Disease
Philosophy is a kind of disease -- and not just an ordinary kind of disease; it is more cancerous than cancer, more dangerous than all the diseases put together. A disease can cut only one root. Even all the diseases put together cannot cut you completely from existence. Philosophy cuts you, uproots you utterly.
What is disease? When one connection is loose with existence, you feel ill. When the head is unconnected, then there is headache. When the stomach is unconnected, then there is stomachache. Somewhere, you have become autonomous; you are no more in the ocean of the interdependence of existence. There exists disease. Disease has a certain autonomy, independence. When you have a cancerous growth inside you, that growth becomes a universe unto itself. It is unconnected with existence.
An ill person is one who is unconnected in many ways. When a certain disease becomes chronic, it simply means that that root is completely destroyed; even the possibility to replant it in the earth no longer exists. You will have to remain alive only partially; a part of you will remain dead. Somebody is paralyzed -- what does it mean? The body has lost contact with the universal energy. Now it is almost a dead thing -- hanging, unconnected. The sap of life no longer flows in it.
If this is what disease is, then philosophy is really the greatest disease there can be -- because it disconnects you utterly; and not only that, it disconnects you with such logic that you never become aware that you are ill. It disconnects you with such justifications and rationalizations that you never become aware that you are missing. It is a very self-justificatory illness; it goes on supporting itself. Philosophy means that a man has become completely head-oriented. He looks towards existence through the eyes of logic and not through the eyes of love.
-Osho, "The Beloved, Vol 1, #9"