Osho Quotes on Smoking

 

 

 

In countries where breast-feeding has stopped, more smoking will automatically be there. That's why the West smokes more than the East -- because no mother is ready to give her breast to the child because the shape is lost. So in the West smoking is increasing more and more; even small children are smoking.

 

♦

 

Small children smoking, and the mother is not aware that it is because the breast has been taken away. In all primitive communities a seven-year-old child, or even an eight or nine-year-old child, will continue breast-feeding. Then there is a satisfaction and smoking will not be so necessary. That's why in primitive communities men are not so much interested in women's breasts; there is no problem that somebody will attack them. Nobody looks at the breasts.

 

♦

 

Whenever you drop something by fight, it is never dropped. You can drop smoking by fighting, and then you will start doing something else which will become a substitute. You may start chewing gum, it is the same; You may start chewing pan, it is the same, there is no difference. You need something to do with your mouth -- smoking, chewing, anything. When your mouth goes on working, you feel at ease because through the mouth tensions are released. So whenever a man feels tense he starts smoking.

 

♦

 

You cannot stop smoking directly because it has many related things, implications. You are tense, and if you stop smoking you will start something else and the other may be more harmful. Don't go on escaping problems, face them. The problem is that you are tense, so the goal should be how to be non-tense, not, smoking or not smoking. Meditate. Relax your tensions without any object into the sky, allow catharsis to happen. When you are non-tense these things will become absurd, foolish, and they will drop. Food will change, your styles of living will change.

 

♦

 

I am less interested in your chain-smoking; I am more interested in your habit. Any habit that becomes a force, a dominating force over you, is a sin. One should live more in freedom. One should be able to do things not according to habits but according to the situations.

 

♦

 

Smoking is unhealthy, unhygienic, but not a sin. It becomes a sin only if you are doing it unconsciously -- it is not smoking that makes it a sin but unconsciousness. Let me emphasize the fact. You can do your prayer every day unconsciously; then your prayer is a sin. You can become addicted to your prayer. If you miss the prayer one day, the whole day you will feel something is wrong, something is missing, some gap. It is the same with smoking or with drinking; there is no difference in it. Your prayer has become a mechanical habit; it has become a master over you. It bosses you; you are just a servant, a slave to it. If you don't do it, it forces you to do it.

 

♦

 

You may have decided again and again, and again and again you have failed -- not because smoking is such a great phenomenon that you cannot get out of it, but because you are trying from the wrong end. Rather than becoming aware of the whole situation -- why you smoke in the first place -- rather than becoming aware of the process of smoking, you are simply trying to drop it. It is like pruning the leaves of a tree without cutting the roots.

 

♦

 

You must be a deeply anxiety-ridden person, otherwise chain-smoking is not possible; chain-smoking is a by-product. You must be so concerned about a thousand and one disturbances inside, you must be carrying such a big load of worries on your heart, on your chest, that you don't even know how to forget them. You don't know how to drop them -- smoking at least helps you to forget about them.

 

♦

 

A meditator cannot smoke, for the simple reason that he never feels nervous, in anxiety, in tension. Smoking helps -- on a momentary basis -- to forget about your anxieties, your tensions, your nervousness. Other things can do the same -- chewing gum can do the same, but smoking does it the best. In your deep unconscious, smoking is related with sucking milk from your mother's breast. And as civilization has grown, no woman wants the child to be brought up by breast-feeding -- naturally; he will destroy the breast. The breast will lose its roundness, its beauty.

 

♦

 

I have just instructed Laxmi to make a small temple for smoking here in the ashram. But you have to go very alert, aware, meditative! If you can smoke meditatively, it is perfectly beautiful. If it stops by being meditative, that too is perfectly beautiful. Life is sacred.

 

♦

 

I have been successful with many of my sannyasins. First they laughed when I suggested to them... they could not believe that such a simple solution could help them. I said to them, "Don't try to stop smoking, but rather bring a milk bottle that is used for small children. And in the night when nobody can see you, under your blanket enjoy the milk, the warm milk. It is not going to do any harm at least." They said, "But how is it going to help?" I said, "You forget about it -- how and why -- you just do it. It will give you good food before you go to sleep, and there is no harm. And my feeling is that the next day you will not feel so much need for cigarettes. So you count." And they were surprised... slowly, slowly the cigarettes were disappearing, because their basic need which had remained hanging in the middle was fulfilled: they are no more children, they are maturing, and the cigarette disappears.