According to Osho, the either/or framing is false: environment and social order (and the individual mind) co-create each other in a single, simultaneous movement. No side comes first. Transform the individual and society shifts; transform social structures and minds shift. Therefore, cultivate inner awareness while working for outer reforms; coordinated change on both fronts is essential.
You can’t change the setting without changing the players, so grow inside and fix outside at the same time.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, you advise us to change the environment first, but how can that happen without a change in the social order?
You are absolutely right. First the social order or the environment? First the environment or the social order? No—the very question of before and after is misplaced; the whole thing is simultaneous. It’s the chicken-and-egg question: which comes first? None comes first. If the individual’s mind changes—society will change. If society changes—the individual’s mind will change. They are so interconnected that we must make efforts on both sides.
Question: Second question: Osho, are you against social revolution? And this inner change does not happen through changing ideas. It happens by leaping from thought to meditation. There is only one revolution in the world: to go from thought to no-thought; from a mind full of choices to a choiceless consciousness. The day the thinking mind dissolves into the emptiness of no-mind, that day doors open within you— the doors of the seven heavens open. That day indeed your chains become anklets. That day no prison can contain you, because for the first time you taste freedom—you experience moksha within. You know, “Even if handcuffs are put on the body, I am free—because I am not the body.” If such an event happens to innumerable people on this earth, perhaps there will be a radiance spread from horizon to horizon. It has not happened yet.
Osho, as I understand your teaching, you want every individual to be aware and to understand life in its totality. But today’s society is very complicated. Our environment is so complicated that it does not allow us to live a free life, to love people, or to live in the state in which we could live a very clean and smooth life.
Society is as it is; only by accepting this truth can anything be done. Society is like this—but if a person can see that apart from a simple, loving, joyous, clean life there is no life at all; if he sees that without becoming loving he will remain deprived of life’s joy; if he sees that without becoming simple there is no path to reach truth—then he will drop worrying about what society is like. For what can society give him—what is it giving? Once he sees that in another direction—which society does not offer and in fact obstructs—there lies the doorway to his life’s bliss, he will begin to move toward it. Certainly the social order will create obstacles. But for such a person they will not be obstacles; they will turn into challenges, and he will try to make steps out of them. The stones thrown onto his…
Osho, please understand one thing: in any country, if the society happens to be spiritualist, then those who don’t get a chance in it are pulled toward materialism; and in other countries, those who are materialists—when they don’t get a chance—are pulled the other way. So it is the chance-less who have erected the opposite cult. What do you say about this?
And remember, this small path that takes us from sleep into awakening is religion in the fundamental sense—this small path! Neither temples, nor rituals, nor sacrifices have anything to do with it. All this is meaningless. These are the devices of sleeping people. Temples, prayers, fire rituals, chanting mantras, repeating “Ram, Ram”—these are the creations of the sleeping. A sleeping man also manufactures a kind of religion—and then it becomes the cause of quarrels: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. These are differences of ritual, not of religion. One sleeping man builds one kind of temple—he doesn’t know what a temple is; he is building it himself. Ten other sleeping men build a mosque; ten more build a church. Then the three fight: ours is the true temple; whoever does not come to our temple will go to hell. Sleeping men also coin doctrines, create systems. They try to explain. But the explanations…
Osho, so it has come down to a question of awareness.
It is only a question of awareness! Only a question of awareness! In the confusion of our daily life, can we have this impartial experience? Yes, yes, absolutely. Only in this very life can you have it. Nowhere else can you. This society as it exists—should it remain as it is, or does it also need to be changed? It needs to be changed every day. So will it change through this very experience? No, no, no. Not necessarily. If this experience happens, then this society will indeed change—change every day. It won’t even need to be what it was yesterday. Then you are talking of anarchism. That would mean that what is to be done could be different in each duty, in each situation. It certainly can be. And in this experience we also think: this is nothing; not this, not this, not this. And then further, further—there is…