Osho Speaks On The Politics Of Population

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Is producing children everybody's birthright? The answer would be a blind, "Yes!" Or maybe a shocked, " Of course!" But think again, give a break to the age-old conditioning of automatically producing children. Looking at this planet, the world that we have created, is it worth adding few more humans to already existing seven billion people here? What do we have to offer the new generation?

We spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh the prolonged negative feelings of depression, meaninglessness and so on. And still do we want to bring a child in this life?

It is time every conscious, intelligent man and woman asks this question to himself/herself. And mind you, the politicians or the religious leaders are not going to support this radical thinking. They certainly want the earth to be more and more populated. They definitely want the poverty and misery to continue so that they can control humanity.

Peter Singer, the Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University has raised a thought - provoking question in his recent article in The New York Times: " Why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction! If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel guilty about."

Osho says that producing children should not be left to the men and women. A benevolent body of experts should decide about it.
"It is not your birthright to go on giving birth to as many children as you want, because those children are going to live on this earth, and they will do something or other.

"Only a medical board should decide about a couple. Unless you have a clearance from the medical board, you cannot produce a child. And since the pill it is so simple. Nobody is preventing you from making love; make love as much as you want, or as much as you can manage! But as far as children are concerned, you are doing something to the whole world. Making love you are not doing anything to anybody -- just a little fun between two individuals; the world is not involved in it.

"Children should be born only if a couple gets permission from the medical board. Still, that is not the best way to do it, because while he is making love a man releases millions of living beings, millions of living cells; and it is just a chance in that race who will reach the female egg first. You cannot decide it, you cannot even know it. So this is not the best way. The medical board may feel that the woman is healthy, the man is healthy; they can look at your heritage -- three, four generations back -- and they can allow you. "
God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth #1


Moreover Osho gives tremendous importance to meditation because he says in his book (Bodhidharma : The Greatest Zen master # 11) "A man of meditation functions with awareness. If he sees that the world is overpopulated, he cannot produce children. Nobody has to tell him. Why should he bring his children into a world which is going down every day towards a disaster? Who wants his children to go through a third world war? Who wants his children to die hungry and starving on the streets? "