Question 2
Osho,
What is wrong with marriage? why do you speak always against it?
MARRIAGE IS a great institution. Without marriage life will be very empty. Without marriage you will be all Buddhas! It is marriage that keeps the world going on; it keeps things running. It keeps all kinds of things moving, alive. In fact, without marriage there will be no religion at all.
Religion exists not because of God or for God; it is because of marriage. Marriage creates so much misery that one has to meditate; meditation is a byproduct. Without marriage, who will bother to meditate? For what? You will be already blissful! Without marriage there will be no renunciation, Buddha would not have left the world -- for what? His wife, Yashodhara, must have created the situation -- Mahavira would not have escaped to the mountains. Without marriage there would have been no Buddha, no Mahavira. Just think: the history would have been very flat, without any salt, tasteless. Marriage keeps this whole "sorry-go-round" on and on. People call it "merry-go-round"...
I am not against marriage -- without marriage, ninety-nine percent jokes will disappear from the world. How I can be against marriage? I am all for it.
Sunderam, marriage makes many things possible.
"Marriage is the process of finding what kind of man your wife would have preferred!" It is a mirror. [....]
Marriage keeps thousands of things going on: the religion, the state, the nations, the wars, the literature, the movies, the science; everything, in fact, depends on the institution of marriage.
I am not AGAINST marriage; I simply want you to be aware that there is a possibility of going beyond it too. But that possibility also open up only because marriage creates so much misery for you, so much anguish and anxiety for you, that you have to learn how to transcend it. It is a great push for transcendence. Marriage is not unnecessary; it is needed to bring you to your senses, to bring you to your sanity. Marriage is necessary and yet there comes a point when you have to transcend it too. It is like a ladder. You go up the ladder, it takes you up, but there comes a moment when you have to leave the ladder behind. If you go on clinging to the ladder, then there is danger.
Learn something from marriage. Marriage represents the whole world in a miniature form: it teaches you many things. It is only the mediocre ones who learn nothing. Otherwise it will teach you that you don't know what love is, that you don't know how to relate, that you don't know how to communicate, that you don't know how to commune, that you don't know how to live with another. It is a mirror: it shows your face to you in all its different aspects. And it is all needed for your maturity. But a person who remains clinging to it forever remains immature. One has to go beyond it too.
Marriage basically means that you are not able yet to be alone; you need the other. Without the other you feel meaningless and with the other you feel miserable. Marriage is really a dilemma! If you are alone you are miserable; if you are together you are miserable. It teaches you your reality, that something deep inside you needs transformation so that you can be blissful alone and you can be blissful together. Then marriage is no more marriage because then it is no more bondage. Then it is sharing, then it is love. Then it gives YOU freedom and you give the freedom needed for the other's growth.
The ordinary marriage is an unconscious bondage: you cannot live alone so you become dependent on the other; the other cannot live alone so he or she becomes dependent on you. And we hate the person on which we are dependent; nobody likes to depend on anybody. Our deepest desire is to have freedom, total freedom -- and dependence is against freedom. Everybody hates dependence, and that's why couples are continuously fighting, not knowing why they are fighting. They have to meditate over it, they have to contemplate over it, why they are fighting. Everything is just an excuse to fight. If you change one excuse, another excuse will be found; if no excuse is left then excuses will be invented, but somehow the fight has to be there.
The fight has a fundamental reason which has nothing to do with anything else. The fundamental reason is you hate the person you have to depend upon. You don't want to recognize it -- you don't want to recognize the fact that you hate the person you believe you love. You hate simply because it is the other that hinders, defines your territories, keeps you confined, makes you feel limited from every side. Your freedom is crippled and paralyzed. How can you love the other person? And the same you are doing to the other. How can the other person love you?
Marriage is a great teaching; it is an opportunity to learn something: to learn that dependence is not love, that to depend means conflict, anger, rage, hatred, jealousy, possessiveness, domination. And one has to learn not to depend. But for that you will need great meditativeness so that you can be so blissful on your own that you don't need the other. When you don't need the other, the dependence disappears. once you don't need the other you can share your joy -- and sharing is beautiful.
I would like a different kind of relationship in the world. I call it relating just to make it different from your old kind of relationship. I would like a different kind of marriage in the world. I will not call it marriage because that word has become poisoned. I would like to call it just a friendship; no legal bondage, just a loving togetherness; no promise for tomorrow -- this moment is enough. And if you love each other this moment and if you enjoy each other this moment, if you can share with each other this moment. the next moment will be born out of it; it will become more and more enriched. As time passes by, your love will become deeper, it will start having new dimensions, but it will not create any bondage.
Hence MY vision of a new humanity does not have any place for the old kind of marriage or old kind of family because we have suffered enough. I know perfectly well that man and woman will need to be together, but not out of need, but out of overflowing joy; not out of poverty but out of richness -- because you have so much that you have to give. Just like when a flower opens, its fragrance is released to the winds because it is so full of fragrance it HAS to release it. Or when a cloud comes in the sky it showers; it has to shower -- it is so full of rain water it has to share.
Up to now we have not helped man to know what love is; on the contrary we have been forcing him to get married. Marriage has to be the first thing and then love will come on its own accord. That whole idea has proved totally wrong. Man has lived in hell for centuries. He has become accustomed, that is true, in fact so much accustomed that the very idea of a world without marriage shocks him.
Just the other day I received a letter that, "If marriage disappears and the family disappears, what will happen to children?" What has happened to children with the marriage and with the family? All children are born so beautiful, so innocent, so intelligent, and the family and the marriage destroy them. They start seeing their mothers and fathers continuously quarreling, nagging. They become accustomed of it and they will repeat the same pattern in their life.
I would like marriage to be replaced by relating and family to be replaced by small communes. For example, this commune: a few hundred people living together, working together, producing together, creating together. The children will not be confined to the small families, the children will belong to the whole commune. Not that they will not get affection from their father and mother -- they will get MORE affection from their father and mother, because father and mother will also not feel burdened with the children, and they will also get affection from everybody else.
This whole idea of "my child" is also egoistic. Children should belong to the commune. And the commune should decide how many children are needed; it cannot be left now to individual families, otherwise the world will become more and more of a hell. And the commune should also decide that who are the right persons to parent children, to give birth to children. It will decide scientifically the man who can become a father, the woman who can become a mother. All men need not be fathers, all women need not be mothers, but they can mother the children of the whole commune, they can father the children of the whole commune.
We can have better children, more healthy, more intelligent, more talented, more beautiful, if we use a little science, which is available now. Now, going on producing like animals is very primitive, it is absolutely absurd. And there is no need also that two persons who are in love should produce the child, because now there are scientific ways. If you can get your son to be as intelligent as Albert Einstein then why bother that you should give birth from your own chromosomes? Why not he can be given birth through Albert Einstein's cells? Just as people dying donate their eyes they can donate their chromosomes, which will be beautiful. Those chromosomes can be preserved for thousands of years; there is no problem in it. And we can go on improving on human race. We are doing it as far as animals are concerned; you can see the difference.
In India, you look at the cows.. . and the foolish Indians think that they respect the cows. Just they call them mothers, that's all; otherwise the poorest cows in the world are the Indian cows, starving, ill, giving so little milk that it is uneconomical, absolutely uneconomical, to preserve them. But all over the world wherever science has entered, better cows, better bulls, better dogs, better animals have become available.
The same is possible with man. There is no need to go on hanging around old ideas. We can stop people like Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah from being born because the first cell of the father is decisive, the egg of the mother is decisive. Now it can be decided that what kind of child will be born. Will he be an Adolf Hitler or an Albert Einstein? His whole future can be read -- it can almost be predicted.
Only one thing will remain unpredictable forever, that is his enlightenment; that will remain unpredictable. Otherwise everything will be predictable. But we can give birth to people who are more intelligent, more healthy. Of course then there is more possibility of their becoming enlightened, of their becoming Buddhas.
We have to change the whole structure of humanity from the very roots. Marriage has to go the way it has existed up to now and a totally new concept has to be introduced. Only then a new man can be born on the earth.
-Osho, “Tao: The Golden Gate, Vol 2, #9, Q2”