If we lived as big sharing communities without personal money, no one would be rich or poor, and groups would trade fairly using computers.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Money is considered one of the greatest inventions to liberate man, and as a means it has a good function. Don't you think that eliminating the use of money will lead to another barbarous world? What in your vision can be substituted for money in the world at large?
Money is certainly one of the greatest inventions of man, and it has helped tremendously in the past. But there is a negative side of it too: money has created poverty and richness, the classes and the class struggle; money has created capitalism, money has created communism. Money has helped in many ways in the exchange of things -- as a means of exchange -- but now its function can be taken by better means which can avoid its negative part. For example, in my perspective, instead of money as currency every society should become a commune. We can make a limit, five thousand or ten thousand... If the town is bigger then it can have two communes, three communes. But instead of a family, a commune takes over. The commune takes care of the children, the commune fulfills the needs of people, and the people don't have to use…
Beloved Osho, why is money such a loaded issue? It seems as though when we have money, either we feel guilty about it, and thus compelled to spend it, or insecure, and therefore want to hold onto it. Obviously it affects a multitude of areas that revolve around the pivot of power and freedom. The curious thing is that even to discuss the subject of money is somehow as much a taboo as discussing sex or death at the dinner table. Please comment.
It seems very strange to say that the religions exist almost on irreligious things, or it will be better to say, on anti-religious things. They use those things, but on the surface you don't see that. You see charity, but you don't see from where charity comes, and why. In the first place, why should there be a need for charity? Why should there be orphans, why should there be beggars? Why in the first place should we allow beggars to happen and orphans to happen? And in the second place, why are there people who are very willing to do charity work, to give money, to give their whole lives to charity and serving the poor? On the surface everything seems to be right because we have lived in this kind of structure for so long; otherwise it is absolutely absurd. No child is an orphan if the commune…
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…
Beloved Osho, in your vision of a model society, would there be one large commune, or a series of communes? If there is more than one, what would be their relationship to one another? Do you envisage people of different communes being able to be interdependent, sharing ideas and skills, and without any of the attitudes that grow out of possessiveness, like nationalism and fanaticism?
A small group of people can enjoy life more easily, because to have so many friends, so many acquaintances, is a joy unto itself. Today in the big cities, you live in the same house and you don't know your neighbor. In one house one hundred thousand people may be living. A one hundred story building can contain that many people -- almost a whole city. And they are absolute strangers to each other, living in a crowd, and yet being alone. My idea of a commune is, living in small groups, which gives you enough space, and yet living in a close, loving, relationship. Your children are taken care of by the commune, your needs are taken care of by the commune, your medical care is taken care of by the commune. The commune becomes an authentic family without any diseases that families have created in the past. It…
Beloved Osho, if national boundaries and visa restrictions continue to separate us from you and from each other, what is best for us to do about it?
They will not. It is for me to find a way that they don't restrict you from seeing me, from being with me. I am working on it, and I don't think it will take a long time to find a way; perhaps a month at the most. So nobody need worry about it. We will soon have our own place which will not be under any country's rule. And I want a totally new experiment that has not happened in history. There have been anarchists -- their philosophy is one of the best. But it is so good that it becomes impossible to make it real; it remains utopian. Prince Kropotkin, Tolstoy -- these people dreamed of a humanity which one day would drop all governments. They thought that governments are the causes of all the evil that exists on the earth. To some extent they are right, but…