Shifting the child's brain, killing creativity

And remember again, each child is born with all the capacities to become a creator. Without any exception all children try to be creators but we don't allow, them. Immediately we start teaching them the right way to do a thing - and once they have learned the right way to do a thing they become robopaths. Then they go on doing the right thing again and again and again, and the more they do it, the more efficient they become. And the more efficient they become, the more respected they are.

Somewhere between the age of seven and fourteen a great change happens in a child.

Psychologists have been searching into the phenomenon... why does it happen and what happens?

You have two minds, two hemispheres. The left hemisphere of the mind is uncreative. It is technically very capable but as far as creativity is concerned it is absolutely impotent. It can only do a thing once it has learned it, and it can do it very efficiently, perfectly; it is mechanical. This left hemisphere is the hemisphere of reasoning, logic, mathematics. It is the hemisphere of calculation, cleverness, of discipline, order.

The right hemisphere is just the opposite of it. It is the hemisphere of chaos, not of order; it is the hemisphere of poetry, not of prose, it is the hemisphere of love, not of logic. It has a great feeling for beauty, it has a great insight into orginality - but it is not efficient, it cannot be efficient. The creator cannot be efficient, he has to go on experimenting.

The creator cannot settle anywhere. The creator is a vagabond; he carries his tent on his shoulders.

Yes, he can stay for an overnight stay, but by the morning he is gone again - that's why I call him a vagabond. He is never a householder. He cannot settle. Settling means death to him. He is always ready to take a risk. Risk is his love affair.

But this is the right-side hemisphere. The right-side hemisphere is functioning when the child is born; the left-side hemisphere is not functioning. Then we start teaching the child - unknowingly, unscientifically. Down the ages we have learned the trick of how to shift the energy from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere; how to put a stop to the right hemisphere and how to start the left hemisphere. That's what our whole schooling is. From kindergarten to university that's what our whole training and so called education is. It is an effort to destroy the right hemisphere and to help the left hemisphere. Somewhere between the ages of seven and fourteen we succeed and the child is killed, the child is destroyed.

Then the child is wild no more - he becomes a citizen. Then he learns the ways of discipline, language, logic, prose. He starts competing in the school, becomes an egoist, starts learning all the neurotic things that are prevalent in the society, becomes more interested in power, money, starts thinking how to become more educated so that he can become more powerful, how to have more money, how to have a big house, and all that. He shifts.

Then the right hemisphere functions less and less - or functions only when you are in dream, fast asleep. Or sometimes when you have taken a drug.

OSHO - Sufis The People of The Path Vol. 1: A Certain Milieu

I want to be creative. What should I do?

I WANT TO BE CREATIVE. WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Become a child again and you will be creative. All children are creative. Creativity needs freedom - freedom from the mind, freedom from knowledge, freedom from prejudices.

A creative person is one who can try the new. A creative person is not a robopath. Robopaths are never creative, they are repetitive. So become a child again.

And you will be surprised that all children are creative; all children, wherever they are born, are creative. But we don't allow their creativity, we crush and kill their creativity, we jump upon them. We start teaching them the right way to do things.

Remember, a creative person always goes on trying the wrong ways. If you always follow the right way to do a thing you will never be creative - because the right way means the way discovered by others. And the right way means that of course you will be able to make something, you will become a producer, a manufacturer, you will be a technician, but you will not be a creator.

OSHO - Sufis The People of The Path Vol. 1: A Certain Milieu

Unconditional love is the door to God

Love is not a relationship, love is a state of mind. It is an essential component of a man's personality.

Therefore, the second stage in the teaching of love is to teach the child to love all. If a child does not even replace a book properly, his attention should be drawn to the fact that it is unseemly to replace the book that way. He should be made aware of what people will think of him if he treats the book in that fashion. If you have behaved brutally, even to your dog, it indicates a shortcoming in your personality; it is proof that you are devoid of love. And one who is not full of love is not a man at all.

Pure love can only survive if it is not adulterated by conditions; a conditional love is not love. Have you never had a feeling of contentment after having smiled at a stranger in the street? Didn't a breeze of peace follow it? There is no limit to the wave of tranquil joy you will feel when you lift a fallen man, when you support a fallen person, when you present a sick man with flowers - but not when you do it because he is your father or because she is your mother. No, the person may not be anyone in particular to you, but simply to give a gift is itself a great reward, a great pleasure.

Love should well up inside you - love for plants, love for human beings, love for strangers, love for foreigners, love for those on their way toward the moon and the stars. Your love should be ever on the increase.

The possibility of sex in a man's life lessens as love increases within him. Love and meditation will open that door which is the door to God. Together, love and meditation touch God, and then celibacy flowers in a man's life. Then the entire life-force ascends through a new passage. Then it does not leak out gradually; then it never recedes. The energy rises upwards from within; it rises on its voyage to heaven. Our journey, at present, is towards the lower levels. By nature, the energy only flows downward, into sex, but celibacy is the upward journey. And love and meditation are the basic ingredients of celibacy.

OSHO - From Sex to Superconsciousness

Children should be taught to meditate

Secondly, children should be taught to meditate - how to remain calm, serene, silent; how to reach the state of no-mind. Children can learn to accomplish this very, very quickly. Every home should have a scheduled program to help children move into silence. And that will only be possible, when you, as parents, also practice with them. A daily hour of sitting silently should be compulsory in every home. One should even do away with a meal if necessary, but an hour of silence must be observed at all costs. It is wrong to call that house a home where an hour of silence isn't observed daily. It can not even be called a family.

A daily hour of silence will conserve energy. And then, at the age of fourteen, it will surge in a tide and push open the door of meditation - that state of meditation where man touches timelessness and egolessness, where he glimpses the soul, where he glimpses the Supreme. A meeting with that summit before the experience of sex would put a stop to the mad rush after sex; the energy would have found a better, more blissful, more exalted path.

This is the first stage in the process of celibacy: to transcend sex. And the way is meditation.

OSHO - From Sex to Superconsciousness

Heaven is not for the weak

Man's inner urge is to reach the deathless from the deathbound; this is the thirst of man's innermost soul. The soul's only search is to reach from the darkness to the light. The basic drive of our primal energy is to reach from untruth to truth.

But for that voyage, man needs to conserve his energy; he needs to allow his energy to grow. To scale truth, to reach to the soul, man must strive to become a reservoir of limitless strength; only then can he reach to the eternal. Heaven is not for the weak.

I repeat, heaven is not for the weak. The truth of life is not for those who dissipate their energy, who allow themselves to become feeble and frail. Those who squander life's energies, who become insipid and impotent within, cannot undertake this expedition. It requires great energy to scale the heights.

Conservation of energy is a prime requisite of religion. But we are a weak, sick generation, and through this loss of energy we are progressively sinking to weaker and weaker levels. Our vitality is being drained away and all that is left inside is a honeycomb of dry cells; nothing is left but a terrible emptiness. Our lives are one sad continuous story of loss; our lives are not productive at all.

OSHO - From Sex to Superconsciousness

how to be happy ...

Many people come to me and they ask how to be happy, where to find happiness. They cannot find it unless they become creative. Happiness cannot happen to them, it happens only to creative souls. Create something. Become more spontaneous. Drop repetitions. Let every morning be a new morning and let every experience be a new experience. Don't think that all is old. Robopaths think there is nothing new under the sun - it is all the same so why bother? 

OSHO, Sufis the People of The Path Volume 1: From Robopathology to Enlightenment