Questioner:

AS THE  MODERN MAN IS IN SUCH A HURRY, AND PATANJALI’S METHODS SEEM TO TAKE SO LONG, TO WHOM ARE YOU ADDRESSING THESE LECTURES? 

OSHO: 

Yes, the modern man is in a hurry, and just the opposite will be helpful. If you are in a hurry, then patanjali will be helpful because he is not in a hurry he is the antidote. Your mind needs an antidote. Your mind needs an antidote. Look at it this way: because the western mind particularly-and now no other mind exists, only the western mind more or less everywhere, even in the east-is in the hurry. That’s why it has become interested in zen, because zen gives the promise of sudden enlightenment. Zen looks like instant coffee, and it has an appeal. But I know zen won’t help because the appeal is not because of zen, the appeal is because of hurry. And then you don’t understand zen. 

In the west, whatsoever is rumored about zen is almost false; it fulfills a need of the mind which is in a hurry, but it is not true to zen. If you go to japan and ask zen people, they wait for thirty years, forty years for the first satori to happen. Even for sudden enlightenment one has to work hard. The enlightenment is sudden, but the preparation is very long. It just like you boil water: you heat the water; at a certain degree, a hundred degrees , the water evaporates suddenly. Right-evaporation is sudden but by heating you have to bring it up to a hundred degrees, the heating will take time, and heating depends on your intensity.

And if you are in a hurry you don’t have any heat, because in a hurry you would have to have zen satori, or enlightenment, just by the way as if it can be attained, as if it can be purchased. Running, you would like to snatch it from somebody’s hands. It cannot be done that way. There are flowers, seasonal flowers: you sow the seeds and within three months the plants have blossomed and gone, disappeared. If you are in a hurry then it will be better to be interested in