According to Osho, when you remain entangled in your problems, you bind yourself to ‘mud’—a condemning way of seeing that shrivels life, breeds rot, and blinds you to the moon, the lotus, the Divine within every situation. Your focus creates your world: clutch the chains and you stay imprisoned; shift to the vast sky and you taste liberation.
Keep staring at the dirt and you feel trapped; look for the moon and lotus in it, and you feel free.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Someone has asked: “How long will I have to stay entangled in this mud?”
And this is exactly what I keep explaining every morning and evening: it is not mud here—lotuses are hidden within it. Does one get entangled in a lotus? Savor the lotus’ nectar. Whatever the Divine has given, accept it as prasad, as a sacred offering. Don’t call it mud—that is an insult to the Divine, because it is his gift, his offering to you. Life is his offering. And you are calling such a precious life “mud.” Your mahatmas have poisoned you. Your so‑called sadhus and saints have filled your mind with a vile poison, with condemnation. They have condemned everything. They have not allowed your life to expand; they have shriveled it. They have made you rot. And your way of seeing has become so wrong, so negative, that you have begun to see evil in everything; you just count thorns, you do not see the flowers. You count…
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…
Asked by Dr. Rajendra I. Desai. Dr. Desai, sannyas has nothing to do with solving problems. I do not solve problems. I do not solve personal problems; I show the way to dissolve the person from whom all problems arise.
One day Mulla Nasruddin was walking down the road—dragging his feet, irritable, hurling abuses. I asked, “Nasruddin, what’s the matter?” He said, “Can’t you see? My feet are swelling; these shoes are too small.” I said, “I’ve heard this many times before. It’s the same rigmarole every day. Why don’t you buy another pair of shoes? Why did you buy shoes two sizes too small?” He said, “I will never do that. You don’t understand—these shoes are the only joy of my life. All day I swear at them; it keeps my mind occupied. It gives me something to do. And then there is a great delight: when I return home in the evening, tired, harassed by these shoes, and I take them off and throw them away and lie down on the bed, I say, ‘Oh Lord!’ There is such bliss in taking off these shoes! If I give…
Osho, there is much sorrow in life and so many problems. Isn’t it necessary to solve them before plunging into love and devotion?
My brother, how will you solve them? The very tangle is the absence of love. Life’s problems exist because our connection to the fountain of love has been cut. There is no flow of devotion, so puddles of problems have collected in life. You are saying, “People are very sick right now—what is the point of talking about medicine? First let people get well, become healthy, then we’ll worry about medicine.” Your question is like that. Devotion is the medicine. What does devotion mean? The way to be joined to God. Not being joined to that is precisely the misery. Having broken from That is the pain. Forgetting That—falling into oblivion—is the darkness. We’ve turned our backs to That and become oriented toward trash. We have connected ourselves to wealth and disconnected from awareness. We’ve tied ourselves to position and broken from the Divine. We’ve clung to the body and…
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.