Osho,
How are you helping to change the world?

“The world does not exist; it is only a word.

What exists is the individual. By changing the individual, the world is changed.

“What has been done in the past with humanity is that people have been deprived of their individuality. That’s how there are crowds, but no individuals; Mohammedans, Christians, Hindus, but no individuals.

“It is the same process which has been applied down the ages in the armies. The whole training of an army is a basic effort to destroy the individual completely, and to make him just a number.

“If a man dies in the fight, in war, his name does not appear on the notice board. What appears is that ‘number sixteen’ died. Now, number sixteen has no wife, no children, no friends, no old father and mother. Number sixteen is simply a number, and number sixteen is replaceable. Some other person will soon fill the gap and will become number sixteen. And the man who was behind the number sixteen is reduced, by and by, with subtle processes.

“The whole training of the army is that the person is made to do things which are irrational. In the beginning, his reason tries to assert.

But his reason is punished, his disobedience is punished, his argumentativeness is punished. His obedience is rewarded.

“Soon, the person can see that he can only allow his reason to function, if he is to remain in continuous misery and punishment. Otherwise, he has just to follow whatever the order is. Even if the order is to drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, the person does it just like a robot, without considering that he is destroying 160,000 people within seconds.

“But he is not an individual, he no longer thinks. His thinking has been very scientifically destroyed. For hours in the morning, in the evening, for years he’s been parading: turn right, turn left. He cannot even ask, ‘What is the point?’….

One slowly stops asking, ‘Why?’ What is the point? One simply starts doing things mechanically.

“Only then can you make a human being drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and he does not ask ‘Why?’ Those people of Hiroshima had done nothing wrong, they had not harmed anybody. They were civilians, small children, women, pregnant women, old people – they had nothing to do with the war as such. Why destroy them?

“No, such a question does not arise anymore. An order is an order, and to follow it is his duty. He dropped the bomb on both the cities, went back to his camp, had a good dinner, drank with his friends, laughed, joked – and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were burning. Never before in history had such destruction been seen. But this man seemed to be absolutely unaffected. In fact he seemed to be enjoying, celebrating, because he had done a great job. As the first man to drop the atom bomb, he had become a historical figure.

“In the morning, he was asked by the journalists, ‘We certainly believe you could not have slept in the night. After killing 160,000 people, how could you sleep?’

“He said, ‘You don’t understand the psychology of the soldier. I have done my duty, and I have done it perfectly. And I had a very good sleep. I had not had that good a sleep for months because this project was there, and I was so excited by the project of dropping the atom bomb.’

“He was being prepared for it. And, naturally, when the work is finished – and finished with perfection – one has the right to relax and go to sleep. So he said, ‘I ate well, drank, danced with my friends and went to sleep.’

Now, something is missing in this man. His heart is no longer functioning.

“His reason is dead. He looks like a man, but he has become a robot.

“What has happened in all the armies has happened on a subtler level in all the societies.

The basic method is the same. Every child is brought up to follow, to be obedient, to respect the elders.

“Every child is conditioned that on his own he is always going to be wrong, that he is a worthless person. One is not born worthy; worth has to be deserved, it has to be earned, it is a goal. Very few people achieve it. As a human being, he is condemned. As he is, he is condemned. He is given all kinds of shoulds and should nots.

The child is so helpless that sooner or later he is caught in the net….

“These are subtle strategies to distract the child from his innocence:

“If he follows the convention, the tradition, he is rewarded. I was always punished, never rewarded, but I accepted each punishment with great dignity because each punishment made me a more solid individual. They were not aware that they were unknowingly helping me; their rewards would have been bribes, their punishment gave me mettle.

“Every day I was punished, at home, in school. And they were wrong and I was right.

But my crime was that I would follow only what I felt to be right.

“It has been a great adventure to be right and to be punished. That gave me tremendous integrity, and everybody – my father, my teachers – later on recognized it. Almost all of them recognized that they were wrong. But they treated me just like any other child. They never thought that I would be able to stand all the punishments, and still insist on doing the things I wanted to do….

“And I learned with these small things, by and by, that this society rewards lies, punishes truth. It teaches truth, but never rewards the truth.

This whole society is against the individual, it wants everybody retarded.

“The retarded people are good: they never give anybody any problem, they cannot raise questions, they are easily enslaved. The individual is essentially rebellious. He will say yes only when he feels it, otherwise he is going to say no.

“You ask me how I am preparing to change the world. I am doing just the opposite of what society has done to individuals. I have to undo it; there is no need to do anything else. My sannyas is simply a process of undoing what the society has done to you.

I am simply provoking your intelligence again.

“It is dormant – it is there, nobody can kill it, it can only be repressed. Finding a suitable, comfortable situation, it can again start growing.

“I want every one of my sannyasins to be utterly unique….

“In Russia they say the society is not for the individual, the individual is for the society. I would like to say to my people that the society is for you, you are not for the society.

Society is simply a word: there is no society. Civilization, ideology, all is jargon; the reality is the individual.

“So if we can undo, deprogram enough young people around the world, we are sowing the seeds of changing the world without talking about any change. We are changing it.

“There is no direct way to change the world, because there is no world which you can change.

Wherever you go, you will find individuals.

“So the individual has to be changed. And that is simple, not difficult at all. If the society had been able to make you something which is absolutely not your potential, it had succeeded in doing the impossible. What I am doing is simply the natural course. If you have to take water upward, you will have to pump it, make arrangements for it. But if you have to take water downward, no arrangement is needed. The water will flow downward itself: it is its natural law.

“The societies around the world, religions, civilizations, cultures, have created very subtle mechanisms to destroy the individual.

All that we have to do is to free the individual from those subtle mechanisms.

“That’s why I am continuously hitting on every device that society has created to destroy people. The moment you are no longer a Christian, something immensely beautiful will arise in you. The moment you are no longer American or Russian or Indian, you will feel wings growing in you.

“The moment you are no longer addicted to any doctrine, you will be surprised what sharpness comes to your intelligence – how you start looking at the same world with a totally different meaning, different eyes. Everything is the same, but you are no longer the same. As if suddenly a blind man has found eyes, or a deaf person has suddenly started hearing.

“Those examples don’t do justice, but just give an indication.

The man who is completely deprogrammed is my revolution.

“And we need only a small minority in the whole world. There is no need for a big majority to change the world. The majority in the world has never done anything.

It is always a small group of people who has run the world.

“Now, Jesus is running millions of people. Karl Marx is running half the world. Mohammedans are second only to Christians in number. Buddhists are third, Hindus are fourth. A few people – not more than a dozen, you can count them on your fingers – have been running the whole world.

We can create thousands of deprogrammed people, and those deprogrammed people will be like a fire – a wildfire.

“Wherever they will move, with them will move a new perspective, a new way of life. And they will become magnetic forces, to which people will simply be pulled.

“So, I have no plan to change the world directly. That has not happened. Many have tried it; basically they went wrong from the very beginning.

Start with the individual and release his intelligence.

“Don’t give him any program, don’t give him any project. Just make him free, and tell him, ‘The whole sky belongs to you – now you can fly anywhere you like. And whatever you want to do, do because there is no God to punish you, or reward you. You are totally free for any act that gives you bliss, that gives you peace, that gives you serenity.’ These people will become models and they will set the whole world afire.

So that is my idea of how we are going to change the world. By changing you.”

 

END

 

Excerpted and abridged from: Osho, The Last Testament, Vol. 2, Talk #4 – A New Perspective