Greed And Meditation

Watching the ways of the mind

 by Osho

When for the first time meditation really goes deep, immediately, for months, that glimpse disappears. "What is happening? I had seen something, and it was tremendously beautiful. Why has it disappeared? What wrong have I done?"

You have not done anything wrong: you became greedy. When it happened for the first time, you were not greedy, because you had not ever known it. How ould you have been greedy about it? It was unknown; it came from out of the blue. It simply came; you were caught unaware. Now watch. It came when you were not asking for it -- you had not known it, so you could not have asked for it. It came on its own.

Greed can be watched many times during the day

Now you are asking for it. Now you are asking for something which had come without your asking. You are creating the whole trouble -- the greed has entered. Sometimes it has happened that a man has come very close to satori, very close, and then he went astray because of the greed. So watch.

Eating, watch. In the morning, you know that the sleep is over, but you still want to turn over and have a little nap. Now it is greed. If your body is fresh and you are feeling good and the tiredness is gone, then watch. It is everywhere. Eating, sleeping, meditating -- it is everywhere.

Great things cannot be managed

This is a fundamental law. Things happen and they happen on their own accord; you cannot manage them to happen. Great things cannot be managed by you; they are beyond you. You can, at the most, allow them to happen. At the most, you can keep your doors open so that they can happen, but you cannot force them to happen. If you force, then nothing happens.

People come to me and they say, "Now for months nothing is happening in the meditation," and they say they have become doubtful. Had they imagined the first time? They had not imagined; it had happened. Now they want it to happen and they are imagining and they are creating an idea around themselves.

What is to be done?

You have to watch all the ways of the mind. Greed, desire, ambition, jealousy, possessiveness, domination -- you have to watch everything. And they are all interconnected, remember. If greed disappears, then anger will disappear. If anger disappears, jealousy will disappear. If jealousy disappears, violence will disappear. If violence disappears, possessiveness will disappear. They are all intertwined. In fact, they are spokes of the same wheel, and the hub that supports them all is the ego. So watch the ways of the ego. Watching, watching, watching... one day suddenly it is not there. Only the watcher is left. That moment of pure watching is the moment of transformation.

Osho, excerpted from First Principle #2

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Greed is a common feeling in the material world, yet it also happens in meditation. In this Osho quote it is described how the emotion of greed comes in after spiritual experiences and what needs to be done with greed: watching the ways of the mind in daily life.