Restlessness

A friend has asked, Osho, I am very restless, and so much energy gets used up in this restlessness. How can I make use of it, and what is its cause?

But the anger remains there; it will not change by your turning away. It will change by your standing your ground and seeing it. If you turn your back, anger will make deeper wounds within and lay down roots. Fix both your eyes on anger. This is the moment to consciously see anger. When lust seizes the mind, do not run. Do not panic. Do not chant Ram-Ram. Look lust straight in the face. A direct encounter with the passions is necessary. But man has been taught to run. He has been told, wherever something bad appears—run away. But where will you run? The bad is within you; it will go with you. There is no way to run away from yourself. If evil were outside somewhere, we could run. It stands within—we will have to change it. We will have to use this manure. And using it is not…

Beloved Osho, the first time I saw you was when I took sannyas, and I had that beautiful feeling of "being at home" for the first time in my life. Whenever I'm away from you I feel a certain restlessness that keeps me moving from one place to another, never feeling right wherever I am. The moment I'm staying close to you again the feeling is back: I'm home again. 2 what is this beautiful feeling? You always say there is no home unless we find it in ourselves. But what is this feeling of being at home?

There is no home, unless we find it in ourselves. But if you are close to a person who has found the home and you are open to the person, available, receptive, then you will also share the feeling that you are at home. After all, your master's home is your home too. So what has been happening is perfectly right. You go far away; you miss the feeling of being at home and you feel that something is not right. It is perfectly as it should be. But it is only the beginning of a journey. You feel at home when you are close to me. Let this feeling grow deeper; don't let it be superficial. Allow it to sink to your very being; then wherever you are, I will be with you. Right now you have to be with me to make it possible for me to be…

First, I have asked one question. And I have also asked one or two related questions. It is asked: Osho, the mind is restless. Without effort and without renunciation, how can it become steady?

No. I will say to you: it is not an effort. If I am clenching my fist and ask you, “How do I open this fist?” what will you say? You will say: “To open it, you need do nothing. Please stop doing what you are doing to clench it; the fist will open by itself.” Opening is not an effort; the moment you cease the effort that clenches, opening happens. Or if I pull down a branch and hold it, and ask how to return it to its place—what will you say? “Do nothing to return it. Just stop doing what holds it down; it will return by itself.” What are we doing continuously with the mind? We are doing something. If we stop that, the mind will quiet by itself. It will quiet by itself. As I said this morning, we are constantly engaged in resistance—twenty-four hours resisting.…

Beloved Osho, in all the years with you I felt meditations simply `happened' to me. Then in the last time when I was away from you I felt this was not me, but your grace overflowing towards me. For the first time I saw that I needed to give meditation a priority in my life or it would not happen. Now, melting in your presence again, everything I could ever desire is here. Osho, what happens to the disciple when one is without the master?

There are only two possibilities when the disciple is not with the master. One is that he goes back to the zero where he had been before he met the master. The second is, seeing that if without the master things that were happening in his presence are not happening, it simply means that his presence has not become an intrinsic part of your being. The master need not be outside you. In fact, he is always inside you, and if you can remember it -- "The master is inside me".... And the master is not asking much, just a small place, a small bedroom with an attached bathroom. Once you start feeling yourself as carrying the master within yourself, everything that was happening in the presence of the master not only continues but grows a thousandfold. Because it was the master outside, there was a distance. Now there is…