From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 16. LET’S NOT FACE IT – YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY ALONE
body is such that the mother cannot carry the child for more than nine months, otherwise she will
die, and her death will mean the death of the child.
It has been calculated that if the child can live in the mother’s womb for at least three years, then
perhaps there will be no need for a father and mother and the family, and the society and the
culture, and God and the priest. But the child cannot live in the mother’s womb for three years.
This strange biological situation has affected the whole of human behavior, thinking, the structure of
family, society; and this has caused the fear.
The first experience of the child is the fear, and the last experience of the man is also fear.
Birth is also a kind of death; you should remember just look at it from the child’s point of view. He
was living in a certain world, which was absolutely satisfactory. He was not in any need at all, he was
not greedy for anything more. He was simply enjoying being, enjoying growing – and then suddenly
he is thrown out.
To the child, this experience is an experience of death: death of his whole world, of his security,
of his cozy home. Scientists say that we have not been able yet to create a home as cozy as the
womb. We have been trying – all our homes are just efforts to create that cozy home.
We have even tried to make water beds, to give you the same feeling. We have hot bathtubs; Lying
down in them you can have a little feeling of the child. Those who know how to take a really hot
bath will also put salt into it, because in the mother’s womb it is very salty – the exact amount of salt
that is in sea water. But how long can you lie down in a bathtub? We have isolation tanks which are
nothing but a search for the same womb that you have lost.
Sigmund Freud is not an enlightened man – in fact he is a little bit cuckoo, but sometimes cuckoos
also sing beautiful songs. Sometimes he has significant ideas. For example, he thinks this idea of
man making love to the woman is nothing but an effort to enter the womb again. There may be
something in it. This man is crazy, the idea seems to be far fetched; but even if a man like Sigmund
Freud is crazy he has to be listened to very carefully.
I feel that there is something of truth in it: the search for the womb, for the same passage as he
had come out from.... He cannot reach that womb, that is true. Then he created all kinds of things;
he started making caves, houses, airplanes. You see the interior of the airplane – it will not be a
wonder if one day you find that in the airplane people are floating in tubs of hot water, salted. The
airplane can give you exactly the same situation, but it is not going to be satisfactory.
The child has not known anything else. We try to make it as cozy: just push a button and the air
hostess is there. We make it as comfortable as possible, but we cannot make it as comfortable as
it was in the womb. You were not needed even to push a button. Even before you were hungry you
were fed. Even before you needed air, it reached you. You had no responsibility at all.
So the child coming out of the mother’s womb, if he feels it at all, must feel it as death. He cannot
feel it as birth, that is impossible. That is our idea – who are standing outside – we say that this is
birth.
From Ignorance to Innocence 217 Osho