Osho – Don't waste a single moment in anything else. Do the necessary things, the essential things

Osho – Man is born only as a potential. If you don’t develop your potential, if you don’t grow spiritually, you are just like an ox. The body will go on becoming bigger and bigger, but that is not growth. Growing old is not growing up, growing physically is not growing spiritually. And unless you grow spiritually you are wasting a precious opportunity.
Man is the only being on the earth who can attain to buddhahood. Elephants and lions and tigers can’t become buddhas. Only man can become a buddha, only man can become a thousand-petaled lotus, only man can release the fragrance called God.
Don’t waste a single moment in anything else. Do the necessary things, the essential things, but pour more and more energy into watchfulness, awareness. Wake up! Unless you become a buddha you have not lived at all, because you will not know the great poetry of life, the great music of existence. You will not know the celestial celebration that goes on and on, you will not know the dance of the stars. It is for you to become part of this celebration. This bliss is for you! All these flowers and all these songs and all these stars are for you. You are entitled to miracles — but grow up, wake up! Enough for today.
Source: from Osho Book “Dhammapada Vol 5″

Osho – Death has to be meditated upon; otherwise life can go on giving you false hopes

Osho – Remember death, never forget it for a single moment! Because of this insistence, many people have thought Buddha is death-obsessed; he is not. You may be life-obsessed but he is not death-obsessed. He is simply bringing everything to a balance.

He says, as much as you are involved in life you have to remember death too, then there will be a balance, an equilibrium. He used to send his disciples, his sannyasins, to watch
whenever a dead body was being burned: “Just go, sit there, meditate and watch and remember this is going to happen to your body too.”

Death has to be meditated upon; otherwise life can go on giving you false hopes. If you remember death, life cannot deceive you anymore. Death will keep you alert. Buddha is not death-obsessed, but he has come to know one thing: that it is only by becoming aware of death that one gets rid of the obsession with the body, the obsession with food, the obsession with sex, the obsession with money, the obsession with the world. You have to live in life, but let there be a consciousness, constantly, that this life is slipping out of your hands and death is coming closer every moment. That will not allow you to be a victim of false desires and false hopes.

Source: from Osho Book “Dhammapada Vol 5″

Osho – Buddha says truth is eternal, and whatsoever is not eternal is a dream

Osho – Buddha says truth is eternal, and whatsoever is not eternal is a dream — beware of the dreams! And your mind is also part of your body; that’s why he says beware of false imaginings. Your mind goes on giving you false ideas; it says, “Look how healthy I am, how strong I am, look how beautiful I am.” It goes on deceiving you, it goes on telling you that death always happens to others, not to you. Nobody is an exception. And the mind is such a deceiver, so cunning, so crafty that it can make you believe anything. It can make you believe in money, and you will have to leave all your money when you go. But you cling to money, people are ready to die for money.

In fact, that’s how many people die: their whole lives are spent accumulating money; they sell their lives just to accumulate a few pieces of gold. That gold will remain here and you will be gone, and the gold has no attachment to you. It is you who have created all kinds of attachments.
And the mind always goes on creating a future; it goes on saying to you, “What has not happened yet is going to happen tomorrow — wait!” It keeps you hoping, it keeps you trying in new ways, in new pastures. If this woman has not satisfied you then the mind says, “It is because this woman is such — find another!” And this will go on and on. If this man is not satisfactory, the mind says, “It is because this man is wrong.” But the mind never allows you to see the fact that no man, no woman, can ever satisfy anybody. Satisfaction is not possible in this world. Contentment is possible only when you move into your state of being, when you become a no-mind. Contentment is the flavor of no-mind. And when you can manage, mind gives you fantasies, foolish, stupid, absurd. But mind is a great seducer….

Muriel and Tina were discussing their recent experiences over cocktails.
“Say,” asked Muriel, “how did you make out with that eccentric millionaire you met yesterday?”
“He gave me five hundred dollars,” said Tina. “That screwball wanted to make it in a coffin.”
“No kidding!” exclaimed Muriel. “I’ll bet that shook you up?”
“Yeah, but not as much as the six pall-bearers.”

The mind can seduce you into anything, into any stupid thing. And once anything gets into your mind, it tortures you, it haunts you. You have to do it — it seems that is the only way to get rid of it. But before you get rid of it, mind gives you another idea. Mind is very inventive as far as imagination is concerned. Mind can go on inexhaustibly creating new ideas for you; that’s what has been happening for centuries, for lives. You have lived in this world for so many lives repeating the same kinds of things again and again, maybe a little bit different but the things are the same… and still you go on hoping. Buddha says beware of the false imaginings; the body is a shadow, you have to leave it one day. You are not it.

Source: from Osho Book “Dhammapada Vol 5″

Osho – Money, power, prestige – they all make you cunning

Osho – Money, power, prestige — they all make you cunning. Seek pleasure and you will lose your innocence; and to lose your innocence is to lose all. Jesus says: be like a small child, only then can you enter into my kingdom of God. And he is right. But the pleasure-seeker cannot be as innocent as a child. He has to be very clever, very cunning, very political; only then can he succeed in this cut-throat competition that exists all around. Everybody is at everybody else’s throat. You are not living amongst friends. The world cannot be friendly unless we drop this idea of competitiveness.
But we bring every child…. From the very beginning we start poisoning every child with this poison of competitiveness. By the time he will be coming out of the university he will be completely poisoned. We have hypnotized him with the idea that he has to fight with others, that life is a survival of the fittest. Then life can never be a celebration. Then life can never have any kind of religiousness in it. Then it cannot be pious, holy. Then it cannot have any quality of sacredness. Then it is all mean, ugly.

Osho – In religion, meditation is the only way. Concentration is not needed

Osho – If you become an intellectual then you will not be a scientist; you will only write histories of science or philosophies of science, but you will not be a scientist, an explorer, an inventor, a discoverer, on your own. You will be simply accumulating information. Yes, that too has a certain use; as far as the outside world is concerned, even information has a certain limited utility, but in the inner world it has no utility at all. It is a barrier; it has a negative effect on the inner experience.
You say, “I understand you to say that the intellect is a barrier to self-realization.” The intellect is neither a barrier nor a bridge; intellect is neutral. Get identified with it, it becomes a barrier; remain unidentified with it, it is a bridge. And without meditation you cannot know your transcendental nature.
In science, concentration is enough; at the most, contemplation is needed. In religion, meditation is the only way. Concentration is not needed, is not a help; it is a positive hindrance. Contemplation also is not a help; it is a compensation for not being meditative, it is a poor substitute for it. Meditation — only meditation — can bring the inner revolution.
Meditation means getting out of the mind, looking at the mind from the outside. That’s exactly the meaning of the word ‘ecstasy’: to stand out. To stand out of the mind makes you ecstatic, brings bliss to you. And great intelligence is released. When you are identified with the mind you cannot be very intelligent because you become identified with an instrument, you become confined by the instrument and its limitations. And you are unlimited — you are consciousness.
Use the mind, but don’t become it. Use it as you use other machines. Mind is a beautiful machine. If you can use it, it will serve you; if you cannot use it and it starts using you, it is destructive, it is dangerous. It is bound to take you into some trouble, into some calamity, into some suffering and misery, because a machine is a blind thing. It has no eyes, it has no insight. Mind cannot see; it can only go on repeating that which has been fed into it. It is like a computer; first you have to feed it.
Source: from Osho Book “Dhammapada Vol 9″

Osho – He has not repressed them, he has transcended them


Osho – The most important thing to remember is: these things have fallen from him. He has not dropped them, they have fallen. If you drop them they will hang around you. He has not repressed them, he has transcended them — and the difference is great. If you repress them they will always be with you. If you repress lust it will spread deep down inside your being like cancer. If you repress hypocrisy you will be creating a deeper kind of hypocrisy, that’s all. If you repress pride you will become a pious egoist.

Beware of it. Millions are befooled by this because repression is easy, anybody can do it. It needs no intelligence; it needs only a little stubborn stupidity and you can do it. You just have to be a little stubborn, you have to insist and you have to force something inside yourself. You have to put pressure on it, you have to sit upon it. But then you will be in trouble. It is always there boiling, ready to explode any moment.

Osho – Gautama the Buddha's whole religion can be reduced to a single word – Freedom

Osho – Gautama the Buddha’s whole religion can be reduced to a single word. That word is freedom. That is his essential message, his very fragrance. Nobody else has raised freedom so high. It is the ultimate value in Buddha’s vision, the SUMMUM BONUM; there is nothing higher than that.
And it seems very fundamental to understand why Buddha emphasizes freedom so much. Neither God is emphasized nor heaven is emphasized nor love is emphasized, but only freedom. There is a reason for it: all that is valuable becomes possible only in the climate of freedom. Love also grows only in the soil of freedom; without freedom, love cannot grow. Without freedom, what grows in the name of love is nothing but lust. Without freedom there is no God.
Without freedom what you think to be God is only your imagination, your fear, your greed. There is no heaven without freedom: freedom is heaven. And if you think there is some heaven without freedom, then that heaven has no worth, no reality. It is your fancy, it is your dream.
All great values of life grow in the climate of freedom; hence freedom is the most fundamental value and also the highest pinnacle. If you want to understand Buddha you will have to taste something of the freedom he is talking about.
His freedom is not of the outside. It is not social, it is not political, it is not economic. His freedom is spiritual. By “freedom” he means a state of consciousness unhindered by any desire, unchained to any desire, unimprisoned by any greed, by any lust for more. By “freedom” he means a consciousness without mind, a state of no-mind. It is utterly empty, because if there is something, that will hinder freedom; hence its utter emptiness.
This word ‘emptiness’ — SHUNYATA — has been very much misunderstood by people, because the word has a connotation of negativity. Whenever we hear the word ‘empty’ we think of something negative. In Buddha’s language, emptiness is not negative; emptiness is absolutely positive, more positive than your so-called fullness, because emptiness is full of freedom; everything else has been removed. It is spacious; all boundaries have been dropped. It is unbounded — and only in an unbounded space, freedom is possible. His emptiness is not ordinary emptiness; it is not only absence of something, it is a presence of something invisible.
For example, when you empty your room: as you remove the furniture and the paintings and the things inside, the room becomes empty on the one hand because there is no more any furniture, no more paintings, no more things, nothing is left inside; but on the other hand, something invisible starts filling it. That invisibleness is “roominess,” spaciousness; the room becomes bigger. As you remove the things, the room is becoming bigger and bigger. When everything is removed, even the walls, then the room is as big as the whole sky.
That’s the whole process of meditation: removing everything; removing yourself so totally that nothing is left behind — not even you. In that utter silence is freedom. In this utter stillness grows the one-thousand-petaled lotus of freedom. And great fragrance is released: the fragrance of peace, compassion, love, bliss. Or if you want to choose the word ‘God’ you can choose it. It is not Buddha’s word, but there is no harm in choosing it.

Osho – Christianity creates great guilt. Buddhism never creates any guilt

Osho – The ordinary way of human beings is to overlook one’s own faults and to emphasize, magnify, others’ faults. This is the way of the ego. The ego feels very good when it sees, “Everybody has so many faults and I have none.” And the trick is: overlook your faults, magnify others’ faults, so certainly everybody looks like a monster and you look like a saint.
Buddha says: Reverse the process. If you really want to be transformed, overlook others’ faults — that is none of your business. You are nobody, you are not asked to interfere, you have no right, so why bother? But don’t overlook your own faults, because they have to be changed, overcome.
When Buddha says, LOOK TO YOUR OWN FAULTS, WHAT YOU HAVE DONE OR LEFT UNDONE, he does not mean repent if you have done something wrong; he does not mean brag, pat your own back if you have done something good. No. He simply means to look so that you can remember in the future that no wrong should be repeated, so that you can remember in the future that the good should be enlarged, enhanced, and the evil should be reduced — not for repentance but for remembrance.
That is the difference between the Christian attitude and the Buddhist attitude. The Christian remembers them to repent; hence Christianity creates great guilt. Buddhism never creates any guilt, it is not for repentance, it is for remembrance. The past is past; it is gone and gone forever — no need to worry about it. Just remember not to repeat the same mistakes again. Be more mindful.

Osho – Nobody can ever be contented in the world — that's impossible

Osho – Nobody can ever be contented in the world — that’s impossible. You can become more and more discontented, that’s all, because contentment happens only when you go inwards. Contentment is your innermost nature. Contentment does not belong to things. You can be comfortable with things — a beautiful house, a beautiful garden, no worries about money — yes, you can be comfortable, but you remain the same: comfortably discontented. In fact, when you have all the comforts and you have nothing to do to earn money, twenty-four hours a day you are aware of your discontent, because no other occupation is left.

That’s why rich people are more discontented than the poor people. It should not be so — logically it should not be so — but that’s how life is. Life does not follow Aristotle and his logic. Rich people coming from the West become very puzzled when they see poor Indian people with faces of contentment. They cannot believe their eyes. These people don’t have anything — why do they look contented? And the Indian so-called saints and mahatmas and political leaders, they go on bragging to the world that “Our country is spiritual — look! people are so contented even though they are poor, because they are inwardly rich.”

This is all nonsense. They are not inwardly rich. The contentment that you see on poor Indian faces is not that of inward realization. It is simply because they are so preoccupied with money, bread and butter, that they can’t afford any time to be discontented. They can’t afford to sit and brood about their miseries. They are so miserable that they have no time to feel miserable! They are so miserable and they have never known any pleasure, so they cannot have any comparison.

When a society becomes rich, it has time to think, “Now what next…?” And there seems to be nothing left. When all outward things are available you start thinking, “What am I doing here? All things are there, but I am as empty as ever.” One starts turning inwards.

Beggars look contented because they don’t have any taste of richness. But a rich person becomes very discontented. Because of his richness he becomes aware of the futility of all riches.

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