Genes Don't Have to be Blue
Question 1
I still study in school and I want to know: What is the secret of education?
It may be a little difficult for you to understand the secret of education. But I cannot come down from my vision, so I will tell what I feel is the secret, knowing perfectly well perhaps you may not be able to understand it yet, since you are too young.
But through you perhaps others may understand, and one day you will also grow up and be in a position to understand it.
The question is very complex, and I can see that you have asked it without knowing its implications. It is the question that is one of the most fundamental for the future of man. I would like to begin from the very beginning.
Up to now, man has been living an accidental life. No one knows what your potential is, what you are supposed by nature to be. And the question - the secret of education - cannot be decided without knowing what your potential is. Are you going to become a musician? a poet? an engineer? a doctor?
Without knowing anything about your possibilities, almost groping in the dark, we go on deciding people's destiny for strange reasons. The very word education, in its roots, means to draw out. It has the very secret in its root-meaning. Whatever is within you as a seed has to be drawn out, given full opportunity, so that it can blossom.
But no one knows what is hidden within you, what kind of soil you need and what kind of gardener, what is the right climate and the right season and the right time for you to be sown.
Parents decide about their children according to their own ambitions. Hence the immense misery in the world: the person who could have been a great musician has become just a pygmy industrialist. A person who could have been a great mystic has been forced to become a mathematician.
Almost everybody is in the wrong place. And to be in the wrong place is very painful. You yourself are not aware of why you are suffering, because you yourself are not aware that you have missed your target. You are following somebody else's idea of what you should be.
So the first thing, according to me, begins with genetic engineering. There lies the secret of all education. Up to now what we have been calling education is a chaos.
The secret is in genetic engineering. Now it is scientifically possible to find the program of each human being, even before his birth. The male sperm carries many of the programs for his life and what he can become; whether he will be male or female, whether he will be a strong-bodied man or a weakling, whether he will live a life of health or will remain continually sick, his resistance against disease, how long he will live - and what kinds of potentialities are hidden in him - whether he can become a great mathematician or a great painter or a great poet or a great industrialist.
Your destiny is written in the biological beginnings of your life, not in the birth-chart, nor in the stars, nor in the lines of your hands. Now there are scientific openings to a new world: each sperm can be read almost like an open book. You can decide your child's life. Before he is born, you can choose what you want your child to be.
To me, the real education begins from there. In each lovemaking the man releases at least one million sperms, but only one sperm may be able to reach the female egg. It is a marathon race. The small sperm - which is not visible to the bare eyes - in proportion to his size, the track that he has to follow towards the mother's egg is almost two miles long, and he has only two hours' lifes pan. So if he does not reach within two hours, he will die. Such competition he will never again face in his life.
The whole life will be competitive, but the beginning is the worst competition you can conceive: one million people rushing towards the female egg, and only one is going to win the race! The remainder are going to die.
Now it is a blind game - most probably the idiots will reach first. That's why the world is full of idiots! The idiots will not take any care, any consideration of anybody; they will simply rush blindly with full force. The wiser ones may stand by the side and see what is happening. The really wise ones may not even participate in the race, it is so stupid.
These problems can be solved. But religious superstitiousness is a great barrier in the world for every kind of progress and new idea. I will be opposed by all the religions - it does not matter, I have been opposed my whole life - but my proposal is that every male who wants children should donate his sperms to a hospital and the medical science board should work out for those sperms what the possibilities are.
In those one million sperms there may be Albert Einsteins, Bertrand Russells, Martin Heideggers, great musicians like Yehudi Menuhin, great dancers like Nijinsky, great philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, great novelists like Fyodor Dostoevsky. They can be picked out, and the father and mother can choose what they want.
When you can choose the great diamonds, why go for the colored stones? And when you can be the chooser, why be accidental? They can choose, if they want, a Henry Ford, who will make great riches possible. Money is an art, just as anything else; it has its own geniuses.
Everybody cannot be a Henry Ford! If you want your child to be a Gautam Buddha, then you have to see, according to the genetic analysis, which sperm has the potentiality of being a mystic. The sperm has to be injected, so he need not be in competition with all kinds of fellows in a crowd. From that choice starts your education.
This is only the beginning of genetic engineering. Finally it is going to happen, the work is growing every day - the chosen sperm has a program, but the program can be changed a little bit. It may be possible that he has the mind of an Albert Einstein, but not the body, not the health - that can be added, the program can be changed a little bit. He may have just a life of fifty years, but that program can be changed. He can be given as long a life as you want - the maximum lifes pan can be almost three hundred years - and as much health and as much resistance against disease.
All these things can be added to the program. The child now starts the journey with the parents' full awareness of what he is going to become, to what school he should be sent, and what kind of education he should be given according to the genetic code. Then the world will be full of geniuses, talented people, healthy people. It is possible to avoid old age completely - a man can go on living youthfully up to the point of death.
Now these are not fictions, these have become scientific facts. But religions are even preventing these scientific facts from being known to the public, to the people. They are afraid of strange things. Their fear is that morality will be disturbed. So let it be disturbed! Anyway, what kind of morality exists in the world? Except hypocrisy, there exists no morality.
Genetic engineering can decide even the character, the morality, the discipline of the individual who is going to be born. From there many things become possible. For the child, a clear-cut, non-accidental career, and for the parents - because the child is not being given birth through sex - sex becomes pure fun. It does not carry any responsibility, any danger.
The scientific truth is that people are unnecessarily suffering because we are listening to the priests and not to the scientists. The priests are absolutely against interfering as far as human life is concerned. They start great protests immediately that you should not interfere in the work of God. But I cannot see what kind of work God is doing. All these people who are retarded, stupid - this is God's work?
And the priests are not ready to have a different world. They are against family planning, they are against birth control, they are against everything that man is now capable of doing to create a better world, a better humanity. So this is my first thing: education will never be right unless children are born through genetic engineering, not through the old bullock-cart method that you have followed up to now.
This is one of the most significant secrets: unless we listen to sanity and intelligence, we are not going to revolutionize human life.
-Osho, "The Great Pilgrimage from Here to Here, #28, Q1"