According to Osho, if your mind is disturbed by thoughts about sleep, it’s not an intrinsic mental problem but borrowed conditioning. Scriptures and doctrines label sleep as ‘tamasic,’ planting guilt and resistance. Drop the secondhand ideas: sleep is a natural, even spiritual, restoration. When conditioning dissolves, conflict ends and sleep—and wakefulness—regain innocence and balance.
You worry about sleep only because you were taught it’s bad; let go of that idea and sleep becomes natural and good.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
But the mind has become so habituated that it refuses to go there; the mind feels troubled, saying that sleep should not come?
No—that’s just something you’ve heard. It’s not the mind; it’s conditioning. The books say, “Sleep is tamasic,” and so on. What could be more spiritual than sleep? That’s just what’s written in the books.
Osho, here the urge to eat becomes very strong.
Yes. It is the very craving to eat that makes eating unbalanced. How much food is actually needed is put aside, and the relish of eating becomes more important. Very few of us feed the body; most of us feed the tongue. Taste is not a requirement of the body; taste is the mind’s lust. And because of taste we overeat. If you act a little consciously, this won’t happen. Be a little more aware and keep the simple remembrance that what you eat should be beneficial for the body as well as agreeable to the mind; it is not as difficult as we imagine. And if the desire to eat more arises, it is better to chew much more. Then you will eat for a longer time. After all, what pleasure can there be in eating for half an hour? For half an hour one keeps experiencing taste. So…
Question: Second question: Osho, my guru Swami Latpatanand Brahmachari used to say: Maintain a sattvic diet of milk and fruit. Rise at brahma muhurta and chant Om. Keep only three pieces of clothing with you. Accumulate nothing else. See every woman as your mother–sister–daughter. Do not allow bad thoughts to arise in the mind. And keep your loincloth tight and firm. But my guru Latpatanand soon passed away to heaven, and I have still not been able to walk the path of truth according to his teachings. Now your words attract me, and they also feel strange and create a kind of doubt within me: does the search for truth require discipline or a free, unrestrained life? I am twenty-six years old, and it is time to enter the householder stage. I am in a dilemma whether to take sannyas or to marry. Please guide me.
Osho, why do I always fall asleep during the discourse?
That's what happens in many car accidents. Many car accidents happen somewhere in the night nearabout between two and four, and the reason is that the driver is trying hard to keep his eyes open; by and by, he becomes capable of keeping his eyes open, and still he falls asleep. He keeps his eyes open and falls asleep with open eyes. Now this is a scientific finding. And that makes the whole problem: because he thinks he is awake he goes on driving because his eyes are open, but the sleep has taken possession of him, he is no longer aware. When you are awake, there is not much wakefulness; just a small part of you is awake. So you are not a loser, don't be worried. Whenever sannyasins come and ask me, "What should we do?" I tell them: Don't fight, otherwise you will miss me and you…
There was one more problem for the monks: they had collected too many suppressions in their unconscious and in sleep all those suppressions started surfacing and entering their dreams! So a kind of fear about sleep arose, because all the things that they had ignored during the day started surfacing in their sleep at night. The women they had left and run away from into the forest started arriving in their sleep. The monks started seeing them in their dreams. The money, the fame that the monks had run away from started following them in their dreams. So they felt that sleep was a very dangerous thing -- out of their control -- so the less they slept the better. These monks created a kind of feeling in the whole world that sleep is something unspiritual. This is an extremely foolish notion.