What is the connection between chaotic groups and my enlightenment?

If at this very moment I can become awakened or enlightened, why then do you allow all those chaotic brain-washing groups, group-leaders and therapists to happen at the ashram and what connection is there between them and my enlightenment?

No connection at all. But they destroy your 'if'. They are needed just to make you alert that nothing is needed. And you can become aware only the hard way; you cannot become easily aware. You have been asleep so long. Your slumber has been of centuries, of millennia. Those therapy groups simply hit hard on your head, they are a kind of hammering to destroy your 'if'. Going through all those hard arduous trips, one day you will realize that nothing is needed, that enlightenment has not to be searched. That you lose the desire for enlightenment -- that is their purpose. And the moment you don't desire enlightenment, it is there. It comes when the desire disappears.

Osho, I have heard that enlightenment, or the natural state of man, is something acausal -- it just happens. And all our endeavours to bring about awareness, to be aware, are actually taking us away from this state since they are all mind games, and these activities for self-awareness are just a "holy business". I cannot imagine what my life would be if I gave up the search since it has permeated my life as long as I can remember. If there is no way to integrate, nothing one can do, why all this activity? Why bother? Yet what else is there to do? Please comment.

It happens only to those who are not holding anything back, when you have put all that you have at stake, when nothing is left behind, when you are utterly empty, you have emptied yourself totally, and it is not happening, then the understanding arises, "My efforts are futile. My efforts are ego efforts -- the ego is futile. My efforts are my own mind games. The mind itself is the barrier." But this has to become your own experience, Samadhi. It is not going to help if you have heard it. You can hear great truths, but unless they arise in your own being they are not true. A heard truth is a lie: only an experienced truth is a truth. And only the experienced truth liberates. How will you experience it? You would like to have it without any efforts. You would like it to happen as it…

What is enlightenment?

He had read all the Buddhist scriptures -- there are thousands of them. It is said about this Chikanzenji that he had all these scriptures in his room and he was constantly reading day and night. And his memory was so perfect he could recite whole scriptures -- but still nothing happened. Then one day he burned his whole library. Seeing those scriptures in the fire he laughed. He left the monastery, he left his guru, and he went to live in a ruined temple. He forgot all about meditation, he forgot all about yoga, he forgot all about practising this and that, he forgot all about virtue, SHEELA, he forgot all about discipline and he never went inside the temple to worship the Buddha. But he was living in that ruined temple when it happened. He was mowing down the weeds around the temple -- not a very religious…

It is a tremendous chaos but very beautiful. And all that is beautiful comes out of chaos. All the stars are born out of chaos. These groups are really to create a chaos in you... to bring to your focus whatsoever is the real situation. They don't lie -- they make you aware of the truth. These groups are really like a diagnosis -- and that is half the therapy, more than half. So passing through these group experiences, you have come to feel your inner conflict, the division. Sometimes you are one person and sometimes you are another. Whenever energy moves into one direction, you are one. When energy moves into another direction, you are another. Now a synthesis is needed, a unification, a yoga. Union is needed... and the inner union becomes easily possible if you are moving in some outer union also.

Beloved Osho, what is enlightenment? Have the experience and the idea of enlightenment evolved with time?

So nirvana is just like darkness. The light is put off and your reality is all there, with all its beauty, benediction, blessing. But there is no word in English to translate nirvana. Jainas use the word moksha. Moksha means absolute freedom, ultimate freedom, freedom from all fetters. And the biggest fetter is the ego. Other fetters are just parts of the ego: greed, lust, ambition, anger. All that is thought to be sin in other religions, in Jainism is thought only to be a fetter. But the root, the main root of the whole tree of your slavery, is the ego. So cut the main root and all other roots will die of their own accord. Don't bother to cut small roots, branches, leaves, because they will come again. Cut the main root and the whole tree will die. And when all your fetters fall, what remains? The unfettered…