Big groups are just labels; what really shapes society is how awake or asleep each person is.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, as I understand your teaching, you want every individual to be aware and to understand life in its totality. But today’s society is very complicated. Our environment is so complicated that it does not allow us to live a free life, to love people, or to live in the state in which we could live a very clean and smooth life.
Society is as it is; only by accepting this truth can anything be done. Society is like this—but if a person can see that apart from a simple, loving, joyous, clean life there is no life at all; if he sees that without becoming loving he will remain deprived of life’s joy; if he sees that without becoming simple there is no path to reach truth—then he will drop worrying about what society is like. For what can society give him—what is it giving? Once he sees that in another direction—which society does not offer and in fact obstructs—there lies the doorway to his life’s bliss, he will begin to move toward it. Certainly the social order will create obstacles. But for such a person they will not be obstacles; they will turn into challenges, and he will try to make steps out of them. The stones thrown onto his…
Social rules seem to be a basic need for human beings. Yet no society has ever helped man to realize himself. Can you please explain what kind of relationship exists between individuals and society, and how they can help each other to evolve?
Nobody will come to know about it, and it is better that nobody knows about it. You simply go on doing your ordinary work, living in the ordinary world, being simple and ordinary -- not becoming revolutionaries, reactionaries, punks and skinheads. That is not going to help. That is sheer stupidity. It is out of frustration, but still it is insane. The society is insane and out of frustration you become insane. The society is not afraid of these people; the society is afraid only of people who can become so centered, so conscious that laws become useless for them. They always do right. They are beyond the grip of the so-called powerful interests. If individuals grow, society will diminish. The way they have known society -- with the government, with the army, with the courts, with the policemen, with the jails -- this society will diminish. Certainly, because there…
Ichazo reckons that our culture, the whole society, is now raising its consciousness, that we are no longer on an individual trip but that humanity is beginning to awaken. And he says that the utopian vision of humanity as one enormous family is now a practical necessity.
A real Master wants a disciple to become a Master in his own right. But ordinarily you don't want that independence yourself, you want somebody to cling to. You are a clinger. You want somebody to be very authoritative, somebody to sit on a high throne and say to you, 'You don't worry, I will take care of you. You forget all about everything. I am here so I will take care. You simply come and follow me.' But if somebody is like that remember that this is a sure sign -- this authoritativeness, this taking other people's responsibility -- this is a sure sign that the man himself wants people to depend on him. He is dependent on his dependents. He enjoys it. He loves the idea that so many people are dependent on him. He himself is a dependent, remember; he is not different from you. It is…
Osho, you advise us to change the environment first, but how can that happen without a change in the social order?
You are absolutely right. First the social order or the environment? First the environment or the social order? No—the very question of before and after is misplaced; the whole thing is simultaneous. It’s the chicken-and-egg question: which comes first? None comes first. If the individual’s mind changes—society will change. If society changes—the individual’s mind will change. They are so interconnected that we must make efforts on both sides.
Question: Second question: Osho, are you against social revolution? And this inner change does not happen through changing ideas. It happens by leaping from thought to meditation. There is only one revolution in the world: to go from thought to no-thought; from a mind full of choices to a choiceless consciousness. The day the thinking mind dissolves into the emptiness of no-mind, that day doors open within you— the doors of the seven heavens open. That day indeed your chains become anklets. That day no prison can contain you, because for the first time you taste freedom—you experience moksha within. You know, “Even if handcuffs are put on the body, I am free—because I am not the body.” If such an event happens to innumerable people on this earth, perhaps there will be a radiance spread from horizon to horizon. It has not happened yet.