Osho on Mahesh Yogi

Amrit Sadhana
Osho has spoken about the late Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation in his own inimitable style. There was a period when TM had taken the West by storm, particularly the US. At the time meditation was not a popular word in the west so Mahesh Yogi seemed to bring a new message. But soon humanity outgrew TM and started looking for more radical and trasformatory process of meditation. Osho insight on Mahesh Yogi is very useful in understanding meditation.

Osho : "If you can learn one thing with me, then that one thing is: Be alert, aware, about your own inner motives, about your own inner destiny. Never lose sight of it, otherwise you will be unhappy. And when you are unhappy, then people say: "Meditate and you will become happy!" They say: "Concentrate and you will become happy; pray and you will become happy; go to the temple, be religious, be a Christian or a Hindu and you will be happy!" This is all nonsense.
Be happy! and meditation will follow. Be happy, and religion will follow. Happiness is a basic condition. People become religious only when they are unhappy -- then their religion is pseudo. Try to understand why you are unhappy.
Many people come to me and they say they are unhappy, and they want me to give them some meditation. I say: First, the basic thing is to understand why you are unhappy. And if you don't remove those basic causes of your unhappiness, I can give you a meditation, but that is not going to help very much -- because the basic causes remain there.
The man may have been a good, beautiful dancer, and he is sitting in an office, piling up files. There is no possibility for dance. The man may have enjoyed dancing under the stars, but he is simply going on accumulating a bank-balance. And he says he is unhappy: "Give me some meditation." I can give him! -- but what is that meditation going to do? what is it supposed to do? He will remain the same man: accumulating money, competitive in the market. The meditation may help in this way: it may make him a little more relaxed to do this nonsense even better.
That's what TM is doing to many people in the West -- and that is the appeal of transcendental meditation, because Maharishi Mahesh Yogi goes on saying, "It will make you more efficient in your work, it will make you more successful. If you are a salesman, you will become a more successful salesman. It will give you efficiency." And American people are almost crazy about efficiency. You can lose everything just for being efficient. Hence, the appeal.
Yes, it can help you. It can relax you a little -- it is a tranquillizer. By constantly repeating a mantra, by continuously repeating a certain word, it changes your brain chemistry. It is a tranquillizer! a sound-tranquillizer. It helps you to lessen your stress so tomorrow in the marketplace you can be more efficient, more capable to compete -- but it doesn't change you. it is not a transformation.
You can repeat a mantra, you can do a certain meditation; it can help you a little bit here and there -- but-it can help you to remain whatsoever you are. It is not a transformation.
Hence, my appeal is only for those who are really daring, dare-devils who are ready to change their very pattern of life, who are ready to stake everything -- because in fact you don't have anything to put at the stake: only your unhappiness, your misery. But people cling even to that."
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