What happens when I try to drop my negative traits while clinging to enjoyable aspects of my personality?

Next time it happens, just watch it. Become very objective, a detached watcher, just to see what exactly it is, how it arises just like a small seed, and then how it grows and becomes a big tree and how you are completely lost in it. Just see the whole process of its growth and just see how you help it to grow. Don't be in a hurry to drop it and don't be in a hurry to get out of it; that's where people are wrong. People are in such a hurry to get out that they can't see how they get in, and that is the secret: just watch how you get in. Once you have seen the whole process and the misery that comes out of it, in that very understanding something evaporates. It is not a question of dropping -- just an old habit evaporates.

Beloved Osho, I see that I am eager to drop my jealousy, judgments, greed, anger, all the baddies. Yet at the same time I am reluctantly clinging to the parts of my personality I still enjoy indulging in -- my passion, my clown, my gypsy adventurer. Why am I so afraid that just to be the watcher will be boring?

The adventurer, the gypsy is really a bored person. He is trying to get rid of boredom, so he goes on running from one place to another place, from one woman to another woman. He gets bored quickly with everything, runs after another thing, thinking perhaps he will not be bored there. But he forgets completely that things are not boring, you are bored. Wherever you are, you will be bored. If Deva Dwabha comes to meet God himself, she will take a few photographs -- what else to do? -- and will start getting fed up. The same God, eternally ancient... how many pictures can you take? You can finish your whole roll of film and then you are stuck with this old dull and dead God. You will start running, even if it is to hell, and you will enter into it; maybe there is some adventure there.…

Osho, yesterday you described the cathartic practice of pillow‑beating to release anger. In the same way, what practices should be done for the cessation of lust, greed, attachment, and ego? Please shed some light on these.

The friend I mentioned yesterday—today his companion told me he actually pulled out a knife and ripped the pillow to shreds. I hadn’t even suggested that! It makes us laugh: how can someone stab a pillow? But when we can rip a living person apart, we don’t laugh—so what’s the difficulty in slicing a pillow? When someone tears a living person, the “juice” is in the tearing itself; the person is incidental. That same juice can arise with a pillow. In fact, more so—because with a pillow you need impose no limits at all. So shut yourself in your room, and when your root “disease” wants to show itself, let it show. Consider this meditation. Let it come out in every pore of your being. Shout, jump, do whatever is happening—let it happen. And watch from behind—you will even feel like laughing. You will be surprised: “I can do this?”…

Osho, the path of sannyas is unfamiliar and I am afraid. What should I do?

But this is everyone’s belief—that love arises from fear. So the husband frightens the wife as much as he can, thinking otherwise there will be no love. And the wife frightens the husband as much as she can, thinking the same. Parents frighten the children; and the children, for their part, do not hold back—they frighten the parents too; they have their own ways, their recipes. All devotees of Baba Tulsidas! Everyone is frightening everyone. Teachers are frightening students; students are frightening teachers. Fear pervades everywhere. Our notion of God is as if he were a policeman. We imagine he watches you twenty-four hours a day; he won’t even leave you alone in the bathroom—sitting there, peeping through the keyhole. I have heard: a Christian nun used to bathe with her clothes on. At last her companions became concerned. They said, “What sort of madness is this? Why don’t you…

Osho, how can I take sannyas? I cannot get jealousy, ego, anger—anything at all—out of my mind. And you keep appearing before me day and night in dreams! What should I do?

Why does jealousy arise? Because someone seems to be getting ahead of you. Someone has bought a better sari, more beautiful jewelry, built a new house, gathered more money in a safe. Jealousy is born because your ego is bruised. A fire flares up inside, smoke begins to rise. You climb onto your own funeral pyre. Anxiety is born inside you. Anger means someone blocks your ego. You set out on a journey of conquest and someone stands in your way, a stone falls in your path because of someone, someone shoves you aside—someone becomes an obstacle. Anger erupts. Anger and jealousy are not very different—two sides of the same coin. Anger is a bit crude; jealousy a bit more civilized. I have heard a Rajasthani tale. A proud Rajput, full of swagger, would twirl his moustache all day long. His arrogance was such that he never allowed anyone else…