If you tell family you’ve grown inside, their pride may feel hurt and they might try to prove you haven’t changed.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, you have earlier said, “Live moment to moment, live in the present.” Now you are saying, “Return to the past.” What should we do?
So it is with the mind—there are ruts. The past means endless grooves. However much you understand, your intellect agrees, you make decisions, you resolve—at the moment of resolve you feel something is going to change. But not even an hour passes before your decision breaks. Then only self-condemnation is produced, nothing else. Your saints, your fakirs, your priests and pundits—most of the time they only succeed in producing self-condemnation in you, nothing else. Their words are logically correct. You cannot even say they are wrong; you have to admit they are right. In that admission you take a decision. But against what are you deciding? Inside are grooves carved since who knows when, deep tracks. Walking in them has become a habit. It is easy to walk in them. They will pull you again and again. The meaning of returning into the past is: these grooves must be erased.…
Osho, I have undoubtedly set out on the path, and the path itself is becoming the destination. But when I sit in discourse, my mind keeps collecting what you say so I can tell it to others. Why is there such eagerness in me to expound it before others—especially before my loved ones?
It is natural. Those whom we love—we want to give them what we have received, that in which we have known joy, in which we have caught a hint of truth. The taste we have savored, we want our loved ones to taste. We want to make them partners in it. Completely natural. Share! Whatever seems right to you, say it. Who knows—someone else may also find it right. Just keep one thing in mind. The eagerness to share is fine; insistence is not. Don’t sit on anyone’s chest saying, “I have accepted it, you must accept it too—because you are my wife; if you don’t agree with me, that’s not okay; or you are my husband.” Do not be insistent—non-insistence! Give full freedom to accept or not. But if a feeling rises in your heart, don’t suppress it either. If you feel joy, if you taste the essence, share…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHEN I CAME TO POONA TEN YEARS AGO I WAS A FIFTEEN YEAR-OLD TEENAGE GIRL WITH A HEART FULL OF TRUST AND A LONGING FOR TRUTH. DURING THOSE FEW MONTHS THAT I COULD STAY WITH YOU UNDISTURBED I EXPERIENCED THE MOST BEAUTIFUL TIME OF MY LIFE. WHEN I WAS FORCED BACK TO GERMANY BY THE LEGAL AUTHORITIES AND MY PARENTS, WHO ARE NOT YOUR SANNYASINS, SOMETHING BROKE INSIDE AND LEFT A WOUND WHICH NEVER HEALED. NOW, BEING WITH YOU IN INDIA AGAIN, THE MOMENT I WALKED THROUGH THE ASHRAM GATE IN POONA SOMETHING SLID INTO PLACE, AND A DOOR OPENED. WALKING THROUGH YOUR GARDEN, JUST SITTING SILENT, UNDER THE TREES, YOUR FRAGRANCE IS STILL IN THE AIR. MY BEING VIBRATES, MY HEART SINGS, "HOME, HOME, THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE I WAS BORN.
Beloved Osho, you said to us this week that we should not concern ourselves with others. But most of us from the west have friends and relatives with whom we would like to share what we've found. What should we tell them about sannyas? What should we tell them about you? How can we explain the unexplainable?
But sannyas cannot be categorized. It is not a category. It is such an altogether different quality of being, there exists no category for it. It cannot be analyzed, it cannot be broken into fragments. It is not a mechanism; you cannot break it, take the pieces apart and put them together again. No, it is an organic unity. If you analyze it, it is no longer there, and you can never put it back together again. It is impossible. Sannyas is a live force -- organic, just like a flower. Analyze the flower, take each petal away, break it, look inside it, be satisfied that you have inquired, then try to put it back together. By that time, the flower is gone, the petals are dead and they can never be put back again in the same way, because it was an organic unity, it was not a mechanism.…
Osho, why is it that my husband and relatives don’t see any progress in me, and up to now nothing but abuses pour from their mouths for Osho? Could it be that I’m making some mistake? The question is a bit complex. It’s from “Manju.” I know her. The husband is upset precisely because there is growth. No husband easily tolerates the wife moving ahead. It weighs heavily on the ego. Even a wife does not like the husband to move ahead—so leave the husband aside! The husband is God! Beyond him!
But as soon as I see the husband gaining a little momentum in meditation and his lust loosening, the wives launch an attack. The very same wives who had told me, “Somehow free us from sex; our husbands come to you, they listen—but this daily sex, it’s filth!”—those very women then insist that sexual satisfaction must be daily. They feel a danger: “The husband is going away, he is slipping out of my hands. If he is completely free of sex, he will be free of the wife too. Then I have no value left.” So obstacles arise. I know Manju. Her progress is certainly happening. But this is the difficulty. Your husband or your family will not accept your growth. To accept your growth means the defeat of their ego. They will deny it. Did Meera’s family accept Meera? They sent her a cup of poison—“Let her die, she’s…