According to Osho, the lamp flickers not as a necessary growth phase but because the mind drags in tomorrow—craving permanence and worrying, you create the gusts that shake it. Equanimity is steady; projection makes it tremble. Remedy: drop the future, live this single moment totally. Drinking the now strengthens your capacity for steadiness in the next, forging a chain of presence rather than anxiety.
Your calm wobbles because you worry about the future; stay with this moment and it will steady itself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, the inner lamp of equanimity and bliss, even after remaining steady for a long time, sometimes begins to flicker. Is this a phase in my growth, or the result of some slackness on my part? Please, from your experience, illumine my path so that this well-being, this joy of rightness, may remain forever unshaken.
If you understand this rightly, you have the whole principle of karma and conditioning. What you did yesterday will affect your today. Yesterday is gone; there is no way to change it now. Be gracious enough to change today—because today will become the tomorrow that harasses you. What you did in your past birth you are reaping now. And now you are busy thinking about the next birth, and this birth is slipping out of your hands. This empty, wasted life will again set you wandering on a road full of darkness. You ask how the lamp of equanimity can burn forever. Simply taste it for a moment. When equanimity is thick, hum, dance, drown in it. When equanimity is thick, drink—don’t delay. Don’t bring in even so much thought as, “Will it stop?” There is a Zen story: At a temple gate two monks are arguing about what is…
Osho, I want to ask something, but nothing seems worth asking. I am in a very wobbly state. At times an ecstasy surrounds me, and suddenly everything becomes desolate again! Please guide me.
Dariya speaks truly: Practice meditation; don’t worry about knowledge. Worry about knowledge, and you will be led astray. Knowledge will lead you into more and more questions. What will meditation lead you into? A state beyond questions. Let the question mark be—don’t fuss with it. Dismiss thoughts, dismiss questions; leave the question mark standing alone. And you will be astonished: as when you remove all the pillars of a temple, the roof collapses—so, the day you remove all the pillars of thought, the roof of the question mark will collapse. No questions will remain, and the question mark will not remain. If there is no bamboo, there is no flute. And where there are no questions and no question mark, samadhi appears. In that samadhi is resolution. That is the search. That is the ache. That is the thirst. You say, “I am in a very wobbly state.” Everyone is…
Question: Osho, In "Lamps on the Path" you have said: Osho, that darkness gathers beneath a clay lamp we can still understand; but we are completely unfamiliar with the dense darkness that lies beneath the inner lamp. What is it, why is it there, and how can it be removed? Kindly explain in detail. I have told you the reasons for the darkness. Break them one by one. The greatest reason is that your taste for the world still persists. Therefore I will not tell you to turn within while the taste persists—you will never be able to. Make this taste tasteless. And my experiment for making it tasteless is completely different from what others have told you. Others have said: “Make it tasteless” by thinking “there is no taste in it.” I don’t say: think. I say: attend. Don’t think there is no taste—root your attention and see.
Osho, in your presence there is a taste of the depth of meditation, but that state does not remain permanent. Please guide us toward making it permanent!
If delay is your way, no harm; we will cultivate the habit of patience—what else! If you tarry, fine. However long you can delay, we will learn to wait longer still. We too will cultivate the habit of acceptance— Your aloofness may be your habit; so be it. Do not fall into haste. Haste breeds tension. It is haste that makes the mind restless. Walk with patience. Infinite time is available. There is no hurry anywhere. Time’s stream is endless—no near shore, no far shore; no beginning, no end. In this eternal, you are worrying needlessly. Why all this running about? Your running will not make anything come sooner. There is no need to hurry. Look at the trees—how languid they are. Look at the moon and stars—how silently they move. Do you see any hurry in existence to reach somewhere? Existence is so calm, as if it has already…
"Everything goes smoothly," someone has asked, "and then, in a weak moment, my entire past surrounds me like a storm."
Naturally! You listen to me, you absorb me, you set out with me on a new journey. You forget your past; it lies behind. Returning to the marketplace, the past tries again to seize you. It will want to take revenge. For an hour you forgot it; now it will grip you all the more tightly—tighter than before, because doubts about its hold on you have begun to arise. You might someday slip away altogether. You might someday completely forget it. So the past will spread every kind of net. But whether you sit here or go outside, make the effort to keep alertness intact. I am with you, if you are with me. Let this remembrance sustain you, Pratibha; that is precisely why sannyas is given. Wherever you go—on the road, in the bazaar, in the crowd—let these ochre robes remind you that you have accepted a new style…