Osho – Veet means beyond, shankaro means conditionings. Man is born unconditioned, man is born as freedom… just an open sky, with no clouds, with no boundaries, with no adjectives, no definitions – neither Hindu nor Christian nor Communist – just pure existence, an emptiness.
But immediately the society starts closing in on you, starts making boundaries; those boundaries are conditionings. Then one forgets one’s original face. Slowly slowly one becomes identified with all that has been said, told, repeated again and again. This is a kind of hypnosis that is being practised on every child.
It is a violation of the most fundamental human right, but it seems very difficult to know how to fight it because children themselves cannot fight it. Children’s liberation is needed. It is the greatest need in the world because no other slavery is so deep and so dangerous and so destructive. The child is not allowed to know his self; rather, the society creates a false self – that he is this, that he is that, to behave this way….
The society gives ideals, ideas and very soon the child becomes accustomed to the fact that he is a Christian, that he is a man and he has to behave in a manly way, that he should not cry because that is sissy. The girl starts behaving in a feminine way – she learns that she should not climb on trees, that that is boyish. Slowly slowly more and more boundaries, more and more boundaries, and they go on becoming narrower; then everyone feels suffocated. That is the situation: everybody is suffocated and everybody hankers deep down to be free. But how to be free?
It seems that the walls that surrounded one are really very powerful and strong. And people live in this kind of imprisonment for their whole life. They live in prison and they die in prison, never having known what life was, what life was meant to be, never knowing the glory and the grandeur of existence.
Buddha has called this state ’shankaro’, the conditioned state of mind. The whole process of meditation is to uncondition it, to withdraw those walls. What the parents and the society and the priests and the politicians have done has to be undone by the master. So the master is basically against the society. If the society poisons Socrates it is not accidental. If it kills Jesus it is very logical.
To be initiated into sannyas is to be initiated into a world of unconditioning; drop, slowly slowly, become more aware and go on dropping all adjectives and all identities. In the beginning it is painful because you will feel confused. You will not know who you are because all that you have known about yourself will start disappearing; you will be in a kind of chaos, in a limbo.
And that is where courage is needed. If one can go on dropping all the boundaries, all the definitions, all that has been told, all that is borrowed and has come from the outside, one day suddenly one is free. In that freedom is joy… and that freedom is god! My work here consists of destroying your conditionings; it is a painful process but the end result is tremendously beautiful.
It is arduous, but when one has reached to the top for the first time one starts being really alive. And that aliveness I would like to give you. That is your birthright – it has to be attained. The man who is not trying to attain it is not worth much – is not worth being called a man. The search for freedom is the most important value; it is the summum bonum.
Source: from Osho Book “The Tongue-Tip Taste of Tao”