Spiritual Materialism

Osho, a few months ago in the west I read a book by lama trungpa, entitled "cutting through spiritual materialism", and I got the impression that everything that could be done wrong, I was doing. Then I tried to be more alert, but by voiding one pitfall I was constantly stepping into another, and so on. Now my question is: would you be so kind as to speak about this subject of avoiding spiritual materialism?

Epicurus, Charvakas, Karl Marx, have a certain truth in what they are saying, but it is half-truth. The other half has been told by the so-called spiritualists. The other half is that matter is illusory, that it does not exist at all, it is maya. The real existence is of the soul; matter has to be avoided. What Lama Trungpa is saying is an ancient, very ancient and rotten ideology. He's a Tibetan, and Tibet is the most primitive country in the world, the most rotten -- even more rotten than India. If India is two thousand years rotten, Tibet is five thousand years rotten. It is stinking. He represents that stinking tradition. These so-called spiritualists have been saying the same thing as the materialists. The materialists say, "The soul does not exist, only matter exists." The spiritualists say, "The matter does not exist, only the soul exists." And my…

Where does educating the subconsciousness conflict or harmonise with tao, as it implies discipline with self-effort from an external expression?

Once upon a time, the Duke of Lu went forward to meet a sea bird that had made its appearance in the confines of that country, and escorted it to his ancestral hall. This is a Taoist parable. There, an ox, a sheep and a pig were slaughtered, and a feast was spread before the sea bird, while the band was playing the celebrated music composed under the supervision of the Emperor Shuen. The bird, however, merely looked on, sad and doleful, refusing to relish a morsel of meat or drink a single cup. Thus it died of hunger after three days. The duke fed the bird as he would feed himself, and he failed to see that it should have been treated as a bird and not as a king. The music is meaningless to the bird, and the ox and the sheep and the pig are not his…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A SPIRITUAL SEEKER? Once this sleep has been broken, the dream has been broken and you become awakened to the reality that is here and now, just in the present. You are reborn. You come to ecstasy, to fulfillment, to all that has always been desired but never achieved. Spiritual seeking is to be here and now, and you can only be here and now when there is no desiring mind; otherwise the desiring mind will create wavering. Just like a pendulum, the mind goes either to the past, in the memory, or to the future, in desires, in dreams. But it is never here and now, it always misses the point of here and now. It just goes to the one extreme, the past, or to the other, the future.

Beloved Osho, when you spoke of greed, I was totally horrified. I have finally reached a point where I am willing to see how big a part it plays in my life, and the misery it brings with it. Could you please shed more light on what this thing called greed is, where it comes from? -- and perhaps offer some tools to help me?

It is strange that the word health, and the word holy both come from `wholeness'. When you are feeling one with wholeness all greed disappears. Otherwise... what have religions been doing? They have misunderstood greed as a desire, so they try to repress it: "Don't be greedy." Then one moves to the other extreme, to renounce. One collects -- the greedy person; and the person who wants to get rid of greed starts renouncing. There too there is no end. Mahavira could never recognize Gautam Buddha as enlightened for the simple reason that he still carries three sets of clothes -- just three sets of clothes, which are absolutely necessary. One you are using, one has to be washed, and one for emergency reasons... someday the clothes may not come from being washed or they are not dry, or it is raining the whole day. So three seems to be…