Question – Beloved Osho, The more I am able to absorb You, The more thirsty I become. Please talk about Meditation and Passion.
Osho – There is no harm in becoming more thirsty for truth.
I call it divine discontentment. Only the fools are contented. You can see it. Watch a donkey… how contented he looks! He should be worshipped by all religious people. You cannot find a more contented being — having nothing, but you will never see him frustrated, in despair, freaking out. In the world of donkeys even psychotherapies don’t exist. Donkeys don’t need any psychotherapist. But it is not a quality; it is not to be praised, it is a condemnation.
The man of any worth is discontented. The smaller men are discontented about smaller things: money, power, prestige. These are not very far away from the donkeys — cousin-brothers.
There is just a difference of a few inches between the donkeys and the presidents and prime ministers. The higher quality man, the man of superiority, the man who has the potential of growing into a Gautam Buddha, into a Mahavira, into a Zarathustra, will also be discontented — although his discontent is totally different, his dimension is different. He is not discontented because he wants to have more things; he is discontented because he wants to be more — not to have more, but to be more. He wants more being, he wants more awareness, he wants more alertness. He wants more lovingness, he wants more compassion. He wants the whole sky and all the stars within him. His discontent is immense.
These smaller people who are discontented for money and power and prestige may find them, and then they will be utterly frustrated. Their whole joy is in the hope, not in the finding. The moment they find they see that they have been running after shadows.
But the really discontented man goes on becoming more and more thirsty, because each step brings him to such immense ecstasies that he cannot stop searching for more. His search is eternal. It is not that what he finds is frustrating, no. It is because what he finds is so satisfying that naturally he wants to go beyond it; there must be more, existence cannot be so limited. It is perfectly good that the more you listen to me the more thirsty you become.
Move on. Have an infinite thirst so that your journey towards the truth is unending; you are always, always coming and never reaching. You have also asked that I say something about meditation and passion. Superficially it will look very strange — why are you putting these two together? — but they are together. It is only the more passionate man who becomes a meditator. His passion is so much that nothing ordinary can satisfy it; everything proves small. His passion is so big….
This has never been said so clearly as I am saying it: as proof, I can tell you that no impotent man in the whole history of man has ever become enlightened. Strange — if your religious people are right, then all impotent people should have become enlightened because they are the real celibates. Their celibacy is absolutely certain, nobody else’s is certain; everybody else’s celibacy is uncertain.
It is the more passionate one who cannot be satisfied by toys, who soon gets fed up with money, with men, with women, with being a celebrity, with fame, with name. They soon become fed up with everything that it is not the real thing. They want the real thing. Their passion is such that unless they find the truth they will not be satisfied.
So there is a relationship: only the passionate ones have become great meditators. And the overflowing energy of passion… unless it is too much it cannot move upwards. Otherwise, it is enough for the biological needs of creating children. When it is too much, then it is bound to rise beyond the boundaries of biology — and that’s how we have found the stages of where it moves in the inner world of man.
There are seven stages. At the seventh stage, when it reaches to the highest point in the head, it explodes, as if into thousands of suns. That’s what we have called `enlightenment’. It is the same energy that expresses itself in sex, creates life; it is the same energy, moving upwards in different stages.
For example, when it is near the heart it creates a tremendous power of love. When it is near the throat it creates a great power in music, poetry, the authority of every single word uttered. It is the same energy when it reaches to the third-eye center, between the two eyebrows; then a man becomes hypnotic, without his effort. Just to be in his presence, you suddenly find yourself agreeing with him. It is not a question of argument; you fall into the same rhythm.
This kind of man never tries to convert anybody. Just by chance if anybody comes close to him, he is bound to be converted. And this is true conversion because it is a transformation: the man will never be the same again. It is when the same energy is moving beyond the sixth center, the third eye, to the seventh, sahasrar that one attains to samadhi. But it is the same energy that we used to call passion; at the lowest level it is passion, at the highest level it is compassion.
Source – Osho Book “The Osho Upanishad”