According to Osho, birth is intrinsically traumatic—a view Freud intuited—but psychological theories remain partial because they rely on outside observation. Prenatal and birth shocks imprint the nervous system and echo through life, colored by the mother’s states, yet their ultimate meaning is grasped only from the “insider’s” awareness. When consciousness is fully awake (as in a Buddha), even through death and conception, the trauma is witnessed and thus ceases to bind.
Being born can hurt and leaves marks, but deep awareness lets you see it so it doesn’t control you.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
According to laing, the first nine months from conception are not necessarily blissful, and janov's findings do not confirm freud's birth trauma theory. Please would you speak a little more about this?
If you can be aware while you are dying, this is one part of birth, one aspect. If in this one aspect you are aware, you will be aware when you take conception. You will float around a couple making love and you will be perfectly aware. You will enter into the womb perfectly aware. The child is conceived and in that small seed, the first seed, you will be perfectly aware of what is happening. For nine months in the mother's womb you will be aware. Not only will you be aware, but when a child like a Buddha is in the womb of the mother, the quality of the mother changes. She becomes more aware; a light burns within. How can the house remain unlighted? The mother immediately feels a change of consciousness. To become the mother of a Buddha is a rare opportunity. The very phenomenon transforms…
Not with reverence, not in welcome—rather in denunciation—Western psychology has begun to accept that the search for Nirvana is a search for the womb. And in the Western conception, to go back is impossible anyway, therefore such a search is wrong, dangerous, an obstacle to human development. But I hold that soon they will begin to understand. As Euclid’s geometry fades and non-Euclidean geometry enters, as the old linear notions fall away, this notion too will fall away. The womb will be known as the final place. And one who cannot reach the womb-state again dies incomplete. Therefore we say he will have to be born again and again—because the experience of the womb did not become complete; the incomplete remains stuck. The incomplete causes wandering.
Osho, you have earlier said, “Live moment to moment, live in the present.” Now you are saying, “Return to the past.” What should we do?
So it is with the mind—there are ruts. The past means endless grooves. However much you understand, your intellect agrees, you make decisions, you resolve—at the moment of resolve you feel something is going to change. But not even an hour passes before your decision breaks. Then only self-condemnation is produced, nothing else. Your saints, your fakirs, your priests and pundits—most of the time they only succeed in producing self-condemnation in you, nothing else. Their words are logically correct. You cannot even say they are wrong; you have to admit they are right. In that admission you take a decision. But against what are you deciding? Inside are grooves carved since who knows when, deep tracks. Walking in them has become a habit. It is easy to walk in them. They will pull you again and again. The meaning of returning into the past is: these grooves must be erased.…
Osho, could each one of those sperm cells also be used?
If you are not in love with a certain woman, take an injection of LSD and look at any woman you’re not in love with—you will go madly in love at once. The LSD injection releases in your body the very drugs that are released naturally in a lover’s body. With those drugs released, any woman will appear extraordinarily beautiful; it isn’t about a particular woman. After taking LSD even an ordinary chair can look so unique that no woman has ever appeared so beautiful; a simple flower becomes so beautiful, so otherworldly. With LSD coursing through the body, everything changes. When we are angry, a kind of poison; when we love, a kind of antidote; and so on—these juices are constantly being released in the body. That is happening on the physical plane. But it is also happening on the subtle plane: when you are angry, specific kinds of…
Beloved Osho seeing that everyone wants so much to be enlightened, isn't it also true that we are all scared too? What is the fear that prevents us from relaxing into our own self?
But you are not aware of the conspiracy. The man who fasts for twenty-one days becomes authoritative, more powerful than you. He demands that you at least fast for three days, and you cannot say to him that he is asking too much. He is fasting for twenty-one days, and he asks you only to fast for three days. He is perfectly authorized to ask it. He is celibate, he asks you to be celibate. He eats only one time a day, he demands you also eat one time a day. Do you see the mutual conspiracy? You feel you are the disciple of a great master -- of course you are a great disciple as a consequence: a simple arithmetic. Great masters have only great disciples, but those masters are fulfilling their egos, and they are fulfilling your egos. No transformation is possible in such a conspiracy. I don't…