Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931–90,) also Ācārya Rajneesh or Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, was a controversial Indian spiritual leader. He preached an eclectic mishmash of meditation, yogic spirituality, Eastern mysticism, Western psychotherapies, individual devotion, and sexual freedom. The religious movement he founded based on what he called “loving meditation” spread to Europe and the USA.
Born in Kuchwada, now in Madhya Pradesh, Rajneesh studied philosophy at the University of Jabalpur. He began his adult career as a teacher after earning a Master of Arts from the University of Saugor. At the age of 35, Rajneesh became a self-appointed guru and a teacher of meditation, building an order of sannyasis who renounced the world and practiced asceticism.
In the early 1970s, Rajneesh’s āśram in Pune became a magnet for Western spiritual seekers who were dissatisfied with their culture and were keen to imbibe the wisdom of the East and explore the nature of consciousness. In 1981, he and many followers moved to a large ranch in central Oregon in the United States and built a small city to house all the devotees.
Rajneesh’s enterprise ended in scandal in 1985—his close associates got arrested, and Rajneesh got expelled from the USA. Returning to Pune, he changed his name to the Buddhist ‘Osho’ (‘Friend’) and reconstituted the organization. Since his death, his followers have continued to run the āśram, now known as the Osho Commune International, and to propagate his mixture of athletic and meditational practices, drawing as much on popularized forms of Buddhism and New Ageism.
Compilations of Rajneesh’s teachings include Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance (2001,) Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic (2000,) and Meditation: The First and Last Freedom (2004.)
The Netflix documentary Wild, Wild Country (2018) and books such as Oregon journalist Win McCormack’s The Rajneesh Chronicles (2010) and ex-disciple Jane Stork’s Breaking the Spell (2018) tell the story of Rajneeshpuram, the short-lived Oregon community founded by Rajneesh and his followers.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
You become that which you think you are. Or, it is not that you become it, but that the idea gets very deeply rooted – and that’s what all conditioning is.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
Every moment there is a possibility to be total. Whatsoever you are doing, be absorbed in it so utterly that the mind thinks nothing, is just there, is just a presence. And more and more totality will be coming. And the taste of totality will make you more and more capable of being total. And try to see when you are not total. Those are the moments which have to be dropped slowly, slowly. When you are not total, whenever you are in the head—thinking, brooding, calculating, cunning, clever—you are not total. Slowly, slowly slip out of those moments. It is just an old habit. Habits die hard. But they die certainly—if one persists, they die.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Meditation
This is the Zen approach: nothing is there to be done. There is nothing to do. One has just to be. Have a rest and be ordinary and be natural.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
The seed cannot know what is going to happen, the seed has never known the flower. And the seed cannot even believe that he has the potentiality to become a beautiful flower. Long is the journey, and it is always safer not to go on that journey because unknown is the path, nothing is guaranteed.
Nothing can be guaranteed. Thousand and one are the hazards of the journey, many are the pitfalls – and the seed is secure, hidden inside a hard core. But the seed tries, it makes an effort; it drops the hard shell which is its security, it starts moving. Immediately the fight starts: the struggle with the soil, with the stones, with the rocks. And the seed was very hard and the sprout will be very, very soft and dangers will be many.
There was no danger for the seed, the seed could have survived for millennia, but for the sprout many are the dangers. But the sprout starts towards the unknown, towards the sun, towards the source of light, not knowing where, not knowing why. Great is the cross to be carried, but a dream possesses the seed and the seed moves.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Growth
The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Mother, Mothers Day, Mothers
The world is not a problem; the problem is your unawareness
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: One liners, Awareness
The real thing is not the goal, the real thing is the beauty of the movement. The real thing is not reaching, the real thing is the journey. Remember, the real thing is the journey, the very traveling. It is so beautiful, why bother about the goal? And if you are too bothered about the goal, you will miss the journey, and the journey is life – the goal can only be death.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Journeys
The future of humanity will move closer and closer toward the approach of Zen, because the meeting of the East and West is possible only through something like Zen, which is earthly and yet unearthly.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
If there is pain, use it as an awareness, as meditation, as a sharpening of the soul. And when pleasure is there, use it as a droning, as a forgetfulness. Both are ways to reach God. One is to remember yourself totally, and one is to forget yourself totally.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Awareness
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.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Growth
Zen is non-serious. Zen has a tremendous sense of humor. No other religion has evolved so much that it can have that sense of humor.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
Nobody can teach you love. Love you have to find yourself, within your being, by raising your consciousness to higher levels. And when love comes, there is no question of responsibility. You do things because you enjoy doing them for the person you love. You are not obliging the person, you are not even wanting anything in return, not even gratitude. On the contrary, you are grateful that the person has allowed you to do something for him. It was your joy, sheer joy. Love knows nothing of responsibility. It does many things, it is very creative; it shares all that it has, but it is not a responsibility, remember. Responsibility is an ugly word in comparison to love. Love is natural. Responsibility is created by the cunning priests, politicians who want to dominate you in the name of God, in the name of the nation, in the name of family, in the name of religion—any fiction will do. But they don’t talk about love. On the contrary, they are all against love, because love is unable to be controlled by them. A man of love acts out of his own heart, not according to any moral code. A man of love will not join the army because it is his responsibility to fight for his nation. A man of love will say there are no nations, and there is no question of any fight.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Love
Nature has come to a point where now, unless you take individual responsibility, you cannot grow. More than this nature cannot do. It has done enough. It has given you life, it has given you opportunity; now how to use it, it has left up to you.
Meditation is your freedom…
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Meditation
One drop has just fallen.
It is a precious moment, and one that is full of poignancy. In surrendering to gravity and slipping off the leaf, the drop loses its previous identity and joins the vastness of the water below. We can imagine that it must have trembled before it fell, just on the edge between the known and the unknowable.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Perception
The child can become conscious only if in his past life he has meditated enough, has created enough meditative energy to fight with the darkness that death brings. One simply is lost in an oblivion and then suddenly finds a new womb and forgets completely about the old body. There is a discontinuity. This darkness, this unconsciousness creates the discontinuity. The East has been working hard to penetrate these barriers. And ten thousand years’ work has not been in vain. Everybody can penetrate to the past life, or many past lives. But for that you have to go deeper into your meditation, for two reasons: unless you go deeper, you cannot find the door to another life; secondly, you have to be deeper in meditation because if you find the door of another life, a flood of events will come into the mind. It is hard enough even to carry one life….
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Meditation
From now on, do whatsoever you want, but do it with awareness. Easy and natural are the keys. Don’t repress anything, be your own self.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Awareness
The ego exists because we go on pedalling desire, because we go on striving to get something, because we go on jumping ahead of ourselves.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Existence
For Zen, man is the goal; man is the end unto himself. God is not something above humanity, God is something hidden within humanity. Man is carrying God in himself as a potentiality.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
You are just now, here, neither coming nor going. Everything passes by you; your consciousness reflects it but it does not get identified. When a lion roars in front of a mirror, do you think the mirror roars? Or when the lion is gone and a child comes dancing, the mirror completely forgets about the lion and starts dancing with the child—do you think the mirror dances with the child? The mirror does nothing, it simply reflects. Your consciousness is only a mirror. Neither do you come, nor do you go. Things come and go. You become young, you become old; you are alive, you are dead. All these states are simply reflections in an eternal pool of consciousness.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Zen is all-inclusive. It never denies, it never says no to anything; it accepts everything and transforms it into a higher reality.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
Man has lost one quality, the quality of zestfulness. And without zest, what is life? Just waiting for death? It can’t be anything else.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Zen says everything is divine so how can anything be special? All is special. Nothing is non-special so nothing can be special.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
Life is a constant challenge to know oneself.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Zen says: be empty. Look without any idea. Look into the nature of things but with no idea, with no prejudice, with no presupposition.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
Zen is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
These tenses—past, present and future—are not the tenses of time; they are tenses of the mind. That which is no longer before the mind becomes the past. That which is before the mind is the present. And that which is going to be before the mind is the future. Past is that which is no longer before you. Future is that which is not yet before you. And present is that which is before you and is slipping out of your sight. Soon it will be past….
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: The Mind
The moment you become miserly you are closed to the basic phenomenon of life: expansion, sharing. The moment you start clinging to things, you have missed the target—you have missed. Because things are not the target, you, your innermost being, is the target—not a beautiful house, but a beautiful you; not much money, but a rich you; not many things, but an open being, available to millions of things.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
If you can become a mirror you have become a meditator. Meditation is nothing but skill in mirroring. And now, no word moves inside you so there is no distraction.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Meditation
First meditate, be blissful, then much love will happen of its own accord. Then being with others is beautiful and being alone is also beautiful. Then it is simple, too. You don’t depend on others and you don’t make others dependent on you. Then it is always a friendship, a friendliness. It never becomes a relationship, it is always a relatedness. You relate, but you don’t create a marriage. Marriage is out of fear, relatedness is out of love. You relate; as long as things are moving beautifully, you share. And if you see that the moment has come to depart because your paths separate at this crossroad, you say good-bye with great gratitude for all that the other has been to you, for all the joys and all the pleasures and all the beautiful moments that you have shared with the other. With no misery, with no pain, you simply separate.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Meditation
Mind is really a tape recorder. But it is not continuously on, not twenty-four hours on. When needed, the witness, the man of meditation, the man of awareness, is capable of putting the mind on or off. He puts it on when there is some need….
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Awareness
What meditation does slowly, slowly, a good shout of the master, unexpectedly, in the situation where the disciple was asking some question, and the master jumps and shouts, or hits him, or throws him out of the door, or jumps over him…. These methods were never known. It was purely the very creative genius of Ma Tzu, and he made many people enlightened. Sometimes it looks so hilarious: he threw a man from the window, from a two-storey house, and the man had come to ask on what to meditate. And Ma Tzu not only threw him, he jumped after him, fell on him, sat on his chest, and he said, “Got it?!” And the poor fellow said, “Yes” – because if you say “No,” he may beat you or do something else! It is enough – his body is fractured, and Ma Tzu, sitting on his chest, says, “Got it?!” And in fact he got it, because it was so sudden, out of the blue – he could never have conceived it.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Meditation
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.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
You can enter yoga, or the path of yoga, only when you are totally frustrated with your own mind as it is. If you are still hoping that you can gain something through your mind, yoga is not for you.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
Zen is not a philosophy, it is poetry. It does not propose, it simply persuades. It does not argue, it simply sings its own song.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
A mature mind is one who understands the impossibility of knowing the ultimate, and with this understanding there is a new dimension: the dimension of being.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Zen lives in the present. The Whole teaching is: how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Zen
A man comes into a bar, obviously nervous and obviously in a hurry, walks over to the counter, picks up an empty glass and starts eating it. When he is finished he goes over to the wall, walks up the wall, walks along the ceiling, walks down the other wall and disappears out the door.
The barkeeper can’t believe his eyes. What the hell, he says, is going on here?
A man who has been sitting on a bar stool and seen the whole thing, says with a shrug of his shoulders, Don’t worry, I know that guy. It’s always the same thing with him—comes and goes without even saying hello.
There are millions of people who are living like this. Miracles are happening all around but they can’t see anything, they are blind with their knowledge.
Drop your knowledge. Knowledge is worthless; wonder is precious. Regain the wonder that you had when you were a child—and the kingdom of God belongs only to those who are able to become children again.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
Topics: Knowledge
Do not cling to anything, to any idea; because clinging is the bondage, even to the idea of enlightenment.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
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