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According to Osho, obsession is a self-created hypnosis where you pour disproportionate attention and energy into one thing until it becomes your whole life, shrinking you to one dimension. Sex, food, money, or power can obsess—positively or negatively. Wisdom is proportion: let every aspect have its place so life becomes a rich, many-sided orchestra, not a single note.
It’s when one desire or thought takes over so much that you forget the rest of life; balance means giving everything its right place.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
You talk a lot about people obsessed with sex -- but what is obsession? Obsession with food or clothes or cleanliness, etcetera?
OBSESSION SIMPLY MEANS you are paying too much attention and energy to something which is not that important. Out of all proportion you have become focussed, hypnotized by something. Obsession is a kind of hypnosis that you have created within yourself. Then everything else disappears in your life and only one thing remains that becomes your focal point. Your life becomes one-dimensional: that is obsession. Life has to be multi-dimensional. There are people who are thinking only of sex, only of sex -- twenty-four hours a day. Deep down in their minds it is always lurking. They may be doing something else, but they are thinking of sex. Then it is an obsession. Sex itself is not an obsession, remember -- I am not against sex. I am not against anything. Obsession means now sex has taken the place of everything. There are people who are obsessed with food; they…
Beloved master, how can one drop an obsession? Or is it not to be dropped at all, but enjoyed?
Satya, an obsession simply means a wound in your being, which keeps attracting you again and again, which goes on declaring itself, which wants your attention. You cannot drop it. How can you drop your wound? An obsession is a psychic wound, you cannot drop it. Understand it. Watch it. Pay attention to it. Be meditatively with it. And the more you are meditatively with it, the more it will be healed. Meditation is a healing force. The words 'meditation' and 'medicine' are derived from the same root; they both mean healing forces. Meditation is medicine -- medicine for the soul. So if you have any obsession, don't call names. The moment you call it an obsession you have already started condemning it. And if you condemn something you cannot watch it -- you are prejudiced against it. How can you watch the enemy? No need to condemn; whatsoever is…
Osho, it seems that all the pioneers in art and science have reached the unknown spaces through some kind of obsessions. What kind of obsessions has the new religious man?
"'If they can go astray even hearing you, then what do you think -- that without hearing you they will not go astray? Take it for granted: those ninety-nine are determined to go astray whether you speak or not. But what about that one percent? We appeal to you for that one percent who may not be able to find the path without your speaking.'" And Buddha said, "I am speaking for that one percent." Strangely, I am still speaking for that one percent. The world has not moved a single inch. Twenty-five centuries and man is as blind, as asleep, and unconscious as he ever was. Charles Darwin was absolutely wrong, because looking at man there seems to be no evolution: as far back as we can see, he is the same. If for ten thousand years there has not been any evolution in man, do you think one…
What is preoccupation?
PREOCCUPATION IS PREJUDICE, preoccupation is pride, preoccupation is past. Preoccupation means you come loaded in the moment, you don't see the case that is there. You look through coloured eyes. For example, if you are hearing me here, and you are hearing through a curtain -- you have your beliefs, you have your ideas, you have your conditionings, your teachers, your parents, your society, your religion, your church are all standing there -- and you hear me through that clamour, then you are preoccupied and you will not be able to hear me. You will not be able to hear what is being said, you will hear something else. You will create your own thing through your interpretation. You will miss me. A preoccupied mind is a dull mind. A preoccupied mind is a borrowed mind. Unoccupied, mind is fresh, intelligent, radiant. Hence, one of the bases of all meditations…
Sigmund Freud was interviewing one of his patients. He asked the man lying on the couch, "Look through the window -- can you see the flagpole on the office building across the street?" The old man said, "Of course. Do you think I am blind? I may be old but I can see the pole, the flag and everything. What kind of question is this? Am I paying you to ask such stupid questions?" Freud said, "Just wait, this is how psychoanalysis works. Tell me what the pole reminds you of." The old man started giggling. Freud was immensely happy. Very shyly the old man said, "It reminds me of sex." Freud wanted everybody to approve his new theory, and this was a confirmation. He said, "I understand. The pole is nothing but a phallic symbol. You need not be worried, it is absolutely true.