And I am not saying that when you are reborn as a no-mind you cannot use the mind. The mind has its limited uses. Use it. When you are working in your office, I am not telling you to be a no-mind. When you are working in your shop or in the factory, I am not saying to be a no-mind. I am saying be perfectly a mind. Use the mind but don’t carry it continuously, twenty-four hours, day in and day out, with you. Don’t go on dragging it. Use it as you use a chair. You don’t go on carrying your chair everywhere, wherever you go, just because you may need it.

The mind is a beautiful instrument if you know how to be a no-mind too.

The mind is impotent, incapable of knowing the beginningless and the endless. The mind exists between birth and death; it knows nothing beyond birth and beyond death.

You were here before you were born, and you will be here after you are dead. The mind has a very limited existence, very momentary – one day it comes, another day it is gone. You are forever. Have some experience of your forever-ness.

But that is possible only through no-mind. No-mind is another name for meditation

The second question:

Osho,
Yes!

This simple word yes contains all the religions of the world. It contains trust, it contains love, it contains surrender. It contains all the prayers that have ever been done, are being done, and will ever be done. If you can say yes with the totality of your heart, you have said all that can be said. To say yes to existence is to be religious, to say no is to be irreligious.

That’s my definition of the atheist and the theist. The atheist is not one who denies God, and the theist is not one who believes in God – not necessarily so, because we have seen great theists who never believed in any God. We have known Buddha, Mahavira, Adinatha: we have known tremendously enlightened people who never talked about God. But they also talked about yes; they had to talk about yes.

God can be dropped as an unnecessary hypothesis, but yes cannot be dropped. Yes is the very spirit of God. And yes can exist without God, but God cannot exist without yes. God is only the body, yes is the soul.

There are people who believe in God and yet I will call them atheists, because their belief has no yes behind it. Their belief is bogus, their belief is formal; their belief is given by others, it is borrowed. Their parents, priests and teachers have taught them that God is; they have made them so much afraid that they cannot even question the existence of God. And they have given them promises of great things if they believe in God. There will be great rewards in heaven if you believe, and great punishments in hell if you don’t believe.