Time Left Before We Become Contemporaries of Osho
Osho is reported to have said that he will be contemporary in two centuries. Meaning that we will finally catch up with him then. Here is some good news: a little taste of what that will mean for the lives of your great, great, great… great-grandchildren.
Osho is pretty clear that everyone misunderstands him. Instead, with one or two exceptions only, even the smartest, most articulate humans today never challenge what he says. All they can manage is to throw insults.
As he explains:
“I have not come across a single human being who is my contemporary – and perhaps in this life I can’t hope to meet anyone.”
And:
“Our minds are made really in such primitive, unintelligent, inhuman ways that it is unbelievable….
“I am trying hard to make you my contemporaries, and perhaps it may happen. It all depends on you: how intelligently you can get rid of past conditionings.”1
As we look around this sad world of human beings, it doesn’t seem that many people are intelligent enough to get rid of their past conditionings. In spite of so many pending catastrophes, not to mention so much simple human misery, there is little sign of that intelligence that Osho is speaking about. We may even be going backwards.
The primary change we will see is that it will be widely understood that how you treat the new arrivals on this planet will determine how they will grow up and affect the world around them.
In short, today’s children create tomorrow’s world.
It will also be obvious to everyone by then that people who don’t love themselves, cannot love others, let alone love the fauna and flora we live with and depend on. Making sure these children have every opportunity to feel completely comfortable in being themselves – in fact, to really love and appreciate themselves, just as they are – will be the key to creating a loving world for us all to enjoy.
It will no longer be considered “a right” to just procreate as you want, irrespective of whether there are sufficient resources to take care of that child. The population of humans in the world will need to be appropriate to the needs of the rest of the people – and the fauna and flora we all share those resources with.
So, the only babies born will be “wanted” – not only wanted but welcomed and loved and received as the amazing gifts from existence that they are – so they become the kinds of beautiful people we would all love to share this planet with.
Even during the pregnancy, the mother will be given so much support that she can be completely relaxed and provide the most perfect womb service any of us could ever hope for.
The birth will not be in a crude clinical, operating-room environment, but in a warm welcoming space, perhaps like water birthing, if that turns out to be the best for mother and baby. If by then artificial wombs are used, it will only be with the approval of those most impacted – the mothers, and later their offspring.
Once born, the child will be allowed to develop as a unique individual. Children won’t be anybody’s property, and yet everybody’s responsibility.
They will be free to spend time with their peers or their biological family, or their wider family of the many “aunts” and “uncles” who will naturally be part of the world around them.
Freedom to be themselves will be paramount. The only restriction will be to ensure that their freedom does not impinge on the freedom of others and to prevent them from damaging themselves or others.
No child will be persuaded to believe in anything.
On top of their natural trust, their equally natural curiosity will be their way of discovering themselves and their world. Belief itself will become irrelevant. They will know what they know and be clear if they don’t know. They won’t indulge in the silly game of pretending something that is unknown is known by calling it a belief.
Their input will be greatly valued as they bring fresh eyes to the world and see things that the existing population may have missed. Already today there are those who are beginning to realize this. As Alison Gopnik explains: “You could think of babies and young children as being the R & D division of the human species and we (adults) are production and marketing.”
In this way, the lives of people in the world go on flowering with ever more love and beauty than before.
All those values that are currently brainwashed into children’s heads today will simply disappear. Gods, heavens and hells, angels and fairies will all be quaint artifacts of an earlier more primitive era. In fact, ideologies per se, whether they were called religious or secular, will be seen as only theories, or hypotheses. Nothing you take too seriously, and certainly nothing you identify with.
These new children won’t be indoctrinated with one of the most pernicious “beliefs” of today’s world: that the ugly behavior that is so common in our species is just “human nature.” It is not. It is the way we damage today’s new arrivals. They will throw fascist propaganda like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies into the bin and rejoice how those real lost children did the opposite.
They will understand exactly what James Gilligan – a psychiatrist who has been on the faculty of New York University since 2002 – means in the movie, “Zeitgeist Moving Forward” by his conclusions, after spending forty years trying to understand “The most violent people our society produces.”
He says, “I discovered that the most violent of the criminals in our prisons had themselves been victims of a degree of child abuse that was beyond the scale of whatever I ever thought of applying the term ‘child abuse’ to. I had no idea of the depth of the depravity with which children in our society are all too often treated. The most violent people I saw were themselves the survivors of their own attempted murders, often at the hands of their parents or other people in their social environment. Or were the survivors of family members who had been killed, their closest family members, by other people.”
Recent estimates by the World Health Organization indicate that up to one billion children between the ages of two and seventeen have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect within the past year.
By contrast, these new children – free from any physical, psychological, or intellectual child abuse – will grow up to be simply human beings. Once the adults stop persuading them to be Christian or Muslim, to be American or Chinese, to be communist or fascist, to be left or right, to be Black or White, to be “a man” or “a woman” – they will be free to be whoever they want to be for as long as it pleases them.
By making sure these children are free from adult indoctrination, religions and nations will just disappear – so the endless competition, conflict, and violence between them will become stone-age relics.
This new world that will be built on the ruins of the world it replaces and will be inspired by the greatest lessons that can be learned by the mistakes of the past.
Perhaps the most profound part of these changes will be the realization that today’s world completely misunderstands the role of the human mind in its evolution. By allowing this brilliant mechanism to be their master rather than their servant, humans have brought a catastrophe on themselves. Obsessed with the science of outer material objects, they denied the immaterial, the unmeasurable. In the process, even something so fundamental to their wellbeing as love was reduced to a chemical reaction.
They created a loveless planet of mechanical people whose pain and suffering have never been so accurately categorized and measured. And misunderstood.
The knowledgeable ones of today’s world have confidently decided that consciousness is just a by-product of biological stuff. It is “a hard problem” they insist, as they keep staring down their test tubes wondering why they cannot find it!
As we become Osho’s contemporaries, we will all realize that the root of all this was the past infatuation with the mind and its wonders.
Science, rationality, logic, and seriousness ruled! Awareness, wisdom, and self-understanding, like consciousness, were just more epiphenomenon of the god called matter.
In the process, the outer researchers, the conventional scientists, arrogantly dismissed thousands of years of inner research – which has been warning consistently that if you make the mind the king, you are going to suffer.
There are “no ghosts in the machine” they insisted. If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist! Has anyone ever measured love, or trust, or joy, or laughter, or peace…?
“Cessation of the mind” we were advised – a few thousand years ago – was the key to a harmonious life. More psychobabble no doubt.
Unconscious science has been the most powerful energy of today’s world. Nuclear power is put in the hands of dis-eased politicians. The planetary ecosystem is put in the hands of money-crazed fossil-fuel emperors. AI is left out in the playground for unconscious billionaires and their friends to play with. On the budget end, there are always downloadable viral genetic engineering kits to see if someone can come up with something novel? Novel? – that rings a bell.
Meanwhile for the rest of us? Do we just keep scrolling those screens, covering our ears in headphones… lost in thoughts and dreams – so we don’t even have to notice what is happening?
As this new world emerges, all this will be seen as the insanity it really is.
So, those Osho contemporaries will make it very clear to these new young children as they grow up that it is their responsibility to become an expert of their own minds. Being the kind of unappreciated wizards they really are, they soon notice how the mind can be useful in trying to figure out where they spent their money, but a completely useless distraction when listening to the birds at sunrise. They will realize that for this one part of their body to be running autonomously, on autopilot makes no sense. Like every other part of the body, it will function better when given the appropriate space to rest.
Naturally, they discover the off button. Exactly as the ancients proposed.
In this way the current trends towards self-destruction are reversed. Of course, the scientific method of experimentation and observation has led to unprecedented transformations of matter with unimaginable technological advances.
Meanwhile, the inner world of human beings has shriveled. Ironically, it is particularly those who have benefited the most from that outer progress who are suffering the most. The “advanced” parts of today’s world have shocking levels of stress and anxiety, expressed as anger, fear, and sadness, overshadowed by violence, addictions, and suicide.
Once Osho’s contemporaries arrive, everything can be different. Science will continue to provide endless advances, but instead of being a partial exploration of only the material, outer world, it will now also include the exploration of the immaterial, inner world.
The former will continue to be based on observation and experimentation, while the latter will be based on observation and experience. The latter will be the doorway to a more conscious aware human being.
That urge to be more conscious will no longer be usurped by priests and their political games, cults, and fairytales, but will become a reality – experienced individually by basically everyone.
Of course, conscious human beings will then direct the science of the outer in ways that are creative and life positive and will not engage in any science that is destructive and life negative. It is so obvious that you can either use the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to boil us to extinction, or you could regulate it to provide exactly the climate that best suits the occupants of planet Earth. That will have to wait for the arrival of those conscious people, those contemporaries of Osho who perhaps should not delay their arrival for too long!
These are going to be totally different kinds of human beings from us. They know by observing their own experiences, that the personality is just a cabaret they can play any time, but it is not who they are. They know that the mind is a kind of internal search engine, to use when required, but nothing you would identify with. They know that the ego is just an artifact that is only needed if you insist on pretending that you are the cabaret, rather than the observer of the cabaret!
They grow up to be the creators of an ever more beautiful world. They are completely self-sufficient psychologically. They know themselves and are clear about what does and does not suit them.
They don’t join groups out of fear of being on their own. They don’t “identify” with anything. In fact, they realize that it is that very identification with this and that, which has caused so much pain and suffering in the past. They are simply delighted to be themselves and to share themselves with whoever else wants to play at the time.
They will finally appreciate what Osho means when he says that “enlightenment is nothing special. It is the most ordinary, natural phenomenon.” They will realize that once the mind is no longer the master, the joy of the empty space that emerges is just natural, and available to one and all. It will soon catch on that life only happens now. So, imagine how absurd the past will look when everyone used to struggle to live longer – and at the same time flush at least fifty percent of the life they already have down the toilet by not being present, but living in some fantasy daydream called “thinking”!
They will laugh at how people used to get all bent out of shape by something they called “woke.” Woke? These fully conscious human beings will be completely awake!
Woke indeed! How pathetic we will look to them.
Just see how different this new world is going to be:
No Russia, no Ukraine. No USA, no Iraq, no Afghanistan, no Vietnam. No China, no Tibet, no Taiwan. No North Korea, no South Korea. No India, no Pakistan, no Kashmir. No Israel, no Palestine….
Naturally, there are also no Russians, no Ukrainians, no US-Americans, no Iraqis, no Afghans, no Vietnamese. No Chinese, no Tibetans, no Taiwanese. No Indians, no Pakistanis, no Kashmiris. No Israelis, no Palestinians….
Just people.
No Christians fighting with Jews fighting with Muslims fighting with Hindus fighting with Buddhists…. No Protestants fighting with Catholics fighting with Orthodox Christians; or Shia fighting with Sunnis fighting with Yazidis…. Ad nauseam.
This is not a “peace dividend” – this is a paradise dividend!
The world is transformed by the simple decision not to persuade these innocent young people that men are inherently superior to women or that masculinity is inherently superior to femininity, or that they have to be one or the other! Then biology and psychology can be allowed to be as fluid as works for any individual – who will be free to be whatever they feel is right for them. The only limitation being that their freedom doesn’t impinge on the freedom of anyone else.
Of course, being the smart, un-brainwashed young people they are, they will realize that the old idea that the polarity in life is between freedom and control is nonsense.
They will understand that the true polarity is between control and license, while freedom rests joyously in the middle.
Guilt is gone. Shame is gone. With everyone being accepted exactly how they are. They look back in horror at the dark ages when misogyny ruled, sexual violence was normal, rapes were ubiquitous. When physical and verbal violence based on condemning people for the color of their skin or their hair, or the shape of their bodies, or what they choose to do with them, was “normal.” This will be seen as barbaric – as today we might look backward – or sideways! – on times when people were publicly beheaded for displeasing the ruling ideology of the time.
Instead of a world full of intimate enemies or lonely outsiders, love becomes a natural part of everyone’s life.
By that time in the future, it will have long been recognized that people who have obsessions with power or money are sick. The very idea that someone wants to control other people’s lives will be understood as a clear indication of some earlier trauma that has created some inferiority complex in them. It will be obvious that they live in the unconscious misunderstanding that power over others, or money, will heal that wound. Such people will need treatment, not votes or our support to run anything!
So, politics, whether secular or religious, will be understood as simply a source of dis-ease.
Political people will have our compassion for the traumas that caused them to pursue such life-negative ambitions – and will be prevented from getting anywhere close to power or responsibility. Just like we wouldn’t want an arsonist to run the fire station!
By that time, there will be very different options for where and how to live than exist today. Instead of huge anonymous urban jungles, we will have human-sized conurbations, of maybe 50,000 people. People can then choose whether they want to mix with others or be alone, or any combination of the two that they prefer. By then, the consciousness will have evolved that those who want to live communally will also manage beautifully.
How will all this be managed?
Once freed from the intellectual shackles of childhood brainwashing, human beings will soon create new ways to organize their lives in the interest of individuals, not organizations – in the interest of cooperation, not competition – in the interest of love, life, and laughter.
Maybe some of us are not expecting to live that long so cannot wait for two centuries to pass before becoming a contemporary of Osho! However, we can, as he suggests, use this current catastrophe as a doorway to consciousness.
So, don’t give up, there is some more good news:
“If you try in this life to become more conscious, whatever you gain will remain with you in the next life; it is never lost.
“So in the next life you can begin exactly from the place you left in the past life, because you have only changed the body – you are the same. So if something has become conscious in you, it will remain conscious in you in a new life. Everything has a fresh beginning; with nothing hanging over you, you will have more freedom to grow in consciousness.
“In every life you will have more chances, more opportunities to grow. It all depends on you.”2
See you then. If not, bon voyage!
END
1– Excerpted from Osho, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Talk #24 – Truth Godliness Beauty
2– Excerpted from Osho, The Path of the Mystic, Talk #11 – And the Wheel Moves
