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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)
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
Life has no meaning in itself but it is itself an opportunity to make it meaningful.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
Do not cling to anything, to any idea; because clinging is the bondage, even to the idea of enlightenment.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
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
To be in time is to be asleep: to be awake is to be in eternity.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
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
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
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
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
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
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
Life is a constant challenge to know oneself.
—Sri Rajneesh (Osho)
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