“Work is a necessary part of your transformation. Groups clean your mind but without work the mind will again gather rubbish. Meditation takes you into beyond-the-mind, but it starts cutting roots from the body-mind, and I want you to be with a wholesome integrated personality. Therapists clean the rubbish that centuries have poured into the mind, then work should make the body rooted in the ground, and then meditation can grow like flowers of a tree in the high sky.
“People need to change the attitude that exists about work, particularly in the Western mind. Meditation should be part of the work, not separate from it.
“Work and relaxation are not contradictory. In fact, the more you put yourself into work the deeper you can go into relaxation. So both are important. The harder you work the deeper you can relax. Work is valuable. It will bring humbleness and silence. People should feel that their work is something very special, and that whatever work they do is respectable.”
“The emphasis should be on full-time work. 6 hours a day is perfectly okay. Work is part of the whole program – when you work, work as if it were a group therapy. Call it “work meditation”. If you really want to meditate and get into yourself, at least 6 hours work is a necessity – is part of the whole change in your energy. It is scientific. For 6 hours you should forget everything else – forget the whole world, forget your problems – whatever work it is, be total in it. Then something is possible.”
On another occasion Osho explains his radical approach:
“It is a very western idea of having a separation between the work and enjoyment; it is a very Christian idea – that God worked for 6 days and on the seventh he rested. But my vision is totally against this whole idea from the past. I am giving you a totally new vision, a totally new man who is not split into work and rest. For me relaxation and work are not opposite. I am not at all in favor of people feeling they work too hard and they need a rest or a break to relax and that they have to go somewhere away, away from the work. My vision is that you enjoy totally whatever you are doing, I am not against swimming or against fresh air, or against lakes. It is the split that I am against, the separation that this is work and this is enjoyment, the idea that I need to go to the lake for a break, to relax, to get away from the work.”
Osho on the Art of Living Creatively:
I believed I was uncreative. What else can be creativity besides dancing and painting and how to find out what my creativity is?
Creativity has nothing to do with any activity in particular – with painting, poetry, dancing, singing. It has nothing to do with anything in particular.
Anything can be creative – you bring that quality to the activity. Activity itself is neither creative nor uncreative. You can paint in an uncreative way. You can sing in an uncreative way. You can clean the floor in a creative way. You can cook in a creative way.
Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach – how you look at things.
So the first thing to be remembered: don’t confine creativity to anything in particular. A man is creative – and if he is creative, whatsoever he does, even if he walks, you can see in his walking there is creativity. Even if he sits silently and does nothing, even non-doing will be a creative act. Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree doing nothing is the greatest creator the world has ever known.
Once you understand it – that it is you, the person, who is creative or uncreative – then this problem disappears.
Not everybody can be a painter – and there is no need also. If everybody is a painter the world will be very ugly; it will be difficult to live. And not everybody can be a dancer, and there is no need. But everybody can be creative.
Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing it is not purely economical, then it is creative. If you have something growing out of it within you, if it gives you growth, it is spiritual, it is creative, it is divine.
Osho
A Sudden Clash of Thunder
