Osho on Drug Use – Drugs can slowly slowly destroy your capacities to Meditate

[A new sannyasin from America, says that she gets high meditating but now and then she slips back into drug-taking. Osho says that drug-taking and meditation are polar opposites though they may appear to be similar.]

Osho – The drug experience is a forced, phony experience, but because we don’t know the real, the phony seems to be right. If you have not seen the real, then even the phony is too much. If you compare your life with an ordinary man who has never taken anything like LSD, marijuana, then you feel very high – if you compare it with an ordinary man. Because he has not known any moment, he has not even had a false glimpse; he lives such a mundane life.

You have lived the same mundane life – then one day this drug creates a dream, gives you a euphoria, and you are tremendously happy. But once meditation can give you an experience, then you will see that this experience was just a dream experience. It is as if you have been thirsty and drinking in a dream from a pool of water, a pure pool of water… but in a dream. By the morning you are awake and thirsty again – it has not helped. Of course it was so clear and so cool and it had looked, for that moment at least, as if you would never be thirsty again.

But if you go on meddling sometimes with meditation and sometimes with drugs – the problem is that drugs can slowly slowly destroy your capacities to meditate. Otherwise there is nothing in it…. If it is to be an ordinary straight life, then drugs are perfectly okay. But if you are really interested in meditation, then drugs are dangerous. The drug is not dangerous for the people who think it is dangerous.
The so-called common people think drugs are dangerous – it is not dangerous for them at all because they have nothing to lose, they have nothing to be destroyed! But if you are really interested in search and you want to grow, then drugs are dangerous. Drugs are not dangerous for politicians – drugs are dangerous for the religious people because something delicate arises out of meditation. It is very delicate and it comes out of much effort.

Just a small quantity of a drug and it is destroyed and you will have to start again from abc. The drug experience is so cheap and the meditation experience is so costly, because you have to go through such effort. Then by and by the mind starts choosing the cheaper one. Mm? it is the path of least resistance, so the mind says ’Why bother?’ The drug can give you something so easily, then why bother with vipassana – sitting and meditating and struggling hard? Why not the easier way?

The mind is always for the short-cut, and the short-cut is always false. As far as the spiritual growth is concerned there is no short-cut. You cannot cheat… there is no back door. Each has to follow the arduous way. In fact the real beauty of the peak depends on how hard your struggle has been. When you struggle hard and you lose the track many times – many times even the peak disappears and you are again in the dark valley, again you struggle and again you fall and again you move – this whole effort creates that situation where when the real experience happens, you are in a tremendous bliss. If you are suddenly dropped on that peak by some helicopter, there will be no joy, there will be no joy at all.

source: from Osho Book “This Is It”