Conditioning

A child will always be helpless. It seems to be impossible to avoid the conditioning process that starts from the day the child is born. How can this be changed?

Just as I have been telling you: children should belong to the commune, not to the parents. Children with parents have been in great trouble for centuries, because to be with parents is bound to be a conditioning. They belong to some religion, they belong to some church, they belong to some political party; they go on putting their own superstitions into the heads of the children, directly or indirectly. And every child becomes conditioned. Children should belong to the commune; the parents can have them on holidays. The parents can go and live with the children in their hostels and it will be far more loving. Twenty-four hours a day together destroys love; it is better that children should be away. The children will be much freer. They should be in the hands of teachers who are trained in meditation, who are trained for non-conditioning the children, for not…

I am a professor of psychology. I have studied and taught conditioning. Can anybody avoid conditioning? Aren't we being conditioned by you?

IT DEPENDS on you. You can be conditioned by me -- but am not conditioning you. Let that be absolutely clear! You can be conditioned by me. If you are listening only through the mind you will be conditioned, because the mind goes on gathering knowledge. The mind is very suggestible, corruptible, vulnerable. If you are listening to me through your mind, through your reason, through your argumentative faculty, through your intellect, you will be conditioned. Even if you are not convinced by me, even if you go thinking that you are not convinced by me, still you will be conditioned. Maybe against me, but that too will condition you. For or against does not matter: if you listen through the mind you will be conditioned -- because mind is the faculty of conditioning. But there is another way to listen also -- and it is not of the mind,…

Osho, right now, here, I could drink you, share in your buddhahood, but I don't. Day after day, I don't. Beloved Osho, is our conditioning that difficult to drop?

THE MOST DIFFICULT THING IN LIFE IS TO DROP THE past -- because to drop the past means to drop the whole identity, to drop the whole personality. It is to drop yourself. You are nothing but your past, you are nothing but your conditionings. It is not like dropping clothes -- it is as if one's skin is being peeled off. Your past is all that you know you are. Dropping is difficult, arduous -- the most difficult thing in life. But those who can dare to drop it, only they live. Others simply pretend to live, others simply go on dragging themselves somehow. They don't have any vitality -- they can't have. They live at the minimum. And to live at the minimum is to miss the whole thing. It is only when you live at the optimum of your potential that blossoming happens. It is only at…

Osho, I have been so much conditioned as a catholic that I see no hope for myself: can you still help me?

CATHOLIC OR COMMUNIST, Mohammedan or Maoist, Jaina or Jew, it makes no difference, it is all the same. Of course, Catholics do it more systematically than Hindus, more scientifically. They have developed a great expertise for how to condition people. But all the religions are doing it more or less, all the societies are doing it in their own way: everybody is conditioned. The moment you are born, conditioning starts, from your very first breath; it cannot be avoided. The parents will condition you, the children you play with will condition you, the neighborhood will condition you, the school, the church, the state. And consciously not much conditioning is being done, but unconsciously the child goes on and on accumulating it. The child learns by imitating. So don't be worried. This is the normal situation in the world: everybody is conditioned. And everybody has to come out of the conditioning.…