Question 1:

Osho,

The phrase "a broken family" is used to conjure up the essence of a disastrous childhood.

By the time i was at university, i had had two fathers and three mothers; and if you include my grandparents - who also functioned as parents for a good while - a grand total of seven, instead of the conventional two.

Initially i was puzzled how it was that i seemed relatively free and well- adjusted, while so many of my more "fortunate" friends - who had had the proper stable family life - seemed endlessly troubled by the continuing demands of family ties that pursued them into adulthood. might not a broken family really be a blessing in disguise?

 

 

The conventional family is already out of date.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.

 

In our commune in America five thousand people were living together, working together; in one single kitchen, five thousand people were eating together. Their children were getting acquainted with so many people - everybody of the age of the father was an uncle, everybody of the age of the mother was an aunt. They were learning from everybody.

 

They had a vast possibility of experience; and there was no way of having a fixed image of a woman or a man, because they were coming in contact with so many women who were all loving towards them, so many men who were all loving towards them. They were not living with their parents; they had their own campus. Parents could go there, meet them. They could come to the parents, live a day or two with the parents. They were invited by other couples, they were invited by couples who had no children. They were moving all over the commune.

 

The whole commune was their family.

 

Psychologically it created only a vague image of a woman in the boy's mind, and a vague image of a man in the girl's mind.

 

This is of tremendous importance. Because the image is vague and is made up of many impressions of different women, there is a possibility you may find a woman who can easily fit. Because you don't have a fixed idea, you only have a vague conception, any woman can fulfill it, any man can fulfill it.

 

And you have not been living with the parents, so you don't know how a wife has to behave, how a husband has to behave. You will start innocently, lovingly. You love the man - that's why you have married him. You love the woman, and you are not carrying a certain pattern of how the woman should behave.

 

The Hindu so-called saint, Tulsidas, is the most important Hindu saint in India; no other book is read as much as his. His book is the bible of the Hindus. He writes in his book "If you don't beat her - physical, corporal beating - you will lose control of her. By beating her, you prove that you are man enough."

 

Your manliness is proved by beating the woman; but if you beat the woman, the woman is also going to find a thousand and one ways to torture you. Whenever you want to make love to her, she will say she has a headache. There is no communication between the two of you. How can there be? You have enslaved her, and no slave can forgive the person who has destroyed his freedom. No woman can forgive the man who has taken away her freedom. But Hindus have been following their saint's advice - and it is not new: the five-thousand-year-old manusmriti, the moral code of the Hindus, says the same thing.

 

There is a book published by a psychoanalyst about the man-woman relationship. Its title is significant: THE INTIMATE ENEMY. That's how men and women have lived up to now, as intimate enemies. And the children are learning, and they will repeat it - they don't know any other way.

 

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.

 

One great surgeon was invited by his friends, because he was retiring. He was the greatest surgeon of his country, and people were celebrating the occasion, giving him a good farewell. But he looked very sad. And one friend came to him and asked,"Why are you so sad?"

 

He said, "I am sad because I never wanted to become a surgeon. I wanted to become a musician.

 

Even if I had to die on the street as a beggar with my guitar in my hands, I would have been more happy than to be the greatest surgeon in the country, because that was not at all my longing; it was not my destiny."

 

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.

 

The women's liberation movement is trying to create so much hate for man that there are a few of the leaders of that movement who are preaching lesbianism: women should love only women - just cut out man completely.

 

And this is happening. Homosexuality is happening. Men are tired of women, of being harassed by women, nagged by women. They have started looking for some substitute, and they have found that it is better to love a man - it is at least not miserable. It is not a coincidence that homosexuals are called gay people; they are gay. But this is turning the whole society into a madhouse. These perversions of sex are going to create great disturbances. Homosexuality has already brought the ultimate disease AIDS, for which there seems to be no cure.

 

Lesbianism also... because it is something new it may take a little longer, but it will produce something. They will have to produce something, otherwise the women's liberation movement will feel, "We are lacking something which men are having; they have AIDS and we don't have anything."

 

The women's liberation movement is making women ugly - they smoke because men smoke, use four-letter words because men use four-letter words, use the same clothes as the men use. But somebody has to tell these women that it is not liberation: "You are simply becoming second-rate men. It is very degrading, it is humiliating." All this is happening because of the family. Unless we dissolve the family into a bigger phenomenon, these things will not disappear. If nobody is forced to live with a man or woman for whom love has disappeared, then prostitution itself will disappear.

 

There is no need to fight and be intimate enemies. If you cannot be intimate friends, there is no need to be intimate enemies - it is better to say goodbye and become strangers again.

 

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.

 

You have no right to produce a child if you don't have the right training to bring him up, to help him to be a blissful human being. The psychologists will discover, the doctors will think about it, the gynecologists will have to ponder over it, and unless you get clearance from these people, you are not to produce a child.

 

Man can produce children without any difficulty. That does not mean that you become a father and a mother. Those are skills, arts. To help a living being grow needs some expertise.

 

And the society, the commune, will decide how many children it needs - so that children can be nourished well, educated well; so that over-population does not disturb things; so nobody is unemployed, nobody is uneducated, nobody is poor.

 

So much is known now about the human child, and impregnation, that not to use that scientific knowledge would be simply idiotic. We are using it on animals, but we are not using it on human beings. In human beings we are still continuing with the accidental way of producing children.

 

One of the great poets of India, Rabindranath Tagore, was the thirteenth child of his parents. It was good that at that time there was no birth control; otherwise the world would have missed Rabindranath Tagore. And we do not know how many geniuses we go on missing, for the simple reason that as far as human beings are concerned, we are still behaving very superstitiously.

 

In a single intercourse a man releases millions of sperm. At that moment, politics begin - a great race, a competition, to reach to the female egg. To us the distance seems to be very small, but to the sperm, for his size, the distance is proportionately almost two miles - and his life is only two hours.

 

In two hours, millions of sperms are running to reach the female egg. Only one will succeed. And you can take it for granted that the better people will stand aside. The Ronald Reagans will reach first. Better people are better from the very beginning - they will give way to others.

 

Now it is possible to donate your sperm to the hospital, and they can find out how many sperm can become geniuses and how many sperm will be just mediocre human beings - Hindus, Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, that kind of people; they can be discarded from the very beginning.

 

The best can be chosen - you can find them. Floating in that crowd there are people like Socrates, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Moses, Jesus. Why bother with mediocre people? And why remain accidental when the scientific facts are perfectly known and established? Because when this crowd - and it is not a small crowd - starts moving, it may be that those who are just in front reach first, for no other reason than that they may be Adolf Hitlers, they may be Mussolinis, they may be Joseph Stalins. Why create these people?

 

And you go on saying history repeats itself! You are the reason it repeats itself, because you go on being accidental. History can be changed completely so that it will never be repeated again; one just has to use a little intelligence.

 

Choose the finest, the best, rather than filling the earth with billions of people. Right now there are more than five billion people; it is better to have just one billion people. But we can create supermen; we just have to change our old patterns of thinking.

 

And we have to use science in the service of man, too. Science should be used for children.

 

Families should be made very loose, relaxed, and bigger; and we can create a paradise on the earth.

 

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