Family

Beloved Osho, in india there is a proverb, "vasudhaiva kutumbakam: the whole earth is a family". Perhaps this proverb is one thousand years old. Osho, were there really people once who lived like a family? Or was it a vision of some mystic, a vision which you are going to bring to reality?

They have not bothered about Jesus' teachings. He was saying, "Love your enemy like yourself." Then I cannot understand who these people were killing. If you are going to love your enemy, are you going to kill your lovers? Enemies have to be loved, so who is to be killed -- friends? No, the teaching has not been followed; only sermons were given in the churches. But enemies -- and innocent enemies, who have done no harm to the Christians.... Their only crime was that they were not Christians, and they were not willing to be Christians; and that was too much, too big a crime. Hindus used a more sophisticated method, perhaps because it was an older civilization, more cultured. They could have crucified Gautam Buddha, but they did not do that. On the contrary, they accepted Gautam Buddha as one of the incarnations of the Hindu God. You…

Yesterday you talked about destroying the family. Did you ever have a family?

Everybody is born in a family. I was born in a family. And in India there are joint families, big families. In my family there must have been fifty to sixty people -- all the cousins, uncles, aunts, living together. I have seen the whole mess of it. In fact, those sixty people helped me not to create my own family. That experience was enough. If you are intelligent enough, you learn even from other people's mistakes. If you are not intelligent, then you don't learn even from your own mistakes. So I learned from my father's mistake, my mother's mistake, my uncles', my aunts'. It was a big family, and I saw the whole circus, the misery, the continuous conflict, fights about small things, meaningless. From my very childhood one thing became decisive in me, that I was not going to create a family of my own. I was…

Osho, as you have just said, life is multidimensional. What do you think should be our attitude toward the... Whether we know that what our parents... and what should be our attitude toward our family? Toward our...

There are two or three points in this. First, this is not a “should” question. The moment we say, “What should my attitude be toward mother and father?” the whole thing goes wrong. In fact, if the mother is a mother, a certain attitude is already implied; if the father is a father, a certain attitude is already implied. Their very being mother and father has already defined a way of relating. There is no room for “should” in it. No one asks me, “What should my attitude be toward my beloved?” No one asks this; so far, no one has. The reason is: with a beloved the attitude is already there. But we ask about the mother because there is no real attitude; about the father, because there is none. So we look for some formal imposition. It becomes a question. This question never arises about a beloved; it…

Beloved Osho, in a few days I am going to visit my eighty-year-old father whom I have not seen for seven years. He is very insistent about seeing me but at the same time very unhappy that I am a sannyasin. How to make him feel good and still not feel like a hypocrite?

You are not going... that's the only way! In the first place to go to Europe in such conditions of nuclear radiation is dangerous; there is no point. Secondly, to make him unhappy while he is dying at the age of eighty is not good. If you go as a sannyasin he will be more unhappy than if you don't go. For seven years you have not gone. If you go as a non-sannyasin you will feel unhappy that you are being a hypocrite, and there is every possibility that it will be discovered that you are simply pretending to be a non-sannyasin. So why harass the old man? And it is not certain that he is going to die. As far as I know the longer a person lives the less is the possibility of death. Have you ever heard of anybody dying at one hundred twenty, one hundred…