According to Osho, accepting 'the father as father' is a practical social convention, not an existential truth; paternity is uncertain and patriarchy made it central. Keep it for smooth living, but never project it onto God. God is not 'Father'—God is total existence to be discovered through inquiry and self-trust, not believed through inherited labels.
Calling someone your father keeps society tidy, but don’t turn God into a father—find truth yourself by looking and learning directly.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Another friend has asked: Osho, what is the relationship between the method of meditation and jati-smaran (recollection of past lives)?
But the one who becomes skilled in this—who can fully awaken any day’s memory up to the age of five—will find that the memories begin to awaken completely. And you should test it. As today passes, note down some events and lock them up. After two years, try to recall today. Most of it will have been forgotten. Then remember—and after remembering, break the lock and compare whether what you recalled matches what you had written. You will be amazed—astonished—that besides what you wrote, many more details have come back which you did not even note at the time. They will all be there in memory. Buddha called this alaya-vijnana. There is a corner of the human mind he called the storehouse of consciousness. Like a junk room in the house where we keep all the odds and ends, there is a storehouse that collects memories—where everything from birth after…
Osho, what is more important in your religion -- to be thyself or to know thyself?
Gurdjieff calls them "selves; it is the same. You can call personalities selves or egos, and you can start looking for them -- it is a tremendously charming game to look at them. In the evening, you decide that tomorrow morning you are going to get up at five. This you have been deciding for many years, and you know it -- that every evening you decide.... But this night is different! -- that too, you know. Every night you have been saying, "This night is different; tomorrow I am going to get up. There is a limit to everything!" But all these things you have been saying every night. You are not saying a single new thing, but you are not aware of it. And at five o'clock when the alarm goes, you just press the button; and you are angry at the clock. You may throw the clock,…
The child grows on the father’s support. Trust, faith, reverence—all flow toward the father. If the father takes the child’s hand and walks into fire, the child will giggle his way in, for where the father goes there can be no obstacle. No doubt has yet arisen; no disbelief has yet formed. The father is the very object of reverence. But as the child grows, that reverence begins to crack; the father’s weaknesses become visible. The first weakness: as soon as the child is a little older and perceptive, he finds that in nine cases out of ten the mother is more powerful, the father weaker. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases he sees the father’s swagger and pomp are for the outside; at home he comes in intimidated, subdued. The first obstruction to reverence has appeared.
It was needed once -- it was needed that your father should be authoritative, that your mother should be authoritative -- otherwise you would not have grown at all. Mm? -- you were simply so unaware of the world and its problems. They had to prepare you. The child cannot understand reasoning and cannot understand arguments and cannot go deep into analysis and causes and things like that. He has to simply be told 'Do this!'. You cannot philosophise, you cannot sermonise, and you cannot go into the deep causes of it; the child will not understand. You have to be very clear. Now psychologists say that because of this, women have become very very authoritative -- because they have to deal with children. The father goes to the office or to the factory or somewhere else for the whole day; the mother has to be with the children.
An institution means something that is not natural, something that has been invented by man. So I take the word 'father' as symbolic of all invented institutions. And there is no other kind. One has to go beyond being a husband, being a father, being a wife, one has to go beyond all these stupid ideas. One has just to be human, loving -- and then a miracle happens in life then you can love somebody else's child as deeply as your own. Once the idea of father is dropped your love is free, then there is no limitation to it. And we will need a totally different kind of humanity.