According to Osho, objects hypnotize and possess us because the very desire to own and master them makes our identity and security depend on them. Since we go to things (they don’t come to us), we make them our masters; attachment, effort, and fear of loss rivet our attention to them. Thus the possessor forgets freedom and becomes the possessed.
When you chase and cling to things, they end up controlling you, so you serve the stuff you thought you owned.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, there is one more thing I want to understand in the first question: how is it that objects—possessions—hypnotize and possess their owner, the possessor? What are the reasons?
In the very desire to become a master lie the seeds of slavery; because whatever we decide to master, we also, unknowingly, have to become its slave. We become slaves because our mastery depends upon that which we own. Without it, our ownership cannot exist. And when ownership depends on something, how can we be the owner of our ownership? The real master is that upon which it depends. If I have ten slaves, I am the master of ten slaves; but my mastery depends on those ten slaves being there. If these ten slaves are lost, my mastery will be lost with them. The key to that mastery is not in my hands; it is in the hands of those ten slaves. In a very deep sense they have become my masters, because without them I cannot be a master. And how can we be masters of those without…
The self, deluded by maya, identifies with the body and does all actions. In the waking
STATES IT IS HE, THE SAME SELF, WHO FINDS GRATIFICATION THROUGH THE VARIOUS OBJECTS OF ENJOYMENT, SUCH AS WOMEN, FOOD, WINE, ET CETERA. IN THE DREAM STATE THAT VERY SAME INDIVIDUALIZED EGO EXPERIENCES PLEASURE AND PAIN IN A FIELD OF EXPERIENCES CREATED BY ITS OWN MAYA, THE LEAST APPREHENSIVE OF REALITY. DURING THE STATE OF PROFOUND SLEEP, WHEN EVERYTHING IS MERGED, IT IS OVERPOWERED BY TAMAS, INERTIA, AND EXPERIENCES IT AS As we live, as we are, it is a deep hypnosis. Whatsoever we feel, whatsoever we think, is based on hypnotic projections. In some face I see beauty; that beauty doesn't belong to the face, because someone else may not feel it as beautiful at all. It belongs to my projection. When I say some face is beautiful, I am projecting something from me; and the face is just a screen, because someone else may see the face as…
A friend has asked: What does “ras-parityaga” mean? Does it mean that attention should not connect with any sense-born vibration? If so, then a ras-tyagi ought to go about with eyes, ears, etc., closed. The blind, the deaf, the mute would be the supreme renouncers. Is this what Mahavira and you think?
A room is empty. Lao Tzu said: a room is empty—you say “empty.” But you can also say: the room is full of itself, not full of things. You can say: it is filled with emptiness. Emptiness too is a fullness. But those who consider furniture to be fullness will find the room empty. The cause of seeing emptiness is not that the room is empty, but your definition of fullness. We have taken things as fullness. The soul has no things. Therefore the soul looks empty. So we try to fill it with things. Greed’s madness begins—never fullness. Mahavira says: one who goes within sees the soul is already full—full of itself, not of something else. The day you sense that fullness, greed disappears. With greed gone, the mad race to collect ends. Those who keep the habit of hoarding—whatever the object—are householders, not monks. What you hoard is…
52. Then comes the dispersion of the cover that hides the light.
53. AND THEN THE MIND BECOMES FIT FOR CONCENTRATION. In India we have called woman the earth element and man the sky element -- because man is a wanderer. He cannot contain much. And it happens every day: if a woman falls in love with a man, she can remain in love for her whole life. That is easier for her -- she knows how to contain one idea deep, and remain with it. Man is a vagabond, a wanderer. If there were no women there would have been no homes in the world -- at the most, tents -- because man is a wanderer. He would not like to live in the same place for ever and ever. He would not create stone palaces and marble palaces, no; that is too static. He will have a vagabond's tent so any moment he can remove it, move somewhere else. There…
A friend has asked: Osho, if through meditation or spiritual practice one can conquer death, does not the same state occur in sleep? And if it does, why can’t death be conquered through sleep?
But meditation and hypnosis are not the same. Understand me carefully. I said: up to this point it is hypnosis, mesmerism—so long as we are manufacturing suggestions. When the manufacturing of suggestions stops and you awaken—where awareness begins—there meditation begins. Where witnessing begins, meditation begins. And the reason for this hypnosis is that you have fallen into a reverse hypnosis. In scientific language, this is not hypnosis but de-hypnosis. Not mesmerism, but the breaking of mesmerism. We are the ones mesmerized—but we don’t know it. In life we have become hypnotized, and we have no idea how many kinds of hypnotic trances we have taken on, by how many devices we have produced them. A large part of our life is hypnosis. And when we want to be hypnotized, we don’t notice what we are doing. For example… we live like this all our lives. If we became aware of…