According to Osho, when the divine glimpse feels fleeting, do not chase it; effort and ego shut the door. Relax into effortless awareness, drop the 'I', and become empty, receptive, and ungrasping. Like Augustine, stop trying to pour the ocean into the mind’s cup—lose yourself. In egoless, spontaneous stillness, grace returns on its own.
Stop trying so hard; relax, forget your “me,” and the joy comes back by itself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
First, a friend has asked: The experience of the Divine—its grace, its bliss—sometimes arrives suddenly in a few moments and then is lost again. Then, even with much effort, that glimpse does not appear. So what should we do?
In a human being’s life, certainly, at times some hidden spring of joy opens unbidden; an inner resonance begins to be heard; a music seems to surround one’s very life-breath. Everyone will have a few such moments in memory. Then our mind longs to have that experience again—and just then, it is as if the doors to that experience close. Two things need to be understood here. First, whatever is truly important and supreme in life never becomes available through human effort. Man is very small, limited. His boundaries are tight—and joy has no boundary. Only when man is absent do the doors of joy open; and when, through great effort, man becomes very present, those doors close. No one has ever found God by effort—only by effortlessness. Not through effort, but in effortlessness does His presence become apparent and is He realized. If I give love to someone, and…
Osho, what is the relationship between meditation and patience?
If you sit to meditate to remove mental restlessness, you will keep looking back again and again: “Has it gone yet?” And the irony is that when you begin to meditate, restlessness will increase. Because what has been repressed will start surfacing; catharsis will begin. The rubbish you have kept hidden within and never allowed to express—meditation will break open those doors too. It will clean the house. Dust piled up for years, for births, will rise again; there will be gusts and storms. For a while even the little peace you had will be lost. Then you will panic: “I came for peace, and even what I had is gone.” Without patience, you could even become unhinged, because meditation brings such a great storm. The disease is not from a day or two; it’s from lifetimes. Meditation will break through all the layers to reach your innermost core. In…
Osho, tell us of some lure that would set us moving toward God—some temptation that would engage our mind in God-realization.
Difficult today, difficult tomorrow; the day after, not so difficult—if you persist and don’t jump up, “Oh, a bad thought—get rid of it!” The witness has nothing to do with good or bad. Thorns have the same worth as flowers. We label; the witness does not. Soon, an amazing thing begins: now and then a gap appears—an interval. A thought comes, then the next does not; a space remains. In that empty space, the first glimpses begin. In that emptiness, even you are not—there is only emptiness. That is the door. Keep at it, and thoughts lessen; spaces grow. It’s like a road where a person passes, then for an hour no one—emptiness. A thought appears on the screen, then none for a long while; the screen is blank. From that blankness, your first contacts with God begin—because in that moment you are present. Thought can take you to past…
Osho, how does the remembrance of the Divine begin? How am I to remember God? I have no clue to God at all.
Have you ever known any joy through the ego? The ego aches like a wound; the smallest things hurt. The greater the ego, the greater the pain in life. Remove the source of this pain. Then some true Master will knock at your door. Or, unawares, you will recognize a Master in one in whom you had never seen one before. Sometimes he was living right next door and you did not hear; you met daily on the road, exchanged greetings—and still you never saw. You need the eye to see; the ego does not allow such an eye to be born. Ego is a great curtain. One way is this. If this too feels hard—if letting the ego drop is not easy, if recognizing the Master is not easy—then there is another way: search in nature. In waterfalls, trees, winds, the moon and the stars. Do not search for…
Another friend has asked: If truth cannot be expressed in words and cannot be written in scriptures, then what is the way to express it?
Think of that man who went into that room and sat silently. What did he do? He left all words and cared only to fall silent—utterly silent. When he became perfectly silent, an answer came—not his own; it came from above, from depths; it was God’s. Let us too, for ten minutes in this quiet night, try to be silent. It is possible; there is no difficulty. We have simply never experimented—that is why it has not happened. But what has never happened may happen today; if not today, tomorrow. The possibility is always there. For those who put in a little effort, the possibility becomes a reality. What will we do here for ten minutes? Look: the night is utterly still—the trees are still, the moon and stars are still, the breezes are still. Can we not, for ten minutes, be still with them and sit quietly? There will…