According to Osho, food is an outer, material necessity—like clothing—that conditions the body-mind; it is neither divine nor irrelevant. Set outer needs in order so the inner can flower; deny them and you breed disease (poverty), worship them and you miss the essential. Real intelligence balances adequate nourishment with inner awareness, letting outer support serve inner transformation.
Food is just fuel for your body so your mind can be calm and aware—don’t glorify it or ignore it; meet your needs and use that strength to look within.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, please tell me: after realization, is taking food also attachment to the body? After realization, can life continue without food?
A mahatma has arrived, it seems! What grudge do you have against food? What enmity with the body? The body too is His form. Taste is His taste. The relish of food is also a hymn to Him. What sickly mind are you carrying! You have fallen into the wrong company—into the company of the perverse—which people mistake for satsang. You’ve been spoiled by the friendship of someone of a twisted nature. Your so‑called sadhus and mahatmas are anti‑life, anti‑body, anti‑joy. Their God is not the creator, the celebrant of life; their God is life’s enemy. In their reckoning, God and His creation are at odds—an idea stuffed with sheer foolishness. If God is the Creator, then creation is His unfolding. How can the Creator be opposed to His creation? Is a poet against his poem? Is a musician against his music? And if a musician is against music, why…
Our beloved master,
YOU WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT FOOD, AND NOW IN THE WEST FOOD IS A BIG CULT. IT'S ONE OF THE THINGS COMING IN AS A BASIS OF SPIRITUALITY. YOU SAID IF WE'RE NATURAL, WE'LL KNOW WHAT TO EAT AND WHEN TO EAT, BUT NOW WE ARE OUT OF TOUCH WITH OUR CHILDLIKE NATURE. ALSO, MANY RELIGIONS SAY THAT THE FOOD YOU EAT DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO ONE'S SPIRITUAL PATH. IS THERE ANYTHING YOU CAN TELL US ABOUT FOOD AS A GUIDE FOR THE WEST? It is the other way round: food cannot make you spiritual, but if you are spiritual your food habits will change. Eating anything will not make much difference. You can be a vegetarian and cruel to the extreme, and violent; you can be a non-vegetarian and kind and loving. Food will not make much difference. In India there are communities who have lived totally with…
Osho, does diet have an effect on the mind?
Some foods are stimulating; they create excitement. All of them are obstacles in spiritual life. Some foods are non-stimulating; they do not arouse excitement. They support spiritual life. Some foods are intoxicating, giving a kind of inebriation; some are non-intoxicating. Intoxicating and stimulating foods are obstacles in spiritual life. But our craving for intoxicating, stimulating foods—the taste for them, the urge within to take them—will dissolve through meditation. As the mind begins to grow quiet, the diet will begin to change accordingly. Recently such incidents have occurred around me. Some friends were meat-eaters. When they first came to me they immediately asked, “We eat meat; you won’t make it a condition of meditation that we must give it up? We can’t give it up.” I told them, I don’t talk about diet at all. Eat whatever you like, enjoy it; I have nothing to do with it. But begin meditation.…
Osho, please shed some light on this clear method of returning.
There are a few things to understand here as well. Ordinarily we have no idea that every touch of ours is a magnetic touch. When we touch someone filled with love, the one who is touched senses the difference. When we touch filled with hatred, that too is sensed. When we touch with indifference, even that is felt. In all three states our magnetic element flows in different currents. And if, with the whole mind and a firm resolve, one concentrates entirely in the hands, the magnetic currents become very intense—what Mesmer called magnetic passes. If we lay a person down naked, do not touch the body, and hold both our hands above the head at a distance of about four inches, keeping that gap, and then, while vibrating the hands strongly, move them the same four inches above the body down to the feet, and do this for fifteen…
Osho, you said that the Hindu genius was once supremely intelligent and succeeded in touching the ultimate heights of religion. As a result there came into being devas, dvijas, gurus and gnanis; the Upanishads, the Gita, the Dhammapada and the Jina-vani. Then what is the reason that the same people have fallen into the great abyss of decline for a thousand years, with no sign of rising?
The West too produces, once in a while, an Einstein—knower of the outer. But even that does not solve anything. The masses remain full of tension and anxiety. Is it not possible to accept the outer and the inner together? Both are; your acceptance or rejection makes no difference—only you get into trouble. Take breathing: it goes out and it comes in. If you insist, “I will only draw it in; I will not let it go out,” you will die. Another insists, “I will not let it go in; I will hold it out here”—he too will die. The East died; the West died—because both embraced only half. I call courageous the one who accepts both together, who says, “I will keep both pans of the scale in balance.” The East has lost; the West has lost. And the danger is: when you lose one thing, a craving arises…