Master and servant : Are you using your mind or is your mind using you?

1. The moment the person withdraws from the mind, the mind has no energy to go on into old routines. It is your identity with the mind that gives power to it. You have taken your identity back, you are no longer nursing the mind; it starts dying.  The farther you go away from it, the more and more your mind dies. And to attain a state of no-mind is what I call health. That is the goal of meditation. Then your spirit is healed, you have become whole.
2. The ordinary man is being used by his mind. When it becomes too much, when the mind starts using you completely in a totalitarian way, we call it madness.
3. There is no God, there has never been. Man has created God according to his own image because it is something that is needed by the sick mind. The healthy mind has no need for a God, the healthy mind has no need for a prayer. The healthy mind has no need for churches, temples, mosques, synagogues.
4. People are ready to throw their garbage, their advice, their wisdom, their knowledge, everybody is ready to catch hold of you and put something in your mind. You are already too much burdened. Subjective art burdens you more. Objective art unburdens you. Subjective art should be part of psychiatric hospitals only. People suffering from mental sicknesses should be allowed painting, poetry, sculpture, anything they want. And it is going to help, it is therapeutic. It will make them healthy.
5. Conscious mind is personal, unconscious mind is impersonal. The collective unconscious mind is all that has preceded you: the whole history of mind is contained in it. But this cannot be the foundation. Below it there is a cosmic unconscious mind, which is the mind of the whole existence.
6. As you go higher than the conscious no-mind, you find superconsciousness, or the superconscious mind. This superconsciousness is exactly the equivalent of the lower collective unconscious mind.
7. Conscious mind is very small: one-tenth of the Unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is nine times bigger. Nine times more powerful. And it knows no reason.
8. To call darshan Indian philosophy is basically wrong. Philosophy is a mind thing — you think about it. Darshan is a realization, a thing of your innermost being; you realize it. Philosophy needs logic; darshan needs silence — no thoughts, everything in absolute nothingness. Only then you will come to know yourself. So I don’t call darshan Indian philosophy.
9. My understanding is that religion is the ultimate luxury. You have to feed your body first; if your body is hungry, it is impossible to become a buddha. You have to train your mind first, bring it to its highest peak of intelligence. If that is not possible, you cannot become buddha. These are the steps. The body has to be completely satisfied. The mind has to be sharpened, alert, aware, able to enjoy Mozart, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Picasso, Rabindranath. Only then is there a possibility of a new flight, because all these things give you a little joy but very momentary.
10. Repress anything and your mind becomes focused on it. For example, if it said to you that, “Don’t eat apples” then your mind will start fantasizing about apples.
11. The moment you believe, inquiry stops. Keep your mind open — neither believe nor disbelieve. Just remain alert and search and doubt everything. Unless you come to a point which is indubitable, that’s what truth is. You cannot doubt it. It is not a question of believing in it, it is a totally different phenomenon and you cannot doubt it. It is so much a certainty, so overwhelming you that there is no way to doubt it.
12. It is really amazing to watch people’s mind how they work and how they make themselves miserable and they go on weaving their misery deeper and deeper and more complex and more complex, to a point from where they cannot get out. And it is all their imagination.
13. There are not many hindrances but only few. One is a repressed mind because whatever you have repressed, whenever you will sit silent to meditate, that repressed idea, the repressed energy will be the first to overflow you and your mind. If it is sex, meditation will be forgotten and you will be having a pornographic session. So first thing is: drop repressions — which is very simple because they are not natural, they have been told to you… that sex is sin. It is not. Is is nature, and if nature is sin then I don’t think what can be virtue. In fact, going against nature is sin.
14. Meditation is not focusing your mind on something, it is emptying your mind of everything — your Gods included.
15. The Eastern mind is accustomed to belief. Faith has been emphasized for centuries; to doubt is a sin and to believe is a virtue. To me the reverse is the case: to doubt is virtue and to believe is sin.

~ Osho ~