Osho on dirty things of life, Osho on Child Upbringing

Question – Osho, is it not possible to raise children in such a way that they never become interested in the dirty things of life?

Osho – Chandrakand, WHAT do you mean by “dirty things of life”? Life is all beautiful! Even dirt is not dirty, even dirt has its own splendor. Because life is divine — how can it be dirty? You have not asked this question out of intelligence, awareness, meditativeness; you have asked this question out of prejudice, tradition.

This is not your question, your society has implanted it in you. You must be a typical Indian, hence the question. India has great expertise in condemning. India has lived for at least twenty-five centuries in a very life-negative way. It was not so always. India is an ancient land: the civilization has existed for at least ten thousand years.

It is only in these last twenty-five centuries that it became more and more life-negative. Otherwise the Indian mystic was the greatest life-affirmative mystic the world has known. The Indian mystic loved life, rejoiced in life and all that life implied.

But whenever something reaches to a peak, the valley is bound to follow. It is a constant rhythm of life; mountains cannot be without valleys. When a great wave comes, following it, in the wake, is a hollow wave, a negative wave. Day is followed by night, night is followed by day. Life is followed by death, death is followed by life. Existence -consists of polar opposites.

India reached to a very great peak of life-affirmation in the Upanishads. The Upanishads are the expression of life-affirmation. Then the decline came; it was bound to come. The life-negative aspect started asserting itself, then everything became condemned. Sex became condemned — in a country which has made Khajuraho, Konarak, Puri.

Sex became condemned in the country which had written the first book of sexology in the world. Sex became condemned in the country of Vatsayana, who the country had loved and respected as a Buddha. He is the first man in the world who wrote a great sexual treatise, one of the most profound.

Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, Masters and Johnson are just children compared to Vatsayana’s insight into sex. Sex became condemned in a country which had raised it to the highest pedestal of Tantra, which had said that the sexual experience is the closest to the experience of God. And not only sex, when life becomes condemned everything becomes condemned — food, clothes, relationships, everything that life implies becomes condemned.

For twenty-five centuries India has lived in a terrible mess. But now, the turning-point is coming again. Now the days of the valley are over. Now again life-affirmation will assert. My sannyas is just to herald a new phase, a new dawn.

What do you mean, Chandrakand, by saying “dirty THINGS OF LIFE”?

And you cannot protect children. Those protected children will not have any spine. They will be dull, insipid, dead. They will not have sharpness of intelligence, because you will be avoiding all challenges in their lives, you will be protecting them too much. Your protection will become an imprisonment.

No, children have to be made aware of all that life implies — good and bad, all, day and night, all, summer and winter, all, flowers and thorns, all. The children have to be made available to the wholeness of life, because only then will they be whole.

There was once a king and his young wife. They were very much in love and life was good. Then one day the queen died while giving birth to their first child, a son. The king was beside himself with grief. He determined at least to protect his son from the possibility of such a cruel misfortune. He decreed that the young prince was never to know of the existence of women. So the boy grew up in peace but knowing nothing of the female.

One day when the boy was almost fifteen he was walking in the orchard with his father when a little urchin girl who had come to steal apples ran across their path.

“Ah, look father!” said the boy. “What is that?”

The king hesitated a second or two. “It is a swan,” he replied.

Some days later the king called his son. “Well, my son, you are almost fifteen. What would you like as a birthday gift?”

“Ah, father, please may I have a swan?” the boy replied.

It is impossible to keep somebody unaware of life’s complexities Many times the experiment has been done and each time it has been a failure.

When Buddha was born all the great astrologers of the country gathered, of course. In his late old age the king had given birth to a child. No one had ever heard of a child so beautiful, and a child with such grace that he did not seem to be part of this world, as if a god v. as born. So all the astrologers gathered to predict about him. They calculated, they looked into theirscriptures, and they were at a loss as to what to say. All the astrologers except one raised two fingers.

The king said, “What do you mean by raising two fingers? Don’t speak in riddles!”

They said, “But we are in a riddle ourselves. We are raising two fingers because all the scriptures we have Consulted say two things about this child: either he will become a CHAKRAVARTIN, a world emperor, or he will become a sannyasin ut nothing definite can be said, hence we are raising two fingers:

one to say either he will be the greatest emperor in the world who will rule the whole world” — -CHAKRAVARTIN means one who will rule all the six continents — “or he will be a sannyasin and he will renounce the world and move into the mountains, into the forests, into deep meditation, and he will become a Buddha.”

The king looked at the one man, one astrologer, the youngest, who was still silent. He asked him, “What do you say?” He raised only one finger.

The king said, “Now what do you mean by one finger — emperor or sannyasin?”
The young astrologer said, “He will become a sannyasin, that is absolutely certain.”

The king was not happy with the young astrologer. He said, “You are young in age, inexperienced. All your old colleagues are saying either/or.”

He simply forgot his advice. He listed to the older ones and he asked them, “What should I do so that he becomes a CHAKRAVARTIN and does not renounce the world?”

They suggested some very common-sense advice. If I had been there I would not have suggested it at all, but I know the king would not have listened to me either, Just as he had not listened to the young astrologer. People listen to that which they want to listen to.

Those old astrologers said, “Do a few things. One: keep him in such pleasure that he never becomes aware of pain, that he never comes to know of suffering. If he never comes to know of suffering he will never renounce, because people renounce the world because of suffering.”

That is utter nonsense! People don’t renounce the world because of suffering, remember. People renounce the world because they become fed-up with pleasure.

You can see it here: so many Westerners and so few Indians. Why? India is in suffering — people cannot think of sannyas. They are hankering for more and more possessions. They have not known that possessions can’t give anything, they have not known the futility of riches — how can they renounce? How can they start moving higher than the worldly things?

How can they think of meditation? In fact, they are puzzled, looking at all you Westerners coming to me. They are very much puzzled, confused: “Why are you coming here?”

Many of my sannyasins come to me and say, “Whenever we meet Indians they immediately ask how their son can get admission into Harvard, into Cambridge, into Oxford:’How can we have some help from the Ford Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation? I would like my son to become a great en
gineer — or a physicist or a surgeon.”‘

My sannyasins say to me, “They don’t see that we have come from Harvard and Cambridge and Oxford, seeing the whole futility of it.”

There are at least two hundred PH.D’S present here today, and at least one thousand post-graduates from all the universities of the world. But the Indian cannot see that these people are coming from there; he asks how he can manage it. His only hope is to make his son ‘foreign-returned’; that is a qualification. Even if he fails at Cambridge that doesn’t matter, he is ‘London-returned’; that is enough of a qualification. A poor country, a suffering country, cannot think of anything more.

Those astrologers suggested, “Give him all kinds of pleasures. Gather all the beautiful women of the country around him. Let him live for twenty-four hours as if he is in paradise — music, song, dance, beautiful women, wine. Let him be drowned in pleasure and he will never renounce.”

And that’s what the king did — and that’s why Buddha renounced. He became so fed-up: he had all the beautiful women, all the good things of life. His father had made three palaces for him for different seasons, so he would never suffer the heat of summer, so he would never suffer the cold of winter, so he would never suffer too much rain — three palaces in different places, in different climates, in different situations.

He was continuously on the merry-go-round. The whole day was nothing but celebration, holiday. Every day was a holiday. From the morning till the night, he was surrounded by beautiful women, wine, dance, music, good food. Life was all roses. And he was only twenty-nine when he became so bored with all this that he escaped. He simply ran away.

If the king had asked me, I would have suggested, “This is stupid! If you do this he is BOUND to become a sannyasin. If you want him to become a CHAKRAVARTIN then let him suffer, let him go through pain, let him go through starvation. Let him see how life is a misery so that he longs for pleasure, strives for pleasure.” But that was not to happen.

And it is good that I was not there, otherwise you would have missed the Buddha. It is good that the king didn’t listen to the young astrologer. His name was Kodana; he must have been a rare man, of great insight. But all those old fools, they convinced the king. And it is good that it happened the way it happened; to have missed Buddha would have been a great calamity.

The world has never been the same since Buddha: some fragrance has been released into the world. Man has changed his plane of consciousness to a higher plane.

India has lived for many centuries in poverty, and when you live in poverty, and when you live in starvation, and when you are ill, the only way to console your ego is to condemn life. Try to understand it; it is a rationalization — life-condemnation is a rationalization.

It is the same story that you know, the famous fable of Aesop.

A fox was trying to reach the grapes, but the grapes were too high and he could not reach them. He looked around — there was nobody — because he was afraid if somebody looked and saw that he had failed, it would be against his prestige. Seeing that there was nobody, he walked away. But a hare was hiding behind a bush and looking, and the hare said, “Uncle, where are you going? What happened? Could you not reach? Were the grapes too high?”

And the fox said, “No.”

And you know, the fox represents the politician. Down the ages, in all the cultures, the fox represents the diplomat, the politician. The fox is the most cunning animal.

The fox said, “No. They were perfectly within reach, but they are sour and not yet worth reaching.”

This has been the logic here in this country for two thousand years. Life became unreachable. The only way to save face was to condemn it: it is sour, it is not of worth.

Chandrakand, drop all that nonsense! Life is beautiful, life is tremendously graceful. All is good. Even that which does not appear to be good on the surface has a goodness in it. It can’t be otherwise.

In fact, the thorns are not against the flowers; they are guards, bodyguards for the flower. And pain is not against pleasure, it is the background. Without it there would be no pleasure.

In the night you see the sky full of stars; where do those stars go in the day? The background disappears. They need the background of darkness; only then can you see them. In the day the background is not there, it is fully light. The stars are still there in the sky, they don’t go anywhere. It is not that they suddenly run away in the day and by the evening they come back. They are there, just the background of darkness is needed for them to shine forth.

Life depends on the polar opposites: good and bad, love and hate, body/mind, matter/God. Nothing is bad, nothing is good. Between good and bad, you have to grow; between good and bad, you have to mature — and BOTH are opportunities, GREAT opportunities. Don’t condemn them. Respect life, and life will respect you. Love life, and love will shower blessings on you.