Bosses
We have created hierarchy in society. The lowest are those poor people who are chopping wood or cleaning the roads. Why are they the lowest? – because they are doing the most essential things. The professors can be discarded, the society can exist without them; but the society cannot exist without the street cleaners, the toilet cleaners, the woodchoppers – the society cannot exist without them. They are far more essential, far more fundamental, but they are the lowest.
The whole idea is wrong. There is no hierarchy. The professor is doing his work, and the woodcutter is doing his work, and both are needed. Neither is there a hierarchy between men and other animals, nor is there a hierarchy between men and men. I am against the whole idea of hierarchy.
And that's my vision of a new commune.
In the new commune there is going to be nobody higher and nobody lower. In this ashram, there is nobody higher, nobody lower. There are toilet cleaners and there are professors, therapists, and they are all the same -- they are all doing some useful work, some essential work. The vice-chancellor here, in this commune, is on the same ground as the woodchopper. The great therapist has no more prestige, power, than the toilet cleaner. Hence, there is no problem. A Ph.D. can choose toilet cleaning -- one Ph.D. IS doing that; another Ph.D. is just cleaning the streets of the ashram.
If there is no hierarchy, there is no problem; otherwise, the Ph.D. will think, "How can I do this work, this menial job? I am not a hand, I am a head." In this commune there are no heads, no hands -- people, whole people, respected, loved, for whatsoever they are doing, or whatsoever they can do, or whatsoever they LIKE doing.
This whole existence is a commune. God is the center and we are all its circumference.
There is no evolution, Digvijay, no ultimate goal. It is a play. Enjoy it, celebrate it! If this idea of ultimate goal and evolution can drop from your mind, I KNOW your potential; you can become one of the great sannyasins. You can be a new man. But you are going crazy because of this idea; your whole life is being devoted to it. And if it is fundamentally wrong then you will repent one day. Forget all about it! Start meditating more and more about your own inner being. Don't be worried what is going to happen; rather, be involved with what is already happening. God is a presence, God is a being, not a becoming, and so is this whole existence.
The day we drop the idea of evolution and ultimate goal, the world will be freed from its bondage of future. It is the future that is keeping us in a bondage, and the past -- and both are in conspiracy against man.
Future and past dropped, you attain to freedom -- freedom, Buddha says, which has no bounds.
-Osho, “The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 3, #6, Q1“