Possessiveness and Theft
One of the dimensions of violence is possessiveness. Without being violent, it is impossible to be possessive. And when possessiveness goes crazy, insane, theft is born. Theft is possessiveness gone mad. If the possessiveness is healthy, then non-possessiveness can slowly arise. If the possessiveness has become unhealthy, then slowly, slowly theft is born. Healthy possessiveness is slowly, slowly transformed into charity; unhealthy possessiveness is slowly, slowly transformed into theft.
By unhealthy possessiveness, I mean that now you consider another person’s possessions to be yours, even though you do not see him as part of you. Unhealthy possessiveness means that you see another as the other, but dare to consider his possessions your own. However, if you feel he is part of you, charity is born. When only the other’s possessions are felt as part of you and the other remains the other, then theft is born.
There is a great similarity between theft and charity. They are two polarities of the same phenomenon. In theft, the attempt is to make another’s possessions your own. In charity, the effort is to feel the other as part of you. In theft, we snatch another’s possessions and make them ours; in charity, we make our own possessions become those of others. In a sense, charity is the apology for theft. The donor is often a former thief, and a thief often becomes a donor later. If theft were only in relation to things, then it would not be such an issue. The theft of objects is related to the law, justice, the state, and society, but there is another deeper kind of theft that is related to religion.
Perhaps the day will come when there is excess wealth and affluence and the theft of objects will stop, but the importance of non-theft will still remain. The theft that your normal so-called religious people talk about stopping can soon come to an end. But none of these mahavrat, these great disciplines of religion, can ever come to an end because there is another deeper meaning of non-theft, which will always be significant, which will always be relevant. If society becomes completely affluent someday, theft will stop. The theft of things is always largely born out of poverty, but there are other thefts; those deeper thefts are connected with the great practices of religion.
So first let us understand this deeper theft a little, in which we are all involved – even those who may never have stolen another person’s possessions.
What do I mean? The deeper spiritual meaning of theft is when I declare what is not mine as belonging to me. There is much that I have claimed as mine that is not my own, even though I have never committed any theft.
This body is not mine, but I call it my body. From the spiritual point of view, a theft has occurred. The body is not mine: I have found it; it is with me. When I say that I am the body, a theft has occurred. In spiritual terms, I have wrongly claimed ownership of something, I have gone mad. But we all consider the body to be our own. In fact we go on thinking that we are the body, not just the owner of it.
You had a body of sorts in your mother’s womb. If it were placed in front of you today, you would not even be able to see it with naked eyes. You would need a large microscope and you would never be ready to agree that this was you at some point. Then, when you were a child you had a body that was changing every day. Every day the body is flowing. If we put pictures of a man’s whole life in front of him, he will be astonished that he was in so many bodies! And the strange thing is that while traveling in all those bodies, he accepts each body as if “This is me.”
-Osho, "The Art of Living, #3"