Use your mind for math and plans, but for love, grief, and meaning, quiet down and feel—clarity comes from being present, not from thinking harder.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Can problems be solved through thinking?
You can take the explanation that the soul is immortal -- now this is a trick. Not that the soul is not immortal -- I am not saying that -- but for you this is a trick. You are trying to deceive yourself. You are in sorrow, and now you want to escape this sorrow, so this explanation will be helpful. Now you can console yourself that the soul is immortal, no one dies, only the body -- just as if one changes the clothes, or one changes the abode -- so from one house to another the soul has gone. You can go on thinking, but you don't know anything about it. You have heard, you have collected information; but through these explanations you will be at ease. You can forget the death. Really this is no solution to the problem. Nothing has been solved. The next day someone…
Beloved Osho, here again, I find myself in the distress of a relationship finishing. It's still the same pattern. I feel that I cannot deal with it any differently than before. Is there no other way than playing the record again and again and again and just watching it? Each time, I think, "with awareness it will be different this time." but no -- the anger, the distress, the hurt, the aloneness, and also the understanding that love comes and fades away. I also am doubting that these moments of love were real. But when those moments of love and connecting are there, they do feel real.
Life is a vicious circle. One things lead to another thing until the circle is complete. To go on moving in a circle is boring, is monotonous, is heavy on the heart. It destroys all playfulness, it destroys weightlessness; it takes away the charm, the magnetic pull towards life. You go again and again in the same routine, in the same circle, unwillingly. You do not want to repeat; nobody wants to repeat. Repetition is the function of a machine. Wherever there is a consciousness, there is a revolt against mechanical repetition. So I can understand your tragedy. Moreover, it is the tragedy of millions of human beings. They are all caught in a circle and then they don't know how to jump out of it. The problem can be reduced to very simple terms: You find it difficult to jump out of the routine because you have some vested…
Osho, what is a problem?
Never ask a theological question, because that is borrowed. Find out existential questions. Find out where your difficulty is. Find out where your shoe pinches. Find out your own problems. And your problem may not be another's, so the other may not agree that this is a problem. Problems are individual; they are not a universal phenomenon. My problem is my problem; your problem is your problem. They are as different as your thumbprints, and they have to be. When I see that people are asking borrowed problems, they don't have your signature on them, and then they are futile -- not worth even asking, not worth answering. Your problem should have your signature on it. It should come out of your life, out of the struggle, challenge, response, out of your own confrontation. I have heard: So finally the marriage broker induced Cohen to meet this girl. After all…
Osho, my problem is that I think there is something wrong with me. If I think that I have a problem then I really do have one. In fact, thinking seems to be just the making up of problems. What do you think?
Have you watched this? If one day many things happen you have a different sense of time; if some day nothing happens You have a totally different sense of the time. The sense of time depends on what happens. Time is measured through events. But nothing is happening in the womb all is quiet, The child cannot feel that there are nine months only; it is infinity. It is a timeless state. And floating in the mother's womb in a warm liquid is immensely pleasant. That's how the desire for bliss arises in us, because we have experienced it. Otherwise, you cannot seek for anything that you have never experienced. Something must be there lingering deep down in your unconscious -- some experience, some nostalgia that keeps you searching for bliss. The whole search for God is basically the search for the mother's womb. And the meditator really enters into…
Osho, when the mind becomes completely thoughtless, then what will it think about? To think, one still needs something to think about, at least as a problem, isn’t it?
If you understand rightly, thoughtlessness does not see problems; it sees solutions. Thought sees problems and then has to think up solutions. The solution is self-fabricated; the problem is outside. For a mind full of thought, the problem is outside and the solution is concocted within. For a thought-free consciousness the problem is not seen at all; only the solution is seen. Therefore there is no need to think. If you like, you can call this right thinking. This, in truth, is what thinking should be: where seeing happens—where there is no problem, only the solution. Understand it like this: when first the problem is seen and then you have to make a solution, that is thought. But if, the very moment the problem is seen, the solution appears—no gap at all between problem and solution, not even a moment left over for cogitation—then know it is thoughtlessness. Therefore, do…