Osho on Parenting

Osho Guidance to seven months pregnant sannyasin

[The new sannyasin is seven months pregnant.]

Osho – Then just be here and absorb as much of my energy as possible. Be open and vulnerable. But go to meditations – even if you can’t do them. Just sit by the side. Be a part, just silently participate. Go to the music group and sit silently by the side. Let the music shower on you. And wherever many people are meditating a subtle vibe of meditation is created. Remain silent and become attuned to that vibe, and that will be enough.

Osho – Children’s liberation is needed, No other slavery is so deep

Osho – Veet means beyond, shankaro means conditionings. Man is born unconditioned, man is born as freedom… just an open sky, with no clouds, with no boundaries, with no adjectives, no definitions – neither Hindu nor Christian nor Communist – just pure existence, an emptiness.

But immediately the society starts closing in on you, starts making boundaries; those boundaries are conditionings. Then one forgets one’s original face. Slowly slowly one becomes identified with all that has been said, told, repeated again and again. This is a kind of hypnosis that is being practised on every child.

It is a violation of the most fundamental human right, but it seems very difficult to know how to fight it because children themselves cannot fight it. Children’s liberation is needed. It is the greatest need in the world because no other slavery is so deep and so dangerous and so destructive. The child is not allowed to know his self; rather, the society creates a false self – that he is this, that he is that, to behave this way….

The society gives ideals, ideas and very soon the child becomes accustomed to the fact that he is a Christian, that he is a man and he has to behave in a manly way, that he should not cry because that is sissy. The girl starts behaving in a feminine way – she learns that she should not climb on trees, that that is boyish. Slowly slowly more and more boundaries, more and more boundaries, and they go on becoming narrower; then everyone feels suffocated. That is the situation: everybody is suffocated and everybody hankers deep down to be free. But how to be free?

It seems that the walls that surrounded one are really very powerful and strong. And people live in this kind of imprisonment for their whole life. They live in prison and they die in prison, never having known what life was, what life was meant to be, never knowing the glory and the grandeur of existence.

Buddha has called this state ’shankaro’, the conditioned state of mind. The whole process of meditation is to uncondition it, to withdraw those walls. What the parents and the society and the priests and the politicians have done has to be undone by the master. So the master is basically against the society. If the society poisons Socrates it is not accidental. If it kills Jesus it is very logical.

To be initiated into sannyas is to be initiated into a world of unconditioning; drop, slowly slowly, become more aware and go on dropping all adjectives and all identities. In the beginning it is painful because you will feel confused. You will not know who you are because all that you have known about yourself will start disappearing; you will be in a kind of chaos, in a limbo.

And that is where courage is needed. If one can go on dropping all the boundaries, all the definitions, all that has been told, all that is borrowed and has come from the outside, one day suddenly one is free. In that freedom is joy… and that freedom is god! My work here consists of destroying your conditionings; it is a painful process but the end result is tremendously beautiful.

It is arduous, but when one has reached to the top for the first time one starts being really alive. And that aliveness I would like to give you. That is your birthright – it has to be attained. The man who is not trying to attain it is not worth much – is not worth being called a man. The search for freedom is the most important value; it is the summum bonum.

Source: from Osho Book “The Tongue-Tip Taste of Tao”

Osho – To be a mother means a great revolution, and a radical change

[A sannyasin says: I’m going to be a mother... Yes, I want it.]
Osho – Do you understand what it means? If you want it, it is okay, mm? But one should be more conscious about it. To be a mother means a great revolution, and a radical change. To be a woman is one thing, and to be a mother is totally another. You are entering into a commitment with somebody you don’t know, and you will have to plan your life accordingly. Then your freedom is gone… so just think about it.

If you take the responsibility of the whole perspective clearly, you will not be able to be as free as you have been. The responsibility of the child will be on you – and not as a duty. If it is a duty, it will become a burden, and then one starts to take revenge on the child.

Right now you don’t know, so everything is good, but when the child comes there are responsibilities. Your freedom is cut completely. You have to think about the child first, and then yourself. The child becomes more important than you who will be secondary. Now you can go on changing lovers and doing whatsoever you like, but once the child is there, things will become
different. So think about it because it is a great decision.

If you take it consciously, it is perfectly okay, but don’t move into motherhood unconsciously – becoming pregnant by just drifting into it. Before, it was okay, because there were no methods available and pregnancy was always an accident, but now it need not be.

[She answers: It wasn’t.]
Then it is okay. If you have taken the step decisively, it is okay and there is no problem. You go into it!

Source: from Osho Book “Hammer on the Rock”

Osho – Children should come out of a tremendous love

Osho – First move as deeply into love as possible. Till then avoid having children, because children should come out of a tremendous love, otherwise not. You can give birth to ordinary children, who are just by-products of a physiological and biological meeting of man and woman, but they are anonymous.

When two people move higher and higher in love, and a point comes where their personalities are no longer separate and boundaries dissolve, then they give birth to children. Then the children come from a higher plane. They have a personality of love – they are not only by-products of sex.

They carry a deep harmony within them, and if you become aware, you can see whether the child is a by-product of a sexual meeting or a by-product of love. A different aura surrounds the child, a different vibration, because he has to carry that original quality of oneness.

When a child is born out of love you give something to the world. When a child is just from a
sexual meeting, you simply over-populate the world; you don’t give anything. Remember also, that when you give birth to a child out of deep love? out of surrender and meditation, something is simultaneously born into you. You become a mother.

Every woman who gives birth to a child is not necessarily a mother; it is not enough just to give birth. To become a mother your own heart should have bloomed. There are many women who have given birth to children, but there are very few mothers. To be a mother is a rare harmony and a unique experience. This is my observation: that if a woman can become really motherly – she may give birth to a child or not, that is not the point – if she can become motherly, that is her enlightenment and none other is needed. That is her buddhahood.

So love first and don’t be worried about children, because then sooner or later you will start thinking about marriage. (laughter from the group) First love each other, and give each other total freedom. Don’t be possessed and don’t possess. Give the other full space to flower. Mm? Share as much as you can, and the sharing itself becomes a very very subtle possession which has no possessiveness about it; you are so certain of the other, you can trust.

Meditate, love, and one day when you feel that you are overflowing now, that you cannot contain it any longer and you would like a soul to carry your burden, your fulfillment, then give birth to a child, not before. One should wait till one has become perfectly grown up. The world would be so beautiful if people would wait for the right moment.

And it seems that you are dominated too much by your family… By and by one has to move away from the family. Not that you should not love them; this is how you can love them. It is the only way. It is just as when a child is born and he moves away from the mother, then one day he moves away from the breast.

Then he is ready one day to move to the neighbourhood to play, and then to school. One day he
comes home and he is totally different from when he left; he has become grown up. When he falls
in love with another woman, that is the furthest he will go from the mother. In fact the day the child chooses his or her partner, that day he is really born, he actually comes out of the womb. Before that, the womb surrounds him in a thousand and one ways.

Everybody has to come out of the family otherwise they will not become themselves; they will always remain immature. One has to understand that to come back one has to first go away. When you have become your own, an authentic being, then you can come back to the home. Then you can again love your father, your mother and your brothers. But now you are there to love them, and before you were not. How can you love when you are not?

This is the trouble – that the family dominates the child too much, and is always afraid that he will go too far away from them. So they force him, they try subtle ways to influence him, condition him. The child goes on resisting deep down, and because of that resistance he cannot love them, cannot really love them.

Only an independent person can love, and a family is fulfilled when a person has become grown up. So just listen to your heart. You are grown up, and whatsoever your heart says, risk.

Source: from Osho Book “Hammer on the Rock”