Osho on Aloneness and Loneliness

The aloneness is total and complete. Not loneliness but aloneness. Loneliness is always concerned with others; aloneness is concerned with oneself.
Aloneness is the joy of being just yourself. It is being joyous with yourself, it is enjoying your own company. There are very few people who enjoy their own company. And it is a very strange world: nobody enjoys his company and everybody wants others to enjoy his company! If they don't enjoy he feels insulted -- and alone he feels disgusted with himself. In fact, if YOU cannot enjoy your own company, who else is going to enjoy it?
Aloneness, solitude is positive. It is overflowing joy for no reason. It is our very nature to be joyous; hence there is no need to depend on anybody else. There is no other motive in it, it is simply there. Just as the water flows downwards, your being rises upwards. Just give it a chance -- give it solitude. And remember again, solitude is not solitariness, just as aloneness is not loneliness.
Only a no-thought is pure, because then you are utterly yourself, alone, nothing interfering. Jean-Paul Sartre says: The other is hell. And he is right in a way, because whenever you are thinking of the other you are in hell. And all thoughts are addressed to others. When you are in a state of no-thought you are alone, and aloneness is purity. And in that aloneness happens all that is worth happening.
Your aloneness is your essential being.
Meditation is total freedom, aloneness, the flight of the alone to the alone. There is no other, so there is no question of drowning yourself, but one hundred percent mindfulness will be needed -- less than that won't do.
Meditation means being ecstatic in your aloneness. But when you become ecstatic in your aloneness, soon the ecstasy is so much that you cannot contain it. It starts overflowing you. And when it starts overflowing you it becomes love. Meditation allows love to happen. And the people who have not known meditation will never know love. They may pretend that they love but they cannot. They will only pretend -- because they don't have anything to give, they are not overflowing.
You can be alone, but that aloneness may not be true aloneness. It may be only loneliness, and you may be thinking and fantasizing about all kinds of things. Aloneness comes out of awareness; it has nothing to do with where you are in the outside world but where you are in the INSIDE world.
Through aloneness, the ego is shattered. It has nothing to relate to, so it cannot exist. So if you are ready to be alone, unwaveringly alone, neither escaping nor falling back, just accepting the fact of aloneness as it is -- it becomes a great opportunity. Then you are just like a seed that has much potential in it. But remember, the seed must destroy itself for the plant to grow. Ego is a seed, a potentiality. If it is shattered, the divine is born. The divine is neither "I" nor "thou," it is one. Through aloneness, you come to this oneness.
Consciousness has come to the point now where you know that you are alone. And only in aloneness can you attain enlightenment. I am not saying loneliness. The feeling of loneliness is the feeling that comes when one is escaping from aloneness, when one is not ready to accept it. If you do not accept the fact of aloneness, then you will feel lonely. Then you will find some crowd or some means of intoxication in which to forget yourself.
The first thing we must do is to accept aloneness as a basic fact and learn to live with it. We must not create any fictions. If you create fictions you will never be able to know the truth. Fictions are projected, created, cultivated truths that prevent you from knowing what is. Live with the fact of your aloneness. If you can live with this fact, if there is no fiction between you and this fact, then the truth will be revealed to you. Every fact, if looked into deeply, reveals the truth.
If you become aware of your aloneness, then you become aware of the aloneness of others also. Then you know that to try to possess another is trespassing.
You must make a distinction between two words: lonely and alone. In the dictionary they carry the same meaning, but those who have been meditating, they know the distinction. They are not the same, they are as different as possible. Loneliness is an ugly thing; loneliness is a depressive thing -- it is a sadness; it is an absence of the other. Loneliness is the absence of the other -- you would like the other to be there, but the other is not, and you feel that and you miss them. YOU are not there in loneliness, the absence of the other is there. Alone? -- it is totally different. YOU are there, it is your presence; it is a positive phenomenon. You don't miss the other, you meet yourself.

Then you are alone, alone like a peak, tremendously beautiful! Sometimes you even feel a terror -- but it has a beauty. But the presence is the basic thing: you are present to yourself. You are not lonely, you are with yourself. Alone, you are not lonely, you are with yourself. Lonely, you are simply lonely -- there is no one. You are not with yourself and you are missing the other. Loneliness is negative, an absence; aloneness is positive, a presence.

If you are alone, you grow, because there is space to grow -- nobody else to hamper, nobody else to obstruct, nobody else to create more complex problems. Alone you grow, and as much as you want to grow you can grow because there is no limit, and you are happy being with yourself, and a bliss arises. There is no comparison: because the other is not there you are neither beautiful nor ugly, neither rich nor poor, neither this nor that, neither white nor black, neither man nor woman. Alone, how can you be a woman or a man? Lonely, you are a woman or a man, because the other is missing. Alone, you are no one, empty, empty of the other completely.

And remember, when the other is not, the ego cannot exist: it exists with the other. Either present or absent, the other is needed for ego. To feel 'I' the other is needed, a boundary of the other. Fenced from the neighbors I feel 'I'. When there is no neighbor, no fencing, how can you feel 'I'? You will be there, but without any ego. The ego is a relationship, it exists only in relationship.
First move from things to thoughts, then from thoughts to the thinker. Things are the world of science, thought is the world of art and the thinker is the world of religion. Just go on moving inwards. The first circumference around you is of things, the second of thoughts, and the third, the centre, your very being, is nothing but consciousness. It is nothing but a witnessing. Drop things and go into thoughts; then one day thoughts also have to be dropped and then you are left alone in your purity, then you are left absolutely alone. In that aloneness is God, in that aloneness is liberation, moksha, in that aloneness is nirvana, in that aloneness for the first time you are in the real.
Ordinarily a man is alone, a woman is alone. Loneliness is there. Even if you are attached to a man or woman or a friend, and it is only the attachment of lust, you will remain lonely. Have you not watched it? Attached to a woman, attached to a man, but still you remain lonely. Somewhere deep down there is no communication with the other; you are cut off, like islands. Even dialogue seems to be impossible. Lovers ordinarily never talk to each other, because each talk creates argument, and each talk brings conflict. By and by, they learn to be silent; by and by, they learn somehow to avoid the other, or at the most, tolerate. But they remain lonely. Even if the other is there, there is space; the inner space remains unfulfilled.
On the path of meditation, aloneness is sought, desired, hoped for, prayed for. Be alone. So much so that not even in your consciousness does any shadow of the other move. On the path of love, get so dissolved that only the other becomes real and you become a shadow and by and by you completely disappear. On the path of love, God remains, you disappear; on the path of meditation, God disappears, you appear. But the total and the ultimate result is the same. A great synthesis happens.
In fact, mountain/valley are one thing, so are love and meditation, so are relationship and aloneness. The mountain of aloneness rises only in the valleys of relationship. In fact, you can enjoy aloneness only if you can enjoy relationship. It is relationship that creates the need for aloneness, it is a rhythm.
Aloneness makes you overfull. Love receives your gifts. Love empties you so that you can become full again. Whenever you are emptied by love, aloneness is there to nourish you, to integrate you. And this is a rhythm.
I have always been alone on my path. Even today I am absolutely alone. Your being here does not make any difference -- my aloneness remains untouched -- because aloneness is so intrinsic. Nobody can enter into your aloneness. You can be in the crowd and absolutely alone, but you may be alone and not alone at all. You can sit in a cave in the Himalayas and still think of the crowd, of the girlfriend and the boyfriend and the marketplace and what is going on there....
Aloneness is also one of the fundamental experiences as you enter silence. In silence there is nobody else, you are simply alone. The deeper your silence will be, thoughts will be gone, emotions will be gone, sentiments will be gone -- just pure being, a flame of light, burning alone. One can get scared because we are so much accustomed to living with people -- in the crowd, in the marketplace, in all kinds of relationships. You may not be aware that in all these relationships -- with friends, with your husbands, with your wives, with your children, with your parents -- you are basically trying to avoid the experience of aloneness. These are strategies so that you are always with somebody.

It is a well-known fact, psychologically established, that if a person is left alone in isolation, after seven days he starts talking... a little like whispering. For seven days he keeps talking inside, keeps himself engaged in the mind, but then it becomes too much -- things start coming out of his mind through his mouth and he starts whispering. After fourteen days you can hear him clearly, what he is saying. After twenty-one days he does not bother about anybody, he has gone insane; now he is talking to walls, to pillars, "Hello friend, how are you?" -- to a pillar, hugging a pillar! And this is true not about somebody special, it is true about everybody. He is trying to find some relationship. If he cannot find it in reality, he will create a hallucination.

You will see: just stand by the side of the road and watch people going from the office to the house, and you will be surprised. They are alone -- although there is a crowd all around -- but they are talking to themselves. They are making gestures, they are telling somebody something... because the crowd around them is not related to them. They are alone in the crowd, so they are trying to create their own illusion. Maybe they are talking to their wife, to their boss -- there are many things which cannot be said but right now they can say them. In front of the wife they cannot say it, but in this crowd, where everybody is engaged in his own thing, everybody is doing his own thing, they can say things to the wife. Nobody is listening, and at least one thing is certain -- the wife is not there! But they need the wife, they need someone to talk to. And after thirty days of isolation, a dramatic change happens: it is not only one- sided; it is not only that they are talking to the pillar, the pillar also starts talking to them! They do both things: first, "Hello, how are you?" and then, "I am good. I am fine, doing well." They answer from the side of the pillar too -- in a different voice. Now they have created a world of their own, they are no longer alone. No madman is alone. Either you are mad or not. If you don't know aloneness, there is something of madness in you.

Only pure aloneness gives you a clean sanity. You don't need the other; the dependence on the other is no more there, you are enough unto yourself. Language is meaningless because language is a medium to relate with the other. The moment you are no longer dependent on the other, language is meaningless, words are meaningless. In your silence -- when there are no words, no language, nobody else is present -- you are getting in tune with existence. This serenity, this silence, this aloneness will bring you immense rewards. It will allow you to grow to your full potential. For the first time you will be an individual, for the first time you will have the touch and the taste of freedom, and for the first time the immensity, the unboundedness of existence will be yours with all its blissfulness.

So whatever happens in silence -- either sadness or aloneness -- remember, in silence nothing wrong can ever happen. Whatever happens is going to enhance the beauty of it, deepen the charm of it; anything that happens will bring more and more flowers, more and more fragrance to it.
Loneliness is a negative state of mind. Aloneness is positive, notwithstanding what the dictionaries say. In dictionaries, loneliness and aloneness are synonymous -- they are synonyms; in life they are not. Loneliness is a state of mind when you are constantly missing the other, aloneness is the state of mind when you are constantly delighted in yourself. Loneliness is miserable, aloneness is blissful. Loneliness is always worried, missing something, hankering for something, desiring for something; aloneness is a deep fulfillment, not going out, tremendously content, happy, celebrating. In loneliness you are off center, in aloneness you are centered and rooted. Aloneness is beautiful. It has an elegance around it, a grace, a climate of tremendous satisfaction. Loneliness is; beggarly; all around it there is begging and nothing else. It has no grace around it. In fact it is ugly. Loneliness is a dependence, aloneness is SHEER independence. One feels as if one is one's whole world, one's whole existence.

Osho Quotes on Addiction

To me transcendence comes out of your experience. You see the futility of something and the addiction drops. Then once in a while, just for a change, if you want to smoke I don't see any harm; if you want to make love I don't see any harm. The harm is in the addiction -- the harm is not in the act. And transcendence is not concerned with the act; transcendence is concerned with the addiction.
To be addicted is bad. It gives you a kind of dependence. And all addictions are bad. There are no good addictions -- addiction as such is bad.
I am not against anything -- but nothing should become an addiction. Otherwise you are in a very very confused state.
These therapists came from the West to me because in the West therapy was going out of fashion. People were tired, because what is the point? -- for a few days you feel great and then come the dumps. You feel worse than before. Then to go again to the therapist becomes a kind of addiction.
And there is no end to it. People go on moving from one therapy to another therapy their whole life, always feeling, "This is going to work." And it seems to work for a while, but it does not change anything basic, just superficial touches, so you are again back to zero.
People don't believe in what you say, people believe in the way you say it. And once you have learned the art of telling lies it becomes an addiction, because people start believing in you, you start becoming powerful. And then, if you can manage a few more things, your power will be immense.
Work is good but it should not become an addiction. Many people have made their work like a drug so they can forget themselves in their work -- just like a drunkard forgetting himself in alcohol.
The chewing gum keeps them engaged, and that's how cigarettes keep them engaged. That's how people go on gossiping with each other. That keeps them engaged. Nobody bothers whether it is true or false, that is not the point. The question is: How to keep engaged and away from yourself? So the workaholics are against meditation. Every addiction is going to prevent you from becoming a meditator. All addictions have to be dropped. But to be total in your work is a totally different thing. To be total in your work is not addiction, it is a kind of meditation. When you are totally in your work, your work has a possibility of perfection, you will have a joy arising out of a perfect work.
A very strange thing about addiction is that if you have the drug, it is nothing; if you don't have it, you are missing. You never think what you are missing because when you have it, it is nothing. Each time you have it you feel that it is just a futile effort, nothing comes out of it. You don't move a single inch in evolution. You just jump for a moment in the air and with a thump you fall back on the ground.
Addiction has to be dropped only when it makes you unconscious. Alcoholics are told to drop the addiction, but here my teaching is of consciousness -- be addicted to it more and more.
But what is anger? It is far more intoxicating than any alcohol can be. What is jealousy? What is hatred? They are far more addictive. You can be easily taken out of your drug addiction; any institution like Alcoholics Anonymous can help you. But to make you unaddicted to your jealousy, to your ambition, to your competitiveness, to your anger, rage, your potentiality for violence, no Alcoholics Anonymous can be of any help. But a few, a very few people, enlightened people, have simply pushed you upwards. They have distributed themselves. They are not hoarders -- they cannot be.
This is what addiction means: if you do it, nothing is gained; if you don't do it, you feel that something is missing. This is what a smoker feels. If he smokes, he knows nothing is gained. He is doing something silly, just a stupid thing -- taking smoke in and throwing it out.

Osho Quotes on Arhata

The arhata is someone who makes every effort to become enlightened and once he is enlightened he completely forgets about those who are still groping in the dark. He has no concern with others. It is enough for him to become enlightened. In fact, according to the arhatas, even the great idea of compassion is nothing but again another kind of attachment.
This is the way of the arhata: he knows where he is. He will not say anything about any road, anything about any way, but he knows where he is and he is utterly contented with that. You can sit by his side, you can be nourished by his presence, but he is not going to make any direct effort. Indirectly... if you can drink out of his presence you are welcome, but he will not call you forth, he will not seek and search for you.
The arhata insists that nobody can help anybody else at all. The very idea of helping others is based on wrong foundations. You can help only yourself. It may occur to the ordinary mind that the arhata is very selfish. But if you look without any prejudice, perhaps he also has something immensely important to declare to the world: Even helping the other is an interference in his life, in his lifestyle, in his destiny, in his future. Hence, arhatas don't believe in any compassion. Compassion to them is another beautiful desire to keep you tethered to the world of attachments. It is another name -- beautiful, but still just a name for a desiring mind.
The arhata insists on individuality and its absolute freedom. Even for the sake of good, nobody can be allowed to interfere in anybody else's life. Hence the moment he becomes enlightened, the arhata does not accept disciples, he never preaches, he never helps in any way. He simply lives in his ecstasy. If somebody on his own can drink out of his well he will not prevent him, but he will not send an invitation to you. If you come to him on your own accord and sit by his side and drink his presence, and get on the path, that is your business. If you go astray, he will not stop you.
The arhatas are those sannyasins who have arrived but are not interested in helping others to arrive. Buddhism has a special name for them: arhata -- the lonely traveler who arrives and then disappears into the ultimate. And the bodhisattvas are those who have arrived but they feel a great compassion for those who have not yet arrived. The bodhisattva is an arhata with compassion. He holds on, goes on looking back and goes on calling forth those who are still stumbling in darkness. He is a helper, a servant of humanity.
The arhata leans more towards meditation. The path of the arhata is of pure meditation, and the path of the bodhisattva is that of pure love. The pure love contains meditation, and the pure meditation contains love -- but the pure meditation contains love only as a flavor, a perfume; it is not the central force in it. And the pure love contains meditation as a perfume; it is not the center of it.
The arhata is a mystic; he has known, he has realized, but he is utterly unconcerned about others. He has found the way. He has reached his home and he does not care about others who are seeking and searching, because his understanding is that if they seek and search authentically they will find the way themselves. And if they are not true seekers, nobody can make them true seekers; hence no help is needed. The arhata does not help anyone. He has traveled alone and he knows everybody has to travel alone. When Buddha became enlightened himself, his first idea was to become an arhata. For seven days he remained absolutely silent, not saying a single word.
An arhata also helps in his own way; without helping he helps -- by his presence. He remains in his silence, he lives his ordinary life without telling anybody anything, without manifesting his experience, without expressing his joy. He lives joyously, but he makes no deliberate effort to communicate. Still, a few sensitive souls will be attracted to him. They will start following him silently, they will sit by his side. He will not say anything; they will listen to his silence. If he has arrived then there is an aura around him; they will be nourished by this aura. If he has found his home there will be such peace radiating that you will be bathed in it, you will be blessed to be with him. He will be able to help you only indirectly.
Buddha says: Mostly it happens that fifty percent of the enlightened ones are arhatas and fifty percent are bodhisattvas. That's how nature keeps its balance on every plane. So don't be worried if you feel one day that you have arrived, but there is no desire to help anybody; then don't force it. Forcing it will be ugly, will be violent, will be destructive. If it is not there it is not there. Then God is happy with you as you are.
The ARHATA and the BODHISATTVA are both enlightened; there is no difference between their experience, but the arhata is not a Master and the BODHISATTVA is a Master. The ARHATA has attained to the same truth but he is incapable of teaching it, because teaching is a totally different art.
Arhatas are called hinayana, a little boat in which one man can row and go to the other side. Of course he reaches the other shore. And bodhisattvas he has called the mahayana; it is a great ship in which thousands of people can move to the other shore. The other shore is the same, but the bodhisattva helps many. The arhata is not articulate; he is a simple, nice, utterly humble person, but will not utter a single word of what he has attained. It is too much for him to say anything. He is completely contented, why should he speak?
The arhata seems to be a little hard. His understanding is: "Just as I have found my enlightenment, so everybody should find their own enlightenment. Why should I interfere into anybody's sleep?" He has a point. His understanding is that this goes against compassion. Somebody is sleeping and snoring, having beautiful dreams, and you unnecessarily push and pull the man. You wake him and tell him, "Become enlightened, become awake. All that you are seeing is only a dream. Don't be lost in dreams." But certainly it is a kind of interference, poking your nose into somebody's affairs. The arhata has a point but it looks a little hard.

Osho Quotes on Attachment

Attachment is the food for the mind to continue. Non-attached witnessing is the way to stop it without any effort to stop it. And when you start enjoying those blissful moments, your capacity to retain them for longer periods arises.
Misery is nothing but the shadow of attachment. And hence all stagnancy. The attached person becomes a stagnant pool -- sooner or later he will stink. He flows no more.
All duality is a mind creation, all duality is created by the clinging and attached mind. When there is no attachment there is no duality.
One day you will disappear on a funeral pyre -- just into nothingness, as smoke. Don't get attached to anything. This attachment takes you away from your real being; you become focused on the thing to which you are attached. Your awareness gets lost in things, in money, in people, in power. And there are a thousand and one things, the whole thick jungle around you, to be lost in. Remember, non-attachment is the secret of finding yourself, then awareness can turn inwards because you don't have anything outside to catch hold of. It is free, and in this freedom you can know your self-nature.
Remember remain alert that you don t get too much attached to the accidental -- and all is accidental except your consciousness. Except your awareness, all is accidental. Pain and pleasure, success and failure, fame and defamation -- all is accidental. Only your witnessing consciousness is essential. Stick to it! Get more and more rooted in it. And don't spread your attachment to worldly things.
Much is being missed because of fear. We are too attached to the body and we go on creating more and more fear because of that attachment. The body is going to die, the body is part of death, the body is death -- but you are beyond the body. You are not the body; you are the bodiless. Remember it. Realize it. Awaken yourself to this truth -- that you are beyond the body. You are the witness, the seer.
When lust is transformed and you enter into the city of love, you enter unattached. Remember, that is their definition of love. If love has attachment in it, it is lust, If love has no attachment in it, only then is it not lust. When you are in lust you are not really thinking of the other, thinking of your beloved or lover. You are simply using the other for your own ends. And of course, attachment is bound to be there, because you would like to possess him, and you would like to possess him or her forever. Because tomorrow also you may need, the day after tomorrow also you may need. You need a lover and you want to possess him.
Remember: no attachment should grow, no clinging should grow. They are all against your independence, your freedom, your individuality.
All of our miseries are nothing but attachment. Our whole ignorance and darkness is a strange combination of a thousand and one attachments. And we are attached to things which will be taken away by the time of death, or even perhaps before. You may be very much attached to money but you can go bankrupt tomorrow. You may be very much attached to your power and position, your presidency, your prime ministership, but they are like soap bubbles. Today they are here, tomorrow not even a trace will be left.
If you try too much to change the outside, that shows that you are still attached. If a man tries to be detached, it shows attachment. Why bother about detachment if you are not attached? If a man escapes from women, it shows that sex is still the obsession. Otherwise, why escape from women if you are not obsessed?
A person who lives moment to moment, who goes on dying to the past, is never attached to anything. Attachment comes from the accumulated past. If you can be unattached to the past every moment, then you are always fresh, young, just born. You pulsate with life and that pulsation gives you immortality. You are immortal, only unaware of the fact.
This is the whole secret of non-attachment: live in the world, but don't be of the world. Love people, but don't create attachments. Reflect people, reflect the beauties of the world -- and there are so many. But don't cling. The clinging mind loses its mirrorhood. And mirrorhood is Buddhahood. To keep that quality of mirroring continuously fresh is to remain young, is to remain pure, is to remain innocent. Know, but don't create knowledge. Love, but don't create desire. Live, live beautifully, live utterly, abandon yourself in the moment. But don't look back. This is the art of non-attachment.
Don't be attached to the things of the world, and don't be attached to the things of the other world, because things are things. It makes no difference whether they are of this world or the other world -- attachment is the problem.
My approach is neither of attachment nor of detachment, but of simple understanding.
To be unattached is not to renounce the world. If you renounce the world you are attached to the world; otherwise why should you renounce it? What is the point in renouncing it if you are not attached to it? Only attachment renounces. If you are really non-attached there is no question of any renunciation.
Just seeing the fact that this is an attachment, that attachment is a bondage -- a beautiful word for bondage -- that attachment is not love... just seeing the ugliness of attachment -- it drops; then arises love. The same energy that was becoming attachment, released from attachment becomes a totally different energy; it becomes love.

Osho Quotes on Awareness

The innermost core is witnessing, awareness, watchfulness. You can call it anything, but it will be another meaning of witnessing.
Truth is pure awareness.
Just by being aware, thoughts start disappearing. There is no need to fight. Your awareness is enough to destroy them. And when the mind is empty, the temple is ready. And inside the temple the only god worth placing is silence. So those three words you have to remember: relaxation, thoughtlessness, silence. And if these three words are no more words to you but become experiences, your life will be transformed.
Only very few people are born with awareness. Those are the people who die in awareness. If the death was conscious, then the birth will be conscious, because the death is the one side and the birth is the other side of the same coin.
Awareness is the greatest alchemy there is. Just go on becoming more and more aware, and you will find your life changing for the better in every possible dimension. It will bring great fulfillment.
I don't have any choice any more. I am in a choiceless awareness. I don't have to be aware. I am simply aware. Now it is just like my heartbeat or like my breathing. Even if I try not to be aware, it is not possible; the very effort will make me more aware. Awareness is not a quality, a characteristic; it is your whole being. When you become aware, there is no choice left to be otherwise.
The technique of positive thinking is not a technique that transforms you. It is simply repressing the negative aspects of your personality. It is a method of choice. It cannot help awareness; it goes against awareness. Awareness is always choiceless.
I am absolutely against positive thinking. You will be surprised that if you don't choose, if you remain in a choiceless awareness, your life will start expressing something which is beyond both positive and negative, which is higher than both. So you are not going to be a loser. It is not going to be negative, it is not going to be positive, it is going to be existential.
If you want to remain totally free, then don't choose. That's where the teaching of choiceless awareness comes in. Why the insistence of the great masters just to be aware and not to choose? Because the moment you choose, you have lost your total freedom, you are left with only a part. But if you remain choiceless, your freedom remains total. So there is only one thing which is totally free and that is choiceless awareness. Everything else is limited.
Don't choose. If you choose, you will be in the quagmire. Don't choose! A choiceless awareness is the goal. Just remain aloof; don't choose. The moment you choose, you have fallen into the trap of the world, or into the trap of the mind.
Whatever you choose you will repent because the other will remain and haunt you. If one needs absolute freedom then choiceless awareness is the only thing.
Awareness means you come with an inner light, you move fully alert. Each step is taken in awareness -- the walking, the coming, the sitting -- everything is done in full awareness.
If you are aware, you speak with awareness. But the awareness comes from the inward being. It flows from the inner being towards others.
Awareness is an inner quality of consciousness; it has nothing to do with closed or open eyes.
Walk, with awareness. Eat, with awareness. Breathe, with awareness.
The ego is nothing but condensed unawareness. When you become aware by and by that condensed unawareness we call 'ego' disappears. Just as if you bring a lamp into the room -- and the darkness disappears. Awareness is the lamp, the lamp we were talking about the first day. Be a lamp unto yourself.
When you listen with perfect awareness, then listening becomes possible.
The body sleeps, the heart sleeps, the mind sleeps -- but you remain alert because you are nothing else but alertness. Everything else is a false identification. Awareness is your nature. The body is your abode. The mind is your computer. Awareness;s you, is your very being.
Walk, but make walking a meditation; walk knowingly Breathe, but let your breathing become a constant meditation; breathe knowingly. The breath going in: watch it. The breath going out: watch it. Eat, but eat with full awareness. Take a bite, chew it, but go on watching. Let the watcher be there in every moment, whatsoever you are doing.
Sinners live in a sort of hell, and saints imagine themselves in a sort of heaven. And the sage? -- for him it is moksha, for him it is the absolute freedom. He is freed from all duality. The secret key, and the only key, is awareness.
For awareness you need not go to the Himalayas; you need not go anywhere. Your life gives you enough opportunities to be aware. Somebody insults you -- listen to it in full awareness. And you will be surprised -- the insult is no more an insult. You may even smile. It does not hurt; it hurts only when received in unawareness. Somebody praises and appreciates you -- listen with alertness. And then nobody can persuade you to do foolish things. Nobody can bribe you; flattery becomes impossible. You will smile at the whole nonsense.
Listen. Watch. Be aware. And by and by a different quality of being arises in you which is neither the body nor the feelings nor the thoughts. A different pillar of flame starts gathering within you and becomes more and more crystallized. As this awareness becomes crystallized, for the first time you will feel more and more that you are -- the feeling of being. And then moods will become more and more irrelevant. They will come and go, but you will remain unperturbed. The climate will change around you, but you will remain unchanged. Whatsoever happens on the outside will not in any way change you within. The within remains absolutely pure and uncorrupted.
The person who follows the path of awareness finds love as a consequence of his awareness, as a by-product, as a shadow. And the person who follows the path of love finds awareness as a consequence, as a by-product, as a shadow of love. They are two sides of the same coin. And remember: if your awareness lacks love then it is still impure; it has not yet known one hundred percent purity. It is not yet REALLY awareness; it must be mixed with unawareness. It is not pure light; there must be pockets of darkness inside you still working, functioning, influencing you, dominating you. If your love is without awareness, then it is not love yet. It must be something lower, something closer to lust than to prayer.

So let it be a criterion if you follow the path of awareness, let love be the criterion. When your awareness suddenly blooms into love, know perfectly well that awareness has happened, SAMADHI has been achieved. If you follow the path of love, then let awareness function as a criterion, as a touchstone. When suddenly, from nowhere, at the very center of your love. a flame of awareness starts arising, know perfectly well...rejoice! You have come home.
Doing brings ego. Ego is the shadow of action. And there is only one thing that is not doing and that is awareness, watchfulness. The only thing that is not part of the world of action is pure awareness. No shadow is created by pure awareness. It is so pure that light can pass through it -- it is transparent and no shadow is created.
Consciousness without thinking: that's what awareness is. Being alert and with no thought. Try it! whenever you see thinking gathering, disperse it! pull yourself out of it! Look at the trees with no screens of thinking between you and the trees. Listen to the chirping of the birds with no chirping of the mind inside. Look at the sun rising and feel that inside you also a sun of consciousness is rising... but don't think about it, don't assert, don't state, don't say. Simply be. And, by and by, you will start feeling glimpses of awareness, sudden glimpses of awareness -- as if a fresh breeze has entered into your room which was getting stale and dead; as if a ray of light has entered into the dark night of your soul; as if, suddenly, life has called you back.
The deeper your watchfulness becomes, the deeper your awareness becomes, and gaps start arising, intervals. One thought goes and another has not come, and there is a gap. One cloud has passed, another is coming and there is a gap. In those gaps, for the first time you will have glimpses of no-mind, you will have the taste of no-mind. Call it taste of Zen, or Tao, or Yoga. In those small intervals, suddenly the sky is clear and the sun is shining. Suddenly the world is full of mystery because all barriers are dropped. The screen on your eyes is no more there. You see clearly, you see penetratingly. The whole existence becomes transparent.

In the beginning, these will be just rare moments, few and far in between. But they will give you glimpses of what samadhi is. Small pools of silence -- they will come and they will disappear. But now you know that you are on the right track -- you start watching again. When a thought passes, you watch it; when an interval passes, you watch it. Clouds are also beautiful; sunshine also is beautiful. Now you are not a chooser. Now you don't have a fixed mind: you don't say, "I would like only the intervals." That is stupid -- because once you become attached to wanting only the intervals, you have decided again against thinking. And then those intervals will disappear. They happen only when you are very distant, aloof. They happen, they cannot be brought. They happen, you cannot force them to happen. They are spontaneous happenings. Go on watching. Let thoughts come and go -- wherever they want to go. Nothing is wrong! Don't try to manipulate and don't try to direct. Let thoughts move in total freedom. And then bigger intervals will be coming. You will be blessed with small satoris. Sometimes minutes will pass and no thought will be there; there will be no traffic -- a total silence, undisturbed.
A Buddha is not a man of concentration, he is a man of awareness. He has not been trying to narrow down his consciousness; on the contrary, he has been trying to drop all barriers so that he becomes totally available to existence. Watch...existence is simultaneous. I am speaking here and the traffic noise is simultaneous. The train, the birds the wind blowing through the trees -- in this moment the whole of existence converges. You listening to me, I speaking to you, and millions of things going on -- it is tremendously rich.

Concentration makes you one-pointed at a very great cost: ninety-nine per cent of life is discarded. If you are solving a mathematical problem, you cannot listen to the birds -- they will be a distraction. Children playing around, dogs barking in the street -- they will be a distraction. Because of concentration, people have tried to escape from life -- to go to the Himalayas, to go to a cave, to remain isolated, so that you can concentrate on God. But God is not an object. God is this wholeness of existence, this moment; God is the totality. That's why science will never be able to know God. The very method of science is concentration and because of that method, science can never know God.
If you don't take the lamp of awareness with you, you are going to create a hell around you. Light your lamp wherever you go -- courting, not courting, that is not the point. Wherever you go, whatsoever you do, always do it in the inner light, with awareness.
Remember, whenever you have two things, two alternatives, choose the new one, choose the harder, choose the one in which more awareness will be needed. At the cost of efficiency always choose awareness, and you will create the situation in which meditation will become possible. These are all just situations. Meditation will happen. I am not saying that just by doing them you will get to meditation -- but they will be helpful. They will create the necessary situation in you without which meditation cannot happen. Be less efficient but more creative. Let that be the motive. Don't be bothered too much about utilitarian ends. Rather, constantly remember that you are not here in life to become a commodity; you are not here to become an utility, that is below dignity;. you are not here just to become more and more efficient -- you are here to become more and more alive; you are here to become more and more intelligent; you are here to become more and more happy, ecstatically happy. But that is totally different from the ways of the mind.

Osho Quotes on Bauls

Baul is one belonging to a secret society of mystics. Just as Zen is in Buddhism and Sufis are part of Islam and Hassids are part of Judaism, Bauls are the flowering of the Hindu tradition; they are the highest flowering.
The word baul means a madman. The bauls are really mad -- madly in love with God.
Bauls have been very extraordinary people. The word BAUL means MAD. Bauls were mad mystics. They have talked in all sorts of paradoxes; but very beautiful. They are not philosophers, they are mad poets. They are not proposing any logical thing, rather on the contrary 'they are trying to show you something through paradox.
Bauls were great mystics of such beauty and depth that people started thinking that they were mad. So the literal meaning of the word "baul" is mad; it means: the mad mystic. Their whole life was so utterly different, so radically different from the ordinary life, that naturally they looked mad. They danced, they sang, they moved like madmen, traveling up and down the country singing songs of joy, of celebration. Naturally they looked mad, because in a world of suffering how do you conceive of celebration? In a world where everybody is miserable, the man who is dancing and has laughter in his soul looks simply out of place, outlandish, mad, stoned, not in his senses. Hence the word "baul" -- it means the mad mystic. Slowly slowly they have disappeared; very few Bauls are still alive. But the glory is gone because this country no more welcomes the real mystic. It still talks about mysticism, in fact talks much about mysticism, but its heart has become materialistic.
The Bauls are called Bauls because they are mad people. The word 'Baul' comes from the Sanskrit root VATUL. It means: mad, affected by wind. The Baul belongs to no religion. He is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian nor Buddhist. He is a simple human being. His rebellion is total. He does not belong to anybody; he only belongs to himself. He lives in a no man's land: no country is his, no religion is his, no scripture is his. His rebellion goes even deeper than the rebellion of the Zen Masters -- because at least formally, they belong to Buddhism; at least formally, they worship Buddha. Formally they have scriptures -- scriptures denouncing scriptures, of course -- but still they have. At least they have a few scriptures to burn.

Bauls have nothing -- no scripture, not even to burn; no church, no temple, no mosque -- nothing whatsoever. A Baul is a man always on the road. He has no house, no abode. God is his only abode, and the whole sky is his shelter. He possesses nothing except a poor man's quilt, a small, hand-made one-stringed instrument called AEKTARA, and a small drum, a kettle-drum. That's all that he possesses. He possesses only a musical instrument and a drum. He plays with one hand on the instrument and he goes on beating the drum with the other. The drum hangs by the side of his body, and he dances. That is all of his religion. Dance is his religion; singing is his worship. He does not even use the word 'God'.
Lovers, the followers of the path of love, Bauls, make love their undercurrent. They eat, but they eat with love. The walk, but they walk with love -- because the earth is holy ground. They sit under a tree; they sit with love -- because the tree is divine. They look at somebody; they look with love -- because there also is divinity. Everywhere they see their beloved, in each movement they remember their beloved. It becomes their constant remembrance.
Bauls don't know much philosophy; they are not philosophers. They are simple people of the earth. They are very simple people who can sing and dance. Their words are simple. If you love, if you trust, their small gestures can reveal much.
The religion of the Bauls is very down-to-earth; it believes in the here-now. It does not say that paradise is somewhere else; it is here, and you cannot postpone it, and all postponement is dangerous, suicidal. If you cannot discover it here-now, you will never discover it anywhere else because you will remain the same. And whenever you will be, life will always come in the form of here-now. So the only door to reality is here, this very moment.
Bauls are not philosophers. They are more like poets -- they sing, they dance, they don't philosophize. In fact, they are almost anti-philosophical, because they have come to see that whenever a man becomes too head-oriented he becomes incapable of love -- and love is going to be the bridge. A man who becomes too head-oriented goes farther away from the heart, and the heart is the center which responds to the call of love.
Don't imitate: imitation creates falsity, pseudo-ness, inauthenticity. Just feel your own way and don't bother about what others say. It is nobody else's business. Don't bother about what churches say, organizations say -- listen to your own heart. Bauls are very individualistic. Religion has to be individualistic because it is a process of individuation. But what other religions have done up to now is to destroy individuality and try to make everybody a part of the crowd. They have created mobs, and they have destroyed individuals. Bauls are rebellious about it.
The Bauls have no character. They are men of consciousness, but not of character. In fact, a man of consciousness never has a character. Character is a fixity, character is an obsession, character is an armor. You have to do only that which your character allows. Character can never be spontaneous. Character is always imposed by the past on the present. You are not free to be, you are not free to respond; you can only react.

The Baul believes in the SAHAJA MANUSH, the spontaneous man. The Baul says the spontaneous man is the way to the essential man. To be spontaneous is to be on the way towards being essential. Every child is a Baul. So as I see it, in the beginning -- if there was, any beginning -- the whole humanity must have been like Bauls: true, authentic, sincere, mad, deep in love, rejoicing -- rejoicing the opportunity that God has given, rejoicing the gift.
BAULS are very active people, whirlwinds -- dancing, singing, and yet very inactive people as far as God is concerned. They say, "Whenever YOU think is the right time, come; you will find me waiting. I am helpless, I don't know where you are. I am helpless, I don't know how to find you. My only prayer is that you help me to allow you to find me." They simply dance and wait, they sing and wait. This waiting for God is their prayer. If you can wait you will pass through a great transformation. Nothing is needed to be done; simple waiting -- but it needs great trust. Otherwise the mind will say, "What are you doing? If you are not going to seek Him, you will never find Him."

Bauls say, just like Lao Tzu, "Seek and you will miss. Seek not and find." He is here; your seeking takes you somewhere else. He has already come. The guest is at the door; He is knocking. But you are so occupied inside the mind -- maybe occupied for Him, thinking about Him, but so occupied -- that you cannot listen to the moment, and you cannot be open to the herenow.

Osho Quotes on Bliss

Misery is a by-product, so is bliss. Misery is a by-product of being asleep, bliss is a by-product of being awake. Hence you cannot seek and search for bliss directly, and those who seek and search for bliss directly are bound to fail, doomed to fail. Bliss can be attained only by those who don't seek bliss directly; on the contrary, they seek awareness. And when awareness comes, bliss comes of its own accord, just like your shadow, unshakable.
When you feel blissful you are right, moving in exactly the way you should move. Because bliss increases only when you are approaching closer to God, and in no other way. If you are going away from God, anguish arises. You feel more and more frustrated, more and more bored, more and more miserable. Misery is an indication that you are going astray, a natural indication that you have lost track of truth. Bliss simply says that you are falling in line with the whole. Things are becoming harmonious, the garden of the Beloved is coming closer: the air feels cooler, winds bring the fragrance of the flowers, freshness, a new thrill, a new enthusiasm. Then you are moving towards the garden of the Beloved. Maybe you cannot see yet, but the direction is right.
Bliss is true happiness. What you call happiness is just misery in disguise. What you call happiness is nothing but entertainment, pleasure. It is momentary -- it cannot be true. Truth has to have one quality, and the quality is of eternity. If something is true it is eternal; if it is untrue it is momentary. True happiness is found only when the mind completely ceases functioning. It does not come from the outside. It wells up within your own being, it starts overflowing you. You become luminous. You become a fountain of bliss.
Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moment. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it -- and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalaya peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together. Or, listening to beautiful music, you fall together. Whenever, in whatsoever situation, you become one, a peace, a happiness, a bliss, surrounds you, arises in you. You feel fulfilled. There is no need to wait for these moments -- these moments can become your natural life. These extraordinary moments can become ordinary moments -- that is the whole effort of Zen
Don't wait for some great bliss to descend on you. It never happens. Great bliss is nothing but small pleasures accumulating in your being. The total of all the small pleasures is the great bliss. Eating, enjoy it. Drinking, enjoy it. Taking a bath, enjoy it. Walking, enjoy it. Such a beautiful world, such a beautiful morning, such beautiful clouds...what else do you need to celebrate? The sky full of stars...what more do you need to be prayerful? The sun rising from the east...what more do you need to bow down? And amidst a thousand and one thorns a small roseflower arises, opening its buds, so fragile, so vulnerable, yet so strong, so ready to fight with the wind, with the lightning, with the thunderings. Look at the courage...what more do you need to understand trust?
It is up to you to make whatsoever you want out of your life. An enlightened consciousness makes even death beautiful. An unenlightened consciousness makes even life ugly. For an enlightened consciousness, only beauty exists -- only beauty; only bliss exists -- only bliss.
The Bauls belong to the seventh type -- joy, celebration, song, dance, ecstasy -- ANAND. They make meditation tremendously joyful -- because a person can be meditative and can become sad. A person can be meditative and can become very silent and may miss bliss. Because meditation can make you silent, absolutely still, but unless dance happens in it, something is missing. Peace is good, peace is very beautiful, but something is lacking in it; bliss is lacking. When peace starts dancing it is bliss. When peace becomes active, overflowing, it is bliss. When bliss is enclosed in a seed it is peace. And when the seed has sprouted, not only that, but the tree has bloomed and the flowers have come and the seed has become a bloom, then it is SAMADHI. That is the highest type of religion.
Accept your responsibility for misery, and you will find that just hidden inside you are all the causes of bliss, freedom, joy, enlightenment, immortality.
I am here, available. If you are thirsty, move closer to me. And soon you will know that light, that insight, that explosion of bliss in which there is no choice. Enlightenment is choicelessness. But don’t misunderstand me. Before that, you will have to move very cautiously, choosing the right against the wrong, choosing the truer so that you can reach to the ultimate truth.
If a person can go into his sorrow deeply he will find all sorrow has evaporated. In that evaporation of sorrow is joy, is bliss. Bliss has not to be found outside, against sorrow. Bliss has to be found deep, hidden behind the sorrow itself. You have to dig into your sorrowful states and you will find a wellspring of joy.
Bliss is a taste, a feel, and so overwhelming and so intense, that once you have got it you cannot believe how you have been missing it all along: “i cannot figure it out because it is simply there. It was always there; how did I manage to miss it for so many lives?” Once you get it, that is the problem that arises: how have you been missing it? Bliss is just sitting at the very center of your being, ready to be remembered.
Buddha says,'Don't be worried about happiness, about bliss. Don't talk about SATCHITANAND, don't talk about ultimate bliss -- there is no need. Just know how not to cause suffering.' If suffering is not there, the very absence of suffering is bliss, because bliss is your intrinsic nature. It is not something that comes from the outside.
Bliss has no counterpart to it. That is the first thing to understand. Pleasure has pain, happiness has unhappiness, but bliss has nothing as a counterpart; it is an organic whole. Gautam the Buddha used to say, “If you taste the ocean from anywhere, it is salty.” So is the case with the bliss: you can taste it from any corner, from any space, from any direction — -it is just blissfulness. There is nothing opposite to it. Bliss is the only experience in life which has no polar opposite to it. That’s why, once you are blissful, you cannot fall back. There is no way to be unblissful again. I have tried but nothing succeeds.
Don't be bothered with the next moment, or the next life, or the next world. Make this moment rejoicing, make this moment a moment of bliss, and the next will follow it, and the next life, and the next world. And everything that you are this moment is going to become deepened more and more. And when you see that you are responsible for your bliss, your bliss will be far more. When you see that nobody has given it to you, that you have not been a beggar, that it is not a gift from somebody else -- because nobody has given it to you, nobody can take it away -- when you see this you will be far happier.

Osho Quotes on Body

I say unto you: The body is your greatest friend. Take care of your body.
Your body is giving you the right indication; the body is very wise. The mind is a very late arrival. The body has lived millions of years, it knows what is needed. It is the mind that interferes. Mind is very immature, body is very mature. Listen to the body. And when I say listen to the body, I don't mean remain confined to the body. If you listen to the body, the body will not have anything to say to you -- things will be settled. And when the body is at ease, relaxed, and there is no tension, and the body is not fighting for something, is not trying to attract your attention because you are not fulfilling a need, when the body is calm and quiet, you can float high, you can fly high, you can become a white cloud.

But only when body needs are truly looked after. The body is not your enemy, it is your friend. The body is your earth, the body has all your roots. You have to find a bridge between you and your body. If you don't find that bridge, you will be constantly in conflict with your body -- and a person who is fighting with himself is always miserable. The first thing is to come to a peace-pact with your body and never break it. Once you have come to a peace-pact with your body, the body will become very, very friendly. You look after the body, the body will look after you -- it becomes a vehicle of tremendous value, it becomes the very temple. One day your body itself is revealed to you as the very shrine of God.
If you really want to be a sensitive, intelligent mind, you need a sensitive, intelligent body too. Yes, the body has its own intelligence. Don't kill it, don't destroy it, otherwise you will be destroying your intelligence. But if it is respected, then it becomes something religious, spiritual, holy.
In the beginning it will be difficult but for just three weeks allow nature. When you feel hungry, eat, when you feel sleepy, go to sleep. When you don't feel hungry, don't eat. It is not a fast, remember, because a fast is from the mind, and you are feeling hungry but you are on a fast. There is no harm if you don't feel sleepy; there is no harm because the body doesn't need it, so don't force it. Stay awake, enjoy, go for a walk, have a little dance in the room or sing or meditate, but don't force sleep. When you feel sleepy, when the eyes say: Now go to sleep....

And don't force yourself in the morning to come out of bed; allow your inner being, give it a chance. It will give you the indication, the eyes will open by themselves. For a few days there will be difficulty but within three weeks... and I say within three weeks if you don't interfere; if you interfere, then three lives are not enough. Don't interfere and just wait for things to happen, and allow them. Within three weeks you will fall into nature again
I don't think that by torturing yourself you can meditate more easily; on the contrary, if your body is pleasantly at ease you can meditate more easily. I don't think that when you are fasting you can meditate. You can only think of food and nothing else; you will dream of food and nothing else. But if you are well fed, well nourished, you don't think of food -- there is no need. The body is completely satisfied, it does not create any disturbance.
To live pleasurably, to live joyously is not against meditation. It is really the basic need of meditation. I know many kinds of ascetics but I have never seen any intelligence in them, I have never seen any creativity in them. I have never seen in their eyes a light of the beyond, or in their gestures some message that cannot be said through words. They don't have anything. They are simply starving -- and starving because it fulfills the ego, because the more they starve, the more they torture themselves, more and more people come to worship them.
People can be helped with diseases, because almost seventy percent of diseases are mental. They may be expressed through the body, but their origin is in the mind. And if you can put in the mind the idea that the disease has disappeared, that you need not worry about it, it does not exist any more, the disease will disappear.
You can fast for three days, you can force your body to fast, but if it is repression, the fourth day the body will take revenge -- you will eat too much, for a few days you will eat too much. In fact, if you had lost any weight in those three days, you will gain more weight within a week. The body has taken the revenge, the body has taught you a lesson. Fighting is not the way -- not the way of the buddhas. Fighting is stupid; it is your own body, you need not fight with it, you have just to be more watchful of it. If some watchfulness starts crystallizing in you, you will be surprised that the body starts following you. It no longer commands you, it no longer orders you: it becomes obedient to you.
When the spine is erect, making a ninety-degree angle with the earth, your body expends the least energy possible. If you are leaning towards the left or towards the front, then your body starts spending more energy, because the gravitation starts pulling you downwards and you have to keep yourself, you have to hold yourself so that you don't fall. This is expenditure. An erect spine was found to need the least spending of energy. Then sitting with your hands together in the lap is also very very useful for low-energy people, because when both the hands are touching each other, your body electricity starts moving in a circle. It does not go out of your body; it becomes an inner circle, the energy moves inside you.

You must know that energy is always released through the fingers, energy is never released from round-shaped things. For example, your head cannot release energy, it contains it. Energy is released through the fingers, the toes of the feet and the hands. In a certain yoga posture the feet are together, so one foot releases energy and it enters into the other foot; one hand releases energy and it enters into the other hand. You go on taking your own energy, you become an inner circle of energy. It is very resting, it is very relaxing.

The yoga posture is the most relaxed posture possible. It is more relaxing than even sleep, because when you are asleep your whole body is being pulled by gravitation. When you are horizontal it is relaxing in a totally different way. It is relaxing because it brings you back to the ancient days when man was an animal, horizontal. It is relaxing because it is regressive; it helps you to become an animal again. That's why in a lying posture you cannot think clearly, it becomes difficult to think. Try it. You can dream easily but you cannot think easily; for thinking you have to sit. The more erect you sit, the better is the possibility to think.
And remember, again let me repeat it: the middle is not a fixed point. You cannot decide once and forever that this is the middle, that "I will eat only so much" -- because your needs change. One day you have walked ten miles, you may need a little more food. One day you have rested, you have not worked at all, it was a holiday -- you will need a little less food. One day you have been chopping wood; you will need more food, your body needs more nourishment. And one day it was raining and you were simply playing cards; you can do with little food.

And once in a while your body may not need food at all. If you are ill it will be good to give the body complete rest, because eating means work for the body. The body has to digest it, the body has to continuously work on the food. Once in a while it is good; if you are feeling that the body is not in good shape, it is good not to eat. But there is no religious quality about it; this is a very scientific approach. One thing is certain: that nothing can become a static phenomenon. You have to go on moving.

When you are young you will need eight hours sleep. When you become old you will need four hours sleep, three hours sleep, and that will be enough. When you were a child you needed ten hours of sleep. In the mother's womb the child needs twenty-four hours of sleep; after the birth, twenty-two hours, then twenty hours, then eighteen hours, and slowly slowly... by the end, when a person comes to die, he needs only two hours sleep and that's enough. In the mother's womb the child is growing; those nine months one grows so much that one will not be growing as much in ninety years' time. Leaps and bounds! The pace is so quick and so fast that the child needs absolute rest. But the old man, he has stopped growing long ago. Now the body does not need so much rest. The body no longer revives itself; it is getting ready to die, the process of revival has stopped. Now whatsoever cells are dying are dying; they are not being reproduced again. Hence, less and less sleep is needed. You can't fix it forever.

There are fools who fix it, who say, "I have taken a vow to sleep for only five hours a night." They will suffer when they are young, they will suffer when they are old; their suffering will never end. When they are young they will suffer because the body may need ten hours sleep, nine hours sleep, at least eight hours sleep -- and they have decided to sleep only five hours. They will be continuously missing those three hours. They will look a little sad, tired, their faces lusterless, their eyes always sleepy. They will not show intelligence, because body and mind both need deep rest. They will simply move through life like a somnambulist, half asleep.

And their scriptures say that if you feel sleepy in the daytime it means you are a sinner, TAMASIK, that you are suffering from lethargy. And the only thing that you are really suffering from is foolishness! You have decided that you will sleep only five hours when the need is for eight hours. And in old age you will try to sleep five hours and you will not be able to sleep, then you will suffer because you can sleep only three hours. Then the whole night you are tossing and turning and cursing the whole world, and you can't conceive why you can't sleep at least five hours. And trying to sleep five hours when you can sleep only three hours will be a disturbance; it will keep you in despair. You will continuously think that something is being missed. Never decide like that. Buddha says: Let your life be dynamic. It has to correspond to the reality, to the situation in which you are. Don't follow dead rules; respond to reality, to that which is. In that responsibility you grow, you become mature. To be responsible is to be right.
I want my people, for the first time in the whole history of man, to be lovers of themselves, their bodies. Take care of the body, it is taking care of you. You cannot repay it, there is no way. It is doing so much for you, what have you done for it? fasting, celibacy, standing naked in the burning hot sun, or standing naked in the freezing cold. And these maniacs have been worshipped down the centuries as the greatest heroes of humanity. Get rid of these heroes. They all need to be imprisoned. They all need psychiatric treatment, they are simply mad. But the line of mad prophets and messiahs has impressed strange ideas on your delicate mind.

Osho Quotes on Gautam Buddha

Buddha says, "Be a light unto yourself." That is his greatest message. Nobody else in the whole world, in the whole history of humanity, has been so respectful towards others as Gautam the Buddha. "Be a light unto yourself."
The word `buddha' will be repeated again and again by Bodhidharma so you have to understand what it means. It is not a personal name of anybody. Buddha simply means one who is awakened. Gautam Buddha is the most famous awakened person but that does not mean that he is the only awakened person. There have been many buddhas before him and there have been many buddhas after him and as long as every human being can become a buddha, there will go on springing up new buddhas in the future.
Gautam Buddha was the most cultured and the most educated, the most sophisticated person ever to become a mystic. There is no comparison in the whole of history. He could see where the innocent mystics had unknowingly given chances for cunning minds to take advantage. He decided not to use any positive term for the ultimate goal, to destroy your ego and any possibility of your ego taking any advantage. He called the ultimate, nothingness, emptiness, shunyata, zero. Now, how can the ego make zero the goal? God can be made the goal, but not zero.
Whenever new disciples used to come to Gautam the Buddha he would say to them, "For two years just sit by my side silently, then something will be possible. Then I can say something to you and then you will be able to understand.
Buddha says, "Even if you meet me on the way, kill me immediately." He is saying: Don't follow me, just take the hints. Try to understand, imbibe the spirit. Feel my presence and then go on your way. Live according to your own light, howsoever small it is; but if it is yours and you live according to it, it will go on growing.
Gautam Buddha had to deny that God existed -- not that he was against God, a man like Gautam Buddha cannot be against God. And if Gautam Buddha is against God, then it is of no use for anybody to be in favor of God. His decision is decisive for the whole of humanity, he represents our very soul. But he was not against God. He was against your ego, and he was constantly careful not to give your ego any support to remain. If God can become a support, then there is no God.
Mahavira and Buddha both insisted on nonviolence. The basic reason for not fighting is that once you stop fighting the ego cannot exist. Ego exists in fight; it is a consequence of fight. The more you fight the more ego exists. If you alone remained on the earth, nobody to fight with, would you have an ego? You would not have an ego.
Buddha and Mahavira both emphasized meditation. Meditation is a totally different technique. There is no need to believe, no need to move to the other; you are alone there. But you have to wake yourself
Gautam Buddha was born on a full-moon night. He became enlightened on a full-moon night. He died on a full-moon night. This cannot be just coincidence. His type has something to do with a synchronicity with the full-moon night.
The next time you enter a temple of Gautam Buddha or Mahavira just sit silently, watch the statue. Because the statue has been made in such a way, in such proportions that if you watch it you will fall silent. It is a statue of meditation; it is not concerned with Gautam Buddha or Mahavira.
The story about Gautam Buddha is that when he reached the gates of nirvana he stood there, his back towards the gates. The gates were opened, and the guards wanted him to enter. They were ready to welcome him -- because centuries pass and then once in a while those gates open. And they were immensely happy that someone has again become a buddha.

But Buddha refused. The story is symbolic. He says, "Unless every living being passes by me into nirvana, I am going to stay here. I will be the last. I cannot go alone, I have to take everybody with me. "They are struggling in pain and misery, and do you think I should enjoy nirvana and its tremendous blissfulness? It is not possible. I will wait. You can wait; but waiting here I will try to help those struggling souls, stumbling in darkness, groping in darkness. Unless I am satisfied that everybody has passed in, I will not come in and close the doors. Buddha is certainly one of the most insightful men. He does not stop at himself. Anybody would have stopped there -- it is a natural tendency to put oneself at the highest point and then stop.

In India I have visited a few places... The place where Gautam Buddha became enlightened is called Bodh Gaya. It is a small temple -- some follower made the temple as a memorial, by the side of the tree under which Buddha became enlightened. That tree still remembers something, and I came to know later on that the bodhi tree has a certain substance which no other tree has, and that is the substance which makes a man a genius. Only geniuses have that substance in their mind, and in the world of trees only the bodhi tree has that substance. Perhaps it is more perceptive, more receptive; it has a certain genius.
A buddha asleep is such a beautiful phenomenon: he looks like a small child, innocent, with no burden of the day.
To look at a buddha while he is asleep is very beautiful, so Ananda used to watch. Buddha would go to sleep, and Ananda would sit and look at him. He was such a silent pool of being. Nothing was incomplete, everything, every moment was complete and perfect. There was no dream, there were no traces left; his mind was a clean mirror. The stream of consciousness was never muddled, it was crystal clear.
Gautama the Buddha is the greatest breakthrough that humanity has known up to now. Time should not be divided by the name of Jesus Christ; it should be divided by the name of Gautam Buddha. We should divide history before Buddha and after Buddha, not before Christ and after Christ, because Christ is not a breakthrough; he is a continuity. He represents the past in its tremendous beauty and grandeur. He is the very essence of the whole search of man before him. He is the fragrance of all the past endeavors of man to know God, but he is not a breakthrough. In the real sense of the word he is not a rebel. Buddha is, but Jesus looks more rebellious than Buddha for the simple reason that Jesus' rebellion is visible and Buddha's rebellion is invisible.

You will need great insight to understand what Buddha has contributed to human consciousness, to human evolution, to human growth. Man would not have been the same if there had been no Buddha. Man would have been the same if there had been no Christ, no Krishna; there would not have been much difference. Remove Buddha and something of tremendous importance is lost; but his rebellion is very invisible, very subtle.

Before Buddha, the search -- the religious search -- was fundamentally a concern with God: a God who is outside, a God who is somewhere above in the heavens. The religious search was also concerned with an object of desire, as much as the worldly search was. The worldly man sought money, power, prestige, and the otherworldly man was seeking God, heaven, eternity, truth. But one thing was common: both were looking outside themselves, both were extroverts. Remember this word, because this is going to help you understand Buddha. Before Buddha, the religious search was not concerned with the within but with the without; it was extrovert, and when the religious search is extrovert it is not really religious. Religion begins only with introversion, when you start diving deeply within yourself.

Osho Quotes on Celebration

True celebration should come from your life, in your life. And true celebration cannot be according to the calendar, that on the first of November you will celebrate. Strange, the whole year you are miserable and on the first of November suddenly you come out of misery, dancing. Either the misery was false or the first of November is false; both cannot be true. And once the first of November is gone, you are back in your dark hole, everybody in his misery, everybody in his anxiety. Life should be a continuous celebration, a festival of lights the whole year round. Only then you can grow up, you can blossom. Transform small things into celebration.
Your life becomes a vital celebration, your relationship becomes a festive thing; whatsoever you do, every moment is a festival. You eat, and eating becomes a celebration; you take a bath, and bathing becomes a celebration; you talk, and talking becomes a celebration; relationship becomes a celebration. Your outer life becomes festive, there is no sadness in it. How can sadness exist with silence? But ordinarily you think otherwise: you think if you are silent you will be sad. Ordinarily you think how you can avoid sadness if you are silent. I tell you, the silence that exists with sadness cannot be true. Something has gone wrong. You have missed the path, you are off the track. Only celebration can give proof that the real silence has happened.
Meditation doesn't lead you to silence; meditation only creates the situation in which the silence happens. And this should be the criterion -- that whenever silence happens laughter will come into your life. A vital celebration will happen all around. You will not become sad, you will not become depressed, you will not escape from the world. You will be here in this world, but taking the whole thing as a game, enjoying the whole thing as a beautiful game, a big drama, no longer serious about it. Seriousness is a disease.
My whole approach towards life is that of total acceptance, is that of celebration, not of renunciation.
Religion cannot be anything other than a celebration of life. And the serious person becomes handicapped: he creates barriers. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot celebrate. The very dimension of celebration disappears from his life. He becomes desert-like. And if you are a desert, you can go on thinking and pretending that you are religious but you are not.
I am not serious, I am just celebrating. And when I talk to you, I am not giving you an idealogy, a philosophy, a religion — no. I simply want to share my celebration. Shift from the words to silence. Don’t listen to my words; listen to me. There, precisely there, is the message.
Death becomes the ultimate celebration if your life is a celebration. Let me tell you in this way: whatsoever your life was, death reveals it. If you have been miserable in life, death reveals misery. Death is a great revealer. If you have been happy in your life, death reveals happiness. If you have lived only a life of physical comfort and physical pleasure, then of course, death is going to be very uncomfortable and very unpleasant, because the body has to be left. The body is just a temporary abode, a shrine in which we stay for the night and leave in the morning. It is not your permanent abode, it is not your home.
Celebration is possible only when existence is a continuous newness, and existence is always young. When nothing grows old, when nothing really dies — because everything is constantly reborn — it becomes a dance. Then it is an inner music flowing. Whether you play an instrument or not is not the point, the music is flowing.
Delight, enjoy. God is not a thing, it is an attitude, an attitude of celebration and festivity. Drop sadness. He is so close by; dance! Drop long faces, it is sacrilege -- because He is so close by. Forget your childish miseries and worries; He is so close by. Don't go on brooding about immaterial things; He is so close by. Allow Him to hold your hand. He has been waiting for you for long.
When awareness is very very deep-rooted, when you are present to the present, you attain to a psychedelic vision of life. That's why mystics talk of so much beauty, and you don't find it. Mystics talk of immense celebration going on, and you don't see any celebration anywhere. Mystics talk of great music, but you don't hear any music. And the mystics are right -- a great music is passing by, but you are deaf. Great beauty is all around, but you are blind. The whole existence is celebrating this very moment, as much as it was celebrating when Atisha was alive. Existence is celebration.

But your heart is dead. Only your physical heart is beating, your spiritual heart is completely nonfunctioning. And without it you will not be able to see the celebration of life. How can you feel grateful to God if you don't see the celebration? How can you feel thankful to God if you don't see the gift? For what to be thankful? You can only be full of complaints, regrets, grudges. You can only be angry at existence. Why have you been created, why this suffering? You see only suffering, because your eyes can only see suffering. Otherwise existence is a blessing, a benediction.
Life has become a torture chamber, a concentration camp; it is no more a celebration. It should be a celebration. If nature is allowed to take its own course, it is bound to be a celebration.
I am in tremendous love with life, hence I teach celebration. Everything has to be celebrated, everything has to be lived, loved. To me nothing is mundane and nothing is sacred. To me all is sacred, from the lowest rung of the ladder to the highest rung. It is the same ladder: from the body to the soul, from the physical to the spiritual, from sex to SAMADHI -- everything is divine!
Life should be a continuous celebration, a festival of lights the whole year round. Only then you can grow up, you can blossom. Transform small things into celebration.
We celebrate everything. Celebration is our way to receive all the gifts from God. Life is his gift, death is his gift; the body is his gift, the soul is his gift. We celebrate everything. We love the body, we love the soul. We are materialist spiritualists. Nothing like this has ever happened in the world. This is a new experiment, a new beginning, and it has a great future.

Osho Quotes on Celibacy

Celibacy can only be spontaneous, there is no other type of celibacy. If it is not spontaneous, it is not celibacy. You can force it. you can control your sexuality, but that is not going to help. You will not be celibate, you will be only more and more sexual. Sex will spread all over your being. It will become part of your unconscious. It will move your dreams, it will become your motivation in dreams, it will become your fantasy. In fact, you will become more sexual than you ever were before. You will think more about it and you will have to repress it again and again.

And whatsoever is repressed has to be repressed again because victory is never complete. There is no way to destroy sex by force, by violence. There is no way to control and discipline it. The people who have tried to control and discipline it have made the world very pornographic. Your so-called saints have a very pornographic mind. If a window can be created and a hole can be made in their heads, you will be able to see just sex, pornography. it is bound to be so. It is natural.

Never enforce any celibacy on yourself. Try to understand what sexuality is, go deep into it. It has a tremendous beauty of its own. It is one of the profoundest mysteries of life. Life comes out of it -- it has to be a great mystery. Sex is not sin; repression is a sin. Sex is very natural, very spontaneous. You have not done anything to have it, it is inborn, it is part of your being. Don't condemn it, don't judge it, don't fear it, don't fight with it. Simply go into it more -- more meditatively. Let it happen in such silence, in such deep acceptance, that you can know the very core of it. The moment you penetrate to the very core of sexual orgasm you will see sex is losing its appeal for you, you r energy is moving in a higher plane, you are becoming more loving and less sexual. And this happens spontaneously.
Try to force celibacy upon yourself and your dreams will become sexual, they will have a quality of sexuality.
People who try to control themselves have chosen a very foolish way. Control will not happen, but they will become cold. That is the only way a man can control himself -- to become frozen so that energy does not arise. People who take the vows of celibacy will not eat much; in fact, they will starve their bodies. If more energy is created in the body, then there will be more sex energy, and then they don't know what to do with it. So Buddhist monks eat only once a day -- and then too, not enough. They eat only enough that bodily needs are fulfilled, very minimum needs, so no energy is left. This type of celibacy is not celibacy. When you are flowing with energy and the energy starts transforming itself into love, then a celibacy, a BRAHMACHARYA, which is beautiful, happens.
I have come across people who think that without long fasting there is no possibility of meditation. Now, fasting has nothing to do with meditation. Fasting will only make you obsessed with food. And there are people who think celibacy will help them into meditation. Meditation brings a kind of celibacy, but not vice versa. A celibacy without meditation is nothing but sexual repression. And your mind will become more and more sexual, so whenever you sit to meditate your mind will become full of fantasies, sexual fantasies. These two things have been the greatest problems for the so-called meditators: fasting and celibacy. They think these two things are going to help -- they are the greatest disturbances!

Eat in right proportions. Buddha calls it "the middle way": neither too much nor too little. He is against fasting, and he knows it through hard experience. For six years he fasted and could not attain to anything. So when he says, "Be in the middle," he means it. About celibacy also: don't enforce it upon yourself. It is a by-product of meditation, hence it cannot be enforced before meditation. Be in the middle there too, neither too much indulgence nor too much renunciation. Just keep a balance. A balanced person will be more healthy, at ease, at home. And when you are at home, meditation is easier. What then is meditation? Just sitting silently doing nothing, witnessing whatsoever is happening all around; just watching it with no prejudice, no conclusion, no idea what is wrong and what is right.
In the name of celibacy, sex has been repressed for centuries and you have become just full of sexuality. Rather than transcending it you are boiling within.
Remember, there are two types of celibates. One: who has simply forced celibacy upon himself -- he is a wrong type, he is doing violence to himself. The other: who has tried to understand sexuality, what it is, why it is; who has watched, observed, lived through it, and, by and by, has become aware of its futility; by and by, has become aware of a deep frustration that comes after EACH sexual act. In the sexual act you have a certain thrill, a moment of forgetfulness, a moment of oblivion. You feel good -- for a few seconds, only for a few seconds, you drop out of this routine world. Sex gives you a door to escape into some other world -- which is non-tense; there is no worry; you are simply relaxed and melting. But have you observed? After each sexual act you feel frustrated.

Sex has promised too much, but it has not been supplied. It is difficult to find a man or a woman who does not feel a little frustrated after the sexual act, who does not feel a little guilty. I am not talking about the guilt that priests have imposed upon you. Even if nobody has imposed any guilt upon you, you will feel a little guilt -- that is part, a shadow of the sexual act. You have lost energy, you feel depleted, and nothing has been gained. The gain is not very substantial. You have been befooled, you have been tricked, by a natural hypnosis -- you have been tricked by the body, you have been deceived. Hence comes a frustration.
That's why real awareness always leads you beyond sex, and celibacy happens on its own accord. Because to be in sex you have either to be identified with the male or identified with the female. A real celibate is one who has gone beyond, who is neither.
Celibacy is one of the most unnatural things. It has destroyed so many human beings -- millions -- Catholic monks, Hindu monks, Buddhist monks, Jaina monks, nuns. For centuries they have been teaching celibacy; and the most amazing thing is, even in the twentieth century, not a single medical expert, physiologist, has stood up and said that celibacy is impossible, that in the very nature of things, it cannot happen.

To impose celibacy means to pervert the sexual energy of man. It is celibacy that has created homosexuality. It is celibacy that has created sodomy. Perhaps you don't understand the word "sodomy"; it is making love to animals. And, finally, it is celibacy which has brought humanity to experience the great joy of AIDS. I call AIDS a religious disease. It has been created by all the religions. Nobody ever has been celibate, whatever the pretensions; you can only be a hypocrite. But your sexual energy will find ways to move -- it is natural.

Osho Quotes on Chakras

Most people die from the lowest chakra, the sex center. There are seven chakras in the body from where life can go out of the body. The last is on top of the head, and unless you are enlightened life cannot go out from that chakra.
As you move more and more into the present, inside you will come across seven lights -- what Hindu yoga calls seven Chakras, Buddhist yoga calls seven lights, seven lamps. As you become more and more detached from the body, detached from possessions, uninterested in desires, your energy starts moving upwards. The same energy that is contained at the lowest center, at the sex center.
Indian music is more concerned with sahasrar, the seventh chakra. Western music is more concerned with the sexual centre, the muladhar. If western music overpowers you, you will feel sexually aroused. If indian music overpowers you, you will feel spiritually aroused.
Music is a very subtle meditation. The seven notes of music are concerned with the seven chakras of the body and each chakra has its own note. If you concentrate on that chakra, you will start hearing that note arising within your body. The second chakra has two notes, the third, three. One is important, the other two are just part of it but create a harmony. It goes on becoming a greater harmony, rising higher with each chakra. On the seventh chakra it is an orchestra. Each chakra has its own form, its own music, its own taste, its own smell. The deeper you move inside yourself, the more you find the whole world, because if it is not within you, you cannot see it without either. Something is needed to correspond.
All this so-called esoteric knowledge about chakras, energy fields, kundalini, astral bodies, is dangerous as knowledge. As experience it is a totally different thing. Don't acquire it as knowledge. If it is needed for your spiritual growth, it will come to you in its right time, and then it will be an experience. And if you have an acquired knowledge, borrowed knowledge, it is going to be a hindrance.

For example, Hindu yoga believes in seven chakras, Jaina scriptures mention nine chakras. And Buddhist scriptures say that there are dozens of chakras, that these are only the important ones which have been chosen by different schools. They don't give any fixed number. Acquired knowledge will be confusing: how many chakras? And what are you going to do with that knowledge, whether there are seven or nine or dozens? Your knowledge is not going to help; it can only hinder.
Energy fields, chakras and all esoteric things should be experienced. And keep your mind clean of all knowledge, so that you don't have any expectations; wherever the experience happens, you are ready to accept it.
It happens exactly like that. There are seven chakras but they don't exist in the same Places for all people. And there are experiences but they never happen in the same way to two persons -- they happen very, very differently. So there is no need to know the physiology of the kundalini, and there is no need to know the chakras, and there is no need to know what happens finally -- because if you know it you will start hypnotising yourself, and by and by you will start getting into the ritual. And you will create a kind of dream around you. And when there are many people doing the same thing, you tend to fall into the crowd-mind. You start swaying with the crowd.
Once awareness has made the third eye function, once awareness has moved in the third eye and the third eye starts functioning, becomes alive... That's why Hindus call it a CHAKRA. CHAKRA means a wheel. The wheel needs energy; once the energy comes in, the wheel starts moving. By 'movement' is meant that it starts functioning. Then a great revolution happens in your being: immediately the lower heart bows down to the higher heart.
The muladhar chakra has to be relaxed -- relaxed from constipation, relaxed from diarrhoea. The muladhar chakra has to function at the optimum, one hundred percent, then energy starts moving.
Energy is needed, and energy is always beautiful. If you don't know how to use it, it becomes ugly; then it goes on running astray. The energy has to go higher. Sex is the lowest center of your being -- but that is not all: you have seven centers of your being. As the energy moves upwards, if you know the key how to release it upwards, as it moves from one center to another, you feel so many transformations. When the energy comes to the heart chakra, to the center of the heart, you become so full of love you become love. When the energy comes to the third-eye center you become consciousness, awareness. When the energy comes to the last chakra, sahasrar, you bloom, you flower, your tree of life has come to a fulfillment: you become a Buddha. But the energy is the same. Don't condemn; don't suppress. Transform. Be more understanding, alert; only then will you be able to enter in totality.
Each chakra has its own colours, so when you concentrate on a certain chakra you will have certain colours in your dreams and visions. As you move upwards they change. In fact in yoga psychology, a person's dreams, fantasies, visions, can indicate where his energy is exactly, at what centre.
Sometimes you are deluded by the body. And somehow, if you manage to go beyond the body, you are deluded by the mind, which is more of a deluder. The first three chakras belong to the body. The next three chakras belong to the mind. And the seventh chakra is beyond both. Ordinarily, the people who indulge remain in the first three lower chakras -- they hang there. Those first three chakras: MULADHAR, SWADHISTAN and MANIPURA are earth-bound. They are earthly chakras, they are attracted by gravitation, they are pulled downwards. The next three chakras: ANAHATA, VISUDDHA and AJNA are sky-bound. Gravitation does not affect them. They are under another law called levitation; they are pulled upwards. These three consist of the mind. The body is pulled downwards, mind is pulled upwards. But you are neither. You are the seventh, which is neither body nor mind. So the people who indulge live in the first three chakras. And the people who repress the first three chakras start living in the second three chakras. But they create a dream-world.
The center around which one's life has revolved is the center from where he will depart. The place where he dwelt the whole life will be the place from where he will depart. Therefore, a yogi can leave from the agya chakra, and a lover from his heart chakra. The life energy of an enlightened man would leave from the sahasrar, the seventh chakra -- his skull will break open as he departs from there.
When the energy moves upward you become more and more silent. Silence is the by-product of energy moving upward and tension is the by-product of energy moving downward. You will be more and more in anxiety when energy moves down; you will be more and more silent, quiet, calm and cool as energy moves upward and inward. And these words downward and outward are synonymous, and inward and upward are synonymous. And when you have become silent, that energy is moving like a flood, it is passing through all the chakras, all the centers. And when it passes through all the chakras, it cleanses them, it purifies them, it makes them dynamic, alive, and the flood goes upward, upward to the last chakra.

Sex is the first chakra, the first center, the lowest -- and we exist at the lowest. That is why we know life only at its minimum. When the energy flows upward and reaches to the last chakra, to the SAHASRAR, energy is at its maximum, life is at its maximum. Then you feel as if the whole cosmos has become silent: not even a single sound is there. Everything becomes absolutely silent when the energy comes to the last chakra. You know the first chakra; it will be easy to understand through that. When the energy comes to the sex center, you become absolutely tense. The whole body is feverish, your every cell is in a fever. Your temperature goes high, your blood pressure goes high, your breathing becomes mad. Your whole body is in a temporary delirium -- at the lowest. Quite the opposite is the case at the last chakra. Your whole body becomes so cool, so silent, as if it has disappeared. You cannot feel it. You have become bodiless. And when you are silent the whole existence is silent because the existence is nothing but a mirror: it reflects you. In thousands and thousands of mirrors, it reflects you. When you are silent the whole existence has become silent.
There are seven chakras, and the anahata is just in the middle; three below it, three above it. The three below are muladhar, swadhisthan and manipur. Those three belong to an extrovert personality. In the west, the majority lives through those three chakras. And now in the east also, the majority is moving towards the western attitude of life. These three chakras are very easily available. They have a certain given function; you need not work much on them.

Without them, life will become impossible. They are survival measures, so nature has not given you a choice between them. From the moment you are born, those three chakras start functioning. They go on functioning until you die. The whole life is covered by those three chakras, and the extrovert person never comes to know that there is anything higher than these. Sex, money, power, prestige, respectability, name, fame -- they all belong to those three chakras.

And the centre of all those chakras is sex. People seek money in order to seek sex. People seek fame and power and prestige in order to seek sex. Sex remains the centre of the lower three chakras. Sex remains the centre of the extrovert personality. His whole mind revolves around sex.

Above the anahata, the heart, there are three chakras: visudha, the fourth centre, then ajna, between the two eyes, the third eye centre, and sahasrar, the last centre, the centre of samadhi, of ultimate unfoldment.

Between these two is the heart. Between the introvert and the extrovert, the heart functions as a door, it is a bridge. Just as sex is the centre of the extrovert mind, prayer -- or call it meditation -- is the centre of the introvert mind. But to call it prayer is more relevant. Between these two -- when a person is just in the middle, on the fourth chakra, at the door -- love happens. Love is between sex and prayer.

When sex is a little purified, it becomes love. When love is also purified, it becomes prayer. So it is the same energy, the sexual energy, which goes into higher formations. In the east people have tried to live an introvert life; they have tried to live above the heart. But both are lopsided. The western extrovert mind and the eastern introvert mind are both lopsided. To become a total man, one needs the functioning of all seven. It is not a question of choice. It is a question of being capable of living in all the centres without any conflict. There is none -- we create the conflict.

Osho Quotes on Children

We go on forcing children to go to sleep when we think it is time. But sleep is not to be manipulated by time, sleep is something inner. When the child feels sleepy he will go to sleep, but mother and father go on forcing the child to go to sleep, as if sleep can be ordered. Children must think that you are foolish, they think that something has gone wrong in your mind. How can a child force sleep? He can pretend, so when you are there he can close the eyes and when you have gone he can open the eyes, because sleep cannot be forced. Nobody, not even you, can force sleep. If you don't feel sleepy how can you go to sleep?
But this is how society destroys.
If there exists in the future any possibility of a real human society, the first thing, the basic thing that will have to be done is this: don't make children automatic. Even if it takes a little longer to make them efficient, make them efficient with awareness; don't make them machines. It will take longer, because two things have to be learned: the efficiency and awareness. A human society will give you awareness, even with less efficiency, but efficiency will come by and by. Then when you are alert you will be able to be efficient with alertness.
Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets -- one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity. By and by, we force wrong beliefs on them. By and by, we distract them. By and by, we make them more and more economical and political and ambitious.
If you miss your youth, you will miss your old age also -- remember. So I am not saying become old while you are young. I am saying be whatsoever you are; let that moment be your totality. When a child, be a child; never enforce your wisdom on any child because that is a crippling thing. Don't try to make a child old before he is old, don't crush him. That's what has happened in the world: old people are dominating children, and they want to pull them out of their childhood faster than nature allows. They kill and they crush -- the child loses something forever. And when a child was not a child when he was a child, he will not be young when he is young. Something will always go on missing. He will always be late in life -- he will miss the train.
Children are careful watchers, observers of what is happening all around. Of course, their senses are very clear, unclouded. They see the truth immediately. You cannot cheat a child; he knows it immediately, intuitively. And he is so innocent that it is impossible for him to be formal. But he has to be formal to survive. And man's child is very helpless. It is because of man's child's helplessness that our whole civilization exists. We can manage, mold the child in every possible way, whatsoever way we want.

Children are not supposed to say things that they know. They know much more than they ever tell you. They pretend to be innocent because you don't want them to know more than is taught in the school, than is taught by the preacher, than is taught by you; and they certainly know more. They move in society, in life, with keen, alert senses. They are watching everything, whatsoever is happening all around. But they learn one thing sooner or later: that they have to be diplomatic -- with the grown-ups you can't be true, honest, sincere.
In schools children are sitting for five or six hours -- by and by they are dulled, their intelligence is lost. Every child is born intelligent and almost ninety-nine per cent of people die stupid. The whole education dulls the mind -- and you can do it yourself also.
The moment you are born, conditioning starts, from your very first breath; it cannot be avoided. The parents will condition you, the children you play with will condition you, the neighborhood will condition you, the school, the church, the state. And consciously not much conditioning is being done, but unconsciously the child goes on and on accumulating it. The child learns by imitating. So don't be worried. This is the normal situation in the world: everybody is conditioned. And everybody has to come out of the conditioning. It is difficult. It is not like undressing -- it is like peeling your skin. It is hard, it is arduous, because we have become identified with our conditioning.
That's why children look so beautiful: because they are yet full of hope, full of dreams, and they have not yet known frustration. Old people start looking very very dead. Hopes have leaked out, by and by, and only frustration -- a very bad taste on the tongue. Experience makes people bitter. Experience makes people lose their innocence, lose their hope, lose their trust. But it is not experience really -- because they wanted to make their dreams real, that's why. Otherwise you could remain as innocent to the very end of your life as in the beginning -- in fact, even more -- because the innocence that happens in childhood is just natural. It has not been tested against fire; it is very fragile. It has no crystallization in it. It is just a gift; it has not been earned. But when an old man is childlike, innocent, then nothing can destroy it. Then it has a solidity to it, then it is substantial; he has earned it.
Psychologists have come across a very significant fact: that if small children are left to themselves, they always choose the right thing to eat. You put everything around, you leave it on the dining table, don't force anything, and don't say what to eat and what not to eat. It has been a tremendous discovery that children eat only the right thing in the right time. If a child is suffering from something and a certain thing is needed which will be helpful for it, he will choose to eat it. By the time that suffering disappears he will stop eating that. We confuse them. We tell them to eat this and don't eat that. Then by and by, their natural instinct functions no more.
Children are trusting, but by and by there will be experiences in which they will be deceived, in which they will get into trouble, in which they will be opposed, in which they will become afraid. By and by they will learn all the tricks of the world. That's what has happened to everybody, more or less.
The children first have to be taught the physical joys. Help them to climb the trees, help them to run, help them to swim, help them to dance, help them to do physical yoga, hatha yoga, so they can have a feel of their bodies, so their bodies can be felt as alive phenomena -- not something dead around them, not something disconnected, not like a machine to be used -- so that they can have a respect for the body, love for the body, so their bodies can become sacred temples.

And then don't be in a hurry. The next step has to be taken very slowly. The movement from the body to the mind has to be very, very delicate, because you are moving from the gross to the subtle. And the movement cannot be very direct; it has to be very indirect. Slowly, slowly let the child know about music, poetry. Let the child know about great paintings, architecture. Let the child enjoy the exercise of his mind.

And then when the child is ready, when he has fulfilled his mind needs, help him to meditate. And nothing has to be done in haste. Let everything ripen, help everything to become mature. Just remember one thing: that the child should not get stuck anywhere. There are many who have become stuck at the body, the physical pleasure; then sex remains their center of life. There are many who have got stuck in the mind; then thinking, philosophizing, logic, and the joys of thinking and philosophizing and logic, remain for their whole lives. These people are half-grown people. Before the child gets stuck somewhere, push him to the further level, to the further plane. Help him to meditate.

Osho Quotes on Contentment

Whatsoever you possess will not give you contentment. The mind, the ego, will always feel unfulfilled.
The inward journey begins only when you understand it clearly that anything outside is not going to give you contentment.
For the spiritual person, this moment is more than enough. He is utterly grateful for whatever is allowed to him. His contentment cannot be disturbed by any desire for more.
This wheel will go on rotating unless you understand and jump out of it. And the only way to jump out of it is to live each moment so totally that it brings such contentment, such fulfillment that you cannot be greedy. And you cannot be jealous, and you cannot be in self-condemnation, and you cannot feel pain. Existence gives you one moment by one moment. So if you know to live one moment totally, you know the whole secret of life.
Whatever you are doing, if there is contentment and a feeling that this whole existence is nothing but the manifestation of godliness, that we are traveling on holy earth, that whomever you are meeting, you are meeting God -- there is no other way; only faces are different, but the inner reality is the same -- all your tensions will disappear. And the energy that is involved in tensions will start becoming your grace, your beauty.
If one can manage to be oneself then there is nothing else to be done. That very phenomenon to be oneself is the beginning of a transformation that makes you a new man; blissful, fulfilled, full of contentment. Now there is nowhere to go; you have arrived. Just to be oneself is to be at home.
Deep contentment is the visible sign of love. Whenever a person is in love, he is in deep contentment. Love cannot be seen, but contentment, the deep satisfaction around him...his every breath, his every movement, his very being -- content.
Rejoice this moment. Very few people in the world are even trying to know who they are. That is what is making a mess of the world. If you know consciously the source of your being, you become filled with contentment, joy, compassion, love. So many thousands of flowers blossom in you. You become a splendor. This is your birthright. You can ignore it but you cannot destroy it. Any moment you want to remember it, it is available. Just want it enough.
People go on following others' advice. Live according to your own light and then whatever happens, you will find a peace, a contentment, a fulfillment. You may not be a great success in the world, you may not be very famous, but you will be yourself.
That is the situation of every unconscious human being. Not only the dragonfly, you are also living in dreams. Until a pillar of consciousness arises in you, you will live in dreams, in nightmares, and your life will be a wastage. It will not come to fulfillment, to contentment, to a deep realization of organic unity with the cosmos.
Whenever you give with a condition you will always be dissatisfied, because the condition cannot be fulfilled. Whenever you give without a condition you will feel a deep contentment, because there is no reason to be dissatisfied. Whenever you give and enjoy it, whenever giving is an end unto itself.
Meditation is the greatest revolution in the world because it brings the original man into existence. It is always there but every society pushes it under many, many covers. Our work here is to throw all those covers, all those layers and find the real, the original, the natural. Start your growth from your natural center. Then whatever you may be, you will find contentment, you will find great joy in life. You will find not only joy in life, but in death too, because your original nature is eternal.
The whole art of meditation is the art of remembering who you are. Fulfillment cannot happen without knowing who you are. How can you be fulfilled if deep within you at the center is darkness, ignorance? If you don't know yourself, how can you be fulfilled? Before fulfillment, contentment, a basic requirement is to remember. And the miracle of remembering is that the moment you remember yourself, contentment and fulfillment come simultaneously -- without any effort on your part. They are flowers of your enlightenment, of your remembrance.
The market is outside you, the mind is outside you, the body is outside you. You are the innermost core -- everything is outside you. This experience of the innermost center brings a contentment. You don't bring it; it comes, it simply rains over you. A contentment that you have practiced is false. A contentment that comes to you on its own accord is authentic. Go to the marketplace, teach people how to be watchers of their minds, but remember not to teach them to be contented with their desires. We have to make them more discontented, till the real contentment comes. If you make them contented, then the real never comes. You are satisfied with something plastic; that becomes the barrier.
All purposes tend to one goal: to give you total freedom because freedom is your flowering, your lotus opening in the morning sun. And unless that happens you cannot find contentment, fulfillment, a peace that one feels when one comes home. And everybody is carrying his home within him. You are not to go anywhere: You have to stop going, so that you can remain where you are, so that you can remain what you are. Just be. And in that utter silence of being are hidden all the mysteries of existence.
Only a fulfilled man can pray. Only a contented man can pray: contentment is prayer. Prayer is the perfume of absolute contentment.
People are manufacturing all kinds of pleasures, but they don't satisfy, they don't bring contentment; they only drive people more and more insane.
It is not a question of what you follow, which part; it is a question of whether you go totally into it or not. To be total in your action brings joy. Even an ordinary, trivial action done with total intensity brings a glow to your being, a fulfillment, a fullness, a deep contentment. And anything done half-heartedly, howsoever good the thing may be, is going to bring misery.

Osho Quotes on Creativity

Every creative soul -- it does not matter what he creates -- should be respected and honored, so that creativity is honored.
In a real, honest human society, creativity will be honored, respected, because the creative soul is participating in the work of God.
It does not matter whether you paint, sculpt, or make shoes; whether you are a gardener, a farmer, a fisherman, a carpenter -- it does not matter. What matters is, are you putting your very soul into what you are creating? Then your creative products have something of the quality of divine. Except creativity, there is nothing divine.
The god is a creator. Whenever sex has become a transformed force, your life becomes creative. Sex is creative force. Right now it moves into biology; it creates new beings, it gives birth. When there is no sex and the energy is transforming, it moves into a new world of creativity. Then many new dimensions of creativity become open to you. It is not that you will start painting, or making poetry, or doing something else -- not that. It may happen, it may not happen, but whatsoever you do will become a creative act, whatsoever you do will become artistic. Even Buddha sitting under his bodhi tree, not doing anything, is creative. The WAY he is sitting, the very way he is sitting there, he is creating a force, an energy, vibrations all around him.
When sex energy is transformed, your whole life becomes creative -- independent, free, creative. Whatsoever you do, you create through it. Even if you do not do anything, non-doing becomes creative. Just your very being creates much that is beautiful, that is true, that is good.
Be creative, and the more creative you are, the more rejoicing, the more dancing, the more songful your aloneness becomes. Those periods of sadness, of grumpiness -- old habits -- will start falling like dead leaves falling from the trees. They also cling for a little while, but they have to fall.
Particularly, I want my people to know that meditation is not just being silent -- that is only one part of it. Finally, it has to be creative. And when a poetry comes out of your inner silences, or a painting, it has a flavor which is not of this world.
All these religious people and the politicians are angry with me for the simple reason that I am telling people that life is herenow -- not after death -- don't wait. And life is in love, life is in being creative, life is in understanding your innermost being. Because only then can you become a constantly overflowing source of beauty, love, and joy.
Each creative act becomes a rebirth for the creator, and each indifferent act becomes a suicide, a slow death. Be overflowing. Don't be misers. Don't try to hold -- share! And let care be your very center of life. And then there is no need to go to the church, no need to go to the temple, no need to kneel down before any god and pray. Your butterfly life, your way of life, is prayer. Whatsoever you touch will become sacred. I say whatsoever, unconditionally. Love makes everything sacred. Carelessness makes everything ugly.
CREATIVITY has nothing to do with any activity in particular -- with painting, poetry, dancing, singing. It has nothing to do with anything in particular.
Anything can be creative -- you bring that quality to the activity. Activity itself is neither creative nor uncreative. You can paint in an uncreative way. You can sing in an uncreative way. You can clean the floor in a creative way. You can cook in a creative way. Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach -- how you look at things.

So the first thing to be remembered: don't confine creativity to anything in particular. A man is creative -- and if he is creative, whatsoever he does, even if he walks, you can see in his walking there is creativity. Even if he sits silently and does nothing, even non-doing will be a creative act. Buddha sitting under the Bodhi Tree doing nothing is the greatest creator the world has ever known. Once you understand it -- that it is you, the person, who is creative or uncreative -- then this problem disappears.

Not everybody can be a painter -- and there is no need also. If everybody is a painter the world will be very ugly; it will be difficult to live. And not everybody can be a dancer, and there is no need. But everybody can be creative. Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing it is not purely economical, then it is creative. If you have something growing out of it within you, if it gives you growth, it is spiritual, it is creative, it is divine.

You become more divine as you become more creative. all the religions of the world have said: God is the Creator. I don't know whether He is the Creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So He must be the Creator because people who have been creative have been closest to Him.
Creativity means loving whatsoever you do -- enjoying, celebrating it, as a gift of God! Maybe nobody comes to know about it. Who is going to praise Paras for cleaning this floor? History will not take any account of it; newspapers will not publish her name and pictures -- but that is irrelevant. She enjoyed it. The value is intrinsic.
When ambition enters, creativity disappears -- because an ambitious man cannot be creative, because an ambitious man cannot love any activity for its own sake. While he is painting he is looking ahead; he is thinking, 'When am I going to get a Nobel Prize?' When he is writing a novel, he is looking ahead. He is always in the future -- and a creative person is always in the present. We destroy creativity. Nobody is born uncreative, but we make ninety-nine percent of people uncreative.

Osho Quotes on Compassion

You cannot be in compassion because you have no energy. All your energy is divided, sometimes in sex, sometimes in anger, sometimes in greed. Compassion is not a form. Only when all your desires disappear does that energy become compassion, KARUNA. You cannot cultivate compassion. When you are desireless, compassion happens; your whole energy moves into compassion. And this movement is very different. Desire has a motivation in it, a goal; compassion is nonmotivated, there is no goal to it, it is simply overflowing energy.
My work is done as far as I am concerned because I am done. Now the energy has become a compassion and an overflowing, and all those who really want to taste are invited to do so without any condition. You are not to give anything, you simply are to take. No discipline, no bargain- nothing is expected on your part. It is a gift. It has always been so, it will always be so; the ultimate bliss is always a gift. That's why we have been calling it grace, PRASAD... as if the divine gives to you out of his overflowing energy.
If meditation really happens, whatsoever the cause, compassion has to follow. Compassion is the flowering of meditation. If compassion is not coming, your meditation is, somewhere, wrong.
This word “compassion” is composed of passion. To be compassionate means to be in love. Compassion is just a dimension of love. Passion is hasty, hectic, a little violent. Compassion is gentle, nice, understanding — but it is passion after all.
Go deeper and deeper into meditation so you can go higher and higher in compassion. The deeper the roots of a tree reach the higher the peak. You can see the tree, you cannot see the roots, but they are always in proportion. If the tree is reaching to the sky the roots must be reaching to the very end of the earth. The proportion is the same. As deep as your meditation is, the same depth will be achieved in compassion. So compassion is the criterion. If you think you are meditative and there is no compassion, then you are deceiving yourself. Compassion must happen, because that is the flowering of the tree. Meditation is just a means towards compassion; compassion is the goal. Make yourself more and more alert. Call your name and answer, just to create more awareness. When you really become aware, you will feel a new upsurge of energy. Compassion will happen to you, and with compassion, bliss; with compassion, beatitude; with compassion, conviction.
Passion arises out of negative nothingness and compassion arises out of positive nothingness.
Buddha says: Meditation is enough to solve your problems, but something is missing in it — compassion. If compassion is also there, then you can help others solve their problems. He says: Meditation is pure gold; it has a perfection of its own. But if there is compassion then the gold has a fragrance too — then a higher perfection, then a new kind of perfection, gold with fragrance. Gold is enough unto itself — very valuable — but with compassion, meditation has a fragrance.
It is exactly the same thing: when enlightenment comes, the ego has already gone out. When enlightenment comes, just as a shadow to it compassion comes in, truth comes in, beauty comes in, grace comes in, blissfulness comes in. All that you have been searching for and were never able to manage is just showered on you.
That's why I say compassion is therapeutic. What is compassion? Compassion is the purest form of love. Sex is the lowest form of love, compassion the highest form of love. In sex the contact is basically physical; in compassion the contact is basically spiritual. In love, compassion and sex are both mixed, the physical and the spiritual are both mixed. Love is midway between sex and compassion. You can call compassion prayer also. You can call compassion meditation also. The highest form of energy is compassion. The word 'compassion' is beautiful: half of it is 'passion' -- somehow passion has become so refined that it is no more like passion. It has become compassion.
That’s why all the religions emphasize: God is compassionate — RAHIM, RAHMAN! — God is compassion. This is just to give you an alternative gestalt so you become focused on His compassion, not on your unworthiness. You may be unworthy — that is irrelevant — but God is compassionate. You may be a sinner — that is irrelevant — God is compassionate. He gives for no reason at all; He is simply a giver, He knows only giving. And He does not give conditionally, He gives unconditionally.
In compassion, you simply give. In love, you are thankful because the other has given something to you. In compassion, you are thankful because the other has taken something from you; you are thankful because the other has not rejected you. You had come with energy to give, you had come with many flowers to share, and the other allowed you, the other was receptive. You are thankful because the other was receptive. Compassion is the highest form of love.
With the flame of awareness even all that you have been thinking is wrong will become right. Love seems to be an entanglement, an imprisonment; with awareness that becomes a liberty, a freedom. Anger without consciousness is a destructive force, a suicidal force; it hurts you, it kills you by and by, it is a poison. With awareness the same energy is transfigured, becomes compassion. The same radiance comes to your face, but not in anger — in compassion. The same blood flows, the same chemistry of the body, but a new foreign element has entered into it, and the whole chemistry changes.

Osho Quotes on Death

You think about death and you become disturbed by small things: a headache, an ant crawling on your body. You become distracted by such small things, small discomforts -- and you talk about death. Maybe you don't know what death is; maybe you have only heard the name. And you have seen people dying, but you yourself have never seen death. In fact, when a person dies you see him Lying in repose -- silent, relaxed, with no discomfort. You think death is not a discomfort? You are seeing only a dead person; you have not seen his inner misery, you have not seen his inner conflict. You have not seen his inner struggle with death. You have not seen his inner anguish and turmoil. You just see the dead body -- painted, dressed well, washed, cleaned.
Only a person who has enjoyed his life becomes capable of enjoying his death. And if you are capable of enjoying your death, you have defeated death. Then there is no more birth for you and no more death for you -- you have learnt the lesson.
Live deeply, live totally, live wholly, so when death comes and knocks at your door you are ready -- ready like a ripe fruit to drop. Just a small breeze comes and the fruit drops; sometimes even without the breeze the fruit drops from its own weight and ripeness. Death should be like that. And the readiness has to come through living.
The secret is, start living more fully, more totally. Be more alert so that you can find within yourself something that is unreachable by death. That is the only shelter, the only security, the only safety. And if you want to help your friends and family, let them become aware of this secret.
While you are alive, be so alive that even death when it comes cannot kill you. A really alive person transcends death. Death happens only to dead people. Let me repeat it: Death happens only to dead people; who are already dead, only to those people does death happen. A really alive person transcends death, goes beyond death. Death comes, but misses the target. How can you kill a person like Buddha? How can you kill a person like Jesus? How can you kill Krishna with his flute on his lips? -- impossible. Death itself will start dancing around him! His life is so abundant that death itself will fall in love with him.
Because of our mind we always divide everything into opposite polarities. Delusion and enlightenment, night and day, birth and death, they are all one process but the mind cannot conceive it. It is intrinsically incapable of conceiving of the oneness of life and death, of light and darkness.
When death knocks at your door, all your certainties will be simply riddles and foolish. Don't cling to any certainty. Life is uncertain -- its very nature is uncertain. And an intelligent man always remains uncertain.
A man of realization knows there is no death. Death is a fiction, you have never died. Yes, you have changed your form many times. You have changed your house many times, many times. But you have never died. Have you ever seen yourself dying? It is always somebody else who dies.
The whole function of the master is to create such energy, such a magnetic force that you are pulled in and slowly, slowly start disappearing. And a point comes when you have become one with existence. This I call real death.
Birth and death are simply devices, because neither birth is true nor death is true. We have been before birth, so how can birth be true? And we will be after death, so how can death be true? Only one thing is true: the consciousness that comes with you through birth and goes with you through death — perhaps birth is a door, and death too! Perhaps they are the same door, just your direction is different.
At the moment of death all your knowledge of the world will be lost into thin air. Only one thing will go with you, and that one thing is being constantly ignored — that is your self-knowledge, your self-realization. In fact, this is the only ignorance — ignoring yourself.
It is always death that comes before your desires are fulfilled. Even if you live for a thousand years your desires are not going to be fulfilled.
Life is spread out over a long time -- seventy years, one hundred years. Death is intense because it is not spread out -- it is in a single moment. Life has to pass one hundred years or seventy years, it cannot be so intense. Death comes in a single moment; it comes whole, not fragmentary. It will be so intense you cannot know anything more intense. But if you are afraid, if before death comes you have escaped, if you have become unconscious because of the fear, you have missed one of the golden opportunities, the golden gate. If your whole life you have been accepting things, when death comes, patiently, passively you will accept and enter into it without any effort to escape. If you can enter death passively, silently, without any effort, death disappears. When Krishna, Christ, Buddha, Mahavir say you are deathless, they are not talking about a doctrine, they are talking about their own experience.

This can happen here in this camp also, because samadhi is death, dhyan is death, meditation is death. Many times there will be moments when you will suddenly feel you are dying. Don't escape, allow it to happen. If you allow it to happen, death has gone, death is there no more, and the inner flame, beginningless, endless, has come into being. It has always been there, now you can feel it. So this should be the sutra. With fear, hate, jealousy, anything whatsoever, don't create a problem out of it. Accept it, allow it, pass through it, and you will defeat all suffering, all death. And you will become a Jaina- a victorious one.
You die in misery. Only a few people die blissfully. And when death becomes a bliss, it is a samadhi. When death is a relaxation...real relaxation. Deep inside you surrender, you welcome. You have known life, now you want to know death also. You have lived life, you have enjoyed it. A great trust has arisen in you about life -- and you know death is the culmination of life, the crescendo. It must be beautiful! When the whole journey has been beautiful, why not the goal? There is no reason to be afraid. When the whole journey has been such a tremendous joy, why not the end? It is the culmination. You have come home. You welcome, you are ready to embrace death. You relax, you simply slip into death.

And that's the moment! If you can die without any fight, you don't die -- and you are never born again. You have simply slipped out of the body confinements -- of the world. You live! -- you live eternally. But then you live as an unembodied existence, with no limitations, with no boundaries. Body gives you a boundary. Death takes away all boundaries from you. Body gives you a definition, makes you a man or a woman, makes you ugly or beautiful, makes you intelligent or unintelligent, makes you this and that -- body gives you definition. Death takes all definitions away. It simply leaves life undefined.

Life undefined is what God is. But to know this death you will have to know life well. So if you can accept my suggestion: next time when a beautiful moment passes by, think in terms of life -- "What a beautiful moment to live and dance and be alive!" Then one day when death comes, you will say the same to death: "What a beautiful moment to die!"

Osho Quotes on Devotion

Devotion, the path of devotion, is the path of surrender.
The feminine mind will need a path of devotion -- the path of Narad, Meera, Chaitanya, Jesus.
Love is freedom, but not total. If love becomes devotion, then it becomes total freedom. It means surrendering yourself completely.
One is the path of devotion, what in India is called BHAKTI yoga, the path of love and devotion -- a Meera, a Chaitanya, dancing and singing, losing themselves completely in the act. When Meera is dancing there is only dance, there is no Meera; the dancer is completely merged into the dance. When Chaitanya is singing and dancing there is no Chaitanya; he has become one with the act.
Devotion is the highest form of love. It is possible you may love one person, and love becomes so deep that slowly slowly the very quality of love changes into devotion. Then that person becomes only a window for you to take a jump into existence.
One has to become intensely aware or intensely loving. These are the only two keys which can bring man out of the state he is in: either intense awareness -- that is the path of meditation -- or intense, total love -- that is the path of devotion.
The path of devotion, BHAKTI. Narada, Chaitanya, Meera, Sahajo, Ramakrishna -- these are the people on that path. It is the most simple, most direct, closest. You cannot find anything easier. This is the shortcut; it is not uphill. You need not do anything -- on this path doing will be your undoing. You need only relax and trust.
Devotion is unconditional.
Devotion is the ultimate stage of disciplehood.
Devotion has its own strange ways. It is not something rational, logical, something that can be explained to you. But it is something, if you go on growing from a student into a disciple, from a disciple into a devotee, and you come so close to the master that there is no distinction at all..
Devotion is the ultimate state of disciplehood -- when you become one with the master, when the dewdrop slips into the ocean and becomes one with it.
Devotion is only a love affair, purified to its ultimate state. Then whomsoever you love becomes a door, a bridge to the universal organic unity, the experience of your small identity dissolving in the ocean just like a dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf.
In ordinary life also, whenever your devotion is total you attain to great talents. So what to say about God? God is the very center of existence. You can only have energy enough to reach that center if you put all that you have at the stake. It is a gamble, it is not a business. You have to put all at the stake, this way or that, whatsoever happens. You have to risk. And the love affair with God has to be passionate, hot. It cannot be a cold philosophic speculation.
Devotion is a blind thing. In devotion the other becomes more important than you. It is a trust. The intellectual cannot trust anybody; he can only criticize. He cannot trust. He can doubt, but he cannot trust And if sometimes some intellectual comes to trust, it is never authentic. First he tries to convince himself about his trust; it is never authentic. He finds proofs, arguments, and when he is satisfied that the arguments help, the proofs help, then he trusts. But he has missed the point, because trust is not argumentative and trust is not based on proofs. If proofs are there, then there is no need of trust.
The path of the heart. I become the mystery and you -- thou, the other, the beloved -- become the real. If you move to the very extreme, then it becomes devotion. If your love comes to such an extreme point that you forget completely that you are, you have no notion of yourself and only the other remains, that is devotion.
In devotion you surrender yourself completely. And this surrender can be to a god who may not be in the sky or who may be, or to a master who may not be awakened or who may be, or to a beloved who may not be worthwhile or who may be -- that is irrelevant. If you can allow yourself to dissolve for the other, you will be transformed. Devotion frees. That is why we have glimpses of freedom only in love.
With deep devotion, results can follow immediately. In a single moment of devotion, you can undo many lives of the past. In a deep moment of devotion, you can become completely free from the past.
'Bhakta yoga', the path of devotion. On the path of devotion, when a satori happens it happens through the heart not through the intellect. It happens through the emotions, and when it happens through the emotions one goes unconscious -- it is a flash of unconsciousness.

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Hindu Vedic Philosophy (The Paramardha Tattwam)

Osho Quotes on -1

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