Methods

In 1969 followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi invited Osho to talk to them. This was the first occasion on which Osho addressed a western audience, and the first time he talked publicly at length in English. The discourse has been published in OTI January 1 & 16, 1991; and February 1, 1991. Osho: Really, there can be no method as far as meditation is concerned. Meditation is not a method. Through technique, through method, you cannot go beyond mind. When you leave all methods, all techniques, you transcend mind. So meditation itself is not a method. Truth cannot be achieved through method. Method is our own invention. We, who are ignorant, have achieved knowledge through methods constructed, created, projected, in our ignorance. Through method you can achieve a sort of self-hypnosis, a sort of auto-hypnosis. Any method, whatsoever it's name, can only give you an illusory kind of peace.

People in the west today are crying out of theoretical solutions to their problems. You have often spoken about 112 major techniques that have been used to reach the divine. Will you please tell us about some of those methods?

Mozart said, "It will be impossible for you. I never went to anybody and asked them anything. You have come to me and asked something. If I tell you, I will be your teacher. You are not a person who can become a great musician without a teacher. Those who can, do so without asking anyone for advice. If you are to become a great musician you will have to grow through discipline, you will need guidance, a teacher. Even this much you cannot understand yourself: how to become a musician without a teacher. You have asked me even this." So those who hear Krishnamurti go on fooling themselves. They are not the right people to follow his teachings. Had they been, they would never have gone to Krishnamurti But they have been going to him for forty years! For forty years they have been going to him to learn…

Beloved Osho, the growth movement has been called the "new narcissism" by many, due to its emphasis on assertiveness and valuing one's own personal ego. How does your way differ?

There is no way. It is impossible to have a way, because you are already there. You have never left home. This whole search for the way is driving you crazy; you cannot find it because you are already there. Wherever you go, you will go against your being, farther and farther away. You have gone already too far. It is time to drop the idea of the way. Life is not a becoming, not some kind of process. It is being. You cannot ask me how my way differs from the growth movement, because I have no way. I am not teaching you a way -- really, I am taking you away from all the ways. But the question has some significance. The growth movement was egoistic. It was the assertion of the ego repressed for centuries. Just by being assertive and egoistic you don't start growing. Or worse,…

Beloved Osho, is not spiritual guidance an absolute necessity for human growth?

Making faces before the mirror is very childish. There is nothing wrong about it; it is not a sin. It is your mirror, it is your face, you are not doing any harm to anybody. But certainly the observer instantly changes you. You start doing other things just to look busy, as if you are doing meaningful things. Just a moment before you were doing meaningless things, now you are doing meaningful things. The same was discovered in the innermost core of the atom: the electrons behave differently when there is no observer. And the moment the scientist and his instruments make them aware that somebody is observing, they change their rules; a sudden transformation takes place. This was very shocking to the scientists because electrons are supposed to be particles of electricity: that's the meaning of electron. They are supposed to be material, but they are behaving with such…