Passions

You say that the suppression of one's passions is harmful. Do you then mean to say that indulging them is the proper course?

Are you ever in your own company like this? This is satsang. This is prayer. This is meditation. When I am all alone within myself and when there is no thought, no thought of anyone, I am in the company of my self. When the outer world is absent, inside there is the company of one's self. In that companionlessness and solitude, in your pure being the truth is realized because in your innermost being you yourself are that truth. It is therefore a question of being religious, not of appearing religious. Whenever anyone asks me about being religious the first question I ask him is, "do you want to appear religious or to become religious?" The two paths are quite different. Being religious is a sadhana, a process of self-realization; appearing religious is just self-adornment. The garbs of the sadhus and saints, their stereotyped, conventional robes, their books, the…

Osho, yesterday you described the cathartic practice of pillow‑beating to release anger. In the same way, what practices should be done for the cessation of lust, greed, attachment, and ego? Please shed some light on these.

The friend I mentioned yesterday—today his companion told me he actually pulled out a knife and ripped the pillow to shreds. I hadn’t even suggested that! It makes us laugh: how can someone stab a pillow? But when we can rip a living person apart, we don’t laugh—so what’s the difficulty in slicing a pillow? When someone tears a living person, the “juice” is in the tearing itself; the person is incidental. That same juice can arise with a pillow. In fact, more so—because with a pillow you need impose no limits at all. So shut yourself in your room, and when your root “disease” wants to show itself, let it show. Consider this meditation. Let it come out in every pore of your being. Shout, jump, do whatever is happening—let it happen. And watch from behind—you will even feel like laughing. You will be surprised: “I can do this?”…

A second friend has asked: Osho, in the practice of awakening, of awareness, fear arises, and there is a constant worry that the routine of life may fall into disorder. It also seems that when anger, sex, etc., arise, if one acts on them, they are finished in five to seven minutes—one feels free of them. If you don’t act, their after-echo, their waves, keep resounding within for days. Then it feels as if it would have been better to have done it and been done with it. So what should one do? Is such awakening not repression?

Two things. First, if through “awakening” your anger—which would otherwise be over in five minutes—goes on for two days, understand it is not awakening; it is repression. Repression makes things spread. It creates even more disturbance than indulgence. If sexual desire arises and is over in a moment, but with your so-called awakening it drags on for days, grows dense, and becomes a burden on the mind, know that it is not awakening, it is repression. Many of us don’t rightly understand the difference between awakening and repression. Understand it. Repression means: what has arisen inside, you press it down inside; you don’t allow it to come out. Indulgence means: you let it out on someone. Get the difference clear. Repression means: you force it down upon yourself; indulgence means: you unload it onto the other. Awakening is a third thing—letting it out into the void: neither pressing it down…

A friend asked me this afternoon: Osho, unless we suppress our vices, we cannot rise above the animal. We will become animals. If we follow what you say and do not suppress our mind—do not repress our anger, do not repress our sex—then we will become animals.

But I want to tell you: as man is today, animals are better than him. It hurts to know this; it hurts me too. But animals are far better than man—in a thousand ways. What has happened to man is astonishing. Animals do not seem so anxious, nor so miserable. Have you ever heard of an animal or a bird committing suicide? You haven’t. I don’t think such a thing has yet occurred. If it ever does, every newspaper in the world will carry it in big letters on the front page: A dog has committed suicide. So far it has not happened. Only man takes his own life. What does this mean? Man’s life has reached such a condition that man himself wants to end it. Has it become so bad that we ourselves finish it? So meaningless? So filled with sorrow and pain? Yet this is what has…