I’m often tortured by the idea that I have to do something special to realize myself.

Beloved Osho,
I’m often tortured by the idea that I have to do something special to realize myself. A few years ago, I was on the point of becoming a psychoanalyst. Fortunately, I dropped this idea and I took sannyas. I tried to work as a doctor, but I was getting so tense that I was no longer loving with the people who were coming to me. Now I do simple jobs but still the idea is there: am I wasting my time? Am I running away from my responsibility? On the other hand, every time this idea of doing was dropped, I experienced days of bliss. Can you please tell me something more about the difference between doing and being?


It is one of the most significant questions for a seeker: the difference between doing and being.

You are born as beings. In your mother’s womb, you are just a being. Then life begins to teach you how to do things: how to be successful, how to be rich, how to be famous, how to be powerful. There are a thousand and one “hows”, and you see around you a whole world engaged in doing something or other.

And in a way, there are things which can only be done. For example, if you want money, you will have to work hard for it – or you can go the easy way, but that will be criminal. If you want to be a powerful politician, you will forget all about morality, humanity. You have to forget all great values of life, you have to concentrate only on one thing: your ambition for power. And you have to do everything – right or wrong, good or bad, anything that helps you to achieve your ambition. You are not to be worried about means and ends; once you are successful, whatever you have done will be known as right. Your success changes the wrong means into right means, and your failure changes your right means into wrong means.

Seeing the situation, one starts following the ways of the world. One starts running for goals, for recognition, for respectability – one is ready to do anything. But the more one gets involved in doings, the more one starts going away from oneself.

Each act takes you away from yourself, and the further away the goal is, the further away you have gone from yourself.

No doing can help you to realize yourself, to know yourself, to be yourself. It is not a question of doing; you have to learn a totally different art than the arts which are based on doing. You have to learn just to be – silent, not running anywhere, no goal in the future, no desire to possess mundane things.

Relaxing into yourself – to such an extent that time stops, mind stops – you simply are. A kind of isness…this is your being. In its purity, it is the most beautiful flower in the whole existence. Lotuses and roses are very jealous of it.

The moment you have tasted just a little bit the nectar of being silent, cool, centered…your whole life is going to change from this moment. Because this taste is not something that anybody has ever been able to forget; on the contrary, this taste of your own being makes you forget the whole world.



From Osho, Sermons in Stones, Chapter 23