OSHO QUOTES

OSHO QUOTES ON LIFE, LOVE, MEDITATION, ZEN, FRIENDLINESS, LAUGHTER, SPIRITUALITY, FREEDOM

• Experience life in all possible ways good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light,summer-winter. Experience all the dualities. Don't be afraid of experience, because the more experience you have, the more mature you become.

• Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That's its balance.

• Friendship is the purest love. It is the highest form of Love where nothing is asked for, no condition, where one simply enjoys giving.

• The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of another person-without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.

• Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars… and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers - for no reason, it is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.

 

• It is beautiful to be alone, it is also beautiful to to be in love, to be with people. And they are complementary, not contradictory.

• Love and respect yourself and never compromise for anything. And then you will be surprised how much growth starts happening of its own accord.. as if rocks have been removed and the river has started flowing.

• The world is like a waiting room in a railway station; it is not your house.You are not going to remain in the waiting room forever. Nothing in the waiting room belongs to you -the furniture, the paintings on the wall .You use them - you see the painting, you sit on the chair, you rest on the bed -but nothing belongs to you. You are just here for a few minutes, or for a few hours at the most, then you will be gone.Yes, what you have brought in with you, into the waiting room, you will take away with you; that’s yours. What have you brought into the world? And the world certainly is a waiting room.The waiting may not be in seconds, minutes, hours, days, it may be in years; but what does it matter whether you wait seven hours, or seventy years?You may forget, in seventy years, that you are just in a waiting room.You may star t thinking perhaps you are the owner, perhaps this is the house you have built.You may start putting your nameplate on the waiting room.

• There is only a difference of proportion of madness between an average man and a mad man; the quality of madness is the same.

• Man, naturally, should be a vegetarian because the whole body is made for vegetarian food. Even scientists concede to the fact that the whole structure of the human body shows that man should not be a non-vegetarian. Man comes from the monkeys and monkeys are vegetarians -absolute vegetarians. If Darwin is correct, then man should be a vegetarian. Now, there are ways to judge whether a certain species of animal is vegetarian or non-vegetarian: it depends on the length of the intestine. Non-vegetarian animals have a very small intestine. Tigers and lions have a very small intestine because meat is already a digested food. It does not need a long intestine to digest it. The work of digestion has been done by the animal and now you are eating the animal’s meat. It is already digested; a long intestine is not needed. Man has one of the longest intestines -that means man is a vegetarian.

• Man ordinarily lives in loneliness. To avoid loneliness, he creates all kinds of relationships, friendships, organizations, political parties, religions and what not. But the basic thing is that he is very much afraid of being lonely. Loneliness is a black hole, a darkness, a frightening negative state almost like death, as if you are being swallowed by death itself. To avoid it, you run out and fall into anybody, just to hold somebody’s hand, to feel that you are not lonely. Nothing hurts more than loneliness.But the trouble is, any relationship that arises out of the fear of being lonely is not going to be a blissful experience, because the other is also joining you out of fear. You both call it love. You are both deceiving yourself and the other. It is simply fear, and fear can never be the source of love. Only those who love are absolutely fearless; only those who love are able to be alone, joyously, whose need for the other has disappeared, who are sufficient unto themselves.

• The day you decide that all these efforts are failures, that your loneliness has remained untouched by all your efforts, that is a great moment of understanding. Then only one thing remains: to see whether loneliness is such a thing that you should be afraid of, or if it is just your nature. Then rather than running out and away, you close your eyes and go in. Suddenly the night is over, and a new dawn.The loneliness transforms into aloneness.

• Aloneness is your nature. You were born alone, you will die alone. And you are living alone without understanding it, without being fully aware of it. You misunderstand aloneness as loneliness; it is simply a misunderstanding. You are sufficient unto yourself.

• You are feeling sad? Befriend it. Have compassion for it. Sadness also has a being. Allow it, embrace it, sit with it, hold hands with it. Be friendly. Be in love with it. Sadness is beautiful! Nothing is wrong with it. Who told you that something is wrong in being sad? In fact, only sadness gives you depth. Laughter is shallow; happiness is skin-deep. Sadness goes to the very bones, to the marrow. Nothing goes as deep as sadness.

• Buddha says: Look into the nature of desire. Watch the movement of desire; it is very subtle. And you will be able to see two things: one, that desire by its very nature is unfulfillable. And second, the moment you understand that desire is unfulfillable, desire disappears and you are left desireless. That is the state of peace, silence, tranquility. That is the state of fulfillment! People never come to fulfillment through desire; they come to fulfillment only by transcending desire.

• The grass beyond your fence is always greener, but don't jump the fence to see whether it is actually so. Enjoy it! If it is greener on the other side of the fence, enjoy it. Why destroy things by jumping the fence and finding out that it is worse than your own grass?

• 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.

• You can love as many people as you want - that does not mean one day you will go bankrupt, and you will have to declare, ‘Now I have no love.’ You cannot go bankrupt as far as love is concerned.

• Be like an alone peak high in the sky. Why should you hanker to belong? You are not a thing! Things belong!

• Relationship is the need of those who cannot be alone. Two alone persons relate, communicate, commune, and yet they remain alone.

• Discover yourself, otherwise you have to depend on other people’s opinions who don’t know themselves.

• Real love is not an escape from loneliness, real love is an overflowing aloneness. One is so happy in being alone that one would like to share.

• NOW is the only reality. All else is either memory or imagination.

• Life is not logic, life is not philosophy. Life is a dance, a song, a celebration! It is more like love and less like logic.

• Your honesty, Your love, Your compassion should come from your inner being, not from teachings and scriptures.

• Friendship is a relationship, friendliness is a state of your being. You are simply friendly; to whom, that is not the point. .

• Take it easy, and remember -Easy is Right.

• You are a great problem- creator. Just understand this and suddenly problems disappear.

• It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love, or how you love, it matters only that you love.

• The person who can be happy alone is really an individual. If your happiness depends on the others, you are a slave. You are yet not free. You are in bondage.

• Life has no meaning. Rejoice! It has no meaning. Dance, sing, enjoy! It has no meaning. You need not be serious. It is a cosmic joke.

• Life is a purposeless play, a play of infinite forces- beautiful if you don’t have an achiever’s mind, ugly if you have ambitions to become something.

• Nobody is responsible except you. Nobody can make you angry, and nobody can make you happy.

• A child needs immense privacy, as much as possible, a maximum of privacy, so that he can develop his individuality

• Love is true only when it does not interfere in the privacy of the other person. It respects his/her individuality, his/her privacy.

• You are the one who is witnessing it. It may be nothingness, it may be blissfulness, it may be silence, but one thing has to be remembered: however beautiful and however enchanting an experience you come across, you are not it. You are the one who is experiencing it. And if you go on and on and on, the ultimate in the journey is the point when there is no experience left - neither silence, nor blissfulness, nor nothingness. There is nothing as an object for you, but only your subjectivity.

• Even great travelers of the inner world have got stuck in beautiful experiences, and have become identified with those experiences, thinking, "I have found myself." They have stopped before reaching the final stage where all experiences disappear. Enlightenment is not an experience.

• The mirror is empty; it is not reflecting anything. It is you.

• Everybody wants freedom as far as talking is concerned, but nobody really is free and nobody really wants to be free, because freedom brings responsibility. It does not come alone. And to be dependent is simple: the responsibility is not on you, the responsibility is on the person you are dependent on.So people have made a schizophrenic way of life. They talk about truth, they talk about freedom, and they live in lies, they live in slaveries - slaveries of many kinds, because each slavery frees you from some responsibility. A man who really wants to be free has to accept immense responsibilities. He cannot dump his responsibilities on anybody else. Whatever he does, whatever he is, he is responsible.

• 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.

• DROP THE IDEA OF BECOMING SOMEONE, BECAUSE YOU ARE ALREADY A MASTERPIECE. YOU CANNOT BE IMPROVED. YOU HAVE ONLY TO COME TO IT, TO KNOW IT, TO REALIZE IT.

• MY MEDITATION IS SIMPLE. IT DOES NOT REQUIRE ANY COMPLEX PRACTICES. IT IS SIMPLE. IT IS SINGING. IT IS DANCING. IT IS SITTING SILENTLY.

• That is the simple secret of happiness. Whatever you are doing, don't let past move your mind; don't let future disturb you. Because the past is no more, and the future is not yet. To live in the memories, to live in the imagination, is to live in the non-existential. And when you are living in the non-existential, you are missing that which is existential. Naturally you will be miserable, because you will miss your whole life.

• This has been said again and again, down through the ages. All the religious people have been saying this; 'We come alone into this world, we go alone.' All togetherness is illusory. he very idea of togetherness arises because we are alone, and the aloneness hurts. We want to drown our aloneness in relationship. That's why we become so much involved in love. Try to see the point. Ordinarily you think you have fallen in love with a woman or with a man because she is beautiful, he is beautiful. That is not the truth. The truth is just the opposite: you have fallen in love because you cannot be alone. You were going to fall. You were going to avoid yourself somehow or other. And there are people who don't fall in love with women or men-then they fall in love with money. They start moving into money or into a power trip, they become politicians. That too is avoiding your aloneness. If you watch man, if you watch yourself deeply, you will be surprised-all your activities can be reduced to one single source. The source is that you are afraid of your aloneness. Everything else is just an excuse. The real cause is that you find yourself very alone.

• Life repeats itself mindlessly - unless you become mindful, it will go on repeating like a wheel. That's why Buddhists call it the wheel of life and death, the wheel of time. It moves like a wheel: birth is followed by death, death is followed by birth; love is followed by hate, hate is followed by love; success is followed by failure, failure is followed by success. Just see! If you can watch just for a few days, you will see a pattern emerging, a wheel pattern. One day, a fine morning, you are feeling so good and so happy, and another day you are so dull, so dead that you start thinking of committing suicide. And just the other day you were so full of life, so blissful that you were feeling thankful to God, that you were in a mood of deep gratefulness, and today there is great complaint and you don't see the point why one should go on living. And it goes on and on, but you don't see the pattern. Once you see the pattern, you can get out of it.

• Be realistic: "Plan for a miracle."

• Fools laugh at others. Wisdom laughs at itself.

• Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

• The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, inauthentic, insincere - and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.

• Don't move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move. Move the way joy makes you move.

• You will find meaning in life only if you create it. It is not lying there somewhere behind the bushes, so you can go and you search a little bit and find it. It is not there like a rock that you will find. It is a poetry to be composed, it is a song to be sung, it is a dance to be danced.

• This is what enlightenment is all about - a deep understanding that there is no problem. Then, with no problem to solve, what will you do? Immediately you start living. You will eat, you will sleep, you will love, you will work, you will have a chit-chat, you will sing, you will dance - what else is there to do?

• There is no need of any competition with anybody. You are yourself, and as you are, you are perfectly good. Accept yourself.

• Once you have started seeing the beauty of life, ugliness starts disappearing. If you start looking at life with joy, sadness starts disappearing. You cannot have heaven and hell together, you can have only one. It is your choice.

• You cannot be truthful if you are not courageous.You cannot be loving if you are not courageous.You cannot be trusting if you are not courageous.You cannot enter into reality if you are not courageous. Hence courage comes first and everything else follows.

• Learn to laugh. Seriousness is a sin, and it is a disease. Laughter has tremendous beauty, a lightness. It will bring lightness to you, and it will give you wings to fly.

• 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. 

• All methods of meditation are nothing but methods to help you to remember the art of let-go. I say remember, because you knew it already. And you know it still, but that knowledge is being repressed by the society.

• How to find joy? Let your ambition disappear; ambition is the barrier.

• If you find a saint who has no sense of humor, then he is not a saint at all.

• Yoga means now you will have to be a harmony, you will have to become 'one'.

• Yoga means to encounter the reality as it is. 

• Truth happens in a state of not knowing, truth happens in innocence. Truth happens where there are no clouds of thoughts moving in your consciousness,when the sky is absolutely clear.

• Relax, let go. But remember only one thing: You are a witness.

• When you love a person all fear disappears. And when you are afraid all love disappears.

• What is a prayer? Prayer is sending blessing to all. Prayer is sending your compassion to all. Prayer is creating an antidote of negative thoughts.

• Love is the door, it is irrelevant with whom you have fallen in love. Love redeems, neither Jesus, nor Krishna. Love redeems.

• Love deeply, love without jealousy, love blissfully and help each other to be more meditative.

• Freedom means freedom from the mind. Then you are simply in a silence, and in that silence you melt, you merge with the whole. And to melt and merge with the whole is to be holy. Not by fasting, not by torturing, but by becoming one with the whole, one becomes holy.

• Desire is our imprisonment. The man who wants nothing, who is absolutely contented as he is, is free of all bondage. He has attained to ultimate freedom, nirvana -and that is the goal of life. And it is only by attaining that freedom that you will know the significance of being, the song of being, the celebration of being. Your life will become a continuous bliss, and not only that YOU will be blissful, you will be able to bless others too. The whole existence will be blessed by you, by your very presence.

• Buddha says: Meditation brings two things. It brings wisdom, it brings freedom. These two flowers grow out of meditation. When you become silent, utterly silent, beyond the mind, two flowers bloom in you. One is of wisdom: you know what is and what is not. And the other is of freedom: you know now there are no more any limitations on you, either of time or of space. You become liberated. Meditation is the key to liberation, to freedom, to wisdom.

   

  

• Become aware, awake. Then you will see that everything comes and goes, all things come and pass. Life is a flux. Your consciousness is the only thing that is immovable, that is eternal. To attain it is freedom. To attain it is the goal of life. If you miss it you have missed your life and you have missed a tremendously great gift, a great opportunity.

• All meditations are nothing but efforts to bring you to the present. When you live in the present moment, with no past hanging around you, with no future projection, you are free from life and death, you are free from body and mind. You are free - simply free -you are freedom.

• Hell means nothing but misery; it is a psychological state of misery, a state of negativity, a state of darkness, of utter loneliness. And heaven is joy, happiness, health, light. But there is a third word, moksha. Moksha means freedom, freedom from both heaven and hell, freedom from pain and pleasure - because pain binds you as much as pleasure binds you. Pain may be an ugly chain and pleasure may be a beautiful chain, decorated, maybe made of gold, but it chains you. One has to be free of both.