According to Osho, simply observe your mind for a week, noting in a diary what repeatedly consumes your energy—jealousy, power-lust, ego, anger, greed, sexuality, inferiority/superiority. Whatever dominates is your chief characteristic—and your primary enemy. Finding it is half the victory; only you can. Then stay aware and non-reactive when it appears; detached witnessing dissolves its hold and frees energy.
Watch what takes most of your energy for a week, write it down, and when it shows up, don’t fight—just watch it until it loses power.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, you were speaking last night about gurdjieff's work, and the individual's chief characteristic. How does one find out what one's chief characteristic is?
It is very simple. Just watch your mind for a few days and see what is the thing that takes most of your energy: jealousy? lust for power? ego? Just watch whatever takes most of your energy, and you will find what is your chief characteristic, and that it is your number one enemy; and you have always thought that that is your number one friend. Somebody may find greed, somebody may find anger, somebody may find repressed sexuality, somebody may find an inferiority complex or a superiority complex -- it does not matter what it is. Finding it is almost half the victory. And only you can find it out. Gurdjieff had his own ways to find it. He will force his disciples to drink as much wine as possible. He will go on forcing them. And by midnight everybody was flat on the floor, and then he will…
Osho, yesterday you described the cathartic practice of pillow‑beating to release anger. In the same way, what practices should be done for the cessation of lust, greed, attachment, and ego? Please shed some light on these.
The friend I mentioned yesterday—today his companion told me he actually pulled out a knife and ripped the pillow to shreds. I hadn’t even suggested that! It makes us laugh: how can someone stab a pillow? But when we can rip a living person apart, we don’t laugh—so what’s the difficulty in slicing a pillow? When someone tears a living person, the “juice” is in the tearing itself; the person is incidental. That same juice can arise with a pillow. In fact, more so—because with a pillow you need impose no limits at all. So shut yourself in your room, and when your root “disease” wants to show itself, let it show. Consider this meditation. Let it come out in every pore of your being. Shout, jump, do whatever is happening—let it happen. And watch from behind—you will even feel like laughing. You will be surprised: “I can do this?”…
Nischalatwam pradakshinam "stillness is pradakshina, the movement around that for worship."
Accept your anger. It is there: accept it and be aware of it. These are two things: acceptance and awareness. And you can be aware only if you accept totally. If you do not accept me, you cannot look at my face. If you do not accept me, you will try to avoid me in subtle ways. Even if I am present in the room, you will look in some other direction, you will think of something else. If you do not accept me, if you reject me, your whole mind will try to avoid me. If you reject anger, you cannot be aware. You cannot encounter it face to face. And when anger is encountered face to face, it dissolves. When sex is encountered face to face, the energy is released into a different dimension. Encounter your mind and accept it. The negative teachings, the condemnatory teachings, teachings which…
Question: bhagwan sri, just as you explained the process of annihilation of anger yesterday, are there methods of annihilating, sex, greed, delusion and ego also? Kindly enumerate these too.
We stand outside, the stream of Gita flows away -- away and apart! I asked him, "What sort of a man are you?" And this is not the case of one man alone. I know many who have the same problem but who are afraid to admit it as their problem. They always insist on a private interview to discuss it with me and request that their problems may not be made public. I say to them that this is as much a personal problem of others as theirs. Now everyone hears the Gita in public but about sex, each one wants a private audience. How is that possible? Besides, you are afraid even to raise the question of your actual problem, whereas you delight in hearing that which is not your problem at all! Thus thousands of years pass and man is still the same. Catch hold of your…
Next time it happens, just watch it. Become very objective, a detached watcher, just to see what exactly it is, how it arises just like a small seed, and then how it grows and becomes a big tree and how you are completely lost in it. Just see the whole process of its growth and just see how you help it to grow. Don't be in a hurry to drop it and don't be in a hurry to get out of it; that's where people are wrong. People are in such a hurry to get out that they can't see how they get in, and that is the secret: just watch how you get in. Once you have seen the whole process and the misery that comes out of it, in that very understanding something evaporates. It is not a question of dropping -- just an old habit evaporates.