Family 

 

 

The conventional family is already out of date.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 the father and creates an inner image of a man she would like to love. Of course she knows she cannot love the father the way her mother loves him, so she is jealous of the mother.

 

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 the first man in her life she is never going to get.

 

But her mind will carry the image of the father her whole life, disrupting all her marriages because in every husband she will be looking for the father -- unconsciously -- and no man can fulfill the 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 the mother, and he carries the image of that first woman his whole life, unfulfilled.

 

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 a mother, and no woman marries him to be a mother.

 

Now we are creating such a complex situation for children that their whole life will remain in a misery, and they will dump the responsibility on the other. The man will think the woman has betrayed him -- because she was looking just like his mother, and after marriage she 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.

 

And both the parents are continuously fighting, nagging each other, trying to dominate each other; and the children are learning -- because there is no other way, this is their first school. And it is not a question of arithmetic or geography or history; it is a question of life. They are learning life's ABC, and what they are seeing is that the mother is continuously harassing the father, and the father is continuously trying to dominate, subjugate, enslave.

 

They also can see... and 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 see the hypocrisy of it all -- because if some neighbor comes in while they were fighting, they immediately stop fighting, start smiling at each other, talking beautiful things, receiving the neighbor, giving the impression to the neighbor that they never fight.

 

The child is also learning hypocrisy. Whatever you are is one thing; you have to present to the society what the society expects you to be -- not what you are, but what the society wants you to be.

 

From the very early childhood we are creating a split personality in each child, schizophrenia, a dual being.

 

They are learning the ways -- the girl is learning how a wife should be, according to the mother's behavior with the father; the boy is learning how the husband should be, according to the behavior of the father.

 

It is because of this that in generation after generation the same stupidities are repeated again and again. And the whole world lives in misery, lives in hypocrisy; and the root cause is the conventional family, where the child is exposed only to two persons, the mother and father.

 

In the future it has to be changed, because almost ninety percent of mental sicknesses are born out of this family. We have to make a bigger family. I call it a commune, where many people are living together. [....]

 

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, just fifteen people were looking 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 great cooks are men; in all the great hotels you will find that the great cooks are men, not women.

 

Every family cannot afford a great genius of a cook, but a commune can afford fifteen really inventive and creative cooks -- men and women both. And we have experimented and found that it works so beautifully.

 

Because the children live together on their own campus, many other things happen. The parents don't feel burdened. They 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. And children are very strange people; if you want them to go to sleep, then they won't go. They become certain that there is going to be something happening, that's why they are being forced to go to sleep.

 

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 the bed and forced to be awake. They can't understand the logic of it. It seems so absurd.

 

But parents feel freedom, because their children living with other children. We discovered a new phenomenon; we were thinking that there might be trouble -- the children might fight with each other. But what we found was just the opposite of it: the older children took care of the smaller ones. There was no fighting. And nobody had any personal things -- all 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, that 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.

 

Thousands of uncles around him, aunts around him -- the child feels almost surrounded in love; wherever he goes he is respected. Because people there are not his parents, they don't force any ambition of their own on the child. The child is not their own. Otherwise, every parent is trying to fulfill his ambitions, which he could not manage to fulfill in his life, through his children.

 

The child is not their own. Otherwise if a man wanted to become a doctor, but he could not become one, 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 what the child's potential is. 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 abut the child, he is not to be 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 out 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 is the potential of the child. 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 what you have been carrying within you -- the potential -- and to bring it to a full flowering. A rose bush should become roses, and that is its joy. [....]

 

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 to the children, but to 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 the reason is just because of the children; otherwise, in the 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.... 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.

 

Flowers cannot be.

 

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 there. 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, 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 love 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. And it 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. 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 just women prostitutes -- because it was a male-dominated society for thousands of years. 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. [....]

 

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, and the commune is the refined, bigger family; so big that whatever the small family was creating -- all kinds of perversions -- is 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, it 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. Anybody who wants to become a father or mother must go through the training. You can remain married, you can remain together -- that is between you two -- but you don't disturb a third life.

 

-Osho, “The Transmission of the Lamp, #31, Q1”