According to Osho, he declines to answer your question about living and earning “just for fun,” redirecting you to your own inner clarity. If you can find answers within, you aren’t ordinary. The teaching is self-inquiry: test life, watch, and let understanding decide. If, after sincere exploration, you can’t discover it, then return and ask.
He won’t tell you; he wants you to look inside and try things, because you can find your own answer.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, is it necessary to live a worldly life to attain self-realization?
The world is fire—vast, blazing. All around you are flames. It is necessary to pass through these flames, for each flame carries a lesson, a teaching, and each will make you stronger. By knowing and knowing again, by falling and rising, one day you will recognize that here everything is insubstantial. The day you know this, the flower of supreme renunciation will bloom in your life. I can tell you, “All is insubstantial,” but will it become insubstantial for you just because I said so? Without tasting, it will not. I can tell you, “Neem is bitter,” but if you have not tasted it, will neem be bitter for you? Even if you trust me, somewhere a doubt will slip in: Who knows, perhaps the man is lying? Perhaps he himself was deceived? Perhaps his tongue is odd, and to him it tasted bitter? Apart from one’s own experience, there…
Osho, the life I am living, and the way I am living—Is this what life is?
He didn’t listen. He came just now, greatly repentant—didn’t become chief minister, and is no longer even a minister. He said, Now tell me meditation. I said: Now come again—when the chance to become chief minister arises once more in your life. People want meditation free—without giving up anything. And meditation is the most precious thing in life. There is no gem greater than it. Even if you give up everything for it—you have lost nothing. Take to meditation, Madhukar! Your very name is sweet—Madhukar, honeybee! Within, the true flower is in bloom. Come inside. Hum its song there. There is the real nectar. Whoever has drunk it is satisfied forever. If to the blossoming mangoes the maddened bees do not come, how am I to know that springtime has arrived? Granted, the sky seems open now and washed, wide-spread, blue upon blue, the frost-burned lawn turns yellow-green again on…
Question: Second question: Osho! I can’t make any sense of whether I’m alive or not! You will have to drop all the logic you have collected—borrowed and stale. You will have to rely on your own intelligence. Only your own intelligence can liberate you. No one else’s truth can set you free. Only your own intelligence can give you life. And this crowd all around—these are all dead. It is a crowd of corpses. Seeing them, don’t conclude, “After all, there are so many; they too are alive like me, so I must be alive.” That would be mere logic, empty logic, of no value. In Jesus’ life there is a mention: early one morning he came to the lake and placed his hand on a fisherman’s shoulder. The man had just cast his net.
Osho, when does the pivot point of “athato”—the “now”—arrive in the lives of us ordinary worldly people? Please explain.
One halts when one sees the futility of life—the lack of essence, the failure—nothing in the hand but pain, nothing in the heart but tears, life utterly dark, the boat on the verge of sinking. In such a moment, when one stops, love arises; desire drops. You no longer ask; you become eager to give. Love gives; desire asks. As long as there is asking, know it is desire. When giving begins… You used to ask hoping asking would increase your wealth and bring happiness. The one who halts begins to give: “I tried asking; it brought pain. Let’s try the opposite.” He starts giving—and finds faint breezes of happiness begin to blow; a veena begins to sound somewhere distant; very distant—but the notes appear; a new realm begins. That is the beginning for the one who has halted. He begins to give, to share—and as he shares, the notes…
Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?
There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…