If we stop having new babies for a while, we can love and raise the many kids who already need parents, and our hearts grow bigger than just what’s mine.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, when I went to Rajneeshpuram in July, in your discourses you said that in India no children should be born for many years. I repeated this to many people when I came back to Hindustan. Different people had different reactions, but most women said, “The maternal feeling in a woman—how is she to satisfy it?” Some said, “A woman does not attain fulfillment until she becomes a mother.” Please say something about this, Osho.
Second, it is true that a woman’s fulfillment is in her becoming a mother. That is why, when I began giving sannyas, the traditional name for a male renunciate was “Swami.” There was no name for a woman—because in India, for thousands of years, woman has been suppressed and erased so badly that she was never given the chance to be initiated into sannyas. There wasn’t even a name. After much search I accepted “Ma” as that name, because in “Ma” lies her fulfillment. But this fulfillment as mother is proof that your love has risen so high that the whole world becomes, for you, as if they are your children—even your husband. This is the blessing of the rishis of the Upanishads. Whenever a couple came to a rishi for a blessing, there was a very unique blessing, found in no other scripture in the world. The rishi would…
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…
A friend has asked: Osho, if sex departs in this way, what will happen to progeny in the world? If, in this way, everyone experiences samadhi and becomes established in brahmacharya, what will happen to children?
Through brahmacharya, too, children will come—but they will not be by-products of sex. For those children, sex will be a vehicle, a mere medium. Sex itself will have no other role. As when a man travels somewhere in a bullock cart—does he have any real concern with the cart? Or he flies by airplane—do you have any bond with the plane? You board here and land in Delhi. Do you have any relationship to the airplane? None. Your relationship is with going to Delhi. The airplane is only a vehicle, only a means. When people attain to brahmacharya and the journey of intercourse reaches samadhi, they can still desire children. But the birth of those children will be true creation; they will be the product, the srijan, the creative act. Sex will be only the medium. And in the same way that until now we have tried—listen carefully—to avoid children…
Maitreya has asked: But won’t this bring in authoritarianism!
We cling to words. If we want to stay alive, we will have to act with some intelligence; and if we want to make life beautiful, we will have to act with a great deal of intelligence. There is no need to get trapped in a web of words. Decisions should now be in the hands of experts—who can have children, and with whom they can have children. And now we have the means. There is no need that you father a child only with your own wife, or that your wife conceive only from you. Drop these old, foolish notions. Your child should be beautiful. Your child should be intelligent. Your child should be such that a lotus blossoms. Care about that. You don’t care about that at all; your only concern is that the child be from “my woman,” from “my husband.” And now there is so much…
Beloved master, I have read your words about the possibility of creating a new way to conceive babies, and they opened my heart. Why then, have you never had a son in this way? Please excuse me for asking such a personal question.
You may have this idea in your head, that celibacy is spiritual, but it will never reach to your blood cells, to your bones, to your stomach. There is no communication. There is no line of communication between you and your physiology. It functions on its own, it is autonomous. So because all the religions insisted on celibacy, they created homosexuality, masturbation, sodomy, lesbianism. For all sexual repressions and for all sexual perversions they are responsible. And humanity has suffered under their idiotic idea. In your monasteries the monks are all homosexuals. If they are not homosexuals, then they will be masturbating. Religions don't allow the monks and nuns to meet and have a little love affair, at least once in a while -- every weekend. One day in a week can be given as a holiday from your saintliness. But there is no holiday. So these people created homosexuality,…