insignificant; the universe is vast and the earth is not the center…”

BELOVED OSHO,

WHAT IS YOUR IDEA OF A MODEL COMMUNE?

Maneesha, mankind is at a crossroads. It cannot live the way it has lived up to now. That has become simply impossible. It has been dreaming for a better future as far back as you can conceive, but life has been deteriorating rather than becoming better. It has come to a point where we are facing either suicide, a global suicide, or a total transformation of human consciousness and its style of life. My idea of a model commune implies the whole life of man from all the possible aspects.

First, the family cannot remain the basic unit of the society. It is the root cause of millions of diseases; it is the basic brick of which nations are made, races are made, religious organizations are made. The family has destroyed the blissfulness of men and women of the whole of mankind. Its basic structure is of possessiveness — the husband possesses the wife and they both possess the children — and the moment you possess a human being, you have taken away his dignity, his freedom, his very humanity. You have taken away all that is beautiful and you have given him only handcuffs, perhaps made of gold… beautiful cages in place of his wings. Those golden cages cannot give him the sky and the freedom of the sky.

So the first thing is: a model commune will not have families. The implication is clear that it will not have marriages. Love, for the first time, should be given the respect that is its due for centuries. Love should be the only law between two human beings if they decide to live together; only joy should be their binding force. The moment love disappears…. And remember, like everything real, love also changes. Only unreal things, plastic things, remain permanent. Marriage is permanent, but it gains permanence by killing love. It is on the grave of love that marriage makes its house. Naturally, it brings only agony, anguish, suffering, slavery — and a total destruction of man’s spirituality. A model commune will be a communion, a gathering of free spirits. Children should belong to the commune, not to the parents. Parents have done enough harm. They cannot be allowed anymore to corrupt their children, although their intentions are all good. But what to do with their good intentions? The results are all ugly.

Parents teach their children to be competitive, and competition brings jealousy. They teach their children to become somebody in the world, to leave a name behind themselves. That makes life a struggle, not a rejoicing but a continuous fight — so destructive that it takes away all your joy, all your juice, all your flowers. It leaves behind only skeletons fighting for power, for money, for position. Life becomes a war field. The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children — their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.

A commune is a declaration of a non-ambitious life with equal opportunity for all. But remember my differences with Karl Marx. I am not in favor of imposing equality on people, because that is a psychologically impossible task, and whenever you do something against nature, it becomes destructive and poisonous. No two men are equal. But I can be misunderstood very easily, so try to understand my standpoint very clearly: I am not in favor of equality, but I am not in favor of inequality either! I am in favor of creating equal opportunities for everybody to be himself. In other words, in my vision, each individual is unique. The question of equality or inequality does not arise, because two individuals are not the same. They cannot be compared.

A real commune, a real communism, will create equal opportunities for growth, but accept the uniqueness of each individual. There should be no private property. Everything should belong to the commune. There should be absolute freedom of expression in words or in creativity. Each individual should be respected as he is, not according to any ideal. His basic needs should be fulfilled by the commune, and as the commune becomes richer, every individual should be provided with more comfort, with more luxury — because I am not against luxury or comfort. I am not a sadist, and I don’t want people to be tortured in any beautiful name. In the name of religion, or in the name of socialism, nobody should be sacrificed. No kind of self torture should be supported.

Man is here to rejoice, to live a life as beautifully, as peacefully, as comfortably as possible. I am all for richness, but the richness will be of the commune. As the commune becomes richer, every individual will become richer. I am against poverty; I am not a worshiper of poverty. I don’t see anything spiritual in being poor — it is sheer stupidity. Neither poverty is spiritual, nor is sickness spiritual, nor is hunger spiritual. A commune should live in a way that it becomes more and more rich, that it does not produce too many children, that it does not overproduce people. Overproduction is bound to create beggars, is bound to create orphans, and once there are orphans there are Mother Teresas. I don’t want any Mother Teresa in the world. Neither do I believe in the virtue of serving the poor, because I don’t want anybody to be poor in the world. And it is in our hands: we have all the scientific techniques to produce according to our needs — or not to produce. To produce the best possible children… there is no need to produce blind, crippled, retarded… that should be a thing of the past! Now science places it absolutely in our hands to choose how our children should be. We just have to drop our old conception.

Our old conception was: my child should be of my blood. It is sheer nonsense. What is the difference between my blood and your blood? The new intelligence should choose the right seed for the child — from whom it comes, it does not matter. In a commune there should be banks for semen in the hospitals, just as there are banks for blood. A couple can go and ask the doctor what kind of child is needed — a mathematician? a Mohammed Ali the Great? a Jesus Christ? — because now it is possible to read the whole history of every child even before he is conceived. Every living cell that is going to become the life of a new child has the whole program. How long he will live, whether he will be healthy or sick, intelligent or unintelligent, a musician, a dancer, a scientist… you can choose! We just have to drop the old, stupid ideas. As far as lovemaking is concerned, you can make love to the woman you like. But as far as producing a child is concerned, your woman can provide the womb and you can find the best seed from the hospital. And it will be anonymous, so you need not be worried that someone in the street will say, “Hello, you are the father of my child.” Nobody can say that; nobody will ever know.

Finally, the children should belong to the commune as a whole. Father and mother should recede, in their place, should be “uncles” and “aunts”. There should be so many uncles and so many aunts… perhaps the mother should be the chief aunt and the father should be the chief uncle, but not more than that. Everybody should be allowed to be himself. Right now everybody is forced to be according to the ideas of others. That causes misery and great anguish, and takes all joy and gladness from life. Everybody should be himself and contribute to life according to his way — by creating music, or by creating paintings, or by writing poetry, or by producing better fruits, better crops, making better roads. Everyone should be allowed to have his own potential fulfilled. A model commune will give dignity to every individual. I was saying this morning that Gorbachev can invite us to have a model commune in the Soviet Union. This is as far as human growth is concerned. One thing for the inner growth is that everybody, irrespective of whether he is a man or a woman, should be allowed to choose a method of meditation suitable to him, so that he can not only experience the joys of life, but he can also experience the joys of his spirit.

Communism is missing only one thing: a spirituality. A model commune should be a spiritual gathering of seekers, of lovers, of friends, of creative people in all dimensions of life. They can produce paradise here on the earth. The time for families is over, and the time for cities is over, and the time for nations is over. The world should be one, consisting of small communes. Then there is no need for armies because there is nobody with whom you are to fight. There is no need of arms, particularly atomic and nuclear, because you are not interested in committing a global suicide.

The whole energy that is being poured into creating more and more destructive weapons can be changed into creativity, and the whole earth can live as richly, as luxuriously, as no emperor has ever lived! And if we do not choose this, then we don’t have any intelligence at all. Even a little intelligence is enough to show that a total transformation of the society, of the old dead and rotten society, has become an absolute necessity for survival; otherwise, if we continue to be the way we are, we can count the years on our ten fingers. The end is not very far away, but the end can become a great beginning if we understand. We can avoid it! It is in our own hands, because the end is not coming by any natural calamity, it is being caused by our stupidity!

A model commune will create as much intelligence as possible and will allow people to grow intelligently, search and seek their truth. That is how one becomes more intelligent, by searching and seeking. Intelligence is sharpened like a sword. Man has lived in unintelligence because all the religions of the world have emphasized only one thing: belief — and belief is poison to intelligence. They have emphasized only one thing: faith — and faith is against all growth.

The new man I conceive, will not have any belief system and will not have any faith. He will be a seeker, a searcher, an enquirer. His life will be a life of tremendous discovery — discoveries in the outside world and discoveries in the inside too. I want every human being to be a discoverer: a Galileo, a Copernicus, a Columbus, in the outside world and a Gautam Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Chuang-Tzu in the inside world. My whole effort is concentrated on one thing: to create the new man as Zorba the Buddha. In a model commune everybody will have the qualities of the Zorba and the qualities of the Buddha; tremendously interested in the outside world, and in the same way, in love with the inner search. The day you are both together you have become the new man, and the new man is going to be the savior of humanity. If the new man is not born there is no hope for humanity.

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune. 

Discourse name: The Golden Future Chapter title: The time for families is over Chapter #22

22 May 1987 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

References:

Osho has spoken on scientists like Aristotle, Chamberlain, Copernicus, Darwin, Descartes, Eddington, Edison, Einstein, Euclid, Galileo, Leibnitz, Kepler, Newton, Ptolemy, Planck, Ramanujan, Rutherford and many others in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. What Is, Is, What Ain’t, Ain’t
2. One Seed Makes the Whole Earth Green
3. Sufis: People on the Path Vol.1-2
4. The Sun Rises in the Evening
5. The Empty Boat
6. Dang Dang Doko Dang
7. Beyond Psychology
8. Zarathustra, the laughing prophet
9. From Personality to Individuality
10. From Ignorance to Innocence
11. That Art Thou
12. The Path of the Mystic
13. The Secret