According to Osho, iron never literally becomes gold or the philosopher’s stone; these are poetic symbols. The “philosopher’s stone” signifies satsang—communion with the awakened—through which our already-golden essence remembers itself. “Iron turns to gold” means sleep turns to awareness. When awakening becomes total, one not only awakens oneself but can awaken others—then the “iron” itself is the philosopher’s stone.
No, not in a lab; it’s a symbol that you’re already gold inside, and being with someone awake helps you remember—until you’re so awake you can help others too.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Man can become gold, he has all the chemicals needed for that transmutation, but those chemicals have to be mixed in the right proportion, heated in the right way to the right degree. Only in a mystery school is that possible. It is the world of inner chemistry. And the moment everything inside you is put in the right place a great harmony arises. Ordinarily a man is like an orchestra in which there is no leader, no guide and everybody is playing solo. Although it is an orchestra everybody is playing solo according to his own ideas, not bothering about others, what they are doing, not making any effort to bring a harmony; hence the noise, hence the craziness inside, the insanity. Almost the whole of humanity is insane.
Become a prayer of rejoicing. Jesus says again and again to his disciples: Rejoice, rejoice, I say unto you, rejoice! He is telling them the true meaning of prayer: dance it, sing it, let it be a gratitude, a great thankfulness. Then it reaches, it succeeds, it is heard. Then it becomes a communion between you and God, it becomes a bridge. But only a prayer that arises out of bliss becomes a bridge. Any other prayer is a wall instead of being a bridge. [Make God the foundation for your life temple, Osho tells Deva Peter] Except for God, everything will be destroyed by death, hence only God can be the true rock The rock represents the eternal, the timeless, the deathless. Once God becomes the foundation of your life you move away from time into timelessness, you move beyond death into immortality.
Is not life stranger than fiction?
A great Indian mystic, Swami Ramateerth, started saying things which look mad when he attained to enlightenment. People started thinking that he had gone bizarre, because he started saying, "I see stars moving within me, not outside, but inside. When I see the morning sun rising, I see it rising in me, not outside." Now this looks like a kind of madness. It is not. He was saying something tremendously significant. He was saying: I am part of the whole and the whole is part of me. So everything is within that is without, and everything is without that is within. All that has happened is in me, and all that is going to happen is in me, and all that is happening is in me. To feel this, to see this, is to be in prayer, in awe, in wonder. Will you not be grateful to be part of…
Osho, there is a verse in the Yoga Vasistha: “As a person constantly strives, as he imagines with total absorption, and as he wishes to become—so he becomes; not otherwise.” Osho, is it really so?
About thirty to thirty-three percent of people are highly susceptible to hypnosis. They are easily hypnotized. These very people become your so-called religious people—your saints, your fakirs. For them, anything is easy. Having bound their own hands by imagination, they now try to open them and cannot. And there is a twist: the more they try and fail, the deeper their conviction that it is now impossible; their hands are bound and won’t open. They panic; they have no way to open them—except to reverse the process. They should stop struggling. Again for ten minutes they should think the opposite of what they thought before: “When I open my hands after ten minutes, they will surely open; certainly they will open. No doubt.” After ten minutes, their hands will open. You can test this with ten friends. You may not have suspected that you are among that thirty-three percent. Such…
Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?
There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…