According to Osho, the commune's function is to wake you to your absolute aloneness by dissolving family and social fictions of belonging. It offers a free space to be together without bondages - relating, not relationships - so two alonenesses can meet without trying to fill each other's gaps. You remain yourself, the other remains other; meeting is a fluid, living flux. The commune is not another club but a context for this understanding.
It helps you see you’re truly alone inside and gives you a safe place to meet others without clinging or making cages.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, since each of us is born alone and dies alone, and aloneness is the state of our being, what is the function of the commune?
THE function of the commune is exactly that: to make you aware of your absolute aloneness. The family does not allow you that. The family gives you the fallacy that you have a mother, you have a father, you have a husband, you have a brother, you have a sister -- that you are not alone. The society gives you the idea that you are a member of the rotary club, the lions club; that you belong to this church, to that temple, to this congregation or that congregation -- that you are not alone. The society provides you with all kinds of crowds to mingle with. You are republican, you are democrat, you are liberal -- but you are not alone, all the republicans are with you. The function of the commune basically is to destroy all these fictions. Nobody is with you. You are alone, and you have…
Osho, our commune is not like any of the traditional ashrams or monasteries. Would you talk to us more about the function of your commune?
IT is necessary first to understand the traditional structure of an ashrama, and also of a monastery. It will give you the background to understand the meaning of my commune. The ashrama is an Eastern concept based on renouncing society, its comforts, conveniences. An ashrama is a group of people living together in austerity, self-imposed poverty, starvation in the name of fasting; torturing the body in order to have control over the physical by the spiritual; doing all kinds of exercises so that they become able to concentrate on the idea of God if they are Hindus, or on the idea of the ultimate growth of human consciousness if they are Buddhists and Jainas. But the goal is far away for all the three -- you can call it God, you can call it the Buddha, you can call it the Jina. They are different words signifying nothing, but pointing…
Osho, you have been speaking about the importance of being oneself. Could you talk about the paradox of being an individual and melting into the commune?
But the pseudo-religions have done just the opposite. They are against love. You can understand now, why they are against love: because love will destroy the personality, and the pseudo-religion depends on your personality. The pseudo-religions have made a great effort -- all these churches and priests and sermons -- and what are they doing? Their whole work is to create the personality. They manufacture personality -- of course, different kinds of personality: a Hindu personality, a Christian personality, a Mohammedan personality. These are different models of personalities. All these religions are just like factories creating different models of cars, but the function is the same. The pseudo-religions are all afraid of love. They talk about love, and they teach you marriage. They talk about love and they say marriages are made in heaven. It is not something that you have to find out; God has already found the person…
In a lecture you said that the really aware were able to live alone. How does this fit with the dream of a community?
Family members are dependent on each other, they cling to each other. It gives a certain comfort, security, safety. Then the family depends on other families. People depend on the church, people depend on clubs, people depend on societies. It is a great world of dependent people, childish ungrownups. A commune is a totally different world. It is not a society. A commune is a gathering of people who are all capable of being alone, and they would like to be together to create a great orchestra of being. A commune is not a dependent phenomenon, it is an independence. That's why many times in this ashram people come and tell me, "Everybody here seems to be so happy with himself that it looks as if nobody is interested in anybody else." Particularly the newcomers feel it, that it is as if people are indifferent. It is not so; they…
Beloved Osho, you have spoken to us about being in the world yet not of it. How come you have not spoken to us about being in the commune yet not of it?
The KGB, the Intelligence Department, has caught hold of twenty sannyasins and has interrogated them continuously for weeks, harassed them just because they had my books. They have taken away all their books, and they were trying to force them to tell who the other sannyasins are. And because they were not telling, they were harassed continuously in the middle of the night; they would be called to the police station and the whole night continuous interrogation... and this is revolution! Man has become even more a slave than he was ever before. Man was not such a slave even in the days of the czar before the revolution; society was not so dominant and so afraid of people and their freedom. America makes claims of democracy. I lived there for five years, and there is no democracy at all. It is one of the most hypocritical societies; it is…