Worry

 

 

Almasta is a state of consciousness where no worry, no anxiety, exists and one is utterly drunk with the divine. These are two aspects: if worries, anxieties, anguish, disappear, then the intoxication with god appears. If worries, anxieties, are there they go on dissipating our energy; and overflowing energy is needed to be drunk with god. Worries are leaks, holes, from where we go on dissipating.

 

Drop worrying. There is nothing to worry about; all is taken care of. Live with that trust. Existence loves you. No harm is going to happen, no harm can ever happen, because how can the whole do any harm to its own part? It is impossible. And if sometimes you feel that some harm is happening that must be some misinterpretation on your part; there must be some blessing in disguise.

 

Once this trust arises in a person he becomes religious. Then there is no need to worry, then there is no need to remain in a state of anxiety. Anxiety means 'There is nobody to look after me. I have to carry the whole burden on my own shoulders. If I don't carry it then I am finished, and the whole existence is inimical.' That's what creates anxiety: 'Everybody is against me. Somehow, everybody is conspiring against me, everybody is at my throat. I have to protect myself. I have to be watchful, I have to plan, I have to move in such a way that I and not others prove the winner. Otherwise everybody is a competitor and they are bent upon defeating me.'

 

This attitude creates anxiety, and this attitude is the attitude of a non-religious person. When I say a non-religious person I don't mean that he does not go to church, he does not read the Bible; that is not the point. He may read the Bible, he may go to church, but if he remains in anxiety he is not religious. And it is possible that he goes to the church only because of his anxiety, out of his anxiety; he prays to god out of anxiety, he reads the Bible as a protection, as a security. But if anxiety is there a person is not religious. He is pathological and his religion will be pathological.

 

The religious person knows nothing of anxiety; he changes the whole gestalt. He knows 'I am part of this whole existence, and if trees are not worried and the birds are not going crazy and mad and the animals are utterly happy, why can't I be? I belong to this existence, I am an essential part of it.' This trust, this understanding, this faith, and anxieties simply disappear, they are not found any more; you have stopped creating them, you have stopped secreting them. Then so much energy is preserved that it starts overflowing in a kind of festivity; it becomes a dance. It is so abundant, it is so exuberant, that life becomes a festival. Then a person is religious, then one is drunk with the divine.

 

That is the meaning of almasta: drunk with the divine, utterly lost in the divine, feeling one with the divine, with no worry, not a worry in the world.

 

-Osho, "Turn On, Tune In and Drop the Lot, #21"