There’s no halfway to waking up; be honest you’re asleep until real light dawns, because pretending you’re “almost there” keeps you dreaming.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A SPIRITUAL SEEKER? This happens: you are not really frustrated with life, but have become greedy for religious promises. You have not known that life is divine, but you have become enchanted with religious heavens. Then everything will be difficult, because you have not gone through the first part. The second part will be very difficult. So go through the first part and the second is very easy. The second is only difficult when the first has not been traveled completely. Then you ask, "How to meditate?" Then you say, "The mind goes on working." Then you say, "The thought process is continuing. It cannot be stopped. How can it be stopped?" Desire is there, so desire will go on creating thoughts. The first part has not been fulfilled.
How can one know that the spiritual search in which one is involved is not an ego-trip, but is an authentic religious search?
If you don't know, if you are confused, then know well that this is an ego-trip. If you are not confused, if you know well that this is authentic, if there is no confusion at all, then it is authentic. And it is not a question of deceiving someone else. It is a question of deceiving or not deceiving oneself. If you are confused, in doubt, it is an ego-trip, because the moment the authentic search is there, there is no doubt. Faith happens. Let me put it in some other way. Whenever you phrase such problems, the very confusion exactly shows that you are on the wrong path. Someone comes to me and he says, `Tell me. I don't know whether my meditation is going deep or not.' So I say, `If it is going deep, there is no need to come and ask me. The depth is such…
Beloved Osho, you seem to be saying that the spiritual search is a matter of being either on this shore or on the other -- that we are either in the religious or in the irreligious, in liberation or in bondage, in rama or in ravana. Perhaps there is no intermediate state. If it is so, then what is the relationship between seeking and surrender?
I have heard of an emperor who used to pray very early in the morning. Because he was an emperor, and because it was a special time, it was his right to pray in the temple before anyone else. Five o'clock in the morning he was there in the temple, because if he came any later others would come to pray, and he would miss out on his privilege. So there he was, praying, "O Holy Father! I am a poor man and a great sinner, I am a humble nobody. Please grace me with your favor!" Just at this moment he felt the presence of someone else in the temple. In the darkness he could see almost nothing, but listening carefully he was able to hear a murmuring coming from the steps nearby. There he found a man, bowing down, praying, "O Holy Father! I am a poor man,…
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…
Beloved Osho, although you were born almost enlightened, when I listen to your stories of your early life, I never get the impression that you saw yourself as a spiritual seeker. Were you looking for enlightenment, or was enlightenment a by-product of an impeccable resolve to never compromise what you felt to be true?
There are things which cannot be sought directly. The more valuable a thing is, the more indirectly you have to go into it. In fact you have to do something else that simply prepares the situation around you -- in which things like enlightenment, truth, can happen. You cannot go seeking and searching for truth. Where will you go? Kabul? Kulu-Manali? Kathmandu? Goa?... and then back home. All seekers of truth go this route and come back home looking more foolish than before. They have not found anything. Where will you go to seek the truth? You don't know the way, there is no map, there is no direction available. Nobody knows what, where, when it is possible to realize truth. The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, unauthentic, insincere -- and when his heart is…