Osho on philosophy and meditation

Osho – There are two ways to seek the truth: one is mind, the other is meditation. If you choose the mind you land in the world of philosophy. Then there are thousands of questions but no answers. Many times you will feel you are coming closer to an answer, but when you arrive you will find ten more questions hiding behind it.

In philosophy answers are only hiding places for many more questions. So each answer creates ten questions. And as philosophy has grown bigger and bigger… now it is nothing but questions and questions and no answer at all. It can drive a man crazy — in fact it does. It is very difficult to find a philosopher who is not crazy. If he is not crazy he is not much of a philosopher, he is wasting his time — that is not his business. A philosopher has to be crazy; otherwise, who wants questions and questions? And to be surrounded by all kinds of questions… finally one gets lost in the jungle of philosophy.

If you go through meditation, which is just the opposite of mind — meditation means no-mind — then you enter the world of religion. Just as in the world of mind there are only questions, in the world of meditation there are only answers, no questions. Hence a person moving into meditation becomes more and more silent, more and more sane. The name of ultimate sanity is buddhahood — that’s what we call wisdom. Then there are no questions left anymore. And because there are no questions anymore, you cannot say you have got the answers either — because they are relevant only with the questions. One is simply silent.

The philosopher is in a turmoil, the mystic is absolutely silent. The philosopher tries hard but finds nothing, the mystic does not try at all and finds everything. The mystic says: sitting silently, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.

The West has not been able to understand the mystic; the mystic seems to be very alien to the Western mind. Just sitting silently, doing nothing, not even thinking? Then why are you sitting? For what? The Western approach is a mind approach. It is dominated by philosophy. Because of that domination it cannot think that there is a possibility of just being and doing nothing — no questions, no problems, no thoughts; relaxing in oneself, resting in oneself. And in that rest one arrives, one arrives at one’s own innermost core. And that is where one finds the truth. There is nowhere else one can find the truth. The philosopher goes everywhere, the mystic simply sits in his own home. Lao Tzu says that you need not even go out of the room; all that you want you can find inside. And he is right!

Being initiated into sannyas means being initiated into meditation. So now learn to drop the mind. Pull the energy out from the mind and put it into meditativeness, into silence. I don’t give any answers, I only destroy your questions. I call that answering — destroying your questions. When all your questions are destroyed, nothing is left in you, all is found. In nothing all is found.

Source – Osho Book ‘Is the Grass Really Greener…?”

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