Osho – Meditation needs not Followers but Friends

Osho – Meditation needs not followers but friends. The follower is stupid; he follows out of his stupidity: because he cannot depend on himself he starts depending on somebody else, but he is a slave, a psychological slave, and psychological slavery is a deeper slavery than all other slaveries. It is very subtle, you cannot see it, but you can feel it. The people who call god the father are just looking for a father figure; they want to depend on a father. Or there are religions which call god the mother — it is the same, there is no difference at all.

These people are childish, they are not grown-ups. They may be old is age but psychologically they are retarded. All followers are retarded people. My sannyasins are not my followers but my friends.

Following comes through belief; friendship, friendliness is born out of meditation. So I don’t give you any doctrine, I don’t give you any philosophy. To me all those philosophical dogmas and great systems of thought are simply bullshit. But people are so interested in rotten things that they go on carrying all that load their whole life. They are just big words, jargon, esoteric jargon. I am not interested at all in any kind of jargon. You have to be very simple with me because it is a question of enquiry. You need an innocent, silent, enquiring mind, not full of belief, not full of philosophy, just clean.

Sannyasins are fellow travellers. We don’t have a church, we don’t have a doctrine, a dogma, we don’t have any beliefs; we share only one thing with each other, and that is meditation. All those who have gathered close to me are here just to learn meditation — and meditation means silence, not chanting, not repeating a mantra. That is not meditation, that is just a simple process of auto-hypnosis.

Meditation means becoming aware and silent, watching your mind with all its game, trips, numbers. And the miracle is that if you can watch silently all those trips and numbers and games disappear. Just by simple watching they evaporate. One day you are there and the mind is no more. That sudden silence, that profound silence when the mind is not at all…. You look for it because you have become habituated with it, it is an old habit; you search for where it has gone and you cannot find it anywhere — even if you go to the four corners of the world you will not find it… That state is silence, meditation, samadhi.

And out of that state is a new upsurge of energy. Call it love, call it friendliness, call it prayer — because all these are aspects of it. But to call it friendliness is the best, because if you call it prayer it stinks of old religion; if you call it god many people withdraw, they become afraid — god has tortured them enough. In the name of god so much stupidity has happened on the earth that it is time to quit.

But if you call it friendliness nobody is offended. It has never been called friendliness, hence I call it friendliness. The word is fresh and young, without any old associations. My sannyasins are friends — friends to me, friends to each other, friends to the whole existence.

Source – Osho Book “Going All the Way”