According to Osho, Americans seem tense because affluence exposes the failure of desire: after “arriving,” hope collapses into disillusionment, meaninglessness, and tension. Indians appear content not from spirituality but from poverty; unmet desires keep hope and comforting illusions alive. Frustration requires wealth; the poor can’t afford it. Only after success fails does authentic religion become possible—thus America, not India, is ripe for true inner inquiry.
Rich people can feel upset because they got everything and still feel empty; poor people seem calm because they still hope tomorrow will be better.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
In america everybody seems to be tense and frustrated while in india even the beggars appear to be happy and contented. Why?
BECAUSE they are beggars. They cannot afford to be frustrated. Frustration first needs a few requirements to be fulfilled: it needs affluence. Only a rich society can be tense; a poor society cannot be tense. It has nothing to do with religion, remember -- because you have been told this again and again by the Indian so-called-spiritual peddlers who go to the West. They go on talking to you and saying that India is contented because it is religious. That is utter bulls hit. It has nothing to do with religion. India is simply poor, that's why India is contented. It will be difficult for you to understand why a poor man seems to be more contented. There are basic reasons. First, a poor man has much to hope for -- that hope brings contentment. A rich man has nothing to hope for -- all that he could have hoped…
A friend has asked: Osho, you said about a wayward son that one should let him pass through his experiences, and he will learn on his own. But even after experiencing, he still prefers the same thing—someone is asking about his wayward son—no matter how much suffering he has to endure, even if death itself should come, still he does the same. After stumbling again and again, he repeats it. What can be done? How to reform him?
You will not be able to reform him. If life cannot reform him, if even death cannot reform him, what will you be able to do? If what you say is true—that again and again, even after suffering, he does the same thing; even if death comes, he will still do the same thing, and he does not change—then take your hands off. You will not be able to reform him. You cannot be stronger than death. And one who does not learn from suffering—what will he learn from you? Do not call him a wayward son. You have found yourself a Jadabharata. Because those whom suffering does not reform, whom even death does not reform—these are great, arrived masters; they are in the ultimate state. Do not even try to reform such a one. And why are you so eager to reform another? It is enough to reform yourself.…
Why is the west becoming more and more interested in meditation? And also, why is the east losing interest in its own spiritual treasures?
After a time, penniless but still submissive to the decrees from one high, he landed in the county poorhouse. One day the overseer sent him out to plow a potato field. A thunderstrom came up but was passing over when, without warning, a bolt of lightning descended from the sky. It melted the plowshare, stripped most of his clothing from him, singed off his beard, branded his naked back with the initials of a neighbouring cowman, and hurled him through a barbed wire fence. When he recovered consciousness he got slowly to his knees, clasped his hands and raised his eyes towards heaven. Then, for the first time, he asserted himself: "Lord," he said, "this is getting to be plumb ridiculous!" This is the situation of the East: "This is getting to be plumb ridiculous!" But the East goes on thanking God, goes on feeling grateful. There is nothing to…
Beloved Osho, why are there so few american sannyasins? I recall you saying that america would be a very spiritual country because they had already mastered material abundance and found it did not satisfy. Why are they so sleepy? Please comment.
America has no roots. It is just a three-hundred-year-old country; it is passing through its childhood. Compared to a country like India which has been there for at least ninety thousand years, America is a just-born baby. So wait a little; babies don't tend to be spiritual. Secondly, America has promoted itself as being really rich. That is not true. Thirty million Americans are in utter poverty; millions of black people are not first-class citizens, and the people to whom the country belongs, the Red Indians, are kept in reservations. Those reservations are not very much different to the concentration camps in Germany -- in fact, they are more dangerous. In Germany, the concentration camps were made of barbed wire; you could not escape. The American reservations are open. If you want to go out, nobody is preventing you. They have created some psychological barbed wire -- invisible. The Red…
Why is it that western societies are becoming so interested in indian religion now?
I consider religion to be the last luxury. Only when a society becomes affluent does religion become meaningful. And now, for the first time, a greater part of the world is not poor. America in particular is the first society in human history to reach such affluence. To be religious, or to be interested in the ultimate questions of life, one needs to have really fulfilled all the lower wants and needs. So to me, a poor society cannot be religious. India was religious only when it was at a peak of affluence. For example, in Buddha's time India was just like America is today. In those days India was the richest land. The religion that we have in India today is just a leftover from those days. There is a basic difference between a poor man's religion and a rich man's religion. If a poor man becomes interested in…