How can I meditate in a world filled with suffering and poverty?

Osho, how can I meditate while there is so much suffering, poverty, and wretchedness in the world? In such a situation, isn’t meditation pure selfishness? Even if I were to meet God, instead of asking for my own peace I would rather ask for punishment for those because of whom there is exploitation, suffering, and injustice in the world.

As you wish! If one doesn’t want to meditate, any excuse will do. If you don’t want to meditate you can convince yourself by any logic that meditation is wrong. But you haven’t even yet understood what meditation is. Nor have you understood that all this suffering, pain, and turmoil in the world is precisely because there is no meditation. A suffering person spreads suffering. Even if he wanted to give something else, he couldn’t. You can only give what you have. If you don’t have it, how will you give it? The unhappy give unhappiness; the fulfilled give fulfillment. If you want joy in the world, inner peace and inner awareness are essential conditions. Don’t stumble over the word “meditation.” It simply means you begin to sink into the juice of your own being. When you are full of inner nectar, it flows through your actions. Then whatever you…

Osho, I cry a lot when I see the world’s suffering. Can’t this suffering be stopped?

Social workers sometimes come to me. A gentleman has been serving the tribal people of Bastar for fifty years. He came to see me—an old man, around eighty. He said, “There is great restlessness in my life, great unease.” I said, “Fifty years of social service—and your restlessness and unease have not gone? Then who knows how many you have made restless and uneasy in these fifty years! Why are you after people?” He said, “I have not done anything wrong. I am working for tribal education.” I said, “First look at the state of your universities. Look at the lives of the educated. Why are you after the tribals? Where have the educated reached? Your universities are the dens of the greatest unrest. What joy is there in the lives of the educated? “The truth is, the educated become ambitious, and ambition increases suffering. Everyone educated wants to be…

Osho, the worry about the world haunts me. People are extremely unhappy. What can I do for them? I search a lot in the scriptures too, but nowhere do I find a path.

Who has ever found the way in the scriptures? If you want a cut-and-dried, hand-me-down path, search the scriptures—you will get lost there. You do not even understand life itself; how will you understand scripture? Life is such an open book before you—so revealed, so clear, written by the hands of the divine—and if that does not make sense to you, then scriptures, words bound in books, will not be comprehensible to you. This is what you miss. A rose blooms and you do not see God in it. A stream of consciousness flows within you and you do not see the divine there. What will you find in dead books, in ink stains on paper? There you will go astray. You will not find from there. Yes, the one who begins to see in life will also find it in the scriptures. And the one who cannot see it…

Osho, what is the definition of God?

Words are very small. If you say God is light, then what of darkness? The scriptures have said that God is light. Suppose we accept this as a definition—then what about darkness? Where will darkness go? Darkness is too; in fact it is far more than light. Light sometimes is and sometimes is not; darkness is always, eternal. Where will you place darkness? If you say God is light, darkness is left out. If you say God is darkness, then light is left out. If you say God is both darkness and light, a contradiction arises: they cannot be together. Try to have both darkness and light in the same room. If you bring in light, darkness disappears; if you preserve darkness, you cannot have light. Then how can both be together? That becomes an impossibility. So you cannot say “both” either. Then the fourth device is to say: it…

Another friend has asked: Osho, what is the relationship between the method of meditation and jati-smaran (recollection of past lives)?

But the one who becomes skilled in this—who can fully awaken any day’s memory up to the age of five—will find that the memories begin to awaken completely. And you should test it. As today passes, note down some events and lock them up. After two years, try to recall today. Most of it will have been forgotten. Then remember—and after remembering, break the lock and compare whether what you recalled matches what you had written. You will be amazed—astonished—that besides what you wrote, many more details have come back which you did not even note at the time. They will all be there in memory. Buddha called this alaya-vijnana. There is a corner of the human mind he called the storehouse of consciousness. Like a junk room in the house where we keep all the odds and ends, there is a storehouse that collects memories—where everything from birth after…