How to save children from parents, priests, teachers is a question of such enormous proportion that
it seems almost impossible to find how to do it.
It is not a question of helping the child.
It is a question of protecting the child.
If you have a child, protect the child from yourself. Protect the child from others who can influence
him: at least up to seven years, protect him.
The child is just like a small plant, weak, soft: just a strong wind can destroy it, any animal can eat
it up. You put a protective wiring around it, but that is not imprisoning, you are simply protecting.
When the plant is bigger, the wires will be removed.
Protect the child from every kind of influence so that he can remain himself – and it is only a question
of seven years, because then the first circle will be complete. By seven years he will be wellgrounded,
centered, strong enough.
You don’t know how strong a seven-year-old child can be because you have not seen uncorrupted
children, you have seen only corrupted children. They carry the fears, the cowardliness, of their
fathers, mothers, their families. They are not their own selves.
If a child remains uncorrupted for seven years .... You will be surprised to meet such a child. He
will be as sharp as a sword. His eyes will be clear, his insight will be clear. And you will see a
tremendous strength in him which you cannot find even in a seventy-year-old adult, because the
foundations are shaky. So in fact as the building goes on becoming higher and higher, the more and
more shaky it becomes.
So you will see, the older a person becomes, the more afraid. When he is young he may be an
atheist; when he becomes old he starts believing in God. Why is that?
When he is below thirty he is a hippie. He has courage to go against the society, to behave in his
own way: to have long hair, to have a beard, to roam around the world, to take all kinds of risks. But
by the time he is forty, all that has disappeared. You will see him in some office in a gray suit, clean
shaven, well groomed. You will not even be able to recognize that he is an ex-hippie.
Where have all the hippies disappeared to? Suddenly you see them with a great force; then, just
like used bullet cases, empty cartridges, impotent, defeated, depressed – trying to make something
out of life, feeling that all those years of hippiedom were a wastage. Others have gone far ahead;
somebody has become the president, somebody has become the governor, and ”we were stupid;
we were just playing the guitar and the whole world passed us by.” They repent.
It is really difficult to find an old hippie. Just one I have found; that is Bapuji, Sheela’s father. He will
die a hippie. At his age – he must be near about seventy – he was living with hippies in northern
New York State. Some photographer took a photograph of him; he was sitting naked on a hill ...
snow, ice, all around. And he was sitting naked there. Somebody took his photo, and those photos
have been coming to me. People think Bapuji is me!
It is printed now, because he looks really beautiful – naked, sitting on the top. The sun is rising, and
all around snow, and he is looking really beautiful. Many people who have found that photo – it is a
postcard now – go on sending it to me saying, ”Osho, it was a surprise to find you sitting here.”
I told Sheela, ”Tell Bapuji, ‘don’t do such things, because nobody knows you.’” But he will die a
hippie.
He brought all his children to me, which no father has done except him. It was he who brought
Sheela to me ... forcibly, because she was not interested. But he is not a man to listen to anybody.
He said, ”Once, you have to come; twice I will not ask, then it is your business. But once I have to
force you because you don’t know what you are refusing. So forgive me for forcing you, but one time
I have to force you.”
He brought all his children by and by, and almost all his children are now sannyasins. And once
Sheela came she never left me. He asked Sheela, teased her, ”Now what about going back to
America?”
She said, ”I am not going anywhere.”
”But,” Bapuji said, ”I had brought you just to meet him, not to stay.”
Sheela said, ”But I have to – this is the place I have been searching for.”
He said, ”I am happy because I have brought you to the right place: now I am freed of my
responsibility. Now whatsoever becomes of you, it will be right.”
If you are a parent you will need this much courage – not to interfere. Open doors of unknown
directions to the child so he can explore. He does not know what he has in him, nobody knows.
He has to grope in the dark. Don’t make him afraid of darkness, don’t make him afraid of failure,
don’t make him afraid of the unknown. Give him support. When he is going on an unknown journey,
send him with all your support, with all your love, with all your blessings.
Don’t let him be affected by your fears.
You may have fears, but keep them to yourself. Don’t unload those fears on the child because that
will be interfering.
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