How can population be brought under control through voluntary family planning?

Osho, in India poverty keeps increasing because of population, and population because of poverty—each feeding the other. In the present situation, how can population be brought under control when family planning is adopted here only voluntarily? Please offer some suggestions.

It is not as big a problem as it appears. Population does not increase by itself; we increase it—and poverty is its natural consequence. The first thing that must enter India’s consciousness is this: population does not grow on its own, we grow it. Poverty does not grow; it is our creation. For centuries we have learned to live under false ideas. We have been told that children are a gift of God. We have been told that children are written into each one’s fate. And for centuries religious leaders have been teaching that preventing children from being born is opposition to God. All of this amounts to saying that God has only one job—to make people as poor as possible. That is the opposite of the very word Ishwar. The original root of Ishwar is aishvarya—affluence, sovereignty. The word Ishwar comes from aishvarya. To claim that affluence produces poverty,…

Osho, from Morarji Desai’s government to Rajiv Gandhi’s, you have remained only a critic. But do you have any particular approach or answer for solving this country’s problems?

This country’s population is the enemy of this country—a problem that can be solved very simply, with a little intelligence. In the commune I created in America there were five thousand sannyasins, twenty-five hundred couples. In five years not a single child was born. No guns were used, no police stood guard—only understanding. Second: India has been enslaved for two thousand years—by Mughals, Turks, Huns, Muslims, the British. Two thousand years is a long time. Slavery has sunk so deep into the mind that it doesn’t leave even when you try to remove it. We must remove this inner slavery. It is not only slavery; it has filled your mind with rubbish that will go only when slavery falls. Outwardly you look free—only outwardly. Within, no difference. Slavery is a chain that stifles human genius. In three hundred years the British built schools, colleges, universities here—not so you would become…

Osho, in ignorance I went on having children. I have ten children—what should I do now?

Now just see: the husband was blind, and the wife had her eyes bound—and still they found each other and managed to have a hundred children! They must have been groping around for where the other was. And in the jostling of a hundred children, searching must have been quite a task. You, with eyes, have given up so soon! This is not the Indian tradition. Will you destroy the tradition? Your forefathers didn’t do this; will you? “The Raghu lineage’s rule has always continued!” It just goes on. Look into the Puranas—how many sons people had! They were heroic men. And your name is Virchand, and you are stopping at just ten! Drop despair! Abandon dejection! Raise the flag high again. Keep our flag flying high! Is this any way to lower the flag! And if you don’t produce more children, think also of the harm you’ll do. If…

Two reasons. First, the intelligent discovers pleasures other than sex that the non-intelligent does not find. Music, literature, religion, meditation—other doors of joy open. The non-intelligent has only one pleasure: sex. He has no other. He cannot spend a night lost in a novel, forgetting his wife; he cannot enter meditation for a day; the flute has no taste for him. His mind has not moved where man finds joys above sex. As men discover joys above sex, their sexual hunger steadily decreases. If scientists remain unmarried, it is not because they practice celibacy; if saints remain unmarried, not because of celibacy—rather because new doors of joy have opened. They fly so high in greater joys that the sexual joy becomes meaningless. The poor, the illiterate, the rural, the laborer—have no other entertainment. Hence, the fewer the entertainments in a country, the faster the population will grow.

Birth control today is the only moral thing. Every religious person should adopt it if he has any sense of humanity and respect for life then birth control is not evil. But not to use birth control methods is evil because you are bringing so many people in the world who will be dying and starving. But all the religions somehow agree, and there must be some reason... there is, there is some vested interest. Only the poor are easily exploited by the priests. The educated, the rich are not so easily gullible. They may formally belong to this religion or to that religion but it is just formality. The poor is in absolute need for solace. He is hungry, he needs somebody to give him hope that, "In the next life -- life after death -- you will not be hungry.