Weight

Osho, there was an experiment in Paris where a dying man was placed in a glass casket to test something about his weight. Would you care to comment?

Such experiments have been tried in many places, but they have not been conclusive. The idea behind them is natural—because science, when it thinks, thinks in the language of matter: if a man dies and there is something in him beyond the body, and that something departs, then the weight ought to decrease. But it may be that what departs is weightless. Why must it have weight at all? Or its weight may be so minute that we have no instrument to measure it. Take sunlight: does it have weight? It does. Put darkness on one pan of a scale and light on the other—if sunrays have weight, the lighted pan should dip. It doesn’t. You might conclude sunrays have no weight. And yet they do. If you could collect all the sunrays falling on one square mile, they would give about a tola of weight. But that is a…

Questioner: to find out if there is something like a soul in man, scientists have carried out experiments by placing a dying man in a glass casket. Please say something about this experiment.

There have been many experiments like this, but none of them have yielded results. Scientists think -- and naturally they think in terms of matter -- that if there is something other than matter in man, then with the passing away of his life or soul there should be some reduction in his body weight. But is it imperative that the element that goes out of one's body at death have weight? It can be weightless as well. Or it can have so little weight that it cannot be measured by any instruments available to us at the moment. For example, sun rays have a little weight, but there is no way to measure them. If all the sun rays spread over a square mile area are collected together, they will weigh roughly ten grams. But it is so difficult to work it out. Similarly, even if our souls have…

Beloved master, I am obsessed with food. I eat too much and have gained enormous weight. Can you help me to reduce my weight?

Sangito, you will have to learn love. There is no other way to reduce your weight. All other programs can help you a little bit, but sooner or later you will gain weight again because the basic root cause remains the same. You can diet, you can run, swim, exercise, but how long can you diet? Sooner or later you will be fed up with dieting and your mind will become more and more obsessed with eating. Now you will eat in your fantasy, in your dreams, and your mind will convince you that this is not the right way to live. You can't eat this, you can't eat that, and somehow if you ask the doctors, all the good things have to be avoided. A child was talking to his mother, "You say God is very wise. I don't believe it." The mother said, "But why don't you believe…

Osho! You say unhappy people eat more, so they become fat. Then why are the mahatmas fat?

Now here is a contradiction. The very man who cripples the woman so she must depend on him—when she does depend, he torments her. She will torment him too, because nothing else remains; whatever there is, is him. So she sits waiting, watching the door: “You are an hour late—why?” Where were you? You have no idea what that hour is. For you it’s just an hour—perhaps not even that. You were chatting with friends, playing cards. But for your wife, there is nothing else in life. You alone are her filling. If you aren’t there, she is empty. For her, an hour passes as if years have gone by. You can’t imagine her pain. So you say, “What got spoiled in an hour?” For you it’s an hour, but you don’t understand relativity. For her, it isn’t an hour. Your situations are entirely different. So then she will harass…