According to Osho, yes: true hard work is “effortless effort”—total activity without the strain of a future goal. Effort, being result-oriented, is half-hearted; hard work is doing something completely for its own sake, here-now, from joy—like singing, meditating, loving, flowering. Drop the calculating mind and devote daily time to intrinsic acts; then work becomes intensity without tension.
Yes—do things fully because you love doing them now, not to get something later.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
The other day you said that effort is dangerous, but hard work is needed in the meditations. For my german mind, effort equals hard work. Is there hard work without effort?
That's how the mind is; it does not want to do anything. It simply hopes, desires, postpones. The future is a trick to postpone the present; the future is a trick to avoid the present. Not that you are going to do anything in the future, no -- because again the same mind will be there and it will say tomorrow, tomorrow. You will die and you will not do anything, you will only think. And that thinking helps you to keep face: you don't feel lazy because you think so much of doing, doing great things always, dreaming about great things and not doing the small things that are really to be done right now. Hard work means to be present and to do that which the present has brought you as a challenge. THE OTHER DAY YOU SAID THAT EFFORT IS DANGEROUS BUT HARD WORK WAS NEEDED IN…
One day there will again be a release of energy, but that will have a totally different quality to it. Then it is not freaking out. It has no violent expression. It is a very soft, subtle vibration. You lose nothing in that, and others who are around you simply gain. They become aflame and aglow. In the East that's what we call satsang. Whenever a person has too much energy in his hara centre, then just sitting by his side is enough. Just being in his presence is enough. You start flying... the gravitation no more affects you; you become weightless. So this is something tremendously beautiful, and it is just on the verge so help it.
Deva means divine and yashodara means the glorious one. Yashodara is the name of the wife of Buddha, too. And that is the true reality of everyone: the glorious one is sitting inside you, waiting for your knock. It is not far away, it is very close by -- just a slight turn and the meeting happens. It is not hard work, either. The very idea of hard work is egoistic. To attain to god is simple, has to be simple. The very idea of much effort is an egoistic idea -- the more effort you make, the more you will be and the less will be god. It happens only when you are not, it happens only when the effort is almost absent. Even when following the path of effort, a moment comes when the effort has to be dropped -- and then is grace.
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…
Osho, have I learned correctly that simplicity is a state of effortlessness, and that wherever there is effort there is no simplicity?
Only the person who has not made efforts for simplicity can be simple in the true sense. But what does this mean? Does it mean we should do nothing for simplicity? No, it does not mean that. I am saying: do not make effort—but you will have to be aware. And being aware is not effort, because in awareness we are not suppressing anything. In awareness we are not repressing anything. In awareness, the light of our consciousness, which lies asleep in dark corners, we lift it up; we awaken it. A man is asleep; we wake him. We are not making him repress anything; we are only breaking his sleep. Our consciousness within is asleep—deeply asleep in many ways. We are awakening it. This awakening may look like a kind of effort, but it is not effort in that sense. Therefore the Zen masters call it effortless effort—actionless action,…