How can I help my husband give up alcohol?

Osho, my husband is otherwise almost a deity—only one bad habit: he drinks. How can I make him give up alcohol?

Rama Devi! Understand my definition of a religious person: a religious person makes a total effort to transform himself, but he has no ambition to transform someone else. The desire to change the other is politics. There is a kick in it—what kick? Ego! I am superior and the other is inferior, therefore I have the right to change them. And as if women have taken a contract to change their husbands! Always on their backs—do this, don’t do that; don’t eat this, don’t drink that. They make life miserable. Often that is precisely why the poor fellows start drinking. If you make their life hell—and they, too, have a right to live—what else is left for them but to drink to forget you for a while? Now, Rama Devi, you say: “In every other way my husband is a veritable god.” Of course he is. He is your husband.…

Osho, my husband has the habit of chewing tobacco. How can he give it up? Asked by Geeta. First of all, trying to make someone else drop their habits is not a mark of decency. Let the other person understand for themselves. Acknowledge at least that your husband has intelligence. If there is to be a question, let your husband be the one to ask.

The weak always finds a tactic that appears right. Being weak, they must play a kind of politics that looks proper and cannot be easily refused. What will you say? The wife isn’t saying something bad. She says, “Your lungs will be ruined; if you smoke you’ll get TB.” She says it for your own good. The weak will always devise ways to torment you “for your own good.” And she isn’t factually wrong, so you cannot even argue. Husbands begin to enter their homes in fear. The home starts to feel like school for little children—that is how husbands feel about home: a classroom. Lessons are given there—where to take off the shoes, where to put the clothes, don’t smoke, don’t play the radio so loud—thousands of lessons. Slowly the wife becomes a schoolmistress and with her own hands breaks the delicate threads of love. The threads of love…

Osho, why can I take almost everything lightly except my husband, pravasi? Why do I fight him so? Why do I always try to change him?

It is a very ancient story. In the very beginning, something went wrong. You may know, you may not know: Eve was not the first woman. God first created Adam and Lilith. And the first night, the honeymoon night -- the first honeymoon -- and a quarrel started because there was only one bed. And in those days double beds were not available! This is the story of the beginning: there was just a single bed. So who should sleep on the bed and who should sleep on the floor? Of course, Adam was as much a male chauvinist pig as anybody! He was muscular, more powerful, so he possessed the bed. But Lilith was not willing. She said, "We are equal, we are made equal." She was the founder of the Lib Movement, the real founder! They fought so much. I don't know whether clothes were thrown at each…

Beloved master, so often a feeling that I can't describe fills my heart and my whole being. During the other morning's discourse it felt like overwhelming love for you and the whole. But now I realize that the same feeling or a very, very similar feeling also comes up in fear, anguish, throbbing pain, helplessness and frustration. I am trembling and confused. Beloved master, can you say something?

He said, "I have to, otherwise I cannot face my wife. When I am utterly drunk I have so much courage I could face a lion! And when I am absolutely drunk I go home, I hit my boot on the doors, open the door, throw things here and there, make great noise, enter my wife's room, give her a good hit on the hips and say to her, `Darling, how about it?' -- and she pretends to be deeply asleep! "It is because of her I have to drink. Since I got married, I have not married my wife, I have married this alcohol. But what is the reason for you? You are also in the same position?" The other said, "No. I am not married. I am a bachelor." The other man said, "Bachelor? It is unbelievable. Being a bachelor, what are you doing here? Drinking late in…

You say not to convert anyone or say you have found it. But what about you, Osho? What about wanting my beloved to become a sannyasin?

But the wife listened to me and stopped saying to the man.... It was hard for her, because she had also been, for thirty years, in the old habit of nagging. The husband was puzzled. He could not believe that the wife was bringing alcohol for him, serving it. He came to me after one week. He said, "What have you done to my wife? It is strange, but suddenly I am feeling that now the time has come to drop it." The male ego.... You are against smoking and your husband will smoke. You are against this and he will do that. He has to protect himself. He's so afraid of you -- that if he does not protect, you will eat him, you will absorb him. He's afraid because he knows you have the capacity to absorb him. Once, he had lived in a woman's womb, and he's…