Question – Surely Meditation is for Mystics. Why do you propose it for ordinary people and their children?
Osho – First, I have never come across an ordinary person; they do not exist. They are only created by egoistic people. The egoist has to create the ordinary – that is the only way the ego can exist, persist. Not a single human being is ordinary because each human being is so unique. Each human being is created by God – how can he be ordinary? God never creates the ordinary. All his creation is rare.
Each individual is so unique that he is never repeated. You never were before, you will never be again. You cannot find anybody who is just like you. Forget about human beings…. Not even animals, not even trees, not even pebbles on a seashore – not even two pebbles – are alike. Wherever you find God’s signature, it is always the original, never the ordinary.
God is not a manufacturer, he is a creator. He does not manufacture people like Cars on an assembly line. You can have many Ford cars exactly alike – that’s the difference between a machine and a man. A machine can be duplicated, a man cannot be duplicated. and the moment you start duplicating, imitating, you become more like a machine – then you are no longer respectful towards your humanity. That’s how robopathology is created.
You ask me: SURELY MEDITATION IS FOR MYSTICS. It is for mystics, surely, but everybody is a born mystic – because everybody carries a great mystery within him which has to be realised, everybody carries a great potentiality which has to be actualised. Everybody is born with a future. Everybody has hope. What do you mean by a mystic? A mystic is one who is trying to realise the mystery of life, who is moving into the unknown, who is going into the uncharted, whose life is a life of adventure, exploration.
But every child starts that way – with awe, with wonder, with great enquiry in his heart. Every child is a mystic. somewhere on the way of your so-called growing you lose contact with your inner possibility of being a mystic, and you become a businessman or you become a clerk or you become a collector or you become a minister. You become something else. And you start thinking that you are this. And when you believe it, it is so.
My effort here is to destroy your wrong notions about yourself and to liberate your mysticism. Meditation is a way of liberating the mysticism, and it is for everybody – without any exception, it knows no exception.
SURELY MEDITATION IS FOR MYSTICS. WHY DO YOU PROPOSE IT FOR ORDINARY PEOPLE AND THEIR CHILDREN?
There is no one ordinary, and children are the most capable. They are natural mystics. And before they are destroyed by the society, before they are destroyed by other robots, by other corrupted people, it is better to help them to know something of meditation. Meditation is not a conditioning, because meditation is not indoctrination.
Meditation is not giving them any creed. If you teach a child to become Christian you have to give him a doctrine; you have to force him to believe things which naturally look absurd. You have to tell the child that Jesus was born out of a virgin mother – that becomes a fundamental. Now you are destroying the natural intelligence of the child. If he does not believe you, you are angry, and of course you are powerful and you can punish the child.
You can torture the child in many ways. If he believes you it goes against his intrinsic intelligence. It looks like nonsense to him, but he has to compromise with you. And once he has compromised he starts losing his intelligence, he becomes stupid. If you teach a child to be a Mohammedan, then again you will have to teach him a thousand and one absurdities. And so is the case with Hinduism and with all kinds of creeds, dogmas.
If you teach a child meditation you are not indoctrinating him. You don’t say he has to believe anything, you simply invite him to an experiment in no-thought. No-thought is not a doctrine, it is an experience. And children are very, very capable because they are very close to the source. They have just come from God! They still remember something of that mystery.
They have just come from the other world, they have not yet forgotten it completely. Sooner or later they will forget, but still the fragrance is around them. That’s why all children look so beautiful, so graceful. Have you even seen an ugly child? Then what happens to all these beautiful children? Where do they disappear to? Later in life it is very rare to find beautiful people . Then what happens to all beautiful children? Why do they turn into ugly persons? What accident, what calamity happens on the way?
They start losing their grace the day they start losing their intelligence. They start losing their natural rhythm, their natural elegance and they start learning plastic behaviour. They no longer laugh spontaneously, they no longer cry spontaneously, they no longer dance spontaneously. You have forced them into a cage, a strait-jacket. You have imprisoned them.
The chains are very subtle, they are not very visible. The chains are of thought – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. You have chained the child and he cannot see the chains, so he will not be able to see how he is chained. And he will suffer his whole life. It is such an imprisonment. It is not like throwing a man into a jail. It is creating a jail around a man, so wherever he goes the j ail continues around him. He can go to the Himalayas and sit in a cave, and he will remain a Hindu, he will remain a Christian – and he will still think thoughts.
Meditation is a way to go within yourselves to that depth where thoughts don’t exist, so it is not indoctrination. It is not teaching you anything, in fact, it is just making you alert to your inner capacity to be without thought, to be without mind. And the best time is when the child is still uncorrupted.