Will dispassion be effortless for someone practicing through rajas or tamas?

Osho, yesterday you explained that the fruit of sattvic actions is natural, effortless dispassion. If someone is practicing through rajas or tamas, will his dispassion also be effortless? Will there be differences in the manifestation of dispassion?

Krishna knows Arjuna thoroughly. His whole personality, his whole structure, is rajas. So he says: Don’t talk of running away. That is not your nature; that is not your swadharma. You will not be able to flee. Even if you escape to the forest, you will not be able to sit quietly under a tree. There in the forest you will start hunting. You will raise some quarrel there. You will not so easily free yourself of being a kshatriya. Enter practice by the very guna that constitutes your personality—that is Krishna’s entire message. Hence he says: Fight. But with one condition: fight, wage the war, but do not think yourself the warrior, the doer. Know yourself to be only an instrument in the hands of the Divine—a tool, a means. Even if practice is of sattva—if one is bringing noble qualities into life, cultivating truth, compassion, nonviolence, purifying and…

Osho, if even sattvic action binds, then why are its fruits said to be knowledge and dispassion?

Because knowledge and dispassion can also bind. Certainly, Krishna’s statement appears paradoxical. The fruit of sattvic action is knowledge and dispassion. And Krishna also says that sattvic action binds. But ordinarily the so‑called saints explain that dispassion liberates, knowledge liberates. So the fruits that Krishna points to are commonly understood as liberating. But remember, whatever arises from sattvic action also carries the possibility of binding. You can be bound even by knowledge. Hence the Upanishads say: whoever declares, “I am self‑realized,” understand that he is not self‑realized. Whoever says, “I have attained dispassion,” understand that his attachment has shifted to dispassion. Sannyas can become householdership; it is in your hands. And the life of a householder can become sannyas; it is in your hands. Ignorance can be liberating, and knowledge can become bondage; it is in your hands. The Upanishads say that the knower understands, “I know nothing.” Socrates says,…

First, I have asked one question. And I have also asked one or two related questions. It is asked: Osho, the mind is restless. Without effort and without renunciation, how can it become steady?

No. I will say to you: it is not an effort. If I am clenching my fist and ask you, “How do I open this fist?” what will you say? You will say: “To open it, you need do nothing. Please stop doing what you are doing to clench it; the fist will open by itself.” Opening is not an effort; the moment you cease the effort that clenches, opening happens. Or if I pull down a branch and hold it, and ask how to return it to its place—what will you say? “Do nothing to return it. Just stop doing what holds it down; it will return by itself.” What are we doing continuously with the mind? We are doing something. If we stop that, the mind will quiet by itself. It will quiet by itself. As I said this morning, we are constantly engaged in resistance—twenty-four hours resisting.…

Gurdjieff wrote: as a child he loved a certain fruit in the Caucasus; delicious, but it caused stomach pain. Yet the taste—irresistible. Children are children, and old people too. Doctors forbid ice‑cream—but you eat; this they forbid—but how to leave! Then you suffer. His father forbade him many times; he wouldn’t listen, ate in secret. One day his father brought a whole basket of the fruit, sat him down with a stick in hand and said, “Eat.” Gurdjieff didn’t understand. First he was delighted—what happened to father! Always forbidding; and now a basket! But the father sat with a stick—so he had to eat. At first he relished—two, four, eight, ten; then the pain began; but father, stick in hand, said, “You must finish the basket.” Tears flowed; vomiting began; still the father said, “If you refuse I will break your limbs. Empty the basket!” He made him finish it.

The distances, the differences, are secondary; the fundamental is present in every man. And as the nature of one man behaves, so do all men behave. The differences in them are in the details, in the extensions—some river’s water a little blue, some a bit muddy, some a little green, some a little clear—differences in the details. These make no difference to water boiling at a hundred degrees. One woman’s nose is a little long, another’s a little short; one woman a little fair, another a little dark—it makes no difference. One woman is born in a Hindu home, another in a Muslim home—that too makes no difference. Her fundamental condition—womanliness—is just as it is for all the water of the world. One drop gives the news; but we, after lifetimes of many drops, still do not arrive at the conclusion—because all the world’s water keeps remaining.