Once your basic needs and curiosities are satisfied, the emptiness you feel makes you look inside for real peace; if you’re hungry, you just look for food.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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…Read the full discourse →
Osho, on the one hand you are in favor of modern technology and believe that the flower of religion will bloom only in countries that are industrially advanced. On the other hand, you also describe the paradoxes of Western industrial civilizations. “Either the machine will survive or man”—this is your own statement. Moreover, among the great ones, saints, and devotees of the past whose words you interpret, none of them believed that religion is not for the poor. How are all these to be reconciled?
Rajkishore! I am in favor of technology. But that does not mean there are no deadly possibilities tied to it. I warn about those dangers too. A wise person can turn poison into nectar, and a fool can turn even nectar into poison. Science has placed a tremendous power in human hands—technology, the world of machines. With it this whole earth can become a paradise. The age-old dream of a heaven somewhere high in the skies can descend upon the earth—upon our earth. Science has released a vast energy. But there are hazards. I caution about those as well. The greatest danger is that the mechanical may dominate the human, that man becomes a mere slave to the machine. Human mastery must remain. If man is the master and the machine the servant, it is auspicious. If the machine becomes the master and man the servant, it is disastrous. So…Read the full discourse →
Aren't authentic experiences always the same?
They are, but these spiritual experiences which are the same are individual experiences. The question con-cerns society, not individual mystics. What I am saying is that a poor man can become a mystic, but a poor society cannot become religious. A rich man is not necessarily religious, but a rich society will become hungry for religion. The moment a society becomes rich, new problems arise. These problems are not concerned with physical bodies and physical needs; they are more psychological. If a poor man falls ill the illness is more or less concerned with the body. If a rich man falls ill the illness is more or less concerned with the mind. America needs more and more psychologists and psychoanalysis now because now the greatest number of madmen exist in America. American psychologists say that at least three out of four people are off the rails, not normal. Your mind's…Read the full discourse →
I have often thought that if children were raised in a free and loving environment rather than the insane society that we grew up in, they would all mature into free, loving, enlightened beings. But if this were so, many of the primitive societies would be overflowing with enlightened beings. Why is this not so?
But Adam cannot become Christ. That is not possible. You first have to fall to rise, you have to lose to get. Adam prepares the way for Christ. By being expelled from innocence, a new possibility arises -- he can re-enter again, he can re-enter the innocence. This second innocence -- what Hindus call 'second birth', DWIJ -- this second birth, this second innocence, is qualitatively different from the first. The first was ignorant innocence. It was not aware of itself. It was not luminous, it was dark. The second kind of innoCenCe is luminous. A light burns in it. It is aware of itself. It is not only innocence, it is innocence plus awareness. So in a way even this insane society does something beautiful to you -- it takes away your bag of diamonds. It creates the possibility of being happy. If you are stuck in it then…Read the full discourse →
Osho, the famous psychologist A. H. Maslow has placed self-actualization at the last rung in the hierarchy of human needs. In your view, is enlightenment an essential need of human life, and have terms like religion and spirituality been unnecessarily attached to enlightenment? Please explain.
Hunger is a man’s first need, but van Gogh must have been receiving something that no one could see—some stream of savor must have been flowing. Otherwise why? What purpose? No prestige, no name, no money—hunger, pain, poverty—yet he goes on painting. When he began to paint, hunger vanished, the body vanished—he became bodiless. When all the paintings he had to create were done, he committed suicide. In the letter he left he wrote: “Now there is no meaning left in living.” This is most intriguing. He wrote: “What I had to paint, I have painted; what I had to hum, I have hummed; what I had to pour into colors, I have poured; what I had to say, I have said; what was hidden within me has been expressed; now there is no meaning in staying.” Those “meaningless” paintings were his very meaning. When that work was finished, he…Read the full discourse →