Is it easy not to have future plans?

Is it easy not to have future plans? I mean, every single person in the world worries about tomorrow. You don't, because you are being taken care of.

I was not worrying even when I was not being taken care of. It has not been always so. I left my family when I was seventeen because I was not ready to go to a science college as my family wanted. They were not willing to support me financially to study philosophy. And they were right, because what are going to do when you become a philosopher? -- you can only be a beggar. In this world philosophy has no value. So I told them, "You don't worry; you just leave me alone -- I don't think of tomorrow." And since that day I have never thought about tomorrow.

Beloved Osho, can one live without planning? Not counting the dreams about a hazy future, I see that a lot of my mind activity goes into planning -- for next week, for next month. And when I try to act spontaneously I look like a weather vane that does not know how the wind blows.

These are the people who have made the proverb: Man proposes and God disposes. There is no God and nobody disposes. Your very proposition is wrong. Proposing anything from your side means you are not trusting existence. Just be a weather vane which slowly moves without any reluctance, without any resistance, wherever the wind is blowing. It enjoys all directions. The whole of life has to be enjoyed; existence in all its colors has to be enjoyed. But the mind is one of the most stupid things that you are carrying within you. When it is morning it is longing for the evening, when it is evening it is longing for the morning; it is the root cause of all your misery and frustrations. What is the need? I cannot understand why the weather vane should want to know how the wind blows. Can you figure it out? Is there…

Osho, entangled in the hope of becoming something, nothing happened. Only the awareness remained that I am. Neither wealth came, nor a house was built, nor music arrived, nor did I become a scholar. Even living itself did not suit me. After coming here, unknowingly I gave life a new direction. The past has been spent in wandering, the present in sannyas, and you decide the future—what will it be?

Deepak Bharti! In life there is only one entanglement, the one and only—and it is there in everyone’s life without exception—the hope of becoming something. You are what you are; you cannot be otherwise. The very effort to be otherwise is anxiety, gloom, anguish. In that effort a vicious circle is born. Then with your own hands you raise new whirlpools; you sink and you rise, you sink and you rise. Your life becomes a long series of dreams—and of every dream’s shattering. If a rose wants to become a lotus, madness is certain. If champa wants to become jasmine, illness is certain. What is, as it is—its acceptance is sannyas. Sannyas means: tathata, thusness; to embrace oneself totally—not in defeat, not as a consolation, not as a sop, because that would be false; but with understanding, with awareness, by seeing this truth: a rose is a rose, and as…

[A sannyasin says: I heard... you said that a sannyasin is one who has no past and no future, and that that could be frightening.] The future is a great problem and one has to come to grips with it. Firstly the future is nothing but your unlived past, projected. Whatsoever has remained incomplete in the past, tends to complete itself in the future. So the future is a reflection of the past. When one lives moment to moment, completely, totally, wholly, by and by the future disappears by itself. That's why I say that a sannyasin has no future, because the future is a pathology of the mind. By a sannyasin I mean one who is healthy or who at least is trying to be healthy; who has no wounds. If you don't have any wounds you need not have any future, because there is nothing to heal.

Osho! To live in the world and yet not be of the world is sannyas. Why does this feel impossible to me?

Prem Chaitanya! It certainly feels impossible, but it isn’t. It only seems so because, until the taste of witnessing arises, whatever we do and wherever we are, we identify with it. That very identification settles on us like dust. Then the mirror of consciousness no longer reflects existence. A Zen saying: cranes and egrets fly over a lake; they have no desire that their reflections form in the water, yet reflections appear. The lake has no desire to reflect them either, yet reflections appear. The cranes and egrets fly on, and the reflections vanish. Such is the state of witnessing: reflections appear and disappear. Ordinarily, we clutch at the reflections. As they begin to fade we cling, we plead with them, “Stop! Stay!” They cannot stop; hence pain, hence sorrow. We cannot let go of the past; we cannot be free of the familiar—that is the hindrance. And upon the…