Osho Quotes on Greed, The mind is greedy. Mind is greed.

Osho Quotes on Greed

1. The mind is greedy. Mind is greed.
2. Greed is your aggression. It is the desire always for more. It never stops; it goes on asking for more. And because it goes on asking for more, you are always miserable. Whatever you may have, you cannot enjoy it because you don’t have more. By the time you have more, your greed has gone ahead of you. It is always ahead of you asking for more.
3. Greed means a desire for more without seeing the total futility of it. If less is not giving you anything. then it is not going to happen by having more of the same.
4. People come to me and they ask,’We can meditate but what will we attain? We can become sannyasins but what are we going to gain out of it?’ This is what mind is — always greedy.
5. Watch. When you are greedy for money, who are you? You are just a greed for money and nothing else.
6. You can see it in all old people. Why are they so irritated? Why is it so difficult to stand them? They are frustrated people; they have wasted their life in grabbing more and more. But the more is never satisfied. Now they are feeling angry at life, so any excuse is enough and they will become angry. Greed is the root cause and when it is not fulfilled, it leaves you with great anger, frustration, irritation, failure. And in your anger and frustration and failure a third thing arises: delusion. Delusion is a consolation. Delusion is a way somehow to keep yourself together.
7. You can go on an ego-trip if you start on the path of greed — and that can take your whole life. To the very end people remain greedy; they are DYING and they remain greedy; even DEATH does not make them aware.
8. Greed is an aggressive attitude towards existence: grab as much as you can and go on grabbing more and more and more. Waste your whole life and your whole intelligence in grabbing more and more and what is the point? Death will not be late, not even for a single minute. It always comes at the right time, and all that you have grabbed and wasted your life for, you will have to leave here.
9. Your saints are all Jews, all mahatmas are Jews, for the simple reason because they are trying to achieve something in the other world. They are gaining virtue, the are doing meritorious acts in order to gain something in the other world. They are really far more Jewish than the ordinary people. The ordinary people are asking tor ordinary things — money, power, prestige — your mahatmas condemn them as momentary. They are asking tor eternal joy for eternal bliss, for non-ending bliss. They are not going to be satisfied by small things. They call things of this world “toys”; real things belong to the other world. They are far more greedy — and greed is Jewish.
10. Greed is Jewish, and everybody is a Jew in that sense. And remember that greed is a projection of fear. It is because of fear that man becomes greedy. He is so much afraid, that he wants to accumulate for the future. He is so afraid, that he sacrifices his today for tomorrow, and the tomorrow never comes. The greedy man is the most foolish man in the world. “The fool” Buddha calls him — the fool par excellence, because he goes on sacrificing the present for the future which never comes. He accumulates money but he cannot use it; he remains poor. The greedy man never becomes rich. He may have the whole world at his disposal, but he remains poor. He cannot enjoy it, his greed won’t allow that. He remains miserly. He always remains in such fear of the future that he cannot part from his money. He accumulates, accumulates, wastes his whole life and one day dies. He was a poor man his whole life — empty-handed he had come, empty-handed he has gone, and his whole life went down the drain with no significance.
11. To be non-greedy simply means you have to live each moment for no motive at all, for the sheer joy of living, for the sheer joy of dancing, for the sheer joy of singing. Just as the flower blooms and the birds sing and the rivers flow, in the same way when you are also living moment-to-moment, for no reason at all, for no purpose at all, with no motivation, with no end, as if this is the first and the last moment and you are utterly contented with it, then Jewishness disappears.
12. You will have to come out of many layers of drunkenness. Greed is a state of drunkenness, and everybody is greedy — greedy for more. Mind continuously asks for more and more, and the demand is never-ending. If you are after money, more money. If you are after political power, more power. If you are after prestige, more prestige. If you are interested in becoming humble, then more humbleness, because you have to be the most humble man in the world. If you are after renunciation, then more and more renunciation. There is never any end to this constant demand of the mind — more…. Greed is a drunkenness, it is a sleep.
13. For a greedy mind there is no meditation; meditation happens only in a non-greedy mind.
14. Mind is not going to get any experience of meditation. And the more greedy the mind becomes, the less is the possibility of that relaxed state when meditation blossoms.
15. In every situation where mind starts any kind of desire, greed, lust, ambition, possessiveness, the meditator has to be just a mirror. And what is that going to do? To be just a mirror means you are simply aware. In pure awareness the mind cannot drag you down into the mud, into the gutter. In anger, in hatred, in jealousy, the mind is absolutely impotent in the face of awareness. And because the mind is absolutely impotent, your whole being is in a profound silence — the peace that passeth understanding.
16. When you breathe, your breathing is never natural. If you are a little angry, your anger changes your breathing. If you are full of passion, lust, your lust changes your breathing. If you are greedy, your greed is reflected in your breathing. Continuously your mind mood infiltrates breathing and changes it. You can watch it. When you are angry, try not to disturb the breathing, and you will be completely unable to be angry. Just try not to change the breathing. Let the breathing remain as it was before you became angry, and then try to be angry. It will be impossible. The breathing has to change first. Through the breathing the body changes; the mind first affects the breathing. When you are in a moment of lust, watch, keep the breathing natural, and you will suddenly find the lust has disappeared, the moment came and passed.
17. Just the mind goes on playing a game. The mind says things can be better. The mind says life can be improved upon. The mind says there must be something more, you must be missing something — seek, search, do something. This is greed, and the greed is so subtle that it can hide in millions of ways. It can even start trying not to be greedy.
18. Once the competitive mind disappears, many things change in you; then you are not jealous. If somebody has a beautiful face and somebody has more money, and somebody has a more powerful body, you simply accept the fact that a few trees are tall and a few trees are small. But existence accepts them all. The disappearance of competitiveness will also help you to get rid of greed. People go on accumulating — they want to be in a better position than you, with more money than you, with everything better than you. And their whole life is wasted in that.
19. Nirvana has to flower within you. When you have dropped the mind with all its desire, with all its ambitions, with all its program for achievements, when you have dropped your whole mind full of greed …. Whether the greed concerns money, or the greed concerns enlightenment, it does not make any difference. Mind can go on changing from object to object. But it remains the same mind full of greed. The moment mind is completely dropped, you suddenly find enlightenment is not a goal. It is your self-nature. Suddenly the lotus blossoms open their petals and you are full of fragrance. And this fragrance is not different in the arhatas or in the bodhisattvas. They both are buddhas; they both are enlightened people.
20. The mind of a businessman is always bargaining, always greedy, always thinking of the profit, always in the future, always interested in petty things, mundane objects. When I say, “Don’t be a businessman,” I mean drop this psychology.
21. An ambitious mind, a greedy mind, a jealous mind, becomes hard, stone-like. And remember, if you are stone-like you will hurt others — but that is only secondary, you will be hurting yourself continuously. Only sometimes will your stone hurt others but your stoniness will hurt you continuously, twenty-four hours, day in, day out, year in, year out. The stone will be there in your heart pinching, hurting, wounding. One is happy only when one is flower-like delicate. soft, a lotus: To remain a lotus one has to drop all Comparisons, all jealousies — and they are stupid anyway. meaningless .
22. Bodhidharma is saying not to be worried about the three poisons of greed, anger and delusion. Even buddhas have lived through the same experience as you all are passing through; but because they started nourishing themselves through meditation and started becoming aware of their self-nature, all these poisons disappeared. They have found the antidote. Meditation is the antidote to all the poisons of your life. It is the nourishment of your authentic nature.
23. Such is the power of great meditation. Such is the power of knowing yourself. All illnesses disappear; illnesses of the spirit, all wounds are suddenly cured — wounds of the spirit. And all appearances, delusions, greed and anger are found no more, not even their footprints. Such is the power of knowing oneself in deep meditation.
24. Just the other day Buddha was saying: Watch, witness the whole process of your thoughts. And slowly slowly, you will see you are neither anger nor greed, neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian, neither Catholic nor communist. Slowly slowly, you will be aware that you are not any thought — you are not mind at all. You are a pure witness. The experience of pure witnessing is the experience of total freedom, but it is an inward phenomenon. And a man who is inwardly totally free has no hankering to be outwardly free. He is capable of accepting nature as it is.
25. This moment is all. Buddha insists very much: Live in the moment. And desire does not allow you to live in the moment. And you go on repeating the same things, you move in circles. Just watch your life, look back. You have been moving in circles: the same anger, the same sex, the same greed, the same ambition, the same postponement and the same desiring mind. When are you going to wake up?
26. If you stop running and drop all the ambitions for greed and power and prestige, and just relax into your ordinariness — then, this very moment, this very body the Buddha, and this very place the lotus paradise.
27. Thousands of buddhas have happened and millions of people have passed them, without even looking back. They are so infatuated, their eyes are so full of their own greed that they cannot see clearly. And a buddha can be seen only if your eyes have no dust, if your mirror is clean.