Archive for February, 2009

Osho – I dont want to do Meditation, It is too Much of an Effort

[A sannyasin says she is not doing the meditations because: It feels too much of an effort. I enjoy just sitting and walking, and being with friends.]

Osho – Then don’t create problems! – because that sitting and enjoying you have been doing your whole life. That has not changed you. Your problems are there. When something is to be done, you don’t want to do it – you enjoy sitting – but the sitting is not going to help you. If it is helping, then there is no difficulty. If you can just change yourself by sitting with friends and enjoying, then I am not here to force you into any discipline, any hard work.

But it is not changing you. That’s what you have been doing for your whole life. You will remain the same Some hard work is needed. And when you have done hard work and you have earned rest, then sit silently and enjoy friends. It is beautiful… nothing is wrong in enjoying friends and sitting silently – it is good, but earn it first.

But how can you-think that sitting and enjoying friends is going to help? It may be just an occupation – just getting into things so that one can pass time, or it may be just an escape from yourself. It may be just a trick of the mind to waste time. If you are really interested in changing and in dropping your problems, then there are two things: either drop them… then I will not say to do any hard work. Simply drop them.

Then you are allowed to sit silently and enjoy and do whatsoever you like, but then drop the problems – and never raise them again. I’m not saying don’t talk about your problems to me – not even to yourself. Drop them completely. And if you cannot drop them, start meditating.

It is hard but it has to be done. At least two, three months hard work is needed. It will cleanse you and it will purify you. It will destroy the old structure and a new possibility will arise. Otherwise you will continue with the old.

And I see that there is a problem. If you want to avoid hard work, drop the problem. But I don’t see that you will be able to drop it so easily. It is a real problem – it is there hanging in your unconscious. And my feeling is that you are avoiding meditations. They are not hard… because so many people are doing them. You are perfectly healthy, full of energy; you are not old. It is just the mind that is avoiding meditation, because the mind knows if it goes into meditation, sooner or later the structure will explode and you will have to change.

My feeling is that you are enjoying your problems, your depression, your sadness; you are enjoying it in a subtle way. If you want to enjoy it, then too, there is no problem – but then enjoy it deliberately, knowingly. Then depression is no more depression.

So tomorrow, think about it – these two things. Sit silently tonight. The alternatives are there: either you drop the problems or you have to start meditating. And not so-so, lukewarm. You have to really work hard and go into it. Tomorrow write a letter about whatsoever you have chosen. And I am happy whatsoever you choose, so don’t bother about me; don’t think about what I would like.

Both are good, perfectly good. In fact if you can drop problems simply like that, that’s beautiful; nothing could be better. But if you cannot, then tomorrow morning get up and start Dynamic meditation. And all five you have to do. When the camp is finished, do two meditations and the Nadabrahma, the humming meditation, at home – three meditations. And after three weeks I am going to give you a meditation – but first you decide, mm? Good.

Source: from Osho Book “The Passion for the Impossible”

Osho – To me Perversion only means that you become a Menace to others.

[A sannyasin had previously written to Osho about her sexuality, which seemed to have become more intensified lately – mainly been through auto-erotic activity. Guilt feelings surfaced from childhood, about its being a perversion. Osho checked her energy.]

Osho – I told you to remain celibate for a few days specifically for this purpose, because once you are celibate for a few days, energy pools; it becomes a reservoir. And when it is a reservoir, then you can easily know where it wants to move, how it wants to be creative, what direction it wants to take. A person who is using his sexual energy continuously, never knows what the energy itself intends to do. And these are two different things.

What your mind intends to do is one thing – what your energy intends to do is totally different. If they meet, good – if they don’t meet, then there is trouble. It is just a coincidence ordinarily – their meeting and their going hand in hand. Otherwise out of one hundred cases, almost ninety-nine percent of people miss the harmony between their mind and their energy.

The mind goes on bossing, goes on judging, evaluating, condemning, saying, ’This is good – that is bad.’ The mind is a priest, and a catholic priest at that. The mind is a puritan… absolutely a victorian. And energy is just a natural phenomenon. It does not know any man-made moralities. It is amoral. It is neither moral nor immoral; it is amoral. It is beyond morality or below morality. But it has nothing to do with morality and moral inhibitions, condemnations, evaluations, oughts, shoulds; it knows nothing. It is simply like a river rushing towards the ocean.

The energy is continuously rushing towards orgasm. If the mind interferes, there is corruption. Then it is very rarely that the intention of the mind and the intention of the energy will meet. Then there is frustration. You are pulled apart… you are tom apart; a person starts falling into pieces. That’s what has happened to the whole humanity – all have become Humpty Dumptys.

I had this very thing in mind when I told you to remain celibate for a few days. Once you are celibate for a few days, the energy becomes so powerful that the mind cannot control it. The mind remains very impotent before it. And the energy is so much that it carries the mind with it. It has to go with it. Condemning, cursing, but it has to go with it. It is a sheer force, and the mind cannot do anything with it. Whether willing or unwilling, it has to go with it.

So this is the natural spontaneous intention of your energy. Whatsoever is happening, allow it and drop all condemnations, drop all judgements. Simply go with it. With no mind go with it. Remember, energy is always pure. Its purity is invulnerable. The mind is always impure. Its impurity is unchangeable. So drop the mind, drop its bossing, its effort to dictate, dominate. Just go with the energy wherever it leads.

Many things will happen, and you will be surprised that they are happening, but they have to happen, because energy never does anything wrong. It cannot do, because it does not know what is right, what is wrong. It simply does that which is natural. For energy, the natural is right, the unnatural is wrong. It only believes in God’s law. It doesn’t believe in any man-made laws.

This is the first thing to understand – drop your mind. It has no business to interfere. Go with the energy, and whatsoever form it takes, it is good and beautiful. Whatsoever form it takes, never say that it is perverted, wrong, immoral, this and that. These are all mind trips. The mind is trying to force its own ideology on the energy. The energy is innocent – simply go with it.

Once you start going with it, many things will happen and many things will disappear. Soon – within two, three months – your energy will become a sheer delight. But if the mind goes on interfering, it will take a very long time. From your very childhood the mind has been interfering with it. It has never accepted its naturalness. That is the problem – not the form that the energy is taking; that is not the problem.

The problem is coming from the mind, not from the energy itself. The mind wants to have its own way, and now that the energy is there, overflowing, the mind cannot control it. When energy is less, the mind can control it. When you go on throwing your energy every day, then the mind is more powerful. Then the river is like a very small spring and it can be channelised by the mind howsoever it wants. But right now it is like a flood, it won’t listen – and there is no need for it to listen.

In the beginning you will find the mind cursing, condemning, judging, but simply don’t listen – listen to the energy. In the beginning you may find that it is maddening, but that will disappear. That too is because of the mind. Because the mind has never allowed the energy any freedom, when you allow freedom, it is maddening. It is just like when a man who has been forced to fast for many years, or has been given only a very small amount of food, who has been always starving, half-starving, is suddenly given freedom to eat whatsoever he wants to. Then he goes mad. He becomes an obsessive eater.

But the problem is still not with the person. The problem comes from the past. So something may be there like an obsession. You will feel that something is happening obsessively. Don’t be worried. It is just a dam that the mind has built; it is being broken by the flood. So there will be chaos for a few days, but nothing to be worried about. As I am watching, your state is better than ever. You just have to drop this last barrier of evaluation. Simply drop it.

And remember one thing – whatsoever makes you happy is good. The whole criterion of good, is happiness; nothing else. Never forget about it. And whatsoever form the sexual energy takes is never perverted unless it becomes harmful to somebody. To me perversion only means that you become a menace to others. If you hurt and harm others, if you become a sadist or something, then it is perversion. But when you are not harming anybody – you simply delight in your energy – there is no problem at all. It is your energy – you have to be happy with it.

So don’t go as if being dragged. Go dancing. Don’t go reluctantly. Surrender… trust the energy – because it is life, it is God. And trust absolutely. Just one condition has to be remembered – one should not become harmful, violent, aggressive, towards anybody else, that’s all. Otherwise everything is permissible. If you feel happy – it is your energy – feel as happy as you want to. Go with it wholeheartedly.

For one month simply go wholeheartedly with it. Relax completely. And after one month, tell me. Everything is going well. What is needed is happening. Within these two, three months, your energy will come to a real natural flow. All these things that are happening will disappear. They are not going to remain there forever. They are because of past starvation. Will it be possible to trust the energy and to go into it?

Source: from Osho Book “The Passion for the Impossible”

Osho discourse on Freudian Psychoanalysis

[A visitor said three years of Freudian psychoanalysis helped her, but also made things difficult.]

Osho – That too is true, because all the analytical methods are in a way incomplete. They help you only to a certain extent and then they leave you in a limbo. One feels that something has happened, but much is missing. Something seems to be incomplete, hanging, suspended. But that is natural because analysis is a very new process.

It just started with Freud; it is not even one hundred years old. And the whole method was developed by one man. It is on the way, it is growing. It takes centuries for a certain method to come to a completion, because so many people have to be experimented upon, and millions of people have to pass through the method. They help the method to grow. The method helps the people to grow; the people help the method to grow.

Freud has just given a framework and that too very primitive. It is bound to be so. All pioneers are primitive, rudimentary, crude; the polishing comes later on. The person who originated the method dies, but the method continues to evolve. Sometimes it takes centuries for a certain method to become so complete that once you pass through it, you don’t have any feelings of incompletion or of missing something.

And once that happens, that means that the process has become a circle. It gives you a smoothness, an ease, an at-homeness, a relaxation. Analysis is incomplete unless it becomes a synthesis too; that’s what is lacking and missing. Analysis is good for the beginning – one has to diagnose the person, the problems, the anxieties, the dreams. The situation has to be analysed, diagnosed, categorised – but that is just the beginning of the work.

When the disease is absolutely known, then the medicine has to be supplied, and then the person starts growing as a unity. That unity is missing. Psychoanalysis is just a diagnosis without a medicine. It makes you clearly aware of what is wrong, but then what to do? In fact, in understanding what is wrong, a few things are reconciled, but many more things bubble up from the unconscious. A few things are solved; many more things become questions.

So the analytic process makes you a little aware but it makes you a little more anxious too, because now you know many more things of which you were never aware. It gives you a certain insight into your being, but the centre is not revealed through it – only layers of the mind – because Freud had no concept of the soul, so he thought that there are layers and layers of the mind – conscious, subconscious, unconscious – but nothing beyond that.

That means that there are only peripheries, concentric circles and no center. A body cannot exist without a soul. If the body exists, the soul must exist, because the outside cannot exist without an inside. If the outside exists, we may not be able to penetrate the inside, but the inside must be there, because they go together – the outside and the inside. The body is nothing but the outside soul, and the soul is nothing but the inside body. And man is psychosomatic.

But Freud was a little too much of the nineteenth century, too physiological, too scientific. He had no religious attitude at all, so the centre is missing. And a psychology is complete only when at its peak it becomes a religion, because that is the very culmination. A tree is complete only when it flowers. Otherwise the tree can be there very green and everything good and beautiful, but still barren if the flowers are not there. Something tremendously beautiful will be missing.

In a way it looks complete – the tree is there, alive, green, its branches high in the sky – but something is missing. The tree has not yet been able to blossom, to overflow. The tree has not yet been able to produce colour and song and ecstasy. So unless psychology becomes a religion, it remains like a tree without flowers.

It is not only a question of becoming normal. The question is to become ecstatic. To be normal is not worth much. The question is not only how to get adjusted to the society – adjustment is just futile. Unless you have something to dance for, just adjustment will create boredom. The whole freudian structure is how to make you normal, and how to make you adjusted, that’s all.

The whole thing seems to be oriented towards the ill person, not the whole person. The approach is not wholistic. The approach is that somebody is ill, so how to help him to be healthy so he starts working as a normal human being. But there are millions of normal human beings. They are not abnormal in any other way; they are absolutely normal.

But what is there in their life? – desert-like, boring. They are just somehow dragging. Religion opens a new dimension – the dimension of ecstasy, the dimension of festivity. Unless you can dance, life is not worthwhile. Unless you can be so grateful and so blissful that you can say that even a single moment of this bliss is enough, a single moment is eternity – then a person is not really whole and healthy and holy.

So psychology is just a foundation. When the temple is completed, it will become religion. In the East we have tried. It was psychology in the beginning; then by and by we failed. For centuries we felt that something was missing. Then a totally new thing arose out of it – and that is religion.

Eastern religion is very psychological. It is a misfortune that Freud was not aware of eastern religion at all. He knew only Judaism and Christianity. And both religions are not culminations, have not really come of age; in many ways, very very primitive. If Freud was aware of Buddhism, he would have known how religion arises out of psychology, because whatsoever Freud says is absolutely relevant in Buddhism. Buddhism had all that Freud says – and more, and plus.

Source: from Osho Book “The Passion for the Impossible”

Osho Discourse on Tai Chi – Guidance onTai Chi Exercise

Osho – When doing these exercises, feel more like a liquid, Flowing energy, than like a solid body. Drop the concept of a solid body and help to focus on a different concept of liquid, fluid, flowing energy. Before you start T’ai Chi start doing this in the night so that you will be ready. Before going to sleep, just sit in the bed and start feeling that you are energy, and that energy is flowing all around your body. You are in a whirlpool of energy – ripples, waves, are coming.

Then feel that the whole room is full of energy, and it is your energy. You don’t know where to make a demarcation; you don’t know where you stop and the world starts. Then feel that the energy is flowing and becoming bigger and bigger like a balloon. Not only is it in the room, the room is in it, the whole house is in it. You have become a flood.

At this moment, go to sleep. This will take not more than three to five minutes. While you are falling asleep, continue to feel like a flood – surging waves reaching to the high heavens and the whole world is engulfed in you, in your energy. Just fall asleep meditating on it so it will enter into your sleep and will remain there as a shadow, hovering around you the whole night.

In the morning, the moment you feel that you are awake now, don’t open your eyes – first feel again the flood-like energy. Connect yourself again with the time you fell asleep. Bridge it again. Again start feeling like a surging wave, an ocean, an oceanic energy.

Just for three to five minutes Lying in the bed, and then get up. You will feel very very energised and vital. You will feel a new elan rising in you, a new life. Continue this for a few days and then go into T’ai Chi. Then you will be perfectly ready.

Chi means energy. The whole concept is that solidity is false – just as in modern physics. These walls are not real – it is just pure energy, but the electrons are moving so fast, with such terrific speed; that’s why it appears solid. Just like a fan can move with such a terrific speed that you cannot see the blades separately. So it gives a sense of solidarity. The same is true with your body. What modern physics has come to know right now, Taoists have known for thousands of years – that man is energy.

It is said about a T’ai Chi master that he would tell his disciples to attack him, and he would just sit in the middle. Five or ten disciples would rush from every corner of the room to attack him, but when they came near him, they would feel as if he were a cloud; there was nothing solid… as if you could pass through him and you would not be obstructed by anything.

If you continue this idea that you are energy, it is possible to become just like a cloud with no boundaries, melting and merging with existence. This anecdote is not just an anecdote. With a man who has gone deep into T’ai Chi, it is very easily possible that when you come across him, you will not find any obstruction; you can simply go through him. You cannot hurt him because he is not there to be hurt. So for these ten days before you start T’ai Chi, imbibe the spirit.

Source: from Osho Book “The Passion for the Impossible”