What should one do in the meantime?

It all sounds so great, as perfect as can be articulated. But what the hell do you do in the meantime?

You have missed. You have not understood what has been said to you. You have not heard. Again the greed has become a barrier. Listening to me you are listening through the greed. When you listen to me, if I am talking about enlightenment and the joy of it, you become greedy. You start thinking, "When am I going to become enlightened?" So you say it is great -- it all sounds great, "as perfect as can be articulated". Now, this greed creates a problem. You put whatsoever I am saying as a goal. Of course, the goal is far away. There is a distance between you and the goal, and the distance has to be traveled, so the second question arises: "What the hell do you do in the meantime?" But there is no meantime. I am not talking about the goal; I am talking about the way. And…

Osho, it feels as if life is passing moment by moment. I have even found a true master; still, why is the next step unclear?

There is no next step. Why are you thinking about a next step? To think of a next step means this step is not blissful; you want another. This moment is not enough; you want the next. Today is not sufficient; you want tomorrow. Somewhere there is pain in the present; you long for the future. The “next step” is the contemplation of a troubled mind. For the happy person, this very step is the last step. For the happy person, the path itself is the goal. If you are delighted with me, drop talking about the next step. There is no next step. The next step arises from a diseased, restless mind. When you are not happy today, you begin to think of tomorrow. To forget today’s misery you think of tomorrow, you spin hopes of tomorrow, you weave dreams of tomorrow, you become absorbed in tomorrow so that…

Osho, entangled in the hope of becoming something, nothing happened. Only the awareness remained that I am. Neither wealth came, nor a house was built, nor music arrived, nor did I become a scholar. Even living itself did not suit me. After coming here, unknowingly I gave life a new direction. The past has been spent in wandering, the present in sannyas, and you decide the future—what will it be?

Deepak Bharti! In life there is only one entanglement, the one and only—and it is there in everyone’s life without exception—the hope of becoming something. You are what you are; you cannot be otherwise. The very effort to be otherwise is anxiety, gloom, anguish. In that effort a vicious circle is born. Then with your own hands you raise new whirlpools; you sink and you rise, you sink and you rise. Your life becomes a long series of dreams—and of every dream’s shattering. If a rose wants to become a lotus, madness is certain. If champa wants to become jasmine, illness is certain. What is, as it is—its acceptance is sannyas. Sannyas means: tathata, thusness; to embrace oneself totally—not in defeat, not as a consolation, not as a sop, because that would be false; but with understanding, with awareness, by seeing this truth: a rose is a rose, and as…

Now, a blind man can become a philosopher about light. He can think much about light. He can go on making great systems of thought about light. He can imagine, and he has much more freedom to imagine than the person who has eyes, because the person who has eyes knows what light is; he cannot imagine something contrary to reality. The blind man can imagine in every direction, in every possible way. He can be very imaginative and he can be very logical; he can make a systematic, logical philosophy about light out of his blindness, but it will be about light. And beware of the word 'about'. Unless somebody sees light, all that he is saying is nonsense. The mystics have always said that philosophy is nonsense because it is thinking. It is like a thirsty man thinking about water.

Osho, I keep thinking of my life in terms of goal or destination, waiting to wake up some day and find myself enlightened, and I worry that others will reach before me. Today is a tension. Why is eternity so difficult to feel and remember? You keep reminding me but I keep forgetting and lose patience. Why am I such a food? And then I think 'so what?' and then I want to scream 'no more!' but go on.

But do you think a day will come when all your invest-ments and all your worries and all your acts are complete? Will there ever come a day when you are finished with the activities of your so-called life, and you can come and say, "Right now I am ready"? It will never come, because life is such a complexity. It never begins, it never ends. You are always in the middle. It is like reading a novel from the middle. The beginning part is missing and the end part is missing -- you know only the middle. That is the mystery of life! Try some time reading a novel from the middle and you will find that even an ordinary novel becomes very mysterious. Intrigued you will be, and many times you will be tempted to look back: "What is the beginning?" But resist the temptation, go on reading…