Are you against garlic?

So many dishes in the ashram kitchen contain onions. Remembering that raman maharshi said to avoid chillies, excess of salt, onions, etc, I am struck with the question: is the kitchen sabotaging our possibilities of enlightenment?

Remember, anything that prevents you from becoming enlightened is your knowing, your thought-process, nothing else. And there is the real task -- how to drop the thought-process. And because you feel impotent there, you create small problems: how to eat only once a day, how to eat without salt, how to eat without ghee, how to eat this way or that way. Jaina monks eat standing. If you eat sitting, enlightenment is sabotaged. Jaina monks eat only once a day. If you eat twice, enlightenment is sabotaged. One Jaina monk come to see me and he said 'Eating twice is not good.' I said 'Eating once?' He said 'Eating once is okay.' I told him 'Half the enlightenment is sabotaged.' And enlightenment does not come in parts. Either it comes whole or it doesn't come. If twice a day is dangerous then once a day is fifty percent dangerous. You…

Osho, please shed some light on this clear method of returning.

There are a few things to understand here as well. Ordinarily we have no idea that every touch of ours is a magnetic touch. When we touch someone filled with love, the one who is touched senses the difference. When we touch filled with hatred, that too is sensed. When we touch with indifference, even that is felt. In all three states our magnetic element flows in different currents. And if, with the whole mind and a firm resolve, one concentrates entirely in the hands, the magnetic currents become very intense—what Mesmer called magnetic passes. If we lay a person down naked, do not touch the body, and hold both our hands above the head at a distance of about four inches, keeping that gap, and then, while vibrating the hands strongly, move them the same four inches above the body down to the feet, and do this for fifteen…

Osho, does diet have an effect on the mind?

Some foods are stimulating; they create excitement. All of them are obstacles in spiritual life. Some foods are non-stimulating; they do not arouse excitement. They support spiritual life. Some foods are intoxicating, giving a kind of inebriation; some are non-intoxicating. Intoxicating and stimulating foods are obstacles in spiritual life. But our craving for intoxicating, stimulating foods—the taste for them, the urge within to take them—will dissolve through meditation. As the mind begins to grow quiet, the diet will begin to change accordingly. Recently such incidents have occurred around me. Some friends were meat-eaters. When they first came to me they immediately asked, “We eat meat; you won’t make it a condition of meditation that we must give it up? We can’t give it up.” I told them, I don’t talk about diet at all. Eat whatever you like, enjoy it; I have nothing to do with it. But begin meditation.…

Osho, I had said something about fasting. People have asked: Are you opposed to fasting? Don’t the senses grow weak through fasting, bringing detachment? Didn’t Mahavira, Buddha, and others do their sadhana through fasting? In this way, many questions have come related to fasting.

The body is an amazing mechanism. The flesh and fat stored in our body are not without purpose. If we stop eating, the body starts digesting its own fat and flesh—a kind of carnivory. We begin to eat our own meat. That is why your weight drops. If you don’t eat for a day, a pound can drop—you’ve digested a pound of your own flesh. The body has to work every day and needs to digest flesh; ordinarily you supply it from food and all goes on. If you stop eating, the stock of flesh you carry begins to be consumed. Within four or five days, the body drops the habit of taking new food and starts digesting its own tissues. You must have seen frogs—they almost come alive in the rains and spend the rest of the time almost like dead, buried in the earth; they dry up and…

Osho, the great Russian spiritual sage and mystic George Gurdjieff has written the memoir of his spiritual search, Meetings with the Remarkable Men. In it he recounts a long discussion with a dervish about chewing food and about yogic pranayama and postures, which greatly impressed him. The dervish told him that one should chew food less, sometimes even swallow it with the bone; this makes the stomach powerful. Along with this the dervish advised him not to do any kind of breathing exercises. The dervish said that changing the natural breathing pattern disturbs the whole personality and has fa

The first thing is this: it is true that if food is not chewed, the stomach will become strong. The work that the mouth is doing will then be done by the stomach. But the consequences will be very harmful. First, understand that the mouth is a part of the stomach. It is not something separate from the stomach; it is the beginning of the stomach. The mouth and the stomach are not two different things; the mouth is where the stomach begins. So the dervish with whom Gurdjieff spoke did not really know where the stomach starts. Where does the stomach begin? It begins at the mouth. And if you do not let the mouth do its work—its work is necessary and indispensable—if you drop it, then the stomach will have to take over that work. But in doing so there will be a double loss. The inner links…