https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/57883Alcohol
An idiot is a person who is trying to find joy where joy does not exist at all, who is trying to search for something which he has never lost in the first place. The enlightened person is one who has looked into his being before searching for anything anywhere else. It is better to look in your own house. He has looked in and has found it there. Now his search has disappeared.
The person who is interested in alcohol must be living in misery, in a kind of suffering. That's why he wants somehow to forget it all. Alcohol is nothing but a chemical strategy to forget your miseries, anxieties, your problems, to forget yourself.
My whole effort here, Shraddan, is to help you to remember yourself -- and you want to forget yourself. By forgetting yourself you will be creating more and more hell for yourself and for others. Remember, rather, remember yourself.
My methods are different from George Gurdjieff's. I am not in favor of any alcoholic beverages. I am not in favor of any psychedelic drugs either, because they all create illusory worlds for you and they all are distractions. They make you more and more oblivious of your own being, unaware of your own self.
My work is based in awareness. The word 'awareness' is the golden key here, the master key. You have to learn to be more aware. Howsoever painful it is in the beginning, be more aware, because it is by becoming more aware that one day you will become part of the celebration of the whole.
-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 8, #12"
♦
Jake the barber, passing by a tenement house in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, saw a man leaning limply against the doorway.
"What's the matter?" he asked sympathetically. "Drunk?"
"Yeah, I'm afraid sho."
"Do you live in this house?"
"Yep."
"Want me to help you upstairs?"
"Yeah, shank you."
"What floor do you live on?"
"Shecon'."
With much difficulty, Jake half dragged, half carried the wilting figure up the dark stairway to the second floor.
"Is this your apartment?" he asked.
"Yep," affirmed the man, his eyes already closed in alcoholic slumber.
Jake opened the unlocked door and shoved the drunk inside. He then groped his way back downstairs. But as he was going through the vestibule, he made out the dim outline of another man, apparently in worse condition than the first, staggering in front of the house.
"What's the trouble, mister?" he asked. "Are you drunk, too?"
"Yesh," came the feeble reply.
"Do you live in this house also?"
"Yesh."
"Don't tell me you live on the second floor, too?"
"Yesh."
Again Jake half carried the stranger to the second floor. He pushed open the same door and shoved the man inside the darkened room.
As Jake was emerging from the building he discerned yet a third man, evidently worse off than either of the other two. This poor fellow was dishevelled and bleeding from cuts and bruises on his head and face. He was about to approach him and offer him assistance when the object of his solicitude darted into the street and threw himself into the arms of a policeman.
Offisher," he gasped, pointing a quivering finger at Jake, "perteck me from this man. All night long he's done nothin' but drag me upstairs an' throw me down the elevator shaft!"
-Osho, "Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen, #1"
