Osho – While you are here with me, be here with me; be totally here with me so that you can learn a new mode of movement, so that you can move into eternity, not in time.

Time is the world and eternity is God; horizontal is the world, vertical is God. Both meet at a point — that is where Jesus is crucified. Both meet, the horizontal and the vertical, at a point — that point is here and now. From here and now you can go on two journeys: one journey in the world, in the future; the other journey into God, into depth. Become more and more aware, become more and more alert and sensitive to the present.

What will you do? How can it become possible? — because you are so fast asleep that you can make that a dream also. You can make that itself a thinking object, a thinking process. You can become so tense about it that just because of it you cannot be in the present. If you think too much about how to be in the present, this thinking won’t help. If you feel too much guilt… if you sometimes move into the past you will; it has been such a long routine and sometimes you will start thinking about the future — immediately you will feel guilty that you have committed a sin again. Don’t become guilty; understand the sin but don’t become guilty — and this is very, very delicate. If you become guilty you have missed the whole thing. Now, in a new way, the old pattern starts: now you feel guilty because you have missed the present. Now you are thinking about the past because that present is no longer present; it is past and you are feeling guilty about it — you are still missing.

So remember one thing: whenever you remember that you have gone to the past or into the future, don’t create a problem out of it; simply come to the present, not creating any problem. It’s okay! Simply bring back your awareness. You will miss millions of times; it is not going to happen right now, immediately. It can happen, but it cannot happen because of you. It is such a long, long, fixed mode of behavior that you cannot change it right now. But no worry, God is not in a hurry; eternity can wait eternally.

Don’t create a tension about it. Whenever you feel you have missed, come back, that’s all. Don’t feel guilty; that’s a trick of the mind, now it is again playing a game. Don’t repent: “I again forgot.” Just when you think, come back to whatsoever you are doing: taking your bath, come back; eating your food, come back; going for a walk, come back. The moment you feel you are not here and now, come back — simply, innocently. Don’t create guilt. If you become guilty then you miss the point.

There is sin and there is no guilt — but difficult for you. If you feel there is something wrong, you become immediately guilty. The mind is very, very cunning. If you become guilty the game has started now; on new ground but the game is old. People come to me, they say, “We go on forgetting.” They are so sad when they say, “We go on forgetting. We try but we remember only for a few seconds. We remain alert, selfremembering, then again it is lost — what to do?” Nothing can be done. It is not a question of doing at all. What can you do? The only thing that can be done is not to create guilt. Simply come back.

The more you come back… simply, remember, not with a very serious face, not with much effort; simply, innocently, not creating a problem out of it, because eternity has no problems. All problems exist on the horizontal plane; this problem will also exist on the horizontal plane. The vertical plane knows no problems, it is sheer delight; without any anxiety, without any anguish, without any worry, any guilt, nothing. Be simple and come back.

You will miss many times — it is taken for granted. But don’t worry about it, that is how it is. You will miss many times but that is not the point. Don’t pay much attention to the fact that you have missed many times, pay much attention to the fact that you have regained many times. Remember this. The emphasis should not be that you missed many times, it should be that you regained remembrance many times. Feel happy about it. That you miss, of course, is as it should be. You are human, have lived on the horizontal plane for many, many lives, so it is natural. The beauty is that many times you came back. You have done the impossible; feel happy about it!

In twenty-four hours, twenty-four thousand times you will miss, but twenty-four thousand times you will regain. Now a new mode will start functioning. So many times you come back home, now a new dimension is breaking in by and by. More and more you will be able to stay in awareness, less and less you will go back and forth. The span of going back and forth will be smaller and smaller. Less and less you will forget, more and more you will remember — you are entering the vertical. Suddenly one day, the horizontal disappears. An intensity comes to awareness and the horizontal disappears.

That is the meaning behind Shankara, Vedanta and Hindus calling this world illusory… because when awareness becomes perfect, this world, this world that you have created out of your mind, simply disappears. Another world becomes revealed to you. Maya disappears, the illusion disappears. The illusion is there because of your sleep, your unconsciousness. It is just like a dream. In the night you move in a dream, and when the dream is there it is so true.

Have you ever thought in a dream, “This is not possible”? The impossible happens in a dream, but you cannot doubt it. In a dream you have such faith, in a dream nobody is skeptical, not even a Bertrand Russell. No! In a dream everybody is like a child, trusting whatsoever happens. You see your wife coming in a dream — suddenly she becomes a horse. Not for a single moment do you say, “How can this be possible?”

Dream is trust, it is faith. You cannot doubt in a dream. Once you start doubting in a dream the rules are broken. Once you doubt, the dream starts disappearing. If even once you can remember that this is a dream, suddenly this will become a shock and the dream will shatter and you will be fully awake.

This world that you see around you is not the real world. Not that it doesn’t exist. It exists — but you are seeing it through a screen of sleep, an unconsciousness is in between. You look at it, you interpret it in your own way; you are just like a drunkard.

It happened: Mulla Nasruddin came running. He was totally drunk and the man who was operating the elevator was just going to close the door, but he somehow pushed in. It was overcrowded. Everybody became aware that he was very drunk; his breath was smelling. He tried to pretend; he tried to face towards the door, but he couldn’t see anything — his eyes, too, were drunk and sleepy. Somehow he was trying to stand, but that was not possible either. And then he felt very much embarrassed, because everybody was looking and everybody was thinking that he was completely drunk; he could feel that. Then he suddenly forgot where he was and he said, “You must be wondering why I called this meeting.” Seeing that so many people were around, he thought that he had called a meeting and that the people were wondering why. By the morning he will be okay. He will himself laugh as you are laughing.

All buddhas have laughed when they awaken. Their laughter is like a lion’s roar. They laugh, not at you, they laugh at the whole cosmic joke. They lived in a dream, in a sleep, intoxicated completely by desire, and through desire they looked at the existence. Then it was not the real existence, they projected their own sleep on it.

You are taking the whole existence as a screen, and then you project your own mind on it and you see things which are not there, and you don’t see things which are there. And the mind has explanations for everything. If you raise a doubt, the mind explains. It creates theories, philosophies, systems, just to feel comfortable, that nothing is wrong. All philosophies exist to make life convenient, so that everything looks okay, nothing is wrong — but everything is wrong while you are asleep.

Source – Osho Book “The Hidden Harmony”

Question – I have been doing all the five meditations every day regularly for three years and because of these meditations i cannot do anything else. i am feeling very happy but my family is worried. what should i do?

Osho – You are overdoing it, sir. You have to choose one meditation. One is enough. Five is too much. Of course you will feel happy because you have nothing else to do. And if the family is worried it is natural, they are right too.

A big Yorkshire farmer found it necessary to go to London for several months and decided to leave one of his best workers in charge. ‘I want you to take care of things, Harry, as if I were here myself. Understand’ Harry nodded.

Four months later the boss farmer returned to find everything in shape. Said Harry, pointing things out, “The chicks have been laying plenty of eggs, the wheat has grown double strong, the vegetables are better than they’ve ever been, and as for those monthly spells your wife used to have, I’ve even got those to stop.’

This is doing too much. This is going too far. You please come to one meditation. It will be difficult, I know, after three years. You should have asked before. It will be difficult to go back to the world and to work and you will find it a little hard, but it has to be done. I am not teaching you any escapism here — this is escapism because now you are not doing anything else.

You are dropping all your responsibilities and I am not for that. Those responsibilities have to be fulfilled — fulfilled with great joy. Your wife, your children, your parents, your old father, your old mother, need you. That is where God has put you — into a certain responsibility. Fulfill it.

I am against all those escapists who escape from the world and become twenty-four-houra-day meditators. I am against them, I am utterly against them. One hour of meditation is enough. Meditation is such a powerful thing that one hour out of twenty four hours is enough. It will illuminate your whole life.

And the test of whether your meditation is succeeding or not is in life. When you meditate and you go to the shop you will know whether you are succeeding in your meditation or not. Are you still as greedy in the shop as you used to be before? Do you still get angry when somebody says something against you? Can people still manage to push your buttons as easily as before? In the market-place is the test of all your meditations.

If you just do meditations and nothing else that is like preparing and preparing and never going to the examination. That is not right. The test has to be there every day — one hour meditation, twenty-three hours test. And you will grow strong.

Source – Osho Book “Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 1″

Question – Can meditation be learned, or is it, like love, a state of being that comes as a present?

Osho – Prem Prabhati, meditation cannot be learned in a positive way, but it can be learned in a negative way. This is very important to understand: the basic method of meditation is negative. What do I mean when I say meditation can be learned negatively, only negatively? I mean that the mind can be unlearned, and the moment you unlearn the mind you are learning meditation. Unlearning the mind is learning meditation; when the mind has been completely unlearned you have learned meditation. You cannot go directly into learning meditation. All that is needed is to remove the mind.

Mind is like a block. The river is there but blocked, it can’t flow. It is covered with rocks; those rocks don’t allow it any outlet. It is surging inside you, it is longing for the ocean, it wants to get out of this prison. That’s why everybody feels so restless. This restlessness is nothing but your consciousness longing to meet with the ultimate. The river wants to reach the ocean. The seed wants to sprout, but it is covered, blocked by a big rock. That rock is of your mind. And it is a big rock because you have been accumulating it for many many lives. Your meditation is simply crushed underneath it.

You cannot reach meditation directly, but you can remove this rock chunk by chunk. You can take a chisel and a hammer – that’s what I go on providing you – and go on hammering on the rock. Slowly slowly the rock will disappear. The day the rock disappears, suddenly a flow, a fresh flow of water, will start running towards the ocean. That is meditation.

Hence, Prabhati, in one sense meditation cannot be learned. You cannot practice it, because all practicing is of the mind. All practices strengthen the mind, make it stronger. And the mind has to be made weaker; its power over you has to be destroyed. It has to be put in its right place: it is not the master, it has only become the master. You have to stop cooperating with it, you have to stop giving more and more nourishment to it.

That’s what I mean by unlearning the mind. Don’t support it. Don’t cling to it. Don’t rely on it. Don’t be possessed by it. Don’t live according to its dictates. And then slowly slowly the master is free from the slave. That master is your meditative quality.

You ask me: ”Can meditation be learned, or is it, like love, a state of being that comes as a present?”
It is already there. It does not come like a present – nobody ’presents’ it to you – it is your very nature, svabhava, it is your very being. And so is love. When meditation has happened, love is its aroma, its perfume. A meditative person is naturally loving; it can’t be otherwise. A loving person is naturally meditative. If it is not so, then you are deceived, then you are carrying false coins. If a man thinks he is meditative and is not loving, then his meditation is nothing but a mind practice, something false, pseudo. Something which is not meditation is masquerading as meditation. He has been deceived by his mind. If a man thinks that he is very loving and is not meditative, his love is nothing but another name for lust. He knows nothing of love; he can’t know in the very nature of things.

AES DHAMMO SANANTANO. This is the ultimate law: meditation brings love naturally – it is its aroma, its fragrance. And love exists only around the flower called meditation, never otherwise. They are together. Either search for love or for meditation. And you can only search for one, because things are already too complicated. If you start searching for both you will make them even more complicated, you may become more confused. Hence I say, only seek one. If you can find one, the other is found without any effort on your part. Either find love or find meditation and the other will follow it like a shadow.

But they are not learned in a direct way as you learn mathematics, as you learn geography, history, as you learn a new language. That is not the way to learn meditation or love; they are learned in an indirect way. If you want to learn meditation, you will have to unlearn the ways of the mind. If you want to learn love, you will have to unlearn the unloving ways that have become very ingrained in you. Anger, possessiveness, jealousy – these will have to be unlearned.

And it never comes as a gift because it is already given; it is your innermost nature. Yes, it is a grace, a gift, but it is not going to happen in the future, it has already happened. You have never been without it, you CAN’T be without it. Love and meditation constitute your real essential core.

Source – Osho Book “The White Lotus”

Question – When does Discipline become Meditation?

Osho – Never. Discipline never becomes meditation; meditation certainly becomes-a discipline. Don’t start with discipline otherwise you will never arrive at meditation. Start with meditation and you will arrive at a discipline, and the discipline will not be imposed from the outside. It will be an inner overflow; you will become luminous from within. In fact, to call it ‘discipline’ is not good because it is so utterly free — but still you can call it discipline.

Your life will be disciplined, not by any effort, but by your inner understanding. You will behave responsibly, not that you have to behave that way, you will behave responsibly because a conscious man can behave only in that way — there is no other way. You will not behave for any profit, for any motive; you will behave out of your spontaneity; there will be no greed in it. If somebody is a Christian saint, he is greedy; he wants to reach to the Christian paradise. If somebody is a Jain monk, he is greedy, he is a businessman. He is trying to win over by virtue, to be victorious in the other world, to become a spiritual conqueror; but the idea is of greed.

If you go and look around the world at monks and saints and MAHATMAS, you will find ninety-nine per cent of them are just greedy people, materialistic people. They are disciplining themselves because they know that if they sacrifice, great is going to be the pay-off. They are ready to sacrifice, they are ready even to kill themselves — but it is a bargain.

A man of meditation, understanding, has no motive, NO BARGAIN WITH REALITY. How can you bargain with reality? The whole idea is silly. A man of meditation is good because it feels good to be good; there is no motive. He is virtuous because being virtuous he feels so happy and so delighted. He loves, he shares, just like a flower shares its scent, its fragrance — naturally. His virtue is not cultivated, conditioned, it is growth in his being.

So you ask ‘When does discipline become meditation?’

Never. Discipline never becomes meditation. but meditation always brings a discipline, an inner discipline. And that discipline is BECAUSE OF freedom. That discipline is not a new cage, that discipline makes you totally free and liberated. You don’t have any commandments to follow, you don’t follow anybody, any scripture, you simply follow your own inner core. And there is no conflict within you, there are no alternatives. You are not to choose, you don’t have to choose to do this or to do that. Whatsoever arises in your being, you do it. There is never any repentance because a man of meditation cannot do wrong — it doesn’t happen. Whatsoever he is doing, he is doing totally; the next moment he has moved beyond it. He never looks back, he never repents: whatsoever happened, happened; whatsoever did not happen, did not happen. He neither praises himself: ‘I did this’, neither does he ever feel guilty: ‘Why could I not do this?’ He has no hangover, he is clean-cut from the past. Each moment he moves into the future, each moment the past disappears and he is fresh like the drew-drops in the morning.

That discipline has freshness, that discipline has freedom, that discipline has fragrance. Otherwise, discipline makes people dull, stupid. Discipline makes people mediocre; discipline kills your freedom, kills your being; discipline becomes a suicide. So never start with discipline, start with meditation. That’s why my emphasis is on meditation. If discipline comes out of meditation — good, otherwise it is not needed. It is better to have no character than to have a forced character.

Source – Osho Book “Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol 1″

Question – In meditation the distraction is often physical pain. Would you talk about meditating on pain while pain is happening?

Osho – This is what I was talking about. If you feel pain, be attentive to it, don’t do anything. Attention is the great sword — it cuts everything. You simply pay attention to the pain.

For example, you are sitting in the last part of the meditation silently, unmoving, and you feel many problems in the body. You feel the leg is going dead, there is some itching in the hand, you feel ants are creeping on the body and many times you have looked — there are no ants. The creeping is inside, not outside.

What you should do? You feel the leg is going dead — be watchful just give your total attention to it. You feel itching — don’t itch. That will not help. You just pay your attention. Don’t open even your eyes. Just pay your attention inwardly, and just wait and watch, and within seconds the itching has disappeared.

Whatsoever happens — even if you feel pain, severe pain in the stomach or in the head, it is possible because in meditation the whole body changes. It changes its chemistry. New things start happening; the body is in a chaos. Sometimes the stomach will be affected, because in the stomach you have suppressed many emotions, and they are all stirred. Sometimes you will feel like vomiting, nausea. Sometimes you will feel a severe pain in the head because the meditation is changing the inner structure of your brain. You are really in a chaos passing through meditation. Soon things will settle. But for the time being, everything will be unsettled.

So what are you to do? You simply see the pain in the head; watch it. You be a watcher. You just forget that you are a doer, and by and by, everything subsides and subsides so beautifully and so gracefully that you cannot believe unless you know it. And not only that the pain disappears from the head — because the energy which was creating pain, if it is watched… pain disappears and the same energy becomes pleasure. The energy is the same.

Pain or pleasure are two dimensions of the same energy. And if you can remain silently sitting and paying attention to distractions, all distractions disappear. And when all distractions disappear, you will suddenly become aware that the whole body has disappeared.

In fact, what was happening? Why these things were happening? — and when you don’t meditate they don’t happen. The whole day you are there and the hand never itches, the head has no pain, and the stomach is perfect, and the legs are okay. Everything is okay. What was really happening? Why in meditation these things start suddenly?

The body has remained the master for long, and in meditation you are throwing the body out of its mastery. You are dethroning it. It clings; it tries in every way to remain the master. It will create many things to distract you so the meditation is lost. You are thrown off balance and the body is again on the throne. Up to now, the body has remained the master and you have been a slave. Through meditation, you are changing the whole thing; it is a great revolution.

And of course, no ruler wants to be thrown out of his power. The body plays politics — that’s what is happening. When she creates imaginary pain, itching, ants creeping, the body is trying to distract you. And it is natural, because the body has remained in rule for so long; for many lives it has been the emperor and you have been the slave. Now you are changing everything upside down. You are reclaiming your throne, and it is natural the body will try whatsoever it can do to disturb you. If you get disturbed, you are lost. Ordinarily, people suppress these things. They will start chanting a mantra; they will not look at the body.

I am not teaching you any sort of suppression. Only awareness I teach. You just watch, pay attention, and because it is false, immediately it will disappear. When all the pains and itches and ants have disappeared and the body has settled in its right place of being a slave, suddenly arises so much bliss you cannot contain it. Suddenly arises so much celebration in the being, you cannot express it; you are overflowing with a peace that passeth understanding, a bliss which is not of this world.

Source – Osho Book “Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 3″

Osho – Mind is vacillation, mind is either/or, mind is always in that space of “to be or not to be.” If you really want to grow, mature, if you really want to know what this life is all about, don’t vacillate. Commit, involve! Involve yourself with life, get committed to life, don’t remain a spectator. Don’t go on thinking whether to do or not — “Should I do this or that?” You can go on vacillating your whole life, and the more you vacillate, the more trained you become in vacillation.

Life is for those who know how to commit — how to say yes to something, how to say no to something decisively, categorically. Once you have categorically said yes or no to something, then you can take a jump, then you can dive deep into the ocean.

People are just sitting on the fence. Millions of people are fence-sitters — this way or that, just waiting for the opportunity to come. And the opportunity will never come, because it has already come, it is there!

My own suggestion is that even if sometimes it happens that you commit to the wrong thing, even then it is good to commit, because the day you will know it is wrong you can get out of it. At least you would have learned one thing: that it is wrong, and never to get into anything like that again. It is a great experience; it brings you closer to truth.

Why do people vacillate so much? — because from the very childhood you have been told not to commit any mistakes. That is one of the greatest teachings of all the societies all over the world — and very dangerous, very harmful. Teach children to commit as many mistakes as possible, with only one condition: don’t commit the same mistake again, that’s all. And they will grow, and they will experience more and more, and they will not vacillate. Otherwise a trembling… and time is passing by, out of your hands, and you are vacillating.

I see many people standing on the shore vacillating, whether to take the jump or not. Here it happens every day. Just a few days ago, one young man came to me. For three years he has been vacillating whether to take sannyas or not. I said, “Decide either yes or no, and be finished with it! And I am not saying decide yes, I am only saying DECIDE. No is as good as yes. But wasting three years? If you had taken sannyas three years ago,” I told him, “by this time you would have known whether it is worth it or not; at least one thing would have been decided. Vacillating three years, nothing has been decided. You are in the same space, and three years have gone by.”

Mind is vacillation. The discipline of a meditator is to become so watchful of the mind, so alert to the mind and its stupidities — its hesitations, its tremblings, its vacillations — to become so watchful that you are cut off. That is the whole purpose of watching: watching cuts you off.

Watch anything in the mind, and you are cut off. Watching is a sword. If a thought is moving in your mind, just watch it — and suddenly you will see the thought is there, you are here, and there is no bridge left. Don’t watch, and you become identified with the thought, you become it; watch, and you are not it. Mind possesses you because you have forgotten how to watch. Learn it.

Just looking at a roseflower, watch it; or at the stars, or the people passing on the road, sit by the side and watch. And then slowly slowly close your eyes and see the inner traffic moving — thousands of thoughts, desires, dreams, passing by. It is always rush hour there.

Just watch as somebody watches a river flowing by, sitting on the bank. Just watch — and watching, you will become aware that you are not it. Mind is being identified with it. No-mind is being disidentified with it. Don’t be a mind, because in fact you are not a mind. Then who are you? You are consciousness. You are that watchfulness, you are witnessing, you are that pure observation, that mirrorlike quality that reflects everything but never becomes identified with anything.

Remember, I am not saying that you are conscious. I am saying you are consciousness: that is your true identity. The day one knows, “I am consciousness,” one has come to know the ultimate, because the moment you know, “I am consciousness,” you also know all is consciousness, on different planes. The rock is conscious in its own way, and the
tree is conscious in its own way, and the animals and the people. Everybody is conscious in his own way, and consciousness is a multifaceted diamond.

The day you know, “I am consciousness,” you have known the universal truth, you have come to the goal. Socrates says, “Man, know thyself.” That is the teaching of all the buddhas: Know thyself. How are you going to know yourself? If mind remains too much and goes on clamoring around you, goes on making great noise, you will never hear the still small voice within. You have to become disidentified with the mind.

George Gurdjieff used to say, “My whole teaching can be condensed into one word, and that is disidentification.” He is right. Not only his teaching can be condensed into one word, all the teaching of all the masters can be condensed into one word: disidentification. Don’t be identified with the mind.

Source – Osho Book “The Book of Wisdom”

Osho – The basic problem before a spiritual seeker is not how to know, but how to be. Knowing is not the problem, it is easy. The real problem is how to be, how the being should be strengthened. Knowing can grow easily; knowing has its own ways of growing. But knowing is a parasitic growth.

Knowing grows in the memory, and memory is just mechanical. That’s why we now have mechanical devices which can be fed with memory – we have computers, and a computer is more efficient than any human brain. A computer can do anything that a human brain can do – and a computer can do many more things which a human brain cannot do. Sooner or later, human memory is going to be replaced by mechanical devices. A mechanical device can do whatsoever your mind is doing, and more efficiently, and in less time. A computer can do a mathematical problem in seconds for which you would need an Einstein, or a person of the caliber of Einstein, to work on for at least three months.

Mind is just a mechanical device. It can grow – you go on feeding it with knowledge, with information, and it can grow. You may not be aware of it, but nothing comes out of your mind which has not been put in it before – nothing. Nothing comes out of your mind which is original. In that way, nothing is original as far as mind is concerned; everything is just repetition. Mind is the most repetitive mechanism. You have to feed it, give it something: it will reproduce it. Not a single thought comes to you which is your own – it has been given to you by society, by education, by study, but always it has been given to you. At the most you can make new combinations, that’s all. Nothing more can be done with the mind. This is one growth, a parasitic growth at the cost of your being.

By being, I mean the consciousness with which you are born. And by mind, I mean all the accumulation that has come to your consciousness through society, through education, through culture. You are not born with a mind; you are born with a consciousness. Mind is a later growth. That’s why if a person is not taught, if a person is not educated, then he has a lesser mind, a poor mind. If no language is taught to you, you will know no language. If nothing is taught to you, you will know nothing. Mind is a social growth.

Consciousness is part of you, but mind is not part of you; mind is given to you. The whole process of social cultivation, of social imposition, is to produce a mind in you. That’s why a Christian mind is different from a Hindu mind – because a Hindu society is feeding something and a Christian society is feeding something else. A Mohammedan mind is totally different from a Hindu, or a Christian, or a Jaina mind. But a Hindu consciousness or a Mohammedan consciousness or a Christian consciousness, are not different.

Really, a consciousness cannot be called Christian or Hindu or Mohammedan – but minds ARE. So unless you go beyond your society – you are imprisoned in your upbringing. This mind, which the society gives to everyone… it is a necessity; a society has to give it to you. It is good as far as it goes, but it must not become an imprisonment. A moment must be attained where you are freed from your own mind. Then mind begins to work as a mechanical thing in you; you can use it but you are not identified with it.

Of course one has to use language, one has to use mathematics, one has to know history and geography and everything. But it must not be identified with your consciousness. You must remain a witness to it. You must remain separate, unidentified, different from your own mind. This is what meditation means: how to be not identified with the mind – how to create a space between yourself and your own mind. It is difficult because we never make any separation. We go on thinking in terms that the mind means me: mind and me are totally identified. If they are totally identified, then you will never be at peace; then you will never be able to enter the divine, because the divine can be entered only when the social has been left behind.

When whatsoever the society has given you has been renounced, only then you enter the divine, because only then, you enter pure consciousness. Mind is an overgrowth; it must be put aside. By renunciation, I mean renunciation of the social. And your mind is nothing but a social by-product, it depends on your society.

This mind can go on growing. Then you grow in knowledge; go on studying, go on learning new things, more things, and your mind goes on growing. And a mind is infinitely capable to grow; yet scientists cannot say to what extent this mind can grow. It can go on growing, the process seems infinite. It has so much potentiality – seventy million cells working in the mind, and a single cell can have millions of bits of information in it. A single cell of the mind can have so much information stored in it, and the mind has seventy million cells in it. We are not using even a single cell’s capacity – ordinarily, we are not using a single cell’s capacity – and we have seventy million cells. And each cell seems to be capable of infinite accumulation of information. The mind seems to be infinite in its own way – and it is not you! It is just something which has been given to you.

It is useful, it is utilitarian; that’s why we become identified with it. One has to use one’s mind constantly, and one has to use it so constantly that there is no gap. You don’t remember any moment when you were not your mind, that’s the problem: to remember it, and to create a space, a gap, when you are not your mind. You are yourself and mind is just a device which can be used or not used, and you are the master to choose whether to use it or not.

Ordinarily, the mind is the master and you have to follow it. The mind gives you something to think about and you have to think about it. The mind gives you some dream and you have to dream it. And the mind goes on…. And sometimes even if you say to your mind, ”Stop!” it is not going to stop, it is not going to listen to you at all. Because you have cooperated with it so much, and you have given it your energy and identification so much, that the mind doesn’t remember your mastery at all. You are just a slave.

Meditation means to create a gap so that you can become master, master of your own mind. And mastery means that you are not identified. I can order my hand to do anything – to move or not to move. Why? – because I am not identified with the hand; otherwise, who is going to order and who is going to be ordered? I can order my hand to move; it moves. But if my hand begins to move and I say, ”Stop!” and it is not stopping, what does it mean? It means only one thing: my order is impotent because of too much identification with the hand. The hand has become a master in its own right – it goes on moving. It says, ”I am not going to follow your order at all.”

This has happened with the mind. The mind goes on working in its own way; no order can be given to it. There is no intrinsic impossibility – it is only because you have never ordered it, so it doesn’t know that you are the master. The master has remained so silent, has remained so hidden, that the slave has begun to feel himself the master.

If one goes on growing in this mind, one goes on more and more hidden deep down. And the mind becomes such a great thing, it is difficult to assert your consciousness. That’s why a very ordinary villager with a lesser mind, is with more consciousness. An ordinary person – not very educated, not knowing much – has always, of course, less mind but more consciousness. So sometimes a person who has more mind may behave very foolishly, because he has less consciousness. A person who has a developed mind can work very wisely, behave very wisely if the situation is such that the mind knows what to do and what not to do. Then he can behave, work, do anything very efficiently. But any new situation in which the mind is not aware, and he will be stupid, he will THAT ART THOU.

Source – Osho Book “That Art Thou”

Question – Beloved Osho, does psychological therapy help to go beyond the mind?
Osho – Vijen, psychological therapy can help you to understand the mind, but it cannot lead you beyond the mind. Only one thing leads you beyond the mind and that is meditation. Meditation has nothing to do with psychotherapy, but psychotherapy can create a ground by giving you a better understanding of your mind to go into meditation. It cannot lead you directly into the transcendental, but it can be a help, just the way you prepare a garden. First, you prepare the soil, but that is not the garden. And just preparing the ground, removing the weeds, the grass, any wild growth, stones, roots, still it is not the garden — this much psychotherapy can do.

Now you will have to put seeds, give nourishment to those seeds, care and love and protection. And slowly, slowly the bare ground will start becoming greener. One day there will be flowers and fruits.

Psychotherapy is only a cleansing process, but it is like all cleansing processes. You have to clean your house every day; it is not as if once you have cleaned it you have cleaned it forever. Within twenty-four hours again dust gathers. You have to take a bath every day, or twice; otherwise you will start getting dirty.

Psychotherapy is good as a cleaning method, but it does not go beyond that. And if you remain addicted to psychotherapies you will have to clean yourself again and again. You will have a better understanding of the mind but just that much is not enough to create the world of the beyond. For that, seeds of meditation, awareness, watchfulness are absolutely necessary.

And once you have gone beyond the mind, psychotherapy becomes meaningless. Going beyond the mind simply means you have realized your own being. Now mind is left far behind. Going beyond the mind also means that now mind is going to function as a servant and you are the master. So whenever you need to, you can use it. Right now the situation is just the reverse. You are not the master, and the mind uses you. The mind is almost blind and it directs your life and sooner or later you are going to fall into a ditch. All minds lead finally to misery, to suffering.

Meditation is the only possibility for creating a space where blessings shower. I am not against psychotherapies. I am simply telling you they can be used as a foothold to jump into meditation. You can jump into meditation directly too, but you will find it a little difficult because you don’t have a clean mind and a clean understanding. The mind
will put every weight on you and drag you backwards. Psychotherapy is instrumental, helpful, but alone it is meaningless. I am using psychotherapy in this commune as a means towards meditation, as a help, as a preparation.

But in the West psychotherapy is used as an end to itself; hence psychotherapy in the West is not of much use. Unless it becomes a stepping-stone for meditation, you are moving in a circle. Every day you will have to clean. Once in a while you will have to go to a psychotherapist. People become addicted because it gives you a clean feeling, but that clean feeling remains only for a few days; again you have gathered all the rubbish.

Psychoanalysts ordinarily give their patients two sessions per week, for years, ten years, fifteen years, and still nobody is beyond the mind. After fifteen years of psychoanalysis one simply becomes addicted to psychoanalysis; now it has become a necessity. If you don’t go twice a week to a psychoanalyst you gather too much tension, too much dust,
you feel too dirty, too heavy. Now you have created a new problem. Psychology rather than giving you freedom has given you new chains. It is as addictive as any alcohol or any drug. Nothing is wrong in it; in itself it is helpful and beautiful, but you should use it for something better.

Psychoanalysis is good but the good is the enemy of the best. You should not get addicted to the good. You should use the good as a stepping-stone for the best; otherwise it turns into an enemy. Even psychoanalysts are very embarrassed by the fact that there is not a single man in the whole world who has been perfectly psychoanalyzed. And I am amazed at their stupidity. Hoping that some day some man will be perfectly psychoanalyzed is exactly like hoping that some day some house will be perfectly clean and there will be no need to clean it again. It is absolutely absurd. The house will need cleaning continually, because as time passes dirt gathers.

Even the cleanest mirror needs cleaning once in a while because dirt gathers on it, vapor gathers on it; it does not reflect clearly, it starts reflecting distortions. There will never be any man perfectly psychoanalyzed, because the process in itself is only of cleaning. Can you get your clothes cleaned forever, perfectly cleaned? They will again become ready to go into the laundry. So the people who are going continuously into psychotherapies are going into a kind of laundry, dry cleaning. It is good, but good is not enough. Vijen, in a sense it can help if you use it as a means and you don’t forget that it is not all. In another sense it can be a disturbance, a barrier, if you think that this is all and there is nothing else beyond it.

That’s what is happening in the West. Psychotherapists think this is the ultimate, but they have not produced a single buddha. Even their founders, Freud or Jung or Adler are not awakened people. They are living in the same misery, in the same suffering as you are living. They are full of fear. They don’t know anything about death, that it is a fiction.
They have not experienced their own being. They are just scratching on the surface. Mind is your surface; your being is in the center. How much you clean your surface does not matter, it is not going to lead you to the center. If you can use psychotherapy as a means it is good. If you think it is the end it is the enemy of your transcendence. It all depends on your intelligence.

A Jew asks his rabbi, “I have two problems. I have asked my boss a dozen times already, but he is determined to fire me at the end of the month.”
“And what is the other problem?” asks the rabbi.
“Ah well, my wife does not get pregnant, although she stays home and prays all day,” answers the Jew.
“You are doing it wrong,” suggests the rabbi. “Next time you stay at home to pray and send your wife to ask the boss.”
Three months later the happy Jew thanks the rabbi: “Your help has worked! The boss has rehired me and my wife is pregnant!”

The rabbi was certainly a great psychoanalyst and did help the poor fellow. If you need
this kind of help then psychotherapy is good, but don’t ask for more.

Source – Osho Book “The Invitation”

Osho – Don’t be in a hurry to find any answer, otherwise some rubbish will kill the answer. Don’t allow your mind to kill the question. And the way of the mind to kill the question is to supply answers, unlived, unexperienced.

You are truth! But it can happen only in utter silence, when not a single thought moves, when the mind has nothing to say, when not a single ripple is in your consciousness. When there is no ripple in your consciousness, your consciousness remains undistorted. When there is a ripple, there is a distortion.

Just go to a lake. Standing on the bank, look down at your reflection. If there are waves, ripples on the lake, and wind is blowing, your reflection is shaky. You cannot figure out what is what — where is your nose and where are your eyes — you can only guess. But when the lake is silent and the wind is not blowing and there is not a single ripple on the surface, suddenly you are there. In absolute perfection, the reflection is there. The lake becomes a mirror.

Whenever there is a thought moving in your consciousness it distorts. And there are many thoughts, millions of thoughts, continuously rushing, and it is always rush-hour. Twenty-four hours a day it is rush-hour, and the traffic goes on and on and on, and each thought is associated with thousands of other thoughts. They are all holding hands and linked together and interlinked, and the whole crowd is rushing around you. How can you know what truth is? Get out of this crowd.

That’s what meditation is, that’s what meditation is all about: a consciousness without mind, a consciousness without thoughts, a consciousness without any wavering — an unwavering consciousness. Then it is there in all its beauty and benediction. Then truth is there — call it God, call it nirvana, or whatsoever you like to call it. It is there, and it is there as an experience. You are in it and it is in you.

Source – Osho Book “The Heart Sutra”

Osho – The most difficult thing, the almost impossible thing for the mind, is to remain in the middle, is to remain balanced. And to move from one thing to its opposite is the easiest. To move from one polarity to the opposite polarity is the nature of the mind. This has to be understood very deeply, because unless you understand this, nothing can lead you to meditation.

Mind’s nature is to move from one extreme to another. It depends on imbalance. If you are balanced, mind disappears. Mind is like a disease: when you are imbalanced it is there, when you are balanced, it is not there. That is why it is easy for a person who overeats to go on a fast. It looks illogical, because we think that a person who is obsessed with food cannot go on a fast. But you are wrong. Only a person who is obsessed with food can fast, because fasting is the same obsession in the opposite direction. It is not really changing yourself. You are still obsessed with food. Before you were overeating; now you are hungry – but the mind remains focused on food from the opposite extreme.

A man who has been overindulging in sex can become a celibate very easily. There is no problem. But it is difficult for the mind to come to the right diet, difficult for the mind to stay in the middle. Why is it difficult to stay in the middle? It is just like the pendulum of a clock. The pendulum goes to the right, then it moves to the left, then again to the right, then again to the left; the whole clock depends on this movement. If the pendulum stays in the middle, the clock stops. And when the pendulum moves to the right, you think it is only going to the right, but at the same time it is gathering momentum to go to the left. The more it moves to the right, the more energy it gathers to move to the left, to the opposite. When it is moving to the left it is again gathering momentum to move to the right.

Whenever you overeat, you are gathering momentum to go on a fast. Whenever you overindulge in sex, sooner or later, BRAHMACHARYA, celibacy, will appeal to you. And the same is happening from the opposite pole. Go and ask your so-called SADHUS, your BHIKKUS, sannyasins. They have made it a point to remain celibate, now their minds are gathering momentum to move into sex. They have made a point of being hungry and starving, and their minds are constantly thinking about food. When you are thinking about food too much it shows that you are gathering momentum for it. Thinking means momentum. The mind starts arranging for the opposite. One thing: whenever you move, you are also moving to the opposite. The opposite is hidden, it is not apparent.

When you love a person you are gathering momentum to hate him. That’s why only friends can become enemies. You cannot suddenly become an enemy unless you have first become a friend. Lovers quarrel, fight. Only lovers can quarrel and fight, because unless you love, how can you hate? Unless you have moved far to the extreme left, how can you move to the right? Modern research says that so-called love is a relationship of intimate enmity. Your wife is your intimate enemy, your husband is your intimate enemy – both intimate and inimical. They appear opposites, illogical, because we wonder how one who is intimate can be the enemy; one who is a friend, how can he also be the foe?

Logic is superficial, life goes deeper, and in life all opposites are joined together, they exist together. Remember this, because then meditation becomes balancing. Buddha taught eight disciplines, and with each discipline he used the word right. He said: Right effort, because it is very easy to move from action to inaction, from waking to sleep, but to remain in the middle is difficult. When Buddha used the word right he was saying: Don’t move to the opposite, just stay in the middle. Right food – he never said to fast. Don’t indulge in too much eating and don’t indulge in fasting. He said: Right food. Right food means standing in the middle. When you are standing in the middle you are not gathering any momentum. And this is the beauty of it – a man who is not gathering any momentum to move anywhere, can be at ease with himself, can be at home.

You can never be at home, because whatsoever you do you will immediately have to do the opposite to balance. And the opposite never balances, it simply gives you the impression that you are becoming balanced, but you will have to move to the opposite again. A buddha is neither a friend to anyone nor an enemy. He has simply stopped in the middle – the
clock is not functioning.

It is said about one Hassid mystic, Muzheed, that when he attained enlightenment suddenly the clock on his wall stopped. It may or may not have happened, because it is possible, but the symbolism is clear: when your mind stops, time stops; when the pendulum stops, the clock stops. From then on the clock never moved, from then on it always showed the same time.

Time is created by the movement of the mind, just like the movement of the pendulum. Mind moves, you feel time. When mind is nonmoving, how can you feel time? When there is no movement, time cannot be felt. Scientists and mystics agree on this point: that movement creates the phenomenon of time. If you are not moving, if you are still, time disappears, eternity comes into existence. Your clock is moving fast, and its mechanism is movement from one extreme to another.

The second thing to be understood about mind is that the mind always longs for the distant, never for the near. The near gives you boredom, you are fed up with it; the distant gives you dreams, hopes, possibility of pleasure. So the mind always thinks of the distant. It is always somebody else’s wife who is attractive, beautiful; it is always somebody else’s house which obsesses you; it is always somebody else’s car which fascinates you. It is always the distant. You are blind to the near. The mind cannot see that which is very near. It can only see that which is very far.

And what is the furthest, the most distant? The opposite is the most distant. You love a person – now hatred is the most distant phenomenon; you are overeating – now fasting is the most distant phenomenon; you are celibate – now sex is the most distant phenomenon; you are a king – now to be a monk is the most distant phenomenon.

The most distant is the most dreamy. It attracts, it obsesses, it goes on calling, inviting you, and then when you have reached the other pole, this place from where you have traveled will become beautiful again. Divorce your wife, and after a few years the wife has again gained beauty.

A film actress came to me. She had divorced her husband fifteen years ago. Now she is old, less beautiful than she was when she and her husband were separated. Their son was married last year, so at the marriage she met her husband again, and they had to travel together. The husband fell in love with her again, so she came to me and asked, ”What should I do? Now he is proposing again, he wants to get married to me again.”

She was also fascinated. She was just waiting for me to say yes. I said, ”But you lived together, there was always conflict and nothing else. I know the whole story – how you were fighting, quarreling, how you created hell and misery for each other. Now again…?”

For the mind the opposite is magnetic, and unless through understanding you transcend this, the mind will go on moving from left to right, from right to left, and the clock will continue. It has continued for many lives, and this is how you have been deceiving yourself – because you don’t understand the mechanism. Again the distant becomes appealing, again you start traveling. The moment you reach your goal that which you used to know is now distant, now has appeal, now becomes a star, something worthwhile.

I was reading about a pilot who was flying over California with a friend. He told the friend, ”Look down at that beautiful lake. I was born near it, that is my village.”

He pointed to a small village just perched in the hills near the lake, and he said, ”I was born there. When I was a child I used to sit near the lake and fish; fishing was my hobby. But at that time, when I was a child fishing near the lake, always airplanes used to fly in the sky, passing overhead, and I would dream of the day when I would become a pilot myself, I would be piloting an airplane. That was my only dream. Now it is fulfilled, and what misery! Now I am continuously looking down at the lake and thinking about when I will retire and go fishing again. That lake is so beautiful….”

This is how things are happening. This is how things are happening to you. In childhood, you long to grow up fast because older people are more powerful. A child longs to grow up immediately. Old people are wise, and the child feels that whatsoever he does, it is always wrong. And then ask the old man – he always thinks that when childhood was lost, everything was lost; paradise was there in childhood. And all the old men die thinking of childhood, the innocence, the beauty, the dreamland. Whatsoever you have looks useless, whatsoever you don’t have looks useful. Remember this, otherwise meditation cannot happen, because meditation means this understanding of the mind, the working of the mind, the very process of the mind.

The mind is dialectical, it makes you move again and again towards the opposite. And this is an infinite process, it never ends unless you suddenly drop out of it, unless you suddenly become aware of the game, unless you suddenly become aware of the trick of the mind, and you stop in the middle. Stopping in the middle is meditation.

Thirdly, because mind consists of polarities, you are never whole. The mind cannot be whole; it is always half. When you love someone have you observed that you are suppressing your hatred? The love is not total, it is not whole; just behind it all the dark forces are hidden and they may erupt any moment. You are sitting on a volcano.

When you love someone, you simply forget that you have anger, you have hate, you have jealousy. You simply drop them as if they never existed. But how can you drop them? You can simply hide them in the unconscious. Just on the surface you can become loving, deep down the turmoil is hidden. Sooner or later you will be fed up, the beloved will become familiar. They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but it is not that familiarity breeds contempt – familiarity makes you bored, contempt has always been there, hidden. It comes up, it was waiting for the right moment; the seed was there.

The mind always has the opposite within it, and that opposite goes into the unconscious and waits for its moment to come up. If you observe minutely, you will feel it every moment. When you say to someone, I love you, close your eyes, be meditative, and feel – is there any hatred hidden? You will feel it. But because you want to deceive yourself, because the truth is so ugly – the truth that you hate a person that you love – you don’t want to face it. You want to escape from real-ity, so you hide it. But hiding won’t help, because it is not deceiving somebody else, it is deceiving yourself.

So whenever you feel something, just close the eyes and go into yourself to find the opposite somewhere. It is there. And if you can see the opposite, that will give you a balance, then you will not say, ”I love you.” If you are truthful you will say, ”My relationship with you is of love and hate.”

All relationships are love/hate relationships. No relationship is of pure love, and no relationship is of pure hate. It is both love and hate. If you are truthful you will be in difficulty. If you say to a girl, ”My relationship with you is of both love and hate. I love you as I have never loved anybody and I hate you as I have never hated anybody,” it will be difficult for you to get married unless you find a meditative girl who can understand the reality; unless you can find a friend who can understand the complexity of the mind.

Mind is not a simple mechanism, it is very complex, and through mind you can never become simple because mind goes on creating deceptions. To be meditative means to be aware of the fact that mind is hiding something from you, you are closing your eyes to some facts which are disturbing. Sooner or later those disturbing facts will erupt, overpower you, and you will move to the opposite. And the opposite is not there in a distant faraway place, in some star; the opposite is hidden behind you, in you, in your mind, in the very functioning of the mind. If you can understand this, you will
stop in the middle.

If you can see I love and I hate, suddenly both will disappear, because both cannot exist together in the consciousness. You have to create a barrier: one has to exist in the unconscious and one in the conscious. Both cannot exist in the conscious, they will negate each other. The love will destroy hate, the hate will destroy love; they will balance each other, and they will simply disappear. The same amount of hate and the same amount of love will negate each other. Suddenly they will evaporate – you will be there, but no love and no hate. Then you are balanced.

When you are balanced, mind is not there – then you are whole. When you are whole, you are holy, but mind is not there. So meditation is a state of no-mind. Through mind it is not achieved. Through mind, whatever you do, it can never be achieved. Then what are you doing when you are meditating?

Because you have created so much tension in your life, you are now meditating. But this is the opposite of tension, not real meditation. You are so tense that meditation has become attractive. That is why in the West meditation appeals more than in the East, because more tension exists there than in the East. The East is still relaxed, people are not so tense, they don’t go mad so easily, they don’t commit suicide so easily. They are not so violent, not so aggressive, not so scared, not so fearful – no, they are not so tense. They are not living at such a mad speed where nothing but
tension is accumulated.

So if Mahesh Yogi comes to India, nobody listens. But in America, people are mad about him. When there is much tension, meditation will appeal. But this appeal is again falling into the same trap. This is not real meditation, this is again a trick. You meditate for a few days, you become relaxed; when you become relaxed, again the need for activity arises, and the mind starts thinking of doing something, of moving. You get bored with it.

People come to me and say, ”We meditated for a few years, then it became boring, then there was no more fun.”
Just the other day a girl came to me and said, ”Now meditation is not fun anymore, what should I do?”

Now the mind is seeking something else, now it has had enough of meditation. Now that she is at ease, the mind is asking for more tensions – something to get disturbed about. When she says that now meditation is no more fun, she means that now the tension is not there, so how can the meditation be fun? She will have to move into tension again, then meditation will again become something worthwhile.

Look at the absurdity of the mind: you have to go away to come near, you have to become tense to be meditative. But then this is not meditation, then again this is a trick of the same mind; on a new level the same game continues. When I say meditation, I mean going beyond the game of the polar opposites; dropping out of the whole game, looking at the absurdity of it and transcending it. The very understanding becomes transcendence.

The mind will force you to move to the opposite – don’t move to the opposite. Stop in the middle and see that this has always been the trick of the mind. This is how mind has dominated you – through the opposite. Have you felt it? After making love to a woman you suddenly start thinking of brahmacharya, and brahmacharya has such an alluring fascination at that moment that you feel as if there is nothing else to achieve. You feel frustrated, deceived, you feel that there was nothing in this sex, only brahmacharya has the bliss. But after twenty-four hours, sex again becomes important, significant, and again you have to move into it.

What is the mind doing? After the sex act it started thinking about the opposite, which again creates the taste for sex. A violent man starts thinking about nonviolence, then he can be violent again easily. A man who gets angry again and again always thinks of non-anger, always decides not to be angry again. This decision helps him to be angry again.

If you really want not to be angry again don’t decide against anger. Just look into the anger and just look at the shadow of the anger which you think is non-anger. Look into sex, and at the shadow of sex, which you think is brahmacharya, celibacy. It is just negativity, absence. Look at overeating, and the shadow of it – fasting. Fasting always follows overeating; overindulgence is always followed by vows of celibacy; tension is always followed by some techniques of meditation. Look at them together, feel how they are related; they are part of one process.

If you can understand this, meditation will happen to you. Really, it is not something to be done, it is a point of understanding. It is not an effort, it is nothing to be cultivated. It is something to be deeply understood. Understanding gives freedom. Knowledge of the whole mechanism of the mind is transformation. Then suddenly the clock stops, time disappears: and with the stopping of the clock, there is no mind. With the stopping of time, where are you? The boat is empty.

Source – Osho Book “The Empty Boat”

[A sannyasin who bakes said that because of his work he was unable to do the meditations, and should he do anything else. Osho said that when he had time he could meditate alone... ]

Osho – Baking is a good meditation. Put your love into it, your whole awareness into it. Just don’t do it for the money – do it for love also. Do it with care, and then there is no need for any other meditation. If you can change your work into meditation, that’s the best thing. Then meditation is never in conflict with your life.

Whatsoever you do can become meditative. Meditation is not something separate; it is a part of life. It is just like breathing: just as you breathe in and out, you meditate also. And it is simply a shift of emphasis; nothing much is to be done. Things that you have been doing carelessly, start doing carefully. Things that you have been doing for some results, for example, money…. That’s okay, but you can make it a plus phenomenon. Money is okay and if baking gives you money, good. One needs money, but it is not all. And just by the side if you can reap many more pleasures, why miss them? They are just free of cost.

You will be doing your work whether you love it or not, so just bringing love to it you will reap many more things which otherwise you will miss. So that is the plus thing. And it depends on you how much you can reap out of it. A very small work like baking can be of tremendous joy because food is very deeply connected with love. Love is food, and food is symbolic love. When a child starts his life, food and love start together. From the same breast of the mother flows love and food. In fact, it is very difficult to divide them, and the child knows love as food and food as love.

That’s why all over the world, whenever you love a person, you like to invite him for food, because it is a love gesture. The host becomes the mother, he becomes motherly. It is very easy to approach people’s hearts through food. Mm? business people understand it – so the business lunch. It is easy to convince the person, it is easy to sell something, very easy, when you invite a person for food. Things happen easily. He is no more defensive. He is no more argumentative… a sort of rapport, mm? because the very food reminds him of his mother; unconsciously he again becomes a small baby, more innocent, more vulnerable.

When a woman loves you she will prepare food for you with tremendous care, and that food will have a spiritual value to it. It may not be possible scientifically to make any distinction between food prepared by love and food prepared carelessly, but spiritually there is a distinction. So when you are eating food that has been prepared with love, you will feel a certain rhythm between you and the food, a rapport. It somehow synchronises with you; it somehow melts easily and becomes one with you, it cooperates with your system. Food prepared carelessly is cold, it will take a longer time to absorb it, and food prepared with anger, hatred, jealousy, is already poisoned.

So do one thing: prepare whatsoever you are preparing – cakes and that – with deep love. Money is secondary. It comes anyhow, that’s not the point at all. By the way there are beautiful flowers to be plucked; why waste the whole scene? People become too narrow in their vision and they simply look for results. There are many things just by the side, freely available, nobody asking any price for them, but people are so narrow they cannot see. They go on running like horses with blindfolds. If you can make that, it is beautiful. So make it your meditation. Good!

Source – Osho Book “Dance Your Way to God”