Entanglement

Osho, why does a person keep getting entangled in futile things?

Because of fear. Out of fear. Fear of what? There is only one fear that follows people like a shadow, twenty-four hours a day, awake or asleep—and that fear is that if I don’t stay busy, if I don’t stay entangled, I might catch sight of the emptiness within, I might glimpse that bottomless abyss. And that abyss is there. So the fear is not a total lie, not baseless. If you become completely unoccupied, with nothing to do, you will suddenly begin to experience your inner void—you will feel empty, hollow. You will quickly rush to busyness. Because in emptiness the ego dies, it melts. The egoist has to remain busy. Only by staying busy can the egoist assure himself that he is somebody. That is why people want to do big things—not small ones, big things. They want to do such things that the whole world will know:…

Someone has asked: “How long will I have to stay entangled in this mud?”

And this is exactly what I keep explaining every morning and evening: it is not mud here—lotuses are hidden within it. Does one get entangled in a lotus? Savor the lotus’ nectar. Whatever the Divine has given, accept it as prasad, as a sacred offering. Don’t call it mud—that is an insult to the Divine, because it is his gift, his offering to you. Life is his offering. And you are calling such a precious life “mud.” Your mahatmas have poisoned you. Your so‑called sadhus and saints have filled your mind with a vile poison, with condemnation. They have condemned everything. They have not allowed your life to expand; they have shriveled it. They have made you rot. And your way of seeing has become so wrong, so negative, that you have begun to see evil in everything; you just count thorns, you do not see the flowers. You count…

In reality he is not running towards something, he is trying to escape from something. But it is impossible to escape from one place without fixing one's sights on another -- and that is why he focuses on material objects. The root cause of man's escapism is his inner emptiness, but outwardly it takes the form of trying to attain something, of trying to reach somewhere else. In fact he is running to escape from his self. But to accept this as a fact is to expose our own escapism and so we indulge ourselves in theories about freedom from the wheel of birth and death. This self-deception is very deep-rooted and unless one breaks this chain of deceit he will never free himself from ambition. If a man fails at one ambition he simply selects another, if he fails in the world he will create an ambition for God.

Osho, you have titled this series of talks “Sahaj Yoga.” Do “sahaj” and “yoga” not seem mutually opposed?

Anand Maitreya! They don’t just seem opposed, they are opposed. But no ultimate truth of life can manifest without contradiction. Life is made of opposites—darkness and light, day and night, woman and man, negative electricity and positive electricity, birth and death. The very structure of life is woven of opposites. Hence the opposites are not only opposed; they are complementary to each other. If you have labored hard all day, you will be able to sleep deeply. Labor and rest are opposites, yet only the one who has worked can rest deeply—and the one who has not worked cannot. So the opposites are not only opposed, they complete each other. And only the one who has rested deeply at night can rise in the morning and engage in work again. One who has not rested through the night will not be able to work in the morning. Look closely at…