According to Osho, lunch is not a menu but a mirror: when sexuality is repressed, libido shifts from love to lunch. Food and sex are intertwined—food sustains the individual, sex sustains the species. True celibacy arises from awareness, not suppression. So don’t obsess over lunch; eat simply and consciously, and resolve desire at its roots rather than divert it into overeating or spiritual pretense.
Lunch isn’t the point; be aware of your feelings so you don’t use food to replace love.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: OSHO, WHAT IS FOR LUNCH TODAY? Sant Maharaj, WHAT IS THE MATTER? Are you really becoming a celibate? It happens to celibates: their interest starts changing from women to food. You can look around the Indian sannyasins, the so-called mahatmas, and you will always find them very fat, with big bellies. And the reason is that their whole sexuality becomes perverted. They start focusing their libido on food. Food and sex are deeply related, very intimately related, from the very beginning. Food is necessary for the survival of the individual and sex is necessary for the survival of the species. Sex is exactly like food for the species and food is like sex for the individual. Without food the individual will die, without sex the species will die. If you start repressing your sexuality, then the natural shift is from love to lunch! It is not coincidental.
Osho, you got as far as breakfast. To complete our religious historical records, could you tell us what goes beyond the juice?
So forgive me, I am going to remain the same way but you can always remind me that I have left something out in the middle. I can always complete it. I would love to complete it but what can I do? There is so much to say -- and nothing to say. You can understand my problem: so much to say that even if I go on for lives it will still be there -- and nothing to say, because that which I want to give to you is not something which can be said. I am living in this dilemma but trying for some middle way; and I have the feeling I have found the middle way. I have heard a story: when God created man of course He was an amateur. He baked the man too much -- a negro came out. God said,''Jesus! What happened to…
Osho, please tell me: after realization, is taking food also attachment to the body? After realization, can life continue without food?
A mahatma has arrived, it seems! What grudge do you have against food? What enmity with the body? The body too is His form. Taste is His taste. The relish of food is also a hymn to Him. What sickly mind are you carrying! You have fallen into the wrong company—into the company of the perverse—which people mistake for satsang. You’ve been spoiled by the friendship of someone of a twisted nature. Your so‑called sadhus and mahatmas are anti‑life, anti‑body, anti‑joy. Their God is not the creator, the celebrant of life; their God is life’s enemy. In their reckoning, God and His creation are at odds—an idea stuffed with sheer foolishness. If God is the Creator, then creation is His unfolding. How can the Creator be opposed to His creation? Is a poet against his poem? Is a musician against his music? And if a musician is against music, why…
Osho, please shed some light on this clear method of returning.
There are a few things to understand here as well. Ordinarily we have no idea that every touch of ours is a magnetic touch. When we touch someone filled with love, the one who is touched senses the difference. When we touch filled with hatred, that too is sensed. When we touch with indifference, even that is felt. In all three states our magnetic element flows in different currents. And if, with the whole mind and a firm resolve, one concentrates entirely in the hands, the magnetic currents become very intense—what Mesmer called magnetic passes. If we lay a person down naked, do not touch the body, and hold both our hands above the head at a distance of about four inches, keeping that gap, and then, while vibrating the hands strongly, move them the same four inches above the body down to the feet, and do this for fifteen…
Another friend has asked: Osho, what is the relationship between the method of meditation and jati-smaran (recollection of past lives)?
But the one who becomes skilled in this—who can fully awaken any day’s memory up to the age of five—will find that the memories begin to awaken completely. And you should test it. As today passes, note down some events and lock them up. After two years, try to recall today. Most of it will have been forgotten. Then remember—and after remembering, break the lock and compare whether what you recalled matches what you had written. You will be amazed—astonished—that besides what you wrote, many more details have come back which you did not even note at the time. They will all be there in memory. Buddha called this alaya-vijnana. There is a corner of the human mind he called the storehouse of consciousness. Like a junk room in the house where we keep all the odds and ends, there is a storehouse that collects memories—where everything from birth after…