Osho discourse on Drugs

Osho discourse on Drugs

Osho - What is the appeal? The appeal is this: alcohol and other drugs – now there are many in the market: marijuana, LSD, psilocybin... and many more will be coming – the appeal of drugs is that they give you the feeling of oneness without the effort of becoming a buddha. You fall back into nature. Through chemicals you force yourself back into unity with nature, where birds are singing and trees are flowering. You force yourself back.

This is a violence on the whole system of your being, and this is destroying the effort of nature to reach a higher harmony through you. This is against nature. For a few moments you can attain a forced oneness with nature, through drugs. But it cannot be a permanent achievement. It cannot become an integral part of your inner being. It can never become an integral part because to go back is not possible. You can only force yourself back.

It is like.... You cannot become a child again. You cannot step back. You cannot enter the womb of the mother again. There is no way back. Time doesn’t move that way. It moves forward, it never moves backward. So you cannot go backward. The only way, the only going, is to go forward; there is no other going.

So drugs are a deception. They give you a feeling which is imaginary, hallucinatory, they give you a feeling that you are back, part of nature. People come to me; they say, ”I have been on a drug trip, and it was beautiful, and so many things happened.” Nothing happened! – because after it you are again the same, even worse. It only releases dreams in you, but you become so unconscious that you take the dreams to be real.

You are not aware, so you cannot see whether this is a dream or a reality. Under drugs you can think yourself a bird singing in the trees, flying in the sky, but you remain all the time on the earth. You have not moved a single inch. And when the trip is over and you open your
eyes, you are where you were. But in the meanwhile a dream was created, a vivid dream, a very real-looking dream, not even a suspicion that this was just a hallucination of the mind.

You have done something with the cells of the mind, and they have started revolving, and they have created something – sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes hell, sometimes heaven. It depends on your mood, the physical condition of your body, the situation around, the whole milieu. So sometimes you can visit hell, and sometimes you can visit heaven through chemicals, but you are not going anywhere, you remain where you are.

But man is in such anguish that if even for moments he can escape from duality it feels like freedom. All religions have been against drugs. The reason is this: if you become an addict then the whole possibility of your higher dimension, of your higher unity, of achieving buddhahood, of becoming a christ, is lost. They are not against drugs, in fact. They are not concerned with drugs, they are concerned with your higher unity.

If you start falling backwards in your mind, and if you become attuned with the lower unity of nature, then who will evolve? Then you have frustrated the very effort of nature through you. It was going to achieve God – and you are satisfied with a drug. It is a poor substitute, very very poor – but the appeal indicates something; it indicates that man can be at home in only two ways.

Either he falls back into nature through chemicals, through sex, or through other means, or he rises above himself, and reaches a point where his whole consciousness has become conscious; nothing remains unconscious in him. The dark continent of unconsciousness is there no more. All corners of his being are lighted up. This is the meaning of becoming a buddha. A buddha means he who has no unconscious.

A buddha means he whose whole being is transformed into light, awareness. Again – the celebration, the marriage, the feast, but on a totally different plane.