According to Osho, let the Buddha and Zorba wrestle without anxiety; don’t rush to fix the split. Watch the inner tug-of-war playfully, and by postponing the urge to ‘settle it,’ you loosen identification. In relaxed witnessing, their energies naturally harmonize—joy and silence, earthiness and awareness—meeting without repression or guilt. Allow time, humor, and awareness to do the integrating.
Don’t panic about the inner fight; smile, wait, and just watch—when you relax, both sides learn to live together.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
She said, "You are behaving like a simpleton. If the sun is here, I cannot be here; if I am here, the sun cannot be here. We cannot stand each other. You will have to hear our story separately and then decide." God said, "That is not my way. You both have to be present here so I can be certain that nobody is lying." The woman said, "Then it is better I take my complaint back." Since then, the woman has not appeared again. Once in a while the sun comes to inquire, "What happened to the woman -- because I want to clear it up, it has become a worry on my head that somebody is being hurt by me, perhaps unknowingly." God said, "You need not be worried. The problem is such that it cannot be solved.
Beloved Osho, the buddha in me condemns the zorba, and the zorba envies the buddha. How can these two beloveds within me become friends?
Just let them fight one day more. Tomorrow we will settle it!
What is your relationship with zorba, as invented by kazantzakis, and what does zorba have in common with you? I know that he didn't have any wealth....
Gautam Buddha was a Zorba up to the age of twenty-nine. Six years of deep meditation transformed the man. He became enlightened. So when I have called the new man Zorba the Buddha, I have reasons to call it so. Every man is born as a Zorba. Your religions don't allow you to live the Zorba, so you don't get bored with it. They don't allow you to live it so totally that you get finished with it. Your religions are preventing you from becoming buddhas. The word `buddha' means the enlightened one, the awakened one. Your religions are keeping you asleep. They are certainly functioning as opium. My effort is to make you first totally Zorbas, utterly Zorbas, intensely Zorbas, so that you can transcend Zorba and enter into another phase of your consciousness -- the awakening. Zorba is the foundation of the temple. Buddha is the temple itself.…
Question: The second question: WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ZORBA AND ZEN? The whole past of humanity has tried to keep them separate, and this has been an unfortunate experiment. The Zorba has remained incomplete, just superficial. And Zen has remained incomplete; it has only the inner world, and the outer is missing. My Manifesto of Zen is that Zorba and Zen are not antagonistic to each other. The Zorba can melt into Zen, and only then will both be complete. The man who has lived outside has lived very superficially, and the man who does not know anything about the inner, knows nothing about the existential, about the eternal. And on the other hand, the man who knows something of the inner starts thinking that the outer is illusory. Nothing is illusory. The outer and the inner are part of one existence.
Beloved Osho, I am a rasa addict, and I can see how this dependency leads to misery. The coolness of meditation scares me though. Can zorba survive the buddha, or can the buddha really remain juicy?
So the blind man does not have any idea of darkness because he cannot see light. When you close your eyes you certainly see darkness because you are aware of light. But the blind man has never opened his eyes and has never seen light; so he lives in a third space which cannot be named because there is no word for him. Seeing is nonexistential to him: he simply does not see, neither light nor darkness. What I am indicating is that where you see a duality between body and soul, between Zorba and Buddha, your question is: Can Zorba survive Buddha? Can Buddha remain juicy? In fact only a Zorba can be a Buddha, and only a Buddha can be a Zorba. Zorba alone, without being a Buddha, is very superficial. Buddha alone, without being a Zorba, has depth, but no life. Together there will be depth, and…