He said, “Yes, I have. They are in the monastery, deeper in the forest. But chopping wood is such a joy that I would rather chop wood than be a master. It is such a sacred, such a blissful feeling, the cool breeze, the hot sun, the whole body perspiring, and each hit of the ax making the silence of the place deeper. Next time you come, join me! We do all kinds of things which are necessary, but one thing remains common, as a golden thread running through all actions, and that is meditation. And meditation makes everything divine. Then actions don’t count. What counts is your consciousness at the moment of the action.”

This is changing the whole ideology of ordinary mind: it judges the act, it never bothers about the consciousness out of which this action is born.

The same action out of meditation becomes sacred, and the same action without meditation is mundane.

We have made our lives full of mundane things, mundane acts, because we don’t know a simple secret that can transform the quality of everything that we do. And remember, if you don’t know the secret of the transformation, amongst those mundane things you are also mundane. Unless you have a consciousness which makes you sacred and holy, which is going to transform everything that you do into the same category in which you are…

Whatever you will touch will become sacred. Whatever you will do will become holy. Zen is the very essence of all religions, without their stupid rituals, nonsensical theologies. It has dropped everything that could be dropped. It has saved only that which is the very soul of religiousness.

So even drinking a cup of tea with a Zen master, you will find that you are participating in a religious phenomenon.

Osho,
All my life I experienced many situations in which I felt imprisoned, encaged. As soon as I could manage, I escaped – as a child, not far away, but after the age of fourteen as far away as possible. Even living in your presence this habit is sometimes there, but it fades completely as soon as I look into your eyes – then what a tremendous relief. What is happening, Osho?

People are escaping from places, from persons, from things, because they have an immediate, intuitive feeling that this is not the place where they belong – it is somewhere else. These are not the people to whom they belong. There must be some people somewhere to whom they belong. Some children can be very acutely aware of the feeling.

And when you look into my eyes, the feeling disappears because you need those kind of eyes; you have been looking for them without knowing it. Your escape has been a search.

The word escape is condemnatory. You have been searching, and because you were not finding in one place you were rushing to another place; not finding in one person you were rushing to another person. And this is happening all over the world: people are changing places, changing their lovers, changing their friends, changing their jobs, but somehow, nothing seems to fit. Their inner thirst remains the same. Not only the same, it goes on increasing as they grow up.