What practices can help rise above mental afflictions like lust, anger, greed, and attachment?

Osho, yesterday you described the cathartic practice of pillow‑beating to release anger. In the same way, what practices should be done for the cessation of lust, greed, attachment, and ego? Please shed some light on these.

The friend I mentioned yesterday—today his companion told me he actually pulled out a knife and ripped the pillow to shreds. I hadn’t even suggested that! It makes us laugh: how can someone stab a pillow? But when we can rip a living person apart, we don’t laugh—so what’s the difficulty in slicing a pillow? When someone tears a living person, the “juice” is in the tearing itself; the person is incidental. That same juice can arise with a pillow. In fact, more so—because with a pillow you need impose no limits at all. So shut yourself in your room, and when your root “disease” wants to show itself, let it show. Consider this meditation. Let it come out in every pore of your being. Shout, jump, do whatever is happening—let it happen. And watch from behind—you will even feel like laughing. You will be surprised: “I can do this?”…

Question: Third question: Osho, how can one be free from suffering? Suffering has not bound you; you are bound to suffering. Suffering is not a chain someone else has put on your hands. Suffering is an ornament you have chosen to wear yourself. Understand this first point clearly. Come, let us reconsider our relationships: a little quarrel, a little love. Who knows whether we are bad or good? Like others, we too have grown in adverse conditions. Come, let us remove the controls on the mind, keep a little silence, and make a few words strike true! Why want only the “good” all the time? Why only flower-strewn paths? Why not have paths with thorns as well? Come, let us play hide-and-seek with our dreams, let a few desires be autumn, a few be spring. Why think only of each other all the time?

Osho, what is attachment? Why do we become so attached to things, ideas and persons? And is there freedom from attachment?

“So do one thing,” she told the courtesan. “I will pay you whatever you ask. Go to him at midnight. He meditates at midnight—has done so for thirty years. I want to know whether meditation has happened or not before I die. His hut door is only latched; no one ever goes there. Open it and go in. Whatever he says, notice every word and tell me. Go and embrace him—then come back and report. Before I die, I want to be sure that my service was not in vain.” The courtesan went. She opened the door. The monk was startled. He opened his eyes—he had been sitting in meditation—and shouted, “You wicked woman! Why are you here? Get out! What need have you to come at midnight?” But his tongue faltered; his body trembled. The woman had taken her money; she went right in. He cried, “Stay back! Why…

Osho, “man eva manuṣyāṇāṁ kāraṇaṁ bandha-mokṣayoḥ. Bandhāya viṣayāsaktaṁ, muktyai nirviṣayaṁ smṛtam.” That is, the mind alone is the cause of human bondage and liberation. The mind that is attached to objects becomes the cause of bondage, and the one that turns away from objects is said to be the cause of liberation. This aphorism from the Shatyāyanīya Upanishad is quite well known; it also appears in many other scriptures. Osho, would you kindly explain this sutra for us?

Chidananda, the sutra is indeed precious—but when it falls into ignorant hands, even the most precious thing is made worthless. The Kohinoor becomes just a pebble. These immortal Upanishadic utterances, once grasped by certain hands, were turned to poison. The whole message was inverted; what was meant became its opposite. The entire country is rotting in that pain. The Upanishads are voices arising from the very life-breath of awakened beings. When the unstruck veena sounds, such incomparable music is born. But when pundits begin to “comment,” they drag the lotus back into the mud. True, the lotus arises from mud—but the lotus is not mud; it is a transcendence of mud, an expression of that within the mud which is not mud. To smear it with mud again is to turn the beautiful into the ugly, truth into untruth. Commentary has not honed truth; it has layered it with dust…

Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?

There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…