Osho on wants and needs – A need is that which will help you to move towards God

• Whatsoever you are doing, judge it on this criterion: whether it is going to help you to move towards God. If it is going to help, it is good, do it, and do it totally. If it is not going to help, don’t waste time.

• This is the difference between wants and needs. The person who lives through wants becomes distracted. He says, ”I want this, I want that,” and he goes crazy because he wants so many things and he cannot manage. He is always frustrated, because whenever he achieves something that he had wanted so long, he feels simply foolish that he wasted so much energy, time, life. Now he has achieved it, and he seems to be getting no joy out of it. The whole effort seems to be meaningless, ridiculous. But before trying to understand he starts jumping into wanting something else. He says, ”So this is not the thing; then it must be something else. Let me have this, let me have that.”

• A need is that which will help you to move towards God; a want is that which will only distract you. A need is a reality; it has to be fulfilled. Needs are very few; they can be easily fulfilled. And wants are millions and they cannot be fulfilled ever. Not only in one life, in millions of lives they cannot be fulfilled.

• So always see whether it is a want or a need. If it is a need, fulfill it. If it is really needed …. And what do I mean by saying ”if it is really needed”? I mean if it is going to help your growth, to make you more mature, more alert, more loving, more open, more present. Is it going to make you more intelligent, more blissful, more rooted, centered? These are the values. Is it going to give you a kind of integration? Is it going to make you more alert, aware, conscious? Then it is good, it is a need. Fulfill it. Then your way towards God is straight.

• Jesus says, ”Straight is my way and narrow.” The way is straight and, yes, it is narrow too – narrow because only one can pass on it; you cannot take anybody else with you. It is so narrow that only one can pass on it – God is available to individuals not to crowds. Each has to move on his own, alone, utterly alone. And it is straight if you are alert.

• Just think of a river going towards the south and then towards the north, and then going to the east and then going to the west; it will just be wasting itself and may get entangled in some desert unnecessarily. But the river follows the shortest course, the straightest way possible, the shortest distance between two points. One point is you, the other point is God. God means the whole, the ocean of existence. We are small riVers moving towards God.