According to Osho, evil cannot be uprooted directly because it is only a symptom of inner restlessness. Like medicine treats the hidden disease, meditation treats the root: the unquiet mind. By cultivating inner peace through meditation, the energy feeding anger, violence, and negativity dries up, and these surface symptoms naturally dissolve without struggle.
Meditation calms your mind, and when you’re calm, bad feelings and actions fade away on their own.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, since evil exists, how can we eradicate it by meditation alone?
It is like someone saying: There is illness—how will we get rid of it by merely taking medicine? Show me some direct way to remove the illness. A man says, I have a cough, a cold, a fever; I have TB, cancer. The doctor hands him a bottle. The man says, Have you gone mad? Here I am dying of cancer and you hand me a bottle? What will this bottle do? He says, I am dying of cancer and you give me red-colored water to hold? What will this red-colored water do? But it does not occur to him that cancer or disease is not going to be pulled out and placed outside directly. To remove cancer or illness, to bring about a change, something opposite has to be introduced. We are ill; by applying what is opposite to the illness, the illness will be cut off. It is…Read the full discourse →
Osho, please explain how, in meditation practice, the dissolution and sublimation of violent tendencies—that is, dissolution and sublimation—take place?
Mahavira was standing near a village and some people came and beat him severely. Someone drove iron pegs into his ears. He stood watching. Later someone asked him, “You said nothing at all? You could at least have said, ‘Why are you beating me without cause?’” Mahavira said: “They were not beating me without cause. There must surely have been some cause in their minds to beat. Perhaps the cause was not related to me, but there was a cause within them. And I thought it would be better if they beat me; if they beat someone else, they would not return without receiving a return blow. Let their violence undergo nirjara. Better than me they would find it hard to find anyone.” Mahavira behaved like a pillow with those people. In meditation the nirjara of all suppressed surges takes place—whether of violence, of anger, of sex, or of greed—meditation…Read the full discourse →
A friend has asked: Osho, if meditation brings peace to life, then why does it not spread across the whole country?
We teach children: anger is bad, anger is a sin, don’t be angry. The result is not that they stop being angry—that cannot happen. The anger only remains incomplete, never allowed to run its full course; they never fully experience the pain of anger; they never pass through its fire. And then the question of non-anger does not arise; the search for peace does not begin. One who has not even been truly unpeaceful—how can he become peaceful? One who lacks even the capacity to be fully unpeaceful—how will he have the capacity to be peaceful? These things may sound upside-down, but I tell you: only the one who can be thoroughly unpeaceful can truly set out on the path to peace. One who, by getting angry, lives anger through and through—who is pierced by all its thorns, who is singed in its flames—one who drinks anger to the dregs…Read the full discourse →
A friend has asked, Osho, I am very restless, and so much energy gets used up in this restlessness. How can I make use of it, and what is its cause?
But the anger remains there; it will not change by your turning away. It will change by your standing your ground and seeing it. If you turn your back, anger will make deeper wounds within and lay down roots. Fix both your eyes on anger. This is the moment to consciously see anger. When lust seizes the mind, do not run. Do not panic. Do not chant Ram-Ram. Look lust straight in the face. A direct encounter with the passions is necessary. But man has been taught to run. He has been told, wherever something bad appears—run away. But where will you run? The bad is within you; it will go with you. There is no way to run away from yourself. If evil were outside somewhere, we could run. It stands within—we will have to change it. We will have to use this manure. And using it is not…Read the full discourse →
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…Read the full discourse →