According to Osho, the mind is dropped not by managing or refining it, but by letting it become so burdened that it falls from your grip on its own. His talks deliberately pile on "weight" - questions, ideas, paradoxes - until the last straw breaks your holding. In that collapse, effort stops and simple awareness remains.
When your head feels too full, don’t try to sort it—just put it down like a bag that’s too heavy.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
A friend has asked: Osho, confusion and clarity—what is that mind filled with delusion, so tangled, the confused mind? And what is clarity of mind? And what does it mean for the mind to be cleansed, fresh, and pure?
This needs a little understanding, because it will be useful for meditation and also for the art of dying. His question is precious. He asks, “What is this tangled mind?” But a mistake creeps in here. We say, “tangled mind, restless mind, confused mind.” That is where the mistake happens. What mistake? We are using two words: “tangled” and “mind.” The truth is, there is no such thing as a “tangled mind.” The state of tangling itself is what is called mind. There isn’t a confused mind; mind is confusion. It is not that there is an unquiet mind; the very name of unquietness is mind. And when unquietness is gone, it is not that the mind becomes quiet—rather, the mind is no more. Understand it this way: a storm has arisen on the ocean, the sea is turbulent, and you say “a restless storm.” Someone will say, “Restless storm?…
A friend has asked: Osho, you said about a wayward son that one should let him pass through his experiences, and he will learn on his own. But even after experiencing, he still prefers the same thing—someone is asking about his wayward son—no matter how much suffering he has to endure, even if death itself should come, still he does the same. After stumbling again and again, he repeats it. What can be done? How to reform him?
You will not be able to reform him. If life cannot reform him, if even death cannot reform him, what will you be able to do? If what you say is true—that again and again, even after suffering, he does the same thing; even if death comes, he will still do the same thing, and he does not change—then take your hands off. You will not be able to reform him. You cannot be stronger than death. And one who does not learn from suffering—what will he learn from you? Do not call him a wayward son. You have found yourself a Jadabharata. Because those whom suffering does not reform, whom even death does not reform—these are great, arrived masters; they are in the ultimate state. Do not even try to reform such a one. And why are you so eager to reform another? It is enough to reform yourself.…
I have been thinking all day of a way to ask the question: how to stop thinking?
Mind is making almost no noise; goes on working silently. And such a servant! -- for seventy, eighty years. And then, too, when you are dying your body may be old but your mind remains young. Its capacity remains yet the same. Sometimes, if you have used it rightly, it even increases with your age! -- because the more you know, the more you understand, the more you have experienced and lived, the more capable your mind becomes. When you die, everything in your body is ready to die -- except the mind. That's why in the East we say mind leaves the body and enters another womb, because it is not yet ready to die. The rebirth is of the mind. Once you have attained the state of samadhi, no-mind, then there will be no rebirth. Then you will simply die. And with your dying, everything will be dissolved…
Osho, please explain how I can meditate over something without using my mind.
Meditation has nothing to do with mind; meditation simply means a state of no-mind. The functioning of the mind is the only disturbance in meditation. If you are trying to achieve meditation THROUGH mind you are bound to fail, doomed to fail. You are trying to achieve the impossible. A Zen initiate was meditating for years and whenever he would come to his Master, whatsoever experience he would bring to the Master, the Master would simply reject: "It is all nonsense. You go back and meditate again." One day the Master came to the but of the disciple -- he was sitting in a Buddha posture. The Master shook him and told him, "What are you doing here? If we needed stone Buddhas we have many in the temple! Just by sitting like a stone Buddha you will not attain to meditation. Do what I have been telling you to…
Osho: You cannot be open through effort. If you are thinking this, then you have not understood it. Thinking means non-understanding. The person who thinks is a man of non-understanding. A person who knows doesn't think. (much laughter) It is not a question of thinking. He sees, he is aware, but not in thinking. Thoughts are not opening, thoughts are closing; they close your mind. The more you are in a thinking mood, the more you are closed and isolated from the whole. If you are not thinking, if you just are, if you are in a state of being, then something comes. That is not thinking, that is the realization. That is not thinking, you have not thought it. And the more you have thought about it, the less is the possibility for its coming. The known must go for the unknown to come.