THE WORLD TOUR
The Transmission of Lamp 31
ThirtyFirst Discourse from the series of 46 discourses - The Transmission of Lamp by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
Osho,
The phrase “a broken family” is used to conjure up the essence of a disastrous childhood.
By the time I was at university, I had had two fathers and three mothers; and if you include my grandparents – who also functioned as parents for a good while – a grand total of seven, instead of the conventional two. Initially I was puzzled how it was that I seemed relatively free and well-adjusted, while so many of my more “fortunate” friends – who had had the proper stable family life – seemed endlessly troubled by the continuing demands of family ties that pursued them into adulthood. Might not a broken family really be a blessing in disguise?
The conventional family is already out of date. It has served its purpose and it has no future. Psychologically, it is very dangerous for the child to be confined to only two parents. If the child is a girl, she starts loving her father and creates an inner image of a man she would like to love. Of course she knows she cannot love her father the way her mother loves him, so she is jealous of her. It is an ugly situation to create for the child. From the very beginning, the first woman in her life is an object of jealousy. And she is never going to get the first man in her life, but her mind will carry the image of her father her whole life, disrupting all her marriages because in every husband she will be unconsciously looking for her father. No man can fulfill those requirements and no man has married her to be her father.
From the man’s side, he is searching for his mother. If the child is a boy, he falls in love with his mother and he carries the unfulfilled image of that first woman his whole life. He will fall in love with many women, finding some similarity. But similarities are one thing – perhaps just the hair style is like his mother’s or the way the woman walks, or the eyes, or the nose. But the nose is not the whole woman and the hair style is not going to help in any way. So no woman is going to fulfill his longing for his mother, and no woman marries him to be a mother.
Now, we are creating such a complex situation for children that their lives will remain a misery, and they will dump the responsibility on the other. The man will think the woman has betrayed him because she looked just like his mother and after marriage turns out to be something totally different. She deceived him.
The same is the situation from the other side. Every woman thinks the man has deceived her, cheated her, pretending to be nice and good and everything before the marriage. After the marriage, the mask that he was wearing disappears and she finds just a male chauvinist.
Both parents are continuously fighting, nagging each other, trying to dominate each other. And the children are learning it because there is no other way, this is their first school. It is not a question of arithmetic or geography or history; it is a question of life. They are learning life’s ABC. What they are seeing is that their mother is continuously harassing their father, and their father is continuously trying to dominate, subjugate, enslave their mother.
Children are very perceptive because they are very new in the world, their eyes are clear, their perceptions are not yet covered with the dust of experience. They can also see the hypocrisy of it all; if a neighbor comes in while the parents are fighting, they immediately stop. They start smiling at each other, talking about beautiful things, receiving the neighbor, giving the impression to him that they never fight.
The child is also learning hypocrisy: whatever you are is one thing; you have to present to society what society expects you to be – not what you are, but what society wants you to be. From very early childhood we are creating a split personality in each child, schizophrenia, a dual being.
The children are learning ways to be: the girl is learning how a wife should be, according to her mother’s behavior with her father; the boy is learning how a husband should be, according to the behavior of his father. It is because of this that in generation after generation the same stupidities are repeated, again and again. The whole world lives in misery, lives in hypocrisy and the root cause is the conventional family, where the child is exposed to only two people, the mother and father.
In the future, this has to be changed because almost ninety percent of mental illness is born out of this family. We have to make a bigger family. I call it a commune, where many people live together. In our commune in America, five thousand people were living together, working together; in a single kitchen, five thousand people were eating together. Their children were getting acquainted with so many people – everybody their father’s age was an uncle, everybody their mother’s age was an aunt. They were learning from everybody.
The children had a vast possibility of experience. And there was no way to have a fixed image of a woman or a man because they were coming in contact with so many women who were all loving towards them, so many men who were all loving towards them. They were not living with their parents, they had their own campus. The parents could go there, meet them. They could come to their parents, live a day or two with them. They were also invited by other couples, by couples who had no children. They were moving all over the commune. The whole commune was their family.
Psychologically, it created only a vague image of a woman in the boy’s mind, and a vague image of a man in the girl’s mind. This is of tremendous importance. Because the image is vague and is made up of many impressions of different women, there is a possibility you may find a woman who can easily fit. Because you don’t have a fixed idea, you have only a vague conception, any woman can fulfill it, any man can fulfill it.
You have not been living with your parents, so you don’t know how a wife has to behave, how a husband has to behave. You will start innocently, lovingly. You love a man – that’s why you have married him. You love a woman and you are not carrying a certain pattern of how the woman should behave.
The Hindu so-called saint, Tulsidas, is the most important Hindu saint in India; no other book is read as much as his. It is the bible of the Hindus. He writes: “If you don’t want your woman to remain in control, then once in a while you have to beat her. If you don’t beat her – physical, corporal beating – you will lose control of her. By beating her, you prove that you are man enough.”
Your manliness is proved by beating the woman. But if you beat the woman, the woman is also going to find a thousand and one ways to torture you. Whenever you want to make love to her, she will say she has a headache. There is no communication between the two of you. How can there be? You have enslaved her, and no slave can forgive the person who has destroyed her freedom. No woman can forgive the man who has taken away her freedom. But Hindus have been following their saint’s advice – and it is not new: the five-thousand-year old Manusmriti, the moral code of the Hindus, says the same thing.
There is a book published by a psychoanalyst about the man-woman relationship. Its title is significant: The Intimate Enemy. That’s how men and women have lived up to now, as intimate enemies. And the children are learning; they will repeat it – they don’t know any other way.
The family has to change into a commune. Five thousand people, ten thousand people living together, are economically better off than five thousand families living separately. In our commune, only fifteen people looked after the kitchen – for five thousand people. Otherwise, twenty-five hundred women would have been crushed and destroyed in their kitchens. And remember, not all women are good cooks. There is nothing in being a woman that makes you a good cook. In fact, all the great cooks are men; in all the great hotels you will find that the great cooks are men, not women.
Not every family can afford a great genius of a cook, but a commune can afford fifteen really inventive and creative cooks – both men and women. We have experimented and found that it works so beautifully.
Because the children lived together on their own campus, many other things happened. The parents didn’t feel burdened. Parents have a certain freedom which children destroy – you have to wait for the children to go to sleep and by that time you are also feeling sleepy. Children are very strange people: if you want them to go to sleep, they won’t go. They become certain that they are being forced to go to sleep because something is going to be happening. And they cannot understand the logic that when they want to remain awake, they are forced to go to sleep; and when in the morning they want to sleep, they are pulled out of bed and forced to be awake. They can’t understand the logic of it. It seems so absurd.
The parents felt free because their children were living with other children. We discovered a new phenomenon; we thought that there might be trouble, the children might fight with each other. But what we found was just the opposite – the older children took care of the smaller ones. There was no fighting. And nobody had any personal things – all the toys and everything belonged to the campus – so there was no jealousy.
The children enjoyed the tremendous beauty of being with other couples – not just their parents – and naturally, uncles are nicer people than fathers. In fact, the Jewish God in the Old Testament says: “I want you to be aware that I am not your uncle, that I am not a nice person: I am an angry person, a jealous person, revengeful.” His use of “I am not your uncle, I am your father,” makes it clear that an uncle has a nice quality about him. With thousands of uncles and aunts around him, a child feels almost surrounded in love; wherever he goes he is respected.
Because the people are not his parents, they don’t force any of their ambitions on the child. The child is not their own. Otherwise, every parent is trying to fulfill the ambitions which he could not manage to fulfill in his life, through his children. He wanted to become a doctor, but could not become one. So he wants to make his boy a doctor; whether the boy wants to become a doctor or not is not the question at all. So there are doctors who would have been better as butchers, and there are butchers who would have been better as doctors. Everything is upside down.
Nobody bothers about the child’s potential. Everybody thinks of what his own ambition is – to see his boy become the president of the country, or the prime minister, without bothering that the boy is potentially a musician, a Yehudi Menuhin; or an artist, a Michelangelo; or a mathematician, an Albert Einstein. Nobody cares about the child; he is not considered at all.
In a commune, it is not the parents who are going to decide what their children should be. The children are born of the parents, but they don’t belong to them. They belong to the commune and the commune will decide – through psychoanalysis, through hypnosis, through other methods – what the potential of the child is. And a child should be helped in every possible way to become what he has come here to become. Then he will be immensely happy.
In life, there is only one blissfulness and that is to become the potential that you have been carrying within you and to bring it to full flowering. A rosebush should become roses, and that is its joy.
A great surgeon was invited by his friends because he was retiring. He was the greatest surgeon of his country and people were celebrating the occasion, giving him a good farewell. But he looked very sad. A friend came to him and asked, “Why are you so sad?”
He said, “I am sad because I never wanted to become a surgeon, I wanted to become a musician. Even if I had to die on the street as a beggar with my guitar in my hands, I would have been happier than to be the greatest surgeon in the country because that was not at all my longing, it was not my destiny.”
So much misery in the world… And the basic cause is that people are not allowed to move towards their destiny. Everybody is distracted.
The family is no longer needed and it will be a tremendous blessing…not only for the children, but for the parents also, as it is because of the children that parents go on remaining together even though they don’t love each other. The moment a man does not love his wife or the wife does not love the man – and they still go on pretending that they love each other – it is nothing but prostitution, permanent prostitution. And it is just because of the children; otherwise, in a broken family, what will happen to the children?
In a commune there is no problem. You can be with a woman as long as you love her. The moment you find that the love has disappeared… And in life nothing is permanent, nothing can be permanent. It is not within your hands to make anything permanent; only dead things can be permanent. The more alive a thing is, the more fleeting. Stones may be permanent, but flowers cannot be. And love is not a stone. It is a flower, and of a rare quality. Today it is there, tomorrow one knows not – it may be there, it may not be there. It is not in your hands to control it. It is a happening. You cannot do anything: you cannot create it if it is not there; either it is there, or it is not. You are simply helpless.
If children are being taken care of by the commune, then parents can move easily. There is no burden and the children will not miss you because they can find their father, or they can find their mother – there is no problem. The mother can go to the children, the father can go to the children, and the children will become aware from the very beginning that love is a changing phenomenon. To make it permanent has been the greatest fallacy of mankind.
Love cannot become marriage. Marriage is law and love cannot be put under any law. It is wild. It is just like a breeze that comes and goes away; fearing that it may go away, you close all the windows and all the doors – but then there is no breeze, just stale air.
Marriage is stale air and nothing else. The breeze that was felt – which led you to marriage – is not there anymore. But because of the children you have to pretend as long as possible: suffer, pretend. That creates perversions of all kinds.
If the husband no longer loves the wife, he will start moving with some other woman – his secretary in the office. If the woman does not love the husband, naturally she will find somebody – the chauffeur. These are ready-made people: the secretary, the chauffeur. What else to do? Where to go?
This creates unnecessary complexities, ugly fights. The whole home becomes tense. The vibrations are no longer calm and quiet and peaceful. And because you are not satisfied with your woman, you have created prostitutes. It is one of the ugliest things that man has done – to force women to sell their bodies just for money. And remember well: you can get the body for money, but you cannot get love for money. Love is not for sale.
Up to now, there were only women prostitutes because for thousands of years it was a male dominated society. But now there is a women’s liberation movement. This liberation movement is creating more stupidities because it is simply imitating man. It is not trying to raise the consciousness of women; it is simply trying to imitate man, creating hatred for man. And it has created it.
Now in big cities like London or New York or San Francisco, you can find male prostitutes. Naturally – the woman has equal rights. If there are female prostitutes, then male prostitutes should be available too.
The women’s liberation movement is trying to create so much hate for men that a few of the leaders of the movement are preaching lesbianism: women should love only women – just cut out men completely. And this is happening. Homosexuality is happening. Men are tired of women, of being harassed by women, nagged by women. They have started looking for a substitute and they have found that it is better to love a man – it is at least not miserable. It is not a coincidence that homosexuals are called gay people; they are gay. But this is turning the whole society into a madhouse. These perversions of sex are going to create great disturbances. Homosexuality has already brought the ultimate disease, AIDS, for which there seems to be no cure.
Lesbianism also – because it is something new it may take a little longer, but it will produce something. They will have to produce something, otherwise the women’s liberation movement will feel, “We are lacking something which men have; they have AIDS and we don’t have anything.”
The women’s liberation movement is making women ugly: they smoke because men smoke, use four-letter words because men use four-letter words, use the same clothes as the men use. But somebody has to tell these women that it is not liberation: “You are simply becoming second-rate men. It is very degrading, it is humiliating.” All this is happening because of the family. Unless we dissolve the family into a bigger phenomenon, these things will not disappear. If nobody is forced to live with a man or woman where love has disappeared, then prostitution itself will disappear.
There is no need to fight and be intimate enemies. If you cannot be intimate friends, there is no need to be intimate enemies – it is better to say goodbye and become strangers again. Life is so short. It is not to be wasted in unnecessary foolishness.
Live and love – and love totally and intensely, but never against freedom.
Freedom should remain the ultimate value. The family has destroyed that freedom. In my vision, the future is not for families; the future is for communes. The commune is the refined, bigger family; so big that all kinds of perversions that the small family was creating are no longer created. And children should be taken care of by the commune, by the experts. In the first place, just because you have a wife, does not mean that you have the right to become a father or the right to become a mother.
The commune should have a training which anybody who wants to become a father or mother must go through. You can remain married, you can remain together – that is between you two – but don’t disturb a third life.
You have no right to produce a child if you don’t have the right training to bring him up, to help him to be a blissful human being. The psychologists will explore, the doctors will think about it, the gynecologists will have to ponder over it, and unless you get clearance from these people, you are not to produce a child.
Man can produce children without any difficulty. That does not mean that you become a father and a mother. Those are skills, arts. To help a living being grow needs some expertise.
The society, the commune, will decide how many children it needs – so that children can be nourished well, educated well; so that over-population does not disturb things; so that nobody is unemployed, nobody is uneducated, nobody is poor.
So much is known now about the human child and impregnation, that not to use that scientific knowledge would be simply idiotic. We are using it on animals, but we are not using it on human beings. In human beings we are still continuing with the accidental way of producing children.
One of the great poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, was the thirteenth child of his parents. It was good that at that time there was no birth control, otherwise the world would have missed Rabindranath Tagore. And we do not know how many geniuses we go on missing, for the simple reason that as far as human beings are concerned, we are still behaving very superstitiously.
In a single intercourse a man releases millions of sperm. At that moment, politics begins – a great race, a competition, to reach the female egg. To us, the distance seems to be very small, but to the sperm, for its size, the distance is proportionately almost two miles – and its life is only two hours.
In two hours, millions of sperm are running to reach the female egg. Only one will succeed. And you can take it for granted that the better people will stand aside. The Ronald Reagans will reach first. Better people are better from the very beginning – they will give way to others.
Now it is possible to donate your sperm to the hospital; they can find out how many sperm can become geniuses and how many will be just mediocre human beings: Hindus, Christians, Mohammedans, Jews. Those kinds of people can be discarded from the very beginning.
The best can be chosen – you can find them. Floating in that crowd are people like Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Moses, Jesus. Why bother with mediocre people? And why remain accidental when the scientific facts are perfectly known and established? When this crowd – and it is not a small crowd – starts moving, it may just be that those who are in front reach first, for no other reason than that they may be Adolf Hitlers, they may be Mussolinis, they may be Joseph Stalins. Why create these people?
You go on saying history repeats itself. You are the reason it repeats itself. It is because you go on being accidental. History can be changed completely so that it will never be repeated again; one just has to use a little intelligence.
Choose the finest, the best, rather than filling the earth with billions of people. Right now there are more than six billion people; it is better to have just one billion people. But we can create supermen; we just have to change our old patterns of thinking.
We have to use science in the service of man too. Science should be used for children.
Families should be made very loose, relaxed, and bigger; and we can create a paradise on the earth.
Osho,
Upon being questioned on his place in history, Einstein said, “If relativity is proved right, the Germans will call me German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.”
In your case, Osho, I imagine the Indians will say you had to leave India for lack of space – you had too many Indian followers; the Americans will say they persuaded you to leave to help spread your message; the Greeks will say they were so impressed with you, that they provided a police motorcade to the airport; and the British will say they even provided you with government accommodation. And all the rest will say that they wanted you to stay but did not want to gain an unfair advantage over the others.
Osho, what do you say?
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was a simple matter: either it is right or it is wrong, hence what he said is relevant. My work is more complex, almost impossible because it is not a question of any theory being right or wrong. I can be right only if humanity goes through a transformation – which is hoping against hope. But I am an adamant optimist.
Knowing the impossibility of the job, I go on working with absolute trust that the revolution is going to happen. And if my revolution happens, there will be no India and no Indians, no Germany and no Germans, no America and no Americans.
This small planet earth is simply one. All divisions are false. If I fail, then these divisions can remain. If I succeed in convincing the intelligent youth of the world, then all the political lines on the map will have to disappear – they are absolutely unnecessary. They are against humanity’s welfare.
It is one single whole. We should be proud that our planet earth is the only planet in this vast universe, where there are millions of solar systems having millions and millions of planets. Our planet is the only one which has evolved not only life, not only consciousness, but has even produced the ultimate flowering of consciousness in people like Gautam the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Tilopa and many more. We should be proud of this planet earth.
All flags need to be burned, all divisions need to be destroyed, and a single humanity has to be proclaimed. So if I succeed, there will be nobody Indian, German, American to say anything about me. Yes, if I fail – which is more possible – then they will all condemn me. They are all condemning me already.
Perhaps a single individual has never been condemned by so many nations – almost the whole world together – because my fight is not against any particular superstition, any particular religion, any particular nation. My fight is against the very concept of nationality, the very concept of the divisions of religions.
If there is only one science, there can be only one religion. If one science is enough to explore the objective world, one religion is enough to explore the inner world of man. And that one religion need not have any adjective to it – Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism or anything.
Just as science is simply science, religion is simply religion. In fact, according to me, there is only one science with two dimensions: one dimension working on the outside world, the other dimension working on the inside world. We can even get rid of the word religion.
This is a fundamental rule of science, that a minimum of hypotheses should be used. So why use two words? Just one word is enough. And science is a beautiful word, it means “knowing.”
Knowing the other is one aspect, knowing one’s self is another aspect; but knowing covers both.
Osho,
Recently when we were in Kathmandu, a Japanese businessman stepped into the lift with me and conversationally asked me what country I was from. Without thinking, I said, “Oh, I'm a sannyasin.”
I don't know what that man must have made of my reply, but I realized only afterwards that something seemed to fall away from me in that moment. A sense of nationality, of having roots somewhere, even a mother to return to if I really had the need – everything that Australia represented for me in terms of the past – simply died right then and there.
Now I really do feel like an existential gypsy, and I love it!
I want everyone to become an existential gypsy. You don’t need roots – you are not trees. You are human beings. And the moment you become a sannyasin, everything else automatically falls away from you. To be a sannyasin simply means renouncing your past, renouncing all political ideologies, renouncing all religious theologies, renouncing everything that belongs to the dead past.
It means just becoming completely clean, deprogrammed, unconditioned, so that you can clearly see the present and the future, and you can start growing from your own insight, not from borrowed knowledge. Not by somebody else telling you be this, do this, but just by your own insight. Whatever feels right to you is right, and whatever feels wrong to you is wrong.
The moment you take such a standpoint, you become an individual for the first time. For the first time, you have respected yourself, you have accepted yourself. For the first time, you are grateful to existence for having made you the way you are.
You don’t have any ideals any more. You are not to become like Jesus, you are not to become like Buddha. You have just to be yourself, and allow your being to grow in freedom without any ideals, because every ideal leads towards slavery.
Once you are unburdened of the past and free to move in freedom, you almost have wings and the whole sky is yours. The moment you drop the roots, you grow wings. It is so beautiful to have the whole sky with all the stars available to you: with no guilt, with no fear, with no God to dominate you, to enslave you, with no Devil to destroy you – for the first time, just you in your crystal clear aloneness.
I teach you simply to be yourself.
The phrase “a broken family” is used to conjure up the essence of a disastrous childhood.
By the time I was at university, I had had two fathers and three mothers; and if you include my grandparents – who also functioned as parents for a good while – a grand total of seven, instead of the conventional two. Initially I was puzzled how it was that I seemed relatively free and well-adjusted, while so many of my more “fortunate” friends – who had had the proper stable family life – seemed endlessly troubled by the continuing demands of family ties that pursued them into adulthood. Might not a broken family really be a blessing in disguise?
The conventional family is already out of date. It has served its purpose and it has no future. Psychologically, it is very dangerous for the child to be confined to only two parents. If the child is a girl, she starts loving her father and creates an inner image of a man she would like to love. Of course she knows she cannot love her father the way her mother loves him, so she is jealous of her. It is an ugly situation to create for the child. From the very beginning, the first woman in her life is an object of jealousy. And she is never going to get the first man in her life, but her mind will carry the image of her father her whole life, disrupting all her marriages because in every husband she will be unconsciously looking for her father. No man can fulfill those requirements and no man has married her to be her father.
From the man’s side, he is searching for his mother. If the child is a boy, he falls in love with his mother and he carries the unfulfilled image of that first woman his whole life. He will fall in love with many women, finding some similarity. But similarities are one thing – perhaps just the hair style is like his mother’s or the way the woman walks, or the eyes, or the nose. But the nose is not the whole woman and the hair style is not going to help in any way. So no woman is going to fulfill his longing for his mother, and no woman marries him to be a mother.
Now, we are creating such a complex situation for children that their lives will remain a misery, and they will dump the responsibility on the other. The man will think the woman has betrayed him because she looked just like his mother and after marriage turns out to be something totally different. She deceived him.
The same is the situation from the other side. Every woman thinks the man has deceived her, cheated her, pretending to be nice and good and everything before the marriage. After the marriage, the mask that he was wearing disappears and she finds just a male chauvinist.
Both parents are continuously fighting, nagging each other, trying to dominate each other. And the children are learning it because there is no other way, this is their first school. It is not a question of arithmetic or geography or history; it is a question of life. They are learning life’s ABC. What they are seeing is that their mother is continuously harassing their father, and their father is continuously trying to dominate, subjugate, enslave their mother.
Children are very perceptive because they are very new in the world, their eyes are clear, their perceptions are not yet covered with the dust of experience. They can also see the hypocrisy of it all; if a neighbor comes in while the parents are fighting, they immediately stop. They start smiling at each other, talking about beautiful things, receiving the neighbor, giving the impression to him that they never fight.
The child is also learning hypocrisy: whatever you are is one thing; you have to present to society what society expects you to be – not what you are, but what society wants you to be. From very early childhood we are creating a split personality in each child, schizophrenia, a dual being.
The children are learning ways to be: the girl is learning how a wife should be, according to her mother’s behavior with her father; the boy is learning how a husband should be, according to the behavior of his father. It is because of this that in generation after generation the same stupidities are repeated, again and again. The whole world lives in misery, lives in hypocrisy and the root cause is the conventional family, where the child is exposed to only two people, the mother and father.
In the future, this has to be changed because almost ninety percent of mental illness is born out of this family. We have to make a bigger family. I call it a commune, where many people live together. In our commune in America, five thousand people were living together, working together; in a single kitchen, five thousand people were eating together. Their children were getting acquainted with so many people – everybody their father’s age was an uncle, everybody their mother’s age was an aunt. They were learning from everybody.
The children had a vast possibility of experience. And there was no way to have a fixed image of a woman or a man because they were coming in contact with so many women who were all loving towards them, so many men who were all loving towards them. They were not living with their parents, they had their own campus. The parents could go there, meet them. They could come to their parents, live a day or two with them. They were also invited by other couples, by couples who had no children. They were moving all over the commune. The whole commune was their family.
Psychologically, it created only a vague image of a woman in the boy’s mind, and a vague image of a man in the girl’s mind. This is of tremendous importance. Because the image is vague and is made up of many impressions of different women, there is a possibility you may find a woman who can easily fit. Because you don’t have a fixed idea, you have only a vague conception, any woman can fulfill it, any man can fulfill it.
You have not been living with your parents, so you don’t know how a wife has to behave, how a husband has to behave. You will start innocently, lovingly. You love a man – that’s why you have married him. You love a woman and you are not carrying a certain pattern of how the woman should behave.
The Hindu so-called saint, Tulsidas, is the most important Hindu saint in India; no other book is read as much as his. It is the bible of the Hindus. He writes: “If you don’t want your woman to remain in control, then once in a while you have to beat her. If you don’t beat her – physical, corporal beating – you will lose control of her. By beating her, you prove that you are man enough.”
Your manliness is proved by beating the woman. But if you beat the woman, the woman is also going to find a thousand and one ways to torture you. Whenever you want to make love to her, she will say she has a headache. There is no communication between the two of you. How can there be? You have enslaved her, and no slave can forgive the person who has destroyed her freedom. No woman can forgive the man who has taken away her freedom. But Hindus have been following their saint’s advice – and it is not new: the five-thousand-year old Manusmriti, the moral code of the Hindus, says the same thing.
There is a book published by a psychoanalyst about the man-woman relationship. Its title is significant: The Intimate Enemy. That’s how men and women have lived up to now, as intimate enemies. And the children are learning; they will repeat it – they don’t know any other way.
The family has to change into a commune. Five thousand people, ten thousand people living together, are economically better off than five thousand families living separately. In our commune, only fifteen people looked after the kitchen – for five thousand people. Otherwise, twenty-five hundred women would have been crushed and destroyed in their kitchens. And remember, not all women are good cooks. There is nothing in being a woman that makes you a good cook. In fact, all the great cooks are men; in all the great hotels you will find that the great cooks are men, not women.
Not every family can afford a great genius of a cook, but a commune can afford fifteen really inventive and creative cooks – both men and women. We have experimented and found that it works so beautifully.
Because the children lived together on their own campus, many other things happened. The parents didn’t feel burdened. Parents have a certain freedom which children destroy – you have to wait for the children to go to sleep and by that time you are also feeling sleepy. Children are very strange people: if you want them to go to sleep, they won’t go. They become certain that they are being forced to go to sleep because something is going to be happening. And they cannot understand the logic that when they want to remain awake, they are forced to go to sleep; and when in the morning they want to sleep, they are pulled out of bed and forced to be awake. They can’t understand the logic of it. It seems so absurd.
The parents felt free because their children were living with other children. We discovered a new phenomenon; we thought that there might be trouble, the children might fight with each other. But what we found was just the opposite – the older children took care of the smaller ones. There was no fighting. And nobody had any personal things – all the toys and everything belonged to the campus – so there was no jealousy.
The children enjoyed the tremendous beauty of being with other couples – not just their parents – and naturally, uncles are nicer people than fathers. In fact, the Jewish God in the Old Testament says: “I want you to be aware that I am not your uncle, that I am not a nice person: I am an angry person, a jealous person, revengeful.” His use of “I am not your uncle, I am your father,” makes it clear that an uncle has a nice quality about him. With thousands of uncles and aunts around him, a child feels almost surrounded in love; wherever he goes he is respected.
Because the people are not his parents, they don’t force any of their ambitions on the child. The child is not their own. Otherwise, every parent is trying to fulfill the ambitions which he could not manage to fulfill in his life, through his children. He wanted to become a doctor, but could not become one. So he wants to make his boy a doctor; whether the boy wants to become a doctor or not is not the question at all. So there are doctors who would have been better as butchers, and there are butchers who would have been better as doctors. Everything is upside down.
Nobody bothers about the child’s potential. Everybody thinks of what his own ambition is – to see his boy become the president of the country, or the prime minister, without bothering that the boy is potentially a musician, a Yehudi Menuhin; or an artist, a Michelangelo; or a mathematician, an Albert Einstein. Nobody cares about the child; he is not considered at all.
In a commune, it is not the parents who are going to decide what their children should be. The children are born of the parents, but they don’t belong to them. They belong to the commune and the commune will decide – through psychoanalysis, through hypnosis, through other methods – what the potential of the child is. And a child should be helped in every possible way to become what he has come here to become. Then he will be immensely happy.
In life, there is only one blissfulness and that is to become the potential that you have been carrying within you and to bring it to full flowering. A rosebush should become roses, and that is its joy.
A great surgeon was invited by his friends because he was retiring. He was the greatest surgeon of his country and people were celebrating the occasion, giving him a good farewell. But he looked very sad. A friend came to him and asked, “Why are you so sad?”
He said, “I am sad because I never wanted to become a surgeon, I wanted to become a musician. Even if I had to die on the street as a beggar with my guitar in my hands, I would have been happier than to be the greatest surgeon in the country because that was not at all my longing, it was not my destiny.”
So much misery in the world… And the basic cause is that people are not allowed to move towards their destiny. Everybody is distracted.
The family is no longer needed and it will be a tremendous blessing…not only for the children, but for the parents also, as it is because of the children that parents go on remaining together even though they don’t love each other. The moment a man does not love his wife or the wife does not love the man – and they still go on pretending that they love each other – it is nothing but prostitution, permanent prostitution. And it is just because of the children; otherwise, in a broken family, what will happen to the children?
In a commune there is no problem. You can be with a woman as long as you love her. The moment you find that the love has disappeared… And in life nothing is permanent, nothing can be permanent. It is not within your hands to make anything permanent; only dead things can be permanent. The more alive a thing is, the more fleeting. Stones may be permanent, but flowers cannot be. And love is not a stone. It is a flower, and of a rare quality. Today it is there, tomorrow one knows not – it may be there, it may not be there. It is not in your hands to control it. It is a happening. You cannot do anything: you cannot create it if it is not there; either it is there, or it is not. You are simply helpless.
If children are being taken care of by the commune, then parents can move easily. There is no burden and the children will not miss you because they can find their father, or they can find their mother – there is no problem. The mother can go to the children, the father can go to the children, and the children will become aware from the very beginning that love is a changing phenomenon. To make it permanent has been the greatest fallacy of mankind.
Love cannot become marriage. Marriage is law and love cannot be put under any law. It is wild. It is just like a breeze that comes and goes away; fearing that it may go away, you close all the windows and all the doors – but then there is no breeze, just stale air.
Marriage is stale air and nothing else. The breeze that was felt – which led you to marriage – is not there anymore. But because of the children you have to pretend as long as possible: suffer, pretend. That creates perversions of all kinds.
If the husband no longer loves the wife, he will start moving with some other woman – his secretary in the office. If the woman does not love the husband, naturally she will find somebody – the chauffeur. These are ready-made people: the secretary, the chauffeur. What else to do? Where to go?
This creates unnecessary complexities, ugly fights. The whole home becomes tense. The vibrations are no longer calm and quiet and peaceful. And because you are not satisfied with your woman, you have created prostitutes. It is one of the ugliest things that man has done – to force women to sell their bodies just for money. And remember well: you can get the body for money, but you cannot get love for money. Love is not for sale.
Up to now, there were only women prostitutes because for thousands of years it was a male dominated society. But now there is a women’s liberation movement. This liberation movement is creating more stupidities because it is simply imitating man. It is not trying to raise the consciousness of women; it is simply trying to imitate man, creating hatred for man. And it has created it.
Now in big cities like London or New York or San Francisco, you can find male prostitutes. Naturally – the woman has equal rights. If there are female prostitutes, then male prostitutes should be available too.
The women’s liberation movement is trying to create so much hate for men that a few of the leaders of the movement are preaching lesbianism: women should love only women – just cut out men completely. And this is happening. Homosexuality is happening. Men are tired of women, of being harassed by women, nagged by women. They have started looking for a substitute and they have found that it is better to love a man – it is at least not miserable. It is not a coincidence that homosexuals are called gay people; they are gay. But this is turning the whole society into a madhouse. These perversions of sex are going to create great disturbances. Homosexuality has already brought the ultimate disease, AIDS, for which there seems to be no cure.
Lesbianism also – because it is something new it may take a little longer, but it will produce something. They will have to produce something, otherwise the women’s liberation movement will feel, “We are lacking something which men have; they have AIDS and we don’t have anything.”
The women’s liberation movement is making women ugly: they smoke because men smoke, use four-letter words because men use four-letter words, use the same clothes as the men use. But somebody has to tell these women that it is not liberation: “You are simply becoming second-rate men. It is very degrading, it is humiliating.” All this is happening because of the family. Unless we dissolve the family into a bigger phenomenon, these things will not disappear. If nobody is forced to live with a man or woman where love has disappeared, then prostitution itself will disappear.
There is no need to fight and be intimate enemies. If you cannot be intimate friends, there is no need to be intimate enemies – it is better to say goodbye and become strangers again. Life is so short. It is not to be wasted in unnecessary foolishness.
Live and love – and love totally and intensely, but never against freedom.
Freedom should remain the ultimate value. The family has destroyed that freedom. In my vision, the future is not for families; the future is for communes. The commune is the refined, bigger family; so big that all kinds of perversions that the small family was creating are no longer created. And children should be taken care of by the commune, by the experts. In the first place, just because you have a wife, does not mean that you have the right to become a father or the right to become a mother.
The commune should have a training which anybody who wants to become a father or mother must go through. You can remain married, you can remain together – that is between you two – but don’t disturb a third life.
You have no right to produce a child if you don’t have the right training to bring him up, to help him to be a blissful human being. The psychologists will explore, the doctors will think about it, the gynecologists will have to ponder over it, and unless you get clearance from these people, you are not to produce a child.
Man can produce children without any difficulty. That does not mean that you become a father and a mother. Those are skills, arts. To help a living being grow needs some expertise.
The society, the commune, will decide how many children it needs – so that children can be nourished well, educated well; so that over-population does not disturb things; so that nobody is unemployed, nobody is uneducated, nobody is poor.
So much is known now about the human child and impregnation, that not to use that scientific knowledge would be simply idiotic. We are using it on animals, but we are not using it on human beings. In human beings we are still continuing with the accidental way of producing children.
One of the great poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, was the thirteenth child of his parents. It was good that at that time there was no birth control, otherwise the world would have missed Rabindranath Tagore. And we do not know how many geniuses we go on missing, for the simple reason that as far as human beings are concerned, we are still behaving very superstitiously.
In a single intercourse a man releases millions of sperm. At that moment, politics begins – a great race, a competition, to reach the female egg. To us, the distance seems to be very small, but to the sperm, for its size, the distance is proportionately almost two miles – and its life is only two hours.
In two hours, millions of sperm are running to reach the female egg. Only one will succeed. And you can take it for granted that the better people will stand aside. The Ronald Reagans will reach first. Better people are better from the very beginning – they will give way to others.
Now it is possible to donate your sperm to the hospital; they can find out how many sperm can become geniuses and how many will be just mediocre human beings: Hindus, Christians, Mohammedans, Jews. Those kinds of people can be discarded from the very beginning.
The best can be chosen – you can find them. Floating in that crowd are people like Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Moses, Jesus. Why bother with mediocre people? And why remain accidental when the scientific facts are perfectly known and established? When this crowd – and it is not a small crowd – starts moving, it may just be that those who are in front reach first, for no other reason than that they may be Adolf Hitlers, they may be Mussolinis, they may be Joseph Stalins. Why create these people?
You go on saying history repeats itself. You are the reason it repeats itself. It is because you go on being accidental. History can be changed completely so that it will never be repeated again; one just has to use a little intelligence.
Choose the finest, the best, rather than filling the earth with billions of people. Right now there are more than six billion people; it is better to have just one billion people. But we can create supermen; we just have to change our old patterns of thinking.
We have to use science in the service of man too. Science should be used for children.
Families should be made very loose, relaxed, and bigger; and we can create a paradise on the earth.
Osho,
Upon being questioned on his place in history, Einstein said, “If relativity is proved right, the Germans will call me German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.”
In your case, Osho, I imagine the Indians will say you had to leave India for lack of space – you had too many Indian followers; the Americans will say they persuaded you to leave to help spread your message; the Greeks will say they were so impressed with you, that they provided a police motorcade to the airport; and the British will say they even provided you with government accommodation. And all the rest will say that they wanted you to stay but did not want to gain an unfair advantage over the others.
Osho, what do you say?
Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity was a simple matter: either it is right or it is wrong, hence what he said is relevant. My work is more complex, almost impossible because it is not a question of any theory being right or wrong. I can be right only if humanity goes through a transformation – which is hoping against hope. But I am an adamant optimist.
Knowing the impossibility of the job, I go on working with absolute trust that the revolution is going to happen. And if my revolution happens, there will be no India and no Indians, no Germany and no Germans, no America and no Americans.
This small planet earth is simply one. All divisions are false. If I fail, then these divisions can remain. If I succeed in convincing the intelligent youth of the world, then all the political lines on the map will have to disappear – they are absolutely unnecessary. They are against humanity’s welfare.
It is one single whole. We should be proud that our planet earth is the only planet in this vast universe, where there are millions of solar systems having millions and millions of planets. Our planet is the only one which has evolved not only life, not only consciousness, but has even produced the ultimate flowering of consciousness in people like Gautam the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Tilopa and many more. We should be proud of this planet earth.
All flags need to be burned, all divisions need to be destroyed, and a single humanity has to be proclaimed. So if I succeed, there will be nobody Indian, German, American to say anything about me. Yes, if I fail – which is more possible – then they will all condemn me. They are all condemning me already.
Perhaps a single individual has never been condemned by so many nations – almost the whole world together – because my fight is not against any particular superstition, any particular religion, any particular nation. My fight is against the very concept of nationality, the very concept of the divisions of religions.
If there is only one science, there can be only one religion. If one science is enough to explore the objective world, one religion is enough to explore the inner world of man. And that one religion need not have any adjective to it – Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism or anything.
Just as science is simply science, religion is simply religion. In fact, according to me, there is only one science with two dimensions: one dimension working on the outside world, the other dimension working on the inside world. We can even get rid of the word religion.
This is a fundamental rule of science, that a minimum of hypotheses should be used. So why use two words? Just one word is enough. And science is a beautiful word, it means “knowing.”
Knowing the other is one aspect, knowing one’s self is another aspect; but knowing covers both.
Osho,
Recently when we were in Kathmandu, a Japanese businessman stepped into the lift with me and conversationally asked me what country I was from. Without thinking, I said, “Oh, I'm a sannyasin.”
I don't know what that man must have made of my reply, but I realized only afterwards that something seemed to fall away from me in that moment. A sense of nationality, of having roots somewhere, even a mother to return to if I really had the need – everything that Australia represented for me in terms of the past – simply died right then and there.
Now I really do feel like an existential gypsy, and I love it!
I want everyone to become an existential gypsy. You don’t need roots – you are not trees. You are human beings. And the moment you become a sannyasin, everything else automatically falls away from you. To be a sannyasin simply means renouncing your past, renouncing all political ideologies, renouncing all religious theologies, renouncing everything that belongs to the dead past.
It means just becoming completely clean, deprogrammed, unconditioned, so that you can clearly see the present and the future, and you can start growing from your own insight, not from borrowed knowledge. Not by somebody else telling you be this, do this, but just by your own insight. Whatever feels right to you is right, and whatever feels wrong to you is wrong.
The moment you take such a standpoint, you become an individual for the first time. For the first time, you have respected yourself, you have accepted yourself. For the first time, you are grateful to existence for having made you the way you are.
You don’t have any ideals any more. You are not to become like Jesus, you are not to become like Buddha. You have just to be yourself, and allow your being to grow in freedom without any ideals, because every ideal leads towards slavery.
Once you are unburdened of the past and free to move in freedom, you almost have wings and the whole sky is yours. The moment you drop the roots, you grow wings. It is so beautiful to have the whole sky with all the stars available to you: with no guilt, with no fear, with no God to dominate you, to enslave you, with no Devil to destroy you – for the first time, just you in your crystal clear aloneness.
I teach you simply to be yourself.