Don’t judge it as easy or hard—you’re already what you seek; just stop measuring and relax into being.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: Maneesha has asked: BELOVED OSHO, IS IT REALLY THIS EASY? Maneesha, easy is not the word because it brings the idea of difficulty. However easy, it is still difficult. However close, it is still far. Your being is neither difficult nor easy, it simply is. It is not your achievement, you are it.
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…
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…
You make it all sound so easy. But is it? Is it really? It seems to me that the whole thing is out of our hands. We have no more choice to surrender than to be in the ego. I live my life and some days I'm happy and some days I'm sad, but I'm not enlightened. There must be some trick, some alchemy. Please enlighten me.
You don't want to believe in it. You don't want to believe in its easiness. See the point! You WANT it to be difficult, then you will be very happy. If I say, "It is very difficult, Dharmen," you will relax, you will be relieved. If I say, "It is almost impossible," a burden is removed from your head. Then you will say, "Then it is okay. Then I can travel. Then there is challenge. Then my ego can do many things -- it is difficult and I am going to do it." The more impossible it looks, the more appealing it is to the ego. Hence, I cannot say it is difficult, because I don't want to support your ego in ANY way. It is easy -- it is absolutely easy. But the moment I say 'easy' you become uneasy. You start feeling, "Then? Then there is nothing left…
Beloved Osho, your enlightenment was hard effort, but when you express your experience, it feels so easy -- just here, on the tip of the nose. But when I look at myself it feels easy and near impossible, simultaneously. Please comment.
Enlightenment is both -- the easiest thing in the world, and the most impossible thing. Before enlightenment it looks like the most impossible thing, obviously, because you don't have any idea, and you cannot have any idea; you can have only the experience. You are afraid too, because everybody is afraid of the unknown, the strange -- and there is not a more strange phenomenon than enlightenment. And effort to become conscious is needed; great effort is needed. You are so fast asleep and snoring that there is every possibility -- many camels dream in their sleep that they have become enlightened! That is the greatest trick your unconscious can play on you. I know a German sannyasin who used to become enlightened once in a while. Whenever he was in Germany he would become enlightened, and he would start writing letters to me, "I have become enlightened, and I…