Will millions of people reach madness or meditation?

You said that there are only two alternatives for men, either madness or meditation, but millions of people on the earth have not reached to either of the two. Do you think they will?

Sanity will be this: you will become aware that you are not centered. So the first thing to be done is to be centered, to get centered, to have a center within yourself from where you can lead your life, you can discipline your life, to have a master within you from where you can direct, you can move. The first thing is to be crystallized, and then the second thing will be not to create suffering for yourself. Drop all that creates suffering -- all those motives, desires, hopes which create suffering. But you are not aware. You simply go on doing it; you don't see that you create it. Whatsoever you do, you are sowing some seeds. Then trees will follow, and whatsoever you have sown you will crop it. And whenever you crop anything, there is suffering, but you never look that these seeds were sown by…

Everybody is mad. Madness is not something that happens to few people; it is a very normal state. Yes, when somebody goes too far, beyond the limits of ordinary normal madness we call it mad, but the difference is only of degrees. Maybe the normal person is only ninety-nine degrees mad and the mad person is one hundred one degree -- just a little boundary to be crossed which can be crossed by any small thing. Just a push: your wife dies and wives are never reliable! (laughter) And they die at such a strange moments... For example, they may die on Sunday and you were planning to go to the swimming pool or to the river and the wife dies! (laughter) She could have died any other day but she had chosen to die on Sunday -- now she had destroyed your (? can't get it)...

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS MADNESS? There are two possibilities: Madness literally means going out of the mind; hence the two possibilities. You can go out of the mind either below the mind or above the mind. Ordinarily, people go below the mind because it needs no effort, you don't have to do anything. Any shock can shatter the stability of your mind: somebody you loved died, your business has gone bankrupt -- the shock is so much that you cannot keep your normality. You fall below the mind, your behavior becomes irrational. But you go beyond the misery -- if you had remained in the normal mind the shock would have created immense misery. It is a natural way to avoid the shock. It simply pulls you down; now you don't know what has happened.

A friend has asked: Osho, people often think that only those who are mentally disordered, overly emotional, or tormented by life's difficulties turn toward yoga or spirituality. Madness or frenzy is often assumed to be the starting point of spiritual practice!

Those who think so are right—up to a point. Their mistake is not in seeing that people troubled and tormented by the mind are drawn toward meditation, yoga, and spirituality; that much is true. But those who believe themselves to be mentally untroubled are just as afflicted—and they, too, should bow toward it. To be human is to be afflicted. The very way man is constituted carries pain. Human existence is sorrowful. So the truly foolish one is the person who imagines they will attain bliss without turning toward the spiritual. There is no other way to bliss. And the sooner one bows, the better. It is true that those who incline toward spirituality are mentally troubled. But note the other side: the very moment they bow, their mental pain begins to dissolve. With that bowing, the frenzy begins to disappear. Passing through the process of spirituality, they become healthy,…

Beloved Osho, the closer I get to you, the madder I become, and I have noticed this phenomenon in other disciples. Please comment.

His family was in search all over the street where he used to go for a walk, and somebody said that they had seen him knock at the madhouse on the corner -- that's how he was found and released. But before getting released he said, "I would like to ask a favor. I would like to see the other three. I have become so interested in them. Once in the night, it came to me, "Perhaps I'm just mad, and they are right." But then I dropped that idea," No, I'm certainly Winston Churchill; I'm the prime minister." But I would love to see them." So he was taken to see them. They all looked like him -- fat, with the cigar. And they all looked at him also, and they all said the same thing. They said, "Boy, you look almost like Winston Churchill -- an exact copy…