Osho,
I am a sociologist. That means I deal scientifically with the relationship between social and political structures, and the individual. Though I think there are sociological laws, and that sociology can help us to understand the problems of society better, I am more and more in difficulties with sociology, in that way of thinking, and with the sociologists as well.
It has been a process like that since I have been a sannyasin. I have the feeling that I can’t stand it any longer at the university. Can you say something about it?

The whole so-called philosophy of sociology is very superficial, for the simple reason that society does not exist. What exists is the individual.

Sociology begins from the wrong end. It starts studying social relationships amongst the societies, amongst individuals. But they never bother about studying the individual – who is the source of all the relationships, of all the societies, of all the cultures that have happened or ever will happen.

Society has no soul. What can you study in it? It is almost as if somebody is studying Rotary Clubs. A Rotary Club has no soul, it is just a club where people meet. But the reality belongs to the people.

And up to now sociology has not yet become a science. It pretends to be a science – it is not, for the simple reason that it has not started from the right point. The right point is the individual. There seems to be some fear about beginning with the individual, because there are millions of individuals in the world, and every individual is unique. It seems easier to take them as a whole and just study from the outside how the whole functions.

If it were a mechanical thing, the sociologist would have succeeded. But it is not a mechanical thing. It is not that the individuals are parts of the society. Society has no existence apart from the individuals. It is just in the individuals living together, relating together, that the society is created.

The fear of studying the individual should be dropped, because although there are millions of individuals and they are all unique, their basic consciousness is the same, and the principles of the functioning of that consciousness are the same. Either the consciousness is awake – then a person functions like a Gautam Buddha – or the consciousness is asleep; then the function of the person is similar all around the world. What you do in your sleep does not matter much; your sleep is the same.

It will certainly be difficult to study a buddha, because he has attained an awakened uniqueness, and each Buddha is bound to respond differently, because his action is not a reaction. His action is purely action. You cannot make him do something; it is his spontaneity which is decisive.

Secondly, he is not logically a consistent person. He does not owe anything to logic: logic has not given him anything. Whatever he has attained, he has attained by dropping logic, by dropping thinking. He functions out of his state of no-mind; hence he is unpredictable.

And every science wants a subject to be predictable; otherwise what is the point of the science? The whole purpose of the science is to predict, and to predict accurately, a hundred percent; there is not even a possibility of any exception. And each awakened human being is an exception – there is no rule.