What Is Freedom? Can the Collective Tolerate Free Individuals?

Osho,
What is freedom? Can you talk about the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the collective?
“Freedom is a three-dimensional phenomenon.

The first is the physical dimension: you can be enslaved physically.

“And for thousands of years man has been sold in the marketplace just like any other commodity. All the Negroes who came to America were purchased like a commodity.
“Slaves have existed all over the world. They were not given human rights. They were not really accepted as human beings – they were subhuman. And they are still being treated as subhuman.
“In India there are sudras, the untouchables. One-fourth of India is still living in slavery. These people cannot be educated, these people cannot move into other professions than those decided by the tradition five thousand years ago.
“And to think of them as human is impossible…even to touch them makes you impure; you have to take a bath immediately. Even if you don’t touch the man, but only his shadow – then too you have to take a bath.

So there is physical slavery and there is physical freedom – where your body is not enchained, where it is not categorized as lower than anybody else’s, where there is an equality as far as the body is concerned.

“But even today this is not true.
“The woman’s body is not considered equal to the man’s body. She is not as free as man is.
“In China, for centuries the husband had the right to kill his wife without any punishment because the wife was his possession.
“Just like you can destroy your chair or you can burn your house because it is your chair, it is your house – it is your wife.
“In Chinese law there was no punishment for the husband if he killed his wife because she was thought to be soulless; she was just a reproductive mechanism, a factory to produce children.

Mohammedans marry four wives, which is absolutely ugly because nature keeps a balance in the world.

“There are an equal number of men and women, and if one man marries four women, then what about the other three men?
“They are going to become perverts, homosexuals, sodomists, and they will create AIDS and all kinds of diseases. Mohammed himself married nine wives.
“But this is nothing! Just forty years ago, when India became free, in one of the Mohammedan states in India, in Hyderabad, the Nizam had five hundred wives!
“But that too is not the limit.
“The Hindu incarnation of God, Krishna, had sixteen thousand wives. At least the Nizam’s wives were his own – he had married them.
“Krishna took anybody’s wife he liked…no consideration that she had children, that she had a husband, that she had to look after them – no consideration. He had the power.
“And to have sixteen thousand wives is so stupid – you cannot even remember their names!

But it was thought that just because the woman in India is property, the more you have the better.

“And of course an incarnation of God has to be allowed to have the largest number of wives to prove that he has more property than anybody else.
“So there is a slavery of the body which still continues in different ways. It is becoming less and less but it has not disappeared completely.

Freedom of the body will mean that there is no distinction between black and white, that there is no distinction between man and woman, that there is no distinction of any kind as far as bodies are concerned.

“No body is pure, no body is impure: all bodies are the same. This is the very basis of freedom.

Then there is the second dimension: psychological freedom.

“There are very few individuals in the world who are psychologically free…because if you are a Mohammedan you are not psychologically free; if you are a Hindu you are not psychologically free.
“Our whole way of bringing up children is to make them slaves – slaves of political ideologies, social ideologies, religious ideologies.

We don’t give them a chance to think on their own, to search on their own.

“We force their minds; we stuff their minds with things which we are also not experienced in.
“Parents teach children that there is a God – and they know nothing of godliness.
“They tell their children that there is heaven and there is hell – and they know nothing of heaven and hell….

You are teaching your children things that you don’t know yourself.

“You are just conditioning their minds, because your minds were conditioned by your parents.
“This way the disease goes from one generation to the next.

Psychological freedom will be possible when children are allowed to grow, helped to grow toward more intellect, more intelligence, more consciousness, more alertness.

“No belief is given to them.
“They are not taught any kind of faith, but they are given as much incentive as possible to search for truth.
“And they have to be reminded from the very beginning: your own truth, your own finding, is going to liberate you; nothing else can do that for you.
“Truth cannot be borrowed. It cannot be studied in books. Nobody can inform you about it.
“You have to sharpen yourself, your intelligence, so that you can look into existence and find it.

If a child is left open, receptive, alert, and given the incentive for search, he will have psychological freedom.

And with psychological freedom comes tremendous responsibility.

“You don’t have to teach it to him; it comes like the shadow of psychological freedom. And he will be grateful to you.
“Otherwise every child is angry at his parents because they spoiled him: they destroyed his freedom, they conditioned his mind.
“Even before he asked any questions, they filled his mind with answers which are all bogus because they are not based on his own experience.
“The world lives in psychological slavery.

And the third dimension is the ultimate freedom – which is knowing that you are not the body, knowing that you are not the mind, knowing that you are only pure consciousness.

“That knowledge comes through meditation.
“It separates you from the body, it separates you from the mind, and ultimately only you are there as pure consciousness, as pure awareness.
“That is spiritual freedom.
“These are the three basic dimensions of freedom for the individual.
“You have asked about both the individual and the collective.
“For the collective there is no need.

Only all the individuals should be free, and the collective will be free.

“The collective has no soul, the collective has no mind, the collective has no body even – it is only a name, it is just a word.
“But we are very much impressed by words, so much so that we forget that words are not substantial. ‘The collective,’ ‘the society,’ ‘the community,’ ‘the religion,’ ‘the church’ – they are all words. There is nothing real behind them….

‘Collective,’ ‘society’ – all these are just words. That which really exists is the individual.

“Otherwise the Rotary Club, the Lions Club…then there will be a problem. What is the freedom of a Rotary Club? What is the freedom of the Lions Club?
“These are just names.
”’The collective’ is a very dangerous word.

In the name of the collective, the individual – the real – has always been sacrificed.

“I am absolutely against it.
“Nations have been sacrificing individuals in the name of the nation – and nation is just a word.
“The lines that you have drawn on the map are not anywhere on the earth. They are just your game.
“But on those lines that you have drawn on the map millions of people have died – real people, dying for unreal lines. And you make them heroes, national heroes.

This idea of ‘the collective’ has to be destroyed completely; otherwise in some way or other we will continue sacrificing the individual.

“In the name of religion we have sacrificed him, in religious wars.
“A Mohammedan dying in a religious war knows that his paradise is certain. He has been told by the priest, ‘If you are dying for the religion, Mohammedanism, then your paradise is absolutely certain, with all the pleasures you have ever imagined or dreamt of. And the person you have killed will also reach paradise because he has been killed by a Mohammedan. It is his privilege, so you need not feel guilty that you have killed a man.’
“Christians having crusades – jihad, a religious war – and killing thousands of people, burning living human beings…for what?
“For some collectivity: for Christianity, for Buddhism, for Hinduism, for communism, for fascism – anything will do.
“Any word representing some collectivity, and the individual can be sacrificed.
“There is no reason for collectivity even to exist; individuals are enough.

And if individuals have freedom, are psychologically free, are spiritually free, then naturally the collective will be spiritually free.

“The collective consists of individuals, not vice versa.
“It has been said that the individual is only a part of the collective – that is not true.

The individual is not just a part of the collective; ‘the collective’ is only a symbolic word for individuals meeting together.

“They are not parts of anything; they remain independent. They remain organically independent, they don’t become parts.
“If we really want a world of freedom, then we have to understand that in the name of ‘the collective’ so many massacres have happened that now it is time to stop.
“All collective names should lose the grandeur that they have had in the past.

Individuals should be the highest value.”

END
Excerpted and abridged from Osho, The Path of the Mystic, Talk #1 – The Individual Versus the Society

To read this complete talk and see all the available media formats, click here.

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