How to integrate meditation with work and business?

Osho, meditation, discourses and kirtan—and then work and business! It feels so crude! How to keep doing it?

The angel said, “I’ll have to check the ledgers; we had no intimation of an arrival now. Must have been a very big doctor! Wait here while I look inside. What did you do for a living?” The man said, “Nothing special—buying and selling scrap iron; I had a junk shop.” The angel went in. When he returned, the man was gone—and so was the iron gate. A scrap dealer given a moment—he ran off with heaven’s iron gate as well. All his life he dealt in scrap; he must have seen what a fine gate it was—and what use is it in heaven anyway! He took it. Your mind goes with you wherever you go. If your mind is that of a junk dealer, you’ll do the same at heaven’s door. Don’t become an enemy of work and business. Don’t bring in that stiffness. To be with me means…

Beloved master, I am a businessman. Can I also meditate and become a sannyasin?

Remain a businessman, but for a few hours forget all about it. I am not here to tell you to escape from your ordinary life. I am here to tell you the ways and the means, the alchemy, to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Be a businessman in your shop and don't be a businessman at your home. And sometimes for a few hours forget even the home, the family, the wife, the children. For a few hours just be alone with yourself. Sink deeper and deeper into your own being. Enjoy yourself, love yourself. And slowly slowly, you will become aware, a great joy is welling up, with no cause from the outside world, uncaused from the outside. It is your own flavor, it is your own flowering. This is meditation. Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Sit silently, doing nothing,…

Is it possible to live religiously and continue on the road to enlightenment while living in a country like the usa and involving oneself in a competitive business?

It is not accidental that Jesus' followers go on talking about Jesus' miracles.What are those miracles? First, they are physiological: a blind man is given eyes, an ill person is healed; or miracles like Jesus' turning stones into bread. Just think! These miracles say something. Jesus does not turn stones into sermons, but into bread; Jesus does not turn stones into music, but into bread; and he turns water into wine. Now we don't have any miracles like that around Buddha. There are miracles, but they are totally different -- the hierarchy. Buddha's miracles are so different that you will be surprised. A woman goes to Buddha: her child is dead and she is crying and she is weeping, and she is a widow and she will never have another child, and the only child is dead, and that was all her love and all her attention. She goes crying…

No, take the challenge to stay with the every-day activity. Vipassana should not become a style of life. These are just techniques to be learned and immediately forgotten, so only the quality is carried with you. The flavour, the fragrance, not the flower, has to be carried into day-to-day activity. so by and by you don't know what is meditation and what is ordinary activity -- they become one. Learn the technique -- and for learning, of course, one needs to be in a particular place. Once you have known the technique, then unlearn it. Then just move into ordinary life -- eat, drink, sleep. Just be ordinary, and carry the sense of silence that has come to you. Again and again remember it, again and again remind yourself. Again and again move into that feeling and catch hold of it in ordinary life.

Osho, no—the way people think these days is: religion is separate in the temple and business is separate in the marketplace. Then the whole business—the trade line...

By that reckoning, you’ve fallen into confusion. Either it is like this: that stage—just as in meditation thoughts arise on their own—according to the theory you’ve stated, then the whole of life is just that. Yes, the truth is that the whole of life has to be like that. (Question inaudible.) Once it is understood, there’s nothing left to do; it becomes twenty-four hours. It becomes twenty-four hours. (Question inaudible.) It has already happened—once it is understood, the thing is done.