Transcript [EN]: ''Stop Fighting Yourself: The Only Real Cure for Addiction That No One Tells You'' | Osho

My beloved ones, you have come here looking for a solution. You are carrying a burden that feels heavy, a chain that feels unbreakable. You call it addiction. You call it a habit. You call it a disease. But before we can drop this burden, we must look at it not with the eyes of society which judge you, not with the eyes of your family which worry for you. And certainly not with the eyes of your own guilt which condemns you. We must look at it with the eyes of truth. You have been told a thousand times that you must control yourself, that you must have willpower, that you must fight the urge. And I say to you, this is why you are still suffering. You cannot end addiction by control. Control is simply another form of addiction. It is the flip side of the same coin. When you are addicted to alcohol or drugs or gambling or food, you are obsessed with the substance. When you fight it, when you use control, you are still obsessed with the substance. Only now you are obsessed with not having it. The substance remains the center of your universe. You have tried to fight. You have tried to resist. You have looked in the mirror with tears in your eyes and promised yourself never again. This is the last time. And for a few days, perhaps a few weeks, you hold your breath. You tighten your fists. You struggle. But all resistance belongs to the same mind that created the craving. You cannot cut the chain by pulling on it harder. You must drop it entirely. But how does one drop what feels like a part of their own skin. In this communion today, I do not want to give you a method. Methods are for machines. You are not a machine. You are a consciousness. I want to give you an insight. I want to give you eyes to see because ending addiction is not about control, punishment or willpower. It is about understanding. Once you see the mechanism, clearly you won't need to fight it. When you see a snake in your path, do you have to force yourself not to step on it? Do you need a commandment? Thou shalt not step on snakes? No. You see the snake and you jump. The action is instantaneous. The understanding and the action are one. So I invite you to put aside your battle armor. Put aside the idea that you are broken and need fixing. Nothing is wrong with you. You are simply asleep and addiction is nothing but a bad dream. Let us go to the very root. Most people completely miss the point. They think addiction begins with the bottle or the needle or the smartphone screen. This is a fallacy. Addiction does not begin with the substance. It begins long before that. It begins in a place so ordinary, so close to you that you almost never look there. It begins with the deep quiet need to forget yourself. You see, the real addiction is not to the chemical. The real addiction is to forgetfulness. You are addicted to escaping your own mind, your own silence, your own being. The substance is only a doorway. It is a poor substitute for meditation. It is a temporary chemical way to silence what you have never learned to face. Consider your life. From the moment you wake up, there is a noise inside, a chatter, a constant commentary. I am not good enough. I need more money. I am lonely. Why did she say that to me? What will happen tomorrow? This noise is constant. It is like a radio that has been left on at full volume and you cannot find the off button. This noise is painful. To be with oneself is difficult because you have not met yourself yet. You have only met your mind. And the mind is a marketplace, noisy, chaotic, conflicting. When the pain of this noise becomes too much, you look for a switch. You look for a pause button. Alcohol provides a pause. Drugs provide a pause. Scrolling endlessly through short videos provides a pause. For a moment, the chattering stops. For a moment, you are not you. You are floated away into a numb haze. And that numbness feels like heaven because the reality of your mind feels like hell. So when you take the drink, understand this. You are not trying to destroy yourself. Deep down you are seeking peace. You are seeking silence. You are seeking God. But you are seeking it in the wrong direction. You are looking for silence in unconsciousness instead of looking for it in super consciousness. The intention is right. The direction is wrong. This is why I say do not condemn the addict. The addict is a seeker who has lost his way. He is looking for the nectar of life but he has stumbled upon poison. But the thirst, the thirst is authentic. I want you to pause for a moment right now. Don't just listen to my words. Listen to the silence between the words. Look inside yourself. Can you feel that subtle hum of anxiety? That feeling that something is missing? That restlessness that makes you want to reach for your phone or a cigarette or a snack even though you are not hungry. We are all carrying this restlessness. It is the human condition. I want to ask you and I want you to be honest with yourself. Perhaps even write it down in the comments below so you can witness it. What is the specific noise you are trying to turn off? Is it loneliness? Is it the feeling of failure? Is it a memory that won't fade? By naming it, you bring it into the light. And bringing it into the light is the first step of the transformation. The problem arises because society has taught you that this inner noise is a sin or a sickness. They tell you be happy, be productive, be normal. So when you feel this emptiness, you feel guilty. You think everyone else is happy, everyone else is managing. Why am I the only one who feels this hollow space inside? So you hide it. And the best way to hide it is to numb it. The cigarette doesn't soothe the pain. It pushes it deeper into the unconscious. The drink doesn't dissolve the emptiness. It delays its echo. Every moment of unconscious pleasure leaves behind a greater hunger for the next one. And here is the irony, the cruel joke of the mind. Every time you escape, you strengthen the prison. The more you try to forget, the more you confirm the lie that something inside you must be avoided. You are telling your own subconscious, there is a monster in here and I must not look at it. So the monster grows. It grows in the dark. Monsters always grow in the dark. If you turn on the light, you will see there is no monster. There is only a shadow. And a shadow cannot hurt you. But you never turn on the light because you are too busy running away. Addiction is the art of running away from your own shadow. You run to the bar. You run to the casino. You run to the refrigerator. You run to work. Yes, work is a great addiction. Very respectable, but still an addiction. People work 60, 70, 80 hours a week not because they love the work but because they are terrified of what happens when they stop. If they stop they have to think. If they stop they have to feel. So the first thing to understand is this. The substance is irrelevant. Whether it is heroin or coffee the mechanism is the same. Do not get distracted by the object of addiction. Look at the subject of addiction. Look at you. You are suffering from a case of mistaken identity. You think you are the mind. You think you are the thoughts because the thoughts are painful. You want to kill the thinker. This is what suicide is. The ultimate attempt to kill the noise. Addiction is a slow suicide. It is killing the thinker in installments. But you are not the mind. You are the witness of the mind. This is the key that opens the door. This is the secret that the mystics have known for 10,000 years. There is a space within you that is already silent, already peaceful, already blissful. It does not need a chemical to be happy. It is happiness itself. But you have lost contact with this space. You are like a man standing in a river dying of thirst because he is dreaming that he is in a desert. I am here to wake you up from the desert. I am here to tell you open your eyes. The water is all around you. But how to open the eyes? First you must stop the war. You have been fighting yourself for years. I am bad. I am weak. I have no discipline. Stop this nonsense. Self- condemnation is the food of the ego. The more you condemn yourself, the more divided you become. One part of you says, "I want to stop." And the other part says, "I want more." And you become a battlefield. No flower grows on a battlefield. Transformation requires a relaxed soil. It requires acceptance. This sounds dangerous to the western mind. Acceptance. Osho. If I accept my addiction, I will kill myself. No, you misunderstand me. I do not mean resignation. I do not mean giving up and indulging blindly. I mean accepting the fact of the craving without judging yourself for having it. When the craving comes, and it will come because it has momentum. It has biology behind it. What do you usually do? You tense up. You say, "Oh no, here it is. I must not. I must not." You grit your teeth. You distract yourself. You struggle. And what happens? The craving persists. It gets stronger. As the saying goes, what you resist persists. By fighting it, you are giving it energy. You are focusing all your attention on it. Try a different experiment. This is the experiment of the meditator. When the urge comes to smoke or to drink or to act out your habit, simply stop. Don't fight it. Don't act on it immediately. Just stop and look at it. Close your eyes. Where do you feel it in the body? Is it a tension in the stomach? Is it a dryness in the throat? Is it a buzzing in the head? Watch it. Just watch it. Say to yourself, "I am noticing a sensation of craving." Do not call it my craving. Do not call it bad craving. Just call it a sensation. Like a cloud passing through the sky. You are the sky. The craving is the cloud. The sky does not fight the cloud. The sky allows the cloud to float by. If you can watch it for 3 minutes without acting and without fighting, you will be amazed. You will see the wave rise, reach a peak, and then miraculously it will start to dissolve. It will break like a wave on the shore. Every craving is impermanent. It cannot last forever. But you never wait long enough to see it die. You rush to feed it, so you keep it alive. Or you rush to fight it. And in the fight, you become exhausted and eventually give in. Watching is a non-doing. It is the most powerful force in existence. Imagine a child throwing a tantrum. He is screaming, kicking, rolling on the floor. If you try to force him to stop, he screams louder. If you give him the candy, he learns that screaming works. But if you sit there calm, reading your newspaper, just watching him out of the corner of your eye with no anger, what happens? He screams. He checks to see if you are reacting. You are not. He screams a bit more, but his heart isn't in it. Slowly the energy dissipates. He gets tired. He stops. Your mind is that child. Your craving is that tantrum. Awareness is the calm parent. Be the parent to your own mind. You have been treating your mind like an enemy. And so it has become one. Treat it with compassion. It is just a mechanism trying to help you survive. It thinks you need the alcohol to survive the pain. It is misguided. Yes, but it is trying to help. So when we talk about ending addiction, we are really talking about beginning a new life. A life of alertness. A life where you do not need to numb yourself because you are no longer afraid of yourself. This journey we are embarking on, it requires courage. Not the courage of a soldier, but the courage of a lover. The courage to be vulnerable with yourself. You are asking but Osho surely there are techniques. Surely there are steps. Yes there are steps but they are not steps of doing. They are steps of undoing. We are going to peel back the layers of the onion. And yes when you peel an onion sometimes tears come to the eyes. That is natural. Let them come. Tears are cleansing. The first layer we must peel back is the layer of the why. Why do you crave? Not the surface reason. Not because I had a hard day. Go deeper. What is the hunger? Every addiction is a hunger for God. I use the word God not in a religious sense. I have no interest in your churches and temples. I use God to mean the ultimate, the total, the complete fulfillment. You are hungry for wholeness. You feel fragmented. You feel small. And the alcohol makes you feel big for a moment. The drugs make you feel expansive for a moment. You are trying to touch the infinite. But you are using a finite ladder. You will fall. You cannot reach the moon by climbing a tree. But the desire to reach the moon is not wrong. Hear me clearly. Your desire is not wrong. Your longing is not wrong. The energy is innocent. It is simply misdirected. We are going to take that same energy, that obsession, that fire, that desperate need, and we are going to turn it inward. We are going to turn poison into nectar. The alchemists used to talk about turning base metal into gold. This is the real alchemy. The base metal is your addiction. The gold is your awareness. And the process of transformation is the fire of understanding. Now you might be thinking, "This sounds beautiful, but I am in the grip of it right now. I am shaking. I am fearful." Good. Stay with the shaking. Stay with the fear. Do not run. This is the most important lesson you will ever learn. The fear of the feeling is worse than the feeling itself. You are terrified of the emptiness, so you run. But if you were to stop and turn around and jump into the emptiness, you would find it has no bottom. You would not hit the ground. You would float. You would fly. That emptiness is not nothingness. It is space. It is freedom. Society has filled you with so much junk, beliefs, expectations, rules that you have no space left. You are suffocated. The addiction is just a gasp for air. I want you to begin to see your addiction not as a curse, but as a signpost. It is a big flashing red light on the dashboard of your car. It is telling you the engine is overheating. You are living against your nature. Don't smash the light. Don't put tape over the light. Stop the car. Open the hood. Look inside. What does it mean to live against your nature? It means you are living a lie. Perhaps you are in a job you hate. Perhaps you are in a relationship that is dead. Perhaps you are pretending to be someone you are not to please your parents or your society. This pretense takes immense energy. It creates immense tension and you need the addiction to release the tension. If you drop the lies, the tension disappears. And when the tension disappears, the need for the addiction disappears. It falls away like dead leaves from a tree. You don't have to pull them off. When the spring comes, the new buds push the old leaves off. Meditation is the spring. Awareness is the new bud. We are going to explore how to bring this spring into your winter. But you must be ready to let go of the winter. And strangely people cling to their misery. They love their misery. It gives them an identity. I am an alcoholic. It is a label. It tells you who you are. If you drop it, who will you be? You will be no one. You will be a vast emptiness. And that is terrifying to the ego. The ego would rather be a miserable someone than a blissful no one. But bliss belongs to the no ones. Truth belongs to the nobodies. Are you ready to be a nobody? Are you ready to drop the story of your struggle? Because that is all it is. A story. A story you keep telling yourself day after day. I can't help it. It's in my genes. It's too hard. Change the script. Or better yet, burn the script. You are the author, the director, and the actor. You can say cut whenever you choose. But you don't believe you have that power. You think the power is in the bottle. You think the power is in the powder. You have given your power away to a dead object. Reclaim your power. Not by fighting the object but by realizing I am the one who is choosing to pick it up. My hand moves. My mind decides. It happens in slow motion. If you watch the thought comes, I need a drink. You watch the thought. The emotion comes. I can't handle this stress. You watch the emotion. The body moves. You watch the movement. If you can inject just one second of pure awareness between the thought and the action, the chain is broken. Just one gap, one breath of consciousness. That gap is the window to God. Most people live with no gaps. Stimulus, response, stimulus, response. Like a robot, someone insults you, you get angry, you feel sad, you eat, you feel bored, you smoke. It is automatic. To become human is to break the automatic. To become human is to act not to react. And this ability to act consciously is what we call will. But not the will of the ego which is stubbornness. The will of the being which is clarity. So my friends we are standing at the threshold. We have acknowledged that fighting is futile. We have acknowledged that the addiction is a search for self forgetfulness because the self is painful. We have acknowledged that we need to turn the light on. Now we must go deeper into the mechanism. We must understand how the mind tricks you, how it creates loops and how it uses guilt to keep you enslaved. Guilt is the guard dog of the prison of addiction. We must learn how to tame this dog. Stay with me. Do not let your mind wander. The mind will want to go check the notifications or get a snack. Tell the mind not now. We are doing something important. We are saving a life, your life. If you are feeling this resonance, if you feel that I am speaking directly to your hidden wound, then you are ready for the next step. And this next step begins with understanding the circle of suffering you have been running in. You need to see the map of your own imprisonment. Unless you see the walls, you cannot find the door. Let us look closely at this mechanism of craving. Here is what most people never realize and this is why they fail again and again. Craving is not your enemy. It is misunderstood energy. Desire itself is innocent. It is simply life moving through you seeking expression, seeking fulfillment. The river wants to reach the ocean. That is its desire. The seed wants to become a flower. That is its desire. You want to become whole. That is your desire. The problem begins when desire becomes unconscious. When you start chasing the shadow of satisfaction instead of the light of awareness, the energy gets twisted. Addiction is not the result of too much desire. It is the result of desire without understanding. The same energy that becomes craving, can become creativity, can become meditation, can become love. Energy is neutral. Electricity can kill you in an electric chair or it can light up your house and keep you warm. The electricity is the same. The difference is how you use it. Right now, your energy is shortcircuiting. The mind hijacks the life force. The mind hates silence because in silence it cannot exist. Have you noticed this? When everything goes still, really still, the illusion of I begins to fade. The ego trembles. The ego is terrified of silence because silence is its death. So the mind creates desire after desire, one distraction after another to keep itself busy, to keep itself alive. It says, "I need a cigarette." Not because the body needs it, but because the act of smoking, the ritual, the sensation keeps you occupied. It keeps you from falling into that scary abyss of silence. Have you noticed that the moment you get what you want, another want appears immediately. You crave the drink all day. You obsess over it. You finally get it. You take the first sip. Ah relief. But 5 minutes later you are looking at the bottom of the glass. You are already calculating the next one. Or you are thinking about food or you are thinking about calling someone. The mind cannot stay in the fulfillment. It hops like a monkey from one branch to another. This endless hunger is not because life is unsatisfying. It is because the mind feeds on dissatisfaction. Its survival depends on it. If you were perfectly content, totally at peace, the mind would have no job. It would have to retire. And the ego does not want to retire. So it creates a loop. And this loop is the most vicious trap in human existence. It goes like this. First there is pain or boredom, a lack of ease. Then the mind suggests a solution. Escape. It offers the image of the substance. It romanticizes it. It tells you just this once. It will make you feel better. You deserve it. So you indulge. For a brief moment. The chemical hits. The brain goes numb. And there is a pseudo peace, a fake silence. But then the chemical wears off. And what returns? reality returns. But now it comes with a friend. That friend is guilt. Now you have the original pain plus the chemical hangover plus the heavy crushing weight of guilt. You feel like a failure. You look in the mirror and you hate what you see. You say, "I am weak. I am disgusting. I promised I wouldn't do this." And listen carefully because this is the trick. This very guilt creates so much pain that the mind says I know how to fix this pain. Let's have a drink. Do you see the guilt drives you back to the very thing that caused the guilt it is a perfect wheel. It feeds itself. The more you feel guilty, the more you need to escape the guilt. So the more you use, society tells you that guilt is good. Religions tell you that you should repent. You should feel bad for your sins. I tell you, guilt is the fuel of addiction. If you want to stop the car, you must stop putting gas in the tank. Guilt is the gas. You must drop the guilt. This sounds impossible. I know. You feel you have done wrong. You have hurt people. You have wasted money. You have wasted time. Yes, these are facts. But feeling guilty about them does not change them. It only keeps you trapped in the past, repeating the same mistake in the future. To drop guilt requires a deep insight. You did the best you could with the level of consciousness you had at that moment. If you had been more conscious, you would not have done it. But you were not. You were asleep. You were under a spell. You don't blame a blind man for bumping into the furniture. You are spiritually blind. The addiction is just the bruising from bumping into the furniture of life. So instead of guilt, bring in responsibility. Responsibility is very different. Guilt looks back and cries. Responsibility looks forward and acts. Responsibility means responsibility, the ability to respond. It means saying, "Okay, I fell. I am in the mud. Crying about the mud will not clean me. Let me get up. Let me find a shower. Guilt is a heavy stone around your neck. You are trying to swim to the shore of freedom, but you are holding on to this stone called I am a sinner. Drop the stone. You will float. And I invite you right now as you are listening to this, if you are carrying this heavy stone of guilt, if you are tired of beating yourself up, just take a moment to hit the like button on this video. Not for the algorithm, but as a physical act of saying, I am ready to drop the heavy stone. I am ready to be lighter. Let it be a small ritual of release. Now let us look at the substance itself. Why does it have such power over you? It has no power. You give it power. You are like the man in the ancient parable I often tell. There was a beggar who sat on an old wooden box by the side of the road for 30 years. He begged for pennies from everyone who passed by. Spare some change. I am so poor. I am so hungry. One day a stranger passed by. The beggar asked, "Can you give me some money?" The stranger said, "I have nothing to give you, but what is that box you are sitting on?" The beggar said, "It's just an old box. I've been sitting on it for as long as I can remember." The stranger asked, "Have you ever looked inside?" "No," said the beggar. What's the point? It's empty. Look inside, insisted the stranger. Reluctantly, the beggar pried open the lid, and he was shocked. The box was filled with gold and diamonds. For 30 years, he had been sitting on a treasure while begging for pennies. You are that beggar. The box is your own being. The treasure is your own consciousness, your own bliss. But you are sitting on it unaware, begging the world for a penny of pleasure, begging the bottle for a drop of peace, begging the cigarette for a breath of relaxation. You have the diamond within you, but you are looking outside. Addiction is simply looking in the wrong place. It is a search for the self, but in the world of things, you cannot find the self in things. You can eat all the food in the world and your soul will still be hungry. You can drink all the wine in the vineyards and your spirit will still be thirsty because the hunger is not physical. The hunger is existential. You are trying to fill a spiritual hole with a material cork. It will never fit. And because it doesn't fit, you keep trying harder. Maybe if I take more, maybe if I try a different kind. Stop trying to fill the hole. Instead, enter the hole. This is what I mean by understanding. When the emptiness comes, instead of running to the fridge, sit with the emptiness. It will feel like death in the beginning. It will feel like you are disappearing. Good disappear. If you stay with that feeling of I am lonely, I am empty. Suddenly the quality changes. You will see that it is not emptiness. It is spaciousness. It is the vast sky. And the sky is not empty. It is full of potential. It is full of God. But you have to cross the barrier of fear. The substance is your shield against that fear. Let me tell you another story about how we trap ourselves. There is a way to catch monkeys in the jungle. It is very simple. The hunter takes a jar with a narrow neck, just wide enough for the monkeykey's open hand to slide in, but too narrow for a fist to come out. He puts some sweet rice inside the jar and ties the jar to a tree. The monkey comes. He smells the rice. He is greedy. He slides his hand in. He grabs a handful of rice. Now his hand is a fist. He tries to pull it out. He is stuck. The hunter comes out of the bushes. The monkey screams. He is terrified. He pulls and pulls, but he cannot escape. Now tell me, what is holding the monkey? Is it the jar? Is it the rice? Is it the hunter? No, it is the monkeykey's own fist. All he has to do is open his hand. let go of the rice and he is free. But he will not let go. He values the rice more than his freedom. He thinks if I let go I lose the prize. So he gets captured. You are that monkey. The addiction is the rice. You are holding on to it so tightly. You think it is your prize, your comfort, your friend. And because you are holding it, you are trapped. The jar is not trapping you. Life is not trapping you. Your job, your wife, your husband, they are not trapping you. Your own clinging is the trap. You say I cannot stop. I say you are choosing not to open your hand. But Osho it is automatic. My hand closes by itself. Yes, because you have practiced it a million times. It has become a mechanical habit. But you are not a machine. You can wake up. The moment you realize I am holding this, this is causing my suffering. The hand naturally begins to relax. You don't have to force it open. If you are holding a burning coal in your hand, do you need willpower to drop it? Do you need to read a self-help book on how to drop hot coals? Do you need to go to a support group for coal holders? No. The moment you feel the burn and you realize you are holding it, you drop it instantly. You haven't dropped your addiction because you haven't truly felt the burn yet. You are still romanticizing it. You are still hoping that maybe, just maybe, the coal will turn into a diamond if you hold it long enough. Or maybe you have numbed your hands so much that you don't feel the burn anymore. Awareness brings the sensation back. Awareness makes you sensitive. When you become sensitive, you see the misery clearly. You see that this habit is destroying your intelligence, your beauty, your life. When you see this clearly, not just intellectually, but existentially, the drop happens on its own. But you are clever. The mind is very clever. It plays a game of tomorrow. I will quit tomorrow. Tomorrow is the most dangerous word in the language. Tomorrow never comes. Life is always now. Addiction lives in the tomorrow. I will have one last drink today and tomorrow I will be a saint. This is the bargain of the devil. The devil does not ask for your soul all at once. He just asks for today. He says, "Give me today. You can have tomorrow for God." But when tomorrow comes, it is today again. And the devil says just today. You have been doing this for years. Just one more time. Break the illusion of tomorrow. If you are going to be free, it must be now. And being free now doesn't mean you will never feel a craving again. It means you are free from the authority of the craving. Imagine the craving is like a noisy neighbor. He bangs on your door. Hey, come out. Let's party. Let's get wasted. In the past, you always opened the door. You felt you had to. You were obedient. Now you sit in your house. You hear the banging. You hear the shouting, but you don't open the door. You continue drinking your tea. He will bang for a while. He will scream. He might even kick the door. But if you simply don't engage, if you don't argue with him through the door, if you don't worry about him, eventually he will see that no one is home. He will get bored. He will go away. But if you open the door and say, "Please go away. I am trying to be good." Then you have engaged. You are in a relationship with him. He will put his foot in the door. He will argue and he will win because he has more energy than your resistance. Do not argue with the devil. Just watch him. The watcher is beyond the mind. The watcher is your true nature. When you are watching, a distance is created. The craving is there but it is over there. You are here. There is a gap and in that gap freedom is born. This is the simplicity I spoke of in the title of this talk. It is not complex. It doesn't require a PhD. It requires a simple shift in focus from the object to the subject, from the movie to the screen. You are the screen. The movie can be a tragedy, a horror story, a tale of addiction and woe. But the screen is never stained by the movie. When the projector turns off, the screen is pure white. Your consciousness is that screen. It is pure. It has never been addicted. This is a very radical statement I am making to you. You have never been addicted. Your body has been addicted. Your mind has been addicted. But you, the witness, no. The witness cannot be addicted. The witness is pure light. Can light get dirty? No. Light shines on a trash heap. But the light does not become trash. You have forgotten who you are. You think you are the trash heap. I am here to remind you that you are the light. When this understanding settles deep in your heart, you will laugh. You will laugh at the absurdity of it all. I was fighting a shadow. I was running from a ghost. And this laughter is the beginning of health. Seriousness is a disease. Addiction is a very serious business. Have you noticed how serious addicts are? They are always planning, hiding, calculating, regretting. It is a full-time job. It is a heavy burden. Drop the seriousness. Become playful. Treat your mind like a small mischievous child. When it says, "I want drugs." You smile and say, "Oh, look at you. You are playing that game again. How cute." Do not get angry. Do not say, "Shut up." Just smile. I see you. I hear you. But we are not going to do that today. Today we are going to breathe. This gentleness is the strongest weapon you have. The rock is hard. The water is soft but the water wears away the rock. Be like water. Soft, fluid, yielding but persistent. Do not try to be a rock. Do not try to be iron willed. Iron breaks. Water flows. flow with your experience but do not drown in it. Now we must look at what happens when you stop running because when you stop running everything you have been avoiding catches up to you. This is the moment of crisis. This is where most people fail. They stop the drug and suddenly the demons arrive. The memories, the pain, the anxiety, it all comes rushing in like a flood. And they say, "This is too much. The cure is worse than the disease." And they run back to the shelter of the addiction. You need to know how to face this flood. You need to know how to build an ark. That ark is meditation. But do not be scared by the word meditation. It does not mean sitting in a lotus posture for hours with mosquitoes biting you. That is torture, not meditation. Meditation simply means being with what is without interference. So the flood comes, the anxiety rises, your heart beats fast, your hands shake. Do not judge it. Do not say this is bad. Just say this is energy. It is just energy. It is trapped electricity in the body. It wants to move. Usually you bottle it up or you numb it down. Now let it move. If the body wants to shake, let it shake. If the tears want to come, let them come. If you want to scream, scream into a pillow. Let the catharsis happen. The addiction was a lid on a boiling pot. You have taken the lid off. Now the steam must escape. Let it escape. Do not be afraid of your own madness. We are all mad. The only difference is that some of us know it and some of us hide it. Be a conscious madman for a while. Let the storm rage. And while the storm rages, you find that quiet center, the eye of the hurricane. There is always a center. The cyclone spins at 100 m an hour. But in the exact center, there is perfect silence. You are that center. The more chaotic the mind becomes during withdrawal, the more you have the opportunity to find the center because the contrast is so sharp. If you can stay in that center for just a few days, the storm will run out of energy, it cannot sustain itself without your cooperation. And then a new silence will descend. A silence you have not known since childhood. A silence that is not empty, but full, full of presence. And in that presence, you will find the only true satisfaction. The nectar you were looking for in the alcohol, the peace you were looking for in the pill. It was this presence all along. You were knocking on the wrong door. Now you are home. But before we can fully settle into this home, we must address the specific lies the mind tells you to get you to leave. The mind is a lawyer. It will argue its case very convincingly. We need to look at these arguments and dismantle them one by one. If you are finding value in this, if you want to help this message reach others who are suffering in the dark, share this video. Send it to a friend who is struggling. Be a light for someone else. Sometimes helping another is the best way to help yourself. Now let us proceed to the courtroom of the mind. The mind stands before you dressed in the robes of logic and it presents its first piece of evidence. It says, "But you need this to relax. Look at your life. It is so stressful. Your boss is a tyrant. Your children are screaming. The world is in chaos. You deserve a break. This is your medicine." It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? It sounds like a friend putting an arm around your shoulder. But look closer. Is it medicine or is it anesthesia? There is a vast difference. Medicine heals the wound. Anesthesia simply numbs you. So you do not feel the surgery. But you are using anesthesia without doing the surgery. So the wound fers underneath. It grows gang green. The mind says it helps me cope. I say to you, it prevents you from coping because coping means facing reality and responding to it intelligently. Numbing yourself makes you less intelligent, less capable, less present. When you wake up, the problem is still there, but you are weaker. Your capacity to handle life has diminished. This is the downward spiral. You use the substance to handle the stress, but the substance reduces your ability to handle stress, so you need more of the substance. The lawyer of the mind presents its second argument. But life is so boring without it. The days are gray. The evenings are long, the drink, the drug, the rush. It adds color to the black and white movie of my life. This is perhaps the most dangerous lie of all because it touches on a deep fear. The fear of boredom. You are terrified of being bored. Watch yourself. If you have 5 minutes of waiting for a bus, what do you do? Immediately the hand goes to the pocket. The phone comes out. You cannot simply stand and breathe. You cannot look at the trees. You must be entertained. You have become a beggar for entertainment. And addiction is the ultimate entertainment. It is a drama. The highs, the lows, the secrecy, the danger. It makes you feel like the star of a movie, but it is a tragedy. Why are you bored? Have you ever asked this? You are bored because you have lost touch with the wonder of existence. A child is never bored. Give a child a few colored stones and he is in paradise. He will play for hours. He sees the magic in the stone. He sees the universe in the pebble. You have lost those eyes. You have become blind. You look at a tree and you say, "It's just a tree. Green leaves, brown bark. I know it." You know the label. You know the word. that you have missed the mystery. The addiction is an attempt to force the mystery back into life through chemical means. You want to see the colors brighter, you take a pill. You want to feel the love deeper, you take a drink. But this is synthetic mystery. It is plastic. And like all plastic, it ends up polluting the ocean of your soul. To end the addiction, you must regain the eyes of wonder. You must learn to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. This is what I call the art of living. When you drink your tea, don't just gulp it down while thinking about the office. Stop. Hold the cup. Feel the warmth in your hand. Smell the aroma. Watch the steam rising. Take a small sip. Let the taste spread on your tongue. Be totally there with the tea. If you can be totally with the tea, the tea becomes wine. It becomes divine. It gives you a fulfillment that no whiskey can ever give. The problem is not that life is boring. The problem is that you are absent. If you bring your presence to the most mundane act, chopping wood, carrying water, washing dishes, it becomes a celebration. But if you are absent, even paradise will be boring. If I put you in the garden of Eden, within 24 hours you will be looking for a pub. You will be asking where is the cinema. So the argument of the mind that I need this for excitement is false. You need awareness for excitement. Awareness makes everything new. Every moment is a new birth. The lawyer of the mind has one final argument and this is the trickiest one. It plays the victim card. It says, "I am too damaged. My childhood was too hard. My trauma is too deep. I am broken. I cannot change." And it appeals to your self-pity. The ego loves self-pity. It is a very sweet poison. You sit in the corner and cry, "Poor me! Look at what life has done to me." As long as you are a victim, you have no responsibility. If you are a victim of your past, then you can continue drinking today because after all, it's not my fault. I want to be very hard on you right now. Because only a surgeon's knife can cut this cancer. Your past is dead. It does not exist. It is a memory trace in your brain cells. It has no reality in this moment. You are carrying a corpse. Why are you carrying this corpse? Because it smells? Because it is heavy? No, you are carrying it because it gives you an excuse. It is a great alibi. I am an addict because my father was abusive. It explains everything. It justifies everything. But do you want to be right or do you want to be free? You can hold on to your history or you can have your destiny. You cannot have both. Drop the history. It is finished. The page is turned today, right now. As you listen to my voice, you are new. Your cells are regenerating. Your breath is fresh. Existence does not care about your past. The sun shines on you today, not on your yesterday. Step out of the victim's story. It is a cage you have built yourself. The door is not locked. It never was. So we dismiss the lawyer. We fire the attorney of the mind. We stop listening to the arguments. Now what remains? A raw, naked, vulnerable energy. This is the energy you have been sedating. Now comes the crucial part of the transformation. We must talk about the gap between the urge and the action. There is a small gap. Usually it is a microscond. The thought cigarette comes and the hand is already reaching. The gap is bridged by habit. We need to widen this gap. How? By not doing. This is a toist concept. Wooi. action through non-action. When the urge hits you like a tsunami, your instinct is to do something. Either do the drug or do something to fight the drug. I say do nothing. Freeze. Literally freeze your body. If your hand is reaching, stop it in midair. Don't pull it back. Just stop it. Become a statue. Inside the mind is screaming, "Go on. Do it or run away. You do neither. You stay. You watch the hand. You watch the scream. You are creating a delay. You are introducing a pause. In that pause, you are breaking the mechanical link. You are disrupting the robot. If you can freeze for 3 minutes, just 3 minutes, you will see the energy change. The urge is a wave. It needs movement to sustain itself. If you stop moving, the wave crashes against your stillness and shatters. And in that shattering, a tremendous amount of energy is released. This is the energy that was bound up in the addiction. Now it is free. What do you do with this free energy? If you don't give it a new direction, it will turn sour. It will turn into anger or restlessness. or it will find a new addiction. You stop smoking. You start chewing gum. You stop drinking. You start overeing. You are just changing the furniture in the prison cell. You are not leaving the prison. We must channel this energy upwards. We must turn passion into compassion. We must turn lust for the object into love for the being. How to do this? through the second key creative expression. You have been consuming. Addiction is consumption. You take something from the outside and put it inside. To heal, you must reverse the flow. You must bring something from the inside and put it outside. You must create. It does not matter what you create. Paint, dance, sing, cook, garden, write. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece. It doesn't have to be sold in a gallery. It has to be expressive. When you are creating, you cannot be destroying. Creation and destruction are opposite poles. When you feel the urge to destroy yourself with the substance, immediately grab a piece of paper and draw your feeling. Draw the monster. Draw the fire. Get it out of your system and onto the paper. You will be surprised. The drawing may be ugly, dark, chaotic, good. That is the chaos that was inside you. Now it is on the paper. You are free of it. Dance it out. Put on music, wild music, and dance like a madman. Stomp your feet, shake your fists. Let the energy flow through your limbs. You will feel a release that is 10 times more powerful than any drug high. And there is no hangover. There is only a deep relaxation afterwards. This is the secret. The addict is a blocked creator. You have immense creative fire, but because you were afraid of it or because society repressed it, you turned it against yourself. You started burning your own house because you weren't allowed to build a fire in the hearth. Build the fire. Let it burn bright. I have seen so many people, alcoholics, drug addicts who when they dropped the habit became great painters, great poets, great dancers. The energy was always there. It was just boiling in a sealed pot. So my suggestion to you is practical. Find your outlet. Rediscover what you loved before the world told you to be serious. Did you love to play with clay? Get some clay. Did you love to run? Put on your shoes. Replace the death ritual of addiction with a life ritual of creation. But do not make it a duty. I must paint to stay sober. No. Then painting becomes another job. Do it for the joy. Do it for the play. And as you begin to express yourself, you will notice something profound. the loneliness begins to fade. You see, addiction thrives on loneliness and loneliness thrives on disconnection. When you are disconnected from your own creative source, you feel alone in the universe. But when you are creating, you are flowing with the universe. You are part of the great dance. The dancer is not lonely. The dancer is the dance. Now, let us address the fear of the void. Many of you stop the addiction, start the creativity, but then in the quiet moments of the night, the void returns. That hollow empty feeling in the chest and you panic. It's back. I haven't healed. Listen to me. The void is not a symptom of sickness. The void is the door to God. You have been taught that emptiness is bad. Empty bank account, bad. Empty stomach, bad. Empty life, bad. But look at a room. What is the most useful part of the room? The walls? The roof? No. It is the empty space inside. That is where you live. Look at a bowl. What is useful? The clay? No. The emptiness inside that holds the soup. Emptiness is utility. Emptiness is receptivity. When you feel that hollow space, do not try to fill it. Do not run to the phone. Do not run to the food. Close your eyes and fall into it. This is the ultimate trust to fall into your own nothingness. It feels like dying. The ego screams, "I am disappearing. Let it scream. Let it disappear." If you can relax into that nothingness, suddenly the quality flips. It is no longer emptiness in the negative sense. It becomes space. It becomes freedom. It becomes silence. It is the silence of the Buddha. It is the peace that passeth understanding. You have been running from your greatest treasure. The diamond is in the box. Remember the diamond is the emptiness because only in emptiness can the divine enter. If you are full of yourself, full of your thoughts, full of your alcohol, there is no room for the guest to enter. You must be hollow like a bamboo flute so that existence can sing its song through you. Addiction blocks the flute. It fills it with mud. Clean the flute. Accept the emptiness. Love the emptiness. Tonight, if you cannot sleep and the urge comes, try this. Lie in your bed in the dark. Don't toss and turn. Just lie still and visualize that you are a hollow bamboo, empty inside, just air. And feel the breath moving through this hollowess. It is very soothing. It is very musical. You will fall into a sleep that is deeper than any alcohol induced coma. You will wake up refreshed, not groggy. My friends, we are moving from the psychology of addiction to the spirituality of freedom. They are linked. You cannot have one without the other. Psychology cleans the floor. Spirituality opens the window. You need both. A clean floor in a dark room is useless. An open window in a dirty room is unpleasant. Clean the floor by understanding your mind. Open the window by trusting the emptiness. And as you do this, you will realize that you are not alone on this journey. Look at the comments section below this video. See, there are thousands of others from every country, every age, every background, all fighting the same battle, all looking for the same light. You are part of a great caravan, a caravan of seekers waking up from the nightmare. If you feel a connection to this caravan, leave a simple message below. I am waking up. Let it be your declaration to the universe. Writing it down seals it. It makes it real. We are now ready to go even deeper. We have looked at the mind. We have looked at the void. Now we must look at the heart because ultimately addiction is a disease of love. You have forgotten how to love yourself. And because you do not love yourself, you punish yourself. We are going to learn how to fall in love with yourself again. Not in a narcissistic way, but in a reverent way to treat your body as a temple, not a trash can. This is the shift that changes everything. When you respect the temple, you do not throw garbage in the holy of holies. But how to find this love when you feel so much shame? That is the question we will answer next. We are going to dissolve the shame in the fire of compassion. Compassion is the fire that burns the shame without burning the person. You have been carrying shame like a dark secret in your basement. You think if people knew who I really was. If they knew what I do in the shadows, they would reject me. So you reject yourself first to avoid the pain of their rejection. You isolate. And in that isolation, the addiction grows stronger because it is your only friend, your only comfort in the dark. But I tell you, shame is a lie. It is a social conditioning. You were not born with shame. Look at a baby. Does a baby feel ashamed when it is naked? Does a baby feel ashamed when it cries for milk? No. The baby is pure innocence. It accepts its needs. It accepts its body. Somewhere along the way, you were taught that you are wrong, that your desires are wrong, that your hunger is wrong. You internalized the voice of the priest, the politician, the parent who was also asleep. And now that voice is in your head, scolding you every time you slip. To heal, you must exercise this voice. You must realize you are not dirty. You are just dusty. A mirror covered in dust is still a mirror. It still has the capacity to reflect the sun. You just need to wipe it clean. And you do not wipe it clean with sandpaper. You wipe it clean with a soft cloth. That soft cloth is self-love. But self-love has become a cliche. Everyone uses it. Love yourself. What does it mean? It does not mean narcissism. It does not mean looking in the mirror and saying, "I am the best." That is the ego. True self-love means treating your own being with gentleness. Start with the body. Your body is the temple of your consciousness. It is the only house you will ever truly own. You take better care of your car than your body. If you put sugar in the gas tank of your car, the engine is destroyed. You know this. Yet you pour poison into your own system and expect it to run smoothly. Why do you do this? Because you think the body is just a machine, a slave to your pleasure. Change the gestalt. The body is a miracle. It is a universe. Millions of cells are working right now in perfect harmony just to keep you alive. They are digesting your food, pumping your blood, fighting off bacteria. They are working for you 24 hours a day without a salary, without a holiday. And how do you repay them? With smoke, with alcohol, with junk. When you begin to feel a reverence for the body, addiction becomes difficult. It feels like a violation. Next time you reach for the substance, look at your hand. Look at the veins. Look at the life pulsing there. Ask yourself, does this hand want to hurt me? Or is it the unconscious mind hijacking the hand? Connect with the body's innocence. The body never wants to be addicted. The body hates the hangover. The body hates the cough. The body is always trying to reject the poison. Vomiting is the body saying, "No, I want to live." Listen to the body. It is wiser than your mind. If you start listening to the body, you will find that it naturally guides you away from what harms it. You will start craving water instead of wine. You will start craving rest instead of stimulation. The intelligence of life will take over. This brings us to the most profound realization of all, the very heart of this message. Surrender. You have been told that to beat addiction, you must be a warrior. You must fight the good fight. I say to you, the war is over and you have lost. Admit it. You have fought a thousand times and you have lost a thousand times. The addiction is stronger than your will. Why? Because the addiction is fueled by your unconscious, which is 9/10 of your mind. Your will is only one/10enth. It is an ant fighting an elephant. The ant will always lose. So stop fighting. This sounds like madness to the western mind. Stop fighting. Osho, are you telling me to just give up and die? No, I am telling you to stop fighting so you can start transcending. When you fight something, you are on the same level as the thing. To fight a dog, you have to get down on all fours. To fight addiction, you have to remain on the level of the addiction. You remain obsessed. Surrender means you rise above the battlefield. Let me explain this carefully because it is delicate. Surrender does not mean saying I will drink myself to death. That is defeat. That is despair. Surrender means saying I cannot handle this with my ego. My small eye is not enough. I hand this over to something bigger. Call it existence. Call it the universe. Call it the towel. Call it God. If that word doesn't offend you, you say, "I am helpless. I have tried everything and I have failed. Now you take over. If you want me to be addicted, I will be addicted. If you want me to be free, I will be free. I am no longer the doer. This requires a total letting go. It requires a death of the ego. The ego loves to be the doer. Even if it is doing something selfdestructive, it loves the drama of I am quitting. But when you surrender, there is no I left to quit. There is only a relaxation into the whole. And here is the miracle. The moment you truly surrender, not just with words, but with your whole heart, the addiction loses its grip. Why? Because the addiction was a prop for the ego. It was a way for the ego to feel special or to escape itself. When the ego dissolves into trust, the prop is no longer needed. Think of a man drowning in a river. He is thrashing, kicking, screaming. He is fighting the water. And because he is fighting, he is sinking. The more he struggles, the more tired he gets. And the water pulls him down. Then he gives up. He stops fighting. He relaxes. What happens? The physics of the water takes over. The body floats. The river was never trying to drown him. The river was just flowing. It was his struggle that created the drowning. Addiction is the struggle. Surrender is the float. You have been thrashing against the river of life for years. You are exhausted. I can see it in your eyes. You are so tired of the battle. So just for today, stop swimming upstream. Turn onto your back. Let the water carry you. But where will it take me? you ask. It will take you to the ocean. That is where all rivers go. It will take you to your destiny. It will take you to your true self. Have you ever noticed that when you try hardest to sleep, you cannot sleep, you toss, you turn, you count sheep. The harder you try, the more awake you are. Sleep comes only when you stop trying. When you let go, when you don't care if you sleep or not, suddenly you are gone. Freedom from addiction is like sleep. You cannot force it. You can only invite it by relaxing. This relaxation is what I call let go. Imagine you are holding onto a branch on the side of a cliff. You are hanging there, knuckles white, terrified of falling. You think below you is a bottomless abyss. But I am telling you the ground is only 6 in below your feet. You are holding on for dear life, sweating, praying, crying, and all you have to do is open your fingers. You will fall 6 in. You will land on solid ground. You will laugh. My God, I was suffering for nothing. The addiction is that branch. You think if you let go, you will die. How will I cope without my drink? How will I talk to people without my drugs? Let go. You will not die. You will land on your own two feet. You will discover that you have resources you never knew about. You have a natural confidence, a natural joy that was blocked by your clinging. But you have to trust. Trust is the bridge. But I don't trust life. You say life has been hard to me. Life has not been hard to you. You have been hard on life. You have been imposing your conditions on it. Life must be like this. I must be happy all the time. I must never feel pain. These demands create the suffering. Life is seasons. Summer comes, winter comes, day comes, night comes, joy comes, sadness comes. The addict wants only summer. He wants only day. He wants to banish the winter and the night. But you cannot have half of life. If you reject the night, you will go mad. The drug is an attempt to create an artificial permanent sunshine, but it burns you. Accept the night. Accept the sadness. Except the boredom. When you say yes to the night, the night becomes beautiful. It has its own stars. It has its own silence. You can rest in the night. When you say yes to everything, addiction becomes impossible because addiction is a giant no. It is a rejection of the present moment. Surrender is the giant yes. I want you to try this mantra. It is very simple. Whenever you feel the struggle arising, whenever the craving grips you, simply say yes. Yes to this feeling. Yes to this pain. Yes to this fear. Do not fight it. Embrace it. If you embrace a ghost, it disappears. If you run from it, it chases you. Embrace your demons. Invite them for tea. Sit with them. Ask them, "What have you come to teach me?" You will find that your demons are actually angels in disguise. They have come to wake you up. They have come to show you where you are still asleep, where you are still attached, where you are still afraid. Once you learn the lesson, the teacher leaves. The addiction leaves. It does not leave with a bang. It leaves with a whisper. You simply outgrow it. Just as a child outgrows his toys. He doesn't throw them away in anger. He doesn't burn them. One day he just doesn't play with them anymore. He has found something better. He has found real life. You are growing up. That is all that is happening. This pain is your growing pain. Do not medicate the growing pains. Feel them. They mean you are expanding. They mean the shell of the seed is breaking so the sprout can come out. The breaking of the shell is painful to the seed but it is the birth of the tree. You are in the breaking stage. Do not be afraid. The tree is coming. Now I want to speak to the part of you that is afraid of the social aspect. If I change I will lose my friends. I will be an outcast. Yes, you might lose your drinking buddies. You might lose the people who only liked you when you were unconscious. Let them go. They were not friends. They were fellow prisoners. When you walk out of the prison, you cannot take your cellmates with you unless they are also ready to walk out. And most of them are not. They will try to pull you back. Come on, one drink won't hurt. Don't be boring. They are not protecting you. They are protecting their own sleep. If you wake up, you become a nuisance to them. You become a mirror in which they see their own slavery. So they want to smash the mirror. Walk away. Walk alone if you must. Better to be a lion alone than a sheep in a crowd. And you will find new friends. Friends who are awake. friends who love you for your light, not for your shared darkness. You are entering a new frequency. You will attract people on that frequency. Trust this. The universe abhores a vacuum. When you clear out the old, the new rushes in, but you must have the courage to stand in the vacuum for a while. To stand in the in between. This in between stage is fragile. You are like a crab that has shed its old shell but hasn't grown the new one yet. You are soft, pink, vulnerable. You want to hide under a rock. Hide if you must. Take a retreat. Be quiet, but do not go back to the old shell. It doesn't fit anymore. It will suffocate you. You have seen too much to go back. Once you have heard the truth, you cannot unhehere it. Ignorance is bliss, but you are no longer ignorant. You know that the addiction is a trap. You can go back to the trap, but you will never enjoy the cheese again because you know the trap shuts. So the only way is forward into the unknown. And the unknown is beautiful. It is fresh. It is alive. The known is dead. The past is dead. The bottle is the past. The future is an open sky. Are you ready to fly or are you going to keep crawling on the earth complaining about the dust? The wings are there. You just have to spread them. And spreading them means trusting that the air will support you. This trust is what I call syas. It is not a religion. It is a decision to live life on your own terms, guided by your own interiority, not by external commands. The addict is the ultimate conformist. He conforms to the habit. He conforms to the chemical. Be a rebel. Rebellion does not mean throwing rocks at police stations. Rebellion means taking charge of your own consciousness. It means saying, "I will not be a slave to any substance, to any thought, to any pattern. I will be the master of my own house, but a master who rules with love, not with a whip. As we approach the final movement of this communion, I want you to feel the possibility of this freedom. Taste it. It is not far away in the future. It is here now. Can you feel the spaciousness in this very moment? The silence between my words. That silence is you. The addiction is just noise. The silence is the truth. Stay with the silence. If you are feeling this silence, if you are feeling the truth of these words settling in your heart, do not keep it contained. Let it flow. Type I am ready to fly in the comments. Let it be a message to your own higher self. And now we must address the final illusion. The illusion that you are giving up something. The mind says I am sacrificing my pleasure. This is the deprivation mentality. If you think you are depriving yourself, you will eventually rebel and go back. We must flip this. You are not giving up anything. You are gaining everything. You are giving up chains. Are you sad to lose your chains? You are giving up sickness. Are you sad to lose your cancer? You are giving up misery. Is misery so precious to you? You are not making a sacrifice. You are making a trade. You are trading a handful of dust for a kingdom. When you see it this way, there is no struggle. Who struggles to trade dust for diamonds? You run to do it. You do it with a song in your heart. The moment you see the addiction as dust and the awareness as diamond, the transformation is complete. It is instantaneous. The problem is you still think the addiction is a diamond. You still think it has value. It relaxes me. It makes me sociable. Look closer. Does it or does it just make you unconscious? Unconsciousness is not relaxation. Relaxation is a conscious state. Unconsciousness is a coma. Do not confuse a coma with peace. Peace is alive. Peace dances. Peace sings. We are moving now towards the ultimate state of no mind where the addiction cannot exist because the addict no longer exists. Let us enter that final space together. Let us enter that final space together. The space where the mind ends and the being begins. You see, addiction is a noise. It is a very loud repetitive noise. And where does this noise exist? It exists only in the mind. The body does not create noise. The body creates sensations. The spirit does not create noise. The spirit is silence. It is only the mind. This mechanism in the middle that creates the problem. So the ultimate solution is not to fix the mind. You cannot fix the mind. The mind is the problem. You cannot use the problem to solve the problem. You must step out of the mind. This is what I call no mind. Do not misunderstand. No mind does not mean you become a vegetable. It does not mean you lose your intelligence. On the contrary, when the clouds of thought disperse, the sun of intelligence shines brighter than ever. You see things exactly as they are. And when you see things as they are, addiction becomes impossible. Why? Because addiction relies on illusion. It relies on the illusion that this substance will make me happy. In the clear light of no mind, you see the fact. This substance makes me unconscious. It makes me sick. It steals my energy. When you see the fact, the hand does not move. You don't have to restrain the hand. The hand is intelligent. It will not touch fire if it knows it is fire. It only touches fire if it thinks it is a flower. The mind tells you the fire is a flower. That is the hypnosis. We are breaking the hypnosis. I want to tell you a story about the musk deer. In the high mountains of the Himalayas, there lives a deer. It has a beautiful scent in its own belly. In the musk gland, the scent is intoxicating. It is the most beautiful perfume in existence. When the deer matures, the scent is released. The deer smells it and goes crazy with joy. He thinks, "Where is this smell coming from? I must find it. I must possess it." So he runs. He runs through the forest, jumping over bushes, crossing rivers, climbing dangerous cliffs. He is searching for the source of the scent. He looks in the flowers. He looks in the grass. He looks in the caves. He runs until he is exhausted. He runs until his hooves are bleeding. And often the deer falls from a cliff and dies, never finding the source. And as he dies, the scent is still coming from his own belly. You are that dear. The scent of bliss, the scent of peace, the scent of ecstasy. It is inside you. It is your very nature. It is not something you have to acquire. It is something you have to uncover. But you are running. You are running to the bar, running to the dealer, running to the distractions. You are looking for the scent outside and you are bleeding. You are exhausted. Stop running. just sit. If the deer just sat down quietly, he would realize, "My God, the scent is coming from me. I am the source." The moment you realize I am the source, the addiction drops because why would you chase a shadow when you are the sun? You have been looking for the high. Let us look at this word. You want to get high. It is a spiritual word. You want to rise. You want to ascend. You want to go above the mundane, the trivial, the boring. You want to touch the sky. But look at what drugs do. Look at what alcohol does. They do not take you high. They take you low. They drag you down into the mud of unconsciousness. You become less than human. You become an animal. You crawl. You slur your words. You lose your balance. Is this a high? It is a low. It is a descent into hell disguised as an ascent into heaven. Real height, the true high is consciousness. When you are fully alert, fully aware, fully present, you are high. You are floating. You are so light that gravity does not affect you. You can dance. You can sing, you can love, and you don't need a chemical to sustain it. It is self- sustaining. It is your natural state. I want you to become a natural high. Look at the runners. When they run after a certain point, the mind stops. The body takes over and suddenly there is a rush of endorphins. They feel ecstatic. They are not taking a pill. They are just using their own life energy. Look at the painters. When they are lost in color, they forget to eat. They forget to sleep. They are high on beauty. Look at the lovers. When two people truly meet, when their energies melt into each other, there is a drunkenness, but it is a divine drunkenness. You have forgotten how to be drunk on life, so you buy cheap alcohol. I invite you to throw away the cheap alcohol and drink the wine of existence. It is free. It is pouring down on you every moment. The sun is pouring it. The wind is pouring it. The trees are pouring it. But your cup is turned upside down. Your cup is turned upside down because you are closed. You are defensive. You are afraid. Turn the cup up. Open yourself. Say yes to life. And when I say say yes, I mean even to the moments of failure. Let us talk about relapse because the mind will worry. Osho, what if I fail? What if I slip back? If you slip, you slip. Do not make a tragedy out of it. The problem is not the slip. The problem is what you do after the slip. Usually you slip and then you beat yourself up. You say, "I am useless. I blew it. I might as well give up completely. And you dive back into the addiction for months. This is the ego. The ego wants to be perfect. If it cannot be perfect, it wants to be perfectly terrible. It hates being human. To be human is to make mistakes. If you slip, simply notice it. Ah, I slipped. I became unconscious. The old habit caught me. Okay, get up, dust off your clothes, and continue walking. Do not analyze it for 10 years. Do not go to a psychiatrist to find out why you slipped. You slipped because the road was slippery and you were not watching your step. Next time, watch your step. If a child is learning to walk, he falls. Does he sit there and cry, "I am a failure. I will never be a walker." No. He giggles. He grabs the furniture. He pulls himself up. He tries again. Be like the child. If you fall, laugh. Look at me. Playing the old game again. And then stop playing. The journey is not a straight line. It is a spiral. You might feel like you are coming back to the same spot, but you are at a higher level. You have more understanding now. Even your relapse can serve you. If you use it to become more aware, if you watch your misery during the relapse, if you see how terrible it actually feels, you will learn. The fire will burn you and you will learn not to touch it. Eventually, the understanding becomes so deep that the slip becomes impossible. Not because you are controlling it, but because you have outgrown it. You don't see adults playing with rattles and pacifiers. They didn't have to force themselves to stop. They just grew up. The pacifier became silly. Your addiction is a pacifier. You are sucking on it to feel comfort. Grow up. Become mature. Maturity means accepting that life is not always comfortable. That life is a challenge. that life is an adventure and an adventure needs danger. It needs the unknown. When you numb yourself, you kill the adventure. You make life safe, predictable, and dead. Do you want a safe death or a dangerous life? Choose the dangerous life. Choose the life of feeling everything, the sharp edges and the soft curves. When you feel the sharp edge of pain, do not run. Say this is life. I am alive. Even this pain tells me I am alive. In the grave there is no pain. Do you want to be in the grave before you die? Addiction is a premature grave. Come out of the grave like Lazarus. Come out. The stone that is blocking the cave is your own fear. Push it aside. It is lighter than you think. And as you emerge into the light, you will see that you are not alone. The whole existence has been waiting for you. The trees were waiting for you to see them. The birds were waiting for you to hear them. The stars were waiting for you to wonder at them. You have been missing the party. God is throwing a celebration and you are sitting in the basement with a bottle. Come upstairs. The music is playing. But I don't know how to dance, you say. No one knows how to dance. You just let the music take you. You stumble. You step on toes. And then you find the rhythm. The rhythm of life is breath. Start there. Whenever you feel the urge to escape, come back to the breath. The breath is the bridge between the body and the soul. It is the only thing that is always with you. Friends leave, money leaves, health leaves, but the breath stays until the very last moment. Trust the breath. When the craving comes, take a deep breath, hold it, feel the life in it, and let it go. With the exhalation, visualize the craving leaving you like gray smoke. With the inhalation, visualize the light entering you like golden liquid. Do this seven times. It takes one minute. In that one minute, you will have changed your chemistry. You will have shifted from the sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight to the parasympathetic rest and digest. You have the pharmacy inside you. Your breath is the pharmacist. Use it. It is free. It is available. It is powerful. Now, I want to speak to your future self. The one who is listening to this video a month from now, a year from now, you will look back on this moment, this very moment, as you sit there watching the screen, and you will realize this was the turning point. Not because I said something magical, but because you heard something true. The truth resonates. It hits a bell inside you that has been silent for too long. Can you hear the bell ringing? That is the bell of freedom. Do not let it stop. Keep ringing it. Every day do one thing that scares you. Every day do one thing that you love. Every day sit in silence for 10 minutes. This is your prescription. No pills, no therapy, just courage, love, and silence. If you take this medicine, the disease of addiction will vanish like mist before the sun and you will become a light. Not just for yourself but for others because the world is full of people stumbling in the dark. The world is full of addicts. Look at the eyes of the people on the subway, in the shops. They are empty. They are looking for something. When you find it, you become a lighthouse. You don't have to preach. You don't have to convert anyone. You just have to be. Your presence will be healing. Your calmness will be contagious. People will come to you and ask, "What is your secret? Why are you so happy? Why are you so peaceful? What are you taking?" And you will smile and say, "I am taking nothing. I have stopped taking. I have started giving. I am giving my awareness to life. This is the greatest gift you can give to the world. A healed, whole, conscious human being. We need you. The world needs you to wake up. We are on the brink of a global madness. Only conscious individuals can save this planet. Your addiction is not just your personal problem. It is part of the collective unconsciousness that is destroying the earth. By healing yourself, you heal the world. So take this responsibility with joy. You are not just saving your liver or your bank account. You are saving the future. My beloved ones, the time has come to end this talk, but the communion continues. The words are just pointers. Do not cling to the words. Look at where they are pointing. They are pointing to your own heart. Go there. Stay there. Rest there. There is no addiction in the heart. There is only love. And love is the only wine that never runs dry. Drink it. Be drunk with it and be free. If you have walked this long path with me through these five parts, through these thousands of words, then you are not just a casual viewer. You are a disciple of truth. You are ready. Do not let this just be another video you watched. Let it be the last video you needed to watch about this. Make a mark right now. Go to the subscribe button. Click it not as a digital action but as a commitment to this path of awareness. Click the notification bell so that when the next reminder comes you do not miss it. We will continue this journey of awakening together and share this. There is someone in your life maybe a brother, a sister, a friend who is drowning. Throw them this rope. Share this video with them. You might save a life today. Thank you for your trust. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your silence. Be whole. Be happy. Be free. Goodbye for