The conditioning of all the cultures is to make everybody insensitive, dull, numb, because sensitivity can be a trouble. To allow people to be sensitive is dangerous. If they are sensitive to beauty then marriage will be on the rocks. If marriage is to be saved then you have to destroy their sensitivity for beauty. Because who knows? — tomorrow you may meet a woman who suddenly catches your whole being, who makes you afire. Then there is no protection.

 

The only way society can control you is to make your skin as thick as possible, so nothing penetrates you. And it is not only a question of a beautiful woman or man, because beauty is the same. Whether you are experiencing a beautiful sunset or a beautiful flower or a beautiful waterfall, or a beautiful cloud, it is the same beauty. You have to be crippled and paralysed so that you cannot experience beauty — then marriage is safe. And marriage is the foundation of our so-called groat society. Marriage functions as the basic unit and it is the ugliest institution man has invented so far.

 

They say love is blind. They also say marriage is an institution. Then I say marriage is an institution for the blind. They make the institution, then they make you blind because the institution needs people, otherwise all the functionaries of the institution will be jobless; they need some work to do. And there are people who have become experts in blinding you — they need jobs. The whole society is functioning in such a way that it is basically against sensitivity.

 

A sensitive person would prefer to die than to become a slave, because slavery is possible only if you are so dull that you don’t feel the humiliation at all. And the society needs slaves, all kinds of slaves; from the peon to the president, all kinds of slaves are needed.

 

The only guarantee for having so many slaves is to destroy peoples’ capacity to feel, to be aware, to see. Their whole clarity has to be messed up so they cannot see, they cannot feel. Then naturally they go on accepting any kind of state, just to survive they go on accepting all kinds of humiliations. They are ready to exist below the human level. Millions of people are existing below the human level, just like dogs, or maybe even dogs are living in a better way.

 

The sensitive person is bound to be rebellious because wherever he sees anything unjust he will revolt, he will not be able to tolerate it. There is so much injustice everywhere. How to protect this injustice and the structure that depends on it and all the investments. Society has found a very sure and certain ways — that is, from the very beginning start making the child a numskull. It is a kind of anaesthesia, psychological chloroform, so one only lives at the minimum; and only then can this whole exploitative establishment continue. The priest, the politicians, the pedagogues — they can all go on exploiting people. And they themselves are in the same boat.

 

It is a very strange society. We are standing in a circle: everybody’s hand in somebody’s pocket; one person is searching in somebody else’s pocket, somebody else is searching in his pocket… and so on and so forth. We are all standing in a circle, and everybody is happy because one is not aware of what the other is doing to him and the other is completely unaware of what is being done to him!

 

This whole stupidity has to be destroyed — it is time. It has existed beyond its limit. Now it is just a mountainous weight on the human heart. It is crippling, destroying; it is like a cancer that goes on growing.

 

My sannyasins have to learn how to be sensitive again like small children — alert, watchful, available, capable of feeling wonder and awe.

 

I am not much interested in god, because if you are sensitive you will find him. So that is not the problem at all, the problem is: are you sensitive enough? Are you sensitive enough to find love? Are you sensitive enough to be a rebel. Are you sensitive enough to go against the mob psychology? If that is there then there is no question of bothering about God; you are bound to find him. But that happens only when one’s sensitivity rises to a peak and one functions at the maximum.

 

God is the experience of being sensitive at the optimum point.

 

- Osho, “Going All the Way, #9”