According to Osho, teenagers need not become realistic; dreams and fantasies are a natural, harmless phase of growth that should be enjoyed, not corrected. Life itself will ground them soon enough. Let youth taste possibility and beauty - memories that later counter life's miseries and inspire deeper transformation. Forcing realism (or premature spirituality) only crushes youthfulness and ill-fits them to a stale society.
Let teens dream now; real life will make them practical later, and those dreams give them hope that life can be better.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Teenagers often have fantasies and dreams regarding their future. How can they be more realistic?
They need not be. There is a time for fantasy, dreams, and it is good for teenagers to have fantasies and dreams rather than making them realistic. That means you are destroying their youthfulness and you are making them adult before their time. No, those dreams and fantasies are part of growth; they will disappear by themselves. Life itself will make them realistic; before they enter life, let them enjoy their dreams -- because in life there are only nightmares, only miseries and sufferings. They will become very realistic, but they will always remember those days of dreams and fantasies as the most beautiful. What can your reality provide in place of dreams and fantasies? Unless you are ready for teenagers to move into meditations... that will not make them realistic, that will make them utopians. That will make them far more difficult to be adjusted in your rotten society…
Uwais al-qarni was offered some money. He said: I do not need it as I already have a coin. The other said: how long will that last you? -- it is nothing. Uwais answered: guarantee me that I shall live longer than this sum will suffice me and I will accept your gift.
And this is natural. Unless something goes wrong a man is not going to remain a hippie forever. That was a phase, good to pass through, but bad to be stuck in. That means you remain stuck at a certain stage. It was good to be homosexual between seven and fourteen, but if one remains homosexual for his whole life that means he has not grown up, he is not adult. A woman has to be contacted, that is part of life. The other sex has to become important because only then will you be able to know the harmony of the opposites, the conflict, the misery, and the ecstasy: agony and ecstasy both. That is a training, a necessary training. By the thirty-fifth year one has to become part of the conventional world. One starts believing in tradition, in the past, in the Vedas, the Koran, The Bible. One…
Rejoice more and more, pray, dance, sing, listen to great music -- not pop music. Listen to classical music, which is soothing and goes very deep into the unconscious, because the child can hear it only from there. Sit silently as much as you can, enjoy nature. Be with trees, birds, animals, because they are really innocent. They are still part of the garden of Eden -- only Adam and Eve have been thrown out. Even the tree of knowledge is still in the garden of Eden; only Adam has been thrown out. So be with nature more, and relax so that the child grows in a relaxed womb, non-tense; otherwise from the very beginning the child starts becoming neurotic. (to the man): And help her in these days so that she can be more positive. Don't provoke her into negativity.
Osho, I keep turning back to look at the past. It’s futile, yet the habit doesn’t drop. What could be the reason?
Even to a dry tree the vine clings. Support! No other support seems visible. Ahead, only darkness; within, only darkness. The one bright thing seems to be the line of the past along which you have come—this path that is over, that will never be again, that has already happened. You sit arranging these preserved blossoms, these dried flowers. You cling to them. The creeper has twined round a lifeless tree— how much the past coddles the unborn It’s all dead, a corpse. Sometimes it happens: a she-monkey goes on carrying her baby pressed to her chest. Even when the baby dies, she keeps carrying it. It takes days—only when it rots and starts to stink does she drop it in a fright. Otherwise she goes on clutching the corpse—old habit. The past is a corpse—gone, done. Dust. Ash; the ember is out. Don’t keep lying on this ash, don’t…
Osho, you are always immersed in bliss—what is the secret of it? When will I be able to attain this ecstasy?
Yogananda, I have given you the name Yogananda; the whole secret is in it. A human being can live in two ways: either cut off from existence, or in oneness with it. Whoever lives separate will live in sorrow—anxiety and anguish. That is natural, for to live apart from existence is like a tree pulling its roots out of the earth and trying to live. It will wither; the leaves will droop, flowers will cease to bloom. Spring will come and keep coming, but that tree will never become a bride, never a bridegroom. For it there will be no spring. If the roots have been torn from the soil, what remedy can even the honeyed month of spring offer? Then where is bliss, where is ecstasy! Then there is no dawn—only a dark new-moon night, a night with no morning. Such a life is called ego. And the tree…