Osho Quotes on Confusion

Osho Quotes on Confusion

1. Once you understand what meditation is things become very clear. Otherwise, you can go on groping in the dark. Meditation is a state of clarity, not a state of mind. Mind is confusion. Mind is never clear. It cannot be. Thoughts create clouds around you — they are subtle clouds. A mist is created by them, and the clarity is lost. When thoughts disappear, when there are no more clouds around you, when you are in your simple beingness, clarity happens. Then you can see far away; then you can see to the very end of existence; then your gaze becomes penetrating — to the very core of being. Meditation is clarity, absolute clarity, of vision.
2. That’s what meditation is all about: a methodology to put the mind aside… even for a few moments. If there is no thought in you then the mind has been put aside, because the mind is nothing but the continuous process of thought, the chain of thought. If even for a few moments there is no thought in you, there is clarity. Thought is confusion; no-thought is clarity. And then the window is open. You are not doing anything to reality; you are simply allowing the reality as it is; and it is a totally different phenomenon. To see reality as it is, is to see god. To see reality through the mind is to see the world. The world is a creation of the mind — god is an experience of no-mind.
3. Mind is always unsure; it lives in unsureness. Mind lives in confusion, it can never have any clarity. Clarity is not part of the mind at all; clarity is the absence of the mind, confusion is the presence of the mind. Confusion and mind are synonymous. You can’t have a clear mind. If you have clarity, you cannot have the mind; if you have the mind, you can’t have clarity. The mind is always divided against itself, it lives in conflict. Divisibility is its nature. Hence those who live in the mind never become individuals, indivisibles. They remain divided: one part wants this, another part wants that. Mind is a crowd of many desires; it is not a single desire. Mind is multi-psychic, and all the fragments are falling apart in different directions. It is a miracle how we go on keeping ourselves together; it is a hard struggle to keep oneself together. Somehow we manage, but that togetherness remains only on the surface. Deep down there is turmoil.
4. Once you see that the mind is confusion and there is no way out through the mind, how long can you go on clinging to the mind? Sooner or later you will have to drop it; even if you don’t drop it, it will drop of its own accord. Confusion will become so much, so heavy, that out of sheer heaviness it will drop. And when the mind drops, confusion disappears. I cannot say that you attain to certainty, no, because that too is a word applicable only to the mind and the world of the mind. When there is confusion, there can be certainty; when confusion disappears, certainty also disappears. You simply are —  clear, neither confused nor certain, just a clarity, a transparency. And that transparency has beauty, that transparency is grace, it is exquisite.
5. Idiots are very very clear —  clear in the sense that they do not have the intelligence to feel confusion. To feel confusion needs great intelligence. Only the intelligent ones feel confusion; otherwise the mediocres go on moving in life, smiling, laughing, accumulating money, struggling for more power and fame. If you see them you will feel a little jealous; they look so confident, they even look happy.
6. It is not always certain what to do. You are very confused. Let it be so. But find a way out of your confusion. It is very cheap and easy to listen to others because they can hand over dead dog mas to you, they can give you commandments — do this, don’t do that. And they are very certain about their commandments. Certainty should not be sought; understanding should be sought. If you are seeking certainty you will become a victim of some trap or other. Don’t seek certainty, seek understanding. Certainty can be given to you cheap, anybody can give it to you. But in the final analysis you will be a loser. You lost your life just to remain secure and certain, and life is not certain, life is not secure. Life is insecurity. Each moment is a move into more and more insecurity. It is a gamble. One never knows what is going to happen. And it is beautiful that one never knows. If it was predictable, life would not be worth living. If everything was as you would like it to be, and everything was certain, you would not be a man at all, you would be a machine. Only for machines is everything secure and certain. Man lives in freedom. Freedom needs insecurity and uncertainty. A real man of intelligence is always hesitant because he has no dogma to rely upon, to lean upon. He has to look and respond.
7. Whenever people are in confusion they fall prey to third-rate minds. The first-rate minds fall prey to third-rate minds because the third-rate mind has no confusion. The third-rate mind knows that just by drinking your own urine all diseases can be cured — even cancer is curable by drinking your own urine. It is only possible to assert this if you really are utterly unintelligent. The intelligent person hesitates, ponders, wavers. The unintelligent never wavers, never hesitates. Where the wise will whisper, the fool simply declares from the housetops. Lao Tzu says, “I may be the only muddle-headed man in the world. Everybody seems to be so certain, except me.” He is right; he has such tremendous intelligence that he cannot be certain about anything. I cannot promise you certainty if you drop the mind. I can promise you only one thing, that you will be clear. There will be clarity, transparency, you will be able to see things as they are. You will be neither confused nor certain. Certainty and confusion are two sides of the same coin.
8. There is no impurity anywhere. All is pure. Impurity is just a shadow of the confusion that you are feeling right now. When the confusion and the confusing mind are dropped, the shadows will disappear of their own accord. Your innermost core has always been pure; purity is intrinsic to you, it cannot be taken away. Your virginity is eternal; you cannot lose it, there is no way to lose it. You can only forget about it or remember it. If you forget about it, you live in confusion; if you remember it, all is clear.
9. This is the way of the mind, how the mind functions. Just try to understand the functioning of the mind, otherwise you will always be in chaos, confusion, in a sort of insanity. Become a watcher. Get out of the traffic of the mind, stand by the side of the road and just see. And when I say just see, I mean don’t evaluate, don’t judge. Don’t say,’This is good, that is wrong.’ Once you say,’This is good,’ you are no more a witness: you have jumped into the river; you are already identified, you are already in trouble. Just stand by the side of the road, or, sit on the bank of a river and let the river flow wherever it goes. You are not concerned; it is none of your business. Unconcerned, indifferent, just watching, you will suddenly be in between: neither this nor that. That in between point is the point of transcendence. Suddenly, the mind disappears with all its traffic. You are left alone, alone in tremendous purity, alone in absolute innocence, alone with no movement — silent, eternal — not going anywhere, just being here. You are not trying to become someone, something, this or that — just being yourself. And to be yourself is to be divine. To be yourself is to meditate. To be yourself is all that religion is about. This is what I’m teaching here.
10. Mind is confusion. Thoughts and thoughts — thousands of thoughts clamoring, clashing, fighting with each other, fighting for your attention. Thousands of thoughts pulling you into thousands of directions. It is a miracle how you go on keeping yourself together. Somehow you manage this togetherness — it is only somehow, it is only a facade. Deep behind it there is a clamoring crowd, a civil war, a continuous civil war. Thoughts fighting with each other, thoughts wanting you to fulfill them. It is a great confusion, what you call your mind. But if you are aware that the mind is confusion, and you don’t get identified with the mind, you will never fall. You will become fallproof! The mind will become impotent. And because you will be watching continuously, your energies will slowly be withdrawn, away from the mind; it will not be nourished any more. And once the mind dies, you are born as a no-mind. That birth is enlightenment. That birth brings you for the first time to the land of peace, the lotus paradise. It brings you to the world of bliss, benediction. Otherwise you remain in hell. Right now you are in hell. But if you resolve, if you decide, if you choose consciousness, right now you can take a jump, a leap from hell into heaven. It is up to you: you can choose hell, you can choose heaven. Hell is cheap. Heaven needs great effort, perseverance, resolve. Hell means you can remain unconscious, you can remain as you are. Heaven means you have to rise above yourself, you have to transcend. You have to move from the valley towards the peaks.
11. Look deep into your confusion. Don’t be worried about it, don’t be concerned about it, because concern means that you are getting ready to escape from it. Hence people create devices; they repress it, they avoid it, they don’t look at it or they start distracting their mind through some other channels. But all these things are not going to help, they will make you more and more confused. If you want to avoid one confusion you will create another; to avoid that you will create another. Don’t avoid the first one: go into it, watch it, let it be your meditation. If it is there, there must be some significance, because nothing exists without any significance. By and by you will feel thankful for it, because looking into it you will become clear, more meditative, more alert, more aware. Then finally you will thank your confusion, that it helped you, that it was an opportunity to grow into awareness. It was just an opportunity knocking on your door to help you to grow into awareness.
12. You get confused because you are carrying certain ideas and prejudices in the mind. If you don’t carry any ideas, any prejudices in the mind, even I cannot confuse you; nobody in the whole world can confuse you. Confusion arises from your own inner causes.
13. Your mind immediately distorts it. Your mind is upside down. It makes a mess of everything. It is in confusion, and you look through that confusion, so the whole world looks confused.
14. The questioning mind is a confused mind, and out of the confusion comes the question; whatsoever answer is given to it will enter into the confused mind again. That answer will be distorted. The confused mind will start playing on it and will create many more questions out of it. It is a vicious spiral. No answer is going to help unless you understand that questioning in itself is futile, unless the understanding grows deep that questioning is meaningless. There is nobody to answer your question. Existence is there without any explanations — and it is absolutely silent. You go on asking, it does not respond. By and by you will understand that questions are meaningless — then they disappear.
15. Mind makes everything a problem; otherwise life is simple, death is simple, there is not a problem at all. But mind gives the deception that every moment is a problem and has to be solved. Once you take the first step of believing that everything is a problem, then nothing can be solved because the first step is absolutely wrong. Mind cannot give you any solution, it is the mechanism which gives you problems. Even if you think you have solved a problem, thousands of new problems will arise out of the solution. This is what philosophy has always been doing. Philosophy is the business of the mind. The moment mind looks at anything it looks with a question mark, it looks with the eyes of doubt. Very simple is life, and very simple is death — but only if you can see without the mind. Once you bring the mind in, then everything is complex, then everything is confusion. And mind tries to solve the confusion when really it is the source of all confusions, so more confusion is created. It is as if a small stream is flowing in the hills. Some carts have passed through it and the stream is muddy, and you jump into the stream to clean it. You will only make it more muddy. It is better to wait on the bank. It is better to let the stream become tranquil again, calm down by itself, so that dead leaves go and the mud settles and the stream is again crystal clear. Your help is not needed. You will only confuse it more. So if you feel that there is a problem, please don’t poke your nose in it. Sit by the side. Don’t allow the mind to get involved, tell the mind to wait. And it is very difficult for the mind to wait — it is impatience incarnate. If you tell the mind to wait, meditation happens. If you can persuade the mind to wait, you will be in prayer — because waiting means no thinking, it means just sitting on the bank not doing anything with the stream. What can you do? Whatsoever you do will make it more muddy; your very entering into the stream will create more problems. So wait. All meditation is waiting. All prayer is infinite patience. The whole of religion consists in not allowing the mind to create more problems for you. So many things, simple things which even animals enjoy, which even trees enjoy, man cannot enjoy — because immediately they become problems, and how can you enjoy a problem?
16. Mind is confusion; it is not that you are in confusion. And there is no way for the mind to be not in confusion. Mind’s whole structure is based on confusion. Mind is a duality; it is always split. There is no single point on which the mind agrees in totality. Half of the mind will agree and half of the mind will disagree, and whatever you choose, you are choosing only the half. The remaining half is going to take revenge. The unchosen part, the left over, will wait for its chance to show you that whatever you have chosen is wrong. But it does not matter which part you choose. Choice itself is wrong. So the first thing to be understood is that there is no mind which has ever been without confusion.
17. The whole confusion is that you jump into the drama of the mind, which is just a screen. I have been telling you again and again just to watch. Every drama has its end, and no thought in the mind remains for long. If you can keep alert not to become a victim of your thoughts, soon less and less thoughts will be moving on the screen. And when the watching becomes perfect, the screen becomes empty. When you are ready to witness, there is nothing to witness. It is your identification with thoughts that is creating the confusion: it brings you down into the mind; otherwise your watcher is far above it. And to get centered in your watching is the only way for peace. There is no such thing as peace of mind. There is only one peace, and that is when there is no mind. When there is only a watcher and nothing to watch, suddenly everything becomes calm and quiet.
18. The mind is confusion — more or less is possible. Sometimes it is more confused, sometimes it is more cloudy, sometimes it is less cloudy. And the most surprising thing is: when it is more cloudy you don’t feel that it is cloudy, because you can’t see sky anywhere so you cannot contrast it. When it starts becoming less cloudy, then you start feeling that there is confusion because there are a few gaps of the sky here and there. So when a person starts getting deeper into meditation then he starts becoming aware that the mind is very confused. Otherwise the whole world is confused and nobody is aware of it; confusion is taken for granted. They have never known anything else; all that they know is confusion. And they have not known the contrary so they cannot call it confusion either.
19. Walking, eating, whatsoever one is doing, one should start watching the body. That is the first step of meditation: watching the body from the inside. Slowly slowly a distance arises between the watcher and the watched, and the confusion starts clearing up.
20. Meditation is a way to be finished with the mind, to part with the mind. Meditation means to step out of the mind. Meditation means to move away from the mind. Meditation means cessation of the mind. Meditation means to stay away from where the confusion is. By moving away from the confusion, the confusion stills — because it is our very presence that creates it. If we move away, it ceases to be. Say, for instance, two people are having a fight. You have come to fight with me and the fight is on. If I were to step aside, how would the fight continue? It would stop, because it can only continue if I make myself a part of it. We live on a mental plane; we are present right where the disorder, where the trouble is going on. We don’t want to get away from there, and yet we want to bring peace there. Peace cannot be there. Just be kind enough to step aside, that’s all. As soon as you step aside, the turmoil will come to an end. Meditation is not a technique to bring peace to your mind; rather, it is a technique to move away from the mind. Meditation is a means to slip away, to turn away from the waves of confusion.
21. What is mind? Mind is a conditioning given to you by the society. It is an over-imposition on the original mind, which we call no-mind. Just so that you don’t get confused, all mind, as such, has to be dropped. The passage has to be completely empty for the divine to enter into you. Thinking is not meditation. Even right thinking is not meditation. Wrong or right, thinking has to be dropped. When there is no thought in you, no clouds of thinking in you, the ego disappears. And remember, when the ego disappears the ‘I’ is not found.
22. Meditation only teaches you the simple art of remaining centred in the turmoil of life. It teaches you to be a centre, always a centre in all kinds of cyclones. If you become disturbed you lose the opportunity, you become confused, unfamiliar, clouded; and that’s how dust gathers. If you remain calm and quiet, as if nothing is happening to you — you are only watching something on the TV screen — then it gives sharpness, brightness. A moment comes when your inner brightness is so much that it becomes almost an explosion of light. Hence the word ‘enlightenment’; that is the ultimate peak to which meditation can bring you. Meditation is climbing the mountain towards the sunlit peak.