One of America’s very famous rabbis, Joshua Liebman, has written a book, Peace of Mind. I wrote him a letter – the book is a great seller – saying, “Whatever you know about mind seems to be rubbish. You don’t even know that peace of mind is a contradiction of terms, and that is the title of your book. The title should be, Peace or Mind.”

He must have been shocked by my letter – he never replied. I wrote to him again. “This cowardliness is not good on the part of a rabbi. Either change the title or give me the explanation.” Neither has he changed the title nor has he given me any explanation, and I have asked a simple thing. Peace of mind…such a thing does not exist.

Either peace exists, then there is no mind, or mind exists and there is no peace. The right title would be Peace or Mind. But he cannot change it because that is the whole theme in the book: peace of mind, and how to attain it. He is showing methods, ways how to attain to peace of mind. The change of title will not fit with the book.

He can understand that I am putting him into a difficult situation; if he changes the title then the book will not fit with the title. He will have to write the whole book again, and he cannot write the whole book again because he does not understand that mind is the source of all your tensions, anxieties, worries. It cannot be peaceful, that is impossible.

This is the whole essence of the East’s experiments in spirituality for thousands of years: peace or mind. The choice is yours. Peace is a very normal, very ordinary, very simple phenomenon. And you are experiencing it, but by the side the mind goes on giving a commentary, “There must be something more. Don’t stop. Go on searching.”

You have to say to the mind, “Shut up!” It is your mind and you have the right to tell it to shut up, that you are not going to bother about its nonsense for more and more…

Enjoy whatever you have got and the more you enjoy it the more it grows. This is the paradox: mind asks for more and more and becomes more and more worried: without mind, you live peace, you live love, you live silence. And by living it, it becomes more and more – deeper and deeper. Slowly, slowly your happiness starts having wings, starts becoming a blessing, a blissfulness, a benediction.

Osho,
This morning you talked about the misery implanted in our minds by society, priests and so on that is not ours. But how could this game develop – priests on the one hand, people on the other? What qualities are there in man so that things develop this way?