According to Osho, difficulties in day-to-day work and business are already present; the real question is how you meet them. Shift from resistance to awareness: watch the mind’s anxiety, act with totality, and let work become meditation. Then challenges stop appearing as “great difficulties” and become occasions for intelligence, creativity, and relaxed efficiency.
Hard things at work are normal; stay calm and aware so they feel smaller and help you grow.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, meditation, discourses and kirtan—and then work and business! It feels so crude! How to keep doing it?
The angel said, “I’ll have to check the ledgers; we had no intimation of an arrival now. Must have been a very big doctor! Wait here while I look inside. What did you do for a living?” The man said, “Nothing special—buying and selling scrap iron; I had a junk shop.” The angel went in. When he returned, the man was gone—and so was the iron gate. A scrap dealer given a moment—he ran off with heaven’s iron gate as well. All his life he dealt in scrap; he must have seen what a fine gate it was—and what use is it in heaven anyway! He took it. Your mind goes with you wherever you go. If your mind is that of a junk dealer, you’ll do the same at heaven’s door. Don’t become an enemy of work and business. Don’t bring in that stiffness. To be with me means…
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…
Osho, what is a problem?
Always be ready to change your mind because life cannot be changed just because of your ideologies. And we have learned ways how to look at life, how to interpret life, and we become fixated in certain routines. Let me tell you one anecdote. A mousy little man used to be very frightened of his boss. One day he told a fellow worker that he was sick. His friend said, "Why don't you go home?" "Oh, I couldn't do that!" "Why not? Don't be silly, he will never know. He is not even here today." Finally the man was convinced and went home. When he got there, he looked in the window -- and there was his boss, kissing and hugging his wife. So he ran all the way back to the office. "A fine friend you are!" he said to his pal. "I nearly got caught." Just an old…
Question: OSHO, WHAT IS THE GREATEST PROBLEM IN THE WORLD? Any small problem, just look at it, at how you have been trying to solve it, and it goes on becoming worse and worse. Certainly in your doing there is something which is becoming a nourishment to it rather than a killer. You are not poisoning it, you are nourishing it, feeding it. And don't try to work on so many knots together. Just choose one small knot, the smallest you can find in yourself; by smallest, I mean the most insignificant. People have the tendency to choose the most significant; even when they are choosing to solve their problems, they choose the greatest problem first. Now, that is simply foolish. Just become a little aware, alert. Start from the small things, very small things.
Osho, is life merely struggle—struggle and struggle? Or is there something more?
Jesus has said: Whoever seeks to save will lose; whoever gives away will be saved. Jesus has said: Those who are first in this world will be last in my Father’s kingdom; those who are last here will be first there. The arithmetic there is different. Give away money and you will become a beggar; give away meditation and you will become a sovereign. Give away money and today or tomorrow you will be knocking door to door; give away love and the sealed springs within will open. Fresh streams of love will surge in you every day; ever-new fountains of fresh loving energy will arise. A well that is sealed up becomes stagnant. Its springs die. Its water turns poisonous. A well lives by being filled and poured out—keep drawing and keep refilling. Hence the wise say: throw it out with both hands! One hand is not enough—use both!…