OSHO QUOTES ON FEAR AND DEATH
- People are not afraid of death, they are afraid of losing their separation, they are afraid of losing their ego. Once you start feeling separate from existence the fear of death arises because then death seems to be dangerous. You will no longer be separate; what will happen to your ego, your personality? And you have cultivated the personality with such care, with such great effort; you have polished it your whole life, and death will come and destroy it.
- If you understand, if you see, if you can feel and experience that you are not separate from existence, that you are one with it, all fear of death disappears because there is nobody to die inside you. In the first place there is nobody at all, existence lives through you.
- Laughter. Yes, laughter is the Zen attitude towards death and towards life too, because life and death are not separate. Whatsoever is your attitude towards life will be your attitude towards death, because death comes as the ultimate flowering of life. Life exists for death. Life exists through death. Without death there will be no life at all. Death is not the end but the culmination, the crescendo. Death is not the enemy it is the friend. It makes life possible.
- Everything returns to its original source, has to return to its original source. If you understand life then you understand death also. Life is a forgetfulness of the original source, and death is again a remembrance. Life is going away from the original source, death is coming back home.
- Birth leads to death, death precedes birth. So if you want to see life as it really is, it is rounded on both the sides by death. Death is the beginning and death is again the end, and life is just the illusion in between.
Face your loss, and the encounter will give you a deep understanding of life, says Osho.
- Death makes no distinction between old and young. Whenever it has to come, it comes. We are helpless against death, and that helplessness has been the very source of all religion. If death can be destroyed, then all religion will disappear from earth. Death is a reminder not to take life seriously; it is momentary. Only meditation cannot be destroyed by death.
- So, don't cry and don't feel sorry for your father, because whether one dies at 55 or 95, it makes no difference. Somebody's dream is a little shorter and somebody's dream is a little longer, but a dream is a dream! The length of the dream does not matter in the final analysis. In the final accounting, how long you dream does not matter. You can be 55 or 95, but whenever death comes, the whole is annihilated. It is just as when you wake up in the morning and the whole night and the dream world is simply no more meaningful - it loses all meaning.
- Whenever somebody like a father or a mother dies, something in you also dies. A father is not just outside; his being overlaps your being. You have come through him. He has been the vehicle to bring you to life and he occupies some inner space. When a father or mother dies, something in you also dies with them. You will never be the same again - a gap will be there. A father cannot be replaced, a mother cannot be replaced. So rather than crying and feeling sorry- because those are tricks of the mind to avoid death; if you look at death directly in the eye without letting emotions interfere, then death becomes meditation.
- Your father has died -this is a fact. Now, whether you cry or not makes no difference, so what is the point? Death has happened; you cannot undo it. So, rather than wasting time, look deeply into it, and in the death of your father you will see your own death coming, and the death of your children, and the death of your grandchildren.
- Death is a universal fact nobody is an exception to it; all are included in it. Look into the fact of death and you will see whole existence dying, and that will give you deep insight not only about death but about life, because it is life that brings death.
- Death is implied in life, inbuilt; it unfolds. When the child is born, he starts dying from the very first breath that he takes. When he has taken one breath, he is one breath old -something has died. Just in the very birth, something starts dying. It will take 70 or 55 or 90 years for death to unfold, but it seems that life carries the seed of death in itself.
- Look into this death; meditate over it without any interference from the emotions. Face it, and that very encounter will give you a deep understanding of life. Then your life can never be the same again, because what is the point then? What your father was doing is meaningless. You will be doing the same, and death will come and destroy everything. So, do something which death cannot destroy.
- I say to you that there is only one thing which death cannot destroy, and that is meditation. Everything is vulnerable to death, only meditation is not.
- The deeper you go inwards, the further away you are from death. The further out you move, the deeper you move into death. At the innermost core, there is no death. Look out and you look into death. Look in and you look into the deathless. That deathlessness is what meditation is all about. Ordinarily, nobody thinks about death, but when something like this happens -these rare moments have to be used, these rare moments should not be wasted.
- So get out of emotions, because it is futile. The further away you are, the more death will become a memory and you will accept it and then it will not be possible to use it. You are still close to it; it is still fresh the wound has not healed. Before it is healed, use it. And this wound can become a message to the beyond. Just meditate about it, and love more. Love and death are very similar.
