According to Osho, calmness amid extremes—whether a flood or searing heat—arises from radical acceptance and playful adaptability. Instead of chasing salvation or resisting reality, turn to the present and ‘learn to live under water’: meet heat with awareness, humor, and practical learning. Responsiveness, not belief or complaint, generates ease.
When it’s very hot, don’t fight it—stay aware, relax, and learn small ways to work with it, like Osho’s joke about learning to live underwater.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, to abide in oneself beyond the knower, knowledge, and the known—can one live in that state for an entire lifetime? Just as a lake is sometimes calm, sometimes playful, and sometimes stormy, does the self-realized one remain unaffected by worldly circumstances in the same way? Osho, dispel my ignorance!
Spring means harmony between season and mood. Meditation means harmony between you and the whole. You become harmonious. Whatever is, is perfectly okay—accepted. Nowhere any refusal, nowhere any opposition. Whatever is happening is auspicious. That is trust; that is meditation. Such meditation naturally takes you into an altogether new experience. Storms will rise; they will not stop because you meditate. Diseases will not stop coming to the body because you meditate. They will come. A thorn will sometimes pierce the foot. Raman had cancer; so did Ramakrishna—great storms came! Ramakrishna got cancer of the throat; he could neither eat nor drink. Vivekananda said to him, “What is not in your power! Why don’t you pray to the Lord at least to allow food and water to pass? We suffer watching you writhe.” Ramakrishna said, “Ah, it never even occurred to me to pray. How could it occur—to one whose prayer…
Osho, to cross the ocean of becoming and dissolve into the Supreme Self, which should one rely on—insensate devotion, foolish devotion, or blind devotion?
So drop this worry—whether insensate devotion, foolish devotion, blind devotion, or deranged devotion. Drop it; devotion is enough. And in devotion all these labels will take care of themselves. Become a devotee once, and “blind” you will automatically be—meaning: the whole world will call you blind. You will not become blind; rather, you will gain eyes. You will begin to see what ordinary eyes cannot see. The invisible will become visible; the imperceptible will come within perception. That which no one has ever touched will be felt as touch. But the world will call you blind. The world will not be able to accept it—because the world is blind, and the blind call you blind. H. G. Wells has a story: somewhere in Mexico there is a valley where children go blind within three months of birth. The story is based on fact. The climate, the food—something there ruins the…
A certain wall surrounds everybody, a subtle, very invisible wall, so you are not even aware that the wall is there. It is a very transparent wall. You can see through it and it hangs around you. So you can move and you can think that you are free but you are not free. You are not imprisoned in a prison made of stones and bricks, you are imprisoned in a prison made of thoughts, concepts, theologies, philosophies. It is a very invisible thing and one has to get rid of it. When the whole sky is yours with all its stars, then the whole existence is yours. That's exactly the teaching of all the masters -- Jesus, Buddha, Zarathustra. There is no difference, there cannot be. If truth is one, how can the teachings of those who have awakened to truth be different?
A friend has asked, Osho, I am very restless, and so much energy gets used up in this restlessness. How can I make use of it, and what is its cause?
But the anger remains there; it will not change by your turning away. It will change by your standing your ground and seeing it. If you turn your back, anger will make deeper wounds within and lay down roots. Fix both your eyes on anger. This is the moment to consciously see anger. When lust seizes the mind, do not run. Do not panic. Do not chant Ram-Ram. Look lust straight in the face. A direct encounter with the passions is necessary. But man has been taught to run. He has been told, wherever something bad appears—run away. But where will you run? The bad is within you; it will go with you. There is no way to run away from yourself. If evil were outside somewhere, we could run. It stands within—we will have to change it. We will have to use this manure. And using it is not…
A friend has asked, Osho: Because of the small and great sorrows of life, the mind sometimes becomes agitated, despondent, and restless. So how can one, while living in the world, keep the mind always calm, joyful, and enthusiastic?
The vision of destiny says: do not do anything. You cannot do anything; simply consent. Try this experiment. Restlessness has come many times, and you have tried to become calm—and you have not managed it so far. Try the second experiment. When restlessness comes, accept: “I am restless. I am such a person that restlessness will come to me. I must have done such actions that restlessness is coming to me. In my destiny I am a vessel fit for restlessness.” Accept this. Do not struggle even a hair’s breadth against this restlessness. What will happen? The moment you accept, restlessness begins to vanish. Because the feeling of acceptance becomes its death. The sorrow we consent to—where does that sorrow remain? We are such that we cannot even consent to happiness; consenting to sorrow is far more difficult. But the very thing to which we consent… Just a few days…