Osho,
I am such a doer. How can I become more open and available to you without doing? How to find the balance between doing and non-doing, to reconcile your two statements: “You have to act without will,” and, “Effort is also needed”?

It is a complicated question – not existentially, but when you think about it, because the thinking part of the mind is the doer. It wants to do something, to make an effort. It is absolutely unable to understand that there is the opposite side of the mind which is non-doing, non-active, and already effortless.

The problem becomes more complicated because these two parts of the mind are not in any connection, in any communication. Nothing joins the split.

You are already doing many things, and also you are not doing many things. But both sections are so separate, so unbridgeably separate, that neither is aware of the other. The question comes from the section of the mind which finds it difficult to think of non-doing. Effort is perfectly good – it is ready to do anything.

Gurdjieff based his whole approach on this half of the mind. It is an arduous effort, and it is not a coincidence that he became a very influential master in the West. He would not have been recognized in Far Eastern countries; he has no following in Far Eastern countries, where for centuries non-doing has been the basic approach. All his teaching was effort, actions.

J. Krishnamurti is more influential in the West than in the East. In the East, millions of people have not even heard his name. Even in India, where he was born, he visits only Delhi,

Bombay, Madras, which are the most Westernized parts of the country. And there too, if you look at his ideas, you can see who the people are.

In Bombay ninety percent of his listeners are Parsis – who are not Indians – and their religion is a religion of effort. In Delhi or Madras, everywhere he is listened to by intellectuals. It is the same part of the mind; and both Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff are denying the other part by different names.

Many women have been attracted to Gurdjieff, to Krishnamurti, not knowing that they are being attracted by the opposite. The attraction is of polarity. Not that they are convinced that Krishnamurti is right, or Gurdjieff is right: they function more from the non-doing part of the brain, and the non-doing part is immensely attracted to doers, thinkers. But it remains only an attraction; they cannot manage to do what these people are asking. Their attraction was basically from the opposite pole.

They would be in better company with Taoists, with Zen, but they may not be interested. I don’t see many women interested in Zen or Taoism. Really Zen and Taoism are, in a way, feminine. They want you to relax and be inactive.