23 Mind is maddening

‌CHAPTER 23

Mind is maddening

23 October 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

[A sannyasin says that she became exhausted assisting the Primal group, and has a fear that because she has burnt up so much energy in her past she will not live long.]

Just a mind idea! And you cannot spend your energy forever. Energy is continuously being produced. It is not like a reservoir: it has no fixed quantity. In fact the more you spend it, the more you get it, so never have that idea in the mind. You have a very materialistic concept of energy: you think it is a certain quantity like bread in your fridge. If you eat it then it is finished, and by tomorrow it is gone. It is not like that.

You can eat it and have it too! That is a totally different kind of energy. It goes on being produced every day. You work all day and then you are tired. In the night you fall asleep and by the morning the energy is there again; your inner dynamo has created again. You are perfectly healthy and perfectly energetic; there is no problem. You must have some mind thing about it... and if you have that mind it can create trouble, because you will go on misinterpreting.

Your work is going well; nothing to be worried about. And when one is learning a certain thing, sometimes it is hard too.… By and by you will learn more, and it will become easier and easier because the more you feel self-confident, the more easy it will be. But that can come only through work.

So I think six months more and you will be perfect in your work, there will be no problem. And you are growing very well! You are going to live long and you have to work for me for a long time. Don’t try to escape so fast and so soon!

[The sannyasin continues that she doesn’t sleep well and always wakes between three and four in the morning.]

You always get up between three and four? Then make it a meditation time.

Always use opportunities for some positive good. Be creative about everything. If you cannot sleep then there is no need to force sleep, and sleep cannot be forced in the first place. Sleep is one of those energies that cannot be willed. If you will it, you will be disturbed. If you do something to go into sleep your very doing will be the hindrance, because sleep is against doing; it is a state of non-doing. So if you make any effort: for example, you start counting sheep or you start repeating a mantra or you start turning this way and that or you start calling out for god and start praying, all that will make you more awake. That won’t help but that’s what people go on doing.

My approach is totally different. First, if sleep is gone that simply means your body is perfectly rested and people have different...

[She says: But I feel exhausted and then I feel... ]

That is your mind; that’s nothing to do with the body. Just the idea that you have not been sleeping well tires you. It is not really the lack of sleep. Because the body mechanism, the body organism, has its own wisdom. For example, you are eating.The body says ‘Enough!’ but you say, ’Because

I am so thin and lean, I have to eat more.’ That is wrong; you are creating trouble for yourself. You can eat, you can force a little more, you can stuff, but the organism is not ready for it and it will reject the food.

One day you are not feeling to eat at all, but your mind says that if you don’t eat you will become weak. Nobody becomes weak in one day. If the body is not feeling to eat it is better to listen to it; it knows better. It has an instinctive knowledge that at this moment eating will be dangerous. Maybe some work is going on in the intestines and the body wants to clean it before you put in any more food. Maybe some poison has entered. You have already taken in too much food and the body has not been able to finish work with it. It does not need any more work, otherwise the whole mechanism will go berserk; it will not be possible for it to manage. So the body says ‘No food, no appetite.’ No appetite is body language, just a symbol for you. The body cannot speak verbally: it cannot say ‘Stop!’ That is a symbol, body symbol: no appetite. The body is saying ‘Don’t eat!’ but you have a certain mind, you feel that you have to eat at least twice or three times a day otherwise you will become weak. So you go on stuffing, and because there is no appetite you try to create a false appetite. You will put more spices in the food so you have a false appetite or you will go to some place where you always like to eat. You are trying to deceive the body, but this is just stupid! And the same happens with sleep.

If you have fallen asleep and at three or four you feel you are wakeful, that simply means the body is rested. The body’s sleep is finished, now your mind is creating trouble. So use that one hour. Just lie down there silently; enjoy the silence of the night! Rather than getting disturbed because the sleep is broken, enjoy this moment for meditation. No need to get up: just lie down there on the bed, rest, but listen.the sounds of the night are there, the silence of the night. The traffic noise is there

but people are not there; everybody is asleep. This is beautiful! You are alone – almost as if you are in the mountains – with the darkness and the soothing quality of the darkness. Enjoy that and relax into that enjoyment.

You see the point? Otherwise you become miserable – that once again your sleep has been broken; again tomorrow you will be tired and worried and there will be tensions and anguish and anxiety. Those things will not allow you to go to sleep again.

Take a positive vision, use this time. One of our sannyasins Is in gaol in australia.For some foolish

legal thing he has been put into gaol. He was very much worried that two years would be wasted. I wrote to him to meditate. This is a monastery; a gaol is a monastery! A few people use monasteries as gaols; you use the gaol as a monastery! He got the idea! Now he is so happy; he has never been so happy. Mm? that small cell and all alone; nobody to disturb and a guard there on duty. It is beautiful! Regular food and regular sleep... no worries of earning, etcetera. He started meditating; now he is enjoying. He says, ‘Osho, it is really a blessing in disguise!’ Now he will come out of the gaol a totally transformed person.

So use that one hour, mm? Get in tune with the night, the sounds of the night, and enjoy! It has immense beauty. Then you will not know when you have fallen into sleep again.but that is a by-

product, and that can only be a by-product. When you are so absorbed listening to the night sounds, again you will slip into sleep slowly – not through any will, not that you were wanting.

And I am not saying that you have to meditate so that you can sleep, no. There is no ‘so that’, there is no ‘therefore’. I am simply saying to enjoy! And suddenly you will find that the sleep has happened. But whether it happens or not is irrelevant. If it happens, good; if it doesn’t happen, perfectly good. Just for three weeks do this and all tiredness will disappear. That is a mind thing. From the very morning you are carrying the idea that you are tired. Of course, you will be getting more and more tired. You will be afraid of everything, of every involvement. You are already tired so if you do this you will be more tired. You are creating a neurosis around you.

Everybody has different needs about sleep and food. Somebody sleeps eight hours, somebody may need ten hours, and somebody may need only six and somebody may need even four or sometimes there are people who need only three or two hours.…

My own father cannot sleep after three. He goes to sleep near about eleven, so he has three, four hours sleep at the most. My mother has always been worried, but I told my father to sit in meditation. So he sits from three, and that has become his door to the divine. For years now he has sat from three to seven.and he almost becomes like a statue; he forgets the body.

Now that has been the most precious experience of his life; no sleep can give it. He is fresh by three; that’s how his mechanism, his body, is functioning. In the beginning he used to try to go to sleep. It was a misery because the sleep wouldn’t come and he would get tired trying to sleep, and frustrated; by the morning he would be frustrated. Three or four hours of struggles to sleep every night and it doesn’t come; how can you remain unfrustrated? But since I have given him meditation, all frustration has disappeared, and those have become his most valuable moments. Now he longs for them: for twenty-four hours he thinks about them, because those are the most peaceful. He has used it rightly. So just see it as meditation...

[A sannyasin, newly returned from the West, said she had been cleaning in the ashram and enjoying that, and then she wanted to do some art work. She becomes confused trying to explain to Osho what she wants to say.]

I understand. This is how the mind goes on: one moment it is for, one moment it is against; one moment it wants to stay here, one moment it wants to go. If you go on listening to the mind you will remain in a turmoil. And then you will not be able even to trust yourself; because how to trust? One moment the mind says ‘Be here’, and then next day you start writing questions: ‘Why can’t I go back?’ Nobody is preventing you – whenever you want to go back you can go back – but there you will start asking ‘Why have I come here?’

So that is not going to help either. You have to understand that this mind is almost a kind of madness. It never gives you any direction; it simply gives you desires. Whenever you start doing something again another desire comes up.

Now, you always wanted to be here and to work in the ashram and you were enjoying. Then the mind says ‘Why not paint, make pictures, this and that?’ So you can do that, but then within a few days the mind will say, ‘What are you doing?’ Then you will start missing your work in the ashram.

This way one cannot grow. It is like making a house: one day you make it, another day you destroy; then the third day you again start putting things together. By the fourth day you are again angry and you again pull apart everything, so when will the house be made?

And the whole point of being a sannyasin is that you will listen to me and not to your mind. So only one decision has to be made: either you decide to listen to your mind, then this will continue; you are choosing it so you have to sufferOr you decide to listen to me. Then forget about the mind;

let the mind commit suicide. It will commit suicide because there will be no need for it. So just think about that.

If you really want to grow and you want to grow into happiness, then this mind-game has to be stopped. Then whatsoever I say, do. You will feel great fulfillment in it because then it will not be your responsibility at all. I am saying to do it so you are free.

Just understand it and drop this mind and start working!

[A sannyasin says he gets sick in the morning discourse with headache and congestion which last for days after. He feels he must be misusing Osho and that’s why he gets sick. Osho checks his energy.]

The connection is there and it will grow. Don’t misuse it.and you will start feeling when you misuse

and when you use it, mm? Just grope in the dark and find the way. But the connection is there and it can become bigger and deeper.

If you go on using it rightly it will become deeper and deeper. If you misuse it you will start losing it. But things are perfectly good.…

It will go, mm?

I think that the problem is not the lecture; you are listening to it too seriously. You are trying to make too much effort of the will to listen to it. You are not relaxed. You have to listen to it very passively. You are too worried that you may miss something; a single word may be missed and then you will

not understand what it is. That is creating the trouble. You are trying to concentrate on it, mm? – that can always create trouble. Then one-and-a-half-hour’s concentration is going to be difficult. It can give you a headache, it can give you throat congestion; it can become heavy. It can go on for days.

Concentration is unhealthy; meditation is good. And the difference in concentration, is effort, will. You are trying to listen just to me so nothing else disturbs you. You are trying to exclude the whole world. That is what is creating that trouble. Meditation is all-inclusive; it is not excluding anything. This bird is included while you are sitting in front of me meditatively . This music is there – of course, in the background; I am more emphatically there but it is there. You have not excluded it, you are simply relaxed... so start with relaxation.

It will be good if you start listening with closed eyes and with relaxation. If something is missed, nothing is missed! Don’t be worried... and don’t be in a hurry! Anyway you cannot miss it because there is nothing to miss! Just relax, and really to get that is to get it!

Be relaxed... and there is nothing to miss and nothing to get. To get that is to get it. With closed eyes start listening as one listens to music, birds singing... a breeze passing through the pines and the river flowing by. Just as you listen to natural sounds, listen that way. There is no need to figure out what I am saying.

And it will be gone; nothing to be worried about! Good!

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