According to Osho, yes—transformation can begin and be completed at the village level. Place and scale are irrelevant; consciousness sets the field. When a community collectively fixes a standard (e.g., a hundred-year lifespan), existence reorganizes accordingly: only souls resonant with that standard incarnate here, others go elsewhere. So start where you are; align locally, and the cosmic order adjusts.
Yes—do it in one village; if people agree on a way of life, reality will match it and those who don’t fit simply won’t come.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, but can all this be done in a village?
Everything can be done at the village level; then the planets will change—it makes no difference. That is, whether one village changes or another is not the issue. If we fix the lifespan at one hundred years for the entire Earth, then those destined for less than a hundred years would no longer be able to be born here; they would have to choose other planets.
Osho, can heaven be brought down to earth? Can there ever be, in the future, a healthy, unambitious, unexcited, and loving society? Experience from the past suggests that here and there a few rare individuals attained liberation while the rest of society remained the same. You are certainly unique; your experiment is original and revolutionary. You say humanity, too, has matured. This time, can we hope for something new?
But how long can they obstruct? If even eight people sit—those eight are my sannyasins—if even eight sit, the train will start. Once it starts, the number of passengers will keep growing. Today the whole world rides; no one worries whether the train will stop or not. No one asks how to stop it, where the horses are, the oxen, who is driving, whether there are ghosts inside, whether the devil’s hand is in it. The engine even looks a bit devilish, like Yama’s messenger—thundering along with such force—who knows what will come of it? In the last five thousand years humanity has discovered all the needed pieces—slowly. Something from Buddha, something from Patanjali, something from Mohammed, something from Christ, something from Moses, something from Lao Tzu, something from Zarathustra—countless explorers discovered countless fragments. What remains is to seat those fragments together. That is what I am trying to do.…
Question: Osho, to me the present state of world affairs appears illusory. Eminent scholars from different walks of life offer various themes for the transformation of life. For instance, religious leaders affirm that God or religion alone is omnipotent and can transform life and provide heaven. Sociologists, politicians, educationists and moralists believe that only better forms can create a better society. Naturalists say that understanding nature will bring transformation. Whereas psychologists and psychopathologists believe that psychoanalysis, tranquilizers, sedatives or brainwashing agents can transform life, etc., etc. But to me, sir, all this appears to be merely a partial transformation. Would you suggest what total and spontaneous transformation is? As you say: clothes are fine, houses are fine, roads are fine; all kinds of instruments have been developed by which man’s senses have become a hundred million times more mobile.
What measures should we take, Osho, to keep away from society, from its activities?
As I have said, these universities, this educational apparatus, is an effort to reimpose all the foolishness and all the ignorance of society onto new children. The attempt is that the children can again create the same kind of society, repeat the same kind of society. Certainly, breaking this endeavor is a very difficult matter. It can be broken only through individuals. So for now, it is simply a matter of carrying the message to individuals—one by one—to all those who can think, reflect, in whose presence questions have arisen, so that it can come into their awareness. Then there can be small, small schools where a few friends sit together and experiment. Let these experiments be at a very small level; gradually they can become larger experiments. And at the very least, it is certain that wherever a person is, if he comes to understand this, he can apply…
In this regard a friend has also asked: Osho, can we know our past lives?
Sri Aurobindo undertook another experiment. He did not appear to succeed, and did not succeed outwardly, but his direction was absolutely right. His experiment was this: Is it possible for a few souls to rise so high that their very presence begins to lift and call other souls upward? Is it possible that when one person’s soul rises, the overall level of the soul of humanity rises with it? This is not only possible; today it is the only possibility. Nothing else can work now. Man has fallen so low that if we plan to change people one by one, perhaps the change will never happen. In fact, the one who goes to change them is more likely to be changed by their company—to be corrupted along with them. You can see it: those “servants of the people” who go to serve the people—within a short time it is discovered…