Growth

Osho, why is growth painful?

Growth is painful because you have been avoiding a thousand and one pains in your life. By avoiding you cannot destroy them -- they go on accumulating. You go on swallowing your pains; they remain in your system. That's why growth is painful -- when you start growing, when you decide to grow, you have to face all the pains that you have repressed. You cannot just bypass them. You have been brought up in a wrong way. Unfortunately, until now, not a single society has existed on the earth which has not been repressive of pain. All societies depend on repression. Two things they repress: one is pain, another is pleasure. And they repress pleasure also because of pain. Their reasoning is that if you are not too happy you will never become too unhappy; if joy is destroyed you will never be deep in pain. To avoid pain…

The more I seem to grow, the more ugly I seem to become. Why is this?

There is a Zen saying, that when a seeker comes to a Master, rivers are rivers, mountains are mountains, but once in contact with the Master, soon rivers are no more rivers, mountains are no more mountains, everything is disturbed. But if he continues, and does not escape in the middle -- again a moment comes: mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers. This is the process. When you start meditating you have a false personality, a painted face, which you have made beautiful according to the social needs. It is false, but you are identified with it. Then you start meditating; that face starts becoming loose, sometimes it slips, you come to feel your real face -- you become afraid, it looks ugly. That's why you had painted it. That's why you were hiding it under a mask. But meditation will drop all the masks. It is a search for…

Beloved Osho, in the west, most of our growth methods tend to be group-oriented -- like encounter groups and psychodrama. In the east, although there are ashrams where seekers live together, the stress seems to be on the individual. Would you tell us about the two approaches?

In the East, people are in the community too much. So whenever they want to be religious, they want to go to the Himalayas. Society is too much around. They are not fed up with themselves, they are fed up with the society. This is the difference. In the West, you are fed up with yourself and you want some bridge, how to be communicative with the society, with others; how to create a bridge, how to move to the other, so you can forget yourself. In the East, people are fed up with the society. They have lived with it so long, and the society is all around so much that they don't feel any freedom. So whenever somebody wants to be free, to be silent, he runs to the Himalayas. In the West, you run to the society; in the East, people run from the society. That's why…

Beloved Osho, being near you, I feel utterly at home, as if in the right soil. In the west, I worried: "how to be near Osho sooner?" and often found it impossible to be meditative. Osho, is it really possible to grow and flower in the harsh environment of the west?

Prem Chhando, it is certainly difficult in the harsh environment of the West to grow into meditation. But it is not impossible. It is certainly arduous, because the whole surrounding is against meditation. Everything is mind-oriented and meditation is a state of no-mind. The whole education, the culture, the society, the people, they are all believers that there is nothing beyond mind. Mind is their whole world. And meditation simply denies mind and wants to go beyond it. So I can understand, it is difficult. But even in the West you can find silent moments when society cannot interfere. In your own room, in the middle of the night, when everybody has fallen asleep, when the noises of city life have disappeared, you can find the East just in your bedroom. When you have some time, weekends, holidays, you can move to some solitary place, you can go to a…