Why is the West becoming more interested in meditation and the East losing interest in its spiritual treasures?

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…

What factors do you attribute the western youth revolt to, and why are so many young people from the west now becoming interested in eastern religion and philosophy?

The whole attitude of modern youth is one of boredom with an empty affluence. The youth are leaving the society, and they will go on leaving it unless the whole society becomes poor. Then they will not be able to leave. This leaving, this renunciation, can exist only in an affluent society. If it is taken to an extreme, the society will decline. Then technology will not progress, and if this continues the West will become like the East is today. In the East they are turning to the other extreme. They will create a society just like that of the West. The East is turning to the West and the West is turning to the East, but the disease remains the same. As I see it, the disease is the imbalance, the acceptance of one thing and the denial of the other. We have never allowed the human mind…

You have asked: India touched the heights of meditation. Then what happened? What accident occurred? Why did the Indian psyche lose its taste for meditation?

People have money. And they have understood that what money can buy is worth two cowries. There is something else that money cannot buy—and now only that is the search, that is the thirst, that is the quest, that is the longing. Meditation is the collective name for all of that. Love is joined to it. Compassion is joined to it. Meditation is a temple with many doors. Everything that money cannot buy is joined to it. In the West there is an unprecedented attraction to meditation, because the West has never touched the heights of meditation—no Gautam Buddha, no Kabir, no Raidas. The Western soul is empty; hands full, life hollow. This condition has produced a revulsion for money in the West and a revulsion for meditation in India. The wheel of life is very strange. There is a real fear that the East will become the West, and…

Beloved Osho, why has it happened that in the east, religion came to its highest flowering, and in the west the same has happened to science? Is there some difference of consciousness between the eastern man and the western man?

There is no difference of consciousness in the East and the West. The difference was in the climate, in the geography, in the situation; the difference was outside, not inside. Hence, religion became the only challenge in the East, and science became the only challenge in the West. But now the situation is totally different. The East has fallen into bankruptcy, which is natural ... that too is a law to be understood. When you are affluent, luxurious, religion is born. Once religion is born, immediately religion starts teaching you to be poor. That is a very strange thing, but there is some inner consistency in it. When you are luxurious, and the whole country is enjoying, and eating, and drinking, and being merry -- this is their only religion. Naturally, those who attain to samadhi and superconsciousness -- start condemning, "What are you doing, wasting your life eating, drinking,…

Osho, you said there are three successive steps of evolution—body, mind, and soul. Western civilization has evolved a great deal on the planes of body and mind, yet the outcome has been melancholy, meaninglessness, and despair. Please explain why, as a natural sequence, the Western intellect has not evolved toward the third stage?

Have you ever thought what you would ask if God appeared to you? Think honestly: if tomorrow morning God stood before you, what would you ask? On a piece of paper, write three things. You will be shocked at your own desires—“a beautiful wife, a film actress; a big house; a big car; victory in my lawsuit.” Whatever you ask will reveal where you are. Your asking will expose you. Will you start begging when you see God—or will the seeing itself so fulfill you that you say, “Nothing to ask”? In the very impulse to ask is hidden the fact that you did not seek God—you sought something else and were going to use God to get it. God was not the goal; what you want to ask for is the goal. If God appears and you ask for an Impala car, then the car was the real deity;…