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presents
The Tree Dimensions of Freedom (Preview)
Osho,
what is freedom,
individual and 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 that came to America
were purchased like commodity.
Slaves have existed all over the world.
They were not given human rights;
they were not accepted really 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
decided by the tradition five thousand years
and
to think of them as human is impossible... Even to touch them
makes you impure:
you have to take a bath immediately.
Not even to touch the man
but his shadow
– then too you have to take a bath.
So there is physical slavery
and there is physical freedom
– that your body
is not enchained,
is not
categorized as lower than anybody else's,
that there is
an equality
as far as 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, it is your house,
it is your chair, it is your wife.
In Chinese law
there is no punishment for the husband if he kills the wife
because she is thought to be soulless;
she is 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 equal number of men and women,
and if one man marries four women,
then what about the three men?
This is nothing!
Just forty years before, when India became free,
one of the Mohammedan states in India, Nizam Hyderabad,
the nizam had five hundred wives!
But that too is not
the limit.
The Hindu incarnation of God, Krishna,
has sixteen thousand wives.
And at least the nizam's wives were his own – he had married them.
Krishna had taken anybody's wife
whom he liked...
no consideration that she has children, that she has husband, she has 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
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 bodies
which still continues in different ways.
It is becoming less and less but it has not disappeared completely.
completely
Freedom of the bodies will mean
that there is no distinction between black and white,
there is no distinction between man and woman,
that there is no distinction
of any kind
as far as bodies are concerned.
Nobody is pure,
nobody is impure: all bodies are same.
But this is
the very basic of freedom.
Then there is the second dimension: psychological freedom…
There are very few individuals in this world who are psychologically free
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