What is the difference between deconditioning and escapism?

There are social needs and there are existential needs that are to be fulfilled. I will not say, "Do not condition children." If you leave them totally unconditioned, they will be barbaric. They will not be able to exist. Survival needs conditioning but survival is not the end, so you must be able to put your conditioning on and take it off--just like clothes. You can put them on, go out and do your business, and then come home and take them off. Then you are. If you are not identified with your clothes, with your conditioning, if you do not say, for example, "I am my mind," it is not difficult; then you can change easily. But you become identified with your conditioning. You say, "My conditioning is me," and all that is not your conditioning is denied.

People from the outside looking at you and your friends are confused. They talk about brainwashing, while you are talking about deconditioning. If the surrender of your people to you is not escapism into a hedonistic dream, what is it then?

I am not brainwashing anybody. Everybody is washing his own brains -- and everybody has to wash his own brain. The washing gives you such freshness, such newness, such perceptiveness, such clarity about things -- about your relationships, about yourself and the world -- that it is not a loss, it is an immense gain. People on the outside may be thinking that I am brainwashing people; they should come here and see that I am not brainwashing anybody. I don't wash even my own clothes... poor Chetana has to do it. And I have one million sannyasins; how can I manage to brainwash so many people? And there is no need when you can do the job perfectly well. I simply show you the way to get out of your mind and then everything else is left up to you. If you are some kind of a psychological hippie…

Beloved Osho, is it possible that while sannyasins might be cleaned of society's conditioning, they can adopt certain facets of your teaching as another kind of conditioning -- such as the need to be total, to doubt unless we know something from our own experience, not to be jealous, and so on? Could you explain how your way of working with us is not simply the exchanging of one set of values -- and thus conditionings -- for another?

In the first place, what I am teaching are not new values, not a new set of values in place of old values. For example, there are people who believe in God -- that is one set. There are people who do not believe in God -- that is another set. I am saying to people that there is no question of believing. Changing from one belief to another belief is changing the conditioning, but you remain conditioned. I am saying you have to remain without any belief system, and you yourself enquire into reality -- and whatever you find is your own truth. There is no need to believe in it because once you know it, the question of belief does not arise. You believe only in things which you do not know. When you know them, you know: belief is irrelevant. So I am not giving you another…

Practice is a sort of conditioning at physical and mental levels, and it is through conditioning that society makes man its slave. In that case how can patanjali's practice be an instrument of liberation?

He was here with me. And I told him, "Don't suppress it." I gave him a pillow and said, "This is your father. Now do whatsoever you like." At first he started laughing, laughing in a mad way. And he said, "It looks ridiculous." I told him, "Let it be ridiculous. If it is in the mind, let it come out." For fifteen days continuously he was beating and tearing the pillow, and doing it. On the sixteenth day he came with a knife. I had not told him. So I asked him, "Why this knife?" He said, "Now don't stop me. Let me kill. Now the pillow is not pillow for me. The pillow has actually become my father." That day he killed his father. And then he started crying; tears came through his eyes. He became calmed down, relaxed, and he told me, "I am feeling much love…

But Osho, as I understand it, there are certain subjects like chemistry, physics, or medicine where positive values are essential. What are your views about that?

Einstein was doing an experiment. He had failed seven hundred times, yet every morning he came into the laboratory laughing, ready to begin again. The young assistant with him was exhausted. “Is this old man mad? Seven hundred failures—and again he starts fresh!” The youth was tired; he said, “We should drop this now. How many times have we been defeated?” Einstein said, “Defeated? You’re crazy—each time we have won.” “Where have we won? Every experiment has failed.” Einstein answered, “In seven hundred directions we have searched, and we now know truth is not there. We have succeeded seven hundred times. Truth is being endlessly eliminated into nearness. Suppose truth will reveal itself on the seven hundred and fifteenth attempt; then fourteen more eliminations are needed. Then only that will remain; it cannot escape. Where will it go? We have searched seven hundred paths and found it absent. That much…