Osho Quotes on Education

1. My vision of a right education is to teach people how to grow the ego and how to be able to drop it; how to become great minds and yet be ready any moment to put the mind aside. You should be able to just put your personality, your ego, your mind, on and off, because these are good things if you can use them. But you should know the mechanism, how to put them off. Right now you know only how to put them on.
    
2. In fact, the moment a child is perfectly conditioned by you, you are very happy; you call it “religious education.” You are very happy that the child has been initiated into the religion of his parents. All that you have done is you have destroyed his capacity to know on his own. You have destroyed his authenticity. You have destroyed his very precious innocence.
    
3. The basic education is missing. The first thing to be taught is meditation, the art of going in, because only out of that arises a discipline.
    
4. A real education will not teach you to compete; it will teach you to cooperate. It will not teach you to fight and come first. It will teach you to be creative, to be loving, to be blissful, without any comparison with the other. It will not teach you that you can be happy only when you are the first. That is sheer nonsense. You can't be happy just by being first. And in trying to be first you go through such misery that you become habituated to misery by the time you become the first.
   
   By the time you become the president or the prime minister of a country you have gone through such misery that now misery is your second nature. You don't know now any other way to exist; you remain miserable. Tension has become ingrained, anxiety has become your way of life. You don't know any other way; this is your very style. So even though you have become the first you remain cautious, anxious, afraid. It does not change your inner quality at all. A real education will not teach you to be the first. It will tell you to enjoy whatsoever you are doing, not for the result but for the act itself. Just like a painter or a dancer or a musician....
    
5. All values imposed from outside never get to your center. The only authentic values are those which come from your center and spread outwards, not vice versa. That's exactly the meaning of education: drawing the water out from the well. Education means drawing your inner being into expression in your living, your day-to-day life. Your honesty, your love, your compassion, should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures, not from rabbis and bishops and shankaracharyas and Ayatollah Khomeini.
    
6. Society teaches you, “Become this, become that.” It teaches you becoming. Its whole education system is based on the idea of becoming. And what I am telling you here is just the opposite of it. I am talking about BEING, not about becoming. Becoming is an invention of the crafty politicians and the priests — and these are the people who have poisoned the whole humanity. They go on giving you goals. If you become tired of the worldly things — money, power, prestige — they are there to tell you about paradise, God, samadhi, truth. Again the whole process starts.
    
7. There is nothing like education. All your education simply makes you capable of worrying about situations everywhere in the world, about everyone except you — about all the troubles that are in the world. They have always been there, they will always be there. It is not because you are here that troubles are there. You were not and they were there; you will not be soon and they will remain there. They change their colors but they remain. The very scheme of the universe is such that it seems that through trouble and misery something IS growing. It seems to be a step, it seems to be a necessary schooling, a discipline.
    
8. The child when he is born functions from the center; we teach him how to function from the circumference. That is our whole educational system all over the world: teaching the child how to function from the circumference. We pull him away from his center, we make him more and more accustomed to the circumference, to living on the circumference... twenty-five years of conditioning, education: good names we have given to ugly things. We call it education -- it is not education, nothing can be a greater mis-education.
   
   The very word 'education' means drawing something out, to draw something out. When you draw water out of the well it is education. Just like that, when something is drawn outwards from your center it is education. But this is not what is going on in the name of education; it is forcing things upon you. It is not bringing your center to function. It is not sharpening your center; it is dulling it, making it more and more sleepy, dozy. The society succeeds the day your center goes into a coma and your circumference remains functioning. Then you are a robot, a machine, no more a man.
    
9. In the future, education will have that dimension. My own vision is that each student should be given an opportunity to teach too. The students who are reading and studying for their master's degree should be allowed to go to lower classes to teach; those who are working for their bachelor's degree, they should be allowed to teach the lower classes. Every student should be a teacher also, and vice versa. Every teacher once in a while should sit with the students and start learning again. Each teacher once in a while should be a student, and each student once in a while should be a teacher too. This difference between the teacher and the taught has to be dissolved; the teacher and the taught are part of one process.
    
10. In the coming century the whole education system is going to be totally transformed and changed because of the computer. It will be stupid to teach children history, geography -- unnecessary, there is no need. All that can be done by a computer; the child can carry the computer. And my own observation is: the less you depend on memory, the more intelligent you become. That's why it happens that in the universities you will not find very intelligent people.
    
    Professors, chancellors, vice-chancellors -- I have seen many, but it is very difficult to find some intelligent person there. You can find more intelligent people in the farmers, in the gardeners, in the villagers. And the reason is clear: because they are not knowledgeable they cannot depend on the memory. They have to respond to reality, they have to respond to challenges, they have to bring their consciousness to respond -- their consciousness remains more sharp. A farmer, a villager, is far more wise than a professor in the university. The professor can depend on the memory, the farmer cannot depend on the memory.
     
11. Twenty-five years of education -- almost one third of your life you are being trained to be ambitious. How can you avoid politics? The only way to avoid politics is to get out of your mind; that means that unless mind is dropped totally, politics will go on clinging to you. You can even be antipolitical but then that will become politics.
     
12. the whole society tries in every possible way to disconnect you from your essential core, and it creates a false, plastic personality around you and it forces you to become identified with it. That's what it calls education. It is not education; it is mis-education. It is destructive, it is violent. This whole society, up to now, has been very violent with the individual. It does not believe in the individual; it is against the individual. It tries in every possible way to destroy you for its own purposes. It needs clerks, it needs stationmasters, deputy-collectors, policemen, magistrates, it needs soldiers. It does not need human beings.
    
    We have failed, up to now, in creating a society which needs human beings, simple human beings. The society is interested that you should be more skillful, more productive, and less creative. It wants you to function like a machine, efficiently, but it does not want you to become awakened. It does not want buddhas and christs -- Socrates, Pythagoras, Lao Tzu. No, these people are not needed at all by the society. If sometimes they happen, they don't happen because of the society; they happen in spite of the society.

  Osho Quotes on Ego

1. All our dreams are our ego projections.
    
2. The ego is your enemy, not your friend.
    
3. The ego is a deep desire to dominate. The ego is a deep desire that says, "I am special, higher, bigger, greater than you."
    
4. The ego does not, cannot live in the present, because the present is real and the ego is false -- they never meet.
    
5. If the ego is fulfilled through giving, nothing is being given. Ego cannot share. The ego can never be generous; that is not its nature.
    
6. The ego is your enemy, not your friend. It is the ego that gives you wounds and hurts you. It is the ego that makes you violent, angry, jealous, competitive. It is the ego that is continuously comparing and feeling miserable.
    
7. To be a nobody is to be divine, because you have dropped your ego and you have allowed God to enter in you. When you are somebody, you are just an ugly ego, and you have closed the doors for God to enter within you -- because God and your ego cannot exist together. They are just like darkness and light: you cannot have them both.
    
8. Self-consciousness simply means ego consciousness and self-awareness means soul consciousness. Your ego is a false entity. Because you have so much money, because you have so much power, because you are born in a very respected family... your education, your position in life -- all these things constitute your ego. But your soul comes with you when you are born, it has nothing to do with anything. Whether you are educated or uneducated -- Kabir was not educated; Jesus was not educated -- whether you come from a respectable family or not, does not matter.
    
9. Sufis say, pray in such a way that nobody knows. Why? For the simple reason that ego is very cunning. It wants to brag; it wants to brag even about religion, about spirituality, about prayer, about meditation. It wants to brag; it does not matter what it brags about. It will brag about money, it will brag about meditation, it will brag about power, it will brag about prayer. The ego wants to brag: "I am doing something special, something great, something extraordinary. Don't think that I am nobody -- I am somebody!"
    
10. That which is imposed upon you is non-essential; it creates your personality. The essential is your individuality; the non-essential is your personality. In other words, the essential is your very soul, your being; the non-essential is your ego. All that helps the ego is non-essential; all that helps you to become egoless is essential. Ambition is non-essential, greed is non-essential; desire, any kind of desire, is non-essential.
     
11. Surrender is the quantum leap from mind to no-mind, from ego to egolessness. And in a single step the whole journey is contained. It is not a long journey from you to God, it is a single-step journey. It is not a gradual phenomenon; it is not that slowly slowly, gradually you come to the divine. It is a quantum leap! One moment you were in darkness and the next moment all is light. All that is needed is to put the ego aside.
     
12. The ego is always goal-oriented. It is always greedy, it is always grabbing. It is always searching for more and more and more; it lives in the more. If you have money it wants to have more money; if you have a house it wants to have a bigger house; if you have a woman it wants to have a beautiful woman, but it always wants more. The ego is constantly hungry. It lives in the future and in the past. In the past it lives as a hoarder -- "I have this and this and this." It gets a great satisfaction: "I have got something" -- power, prestige, money. It gives a kind of reality to it. It gives the notion that, "When I have these things, I must be there." And it lives in the future with the idea of more. It lives as memory and as desire.
     
13. The moment you put the ego aside, the curtain disappears. God is not hidden, only your eyes are closed. Open your eyes!
     
14. The ego is the problem; that's why you cannot know yourself. The ego gives you certain false images of yourself, and if you carry those images for a long time, you become afraid. The fear enters that if your image falls, then your identity will be broken. You create a false face and then you become afraid: if this false face falls, who will you be? You will go mad. You have invested too much in it. And everybody thinks about himself in such lofty terms, in such false terms; nobody agrees with him, nobody approves, but then your ego thinks that everybody is wrong.
     
15. Ego is a hallucination. You are not separate from the whole -- trying to be, of course, hence the whole misery. Trying to do something which is not possible, which is impossible, is bound to create misery. Misery is unnatural; it is your invention. Misery does not exist; it is your hallucination. It is a nightmare created by you. It is your great work!
     
16. The ego is the center of all your sleep and all your dreaming. If you can put the ego aside... seeing that it is a false thing, why go on carrying it? -- put it aside. In fact, there is no need to put it aside -- seeing that it is false, it drops of its own accord. And the moment it drops a tremendous explosion happens in you. For the first time you are awake, fully awake, totally awake. There is no unconscious in you, there is no darkness in you. All becomes light; hence the word "enlightenment." You are pure light, made of light, eternal light. And when you open your eyes and look at existence, the whole existence is made of light!
     
17. I am saying the ego exists not! How can you drop something which doesn't exist? And Buddha has not said that the ego has to be dropped, he is saying the ego has to be only looked into -- and you don't find it, hence it disappears. What can you do then -- when you go inside your being and you don't find any ego, you find silence there; no self dominating, no center like an ego there? Dropping the ego does not mean that you have to drop it. Dropping the ego is only a metaphor. It simply means that when you go in, you look in and you don't find anything, the ego disappears. In fact, even to say 'disappears' is not right, because it was not there in the first place. It is a misunderstanding.
     
18. The mind that relies on something else is the spurious self, the ego. The ego cannot exist without props, it wants props. Something has to support it. Once all props have been removed, the ego falls to the ground and disappears. But only when the ego falls to the ground does that consciousness arise in you which is eternal, which is timeless, deathless.
     
19. You have to move through fire, and only in that fire will your ego drop. Looking at the whole ugliness of it, it drops automatically.
     
20. To be ordinary is the greatest virtue -- because when you are just ordinary, nothing to claim, of this world or that, the ego disappears. The ego feeds on imbalance, the ego feeds on extremes. The ego lives on the polarities -- in the middle it disappears. And in every area, in every direction of life, remember this: just stop in the middle and soon you will find the mind has stopped, the ego has stopped. Nothing to claim, it disappears. And when it disappears you have become virtuous. Now the door is open for the divine. In the middle you meet him; at the extremes you miss.
     
21. Hell is for all extraordinary people. They may be in politics, in art, literature -- wherever they are, hell is for all geniuses, for all extraordinary people, all egoists. Ego is the hell, it gives you suffering -- because unnecessarily you start conflicting with everything. You are never at ease, unease becomes your style of life; with the ego you will always be at unease. Ego is a discomfort; it is a nail in the shoe, it continuously pinches, but you want to be extraordinary.

Osho Quotes on Enlightenment

1. Zen believes in sudden enlightenment because Zen believes that you are already enlightened; just a certain situation is needed which can wake you up. Just a little alarm may do the work. If you are a little alert, just a little alarm and you are suddenly awake. And all the dream with all its long long desires, journeys, kingdoms, mountains, oceans...they have all disappeared in a single instant.
    
2. Your enlightenment is perfect only when silence has come to be a celebration. Hence my insistence that after you meditate you must celebrate. After you have been silent you must enjoy it, you must have a thanksgiving. A deep gratitude must be shown towards the whole just for the opportunity that you are, that you can meditate, that you can be silent, that you can laugh.
    
3. Enlightenment is always sudden because it is not an achievement; it is already the case. It is only a remembering, it is only a reminding, it is only a recognition. You are already enlightened; you are just not aware of it. It is awareness of that which is already the case.
    
4. An enlightened person is one who has no barrier between him and existence. And knowledge is a barrier. Knowledge divides you from existence; it keeps you separate. Not knowing unites you. Love is a way of innocence. Innocence is a bridge: knowledge is a wall. Who has ever heard of knowledgeable people becoming enlightened? They are the farthest away from enlightenment. Enlightenment grows only in the soil of innocence.
    
5. The word 'enlightenment' belongs to the path of meditation. The meditator says, "Enough is enough. Long have I suffered; now let me be free." In fact, he cannot ask. He tries, but he cannot pray -- because to the man on the path of meditation, even prayer is a bondage. Mahavir never prayed, Buddha never prayed. Prayer was meaningless for Buddha; he made all efforts to get out of it.
    
6. Enlightenment means to live life without any hankering for meaning. Then whatsoever is, is good, and whatsoever is not, that too is good. Then each moment becomes so radiant, so luminous, so fun of fragrance, but still there is no meaning.
    
7. Nirvan means enlightenment, the state of ultimate realisation, the experience of one’s innermost core, the actualisation of all the potential that one has carried all along, the seed turning into the flower.
    
8. The ultimate enlightenment means the ultimate dissolution of the ego, the ultimate disappearance of the individual.
    
9. Try to be so wakeful that you don't fall asleep again. Remain so alert that the future is not allowed to deceive you again as you had allowed it before. What has become past is nothing, but once it is your future then you get deceived by it. Now it is past; now another future is arriving. Every moment future is arriving, and future can deceive you only if you are asleep. Then again it will become past. Now let me tell you one thing: if you remain alert and you don't allow the future to deceive you in the present, the past disappears. Then there is no memory left of it, no trace of it. Then one is just a clean slate, a sky without any clouds, a flame without smoke.
   That's what the state of enlightenment is -- so alert that only the witness is real and everything else is nothing but ripples on the surface of the water. Everything is passing, everything is a flux. Only one thing remains and remains and remains, and that is your consciousness, your awareness.
    
10. After enlightenment, you have to disappear. The world is left behind, the body is left behind, the mind is left behind; just your consciousness, as individuality, is still there. To go beyond enlightenment is to go beyond individuality and to become universal. This way, each individual will go on moving into nothingness. And one day, the whole existence moves into nothingness and a great peace, a great night, a deep, dark womb, a great awaiting for the dawn.... And it has been happening always, and each time you are always born on a higher level of consciousness. Enlightenment is the goal of human beings. But those who are enlightened cannot remain static; they will have to move, they will have to change. And now they have only one thing to lose -- themselves. They have enjoyed everything. They have enjoyed the purity of individuality; now they have to enjoy the disappearing of individuality. They have seen the beauty of individuality; now they have to see the disappearance and its beauty, and the silence that follows, that abysmal serenity that follows.
     
11. The experience of enlightenment is also beyond description, but it has been described by all who have experienced it. They all say it is beyond description and still they describe it -- that it is full of light, that it is full of joy, that it is the ultimate in blissfulness. If this is not description then what is description? I am saying it for the first time: for thousands of years the people who have become enlightened have been saying that it cannot be described, and at the same time have been describing it, have been their whole lives singing it. But beyond enlightenment you certainly enter into a world which is indescribable. Because in enlightenment you still are; otherwise who is feeling the blissfulness, who is seeing the light? Kabir says, "... as if thousands of suns have risen." Who is seeing it? Enlightenment is the ultimate experience -- but still it is experience, and the experiencer is there. Going beyond it, there is no experiencer.
     
12. You have to understand one thing: that enlightenment is not an escape from pain but an understanding of pain, an understanding of your anguish, an understanding of your misery -- not a cover-up, not a substitute, but a deep insight: "Why am I miserable, why is there so much anxiety, why is there so much anguish, what are the causes in me that are creating it?" And to see those causes clearly is to be free from them. Just an insight into your misery brings a freedom from misery. And what remains is enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something that comes to you. It is when pain and misery and anguish and anxiety have been understood perfectly well and they have evaporated because now they have no cause to exist in you -- that state is enlightenment.
     
13. Nirvana means utter cessation, all disappears, there is simple emptiness. In that emptiness there is tremendous consciousness, fulfillment, but no centre to be fulfilled. To know it, it has to be experienced….
     
14. Enlightenment is not a desire, is not a goal, is not an ambition. It is a dropping of all goals, a dropping of all desires, a dropping of all ambitions. It is just being natural. That’s what is meant by flowing.
     
15. Enlightenment is the ultimate peak of sanity -- when one becomes perfectly sane, has come to a point where silence, serenity, consciousness are twenty-four hours his, waking or sleeping. There runs a current of tranquility, blissfulness, benediction which is a nourishment, food from the beyond. Eastern psychology accepts mind as the lowest part of human consciousness -- dismal and dark. You have to go beyond it. And enlightenment is not the end, because it is only individual consciousness. Individuality is still like two banks of a river. The moment the river moves into the ocean, all banks disappear, all boundaries are annihilated. You have gone beyond enlightenment.

  Osho Quotes on Existence

1. Existence is available for those who are available to existence. And then I tell you, there is no boredom. Life is infinite delight.
    
2. God is whispering. God is a whisper. And you are deaf and God cannot shout. He is incapable of it because he cannot be aggressive, because he cannot interfere, because he cannot trespass, because he respects your freedom. He whispers and you are deaf. The whole of existence is a whisper -- it is very subtle. Unless you are tuned, unless you have become capable of listening to the whisper, you will not be able to understand -- you will not be able to hear the music.
    
3. Remember one basic law: anything that is complete drops, because then there is no meaning in carrying it; anything that is incomplete clings, it waits for its completion. And this existence is really always after completion. The whole existence has a basic tendency to complete everything. It does not like incomplete things -- they hang, they wait; and there is no hurry for existence -- they can wait for millions of years.
    
4. The whole is your mother. The whole is not indifferent to you. Let this truth penetrate as deeply as possible in your heart, because even this awareness that the whole feels happy with you will change you. Then you are not alienated, then you are not a foreigner here. Then you are not a homeless wanderer, then this is a HOME. And the whole mothers you, cares about you, loves you. So it is natural that when somebody becomes a buddha, when somebody reaches the ultimate peak, the whole existence dances, the whole existence sings, the whole existence celebrates. Literally true it is. It is not a metaphor, remember; otherwise you will miss the whole point. Blossoms shower, and then they go on showering -- they never stop.
   
   The blossoms that showered for Buddha are still showering. The blossoms that showered for Subhuti are still showering. You cannot see them, not because they are not showering but because you are not capable of seeing them. Existence goes on celebrating infinitely for all the buddhas that have happened, for all the buddhas that are happening, and for all the buddhas that will happen -- because for existence, past, future and present don't exist. It is a continuity. It is eternity. Only the now exists, infinite now.
   
   They are still showering, but you cannot see them. Unless they shower for you, you CANNOT see them; and once you see them showering for you, you will see that they have been showering for every buddha, for every enlightened soul.
   The first thing: existence CARES what happens to you. Existence is continuously praying that the ultimate should happen to you. In fact you are nothing but a hand extended by the whole to reach the ultimate. You are nothing but a wave coming from the whole to touch the moon. You are nothing but a flower opening, so that the whole is filled with fragrance through you.
    
5. If you cannot flower, existence is not going to shower flowers on you. Existence simply responds to you: whatsoever you are, existence gives you more of that. If you have many flowers within your being flowering, a million times more flowers will shower on you. If you have a deep depression, the existence helps that too -- a million times more depression will come to you. Whatsoever you are will knock at your door. Whatsoever you are will be given to you more and more.
    
6. You don't need any churches, you don't need any temples, you don't need any mosques; you need only a prayerful heart, a loving heart, a grateful heart. That is your real temple. That will transform your whole life. That will help you to discover not only yourself, but the very depths of this immense existence.
    
7. For centuries man has been imposing meaning on existence because it needs guts to live joyously without meaning. It needs real intelligence to live in ecstasy without any meaning at all. The crowds don’t have that much intelligence, they need some excuse. Howsoever false the excuse is it does not matter – even a false excuse is good enough for them to live for. But they are absolutely in need of a meaning. It is man’s need that imposes meaning on existence. The more immature a man is the more his need for meaning. As he becomes mature the need becomes less.
    
8. God is a great consolation, but it is not a cure. Existence is not a consolation. To be in tune with it is to be healthy and whole. All the religions of the world have been teaching God; I teach you existence. I teach you to be in tune with that which surrounds you, which is within you and without you. Once you are in tune with it, there is no death for you, no misery, no tension, no worry, but a tremendous peace surrounds you, a contentment which you have never even dreamt of.
    
9. Remember the clear-cut distinction between existence and God. God is a condemnation of our intelligence. It is accepting humiliation, it is accepting that, "We are only puppets; you are the power. Whatever you want to do with us you will do. All that we can do is to pray." It makes you so crippled. The very idea of God is nauseating. But existence has a freshness and a beauty and a truth. Never get mixed up with these two words. One is reality, one is simply fiction.
    
10. You may not have observed this because it is impossible before you go into deep meditation; you cannot observe the fact that the whole universe breathes. And just as you expand and shrink the whole existence shrinks and expands. Just as you inhale and the chest fills, and then you exhale and the air goes out and the chest shrinks, the same rhythm exists in existence. The whole existence breathes, expands, inhales, exhales -- and if you can find the rhythm of existence and become one with the rhythm, you have attained.
    
    The whole art of ecstasy, meditation, samadhi, is: How to become one with the rhythm of the universe. When it exhales, you exhale. When it inhales, you inhale. You live in it, are not separate, are one with it. Difficult, because the universe is vast. A master is the whole universe in miniature. If you can learn how to inhale with the master and how to exhale with the master, if you can learn simply that, you will learn all.
     
11. EXISTENCE is paradoxical; paradox is its very core. It exists through opposites, it is a balance in the opposites. And one who learns how to balance becomes capable of knowing what life is, what existence is, what God is. The secret key is balance.
     
12. Meditation is simply the only pure way of coming in contact with existence. And this contact immediately becomes a merger and a melting. You become existence yourself. Then you are in the clouds and you are in the stars and you are in the flowers and you are in the rains. You are everywhere. You are no longer a drop, you have become the ocean.

Osho Quotes on God

1. God is the state of no-mind.
    
2. When things are no longer important, only consciousness becomes important. When things are no longer significant, a new search, a new door opens. Then you are not rushing towards the without: you start slipping into the within. The kingdom of God is within. And once you drop identifying with things, suddenly you are no longer fighting -- there is no point. You start moving with the river of existence.
    
3. The Devil is the fallen human being, God is the risen human being. God is the ultimate possibility of your beatitude; the Devil is your ultimate fall. There is nobody like the Devil existing somewhere. You will never meet him unless you become him. And you will never encounter God unless you become God.
    
4. Whatsoever you do with happiness is a prayer: your work becomes worship; your very breathing has an intense splendor to it, a grace. Not that you constantly repeat the name of God -- only foolish people do that -- because God has no name, and by repeating some assumed name you simply dull your own mind. By repeating His name you are not going to go anywhere. A happy man simply comes to see God is everywhere. You need happy eyes to see Him.
    
5. There is a problem with Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, who think of God as a person -- there is a problem. They think God is the one who created the world. In the East we have a deeper understanding of God than that. Creation is not something separate from God: it is His play; it is He Himself hiding in many forms. Here He has become a rock, there He has become a flower. Here He is a sinner and there He is a saint. The whole play is His. And He is the only actor and He goes on dividing His roles. He is in Jesus and He is in Judas. In the East, God is not a person -- God is the very stuff the universe is made of. God is not a creator -- God is creativity. And the creator and the creation are just two aspects of the same creative energy.
    
6. God is alive when you are alive. If you are not alive, how can your God be alive? Your God is yours. If you are dead, your God is dead; if you are alive, your God is alive. Your God cannot be more than you, because your God is your innermost core of being. So if you want to know what God is, become more alive. If you want to know what God is, become more divine. If you want to know what God is, then don't try to know -- try to feel. He comes through the door of the heart.
    
7. Even when you have known God, you will not be able to believe that you have known Him. That is what I mean when I say God is a mystery. Unknown, He remains unknowable. Known also, He remains unknowable. Unseen, He is a mystery; seen He becomes an even greater mystery. It is not a problem that you can solve. It is bigger than you. You can dissolve into it -- you cannot solve it.
    
8. 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. Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it -- whatsoever it is! irrelevant of the fact of what it is.
    
9. It is not only that you are seeking God -- God is also seeking you in many, many ways. Sometimes as a Krishna with his flute, sometimes as a Buddha with his silence, sometimes as a Jesus with his revolutionary approach to life -- in millions of ways God has been extending his hand towards you, groping for you. Sometimes your hand has even touched His hand -- but you don't understand. Sometimes even a glimmer, a tremor has gone through your spine, but you don't understand. On the contrary, you explain it somehow.
    
10. Every child is a warrior and every old man is a businessman. How every warrior becomes a businessman is a long story: the whole society, education, culture, conditioning, makes you more and more fearful, afraid. You cannot take a risk and everything that is beautiful is risky. Love is a risk. Life is a risk. God is a risk. God is the greatest risk, and through mathematics you will not reach -- only through taking the ultimate risk, putting everything that you have at stake.
     
11. Kabir, one of the greatest mystics ever born, has said two things. He has said, "In the beginning, when I was in search of God, I was thinking my drop of water would drop into the ocean of the divine. But when it really happened it happened quite otherwise: the ocean dropped into my small drop." It always happens otherwise. You are not going to meet God, God is going to meet you. How can you seek him? You don't know his whereabouts, you don't know his address. He is in search of you constantly, and whenever you are ready the ocean drops into you. Meditation will make you ready, compassion will make you perfect. So carry these two mantras: PRAGYA, meditation, KARUNA, compassion -- let these two be the goals. Let your whole life revolve around them, and very soon you will be attuned. Then I can pour myself into you.
     
12. I myself say I don't know; you cannot come across a more ignorant man than me. There is no truth and there is no way. I have not reached anywhere, I am simply here and now. If you can follow this ignorant man your mind will drop. For the mind always follows knowledge, and when the mind drops there is no need to go anywhere. Everything is available, has been available always; you have never missed it. But just because of your seeking of the future, of the goal, you cannot look. The truth surrounds you, you exist in it. Just like the fish exist in the ocean, you exist in the truth. God is not a goal, God is what is here and now. These trees, these winds blowing, these clouds moving, the sky, you, I -- this is what God is. It is not a goal. Drop the mind and the divine. God is not an object, it is a merger. The mind resists a merger, the mind is against surrender; the mind is very cunning and calculating.
     
13. Let your knowing be there, but don't allow it to become knowledge or character. The moment it is turning into knowledge, drop it, empty your hands. Forget all about it. Move ahead! again like a child. Difficult, I know. Easy to say; difficult to be that way -- but that is the only way you can attain to satchitanand -- you can attain to truth, you can attain to consciousness, you can attain to bliss. Yes, it is hard. One has to pay too much for it -- but God is not cheap. You will have to pay with your whole being. Only when you have paid totally and you are not holding anything and you are not a miser, and you have sacrificed and surrendered yourself totally, will you attain. God comes to you when you are not; when you have become just a zero God comes to you. He is just waiting by the corner. The moment you become empty, He rushes towards you, He comes and fulfiles you.
     
14. A real man of understanding becomes godly -- godly in the sense that he is in the world and yet he remains out of it; on the periphery and yet he remains mindful of his center. Doing a thousand and one things, yet he remains a non-doer. In tremendous activities, but he is never lost. His inner light burns bright.
     
15. Many times God has reached you, and many times you have withdrawn yourself. Many times He has walked with you and you have not recognized Him. Many times He has shouted at you: "Lazarus, come out! " and you won't listen. Or you think: "He must be calling somebody else -- Lazarus is not my name. " Let me tell you: Lazarus is your name!
     
16. If you are looking for God, you will never find Him -- because looking means you have a certain idea already of who God is. And your idea is bound to be either Christian or Judaic or Hindu or Mohammedan. Your idea is going to be your concept -- and your concept can never be higher than you. And your concept is bound to be your concept. Your concept is bound to be rooted in ignorance, borrowed. At the most, it is just belief; you have been conditioned for it. Then you go on looking. A person who is looking for truth will never find it, because his eyes are already corrupted, he already has a fixed concept. He is not open.
     
17. A fish in the ocean forgets the ocean. Throw the fish on the shore, in the sands, hot sands, and then the fish knows, then the fish remembers. But there is no way to throw you out of God; there is no shore to Him -- God is a shoreless ocean. And you are not like a fish, you are like a wave. You are exactly like God; your nature and God's nature are the same.
     
18. To arrive one has to become feminine. You cannot reach God as aggressive invaders, conquerors. You can reach God only... or it will be better: God can reach you only when you are receptive, a feminine receptivity. When you become yin, a receptivity, the door is open. And you wait.
     
19. Zen has NO concept of God -- because how can you have a concept of a formless God? That is absurdity! The moment you have a concept you have created a form. That's why Zen never talks about God, Buddha never mentioned God at all. He has been asked again and again, but he keeps mum, he will not say.

Osho Quotes on Intuition

1. This word 'intuition' is beautiful. You know the other word, 'tuition'; tuition means somebody else is giving it to you. Intuition means nobody is giving it to you; it is growing within yourself. And because it is not given to you by somebody else, it cannot be put into words.
    
2. What is intuition? you have asked. Intuition is in some ways like instinct, in some ways absolutely unlike instinct; in some ways like intellect, in other ways absolutely against intellect. So you will have to understand, because it is the subtlest thing in you. Intuition is like instinct because you cannot do anything about it. It is part of your consciousness, just as instinct is part of your body. You cannot do anything about your instinct and you cannot do anything about your intuition. But just as you can allow your instincts to be fulfilled, you can allow and give total freedom to your intuition to be fulfilled. And you will be surprised at what kinds of powers you have been carrying within you.
   
   Intuition can give you answers for ultimate questions -- not verbally but existentially. You need not ask, What is truth? Instinct won't hear, it is deaf. Intellect will hear but it can only philosophize; it is blind, it can't see. Intuition is a seer, it has eyes. It sees the truth -- there is no question of thinking about it. Instinct and intuition are both independent of you. Instinct is in the power of nature, of unconscious nature, and intuition is in the hands of the superconscious universe, the consciousness that surrounds the whole universe, the oceanic consciousness of which we are just small islands -- or better, icebergs, because we can melt into it and become one with it.
   
   In some ways intuition is exactly opposite to instinct. Instinct always leads you to the other; its fulfillment is always dependent on something other than you. Intuition leads you only to yourself. It has no dependence, no need for the other; hence its beauty, its freedom and independence. Intuition is an exalted state needing nothing. It is so full of itself that there is no space for anything else. In some way intuition is like intellect because it is intelligence.
    
3. Buddha means an egoless trust. One who trusts in the whole existence also trusts in himself, because he is part of the whole. He listens to his heart's voice and follows it. Unafraid he goes with his heart. He trusts his intuition. And once you have known the art of how to listen to your intuition, you will be surprised: intellect can err, intuition never errs -- it is infallible. It always directs you in the right course of action.
    
4. Intuition is the highest rung of the ladder, the ladder of consciousness. It can be divided into three divisions: the lowest and the first is instinct; the second, the middle one, is intellect; and the third, the highest one, is intuition.
    
5. The West represents the male mind, aggressive intellect. The East represents the female mind, receptive intuition. East and West are not just arbitrary -- the division is very very significant and profound.
    
6. If you choose according to your own inclination, according to your own intuition... it is very strong in children but, slowly slowly, becomes weaker. The voices of the parents and the teachers, the society and the priest, become louder and louder. Now if you want to find out what is your voice, you will have to pass through a crowd of noises.
    
7. Unless you have found your natural inclination your life is going to be a long, long tragedy, from the cradle to the grave. The only people who have been blissful in the world are the people who have lived according to their own intuition and have rebelled against any effort by others to impose their ideas. Howsoever valuable those ideas may be, they are useless because they are not yours. The only significant idea is that which arises in you, grows in you, blossoms in you.
    
8. Just the energy touching your higher level of consciousness, the superconscious -- just the touch, and there is a shower of joy which continues. Slowly the energy goes on hitting and makes its way to the center of the superconsciousness. You have nothing to do: your work is finished when you have stopped repressing and you have cleaned your unconscious. Then you have nothing to do; then all that has to be done is done by your energy. And when you reach the center a new faculty starts functioning in you which is intuition.
   At the center of the unconscious is instinct.
   At the center of the conscious is intellect.
   At the center of the superconscious is intuition.
    
9. Intuition functions in a quantum leap. It has no methodological procedure, it simply sees things. It has eyes to see. It sees things which you have never even thought of as things -- for example, love. You have never thought of it as a thing. But a man of intuition can see whether there is love in you or not, whether there is trust in you or not, whether there is doubt in you or not. He can see them as if these are things. In my religion intuition holds the highest place. That's where I am trying to push you.
   
   An unclean unconscious is hindering you. Clean it; and the way to clean it is to satisfy it, to satisfy it so much that it starts telling you, "Please stop! It is more than I needed." Only leave it then. And with that, your intellect is filled with such a fresh flow of energy that it turns into intelligence. Then the energy goes on rising and opens the doors of intuition. Then you can see things which are not visible to your physical eyes, things which are not even things. Love is not a thing, truth is not a thing, trust is not a thing, but they are realities -- much more real than your things. But they are realities only for intuition, they are existential. And once your intuition starts functioning, you are for the first time really a man. With the unconscious you are animal. With the conscious you are no longer animal. With the superconscious you are man.
    
10. Just as the body has its own wisdom -- it is called instinct -- your soul has its own wisdom. It is called intuition. Your mind is a borrowed thing; it has nothing like instinct or intuition. It is just a computer which goes on collecting all kinds of information. But it has tremendous power over you because it has all that you know. If it is erased you will be simply dumb, not knowing who you are, where you are going -- for what? What is the business?
     
11. When something from the unknowable comes to be known, it is a jump. It is a jump! There is no interlink, there is no passage, there is no going from one point to another point. But it seems inconceivable, so when I say, ”You can feel it, but you cannot understand it,” when I say such things, I know very well that I am uttering nonsense. Nonsense only means ”that which cannot be understood by our senses.” And mind is a sense, the most subtle, and wisdom is a sense. Intuition is possible because the unknowable is there.
     
12. One has to follow his own instinct. They have to be understood, these two words: instinct and intuition. Instinct is unconscious nature and intuition is conscious nature. First your instinct has to be freed from all the fetters of principles, dogmas, right and wrong, morality and immorality. Instinct, completely natural, has tremendous beauty. That is the beauty you see in the animals. A deer just jumping, running, has a certain beauty which man has lost. His jumping and running has a grace that comes from instinct. He is not jumping and running, it is nature jumping and running through him. He is just instrumental.
    
    This is the first step towards ultimate freedom, that your instinct should be allowed all growth possible. And alongside, you should continue to meditate, because meditation is not a program. Meditation is just a method of becoming aware of what is happening to you. No disturbance, no judgment, just watching what is happening in you. If you go on watching your instincts and their growth, a moment comes when your instincts start changing into intuition.
    
    The word is very significant. We are given tuition everywhere. That tuition is to repress your intuition. In the schools, in the colleges, in the universities, you are given tuition. It means something from the outside being forced upon you, and intuition means something coming from your innermost core. If you are unconscious, then it will remain instinct. If you are conscious, then instinct plus awareness is equal to intuition. Then for the first time you have found your Master within yourself Intuition is your Master, your real university. And now you don't need any scripture, you don't need any guide. Your inner light is enough to lead you to the ultimate goal of enlightenment.

Osho Quotes on Jiddu Krishnamurti

1. Krishnamurti is right when he says no Master is needed. Yes, one day you will also know that no Master is needed, but you will know only when somebody has awakened you or you have become awakened in somebody's presence. Then you will know, you will say 'Krishnamurti is right.' But if you listen to Krishnamurti right now and believe that no Master is needed, you will never come to know that Krishnamurti is right. You will remain unawakened.
    
2. Krishnamurti goes on saying that there is no need to do anything. In fact, for the first-rate mind there is no need to do anything; just by hearing, by right listening, one attains. But where to find the first-rate mind? It is very rare. Unless a Krishnamurti comes to listen to Krishnamurti it won't happen. But why should a Krishnamurti go to listen to a Krishnamurti? It is absurd. It has no meaning. A man who has that kind of perceptivity can become awakened just by listening to the song of a bird, just by listening to the breeze passing through the trees, just by listening to the sound of the water flowing -- that's enough, because from everywhere the Divine speaks. If you are perceptive, whatsoever you hear you have heard the Divine
    
3. J. Krishnamurti is totally different in his expression, very logical, very rational. The beginning of his work is always with the mind; then slowly slowly he leads you beyond the mind.
    
4. You can not like or dislike. It is not a question of your choice. Truth is! Whether you like it or do not like it is irrelevant. You can choose lies, but you cannot choose truth -- truth is there. That's why Krishnamurti insists so much on choiceless awareness. You cannot choose truth. Truth is already there! It has nothing to do with your choice, liking, disliking.
    
5. You will have to become more watchful about the thoughts, dreams, memories, flicking by, moving around you. You will have to have more attention focused on the thoughts. Thoughts are the objects and you will have to become aware of them. This is the first awareness: 'awareness one'. Krishnamurti talks about this, he calls it 'choiceless awareness'. Don't choose. Don't judge whatsoever thought is passing by, just watch it, just see that it is moving. If you go on watching, one day, thoughts don't move that fast; their speed has slowed down. Then, some day, gaps start coming: one thought goes and another does not come for a long time. Then, after some time, thoughts simply disappear for hours... and the road is just empty of traffic.
    
6. Krishnamurti is right when he again and again emphasizes choicelessness. That is also the taste of Zen.
    
7. My observation has been this: that Krishnamurti is surrounded by the most egoistic people of this world, and the reason is because there is a safe place -- no need to surrender, no need to drop your ego, no need to follow anybody. Your ego feels very strengthened and your ego feels that many rationalisations are given to you. So you protect yourself with those rationalisations.
    
8. J. Krishnamurti was very serious -- I don't think he ever smiled. A long life: ninety years. His fame started very early, at thirteen years old; so really he had a very long life of work and disappointments. Even the closest ones betrayed him. His whole life seems to be just a series of betrayals, and those who remained never managed to understand what he was saying. They listened to him for half a century, but still he could not cross their thick minds and reach to their being. And every day... if you look at his life, in the beginning he was very hopeful, very excited that man can be changed, that a new man can arrive. But slowly, slowly that hope disappeared, that excitement was no more there. And as he grew older, he became sadder.
    
9. J. Krishnamurti goes on talking in abstract terms. The whole approach seems to be mental, as if only mind is to be used. The body need not be involved in it, emotions need not be involved in it: only the abstract mind, as if Brahman is a mathematical problem. It is not, it is an organic problem.
    
10. Listening to Krishnamurti you are listening to the mind -- the purest mind. You will feel good. Listening, you will feel that you are understanding. Listening, you will feel that you are reaching somewhere. But you are learning only new words. You will learn 'awareness' -- the word, not awareness itself. You will learn 'choicelessness' -- the word, not choicelessness. And they will go on in the mind, and they will move in the mind, and you will become just a mind -- a cerebral center. Your emotions are not touched; your body remains untouched. Only your mind is touched. That is why Krishnamurti has been a failure. He is himself enlightened but he has been a failure. His whole life he has been working with the mind and whatsoever he says is true but it is not applicable because you are not only the mind: you are much more. And that "much more" has to be transformed with the mind. You have to be transformed as a totality.
     
11. J. Krishnamurti is there. He talks; talks very intelligently. Remember, I will not say logically: talks very intelligently; goes into the analysis of any problem as deeply as is humanly possible. But he is not a philosopher either. All his talk is just like uprooting weeds from the garden. He destroys your problems through his analysis. He does not give you anything; he simply takes away all that you have been carrying in your mind. For a moment you are utterly lost -- and in that very moment you can see his reality. His experience starts flowing in you. People can miss him also.
     
12. Krishnamurti has his way, and I am happy that he is in the world. He is at the other extreme. If he is gone, I will miss him more than anybody else in the world. But I can understand your question, Henk Faassen. This is not the only question; you have asked many more about the same thing. It seems it has hurt you deeply that I criticized Krishnamurti. You don't understand me yet. This is my way of paying respects to him. This is my way of declaring that there exists another enlightened person in the world.
    
    If my orchestra does not suit you, then the only alternative possible is the solo flute-playing of J. Krishnamurti. There is no other, no third person who can be of any help to you. Either Krishnamurti or me -- there is no other alternative. Right now there is no other alternative. Krishnamurti is bound to criticize me; I can understand it. His standpoint is simple and clear, my standpoint is a little more unclear. Sometimes I will appreciate him tremendously, because I would like him to also become part of my orchestra. And sometimes I will criticize him, because my own liking is not for solo flutes.
     
13. Just last night I received the last book of J. Krishnamurti, in which he is not speaking to anybody -- he is speaking just to himself. The words are recorded but there was no audience, and perhaps in this book he comes closer to truth than in any of his other books. The audience is a limitation. This has been my experience too. If I am speaking to my own people, then there is no limitation; then I don't feel that I have to say something, or not to say something. Then I simply speak as if I am speaking to myself. When I am speaking to people who don't know me, who don't understand me -- moreover they misunderstand me -- there is a great limitation. Then I am not at freedom to speak. Their very faces, their eyes, their gestures prevent me from saying something that may hurt them.
     
14. When I say Krishnamurti can get angry, I don't mean, Henk, that he can get angry like you get angry. His anger is out of compassion. This situation is unbelievable! He wants to help this lady and he feels so helpless. He tries this way and that. His message is very simple, singular, one-dimensional. For fifty years he has been saying only a single word. In essence his whole teaching can be printed on one side of a postcard. He has been saying it in as many possible ways as one can invent, but it is the same citadel that he attacks from the north, from the south, from the west, from the east. And still people go on listening to him and go on asking the same old foolish questions.
    
    He certainly gets angry. And when a man like Krishnamurti gets angry, he is pure anger. Many in India have felt very disappointed with Krishnamurti because he gets angry. They have a certain concept that a buddha should not get angry. They go with a prejudice. And when they see that Krishnamurti can get angry, they are disillusioned, "So this man is not a buddha, he has not become enlightened yet."
     
15. J. Krishnamurti has not received a Nobel Prize -- and he is one of those rare human beings, those few of the buddhas, who are really laying the foundation for world peace. And Mother Teresa has received the Nobel Prize for world peace. Now, I don't understand what she has done for world peace! George Gurdjieff didn't receive a Nobel Prize, and he was working hard to transform the inner core of human beings; Raman Maharshi didn't receive the Nobel Prize -- because their work is invisible: their work is that of bringing more consciousness to people. When you bring bread to people it is visible, when you bring clothes to people it is visible, when you bring medicines to people it is visible. When you bring God to people, it is absolutely invisible.
     
16. The path of affirmation seems the path of effort, great effort: one is trying to reach God, one has to make all the effort that is possible, one has to do the utmost, one has to put oneself at stake. In modern times, Gurdjieff, Ramakrishna-they followed the path of affirmation, VIA AFFIRMATIVA. The other path is VIA NEGATIVA, through negation, through the 'no'. Lao Tzu, Buddha, Nagarjuna -- they followed the path of negation. In modern times, Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti -- they follow the path of the 'no'.
     
17. Krishnamurti is the purest statement of the negative path as pure as Lao Tzu, as pure as Ashtavakra. A very pure statement, but pure statements become very difficult because you cannot understand them; they are so far away. You can only misunderstand them. So he has been misunderstood. He is the most misunderstood man. Nobody understands him, not even those who say that they follow him. They also cannot understand, because he says 'No following is allowed. You should not become imitators.' And they have become imitators. He says 'You cannot learn from me.' And they have learned from him. That's why he sometimes beats his own head
     
18. Krishnamurti fell into the hands of a very fanatical group -- theosophists. It was a new religion. Whenever a religion is new, it is very fanatical. By and by, it relaxes and compromises and becomes just a social phenomenon; then it is no more religion. Theosophy was just in its beginning, and Krishnamurti was only nine years old when he fell into the hands of those fanatics. They tried hard. They wouldn't allow Krishnamurti to meet and mix with ordinary children -- no -- because they had a goal that he had to become the world Teacher, JAGADGURU. He had to become the coming-Buddha; he had to become the incarnation of Maitreya.
    
    He was not allowed to move with any girl, because he might have fallen in love and the whole dream of the theosophists would have been shattered. He was constantly guarded. He was not allowed to move alone; somebody was always with him, watching him. And he was forced to follow very strict rules: three o'clock in the morning he had to get up and take a cold bath; and then he had to learn Sanskrit and he had to learn French and he had to learn English and he had to learn Latin and Greek -- because a World Teacher should be well cultured, sophisticated. Just a nine-year-old child!
    
    When he was twelve years old, they started forcing him to write a book. Now what can a twelve-year-old child write? In fact, the teacher, Leadbeater, he was writing in his name. Krishnamurti would write and Leadbeater would correct it and make it perfect. The book still exists. A beautiful book, but you cannot expect it of a boy just twelve years old. It is not from him. Even Krishnamurti cannot remember it. When he has been asked he has said, "I don't remember when I wrote it -- I don't remember at all how it came into being."
    
    And they were talking nonsense -- esoteric nonsense: "In his dreams he goes to the seventh heaven, and there God Himself is teaching him." And just a twelve-year-old child -- very vulnerable, soft, receptive; he would trust. And these people were world-famous; they had great names. And the movement was really big and worldwide; thousands and thousands of lodges were opened all over the world. Just a twelve-year-old boy had become a world-famous personality. Wherever he was going, thousands of people would gather just to see him.
    
    If you look at those pictures, you feel pity for him, compassion. He was continuously in a cage. And it was natural, I think it would have happened to anybody -- it had nothing to do with Krishnamurti. Anybody in his place, if he had any spirit left, would have renounced this whole nonsense, and would have come out of it. It was too much of a prison. He could not write letters to anybody because he might have made some relationship through the letters. A World Teacher needs to be completely unattached. He started feeling a little love for a woman who was old enough to be his mother, but even that was stopped. It was nothing to do with sexuality or anything; he just started feeling love from the woman. The woman was already a mother of three children -- but the theosophists wouldn't allow it. They stopped it.
    
    He was completely in seclusion, never allowed to move into the outside world. He was not allowed to enter in any school, in any college, because there he would meet ordinary people and he would become ordinary. Special teachers were appointed; he was taught specially. And all around him, just a nine-year-old boy, all around him such big talk -- of Masters, Master K.H. sending messages, letters falling from the roof. They were all managed! Theosophists were caught later on -- they were all managed: the roof was specially made and a letter would drop suddenly, and it was for Krishnamurti -- a message had come from the unknown.
    
    Just think of a small boy.... No freedom allowed became a great urge to be free. One day -- nobody was expecting it, that he would renounce it -- the theosophists had gathered from all over the world for the first declaration in which Krishnamurti was expected to declare that he was the World Teacher and that God had entered into him.
    
    Suddenly, without saying anything to anybody.... He could not sleep the whole night. He brooded over it: he has become a slave, and they are all do-gooders; they have made you a slave because they want to do good to you; and they love you and their love became nauseating; and their well-wishing became poisonous. The whole night he brooded: what is he to do? Whether he has to continue and become part of this nonsense, or get out of it?
    
    And blessed he is that in the morning when they had gathered and they were waiting for God to descend in him and to declare that he is now no more Krishnamurti but Lord Maitreya -- Buddha has entered in him -- he suddenly declined and he said, "It is all nonsense. Nobody is descending in me. I am simply Krishnamurti and I am nobody's Master. And I am not a Jagadguru, not a World Teacher. And I dissolve this nonsense and this organization and the whole thing that has been made around me."
    
    They were shocked! They could not believe it: "Has he gone mad, crazy?" They had put much hope in him, much money; it was a great investment, years of training. But it was going to be so. If he had been absolutely a dead man, then only would he have accepted it. He was alive. They could not kill his life, that aliveness exploded. If he had been a dull, mediocre mind, maybe he would have accepted -- but he has an intelligence, a tremendous awareness. He got out of it. That whole movement and the whole organized thing functioned as a positive challenge.
     
19. Intelligence has no choice. That's why Krishnamurti goes on defining intelligence as choiceless awareness.

Osho Quotes on Laughter

1. Laughter is not irreligious. Laughter is one of the most evolved phenomena in human life. No other animal can laugh, it is only man; it is only man who can laugh.
    
2. To be serious is not only not to be alive, it is worse than death. Have you ever seen a dead person serious? Impossible! Seriousness is worse than death. Laughter is life, is love, is light. Laughter in its purest form is a dance of all your energies.
    
3. In a real deep laughter the mind disappears. It is not a part of mind or of the heart. When a real laughter happens -- a belly laughter, as it is called -- then it comes from your very core; from your very center ripples start spreading towards your circumference. Just as you throw a rock into a silent lake and ripples arise and they start moving towards the source, in the same way real laughter arises from your center and moves towards your circumference. It is almost like an earthquake! Each single cell of your body, each fiber dances in tune.
    
4. Laughter has never been used as a meditation. I may be the first person who is using laughter as a meditation. Jokes have never been used as part of a spiritual transformation -- I may be the first person! -- but they can be used; they are tremendously refreshing.
    
5. Laughter is a great medicine. It is a tremendously powerful therapy. If you can laugh at your own unconscious, the unconscious loses its force. In your very laughter your guilt, your wounds, disappear.
    
6. My own experience says to me that if you can laugh rightly, in the right moment, it will bring you out of unconsciousness into the open sky, from the darkness to the light. I am introducing laughter as a meditation because nothing makes you so total as laughter; nothing makes you stop your thinking as laughter does. Just for a moment you are no more a mind. Just for a moment you are no more in time. Just for a moment you have entered into another space where you are total and whole and healed.
    
7. Laughter is beautiful when it comes out of understanding, out of innocence. But when it is hysterical it is insane and stupid.
    
8. If you really want to laugh you will have to learn how to weep. If you cannot weep and if you are not capable of tears, you will become incapable of laughter. A man of laughter is also a man of tears -- then a man is balanced. A man of bliss is also a man of silence. A man who is ecstatic is also a man who is centered. They both go together. And out of this togetherness of polarities a balanced being is born. And that is what the goal is.
    
9. LAUGHTER is the very essence of religion. Seriousness is never religious, cannot be religious. Seriousness is of the ego, part of the very disease. Laughter is egolessness. Yes, there is a difference between when you laugh and when a religious man laughs. The difference is that you laugh always about others -- the religious man laughs at himself, or at the whole ridiculousness of man's being.
    
10. Laughter is a mystery. It is better to experience it than to hear someone talk about it. But one becomes curious, "What is laughter?" Laughter is the most intelligent factor in you. Buffaloes don't laugh, and if you meet a buffalo laughing you will go mad! Then it will be impossible to bring you to sanity. No animal laughs. Laughter needs a very sensitive intelligence. It means that you can understand the ridiculousness of a certain situation.
     
11. When you have a hearty laugh, mind stops, because mind cannot laugh. It is structured seriously, its function is to be serious, miserable, sick. The moment you laugh, it does not come from your mind, it comes from the beyond, from your very inner spirit. According to me, all the religions have missed one of the dimensions of the greatest importance, a sense of humor. And they have made the whole world serious.
     
12. I want my people to fill the world with laughter, joy, songs, and dances. We are not seeking for any paradise -- we are seeking how to create the paradise, herenow, because we are not interested in things after death. If we can create a paradise herenow, certainly we will be able -- even if we meet in hell -- to create the paradise there.
     
13. When you become a calm and cool observer of life you are going to laugh -- not ordinary laughter but a belly laughter like a lion's roar. And white lotuses will start showering on you. Life is neither serious nor nonserious. It is a tremendous play, playfulness.
     
14. Laughter brings some energy from your inner source to your surface. Energy starts flowing, follows laughter like a shadow. Have you watched it? When you really laugh, for those few moments you are in a deep meditative state. Thinking stops. It is impossible to laugh and think together. They are diametrically opposite: either you can laugh or you can think. If you really laugh, thinking stops. If you are still thinking, laughter will be just so-so, it will be just so-so, lagging behind. It will be a crippled laughter.
    
    When you really laugh, suddenly mind disappears. And the whole Zen methodology is how to get into no-mind -- laughter is one of the beautiful doors to get to it. As far as I know, dancing and laughter are the best, natural, easily approachable doors. If you really dance, thinking stops. You go on and on, you whirl and whirl, and you become a whirlpool -- all boundaries, all divisions are lost. You don't even know where your body ends and where the existence begins. You melt into existence and the existence melts into you; there is an overlapping of boundaries. And if you are really dancing -- not managing it but allowing it to manage you, allowing it to possess you -- if you are possessed by dance, thinking stops.
    
    The same happens with laughter. If you are possessed by laughter, thinking stops. And if you know a few moments of no-mind, those glimpses will promise you many more rewards that are going to come. You just have to become more and more of the sort, of the quality, of no-mind. More and more, thinking has to be dropped. Laughter can be a beautiful introduction to a non-thinking state. And the beauty is.... There are methods -- for example, you can concentrate on a flame or on a black dot, or you can concentrate on a mantra, but the greater possibility is that by the time the mind is disappearing you will start feeling sleepy, you will fall asleep. Because before the mind disappears there open two alternatives: sleep -- sushupti -- and samadhi: sleep and satori.
     
15. In a few Zen monasteries, every monk has to start his morning with laughter, and has to end his night with laughter -- the first thing and the last thing! You try it. It is very beautiful. It will look a little crazy -- mm? -- because so many serious people are all around. They will not understand. If you are happy, they always ask why. The question is foolish! If you are sad, they never ask why. They take it for granted -- if you are sad, it's okay. Everybody is sad. What is new in it? Even if you want to tell them, they are not interested because they know all about it, they themselves are sad. So what is the point of telling a long story? -- cut it short! But if you are laughing for no reason, then they become alert -- something has gone wrong. This man seems to be a little crazy because only crazy people enjoy laughter; only in madhouses will you find crazy people laughing. This is unfortunate, but this is so.
     
16. Laughter is prayer. If you can laugh you have learnt how to pray. Don't be serious; a serious person can never be religious. Only a person who can laugh, not only at others but at himself also, can be religious. A person who can laugh absolutely, who sees the whole ridiculousness and the whole game of life, becomes enlightened in that laughter.
     
17. It is said that when Hotei attained enlightenment he started laughing. He lived at least thirty years afterwards; he continued laughing for thirty years. Even in sleep his disciples would hear him giggling. His whole message to the world was laughter; he would go from one town to another just laughing. He would stand in one marketplace, then in another, just laughing, and people would gather. His laughter had something of the beyond -- a Buddha's laughter. He is known in Japan as 'the laughing Buddha'.
    
    His laughter was so contagious that whosoever heard it would start laughing. Soon the whole marketplace would be laughing; crowds would gather and laugh and they would ask him, "Just give us a few instructions." He would say, "Nothing more, this is enough. If you can laugh, if you can laugh totally, it is meditation." Laughter was his device. It is said many people became enlightened through Hotei's laughter. That was his only meditation: to laugh and help people laugh.
     
18. Laughter is one of the things most repressed by society all over the world, in all the ages. Society wants you to be serious. Parents want their children to be serious, teachers want their students to be serious, the bosses want their servants to be serious, the commanders want their armies to be serious. Seriousness is required of everybody. Laughter is dangerous and rebellious.
    
    When the teacher is teaching you and you start laughing, it will be taken as an insult. Your parents are saying something to you and you start laughing -- it will be taken as an insult. Seriousness is thought to be honor, respect. Naturally laughter has been repressed so much that even though life all around is hilarious, nobody is laughing. If your laughter is freed from its chains, from its bondage, you will be surprised -- on each step there is something hilarious happening.
    
    Life is not serious. Only graveyards are serious, death is serious. Life is love, life is laughter, life is dance, song. But we will have to give life a new orientation. The past has crippled life very badly, it has made you almost laughter blind, just like there are people who are colorblind.

Osho Quotes on Life

1. What binds you is the lust for the unlived life.
   So live life totally and let this lust disappear.
    
2. Life can be really lived only if you live it naturally. If you impose artificial commandments over it, you will destroy it.
    
3. Meditation will help you to come closer to life. Love will help to bring you closer to life. Creativity will bring you closer to life. Enjoying small things which have been condemned by your stupid so-called saints will bring you closer to life.
    
4. Just look at the lighter side of life and enjoy it to its fullest, and all fear will disappear.
    
5. Life is a woman. Try to understand life and you will become a mess. Forget all about understanding. Just live it and you will understand it. The understanding is not going to be intellectual, theoretical; the understanding is going to be total. The understanding is not going to be verbal; it is going to be non-verbal. That is the meaning when we say life is a mystery. It can be lived but it cannot be solved.
    
6. Existence is freedom. It is not determined beforehand. It is not predestined. If it were predestined then all meaning would be lost. Life is not a drama, but you can take it as a drama. If you take it as a drama, you transcend life. But remember, life is not a drama; life is total freedom. Nobody can predict what is going to happen the next moment, because the next moment comes as if out of the blue, totally free and fresh. If it could be predicted, then all meaning would be lost.
    
7. Life is not just to pass, it is to reach somewhere deep within you. Life is not on the surface, it is not the circumference, it is the center. And you have not reached to the center yet. Sober up! Enough time is already wasted. Be alert and see what you are doing. And what are you doing? Searching for money? It is finally, ultimately useless. It is again a game, the money game. You have more than others, you feel good; others have more than you, you feel bad. It is a game. But what is the meaning of it? What do you gain from it? Even if you have all the money the world contains, at the moment of death you will die as a beggar. So the whole wealth of the world cannot make you rich. Games cannot make you rich. Sober up!
    
8. Old age, when death is just standing close to you, creates the question, "What is the meaning of life?" But when you are alive, when death is far away beyond the horizon of your vision, who cares about the meaning of life? -- you live it, you have it, you sing it, you dance it. It is in every breath, it is in every beat of your heart. One thing has to be understood clearly: that the people who have asked so-called great questions about the meaning of life, about the meaning of the very existence, about the meaning of love, about the meaning of beauty, are thought to be great philosophers but they have one foot in the grave. Just before slipping into their graves, they are raising all these questions.
    
9. Life in itself is not meaningful. It is meaningful only if you can sing a song of the eternal, if you can release some fragrance of the divine, of the godly, if you can become a lotus flower -- deathless, timeless. If you can become pure love, if you can beautify this existence, if you can become a blessing to this existence, only then does life have significance; otherwise it is pointless. It is like an empty canvas: you can go on carrying it your whole life and you can die under its weight, but what is the point? Paint something on it! Meaning has to be created in life; meaning is not given already. You are given freedom, you are given creativity, you are given life. All that is needed to create meaning is given. All the essential ingredients of meaning are given, but meaning is not given, meaning has to be created by you. You have to become a creator in your own right.
   And when you became a creator in your own right, you participate with God, you become a part of God.
    
10. Remember, life is always uncertain. Everything dead is certain, life is always uncertain. Everything dead is solid, fixed - its nature cannot be changed; everything alive is moving, changing - a flow, a liquid thing, flexible, able to move in any direction. The more you become certain, the more you will miss life. And those who know, know life is God. If you miss life, you miss God. Act spontaneously. If there is discomfort in the beginning allow it to be there; don't hide it and don't suppress it - and don't imitate. Be childlike but don't be childish. If you are childlike, you will become a great saint; if you are childish, you will become a great, knowledgeable person.
     
11. The very insecurity makes life a thrill; the very danger that tomorrow you may not be here makes you live today as intensely as possible, makes you love as totally as possible, because postponement is not at all conceivable.
     
12. I want you to belong to the present so that you can live each moment fresh, young, alive, with a great adventure for the coming moment. Unless your life becomes an ecstasy, you have not lived it. You have missed the very point, the bull's eye.
     
13. My rebellion is life-affirmative. I want you to dance and sing and love and live as intensely as possible and as totally as possible. In this total affirmation of life, in this absolute yes to nature we can bring a totally new earth and a totally new humanity into being.
     
14. Through planning life becomes more and more unconscious, and the more unconscious you are, the more you need planning. Before really dying, you are dead. Alive means responding, sensitive. Alive means: whatsoever comes, I will be there to respond, and the response will come from me, not from the memory. I will not prepare it.
     
15. Whatsoever you do, whatsoever you don't do, whatsoever you say, whatsoever you don't say, reveals you. Everywhere mirrors are all around you. Every other person is a mirror, every situation is a mirror -- and whom do you think you are deceiving? If deception becomes a habit, ultimately you will have deceived yourself and no one else. It is your life you are wasting in deceptions.
     
16. People are just dragging. You don't need to look at others' faces, just look in the mirror and you will find out what dragging means -- neither alive nor dead. Life is so beautiful, death is also beautiful -- dragging is ugly.
     
17. When you are surrounded by fear, remember that in life there is only one thing certain, and that is death. Hence, those who understand drop the fear. Because what else could be more insecure than life? To be alive means that at any moment death is possible. Security is possible only in the grave, because nobody has ever heard that anybody dies in the grave. Everything is secure and safe.
     
18. Those who want to really live drop all fears, all thinking, all security, all safety. They risk everything, because life is so precious and so fleeting, so momentary that you cannot go on postponing. And thinking is a way of postponing, feeling is a way of postponing, desiring is a way of postponing.
     
19. Life is such... today it is one thing, tomorrow it is another, the day after tomorrow nobody knows what it will be. Your memorized answers, your borrowed knowledge from others never fits with life, because life goes on changing and your scriptures remain the same.
     
20. The moment you are at the very center of your being, you have such clarity about all the problems of life that one thing is certain: you will not create any problem; and another thing is certain: you will spread your vision, your understanding, to other people. All problems are our own creation. In our ignorance of ourselves we have created them. In our consciousness, they will dissolve just like dewdrops disappearing in the morning sun.
     
21. Basically life is just a preparation for dying, and only those are wise who learn in their life how to die. If you don't know how to die you have missed the whole meaning of life: it is a preparation, it is a training, it is a discipline. Life is not the end, it is just a discipline to learn the art of dying. But you are afraid, you are scared, at the very word death you start trembling. That means you have not yet known life, because life never dies. Life cannot die.
     
22. When a person has known the transcendental in himself, death is nothing but another face of God. Then death has a dance to it. And unless you become capable of celebrating death itself, remember, you have missed life. The whole life is a preparation for this ultimate.
     
23. The most fundamental thing to be remembered is that life is dialectical. It exists through duality, it is a rhythm between opposites. You cannot be happy forever, otherwise happiness will lose all meaning. You cannot be in harmony forever, otherwise you will become unaware of the harmony. Harmony has to be followed by discord again and again, and happiness has to be followed by unhappiness. Every pleasure has its own pain, and every pain has its own pleasure. Unless one understands this duality of existence, one remains in unnecessary misery. Accept the total, with all its agonies and all its ecstasies. Don't hanker for the impossible; don't desire that there should be only ecstasy and no agony.
     
24. Become more conscious, become more aware, become more alive. Let all your juices flow. Don't hold yourself back. Respect your nature, love yourself, and don't be worried about unnecessary things. Unworried, move into the thick of life, explore it. Yes, you will commit many mistakes -- so what? One learns through committing mistakes. Yes, you will go into many errors -- so what? It is only by going into errors that one comes to the right door. Before one knocks at the right door, one has to knock on thousands of wrong doors. That is part of the game, part of the play.

Osho Quotes on Love

1. I love, because my love is not dependent on the object of love. My love is dependent on my state of being. So whether the other person changes, becomes different, friend turns into a foe, does not matter, because my love was never dependent on the other person. My love is my state of being. I simply love.
    
2. How can love impose ideals on anyone? Love simply accepts you as you are; there is no need to be somebody else. I call a place holy only where love is unconditional, shared without asking anything in return, not even in a subtle way.
    
3. Everybody goes on thinking that he loves people and nobody returns the love, but it has never happened that way. It is against the law; it is against dharma, against the ultimate law of life. If you love, love comes in return. If it is not coming, go deeper; somewhere in the name of love you have done something else.
    
4. Love will give you the secret key, the golden key, the master key.
   Love unconditionally, and flowers will be showering on you from all the directions. And once you have known the generosity of existence you will never feel miserable.
    
5. Love is death of the ego, the personality, the false. There is no way to have both, love and ego. Either you can have the ego or you can have love -- but make it a conscious thing.
    
6. All growth needs love -- but unconditional love. If love has conditions then growth cannot be total, because those conditions will come in the way. Love unconditionally. Don't ask anything in return. Much comes on its own -- that's another thing. Don't be a beggar. In love be an emperor. Just give it and see what happens... a thousandfold it comes back. But one has to learn it. Otherwise one remains a miser; one gives a little and waits for much to come back, and your waiting, your expectation, destroys the whole beauty of it.
    
7. If you cannot love yourself, you don't know even the taste of love or what love means.
    
8. Love yourself, so that all your loving sources become open, all blocks are removed. And if you can love yourself -- with all your frailties, with all your weaknesses, with all your errors -- you can love anybody in the world. You will have tremendous compassion and understanding, because you commit the same mistakes; the same are your errors, the same are your frailties.
    
9. If you are not in love, you are lonely. If you are in love, really in love, you become alone. Loneliness is sadness; aloneness is not sadness. Loneliness is a feeling of incompleteness. You need someone and the needed one is not available. Loneliness is darkness, with no light in it. A dark house, waiting and waiting for someone to come and kindle the light. Aloneness is not loneliness. Aloneness means the feeling that you are complete. Nobody is needed, you are enough. And this happens in love. Lovers become alone -- through love you touch your inner completeness. Love makes you complete. Lovers share each other, but that is not their need, that is their overflowing energy.
    
10. Love allows freedom; not only allows, but strengthens freedom. And anything that destroys freedom is not love. It must be something else. Love and freedom go together, they are two wings of the same bird. Whenever you see that your love is going against your freedom, then you are doing something else in the name of love. Let this be your criterion: freedom is the criterion; love gives you freedom, makes you free, liberates you. And once you are totally yourself, you feel grateful to the person who has helped you. That gratefulness is almost religious. You feel in the other person something divine. He has made you free, or she has made you free, and love has not become a possessiveness.
     
11. As sex disappears you will find authentic love growing in you. Sex is not love; it is just a fallacy, a blindness. You are tricked by biology into believing that this is love. But once sex has disappeared your whole life energy is redeemed from its animal past. And just as sex was reproducing more and more children, sex-freed energy starts giving you every moment a new birth. Your whole life becomes fresh, growing in a new direction. Sex is horizontal; love is vertical, it takes you upwards to higher realms of being. And the higher you are in your love, the closer you are to the ultimate truth. The day your love has reached to its climax, you will experience what I have been defining as satyam, shivam, sundram -- the truth, the godliness and the beauty.
     
12. If you love deeply, by and by you will become aware that your love is becoming more and more meditative. A subtle quality of silence is entering in you. Thoughts are disappearing, gaps appearing -- silences. You are touching your own depth. Love makes you meditative if it is on the right lines. Meditation makes you loving if it is on the right lines.
     
13. Love is not surrender. Love does not ask you to surrender. Love does not ask for anything. Love simply gives. And the miracle is, that when you give out of love the whole existence returns it a thousandfold, as if, from all over around you, roses start showering on you. You cannot imagine, cannot conceive of it, unless you experience it. But give it a try. You will not be losing anything.
    Love is not something like a commodity, that if you give it you will have less of it. It is not money, that you had ten dollars and five you have given; now you have only five dollars left. Love is not a commodity. It is not a quantity; it is a quality. Give it, and you will be surprised that from unknown sources, from everywhere, love is flowing towards you. Give it unconditionally, and once you have known the taste and the joy of giving unconditionally, you will also know that the existence is very generous.
     
14. Love, but not as a need -- as a sharing. Love, but don't expect -- give. Love, but remember your love should not become an imprisonment for the other. Love, but be very careful; you are moving on sacred ground. You are going into the highest, the purest and holiest temple. Be alert! Drop all impurities outside the temple. When you love a person, love the person as if the person is a god, not less than that. Never love a woman as a woman and never love a man as a man, because if you love a man as a man your love is going to be very, very ordinary. Your love is not going to be more than lust. If you love a woman as a woman, your love is not going to soar very high. Love a woman as a goddess, then love becomes worship.

Osho Quotes on Marriage

1. Love marriage' came into existence but is not going to survive, for the simple reason that love comes, happens, and one day suddenly goes. It was not in your hands to bring it; neither is it in your hands to keep it. The old marriage failed because the insistence was that you should love your wife, you should love your husband. It was a `should'. And you could not even conceive how you could love; at the most you could pretend, you could act. But love is not a pretension, is not an acting. You cannot do anything. You are absolutely powerless as far as love is concerned. The old marriage failed.
   
   The new marriage is failing because the new marriage is simply a reaction to the old marriage. It is not out of understanding, but only out of reaction, revolt -- `love marriage.' You don't know what love is. You simply see some beautiful face, you see some beautiful body and you think, "My God, I am in love!" This love is not going to last, because after two days, seeing the same face for twenty-four hours a day, you will get bored. The same body... you have explored the whole topography; now there is nothing to explore. Exploring the same geography again and again, you feel like an idiot. What is the point? This love affair, this love marriage is failing, it has already failed. The reason is that you don't know how to wait so that love can happen.
    
2. Your marriage is a subtle politics of domination. Your fatherhood, motherhood, is a subtle politics.
    
3. Marriage has made love disappear badly, marriage has made love disappear from the earth. Because for other considerations marriage is arranged — money, finance, family, prestige, astrology — all absurd. They have nothing to do with the heart of the two persons who are going to be married. So marriage is almost always a failure; only in rare accidents it is not so — but they are accidents, exceptions. They cannot be counted. Marriage is always on the rocks, because it is for wrong reasons. Only love can become the foundation of a real marriage, there is no other way. Because there is no other way to find that your wave length is exactly the same as the other’s, that you vibrate in the same way as the other. There is no other way to find it out.
    
4. One should marry only when one is wise enough. Marriage is not for young people. For young people is to fool around. Marriage is for those who have experienced life in many ways, who have seen all the colors, the whole spectrum of it, and are now ready to settle.
    
5. I am not against marriage -- I am for love. If love becomes your marriage, good; but don't hope that marriage can bring love. That is not possible. Love can become a marriage. You have to work very consciously to transform your love into a marriage. Ordinarily, people destroy their love. They do EVERYTHING to destroy it and then they suffer. And they go on saying, "What went wrong?" They destroy -- they do everything to destroy it.
   
   There is a tremendous desire and longing for love, but love needs great awareness. Only then can it reach its highest climax -- and that highest climax IS marriage. It has nothing to do with law. It is a merging of two hearts into totality. It is the functioning of two persons in synchronicity -- that is marriage.
   
   But people try love and because they are unconscious...their longing is good, but their love is full of jealousy, full of possessiveness, full of anger, full of nastiness. Soon they destroy it. Hence for centuries they have depended on marriage. Better to start by marriage so that the law can protect you from destroying it. The society, the government, the court, the policeman, the priest, they will all force you to live in the institution of marriage, and you will be just a slave. If marriage is an institution, you are going to be a slave in it. Only slaves want to live in institutions.
   
   Marriage is a totally different phenomenon: it is the climax of love. Then it is good. I am not against marriage -- I am for the REAL marriage. I am against the false, the pseudo, that exists. But it is an arrangement. It gives you a certain security, safety, occupation. It keeps you engaged. Otherwise, it gives you no enrichment, it gives you no nourishment.
    
6. I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you who destroy it, because you don’t know what love is. You simply pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you don’t know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is.
    
7. India missed with arranged marriage; the West is missing with free love.
   India missed love because parents were too calculating and cunning. They would not allow falling in love: that is dangerous, nobody knows where it will lead. They were too clever, and through cleverness India missed all possibility of love. In the West they are too rebellious, too young; not clever -- too young, too childish. They have made sex a free thing, available everywhere: no need to go so deep to discover love, enjoy sex and be finished.
   
   Through sex, the West is missing: through marriage, the East has missed. But if you are alert you need not be Eastern, you need not be Western. Love is neither Eastern nor Western. Go on discovering love within you. And if you love, sooner or later the person will happen to you, because a loving heart, sooner or later, comes to a loving heart -- it always happens. You will find the right person. But if you are jealous you will not find, if you are simply for sex you will not find, if you live only for security you will not find.
    
8. Be a little aware before you are trapped! Marriage is a trap: you will be trapped by the woman and the woman will be trapped by you. It is a mutual trap. And then legally you are allowed to torture each other forever.
    
9. Love, and love as deeply as possible. And if love itself becomes the marriage, that is another thing, altogether different. If love itself becomes such an intimacy that it is unbreakable, that is another thing, that is not a legal sanction. Legal sanctions are needed only because you are afraid. You know that your love is not enough; you need the legal support for it. You know perfectly well that you can escape or the woman can escape, hence you need the policeman to keep you together. But this is ugly, to need a policeman to keep you together. That's what marriage is!
    
10. Marriage exists as an institution of exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of exploitation how can ecstasy be born?
     
11. I have never heard about any perfect marriage. They say perfect marriages are made in heaven. Nobody comes back from there so maybe it is true, but what kind of marriage will those perfect marriages be? There will be no tension, there will be no individuality in the man or in the woman. They will never collide, they will never fight. They will be too sweet to each other. And too much sweetness brings diabetes!
     
12. Marriage is an institution that teaches a man regularity, frugality, temperance, forbearance and many other splendid virtues he would not need had he stayed single.
     
13. As I see it, out of a hundred marriages ninety-nine marriages are just licensed prostitution. They are not marriages. A marriage is only a real marriage when it grows out of love. Legal, illegal, does not matter. The real thing that matters is love. If love exists between two persons, it is blessed. If love does not exist between two persons, then all your laws put together cannot bridge them. Then they exist separate, then they exist apart, then they exist in conflict, then they exist always in war. And they create all kinds of trouble for each other. They are nasty to each other, nagging to each other, possessive of each other, violent, oppressive, dominating, dictatorial. In a better world, with a better humanity, things will be different. In a better world, the child born out of love will not be called bastard; the child only born out of license, law, will be called bastard.
     
14. Love affairs have been failing, and parents feel very happy. People come to me and they say, "Look, in the West love affairs have been failing. Then why are you against marriage?" they ask me. Love affairs are failing because first the marriage was arranged by the astrologer, then it was arranged by the parents, and now it is being arranged by biology, by instinct. You suddenly feel that you like a woman, but you don't know how long this is going to last and you are not even aware why you like her. You are not even alert to what it is in you that likes her. Maybe it is just her hairstyle. Now, are you going to get married to a hairstyle? You can get married, but tomorrow morning when you see her hair disheveled you will be at a loss: "Is this the same woman I fell in love with?" How long can you be interested in the hairstyle? Soon you will get fed up. The same hairstyle again and again -- the whole day, twenty-four hours a day...!
    
    People are falling in love because a certain man has a certain type of nose. People are falling in love with fragments! Nobody is bothered about the totality of the person -- and it is a vast thing. The nose does not count for much -- after two days you won't look at it at all. Or the color, or the shape, or the proportion of the body -- all these things are very minor. The real thing is the total functioning of the person, and that can be experienced only when you live together.

Osho Quotes on Money

1. Look at American newspapers and you will see that you are missing: happiness can be purchased just through money. They create a feeling that you are missing something; then you start working for it, then you earn money, then you purchase it. And then you feel that you have been deceived. But that feeling is not very deep, because before you feel that you have been deceived some new deceptions have entered the mind, and now they are pulling you ahead. You must have a hill station house, or you must have a summer resort, or you must have a yacht -- something is always there to be achieved. Only then will you be happy. They will go on pulling you up to your death. Until you die, those advertisements, that propaganda, will go on pulling you.
    
2. The materialistic pattern of life is that where money predominates over everything. The non-materialistic life is that where money is just a means — happiness predominates, joy predominates; your own individuality predominates. You know who you are and where you are going, and you are not distracted. Then suddenly you will see your life has a meditative quality to it.
    
3. One of the greatest problems that money creates is that you never know whether you are loved or your money is loved, whether you are desirable or your money is desirable. And it is so difficult to figure out, that one would have preferred not to have had money; at least life would have been simple.
    
4. A real spirituality must be rooted in earthliness. Any spirituality that denies the earth, rejects the earth, becomes abstract, becomes airy-fairy. It has no more blood in it; it is no more alive. Yes, Jews are very earth-bound. And what is wrong in having money? One should not be possessive; one should be able to use it. And Jews know how to use it! One should not be miserly. Money has to be created and money has to be used. Money is a beautiful invention, a great blessing, if rightly used. It makes many things possible. Money is a magical phenomenon.
   
   If you have a ten-rupee note in your pocket, you have thousands of things in your pocket. You can have anything with those ten rupees. You can materialize a man who will massage your body the whole night! Or you can materialize food or you can materialize ANYTHING! That ten-rupee note carries many possibilities. You cannot carry all those possibilities with you if there is no note; then your life will be very limited. You can have a man who can massage your body, but then that is the only possibility you have with you. If you suddenly feel hungry or thirsty, then that man cannot do anything else. But a ten-rupee note can do many things, millions of things; it has infinite possibilities. It is one of the greatest inventions of man; there is no need to be against it. I am not against it.
   
   Use it. Don't cling to it. Clinging is bad. The more you cling to money, the poorer the world becomes because of your clinging, because money is multiplied if it is always moving from one hand to another hand. In English we have another name for money which is more significant -- it is "currency." That simply indicates that money should always remain moving like a current. It should always be on the move from one hand to another hand. The more it moves the better. For example, if I have a ten-rupee note and I keep it to myself, then there is only one ten-rupee note in the world. If I give it to you and you give it to somebody else and each person goes on giving, if it goes through ten hands then we have a hundred rupees, we have used a hundred rupees' worth of utilities; the ten rupees is multiplied by ten. And Jews know how to use money; nothing is wrong in it. Yes, greed is bad. Greed means you become obsessed with money; you don't use it as a means, it becomes the end. That is bad, and it is bad whether you are a Jew or a Jaina, Hindu or Mohammedan; it doesn't matter.
    
5. The mind always hankers for more and more. If you have money, it hankers for more money; if you have prestige, it hankers for more prestige; if you have knowledge, it hankers for more knowledge. Mind lives in the “more.”
    
6. Our whole attitude about life is money-oriented. And money is one of the most uncreative things one can become interested in. Our whole approach is power-oriented and power is destructive, not creative. A man who is after money will become destructive, because money has to be robbed, exploited; it has to be taken away from many people, only then can you have it. Power simply means you have to make many people impotent, you have to destroy them -- only then will you be powerful, can you be powerful. Remember: these are destructive acts. A creative act enhances the beauty of the world; it gives something to the world, it never takes anything from it. A creative person comes into the world, enhances the beauty of the world -- a song here, a painting there. He makes the world dance better, enjoy better, love better, meditate better. When he leaves this world, he leaves a better world behind him. Nobody may know him; somebody may know him -- that is not the point. But he leaves the world a better world, tremendously fulfilled because his life has been of some intrinsic value.
   
   Money, power, prestige, are uncreative; not only uncreative, but destructive activities. Beware of them! And if you beware of them you can become creative very easily. I am not saying that your creativity is going to give you power, prestige, money. No, I cannot promise you any rose-gardens. It may give you trouble. It may force you to live a poor man's life. All that I can promise you is that deep inside you will be the richest man possible; deep inside you will be fulfilled; deep inside you will be full of joy and celebration. You will be continuously receiving more and more blessings from God. Your life will be a life of benediction.
   
   But it is possible that outwardly you may not be famous, you may not have money, you may not succeed in the so-called world. But to succeed in this so-called world is to fail deeply, is to fail in the inside world. And what are you going to do with the whole world at your feet if you have lost your own self? What will you do if you possess the whole world and you don't possess yourself? A creative person possesses his own being; he is a master. That's why in the East we have been calling sannyasins 'swamis'. 'Swami' means a master. Beggars have been called swamis -- masters. Emperors we have known, but they proved in the final account, in the final conclusion of their lives, that they were beggars. A man who is after money and power and prestige is a beggar, because he continuously begs. He has nothing to give to the world.
    
7. Everybody is immensely strong because everybody is immensely divine. Everybody is strong because everybody is rooted in God, in the very origin of existence. Remember it The human mind tends to forget it. When you forget it, you become weak. When you become weak,.you start trying some artificial ways to become strong. That's what millions of people are doing. Searching for money, what are you really searching? You are searching power, you are searching strength. Searching for prestige, political authority, what are you searching? You are searching power, strength -- and strength is all the time available just by the corner. You are searching in wrong places.
    
8. Don't be too much concerned about money, because that is the greatest distraction against happiness. And the irony of ironies is that people think they will be happy when they have money. Money has nothing to do with happiness. If you are happy and you have money, you can use it for happiness. If you are unhappy and you have money, you will use that money for more unhappiness. Because money is simply a neutral force.
   
   I am not against money, remember. Don't misinterpret me: I am not against money -- I am not against anything. Money is a means. If you are happy and you have money, you will become more happy. If you are unhappy and you have money, you will become more unhappy because what will you do with your money? Your money will enhance your pattern, whatsoever it is. If you are miserable and you have power, what will you do with your power? You will poison yourself more with your power, you will become more miserable. But people go on looking for money as if money is going to bring happiness. People go on looking for respectability as if respectability is going to give you happiness. People are ready, at any moment, to change their pattern, to change their ways, if more money is available somewhere else.
    
9. You earn money, and one day money is there -- then life says to you, 'What have you got?' But you don't listen. Now you think you have to put your money into politics, you have to become a prime minister or a president -- then everything will be okay. One day you are a prime minister, and life again says, 'What have you got?' You don't listen. You go on thinking of something else and something else and something else. Life is vast -- that's why many lives are wasted.
    
10. We have been distracted into unnatural motivations: money, prestige, power. Listening to the cuckoo is not going to give you money. Listening to the cuckoo is not going to give you power, prestige. Watching the butterfly is not going to help you economically, politically, socially. These things are not paying, but these things make you happy.
     
11. People go on postponing everything that is meaningful. Tomorrow they will laugh; today, money has to be gathered… more money, more power, more things, more gadgets. Tomorrow they will love — today there is no time. But tomorrow never comes, and one day they find themselves burdened with all kinds of gadgets, burdened with money. They have come to the top of the ladder — and there is nowhere to go except to jump in a lake.
     
12. You earn money, you become the richest man in the world -- you become an Andrew Carnegie. And at the peak, when you have become the richest man in the world, suddenly you see your whole life has been a wastage. Money is there, but there is no contentment inside -- and life has gone down the drain.

  Osho Quotes on Music

1. To the ordinary musician the sound is important. To the master musician the silence is important: he uses sound only to create silence. He raises sound to a high pitch and then drops it so suddenly that you fall into a deep silence. In the East the classical music is absolutely devoted to meditation. It has not forgotten its origin. But the origin must have been thousands of years back. There is no written record about it, so whatever I am saying is according to my inner experience. I have felt it, that I use language also in the same way... words to create moments of wordlessness. Basically it is the same technique. So it is possible: listening to music you may remember me. You may feel close to me, although I am not a musician. There is no superficial connection between me and music, but there is something deeply connected. The musician is using notes of music to create periods of silence. I am using words to create gaps.
    
2. When for the first time you fall in love, you meet the opposite. Immediately, it is as if you have got wings, you can fly; poetry arises in your heart. What is happening? The opposite has created something in you. Silence alone is not very beautiful, sound alone is not very beautiful, but the meeting of sound and silence is very, very beautiful -- that is music. The meeting of silence and sound is music.
    
3. Music comes next to silence, but the difference is very big. And it is not that all music necessarily comes close to it. In the name of music, contemporary idiots are doing something which goes even farther away from silence -- from Beatles to jazz to Talking Heads. It is not music; it is simply making noise! It is simply disturbing the silence. In the East, music has been always accepted as a spiritual phenomenon. If your music cannot create silence in the people who are listening, it is not music. If your music does not become an unmoving no-mind in the people of your audience, it is not music. It is just making noise.
    
4. A musician can easily become a meditator, he is very close. There is nothing closer to meditation than music -- wordless, meaningless, but tremendously significant. It says nothing but shows much, expresses nothing but brings to you a great splendor. From musician move towards the mystic. The day your music consists only of silence, you have arrived home.
    
5. Even a man like Picasso is not sane -- very intelligent but not sane. The paintings show his mind. They are nightmarish. They don't have the beauty of the classical art. It is just like jazz music, which is insane and cannot be compared to classical music. Classical music has tremendous sanity. It can make even an insane person sane. Just listening to classical music, he may calm down. But jazz -- even a sane person may start feeling a jerk.
    
6. Compared to classical music, jazz music is in the lowest category, because rather than creating a spirituality in you it simply activates your sexuality. The great classical music takes you higher, beyond your mind, to silences which can give you a taste of meditation, a taste of existence.
    
7. Music can be understood only by those who have a musical ear. And those who have a musical ear should think themselves fortunate because beyond music, just one step more, they enter the world of meditation, silence. Silence is the ultimate music.
    
8. If you want to enjoy classical Indian music you will have to learn. You cannot just go and enjoy it, it needs a certain preparation in you, it needs a certain receptivity in you. It is not vulgar. It needs a certain understanding in you... a deep understanding of sounds and silence -- because music consists of sound and silence. It is not only sound, it contains silence in it.
    
9. I am not teaching you anything at all. I am simply preparing you to listen to my silence. Certainly teaching can be used to create silence, just as sound can be used to create silence. But the sound is not the real music... the real music is between the sounds, the gaps, the intervals.
    
10. When the dancer disappears and only the dance remains, it is meditation. If the dancer is there then it is only dance, not meditation. When the singer disappears and only the song remains, it is meditation. When the musician is not found and only music remains, then it is meditation.
     
11. To understand classical music is possible only if you learn -- and it is a long learning. It is not like jazz music, for which no learning is needed. Even monkeys can understand jazz -- in fact, only monkeys understand it. It is not music, just a few crackpots making all kinds of noises, and you think it is music. You will find better music in a waterfall, or when the wind blows through the pine trees, or simply when you walk in the forest in autumn on dry leaves, and sounds are created. But to understand that, you will need to be free from hunger, free from poverty, free from all kinds of prejudices.
     
12. First the bodily needs have to be fulfilled. If they are not fulfilled you will not have higher needs arising -- impossible. The hungry person cannot think of music. If you start playing on the guitar before a hungry person, there is every possibility that he may retaliate in anger. He may throw your guitar, he may break your guitar, because it is insulting, it is humiliating.
     
13. Remaining uncreative is almost a sin, because you exist and you don't contribute. You eat, you occupy space, and you don't contribute anything. My sannyasins have to be creators. And when you are in deep creativity you are close to God. That's what prayer really is, that's what meditation is. God is the creator, and if you are not creators you will be far away from God. God knows only one language, the language of creativity. That's why when you compose music, when you are utterly lost in it, something of the divine starts filtering out of your being. That is the joy of creativity, that's the ecstasy -- svaha!
     
14. Music is not property; it is art, it is love. It is devotion, it is prayer. You cannot possess it.
     
15. You cannot taste food the way I taste. I can say it because once I was also a camel like you, so I know both kinds of taste. When I see a sunset you may be standing by my side, but you cannot see it; your eyes have lost their sensitivity. Listening to Mozart you may fall asleep, but listening to jazz music you start jumping, shouting, screaming. Jazz is simply crazy! It is not music. These Beatles are really beetles, not human beings, but they appeal to you. To understand the classical music of the East you will need very sensuous ears, very trained, disciplined; the music is so subtle.
     
16. In fact, the greatest music in the world is nothing but an echo of the inner music. Whenever a musician comes closer to that music, great music is born. Only very few have reached close to it: a Tansen, a Baiju Bawara, a Beethoven, a Mozart, a Wagner. Only very few have come close to it, but whenever some music comes close to it, resembles it, it has something great in it. The modern trends in music are far away from it: they are more noisy, less musical. Jazz and other music is more sexual, less spiritual. They are loud. They keep your mind occupied, certainly; they are so loud that you have to remain occupied.
    
    People go on listening to the radio, to the television, at full volume, as loud as possible, blaring, so that they need not think, so that they need not be worried, so that they remain occupied. The noise is so much, you cannot think -- and they are tired of thinking, tired of worrying. People are glued to their chairs for hours listening to just stupid noise; it is not music at all. Music, to be worthy of being called music, has to be meditative. If it brings meditation to you, if it brings silence; if it fills you with silence, if it reminds you of the soundless sound inside you, then only is it real music. Otherwise it is a false coin.
     
17. You can try one beautiful experiment: just put some sand on a plate and then when somebody is playing music, put your plate with the sand on top of it. You will be surprised to see that every sound makes a change in the pattern of the sand on the plate. It goes on changing with every sound. Classical music will put all the sand in a very silent, very harmonious state; it will create a pattern of harmony. The same sand, the same plate and any stupid kind of modern music -- from jazz to the skinheads -- and you will be surprised that your sand is in a chaos. It loses all harmony, it loses all peacefulness, and patterns are created which show immediately to anybody disharmony, discord. A man of silence moves with a certain field of energy around him, and if you are receptive, his vibe starts touching your heart.
     
18. AUM means exactly what Zen people call "the sound of one hand clapping". AUM is the innermost music of your being. When all the thoughts and desires and memories have gone, have disappeared, and the mind is absolutely quiet and silent, there is no noise inside, you start hearing a tremendously beautiful music which does not consist of any meaning. It is pure music without any meaning, gives you great joy, fills you with celebration, makes you dance. You would like to shout "Alleluia!" But the music itself has no meaning; it is pure music, not polluted by any meaning. AUM represents that inner music, that inner harmony, that inner humming sound which happens when your body, your mind, your soul are functioning together in deep accord, when the visible and the invisible, the manifest and the unmanifest are dancing together.
     
19. AUM represents the music of existence, the soundless sound, the sound of silence, when your whole being hums with joy.
     
20. This fact has to be meditated upon. A musician creates music, hence his sexual energy is used in a non-sexual way. A dancer creates dance, he need not create children. He becomes a creator of something higher -- what is the need to create the lower? Even animals can create children; that is nothing special to man. In fact, animals are far more productive -- even mosquitoes can defeat you! That is nothing special to you. Now there are two ways: either repress sex -- as has been done by all the so-called religious traditions of the world -- or transform it.
    
    I am for transformation, hence I teach my sannyasins to be creative. Create music, create poetry, create painting, create pottery, sculpture -- create something! Whatsoever you do, do it with great creativeness, bring something new into existence, and your sex will be fulfilled on a higher plane and there will be no repression. Let your sex become more and more love and less and less lust. And then finally let your love also become a little higher -- that is prayer. Lust is the lowest form of sex, love higher than sex, and prayer is the ultimate transformation.
     
21. Om is the silent sound, when the mind stops all chattering and you enter into the world of no-mind. The music of no-mind is something closer to Om. It is not exactly Om, but Om comes very close to that subtle sound.
     
22. Existence can sing any song that it wants; the flute does not interfere. The flute allows existence to commune with those who are capable of listening to the music that is flowing through it.
     
23. In Indian music there are ragas. A raga is a certain type of music for a certain period of time. For example, for the morning, one raga; for the evening, another; for the middle of the night, another. Around the clock those ragas are played, but each has its own time. And it is really strange, that if you play the raga that is meant to be played in the early morning, in the evening, it does not create the same climax within you. The same man is playing, but something is missing.
    It is just like at sunrise when the birds start singing and the flowers open up. At sunset the birds stop singing, the flowers start closing. Existence is going into rest, so there is a different music for this moment which will be in tune with the whole existence. There is a different tune for the morning Because the sun is rising, your music should be harmonious with the rising energy, the wakening energy of existence.
     
24. If a person is hungry, how can he understand music? It is sheer absurdity to ask him to listen to classical music when he is hungry. Or to tell him to meditate or to sit in zazen. He cannot think anything about Buddha, cannot think anything about God or Jesus. He cannot meditate, his mind will flicker and waver; it will go again and again to his empty stomach. No, he cannot love poetry and he cannot love music when the first needs are unfulfilled. Give him fulfillment in the first, primary needs -- food, shelter, love -- and then suddenly the energy is released from the lower world and he will start reading poetry, listening to music; he will enjoy dancing. Now higher needs are arising: he would like to paint or sculpt. These are luxuries. They only come into existence when lower needs are fulfilled. And when these higher needs are also fulfilled -- you have loved music, listened to music; you have loved poetry, enjoyed it; you have painted, danced -- one day you will see a new realm of needs is arising called the ultimate needs: meditation, God, prayer.
     
25. Listening to classical music you fall into a totally different kind of state. Everything becomes tranquil, still, but it is momentary; it is only a dream world that the musician creates around you. Listening to poetry or looking at great sculpture, for a moment you are dazed, stunned. The mind stops as if you are transported for a moment to some other world, but again you are back in the same old world, in the same old rut. But there are different kinds of poets, painters, sculptors too: the buddhas. A single verse from them may transform you forever. Listening to a buddha is listening to divine music. Listening to a buddha is listening to God himself. A buddha is God visible, a buddha is God available. A buddha is a window into God, an invitation from the beyond.

Osho Quotes on Parenting

1. In a better world no parent will give you any belief. Certainly he will give you courage to inquire, courage to adventure. He will sharpen your intelligence so that when you come across a lie you can see it and when you come across a truth you can immediately recognize it, but he will not give you any belief. No parent, if he loves the child, can give beliefs because beliefs are poisonous. They destroy your intelligence, they destroy your courage, and they create prejudices in you.
    
2. Every parent distracts the child from his essential being, leads him astray. Every teacher, every priest goes on doing the same. Nobody respects the individual. They have already decided what is right and what is wrong, and for all!
    
3. The children need privacy, they need freedom -- they need the freedom to be. But every parent is trying to make the child into something other than he is. They are telling the child to become a Jesus Christ or to become a Gautam Buddha or to become a Mahavira or a Zarathustra. And this is such an ignoble project because nobody can become a Bud&a again, nobody can become a Jesus again. Existence is so creative it never repeats itself.
    
4. If the child is afraid of the parent, love is not possible. If the parent is afraid of the child, love is not possible. How can you love in fear.
    
5. I have never seen a single parent who is happy about their children.
    
6. To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing -- any animal can do it; it is a natural, biological, instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary; very few people are really capable of being parents.
    
7. The criterion is that the real parents will give freedom. They will not impose themselves upon the child, they will not encroach upon his space. From the very beginning their effort will be to help the child to be himself or to be herself. They are to support, they are to strengthen, they are to nourish, but not to impose their ideas, not to give the shoulds and should-nots. They are not to create slaves.
    
8. That's what parents all over the world go on doing: their whole effort is to fulfill their ambitions through the child. Of course nobody has been ever able to fulfill his ambitions, so every parent is in a turmoil. He knows the death is coming close by every day, he can feel the death is growing bigger and bigger and life is shrinking, and his ambitions are still unfulfilled, his desires are still not realized. He knows that he has been a failure. He is perfectly aware that he will die with empty hands -- just the way he had come, with empty hands, he will go.
    
9. Now his whole effort is how to implant his ambitions into the child. He will be gone, but the child will live according to him. What he has not been able to do, the child will be able to do. At least through the child he will fulfill certain dreams.
   It is not going to happen. All that is going to happen is the child will remain unfulfilled as the parent and the child will go on doing the same to his children. This goes on and on from one generation to another generation. We go on giving our diseases; we go on infecting children with our ideas which have not proved valid in our own lives.
    
10. The children are always afraid. The fear is that if they are true then the parents are hurt. If they want to satisfy the parents they have to be untrue; then it hurts them. This is the problem. Parents don t allow authenticity they don't want you to be yourself. They have a certain idea of how you should be, what you should be. If you are that, they are happy; if you are not that, they are unhappy. And nobody can fulfill their idea, nobody at all, because you are not here in this world to fulfill anybody's idea. And your parents cannot conceive who you are going to be. The future is open -- utterly open and unpredictable -- but each parent tries to control the future and each parent feels frustrated.
     
11. It is very difficult to find a parent who is satisfied. Not even the father of Buddha was satisfied.
     
12. They are trying to enforce their ambitions on the child; that's how conditioning begins. They are not allowing the child to be himself. No parent ever allows the child to be himself; it has not happened up to now. That's why humanity is living in such misery: because no child is allowed to be himself. How can he be happy? Happiness happens only when you are authentically yourself. And don't ask me how it happened in the very beginning, because there has been no beginning. Whenever a child is born there is a beginning; otherwise existence has continued forever and forever.
     
13. If you are a parent you will need this much courage -- not to interfere. Open doors of unknown directions to the child so he can explore. He does not know what he has in him, nobody knows. He has to grope in the dark. Don't make him afraid of darkness, don't make him afraid of failure, don't make him afraid of the unknown. Give him support. When he is going on an unknown journey, send him with all your support, with all your love, with all your blessings. Don't let him be affected by your fears. You may have fears, but keep them to yourself. Don't unload those fears on the child because that will be interfering.
    
    After seven years, the next circle of seven years, from seven to fourteen, is a new addition to life: the child's first stirring of sexual energies. But they are only a kind of rehearsal. To be a parent is a difficult job, so unless you are ready to take that difficult job, don't become a parent. People simply go on becoming fathers and mothers not knowing what they are doing. You are bringing a life into existence; all the care in the world will be needed. Now when the child starts playing his sexual rehearsals, that is the time when parents interfere the most, because they have been interfered with. All that they know is what has been done to them, so they simply go on doing that to their children.
    
    Societies don't allow sexual rehearsal, at least have not allowed it up to this century -- only within the last two, three decades, and that too only in very advanced countries. Now children are having co-education. But in a country like India, even now co-education starts only at the university level. The seven-year-old boy and the seven-year-old girl cannot be in the same boarding school. And this is the time for them -- without any risk, without the girl getting pregnant, without any problems arising for their families -- this is the time when they should be allowed all playfulness. Yes, it will have a sexual color to it, but it is rehearsal; it is not the real drama. And if you don't allow them even the rehearsal and then suddenly one day the curtain opens, and the real drama starts .... And those people don't know what is going on; even a prompter is not there to tell them what to do. You have messed up their life completely.
    
    Those seven years, the second circle in life, is significant as a rehearsal. They will meet, mix, play, become acquainted. And that will help humanity to drop almost ninety percent of perversions. If the children from seven to fourteen are allowed to be together; to swim together, to be naked before each other, ninety percent of perversions and ninety percent of pornography will simply disappear. Who will bother about it? When a boy has known so many girls naked, what interest can a magazine like PLAYBOY have for him? When a girl has seen so many boys naked, I don't see that there is any possibility of curiosity about the other; it will simply disappear. They will grow together naturally, not as two different species of animals.
    
    Right now that's how they grow: two different species of animals. They don't belong to one mankind; they are kept separate. A thousand and one barriers are created between them so they cannot have any rehearsal of their sexual life which is going to come. Because this rehearsal is missing, that's why in people's actual sex life foreplay is missing; and foreplay is so important -- far more important than actual sexual contact, because actual sexual contact lasts only for seconds. It is not nourishment. It simply leaves you in a limbo. You were hoping for so much, and nothing comes out of it. In Hindi we have a proverb: kheela pahad nikli chuhia. `You dug out the whole mountain and you found one rat.' After all the effort -- going to the movies and going to the disco and going to the restaurant, and talking all kinds on nonsense which neither you want nor the other wants to do, but both are talking -- digging the mountain, and in the end, just a rat! Nothing is so frustrating as sex.
     
14. Make love only when you are ready to be in a meditative space. And create a meditative atmosphere while you are making love. You should treat the place as sacred. Creating life... what can be more sacred? Do it as beautifully, as aesthetically, as joyously as possible. There should be no hurry. And if the two lovers meet in such an atmosphere outside, and such a silent space within, they will attract a soul, the highest available. You give birth to a child according to your state of love. If every parent is disappointed, he should think about it, that this is the child they deserved. They never created a possibility for a higher and more evolved soul to enter into the womb -- because the male sperm and the female egg only create an opportunity for a soul to enter. They create the opportunity for a body, so some soul can become embodied. But you will attract only that kind of person which your sexual activity makes possible.
    
    If the world is full of idiots and mediocre people, you are responsible; I mean, parents are responsible. They never thought about it, their children are accidental. There cannot be a bigger crime than to create a life accidentally. Prepare for it. And the most essential thing is to understand the orgasmic moment: thoughtless, timeless, mindless, just a pure awareness. In that pure awareness you can attract a Gautam Buddha. The way you are making love, it is strange that more Adolf Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Nadirshahs, Tamerlanes, Genghis Khans, are not attracted. You attract only mediocre people. You don't attract the lowest either, because for the lowest your love has to be almost a rape. For the highest, your love has to be a meditation.
    
    The child's life begins from the moment the soul enters into the womb. If it has come into a meditative space, it is possible to have a child without conditioning him. In fact, a child who is born out of meditation cannot be conditioned; he will rebel against it. Only mediocre people can be conditioned. And a couple who is capable of meditativeness while making love is no ordinary couple. They will be respectful to the child. The child is a guest from the unknown, and you have to be respectful to the guest.
    
    Parents who are not respectful to their children are bound to destroy their lives. Your respect, your love, your gratitude that, "You have chosen us as your parents," will be responded to with deeper respect, more gratitude, more love. And when you love a person, you cannot condition him. When you love a person, you give him freedom, you give him protection. When you love a person you would not like him to be just a carbon copy of yourself, you would like him to be a unique individual. And to make him unique you will arrange all the conditions, all the challenges which provoke his potential.
    
    You will not burden him with knowledgeability, because you would like him to know the truth himself. Any borrowed truth is a lie. Unless it is experienced by you, it is never the truth. You will help the child to experience more and more things. You will not tell him lies, that there is a God. It is a lie, because you have not seen God. Your parents lied to you, and you are repeating it in your turn to your child. Your parents conditioned you, and what is your life? -- a long misery from cradle to grave. Do you want your child's life also to be just a misery, full of suffering, anxiety, despair?
     
15. Let your child have his original face. It may create fear in you, it may create concern in you, but those are your problems. Don't in any way inhibit the child. And a child who has been given freedom -- even against his own parents -- will respect you forever, will remain grateful to you forever. Right now, just the opposite is the case: every child is full of anger, rage, hatred for the parents, because what they have done to him is unforgivable. So by giving freedom, by allowing the child to be himself whatever that means, accepting him in his natural self wherever it leads, you are creating a child who will worship you. You have been not only ordinary fathers and mothers, you have been givers of life, freedom, uniqueness.
    
    He will carry the beautiful memory in his heart forever, and his gratitude towards you will make him absolutely certain that what has been done for him, he has to do for the future generations. If every generation behaves towards the children with love and respect, and gives them freedom to grow, all this nonsense of the generation gap will disappear. If you respect your children, if you are friends to your children, no generation gap is possible. Ordinarily what is happening around the world is, there is no communication between the children and the parents. They kiss each other, they shake hands, but it is all hypocrisy -- done because it has to be done.
     
16. Every parent is harassing the child to become great, to become Alexander the Great, to become Gautam Buddha. What can the child do? -- it is not in the program of his basic cell. So parents are disturbed because children don't listen to them, and children are unnecessarily harassed and hurt. They cannot forgive their parents their whole life for the way they have been treated in their helplessness, in their childhood. What you are demanding of them they don't have in their basic program. Every human psychology is completely programmed, his physiology is completely programmed, and everything goes according to the program. There are no accidents. You can have as beautiful women in the world as you like; you can have as strong men in the world as you like. Now it is within our hands.
     
17. Every parent wants his child to be the greatest, an Alexander the Great. Each parent is living his unfulfilled desires through his children. He has not been able to fulfil his desires. Nobody has ever been able to fulfil their desires because desire as such is unfulfillable. Nothing can be done about it; it is not in the nature of things, it is not the law of life.
     
18. That's what parents go on doing with the children: they try to enforce things on them and the children become serious; and the moment a child becomes serious you have killed him, you have disconnected him from his own source. All that a real parent will do is to help the child to be more and more playful, to be more and more joyous, celebrating. And the parent should help the children to keep that quality intact for their whole life; the child should never disappear. It should not be imposed on by other things: the child should remain an undercurrent always flowing there.
     
19. If we were loving our children, there could not have been so many wars in the world. Who is the parent who will send his children to war? If we were loving our children the world could not have become so ugly. If we were loving our children, I go as far as to say, we would not have given birth to children... because which loving parent will be ready to give birth to their children in this ugly and dirty world? They will excuse themselves, saying, "How to bring our children into such a world? Tomorrow, when we face them, we will feel so ashamed in front of them that we gave birth to them in this world. How to send them out into this ugly world full of immorality and darkness?" Parents would have refused to give birth to children if they had love in their hearts.

Osho Quotes on Philosophy

1. Philosophy means knowing something about the unknown without knowing it. It is just preconceptions, hypotheses, man-constructed ideologies.
    
2. Philosophy tries to explain things -- never succeeds. At the most, it can succeed only in explaining away things, but it never succeeds in explaining them. Religion makes no effort to explain life. It tries to live it. Religion does not take life as a problem to be solved -- it takes life as a mystery to be lived. Religion is not curious about life. Religion is in awe, in tremendous wonder about life.
    
3. Philosophy is a substitute for religion. Those who go into philosophy are lost to religion, and those who want to go into religion, they have to drop all kinds of philosophizing.
    
4. Philosophy is just intellectual gymnastics, it has nothing to do with reality. It talks, argues, creates magnificent systems of thought, but it does not change the man who is creating all this. He remains the same man.
    
5. Philosophy is baseless. It makes castles in the air. Ideas are just ideas. You can project an y idea you like, nobody can prevent you; and once you project the idea you can find all kinds of rationalizations to support it. There is no difficulty.
    
6. Science grows out of doubt. Religion grows out of wonder. Between the two is philosophy; it has not yet decided -- it goes on hanging between doubt and wonder. Sometimes the philosopher doubts and sometimes the philosopher wonders: he is just in between. If he doubts too much, by and by he becomes a scientist. If he wonders too much, by and by he becomes religious. That's why philosophy is disappearing from the world -- because ninety-nine percent of philosophers have become scientists. And one person -- a Buber somewhere, or a Krishnamurti somewhere, or a Suzuki somewhere -- great minds, great penetrating intellects, they have become religious. Philosophy is almost losing its ground.
    
7. Beware of getting lost in philosophy and religion if you really want to know what truth is. Beware of being Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, because they are all ways of being deaf, blind, insensitive.
    
8. RELIGION IS NOT CONCERNED with philosophical questions and answers. To go on looking this way is stupid, and a sheer waste of life, time, energy and consciousness, because you can go on asking and answers can be given -- but from answers only more questions will come out. If in the beginning there was one question, in the end, through many answers, there will be a million questions. Philosophy solves nothing. It promises, but never solves anything -- all those promises remain unfulfilled.
   
   Still it goes on promising. But the experience which can solve the riddles of the mind cannot be attained through philosophical speculation. Buddha was absolutely against philosophy -- there has never been a man more against philosophy than Buddha. Through his own bitter experience he came to understand that all those profundities of philosophy are just superficial. Even the greatest philosopher remains as ordinary as anyone. No problem has been solved by him, not even touched. He carries much knowledge, many answers, but he remains the same in his old age -- no new life happens to him. And the crux, the core of the matter is that mind is a question-raising faculty: it can raise any sort of question, and then it can befool itself by answering them. But YOU are the questioner, and You are the one who solves them.
    
9. Philosophy is a disease, and it is like a cancer: no medicine exists for it yet, you have to go through surgery, a great operation is needed. And philosophy has a similar type of growth, a canceric growth: once it is in you it goes on growing by itself, and it takes all your energies. It is a parasite. You go on becoming weaker and weaker and it becomes stronger and stronger and stronger. Every word creates another word -- and it can go on infinitely.
    
10. Philosophy means that a man has become completely head-oriented. He looks towards existence through the eyes of logic and not through the eyes of love.
     
11. The philosophy of positive thinking means being untruthful; it means being dishonest. It means seeing a certain thing and yet denying what you have seen; it means deceiving yourself and others. Positive thinking is the only bullshit philosophy that America has contributed to human thought -- nothing else. Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and the Christian priest, Vincent Peale -- all these people have filled the whole American mind with this absolutely absurd idea of a positive philosophy. And it appeals particularly to mediocre minds.
     
12. I do not believe in any philosophy of positive thinking; nor do I believe in the opposite, in the philosophy of negative thinking -- because both are there. The positive and the negative make one whole. My philosophy is holistic -- neither positivist, nor negativist, but holistic, realistic. You see the whole in its totality, whatever it is. Good and bad, day and night, life and death, they both are there. My approach is to see exactly what is the case. There is no need to project any philosophy on it.
     
13. Think about truth -- that is allowed! That's why in the West philosophy has grown to great heights and depths. But it is always thinking about truth. It is like madmen thinking about sanity, blind men thinking about light. However the blind man tries to think about light... he may create a big system of thought about what light is, but it is not going to be anything like light. For light, you need eyes.
    
    You cannot think about truth, because thinking will be done by your mind -- which is full of lies, nothing but lies. How are you going to think about truth? Truth can be found only when you have put the mind aside. In the East we say truth is the experience that happens in the state of no-mind or in the state of beyond mind. But in the West the very idea has not existed. And that will make one thing clear to you: philosophy is a Western thing. In the East there is nothing like philosophy.
    
    It is very strange: the East is far older, at least ten thousand years old, but there is nothing like philosophy in the East. What is called Eastern philosophy is a wrong name. In the East it is called darshan -- darshan means "to see." It has nothing to do with thinking. The very word darshan means "to see."
    I had to coin my own word for it: I call it philosia, as against philosophy, because philosophy means "to think," and philosia means "the love of seeing." Philosophy means "the love of thinking" -- but what can you think? Just to avoid the danger of people going beyond mind, and becoming dangerous to the society, a substitute, a toy has been created. That is philosophy.
     
14. Life is a quest not a question, a mystery not a problem, and the difference is vast. The problem has to be solved, can be solved, must be solved, but the mystery is insoluble; it has to be lived, experienced. The question has to be solved so that it disappears; encountering a mystery, you have to dissolve in it. The mystery remains, you disappear. It is a totally different phenomenon. In philosophy the problem disappears, but YOU remain; in religion the mystery remains, you disappear, you evaporate. The ego is very much interested in questions and very much afraid of the mystery. The questions arise out of the ego. It plays with the questions, tries to find out answers -- and each answer in its own turn brings more questions.
    
    It is an unending process; that's why philosophy has not come to any conclusion. Five thousand years of philosophizing, and not even a single conclusion! It is proof enough that philosophy is an exercise in sheer futility; its claims are very bombastic. In India we have a proverb that you dig the whole mountain and in the end you find only one rat -- but philosophy has not even been able to find the rat. It has been trying, and with great effort, to find some way out of the questions, but it gets more and more lost in the jungle. Now there are more philosophical problems than there were before, and they will go on increasing because the moment you assert a single answer it immediately explodes into many questions. It solves nothing, it simply gives you more work to do.

1. us believe in God and the soul. Jainas don't believe in God at all but only in the soul. And Buddhists don't believe in the soul or God either. But about reincarnation all three agree -- even Buddhists agree, who don't believe in the soul. A very strange thing...then who reincarnates? Even THEY could not deny the phenomenon of reincarnation, although they could deny the existence of the soul; they say the soul does not exist but reincarnation exists.
    
2. If people become aware that they have lived the same kind of life thousands of times ... and this was the use that the theory of reincarnation was put to -- to create a great boredom and a fed-upness, because all these things you have done before. And you have not learned anything, you are again ... for thousands of lives you have been running for power, for money, and you are still doing that. It seems every life's experience is being erased and you start from ABC again!
    
3. My suggestion is, don't ask me whether the theory of reincarnation is true or not. To me it is true, to you it is not -- not yet. Don't take any position, negative or positive. Just remain open to the hypothesis. Explore. If you can go into your own past lives, that's enough proof that everybody has a long, long past. And that gives another insight: if there are past lives, that means there are going to be future lives; this life is only just in the middle. Of course, to enter future lives is not possible because the future has not happened yet. But to enter the past is absolutely easy because it has already happened; the memory is there and the record is there. It is just that you have forgotten the way to the record room where it is recorded. Take it as a hypothesis.
    
4. As far as I am concerned, reincarnation is a reality. It is my own experience.
   But what is truth to me becomes theory to you. That is the difficulty.
   And I don't want my truth to be your theory. I want it to be a truth for you also.
    
5. I know reincarnation is a truth. But I am not saying that you should believe it because I say so. Never believe anybody else's experience; that is a hindrance. I can only say to you, just live this incarnation. That will open doors and you will be able to see backwards, you will be able to see forwards. And then it is up to you to believe in it or not. How can you disbelieve it then? But before that.... Let it become an experience.
    
6. Become more meditative. Reincarnation and God, heaven and hell, do not matter. What matters is your becoming alert. Meditation awakens you, gives you eyes -- and then whatever you see, you cannot deny. As far as I am concerned, reincarnation is a truth, because in existence nothing dies. Even the physicist will say, about the objective world, that nothing dies. You can destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- so much power science has given to chimpanzee politicians -- but you cannot destroy a single drop of water.
    
7. In India we have a special science for it -- jaati smaran, remembrance of the past. A certain meditation, certain preparations and you can enter into past lives. But remember that you have to have the stamina and the guts not to get lost. Only in the East has reincarnation been considered. And the three religions which have born in India are the only religions which have an absolute agreement on the point of reincarnation. They differ in their philosophy, theology, on everything, but not on rebirth. It is factual to all of them. They all have come in their meditations to the same place. They cannot deny it. It is an existential fact that you have been before and you will be after your death. The one that was before birth, and the one that will be after death is the same one. Its name is the buddha. Its name is the witness. It never dies and it never is born.
    
8. Remember this: Christianity, particularly Jesus, knows well that there is incarnation, reincarnation, rebirth. Life is a long continuity, this death is not going to be the ultimate death. But once this is said, you relax. And the whole method of Jesus depends on friction: you are not allowed to relax, you have to fight, create friction, so that you can become crystallized.
    
9. This wheel of reincarnation is due to unconsciousness. Once you become conscious, you see there is no point: you have achieved success many times, but what is the point? Death comes and erases everything. It is almost like making castles in the sand -- a wind comes and the castle is gone. And you start making another castle ... again and again the same thing will happen.
    
10. This is the whole doctrine of reincarnation: that unless you learn it by yourself, the whole is not satisfied with you. Unless you become a child in your own right -- not because of your body but because of your being: if the innocence is attained by you, and the innocence is attained in spite of all distractions, in spite of all that was there to destroy it -- you will have to be thrown back again and again and again.
     
11. The eastern concept of reincarnation is beautiful. True or not true, that is not the point. Do you understand me? It is not the point... but it gives you a very relaxed attitude towards life. That is the real thing.
     
12. In the East, all the three great religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism -- have used the idea of reincarnation; that you don't have only one life like in Christianity and Judaism and Mohammedanism. Those three religions born outside of India have only one life. They have not understood the great psychological insight of the East: the East accepts that you will have many, many lives. You had many before, and you will have many in the future.
    The idea was to create in you a sense of utter boredom. Just think, you have lived many times, you have done the same stupid things many times, you are still doing them, and you are bound to do them in the future also. Many, many times, thousands of lives, and you will be just sitting in a grocery store, tending the shop, fighting with your wife, complaining to everybody about your misfortunes. The film is the same, the story is the same, the dialogues are the same, the actors are the same.
    
    The idea was used by these three religions to give you a clear-cut sense of utter boredom. If you want to change, change; otherwise you will be moving like a wheel, and the same spokes will go on coming on top and down, on top and down, and the same misery.... If you want to change then don't postpone it for tomorrow, from this very moment start exploring. And remember not to be repetitive. Always look for something new, something fresh -- because there is really no goal except the journey. So make the most of it. Make it as beautiful as possible, as enchanting, as creative as you have the capacity to make it. And you have infinite capacity, it is just dormant.

Osho Quotes on Sadness

1. If you really want to get beyond the mind and all its experiences -- sadness and joy, anger and peace, hate and love; if you want to get beyond all these dualities, you have to watch them equally, you cannot choose. If you choose, you will not be able to watch those which you don't want to choose. So the first thing is, just be a watcher.
    
2. Watch everything with equal distance, with equal aloofness. Sadness, anger, jealousy, happiness, joy, love -- remain aloof from all and just be total in your watching. Your watchfulness should be total.
    
3. Existence does not make me sad. My own inner being for three decades has never felt a single moment of sadness for myself. I have completely forgotten the strategy, how to be sad. But what goes on happening around the world just brings tears to my eyes.
    
4. Joy is contagious! Laugh, and you see others start laughing. So is it with sadness: be sad, and somebody looking at your long face suddenly becomes sad. We are not separate, we are joined together, so when somebody's heart starts laughing many other hearts are touched -- sometimes even faraway hearts.
    
5. This sadness is existential: unless you can be your natural self, the spring will never come to you, the flowers will never blossom in your being, love will never grow.
    
6. Sickness is unnatural, sadness is unnatural, misery is unnatural -- there must be a cause to it, but just rejoicing in life, in the small things of life is a natural thing. There is no question of finding any cause.
    
7. 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.
    
8. These are the only two situations possible, and you are in the sad situation. Everybody may know about you -- who you are -- but you yourself are completely oblivious of your transcendence, of your real nature, of your authentic being. This is the only sadness in life. You can find many excuses, but the real sadness is this: you don't know who you are. How can a person be happy not knowing who he is, not knowing from where he comes, not knowing where he is going? A thousand and one problems arise because of this basic self-ignorance.
    
9. Only people who want to be somewhere, somebody, have to suffer the sadness of failure. But a person who never wants to be anybody, never wants to be anywhere else, cannot suffer the sadness of failure -- he is always successful, just like me.
    
10. Meditation is the only answer to all the questions of man. It may be frustration, it may be depression, it may be sadness, it may be meaninglessness, it may be anguish: The problems may be many but the answer is one. Meditation is the answer. And the simplest method of meditation is just a way of witnessing.
     
11. Sadness has come. It has happened to you; it is not you. The moment you remember this, suddenly you will see a distance arising between you and the sadness. It does not affect you anymore. When you lose awareness, it affects you; when you gain awareness, there is a distance. The more awareness rises to a higher peak, the more the distance becomes greater and greater. A moment comes when you are so far away from your sadness that it is as if it is no longer there. The same has to be done with happiness also. It will be difficult, because one wants to cling to happiness. But if you want to cling to happiness, you are sowing the seeds of unhappiness.
     
12. People go on repeating the same thing, again and again. If you look at the faces of people in the world, you will be surprised: why do all these people look so sad? Why do their eyes look as if they have lost all hope? The reason is simple; the reason is repetition. Man is intelligent; repetition creates boredom. Boredom brings a sadness because one knows what is going to happen tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow... until one goes into the grave, it will be the same, the same story.
     
13. Make it a point: whatsoever -- sadness, anger -- whatsoever -- depression, unhappiness -- be with it. And you will suddenly become surprised that if you remain with sadness, sadness changes into a beautiful thing, sadness becomes a depth. If you remain with anger, not thinking about, just being with, anger is transformed; it becomes forgiveness. If you remain with sex, sex takes on a different quality; it becomes love.
     
14. Life consists of sadness too. And sadness is also beautiful; it has its own depth, its own delicacy, its own deliciousness, its own taste. A man is poorer if he has not known sadness; he is impoverished, very much impoverished. His laughter will be shallow, his laughter will not have depth, because depth comes only through sadness. A man who knows sadness, if he laughs, his laughter will have depth. His laughter will have something of his sadness too, his laughter will be more colorful.
     
15. All your so-called religions are too serious. To me seriousness is sickening. Laughter has a health, a beauty, a quality of grace and dance. I am in absolute favor of laughter and against sadness. Sadness is sickness and is very close to death. Laughter is life and is very close to the universal life, to the very God that is spread all over.
     
16. Just look: happiness, unhappiness, sadness, joy, they come and go, they are beggars around you. The witnessing remains the very center, uncaused, unchanging, one. Seek that within you and then everything becomes clear. When you are clear within, everything is transparent. The truth is everywhere around you, only you have to become one.
     
17. To make the phenomenon of sadness happen, you have to give energy. That's why after sadness you feel so dissipated, drained. What happened? -- because in depression you were not doing anything, you were simply sad. So why do you feel so much dissipated and drained? Out of sadness you must have come full of energy -- but no. Remember, all negative emotions need energy, they drain you. And all positive emotions and positive attitudes are dynamos of energy; they create more energy, they never drain you.
     
18. You will be surprised: if you can meditate on sadness, sadness will reveal its secrets to you -- and they are of tremendous value. And sadness, once it has revealed its secrets to you, will disappear. Its work is done, its message delivered. And when sadness disappears, joy arises. Joy arises only when sadness disappears out of meditation; there is no other way. Joy wells up when you have broken the ice of sadness that surrounds it. In fact, sadness is like the shell that surrounds the seed; it is protective, it is not the enemy. Once the seed has dropped its protection, is surrendered into the soil, the shell has died, only then the sprout is born.
     
19. When you are like a rock, sitting dead with your sadness, nursing your sadness, nobody is with you. Nobody can be with you. There simply comes a gap between you and the life. Then whatsoever you are doing, you have to depend on your energy source. It will be dissipated, you are wasting your energy, you are being drained by your own nonsense. But one thing is there, that when you are sad and negative you will feel more ego. When you are happy, blissful, ecstatic, you will not feel the ego. When you are happy and ecstatic there is no I, and the other disappears. You are bridged with existence, not broken apart -- you are together.
    
    When you are sad, angry, greedy, moving just within yourself and enjoying your wounds and seeing them again and again, playing with your wounds, trying to be a martyr, there is a gap between you and existence. You are left alone, and there you will feel I. And when you feel I, the whole existence becomes inimical to you. Not that it becomes inimical because of your I -- it appears to be inimical. And if you see that everybody is the enemy, you will behave in such a way that everybody HAS to be the enemy.
     
20. Responsibility is yours. And if you take it as yours, you can do something about it. If it is somebody else's, what can you do? If others create sadness, you will always remain sad because what can you do about it? Millions of others are all around: if others make you frustrated then nothing can be done. You will remain frustrated, then this is your destiny -- because how can you change others? If you are responsible, immediately you become a master. Now you can do something. You can change yourself, you can change your attitudes. You can look through different attitudes towards the world, and you can feel that if you feel miserable, somewhere you are a misfit in the total energy system. That's all that sin means: you are a misfit, not knowing how to move in this total energy system. And the energy system is neutral. If you follow it you will be happy. If you don't follow it, you will be miserable.
     
21. Don't fight it, don't try to distract your mind into something else. Don't go to see a movie because you are feeling very sad. Don't try to repress your feeling. It is a great opportunity for meditation.
    Just watch from where the anger arises. Just go to the very roots. Just go to the very roots from where the sadness is coming -- and the greatest surprise is that it doesn't have any roots. So when you look for the roots, by that time your emotions start disappearing seeing that, "This man is strange -- he is looking for the roots!" And those afflictions, emotions, sentiments, feelings -- none of them have any roots. They are just clouds, without any roots, surrounding your mind.
    
    So, if you start looking for roots, your emotions start dispersing -- "This is not the right man, he is not going to be affected by us. He is a little strange; here we are, and he is looking for the roots!"
    Rather than being sad, rather than being angry, rather than being miserable -- search for the roots! Every sentiment, every emotion, every feeling will disappear if you look for the roots. If your awareness goes that deep in search, then the emotion will be gone, and the sky of your inner being will be absolutely clear and clean.
     
22. My sadness is not about myself. I am absolutely contented. Death cannot take anything from me. My sadness is concerned with the whole of humanity, because their death will take away any opportunity of their becoming enlightened, of their becoming blissful, of their knowing meaning and significance. They have lived in darkness. Are they going to die in darkness too?
     
23. Why is the whole world against me? I have not harmed anybody, I have not committed any crime. It is unprecedented that the whole world, all the religions, all the nations, all the politicians, should be against a man who is absolutely innocent. But I know their reason, why they are against me: They are miserable, and I teach you to be blissful. They have been living in sadness -- sadness has become their second nature -- and I teach you to live fully, intensely and totally. Then even your tears will be part of your laughter. Then your dark nights will also be nothing but moments of relaxation and peace, and wombs for a new day, a new dawn. My teaching is for life, and all the teachings in the world that have gone by are against life -- that is their problem. And they cannot argue.
     
24. Anger is active sadness; sadness is inactive anger. They are not two things. Watch your own behaviour. When do you find yourself sad? You find yourself sad only in situations where you cannot be angry. The boss in the office says something and you cannot be angry; it is uneconomical. You cannot be angry and you have to go on smiling -- then you become sad. The energy has become inactive. You come home, and with your wife you find a small thing, anything irrelevant, and you become angry.
    
    People enjoy anger, they relish it, because at least they feel they are doing something. In sadness, you feel that something has been done to you. You have been at the passive end, at the receiving end. Something has been done to you and you were helpless and you could not retort, you could not retaliate, you could not react.
    In anger, you feel a little good. After a big bout of anger, one feels a little relaxed... feels good. You are alive. You also can do things. Of course you cannot do to the boss, but you can do to the wife.
    
    Then the wife waits for the children to come home -- because it is uneconomical to be angry with the husband. The whole life seems to be economics. He is the boss, and the wife depends on him, and it is risky to be angry at him. She will wait for the children. They will come home from school, and then she can jump and she can beat them -- for their own sake. And what will the children do? They will go in their rooms, they will throw their books, tear them, or beat their dolls, or beat their dogs, or torture their cats. They will have to do something. Everybody has to do something, otherwise one becomes sad.

Osho Quotes on Sadness

1. If you really want to get beyond the mind and all its experiences -- sadness and joy, anger and peace, hate and love; if you want to get beyond all these dualities, you have to watch them equally, you cannot choose. If you choose, you will not be able to watch those which you don't want to choose. So the first thing is, just be a watcher.
    
2. Watch everything with equal distance, with equal aloofness. Sadness, anger, jealousy, happiness, joy, love -- remain aloof from all and just be total in your watching. Your watchfulness should be total.
    
3. Existence does not make me sad. My own inner being for three decades has never felt a single moment of sadness for myself. I have completely forgotten the strategy, how to be sad. But what goes on happening around the world just brings tears to my eyes.
    
4. Joy is contagious! Laugh, and you see others start laughing. So is it with sadness: be sad, and somebody looking at your long face suddenly becomes sad. We are not separate, we are joined together, so when somebody's heart starts laughing many other hearts are touched -- sometimes even faraway hearts.
    
5. This sadness is existential: unless you can be your natural self, the spring will never come to you, the flowers will never blossom in your being, love will never grow.
    
6. Sickness is unnatural, sadness is unnatural, misery is unnatural -- there must be a cause to it, but just rejoicing in life, in the small things of life is a natural thing. There is no question of finding any cause.
    
7. 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.
    
8. These are the only two situations possible, and you are in the sad situation. Everybody may know about you -- who you are -- but you yourself are completely oblivious of your transcendence, of your real nature, of your authentic being. This is the only sadness in life. You can find many excuses, but the real sadness is this: you don't know who you are. How can a person be happy not knowing who he is, not knowing from where he comes, not knowing where he is going? A thousand and one problems arise because of this basic self-ignorance.
    
9. Only people who want to be somewhere, somebody, have to suffer the sadness of failure. But a person who never wants to be anybody, never wants to be anywhere else, cannot suffer the sadness of failure -- he is always successful, just like me.
    
10. Meditation is the only answer to all the questions of man. It may be frustration, it may be depression, it may be sadness, it may be meaninglessness, it may be anguish: The problems may be many but the answer is one. Meditation is the answer. And the simplest method of meditation is just a way of witnessing.
     
11. Sadness has come. It has happened to you; it is not you. The moment you remember this, suddenly you will see a distance arising between you and the sadness. It does not affect you anymore. When you lose awareness, it affects you; when you gain awareness, there is a distance. The more awareness rises to a higher peak, the more the distance becomes greater and greater. A moment comes when you are so far away from your sadness that it is as if it is no longer there. The same has to be done with happiness also. It will be difficult, because one wants to cling to happiness. But if you want to cling to happiness, you are sowing the seeds of unhappiness.
     
12. People go on repeating the same thing, again and again. If you look at the faces of people in the world, you will be surprised: why do all these people look so sad? Why do their eyes look as if they have lost all hope? The reason is simple; the reason is repetition. Man is intelligent; repetition creates boredom. Boredom brings a sadness because one knows what is going to happen tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow... until one goes into the grave, it will be the same, the same story.
     
13. Make it a point: whatsoever -- sadness, anger -- whatsoever -- depression, unhappiness -- be with it. And you will suddenly become surprised that if you remain with sadness, sadness changes into a beautiful thing, sadness becomes a depth. If you remain with anger, not thinking about, just being with, anger is transformed; it becomes forgiveness. If you remain with sex, sex takes on a different quality; it becomes love.
     
14. Life consists of sadness too. And sadness is also beautiful; it has its own depth, its own delicacy, its own deliciousness, its own taste. A man is poorer if he has not known sadness; he is impoverished, very much impoverished. His laughter will be shallow, his laughter will not have depth, because depth comes only through sadness. A man who knows sadness, if he laughs, his laughter will have depth. His laughter will have something of his sadness too, his laughter will be more colorful.
     
15. All your so-called religions are too serious. To me seriousness is sickening. Laughter has a health, a beauty, a quality of grace and dance. I am in absolute favor of laughter and against sadness. Sadness is sickness and is very close to death. Laughter is life and is very close to the universal life, to the very God that is spread all over.
     
16. Just look: happiness, unhappiness, sadness, joy, they come and go, they are beggars around you. The witnessing remains the very center, uncaused, unchanging, one. Seek that within you and then everything becomes clear. When you are clear within, everything is transparent. The truth is everywhere around you, only you have to become one.
     
17. To make the phenomenon of sadness happen, you have to give energy. That's why after sadness you feel so dissipated, drained. What happened? -- because in depression you were not doing anything, you were simply sad. So why do you feel so much dissipated and drained? Out of sadness you must have come full of energy -- but no. Remember, all negative emotions need energy, they drain you. And all positive emotions and positive attitudes are dynamos of energy; they create more energy, they never drain you.
     
18. You will be surprised: if you can meditate on sadness, sadness will reveal its secrets to you -- and they are of tremendous value. And sadness, once it has revealed its secrets to you, will disappear. Its work is done, its message delivered. And when sadness disappears, joy arises. Joy arises only when sadness disappears out of meditation; there is no other way. Joy wells up when you have broken the ice of sadness that surrounds it. In fact, sadness is like the shell that surrounds the seed; it is protective, it is not the enemy. Once the seed has dropped its protection, is surrendered into the soil, the shell has died, only then the sprout is born.
     
19. When you are like a rock, sitting dead with your sadness, nursing your sadness, nobody is with you. Nobody can be with you. There simply comes a gap between you and the life. Then whatsoever you are doing, you have to depend on your energy source. It will be dissipated, you are wasting your energy, you are being drained by your own nonsense. But one thing is there, that when you are sad and negative you will feel more ego. When you are happy, blissful, ecstatic, you will not feel the ego. When you are happy and ecstatic there is no I, and the other disappears. You are bridged with existence, not broken apart -- you are together.
    
    When you are sad, angry, greedy, moving just within yourself and enjoying your wounds and seeing them again and again, playing with your wounds, trying to be a martyr, there is a gap between you and existence. You are left alone, and there you will feel I. And when you feel I, the whole existence becomes inimical to you. Not that it becomes inimical because of your I -- it appears to be inimical. And if you see that everybody is the enemy, you will behave in such a way that everybody HAS to be the enemy.
     
20. Responsibility is yours. And if you take it as yours, you can do something about it. If it is somebody else's, what can you do? If others create sadness, you will always remain sad because what can you do about it? Millions of others are all around: if others make you frustrated then nothing can be done. You will remain frustrated, then this is your destiny -- because how can you change others? If you are responsible, immediately you become a master. Now you can do something. You can change yourself, you can change your attitudes. You can look through different attitudes towards the world, and you can feel that if you feel miserable, somewhere you are a misfit in the total energy system. That's all that sin means: you are a misfit, not knowing how to move in this total energy system. And the energy system is neutral. If you follow it you will be happy. If you don't follow it, you will be miserable.
     
21. Don't fight it, don't try to distract your mind into something else. Don't go to see a movie because you are feeling very sad. Don't try to repress your feeling. It is a great opportunity for meditation.
    Just watch from where the anger arises. Just go to the very roots. Just go to the very roots from where the sadness is coming -- and the greatest surprise is that it doesn't have any roots. So when you look for the roots, by that time your emotions start disappearing seeing that, "This man is strange -- he is looking for the roots!" And those afflictions, emotions, sentiments, feelings -- none of them have any roots. They are just clouds, without any roots, surrounding your mind.
    
    So, if you start looking for roots, your emotions start dispersing -- "This is not the right man, he is not going to be affected by us. He is a little strange; here we are, and he is looking for the roots!"
    Rather than being sad, rather than being angry, rather than being miserable -- search for the roots! Every sentiment, every emotion, every feeling will disappear if you look for the roots. If your awareness goes that deep in search, then the emotion will be gone, and the sky of your inner being will be absolutely clear and clean.
     
22. My sadness is not about myself. I am absolutely contented. Death cannot take anything from me. My sadness is concerned with the whole of humanity, because their death will take away any opportunity of their becoming enlightened, of their becoming blissful, of their knowing meaning and significance. They have lived in darkness. Are they going to die in darkness too?
     
23. Why is the whole world against me? I have not harmed anybody, I have not committed any crime. It is unprecedented that the whole world, all the religions, all the nations, all the politicians, should be against a man who is absolutely innocent. But I know their reason, why they are against me: They are miserable, and I teach you to be blissful. They have been living in sadness -- sadness has become their second nature -- and I teach you to live fully, intensely and totally. Then even your tears will be part of your laughter. Then your dark nights will also be nothing but moments of relaxation and peace, and wombs for a new day, a new dawn. My teaching is for life, and all the teachings in the world that have gone by are against life -- that is their problem. And they cannot argue.
     
24. Anger is active sadness; sadness is inactive anger. They are not two things. Watch your own behaviour. When do you find yourself sad? You find yourself sad only in situations where you cannot be angry. The boss in the office says something and you cannot be angry; it is uneconomical. You cannot be angry and you have to go on smiling -- then you become sad. The energy has become inactive. You come home, and with your wife you find a small thing, anything irrelevant, and you become angry.
    
    People enjoy anger, they relish it, because at least they feel they are doing something. In sadness, you feel that something has been done to you. You have been at the passive end, at the receiving end. Something has been done to you and you were helpless and you could not retort, you could not retaliate, you could not react.
    In anger, you feel a little good. After a big bout of anger, one feels a little relaxed... feels good. You are alive. You also can do things. Of course you cannot do to the boss, but you can do to the wife.
    
    Then the wife waits for the children to come home -- because it is uneconomical to be angry with the husband. The whole life seems to be economics. He is the boss, and the wife depends on him, and it is risky to be angry at him. She will wait for the children. They will come home from school, and then she can jump and she can beat them -- for their own sake. And what will the children do? They will go in their rooms, they will throw their books, tear them, or beat their dolls, or beat their dogs, or torture their cats. They will have to do something. Everybody has to do something, otherwise one becomes sad.

Osho Quotes on Samadhi 

1. Sanskrit has two words VYADI and SAMADHI. VYADI means "sickness of the soul" and SAMADHI means "health and wholeness of the soul." But these are existential meanings. A man who has not experienced samadhi is spiritually sick. He may be bodily fit, but he is not spiritually fit. It is possible a man may be bodily sick, but he can attain to samadhi. Even at the last moment of your life, you can attain to samadhi. Your spiritual being comes in all its health, wholesomeness. Even if for a single moment you have known samadhi, you have known the greatest secret in existence.
    
2. There is no self nature which makes people different. The moment you are in samadhi, you will see trees are also in samadhi. The mountains are in samadhi. The stars are in samadhi. The whole existence is in samadhi. Only you had gone astray. You have come back, merged and melted into the wholeness of the universe.
    
3. Right samadhi means you have to be without mind, fully awake; in wakefulness, thoughts have to disappear. It is easy to fall asleep, to fall into a deep coma, in a kind of hysterical fit and be without mind; but that is falling below mind not transcending mind. Right samadhi is a transcendence: you go beyond mind, but you are fully alert, aware. Only then is samadhi right -- when it grows in awareness and when awareness grows through it. When you become enlightened you have to be absolutely awakened; otherwise you missed at the last step.
    
4. Satori is half awake, half asleep. Samadhi is full awareness. But if you are half awake, it won’t take long for you to be fully awake. Just a little hit of the master’s staff on your head, and you will jump out of the bed.
    
5. Samadhi means death with consciousness, dying fully alert. You have died many times but it was not samadhi, it was simple death, because whenever you died you were unconscious. Before death happens you are unconscious, it is just a surgical procedure.
    
6. Samadhi is your very nature in its absolute clarity, in its absolute purity, in its absolute awareness. Samadhi is your real home. And the people who don't know samadhi are wandering without a home. They are homeless people, rootless people and their whole life is nothing but a tragedy. Samadhi gives you roots in existence, and it opens the doors of your home. Samadhi is the ultimate actualization of your potential. And the way to samadhi is simple. Drop the mind -- go beyond the mind and you will enter into samadhi. Mind is the only barrier and strangely we are continuously educating the mind to become more and more powerful. Our whole educational systems around the world, are nursing the mind -- your enemy, making it stronger, more informative, more knowledgeable.
    
7. Patanjali says there is not much difference between sushupti, dreamless sleep, and samadhi, the ultimate state of buddhahood -- not much difference, although there is a difference. The difference is that of consciousness. In dreamless sleep you are unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious, but the state is the same. You move into God, you move into the universal center. You disappear from the circumference and you go to the center. And just that contact with the center so rejuvenates you.
    
8. when the mind dies totally, what is left is samadhi. So I cannot say that the mind dies totally only in samadhi; that will be putting things upside down. The mind dies first, and then what is left is called samadhi. That state of no-mind is called samadhi.
    
9. Awareness is something beyond the mind. You have to watch the mind, you have to watch the presence of mind as much as absence of mind. You have to watch both, you have to go beyond both. It comes, it certainly comes, and when it comes it takes all that is your misery, your ego, your insensitivity, your cruelty. It takes all mud from you... and out of that mud arises the lotus, the one-thousand-petaled lotus of samadhi in you.
    
10. God is total relaxation. Hence Patanjali says that perfect SAMADHI is like sleep, with only one difference — otherwise the quality is the same, the same flavor, the same taste — with just one difference: in sleep you are unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious. But the relaxation, the letgo, is the same. Everything untense, not going anywhere, not even a thought of going anywhere, just being here and now — suddenly everything starts happening.
     
11. Samadhi, the ultimate goal of all yoga and Tantra, is a deep orgasm with the universe itself, with the existence itself. The guru is just trying to help you, to bring you to a point where you can at least surrender the ego. Then a deep ecstasy will happen between you and your master. Wherever there is a `let-go’, ecstasy happens — that is the law.
     
12. In India we make a difference. When an ordinary man dies, it is death. When someone who has attained enlightenment dies, it is samadhi, it is not death. And the word “samadhi” is immensely significant. Samadhi means: one who has attained the ultimate harmony with existence.
     
13. Samadhi is just like the total opening of the lotus, and satori is the beginning of the opening of the petals. Satori is the beginning, samadhi is the climax.
     
14. Don't give energy to your thoughts. Become a witness -- indifferent, aloof, distant. Just see the thoughts, and don't be in any way involved in them. Note the fact: the thoughts are there; but don't choose this way or that, don't be for or against, don't be pro or con. Just be a watcher. Let the mind-traffic move, just stand by the side and look at it, unaffected by it, as if it has nothing to do with you.
    
    Sometimes try it: go on the busiest street where the traffic rush is too much. Stand by the side of the road and see the traffic -- so many people going hither and thither, and cars and bicycles and trucks and buses. You just stand by the side and look, and do the same inside: close your eyes and see -- the mind is a traffic of thoughts, thoughts rushing here and there. You watch, you just be a watcher. By and by, you will see that the traffic is becoming less and less. By and by, you will see that the road is empty, nobody is passing. In those rare moments, first glimpses of SAMADHI will enter in you.
    
    There are three stages of SAMADHI. First, when you achieve glimpses through gaps -- one thought comes, then it has gone and another has not come for the time being. There may even be a gap for a few seconds; in that interval reality penetrates you -- the moon becomes one. The reflection is there only for a single moment, but you will see the first glimpse.
    
    This is what in Zen they call SATORI. By and by, the gaps will become bigger, and when the gaps become bigger and you can see reality more clearly, that vision of reality changes you. Then you cannot be the same because your vision becomes your reality also. Whatsoever you are seeing affects your being. Your vision, by and by, is absorbed, digested. That is the second stage of samadhi.
    
    And then comes the last stage: when suddenly the whole traffic disappears, as if you were fast asleep and dreaming and somebody has shaken you and awakened you, and the whole traffic of dreaming has stopped. In that third stage you become one with reality, because there is nothing to divide. The fence that was dividing you has disappeared. The wall is no more there. The wall is made of the bricks of thoughts, desires, feelings, emotions; once it disappears -- it is a China wall, very ancient, and every strong -- but once it disappears, there is no fence between you and God. When for the first time the third stage happens, that is where the Upanishads announced, "AHAM BRAHAMASMI" -- I am God, I am the Brahma. It is where the Sufi mystic, Mansur, declares, "ANA'L HAQ" -- I am the truth. It is there when Jesus declares, "I and my God are one, I and my Father are one."
     
15. Patanjali says sleep is just next to samadhi. A good sleep, a deep sleep, and samadhi, are different only in one sense: samadhi has awareness, sleep has no awareness. But awareness can happen in sleep. Don't make trouble for yourself, don't divide yourself.

Osho Quotes on Satori 

1. Satori is samadhi and yet not samadhi. It is a glimpse, and a glimpse in the very ordinary of the extraordinary: samadhi happening in ordinary moments. A sudden thing also -- it is not gradual, you don't move in degrees. It is just like water coming to boiling point, to one hundred degrees -- and then the jump, and the water becomes vapor, merges into the sky, and you cannot trace where it has gone. Up to ninety-nine degrees it is boiling and boiling and boiling, but not evaporating. From the ninety-ninth degree it can fall back, it was only hot. But if it passes the hundredth degree, then there is a sudden jump.
    
2. Satori is a glimpse. Much has to be done after it is attained. In fact, the real work starts after the first satori, first glimpse, because then you have tasted of the infinite. Now a real authentic search starts. Before it, it was just so-so, lukewarm, because you were not really confident, certain, what you are doing, where you are going, what is happening.
    
3. That's what Zen calls satori... utter relaxation of your being; a state of your consciousness where there is no becoming left; when you are not an achiever any more; when you are not going anywhere; when there is no goal; when all goals have disappeared and all purposes have been left behind; when you are, simply are. In that moment of isness you dissolve into totality and a new tick arises that has never been there. That tick is called satori, samadhi, enlightenment.
    
4. It can happen in any situation -- whenever you fall in tune with the whole.
    
5. That oneness is samadhi -- and that is the difference between satori and samadhi. Satori is getting in harmony within yourself, that is the first step; samadhi is getting in harmony with the total, that is the last step. In satori your conflict disappears; in SAMADHI you also disappear.
    
6. Samadhi means that you are no more an individual. Satori gives you great individuation. Now listen to it.... Before satori you are a person, not an individual. 'Person' comes from a root which means persona, a mask. Before satori you are just a person, a personality, but not an individuality.
    
7. Satori is only a glimpse of samadhi -- a faraway glimpse. For example, you can see the Himalayan peaks from hundreds of miles away, but to see the peak when sitting on it, is a totally different experience. Satori is only a faraway vision of samadhi; a glimpse, beautiful in itself but not equivalent to samadhi.
    
8. Ordinarily, when you are a person, you are in tremendous unrest. Restlessness is what you are. When you come to satori you have become very, very restful. You are and you are rested, deeply rested. In samadhi you have disappeared, there is only rest, nobody resting... eternal rest.
    
9. One day it happens that your witness has become so perfect that the screen remains empty, nothing passes -- no thought, no desire. That day you have attained to the first state of samadhi, the first satori. And the first satori is the beginning; it triggers many satoris in you, culminating ultimately into samadhi, into nirvana.
    
10. When satori happens or when drilling stops and mind functions no more you may feel for a single moment that you have gone mad, but in fact there is now no possibility of going mad because only a mind can go mad. Now that the mind is no more you cannot go mad. For a moment the idea of madness may come to you -- because you have lived with the mind so long and suddenly it has stopped. You will be in an emptiness. That emptiness is very, very scary. It is like death. You are disappearing, losing identity. It is very paralysing -- for a single moment.
     
11. Once you drop all preoccupations, a great emptiness arises in you. That great emptiness is what meditation is all about. That great emptiness, where no thought flickers, where you are purely available to whatsoever is the case, is satori, is samadhi.
     
12. Whenever the gestalt changes you attain a glimpse. That glimpse is satori. It is not final, you will lose it again. You will not become a buddha by satori; that's why I say it is a samadhi and yet not a samadhi. It is an ocean in a teacup. Ocean, yes, and yet not the ocean -- samadhi in a capsule. It gives you a glimpse, an opening... as if you are moving in a dark night, in a forest, lost; you don't know where you are moving, where the path is, whether you are moving in the right direction or not -- and then suddenly there is lightning. In a moment you see everything! Then the light disappears. You cannot read in lightning, because it lasts only a moment. You cannot sit under the sky and start reading in lightning. No, it is not a constant flow.
    
    Samadhi is such that you can read in its light. Satori is like lightning -- you can see a glimpse of the whole, all that is there, and then it disappears. But you will not be the same again. It is not final enlightenment, but a great step towards it. Now you know. You have had a glimpse, now you can search for more of it. You have tasted it, now buddhas will become meaningful. Now if Zengen meets Dogo again he will not hit him, he will fall at his feet and ask for his forgiveness. Now he will weep millions of tears, because now he will say, 'What compassion Dogo had, that he allowed me to hit him; that he said, "Okay, you go ahead. Beat away!"' If he meets Dogo again, Zengen will not be the same. He has now tasted something which has changed him. He has not attained the final thing -- the final thing will be coming -- but he has got the sample.
    
    Satori is the sample of Patanjali's samadhi. And it is beautiful that the sample is possible, because unless you taste it how can you move towards it? Unless you smell it a little, how can you be attracted and pulled towards it? The glimpse will become a magnetic force. You will never be the same again. You will know something is there and 'whether I find it or not -- that is up to me.' But trust will arise. Satori gives trust and starts a movement, a vital movement in you, towards the final enlightenment that is samadhi.
     
13. People feel very puzzled as to how satori is attained so fast. It is attained so fast because you are already in it. It is not something to be achieved in time, with effort; no effort is needed. It is as if a man has fallen asleep and he has forgotten his name -- as you all forget in your sleep. Then somebody comes and shouts, "Ram! What are you doing here? Get up -- the sun has risen!" He opens his eyes, and he is Ram again. And just a moment before, he was under a thousand and one dreams -- floating, moving, going in a thousand directions, dreaming impossible things. And suddenly a shout, "Ram! Get up -- the sun has risen!" and Ram opens his eyes. Exactly like that is satori.
     
14. Sometimes it has happened that a man has come very close to satori, very close, and then he went astray because of the greed. So watch. Eating, watch. In the morning, you know that the sleep is over, but you still want to turn over and have a little nap. Now it is greed. If your body is fresh and you are feeling good and the tiredness is gone, then watch. It is everywhere. Eating, sleeping, meditating -- it is everywhere.
     
15. Ramkrishna attained to his first SAMADHI, to his first satori, by seeing a row of cranes against the black clouds. He was very young, must have been thirteen. He was sitting by the lake of his town, it was cloudy, dark clouds were gathering, the beginning of the rain, and suddenly a row, many white cranes against the black clouds. Almost like lighting they were there and they were gone, and he attained to his first SAMADHI. For days he was drunk with the unknown, he danced, sang. His town's people, his family thought he had gone mad. But he was so happy.
    
    That sudden experience. Something penetrated like a sword. Something was cut. Sometimes it happens to you too. You don't take account of these moments, because you are afraid. You try to forget them. And they are so extraordinary and they are so exceptional and so rare that even to talk about them, nobody will believe it. So you don't take account of them; you think, "Must be a fantasy, an imagination." But one day in the morning suddenly the world is beautiful -- for no reason at all. The reason IS there: the reason is you are more aware. Maybe you rested well in the night, it was a good sleep, the dreams were not too many, your stomach was not too full of food or hungry. Things somehow went well, and in the morning you felt on the top of the world. It is nothing but awareness.
    With a friend you have not seen for many years, suddenly you become more aware. Anything that makes you more aware, watch it, take account of it, remember it, so that you can go more and more into it. Don't put it aside. Don't neglect it. It has to be fed and watered, taken care of.

Osho Quotes on Tantra

1. Tantric experience means neither to be repressive nor to be indulgent. Tantric experience is possible only if you move deep into meditation, otherwise not. When you become very very still, silent, aware, alert, then only is it possible that you will know something of tantra. Otherwise, tantra can also become an excuse for indulgence -- a new name, a religious name. And you can move into indulgence behind the name of tantra. Names won't make much change; your being needs change.
    
2. Tantra says that before you make love to a woman or to a man, first pray -- because it is going to be a divine meeting of energies. God will surround you. Wherever two lovers are, there is God. Wherever two lovers' energies are meeting and mingling, there is life, alive, at its best; God surrounds you. Churches are empty; love-chambers are full of God. If you have tasted love the way Tantra says to taste it, if you have known love the way Tao says to know it, then by the time you reach forty-two, love starts disappearing on its own accord. And you say goodbye to it with deep gratitude, because you are fulfilled. It has been delightful, it has been a blessing; you say good-bye to it.
    
3. Tantra belongs to Shiva, and the Baul is an offshoot of the same tree. Tantra says, "Everything happens in its own right time, you need not force it. Your force will not help. It will be a disturbance. It may destroy, but it can never be creative. One has to be very effortless, spontaneous. One has to be in a let-go."
    
4. Tantra has special methods how to go on drinking and yet remain aware. YOU cannot be aware even without drinking. Tantra has methods to slowly slowly drink, and keep awareness, not to lose track of your awareness. Slowly slowly, the quantity of your drug has to be increased as you increase in your awareness. A moment comes when -- you will be surprised to know, still there are people in the East who practice it -- a moment comes, when no drug can affect your consciousness at all.
   
   Then the last thing they try is this: they keep poisonous snakes and they allow the snake to bite them on their tongue; that is the last method. Ordinarily a man will die.... These snakes are absolutely poisonous. Three percent of the snakes in India are dangerous; you cannot survive their bite -- once bitten you are gone. But these tantra masters will remain alert even in that moment and they will not die. Their bodies have become accustomed to all kinds of poisons and they have become alert, so alert that no drug can affect them.
    
5. Tantra has an attitude about sex. The reason? -- it tries to redress what the society has done. Tantra is medical. The society has repressed sex; Tantra comes as a remedy to help you redress balance. You have leaned too much to the left; Tantra comes and helps you to lean to the right. And to redress the balance sometimes you have to lean too much to the right, only then the balance is gained. Have you not seen a rope walker, a tightrope walker? He carries a staff in his hand to keep balance. If he feels he is leaning too much to the left, he immediately starts leaning to the right. Then again he feels that now he has leaned too much to the right, he starts leaning towards the left. This is how he keeps in the middle. Tantra is a remedy.
    
6. one thing to be remembered always: if you are not very alert you may go on believing that you are moving into tantra, and you may be simply rationalizing your sexuality -- it may be nothing but sex, rationalized in the terminology of tantra. If you move into sex with awareness, it can turn into tantra. If you move into tantra with unawareness, it can fall and become ordinary sex. It has happened in India -- because only India has tried it. All tantra schools in India, sooner or later, were reduced to sex orgies. It is very difficult to keep aware... it is almost impossible to keep aware. If from the very beginning the discipline has not gone very deep in you, there is every possibility that you will start deceiving yourself. Tantra schools arose in India with great energy, with great insight. And they had something -- because that is the last center humanly available: the seventh is superhuman, the seventh is divine. The sixth is the spiritual center.
   
   From sex to tantra: a great revolution, a mutation, is possible in man. And in the Eat, people became aware that if you become meditative while making love, the quality of sex changes and something new enters into it -- it becomes tantric, it becomes prayerful, it becomes meditative... it becomes SAMADHI. And a natural flow happens: from the third you can jump to the sixth -- you can bypass the fourth and the fifth. It is a great temptation, a great leap -- you can bypass, a shortcut -- but dangerous too, because you may be simply deceiving yourself... and man is very clever -- very clever in finding rationalizations.
    
7. You can find rationalizations. The temptation is always there -- you can find good reasons for wrong motives. Tantra can any moment become just a garbed sexuality; just in the guise of tantra, nothing but sexuality. Then it is dangerous, more dangerous than ordinary sex -- ordinary sex is at least honest. You don't pretend, you don't claim something higher; you simply say it is ordinary sex. But tantra can be dangerous: you start pretending that this is something higher, something superhuman, something not of this world. Keep this in mind.
    
8. In tantra they say: Never make love unless you have checked your nostril -- never make love. If the man is breathing from the feminine nostril then the woman has to breathe from the male nostril. Then there will be real orgasm. Otherwise, love will be just a wastage of energy -- not more than sneezing. You will feel relived after a sneeze -- a good sneeze, one feels relieved -- but nothing much will happen out of it.
    
9. Tantra is basically spiritual sexology ... because man's mind is perverted throughout the world by religions teaching repression of sex. Tantra is the only science which teaches you expression of sex -- not as indulgence, but as a spiritual discipline. This is a transformation of a biological phenomenon into spirituality.

  Osho Quotes on Zen

1. The small word `zen' contains the whole evolution of religious consciousness. It also represents freedom from religious organizations, from priesthood, from any kind of theology, from God. This small word can bring fire to your being.
    
2. Zen is the very essence of all religions, without their stupid rituals, nonsensical theologies. It has dropped everything that could be dropped. It has saved only that which is the very soul of religiousness. So even drinking a cup of tea with a Zen master, you will find you are participating in a religious phenomenon.
    
3. Zen believes that truth cannot be expressed by words, but it can be expressed by gestures, action. Something can be done about it. You cannot say it, but you can show it.
    
4. Zen, in the first place, is not a teaching but a device to awaken you. It is not information, it is not knowledge. It is a method to shake you up, to wake you up. Teaching means you are fast asleep and somebody goes on talking about what awakening is — and you go on snoring and he goes on talking. YOU are asleep, HE is asleep; otherwise he will not talk to you. At least when he sees that you are snoring he will not talk to you.
    
5. Zen wants you to approach life unconditionally. That means without any prejudice, without any precondition, without any expectation. You can be total only if you are standing at your very center.
    
6. Zen approaches things from the very other extreme: wherever there is sacredness, God is. Wherever there is holiness, God is. Not vice versa -- not that God's presence makes any place holy, but if you make any place holy, the presence of the divine, of godliness, is immediately felt there. So they have tried to bring the sacred into everything. No other religion has gone that far, that high, that deep. No other religion has even conceived the idea. In Zen there is no God. In Zen there is only you and your consciousness. Your consciousness is the highest flowering in existence up to now. It can go still higher, and the way to take it higher is to create your whole life in such a way that it becomes sacred.
    
7. Pain has a tremendous value in awakening. Pain has been used by many masters to awaken the sleeping disciple. All your old religions, on the contrary, console the disciple and help him to sleep well -- God is in heaven and everything is okay on the earth, you don't be worried! But Zen is not at all interested in consoling you. It is interested in awakening you.
    
8. I call Zen the only living religion because it is not a religion, but only a religiousness. It has no dogma, it does not depend on any founder. It has no past; in fact it has nothing to teach you. It is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of mankind -- strangest because it enjoys in emptiness, it blossoms in nothingness. It is fulfilled in innocence, in not knowing. It does not discriminate between the mundane and the sacred. For it, all that is, is sacred.
   Life is sacred whatever form, whatever shape. Wherever there is something living and alive it is sacred.
    
9. Zen has only created devices, leaving you completely free to find the truth. And it is strange, more people have become enlightened through Zen than through any other religion of the world. The other religions are very big, and Zen is a very small stream. You can see these small things, and a master uses them in such a way that they start pointing to the moon.
    
10. Organized religions are political. Zen is a non-political religiousness. You cannot call it even religion. It is so individualistic and so emphatically concerned only with the potential of the individual. It does not want anything from the individual, it simply wants him to be himself.
     
11. In Zen an empty-headed fool is almost ready for meditation. A man full of knowledge is far away from meditation. An empty-headed fool is simply a loving way of saying that you are not far away from becoming wise. The fool can become wise; the knowledgeable never. The empty-headed can become empty-minded, but the man who is carrying scriptures and degrees and the universities and the libraries in his head, he is far away. A master will not unnecessarily waste time on such a person.
     
12. In Zen an empty-headed fool is almost ready for meditation. A man full of knowledge is far away from meditation. An empty-headed fool is simply a loving way of saying that you are not far away from becoming wise. The fool can become wise; the knowledgeable never. The empty-headed can become empty-minded, but the man who is carrying scriptures and degrees and the universities and the libraries in his head, he is far away. A master will not unnecessarily waste time on such a person.
     
13. The internal and the external are in absolute harmony. There is no division. But man has created the division and has created much anxiety about it. Drop the division, and go beyond anxiety. Dropping dualities one becomes religious. Don't think yourself separate from the world. That's why Zen people say: The world is Nirvana. There is no other enlightenment.
     
14. Zen does not want anybody to be a believer. Either experience or just go home. Except experience, no belief is going to help. So those who have followed Zen masters were not followers, they were fellow travelers. They were rejoicing in the master’s enlightenment. They were drinking as much of his wisdom as possible, and they were finding the path so that they could also experience the same lightning experience which dissolves all questions, all answers, and leaves you simply innocent, centered — eternity in your hands. But they were not followers, and this is very difficult for the ordinary masses to understand.
     
15. When you are a master of your own being, then you live in the same world but with totally different eyes -- the same world becomes divine. That is the meaning of the declaration of Zen Masters: samsara IS nirvana -- this very world is enlightenment. All that is needed is a change in you from foolishness to wisdom, from unawareness to awareness.
     
16. The path of Zen starts by dropping thoughts, becoming more and more alert to the thought process -- becoming so aware that in that awareness, in that heat of awareness, thoughts start evaporating and you are left in your total nudity and aloneness. That is the path of meditation; it works through the mind. It is against mind, it transcends mind, but the path goes through the mind.
     
17. AUM is the unstruck sound; there is no instrument. When you become absolutely silent, suddenly it is there. Zen people have the right expression for it; they call it'the sound of one hand clapping'. If two hands are there, of course, the clapping is easy, but one hand clapping and the sound of one hand clapping seems to be absurd -- but they are truly expressing the reality. When you go inside and you are absolutely silent you hear for the first time the inner music.
     
18. Zen wants everybody to be a glory unto himself. It is not an achievement, it is not competition; it is simply originality. And the originality is already there, you have just to throw away all the rubbish that you have been collecting from others. However valuable it may be, it is destroying your original being, covering it with dust; and you will never be happy unless you find your original being. The very finding of your original being is such a dance, such a joy, that you can bless the whole world yet you will remain overflowing.