Osho Quotes on Living Totally

1. One can live as intensely and totally in one second as people live in their whole life. But their living is very thin, spread all over a long time. That does not mean that they are the fortunate ones, because authentic living needs great intensity and great totality, not a thin layer. A lukewarm survival is not living. But if you know that the next moment you are going to die you will drop everything that you were involved in, and the only priority will be to know yourself.
2. Live as totally and passionately as possible, because it is through intense living that you will find God. God is nothing but life lived at the optimum, with total abandon, a dance danced so totally that the dancer disappears; only the dance remains. Then you have found and you have come home.
3. The greatest courage in life is to live totally, in spite of all the priests and all the people who want you not to be joyous, not to be living totally.
4. Anything that is totally lived is equal to meditation. You don’t need meditation. And a man who is living moment-to-moment, absolutely naturally, according to himself, has nothing to regret, is not a failure. Hence, a happy man, a blissful man, needs no God.
5. How to live each moment totally…. It is not a question of duration, the question is of depth. Only those who live in depth know what life is all about. Those who live in duration live horizontally, superficially. Their life is a mask; there is no authenticity in it. Hence, I say Indian culture is neither alive nor dead but living in a kind of suspension, in a kind of limbo. It is a ghost culture: all that is significant, all that makes life a joy, has been dropped because it is dangerous, and all that is stable, permanent, plastic, has been gathered because it is safer.
6. God is not found by praying on your knees; God is not found in the temples and churches. God is found in intense living — a life of depth, depth and totality, and a death also of depth and totality. Live totally and die totally, and God is yours and truth is yours.
7. God is not found by praying on your knees; God is not found in the temples and churches. God is found in intense living — a life of depth, depth and totality, and a death also of depth and totality. Live totally and die totally, and God is yours and truth is yours. You are always given a single moment; you are not given two moments together. If you know the secret of living one moment, you know the whole secret of life. Because you will always get one moment — and you know how to live it, how to be totally in it.
8. I don’t want anybody to die for me — I am not a sadist. I want you to live for me. I want you to blossom and flower for me. I want you to eat, drink and be merry for me. I want you to celebrate for me. I want you to live your life as totally, as fully as possible.
9. Live deeply, live totally, live wholly, so when death comes and knocks at your door you are ready — ready like a ripe fruit to drop. Just a small breeze comes and the fruit drops; sometimes even without the breeze the fruit drops from its own weight and ripeness. Death should be like that. And the readiness has to come through living.
10. My people are rejoicing, dancing, singing, enjoying every moment to its fullest. And that is my approach, that: squeeze the juice of every moment, so that you have never to repent that that moment went away unlived. Don’t bother about the past and don’t bother about the future. The present is all there is, so live it totally.
11. Religion is living. Living totally, living intensely, without any purpose because purpose is always in the future and living is always in the present. If you have a purpose to live your life is divided between present and future — you cannot be total. And without being total you cannot experience what life is. The only way to be total is to forget all about purpose. It is a meaningless question.
12. If you live in the moment totally, then there is no need to worry for the future. A rightly lived childhood brings you to a right, ripe youth — flowing, vital, alive, a wild ocean of energy. A rightly lived youth brings you to the very settled calm and quiet life. A calm and quiet life brings you to a religious inquiry: What is life? Living is not enough, one has to penetrate the mystery. A calm and quiet life brings you to meditative moments. Meditation brings you to renounce all that is useless now, just junk, garbage. The whole life becomes garbage; only one thing remains always eternally valuable, and that is your awareness.

Osho Quotes on Life

1. This moment, here and now, is the time to taste life.
2. Death is the ultimate mystery. That gift is given only to those who have lived really intensely, who have burned their torch of life from both the ends together. Only then it happens sometimes that in a single moment of intensity the whole life is revealed. In a single moment of total intensity, the whole eternity opens its doors to you, you are welcomed by God.
3. Life is an absurdity — it is a mystery. You need not search for meaning, you have just to live it, enjoy it.
4. Life is not a fasting, it is a continuous feast — a celebration, a festival of lights. Love transforms your life into a festival of lights. And unless your life becomes a feast and a festival, remember: you have not done the thing you have come for on this earth.
5. Life should not be taken as a problem. Once you start that way you are lost. Once you think life is a problem it can never be solved. That’s how philosophy moves — and that’s how philosophy always moves wrongly. There are no right philosophies: there cannot be. All philosophies are wrong. Philosophizing is wrong, because philosophy takes the wrong basic step of thinking of life as a problem. Once life is a problem there is no solution to it. Life is not a problem but a mystery, which is how religion takes it.
6. Life knows only one moment, and that is the present. Life knows only one space, and that is here. Now and here: these two words are the most significant words in the human language; they represent reality.
7. Everything that is of authentic value in life has arisen out of meditation. There is no other way. Meditation is the mother of art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture. All that is creative, all that is life-affirmative, is born out of meditation. All that is life-negative — hate, anger, jealousy, violence, war — is born out of the mind. Man has two possibilities: mind and meditation.
8. To make everything certain is a deep urge in the mind because mind is afraid of life. Mind creates science just to kill every possibility of life. Mind tries to find explanations once an explanation is found, the mystery is dissolved.
9. Look for the mysterious in life. Wherever you look — in the white clouds, in the stars in the night, in the flowers, in a flowing river — wherever you look, look for the mystery. And whenever you find that a mystery is there, meditate on it. Meditation means: dissolve yourself before that mystery, annihilate yourself before that mystery, disperse yourself before that mystery. Be no more, and let the mystery be so total that you are absorbed in it.
10. A man of meditation simply enjoys the flowers, the birds, the trees, the rain, the sun, the moon, the people. It is good that we are all engulfed in a mysterious whole. Life will be utterly boring if every mystery is decoded.
11. When I say ‘to die’ I really mean: live intensely; I really mean: live passionately. How can you die unless you have lived totally? In total life there is death, and that death is beautiful. In a passionate, intense life, death comes spontaneously — as a silence, as a profound bliss. When I say ‘to die’, I am not saying anything against life; in fact, if you are afraid of death you will be afraid of life also.
12. Move with life with a deep trust, wheresoever it leads. Don’t create your own goal; if you create your own goal you will become false. Life has no goal; if YOU have a goal you are against life. Life moves not like a business, it moves like poetry; life moves not from the head, it moves from the heart — it is a romance. Trust is needed, doubt won’t be helpful. Life is not scientific, it is irrational. Life doesn’t believe in Aristotles and the logicians, it believes in love, in the poets, it believes in the mystics. It is a mystery to be lived, not a riddle to be solved — it is not a puzzle, it is not a problem. The secret is open, only you are closed. It is revealed everywhere: in each tree, in each leaf, in every ray of the sun it is revealed — but you are closed.
13. All that is needed is a certain deepening of your consciousness, and that happens through meditation. Then all your actions, your behavior, your life starts changing on its own accord; you start seeing things clearly. Right now you see things through such smoke that nothing seems to be clear.
14. Religion is nothing but a science to attain wisdom, understanding, to know what life is, and to live it in utter celebration. And you can live life in celebration only if you know there is no death. If you know that it is going to be eternal, that there is no beginning and no end, only then can you live without misery.
15. No society wants individuals so powerful in themselves. Every society wants you to remain dependent on it. Your independence is being curtailed in every possible way. And because your independence, your individuality is being curtailed, death comes before meditation comes. Life has been a wastage. Unless you attain to meditation, you have not really lived.
16. Life is immediate, life is always now and here. And live it with all the frailty of a human being, with all the frailty of a rose flower, and you will come to know the greatest splendor in the moment — not in eternity. It is always now and it is always here! Don’t condemn the momentary, rejoice in it, rejoice to abandon.
17. It is up to you to make whatsoever you want out of your life. An enlightened consciousness makes even death beautiful. An unenlightened consciousness makes even life ugly. For an enlightened consciousness, only beauty exists — only beauty; only bliss exists — only bliss.
18. Live here now! Living in hope is living in the future, which is really postponing life. It is not a way of living, but a way of suicide. There is no need for any hope and there is no need to feel hopeless. Live here now. Life is tremendously blissful, it is showering here and you are looking somewhere else. It is just in front of your eyes, but your eyes have moved far away, they look at the horizon. It is within you, but you are not there.
19. The future is just your hope, expectation. And when this life is not fulfilling you start looking further, beyond death. All these are fictions just for you to survive somehow. But this survival is not how you are supposed to be. Existence has not given you birth just to live in hopes. You can be really ecstatic this moment, and there is no other moment. Meditation is, Zen is living now and here.
20. Now and here put in your total energy, and you will be enlightened. Enlightenment is your nature, so you are not to find it somewhere else. You don’t have to go on any pilgrimage. You don’t have to go to any holy place. You don’t have to believe in any theology, in any religion. You just have to dig deeper into yourself, in the present moment, and suddenly the whole of life springs up.
21. Look at people’s faces. They carry life as a burden — boring, with no meaning. It seems that everything is just a nightmare, a very cruel joke, that somebody is playing a trick, torturing them. Life is not a celebration, it cannot be. With a mind burdened by memory life cannot be a celebration. Even if you laugh, your laughter carries boredom. Look at people laughing: they laugh with an effort. Their laugh may be just to be mannerly, their laugh may be just etiquette.
22. Just live your life with as much joy and celebration, as a gift of God. Dance with the trees in the sun, in the rain, in the wind. Neither do the trees have any scriptures, nor do the animals have any scriptures; neither do the stars have any scriptures, nor do they have any saints. Except man, nobody is obsessed with the dead. This obsession I call one of the greatest mistakes which has been committed over thousands of years. It is time it should be stopped completely.

Osho Quotes and Sayings

1. Ambition is violence, the very effort to succeed in the world is violent.
2. A mechanical mind is an unconscious mind. You go on doing things, but not knowing what you are doing and why you are doing them. And while doing them there is no awareness. Walking, you walk, but there is no awareness. Eating, you eat, but there is no awareness. Talking, you talk, but there is no awareness.
3. Life is a very mysterious phenomenon where laughter is part and where tears also are part. Once in a while to be sad, really sad, is not bad. Sadness has its own beauty. You have just to learn to enjoy the beauty of sadness, its silence, its depth.
4. Meditation is an effort to die voluntarily. And in deep meditation one dies. In deep meditation, the so-called life disappears and for the first time you encounter death. That experience of encountering death makes you deathless. Suddenly you transcend death. Suddenly you know — that which is going to die is not you. All that can die, you are not. You are neither your body nor your mind nor your self. You are simply pure space — which is never born and never dies.
5. My approach is to go on dying to the past moment continuously so that you can be alive in the new moment that is coming. Death to the past, life to the present. And the future is going to come to you as present, never as past.
6. People are afraid of death because they have not lived yet and death is coming closer. I have lived, I have tasted the nectar of life. Now there is no problem for me, so I can create as much hostility as possible in the hope that perhaps a few, out of thousands, may wake up. And they are waking up.
7. An intelligent man cannot be Catholic, an intelligent man cannot believe in the boundaries of nations, an intelligent man cannot conceive that white and black colors make any difference. An intelligent man will have a totally different vision of life.
8. Every man has the potential to become enlightened. If he does not become, he is responsible — nobody else is responsible for it.

Osho - A choiceless awareness simply means whatever happens to you is perfectly the right thing to have happened. You don’t have any judgment about it. It does not mean that you will stop doing things; you will continue doing things but your doing things will be more like a man flowing in the current of the river, not swimming, not swimming against the current.

The effort comes when you are against the current, so that existence wants you to move north and you want to move towards the south. There comes the struggle, there comes your effort, there comes your separate existence as an ego. But if you are simply flowing with the river wherever it is going, you don’t have a goal, because a man with a goal cannot be choiceless. You don’t have a destination, because a man with a destination cannot relax and cannot be choiceless. He has already chosen.

Osho – The man of understanding is in a total let-go. He allows the law to function. If you want old religious language, non-buddhist language, you can call it surrender to god. Then the devotee says, ‘Now I am no more, only you are. I am just a flute on your lips, a hollow bamboo. You sing; the song will be yours, I will be just a passage.’ This is old religious language. Buddha is not happy with the old language. Buddha is not happy with the poets’ language. Buddha likes the scientific language more. He talks the same way as Albert Einstein, or Newton, or Edison. He talks about the law. Now it is for you to decide. The difference is only of language, but the basic thing is letting go, a total surrender.

Osho – Mind is a prison. Awareness is getting out of the prison — or realizing it has never been in the prison; it was just thinking that it was in the prison. All fears disappear. I am also living in the same world, but I have never felt for a single moment any fear because nothing can be taken away from me. I can be killed — but I will be seeing it happening, so what is being killed is not me, is not my awareness.

The greatest discovery in life, the most precious treasure, is of awareness. Without it you are bound to be in darkness, full of fears. And you will go on creating new fears — there is no end to it. You will live in fear, you will die in fear, and you will never be able to taste something of freedom. And it was all the time your potential; any moment you could have claimed it, but you never claimed it. It is your responsibility.

Osho – All that you need is just to be watchful, and nothing will affect you. This unaffectedness will keep your purity, and this purity has certainly the freshness of life, the joy of existence – all the treasures that you have been endowed with. But you become attached to the small things surrounding you and forget the one that you are. It is the greatest discovery in life and the most ecstatic pilgrimage to truth. And you need not be an ascetic, you need not be anti-life – you need not renounce the world and go to the mountains. You can be where you are, you can continue to do what you are doing. Just a new thing has to be evolved: whatever you do, you do with awareness – even the smallest act of the body or the mind – and with each act of awareness you will become aware of the beauty and the treasure and the glory and the eternity of your being.

Osho – The master cannot react. He responds, but he never reacts. Reactions come from the past, response is spontaneous; it is in the present. The slave reacts, the master responds. The unconscious mind reacts, the conscious man responds. He has no ready-made answers. He encounters the situation, he reflects the situation. He accepts the challenge of the situation — and acts accordingly. His action is born out of the present.

And remember one fundamental secret of life: if the action is born out of the present it is never binding; if it comes out of the past it is binding, it is karma. If the action comes out of your present awareness it is not karma, it is not binding. You do it and it is finished, you do it and you get out of it; it never accumulates in you. The master never accumulates the past; he dies every moment to the past. He is born anew every moment.

Osho – One who has become aware, he sees everywhere only one thing: that everything is born and dies, everything begins and ends, that everything is a flux. Nothing is worth clinging to, nothing is worth holding, nothing is worth possessing, because it is bound to disappear sooner or later. Hence he remains nonpossessive. He moves through the world detached, calm, cool, seeing everywhere the falling and the uprising. He knows things come and go; he watches. When something arises he watches and knows perfectly well it will go. Misery comes — he is not worried because he knows it will go. Happiness comes — he is not excited because he knows it has come, it will go.

WITH DISPASSIONATE EYE…. Awareness gives him a new kind of eye, a new vision — dispassionate. He simply looks with no desire; it is a totally different vision. When you look with no desire, the world appears totally different; when you look with desire you are confined in your desire and you color everything according to your desire.

Osho – First be selfish, first transform yourself. Your life in peace, in joy, in health, can be a great source of nourishment for people who are starving for spiritual food. People are not really starving for material things. Material richness is very simple: just a little more technology, a little more science, and people can be rich. The real problem is how to be inwardly rich. And when you are outwardly rich you will be surprised — for the first time you become more acutely, more keenly aware of your inner poverty. For the first time all meaning in life disappears when you are outwardly rich, because in contrast, the inner poverty can be seen more clearly. Outside there is light all around and inside you are a dark island.

The rich man knows his poverty more than the poor person, because the poor person has no contrast. Outside there is darkness, inside there is darkness; he knows darkness is what life is. But when there is light outside you become desirous of a new phenomenon: you long for inner light. When you see that richness is possible outside, why can’t you be rich inside?