What should I do if my meditation practice is affecting my daily life and family relationships?

I have been doing all the five meditations every day regularly for three years and because of these meditations I cannot do anything else. I am feeling very happy but my family is worried. What should I do?

You are overdoing it, sir. You have to choose one meditation. One is enough. Five is too much. Of course you will feel happy because you have nothing else to do. And if the family is worried it is natural, they are right too. A big Yorkshire farmer found it necessary to go to London for several months and decided to leave one of his best workers in charge. 'I want you to take care of things, Harry, as if I were here myself. Understand' Harry nodded. Four months later the boss farmer returned to find everything in shape. Said Harry, pointing things out, "The chicks have been laying plenty of eggs, the wheat has grown double strong, the vegetables are better than they've ever been, and as for those monthly spells your wife used to have, I've even got those to stop.' This is doing too much. This is…

No, take the challenge to stay with the every-day activity. Vipassana should not become a style of life. These are just techniques to be learned and immediately forgotten, so only the quality is carried with you. The flavour, the fragrance, not the flower, has to be carried into day-to-day activity. so by and by you don't know what is meditation and what is ordinary activity -- they become one. Learn the technique -- and for learning, of course, one needs to be in a particular place. Once you have known the technique, then unlearn it. Then just move into ordinary life -- eat, drink, sleep. Just be ordinary, and carry the sense of silence that has come to you. Again and again remember it, again and again remind yourself. Again and again move into that feeling and catch hold of it in ordinary life.

Beloved Osho, with meditation sensitivity increases, making life more difficult because one's reactions are so sharp and intense, and at every step it feels as though one's very life is at stake. How to attain the golden mean, the balance point, in this situation?

A very rich industrialist in Japan has erected a statue of himself outside his office. A very clever man! His psychologists counselled him to keep a statue of himself opposite his office. In his factory there are some ten thousand employees, and it has been announced to them that they should all feel free to maltreat the statue any way they choose! And it is an easy matter for anyone -- especially an employee -- to get angry. He does not need a reason. To have to serve someone else, to be someone's paid slave, is enough in itself to provoke anger. The workers, and even sometimes the managers, habitually abuse and mistreat the statue before they enter the factory, and this has had important results. What it has done is to create a psychological equality between the owner and his employees. We all behave like this. Even today we…

First, they have created a great hurry in people -- that's why the West is in so much of a hurry. The roots go deep into the religions that have dominated the western mind. If there is only one life, only this life and then you will be in the grave, who knows for how long... who knows when the last Judgement Day will come? For almost an eternity you will be in the grave, so make as much as you can make of your small life -- it is not much. If you are going to live sixty years, twenty years will be wasted in sleep. Of the remaining forty years, for twenty years you will be working as a clerk or as a teacher or as a D.T. collector or as an engineer. There are thousands of kinds of stupid professions in which one can waste one's life.

Now try to go deep into meditation. Sannyas needs nothing, nothing external; its need is just internal, and that is that you should be deeply involved in meditation and all your energy should flow into it. It is only a matter of effort for a few days in the beginning. Once the rock is broken and the stream starts flowing, there is no difficulty. Once the stream starts flowing, then the stream itself will carry you to the ocean. Effort is needed only in the beginning. If you do it for the first four to six months with determination, without wavering and without relaxing your efforts, then meditation will happen by itself; you will not be required to do it. Try all the meditation techniques here, and then regularly continue one of them that suits you. [The new sannyasin says: I do Vipassana.] Vipassana is good. Concentrate on Vipassana....