Stop trying so hard; relax and gently watch inside, and your natural light shows up by itself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, is it possible to become enlightened in a really easy and relaxed way, with not too much effort and lots of naps?
Gayano, you are asking me, a man who has never done anything. Just through relaxation ... without any effort and lots of naps! Mostly I am asleep. I just get up to talk to you in the morning, then I go back to sleep; then I get up again in the evening to talk to you and go back to sleep. My total hours of sleep must be eighteen. Six hours I am awake, two hours with you, one hour for my bath, for my food and the remainder I am in absolute samadhi. And I don't even dream -- so lazy! And you are asking me the question. This is my whole philosophy, that you should not make any effort, that you should relax and enlightenment comes. It comes when it finds you are really relaxed, no tension, no effort and immediately it showers on you like thousands of…Read the full discourse →
Beloved master, you say that enlightenment can happen any moment. To me it feels like a very slow process of learning and becoming aware of the unconscious parts of my being. Do you have something to say about this?
Enlightenment is not something like an achievement; one cannot achieve it. One has to disappear for it to happen. It is a happening and it happens only in the absence of the ego. And whenever you are doing something the ego becomes more and more strengthened. The ego is a doer, and enlightenment happens in a state of nondoing. It is simply the realization of who you are; it is not a question of achievement. You are already it! Just an awakening, just a turning in! Seeing the point, Buddha relaxed; he dropped all his methods. That is the only use of methods: you get tired of them, you feel utterly bored with them. One day out of sheer boredom you drop all the methods. That evening he dropped his whole spiritual search. He had dropped all worldly search six years before, but it is the same search whether you…Read the full discourse →
The lectures on zen delight me to no end. I feel myself falling in tune with it more and more. But it seems so easy. Am I becoming lazy? I thought spirituality is supposed to be arduous -- not a free and easy let-go.
The MAHAYANA story is that Buddha, after six years, came to realize that all effort is meaningless. Truth cannot be achieved by achieving, because in the very idea of achieving, ego remains -- the achiever remains. Understanding this, he dropped the very idea. He forgot all about achievement, he relaxed. He said: 'No more.' He had dropped out of the world one day; money, power, prestige -- he had dropped those goals. Then he had put all his energies into one goal -- enlightenment, NIRVANA. Now he saw the point, that this is again an ego-goal, again an ego-trip: 'I am again trying to achieve something.' Seeing this, he must have laughed. He dropped that idea too; he relaxed. That night a young woman had come to worship the tree. She was a worshipper of the tree, a pagan. And it was a full-moon night and she had come with…Read the full discourse →
Osho, I have heard that enlightenment, or the natural state of man, is something acausal -- it just happens. And all our endeavours to bring about awareness, to be aware, are actually taking us away from this state since they are all mind games, and these activities for self-awareness are just a "holy business". I cannot imagine what my life would be if I gave up the search since it has permeated my life as long as I can remember. If there is no way to integrate, nothing one can do, why all this activity? Why bother? Yet what else is there to do? Please comment.
It happens only to those who are not holding anything back, when you have put all that you have at stake, when nothing is left behind, when you are utterly empty, you have emptied yourself totally, and it is not happening, then the understanding arises, "My efforts are futile. My efforts are ego efforts -- the ego is futile. My efforts are my own mind games. The mind itself is the barrier." But this has to become your own experience, Samadhi. It is not going to help if you have heard it. You can hear great truths, but unless they arise in your own being they are not true. A heard truth is a lie: only an experienced truth is a truth. And only the experienced truth liberates. How will you experience it? You would like to have it without any efforts. You would like it to happen as it…Read the full discourse →
Beloved Osho, to break our habitual ways of acting, feeling and thinking, and to start witnessing instead, some effort seems to be required. But ultimately all effort, including the effort towards enlightenment, has to be dropped. Can you please speak on effort and non-effort, and how they relate to witnessing?
Don't be bothered about the future. You have not started making an effort, and you are worried that ultimately you will have to drop making an effort also. Just start -- make every effort. I can only say one thing to you: when you have made every effort -- and all the efforts will fail, as far as the ultimate experience of enlightenment is concerned -- when all the efforts fail, you are not required to make no-effort. When all the efforts fail, there is no-effort. You have done everything that was possible, humanly possible, and everything has failed. And everything fails as far as enlightenment is concerned. It is not your doing. But when everything fails, and you have not been miserly in making efforts, you were total -- what remains? A great silence. That is the no-effort. You don't have to do it. If you do it, it…Read the full discourse →