According to Osho, refusing challenges is escapism. Only by welcoming, grappling with, and joyfully crossing life’s obstacles does our ‘second birth’ occur—the soul awakens. Running away, even under spiritual pretexts, keeps problems intact and society soulless. Real peace and solutions arise inside wholehearted struggle; God is found in life’s very frictions, not in flight.
If you run from hard things, you never grow; face them fully and you’ll find your strength, peace, and even a glimpse of the divine.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, should I understand that not accepting a challenge is a kind of escapism?
Yes, not accepting challenges is a kind of escape, an escapism. And until we accept challenges, our real birth cannot happen. The second birth I speak of will happen only when we accept all challenges. We accept them, we fight with them, we face them; in that very facing, the soul is born within us. In an escapist, the soul is never going to be born, because he runs away from the very occasions where the soul takes birth. Take a seed: the gardener plants it in the soil. If the seed gets frightened and says, “I am not going into the darkness of the earth; I was fine lying in a corner of the gardener’s house. I will not go into the earth, into the dark,” then the seed is refusing the challenge of descending into darkness—no sprout will ever arise in it. Or suppose the seed is placed…
Both are the possibilities. One can just go on seeking challenges because it enhances the ego. Then the motive is wrong. What you are doing is right, but the reason you are doing it is wrong. If you simply love challenges and it is not in any way an effort to enhance the ego, then it is tremendously beautiful. Then whatsoever you are doing is right, and the motive is also right. Then you are one thousand percent right. So just watch that -- that's what I am saying. Don't gather the ego. Go on finding new challenges, enjoy, but there is no need to collect the ego, to feed an ego, because if you are feeding an ego, then in fact you will not be able to enjoy the challenges; they become secondary. The purity is lost then; you are always hankering for the ego.
Osho, what family or social discontent did Mahavira have? Isn’t his renunciation an escape from responsibilities?
Such a person can rightly be called an escapist—not a person like Mahavira. He raises no new entanglements and flees from no fear; out of understanding, out of a knowing consciousness, he changes staircases—he goes to another step. I see it like this: if someone runs out of fear from something, that is one thing; if someone runs to gain something, that is entirely different. The man with a gun at his back runs; and the man who has seen a diamond mine runs. Both run. But one runs out of fear of the gun; the other runs because he has seen diamonds. You cannot call the second one an escapist. You can call him one who is in motion, running—but not fleeing. He is not running from something; he is running to something. The emphasis of his vision is not on what he leaves but on where he goes.…
It is just like when you dive deep into water and an urge arises to go back to the surface. This is a greater depth than that. No ocean is so deep as the inner reality. So one trembles, feels afraid, lost, uprooted. One feels unskillful because the new is so new and you have never practised it. But by and by if you go on with courage and you take the challenge of the unknown, that very challenge will create the capacity to encounter it. Once you accept a challenge, you start becoming capable of encountering it. Nothing else is needed because the capacity is lying there within you fast asleep because you have never used it. So whenever there is a challenge, never reject it -- welcome it. Challenge is life and life-giving.
Osho, the so-called sannyasins do shopkeeping in the name of religion. And you have told your sannyasins to keep running their own shops. This seems like a contradiction. Please clarify.
There is not the slightest contradiction. The so-called sannyasins do shopkeeping in the name of religion because they were torn away from their shops. And they were not ripe yet; the mind still wanted to do business, yet they were made to sit in the temple. They turn the temple into a shop. Therefore I do not tear my sannyasins away from their shops; I say, if a temple is going to be turned into a shop, it is far better to turn the shop into a temple. I don’t wrench them from the shop, because I see that those sannyasins who were wrenched away have turned the temple into a marketplace. Until the very relish for the shop dries up within you, breaking you away from the shop is futile. And if the relish has really disappeared, what need is there to break away at all? Sitting in the…