Question asked to Osho: IF ENLIGHTENED BEINGS DON’T HAVE CHILDREN, AND WE NEUROTIC PEOPLE ARE PRONOUNCED UNFIT FOR PARENTHOOD BY YOU, WHEN IS THE RIGHT TIME?
Enlightened persons don’t have children; neurotic persons should not have. Just between the two, there is a state of mental health, of non-neurosis: you are neither neurotic nor enlightened, simply healthy. Just in the middle – that is the right time for parenthood, to become a mother or to become a father.
This is the trouble: neurotic persons tend to have many children. In fact, in the West neurosis is more. People don’t have many children. That may be one of the causes that neurosis has become so prevalent: the old engagement with children is no longer there. In the East, people are not so neurotic. They cannot afford to be neurotic; children are enough. A joint family has so many children.
You cannot have any time to go mad – impossible. They won’t allow you to. You are in such a mad state and so tuned with it, that you will not become aware that you are mad. In the West, the joint family has disappeared. Children have also disappeared, the way they appear in the East. There are one or two children, at the most. Much space is left. The whole old occupation is no longer there. People are becoming more and more rich, affluent, less and less work is there, more and more leisure, and they don’t know what to do with the leisure. They go neurotic. Just think about yourself if you have nothing to do, no children to work for.
Once I asked Mulla Nasrudin, “Are you still working for the same firm?” He said, “Yes, the same company: the wife and thirteen kids!”
If you have a family to support, to work hard for the whole life, from morning till evening, and you come home tired and go to sleep and in the morning you are again on the track, how can you afford to be neurotic? When will you find time to go to a psychiatrist? In the East the psychiatrist does not exist. Children are the only psychiatrists.
Neurotic persons tend, in their neurosis, to create a very occupied space around them. They should not, because that is avoidable. They should face the fact of neurosis and they should go beyond it.
An enlightened person need not have children. He has given the ultimate birth to himself. Now there is no need to give birth to anything else. He has become a father and mother to himself. He has become a womb to himself, and he is reborn.
But between the two, when the neurosis is not there, you meditate, you become a little alert, aware.
Your life is not just darkness. The light is not as penetrating as it is when one becomes a Buddha, but a dim candlelight is available. That is the right time – the twilight time, when you are just on the border, moving out of the world, moving in the other world; that is the right time to have children, because then you will be able to give something of your awareness to your children. Otherwise, what will you give as a gift to them? You will give them your neurosis.
I have heard: A man with eighteen children took them to a dairy show. Included in the show was a prize bull worth 8,000 pounds and there was an additional charge of five pence to go in and see it. The man thought that this charge was exorbitant, but his children wanted to see the animal, and so they approached the entrance to its enclosure. The attendant said, “Are all these children yours, sir?”
“Yes, they are,” answered the man. “Why?”
The attendant replied, “Well, wait here a minute and I will bring the bull out to see you!”
Eighteen children! – Even the bull will feel jealous.
You go on unconsciously reproducing your own replicas. First think: are you in such a state that if you give birth to a child, you will be giving a gift to the world? Are you a blessing to the world, or a curse? And then think: are you ready to mother or to father a child? Are you ready to give love unconditionally? Because children come through you, but they don’t belong to you. You can give your love to them, but you should not impose your ideas on them. You should not give your neurotic styles to them. Are you ready not to give your neurotic style to your children? Will you allow them to flower in their own way? Will you allow them freedom to be themselves? If you are ready, then it is okay. Otherwise, wait; become ready.
With man, conscious evolution has entered into the world. Don’t be like animals, just reproducing unconsciously. Now get ready before you would like to have a child. Become more meditative, become more quiet and peaceful. Get rid of all the neurosis that you have within you. Wait for that moment when you are absolutely clean, then give birth to a child. Then, give your life to the child, your love to the child. You will be helping to create a better world. Otherwise, you will be simply crowding the world. The crowd has already become maddening. There is no longer any need to increase the crowd. If you can give human beings to the world, not just like worms, crowding and crawling all over the earth, then first be ready.
To me, to become a mother is a great discipline; to become a father is a great austerity. Otherwise, you will leave somebody just like you, or even worse than you, in your place. That will not be a good gesture on your part. Enlightened people need not give birth to anybody; neurotic people should not. Just in between the two, is the point.
Question to Osho: YOU SAY, REMOVE ALL YOUR MASKS AND BE AUTHENTIC. I THINK ONLY OF SEX, LOVE AND ROMANCE. I DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ELSE EXCEPT THIS. AM I ON THE WRONG TRACK?
I don’t see anything wrong in sex, in love, in romance. You are on the right track. Love is the right track, and only through a lived life of love, prayer arises – never otherwise. Only out of deep experiences of love, sweet and bitter, pleasant and painful, high and low, heaven and hell; only out of deep experiences of pain and pleasure through love does one become aware. They are needed to make you aware.
Pain is as much needed as pleasure, because both work. And by and by, between the pleasure and the pain, you become a tightrope walker. You attain balance.
But for centuries love has been condemned, sex has been condemned. So of course, the idea arises in your mind that you must be on the wrong track. You are simply natural. To be natural is not to be on the wrong track. If you think in that way and you become condemnatory, then you will be on the wrong track. Then you will repress, and whatsoever you repress will remain lurking in your unconscious, in your basement, and then much ugliness arises out of that repression.
Let me tell you a few anecdotes.
It is said, about a very rich and well known man, Lord Dewsberry: he was ninety years old to the day, and sat in the large bay window of his ground floor flat in Park Lane watching the Sunday morning strollers. Suddenly, he spotted a pretty, young, and fair girl wheeling a pram across to the park.
“Quickly James,” he said. “My teeth; I want to whistle.”
Ninety years old! – But this happens.
The question is from Krishna Priya.
Remember, if you don’t whistle now, then someday when your teeth are also gone, you will see some young man walking and, “Quick, bring my teeth!” That will be ugly. Right now the teeth are okay; you can whistle. Everything should be done in its time. Otherwise, things become ugly.
A child running after butterflies is okay, but a man of forty running around butterflies will look mad.
Young men are bound to be a little foolish. One expects that and accepts also. Nothing is wrong with it. That must be something basic to life: to be foolish at some times, because wisdom comes out of the experience of many foolishnesses. You cannot become wise suddenly. You will have to move, and go astray, and do many foolish things. And out of all those actions, foolish or otherwise, wisdom arises.
Wisdom is like fragrance, and experiences of foolishness work like manure. They stink! – But beautiful flowers come out of them. So don’t avoid the manure of life, otherwise you will miss the flowers of wisdom. And you can repress one desire from one side, but it will start arising from another side. You cannot deceive life.
“Mummy,” said the little monster, “the lads at school keep saying I have got a very big head.”
“You have not got a big head at all,” said the mother. “Just forget about those nasty boys and pop down to the shops for me. I want ten pounds of potatoes, five pounds of turnips, and two cabbages.”
“Alright, mummy. Where is the shopping bag?”
“Oh, don’t bother about that. Just use your cap.”
So from this way or that… just think again. Ten pounds of potatoes, five pounds of turnips and two cabbages – and just use your hat, just use your cap. You can suppress it from one side; it bubbles up from another side. Never suppress anything. If sex is there, allow it before it is too late. Allow it, move into it, accept it. It is a God-given thing. There must be a deep reason for it. There is. Never shirk any responsibility that God has given to you, otherwise you shirk from growth. And now, to ask such questions in this century, this twentieth century, is simply stupid.
The six-year-old was having his first trip to the zoo, and was asking awkward questions as usual.
“Hey Dad, where do baby elephants come from?” he asked; then added, “and if you give me that old stork story this time, I will really know you are crazy.”
Elephants being brought by the stork? – So the six-year-old is saying, “And if you give me that old stork story this time, I will really know you are crazy.”
Gone are those foolish days when people were thinking in terms of condemnation, of anti-life philosophies. After Freud, man has come to accept sex more naturally. A great revolution has happened in the world.
Now to think in condemnatory ways is simply not to be contemporary. Now, Krishna Priya’s question was okay if she had asked it five hundred years ago, but now? It is absurd.
And in my ashram?
Tags: Patanjali Wisdom Is Like Fragrance
