Quotes From "Bliss: Living Beyond Happiness And Misery" By Osho

But you do just the opposite. You strengthen your thought-waves. You are seized by worthless thoughts and you co-operate with them. You are sitting alone, there is nothing to do and you start thinking of fighting the coming election. The dream begins! Nothing will please you short of reaching the president’s chair. You have become a president in your dream. There are felicitations and you are enjoying them thoroughly! You never stop to think — what kind of stupidity is this! What are you doing? You are just giving energy to worthless fantasies. Your mind is filled with useless illusions of this kind. The constant flow of dreams eats up a large amount of your energy. It is not for free! You purchase it at the cost of your life. If we examine human life in detail, we will find that ninety-nine percent of the life is lost in fruitless dreams like this. Some dream of wealth, others of power, and others of various conquests. What will you gain even if you attain them all? Thought-waves are nothing but dreams. Do not strengthen them. When the dream starts running within, shake yourself and break the dream as quickly as you can. Osho

THE CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE ATMAN, THE SOUL.The first meaning is: in this world, only consciousness is yours. The word atman means: that which is your own. Regardless of how much the rest may appear to you as your own, it is alien. All of that which you otherwise claim as yours — friends, loved ones, family, wealth, fame, high position, a great empire — it is all a deception. Because one day death will snatch it all away from you. So death is the criterion for determining who is your own and who is the stranger. That which death can separate you from, know that it didn’t belong to you, and that which it can’t, was indeed your own. . Osho

As long as there is thirst in you, water can quench it; but you can live a kind of life in which you never feel thirsty; do not go in the sun, do no manual work, stay at home and relax and you will not feel the thirst. But then you will find no joy in drinking water. He who toils all day, enjoys the bliss of a good night’s rest. This is ironical: if you want to enjoy the pleasure of a good night’s sleep you have to work like a labourer all day. The trouble is that you want to spend your days like an emperor and your nights like a labourer. Osho

Your body is made of two things: your will to do, your ego, and the physical form you have received from the prakriti, the nature. If the will to do is present within you, then the nature will go on providing you with an appropriate body. This is how you have been born again and again. Sometimes you were an animal, sometimes a bird, a tree some other time, and sometimes a man. Whatsoever you wished to achieve, it has happened. Your desire to achieve becomes the actuality; thoughts become real things. So beware when you desire, because all desires are fulfilled — sooner or later. If you are of the habit of watching the birds fly in the sky and wonder, ”How free the birds are, I wish I were a bird.” it will not be long before you become a bird. You see dogs mating, and if that moment a thought arises in you, ”What freedom! What happiness! ” — soon you will become a dog. Whatever desire you keep within you, it becomes a seed. . Osho

Has it ever occurred to you that the last thought before your falling asleep at night becomes the first thought on waking up in the morning? All night long, while you remain asleep, the thought stays within you in a seed form. And so, that which is the last thing at night becomes first in the morning. At the moment of your death all your desires will come together and become a seed. That very seed will consequently be the new life in the womb. You start fresh from where you left off. Whatsoever you are is of your own making. Don’t blame others. As a matter of fact, there is no one whom you can blame. Basically it is the cumulative effect of your own actions. Whatsoever you are — beautiful or ugly, happy or unhappy, man or a woman — it is all a result of your actions. You are the architect of your life. Don’t blame on your stars — you’ll be simply fooling yourself. This way you are dumping the responsibility on to someone else. No need to say God has sent you — don’t dump the responsibility on God. That’s just a strategy to avoid your own responsibility. You alone are the cause for being imprisoned in this body. One who understands perfectly that he himself is responsible for being in this world, a transformation takes place in his life. Osho

No injustice ever takes place in this universe. Whatsoever happens is always just and right, for there is no human being sitting up there doing either justice or injustice. The universe is ruled by certain laws, and these laws constitute religion. Osho

As soon as you are filled with awareness, the first thing that will happen is you will begin to see misery, the hell around you. Because you are the one who has created it. However, if you remain courageous and pass through the misery consciously, you will have cut the crop. You won’t have to go through the same miseries again. Once you have gone through this chain of miseries — the chain of karmas, the chain tied around your soul.. If you could pass through it without losing your consciousness, courageously, unworried; if you could determine, ”whatever misery I have created, I’ll go through it, I’ll go to the end of it. I want to arrive at that initial moment when I was innocent and the journey of suffering had not started yet, when my soul was absolutely pure and I had not gathered any misery — I am determined to penetrate up to that point regardless of any consequences, pain, or sorrow. . Osho

Start with very small experiments. When anger arises, stop! What is the hurry? When you feel hatred, wait! There should be some interval. Reply only when you are fully conscious — not until that. You will find that all that is sinful in life has fallen away from you; all that is wrong is banished forever. You will suddenly discover, there is no need to respond to anger. Perhaps you might feel like thanking the man who insults you. Because he has obliged you. He gave you an opportunity to awaken. Kabir has said stay near the one who is critical of you. Look after him and serve him who is abusing you because it is he who gives you the opportunity to awaken. All the occasions that drown you in unconsciousness can be turned into stepping stones to awareness if you wish so. Life is like a huge boulder lying in the middle of the road. Those who are foolish, see the stone as a barrier and turn back. For them the road is closed. Those who are clever, climb the stone and use it as a step. And the moment they make it a stepping stone greater heights are available to them. A seeker should keep in mind only one factor, and that is: to utilize each moment to awaken awareness. Then be it hunger or anger or lust or greed, every state can be utilized towards awareness. Osho

You listen to anybody who suppresses you. And your personality fractures into thousands of pieces. Until you begin to listen to the inner voice, you cannot be an integrated whole. I call him a sannyasin who has begun to heed the inner voice and is ready to stake everything on it. But you cannot hear the inner voice as long as you are unconscious. Until then whatever you might take to be the inner voice will not be the inner voice; it will be a voice from outside The voice that satisfies you is the voice of your desires, but you call it your inner voice. Only the awakened person has an inner voice. Once this voice comes within range of your hearing, all that is sinful, all that is impure and dirty, all the chaos and confusion within you, will cease at once. You will then realize what a collection of personalities you have been. Osho

So start with the waking state. When you are hungry eat, but always remember that it is the body that is hungry, not you. If you hurt your leg, wash and clean the wound, apply medication, but always remember that it is the body that is hurt, not you. This much remembrance — and you will find that ninety-nine percent of the pain has vanished. This slight knowledge, this little awareness removes so much of your suffering. One percent is bound to remain because the knowledge is not total. When knowledge becomes total all of the suffering disappears. Buddha said that an awakened person is beyond suffering. You can cut off the limbs of such a person, you can throw him in the fire, you can kill him, but you cannot make him suffer, because he stands apart from all that is happening around him. Osho

Whenever you’ll open your eyes, you will find nothing but ugliness and misery all around you. Everything looks fine when you are in an unconscious state. This is the reason why you find it difficult to conceive: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING. You say, ”Impossible! ” That’s why one needs to go through pain. That is called tapascharya, spiritual practice. Whenever one begins to become aware, first he will have to go through suffering. For lives you have created misery around you, who else would pass through it if not you? That is what we have called the karma. . Osho

How can I know these trees, how can I know you, how can I know the other if I myself am unknown to me, if I am myself ignorant; when I do not know who I am. Osho

Tapascharya, spiritual practice means: accepting the truth that you are alone; that there is no way one can have a friend, a companion. No matter how much you long for it, regardless of how much you close your eyes and dream of them — you will still remain alone. For lives you built a home, you built a family, and then you lost it — and all through that you have always remained alone. Not even slightly has your aloneness been ever affected. So one who has known, one who has accepted that he is alone, for him there is an indication in this sutra: CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE BEING. Only being is yours, nothing else. Osho

Shiva is saying: the body is a product of nature and your will to do. The nature is merely the source, the womb. Your ego functions like a seed in it. Your will to do this or that, to achieve this or that, to become this or that — acts like a seed. And the moment the art of your doing meets the womb of nature, a body is formed. Therefore, buddhas say: ”Give up all desires, only then will you be liberated.: If you desired for heaven, you will become an angel, but that won’t be liberation either. Because as long as desires persist, there can never be any liberation. All desires lead to the formation of bodies. Osho

Half your life is spent in thinking of the past and the other half in thinking about the future. The journey never begins. Either you roam around the byways of your memory, which is a dead dream, or you wander in your imagination which is a dream of the future, which is still to come. You are divided in these two. The present is in the middle, and that is where life is — but you miss it! Osho

Do not focus your gaze on things that are wrong, for what you see, slowly begins to penetrate you. You are addicted to fixing your eyes on the wrong; you pay attention only to what is wrong inside you. The angry man concentrates on his anger, and how to get rid of it. Though he wants to get rid of the anger, he is actually concentrating on that white line of anger within him; the more he concentrates the more he is hypnotized by it. Don’t worry! Everybody is! Don’t focus your eyes on the anger, but concentrate on compassion. Concentrate on what is right. As the right gets more and more energy, the strength of the wrong gets weaker and weaker. Ultimately it will disappear. This happens because energy is one; you cannot use it in two ways. If you have utilized your energy in becoming peaceful, you would have no energy for restlessness. All your energy has moved towards peace, and if you have had a taste of peace and serenity, why bother to become restless? You can maintain your restlessness only if you have never known the flavour of serenity. You can dive into the pleasures of the world only if you have not tasted the divine. Osho

What is it that makes you cry? It is only your attachments. What is it that you miss when it is lost? It is the object of your attachment. Ponder over this. Find out what it is that grips your very life, without which you feel miserable and destitute; that is the center of your attachment. Here is what you should do: make an effort to find out what things it would hurt you to lose. Then, before they are lost, open your hands little by little, relax your grip on them. This is the method for conquering attachment. There is bound to be pain, but you must bear it; this is your penance. It is not necessary to renounce anything. It is not that you should leave your wife and run away to the Himalayas. Remain there, where you are, but gradually stop depending on her. There is no need to cause any pain; your wife need not even know it. There is no need to tell her. Seek out the attachments. Try gradually to live without the things that you now think you cannot live without. Create such a state within yourself that if and when these things are lost, there is not the slightest tremor within you. Then you will have attained victory over these attachments. This can be possible. It has been possible. And if it has happened to even one, it can happen to all. Osho

So as long as you have not attained to desirelessness, as long as you have not renounced desires completely, you will go on taking births and wandering in different bodies. And howsoever different the forms of the body may be, their basic condition is always the same. The ills of the body are the same, regardless whether it’s a bird’s body or man’s. There is no difference in their miseries, because the fundamental misery is only one: the soul becoming confined in the body, the entering of the soul into the prison of body. A prison after all is a prison; it makes no difference whether its walls are circular or angular no matter what you think. Osho

As you become aware of life, you will begin to see the root cause to all your actions and reactions. Then you will realize that you are not angry with the child because he made a mistake, but because you get pleasure out of being angry. The mistake was only a excuse. Osho

Understand this first and foremost that you are the center of your existence; nobody else is responsible. No matter how burdensome it feels, but you alone are responsible. If you accept this truth all sorrow will soon disappear. Because once it is clear that I am making this game, how long will it take you to destroy it? Osho

In life the only things that you see are things that you are projecting, and life presents you with so many situations that demonstrate that this is so. Osho

You feel what else is there to do in life apart from living? And even that is out of your control; it depends on an infinite number of factors. Everything is in your unconscious mind. Why sex desire arose in you, why you raised a family, how greed and anger entered you, why you were dishonest, why you accumulated wealth, why you made enemies — you have no idea! You are just like a puppet, whose strings are being pulled by someone else. You imagine you are dancing, but in fact it is someone else who is making you dance. Look closely at your life and you will find that you are nothing more than a puppet. How can anything real happen in the life of a man who is not his own master, but merely a puppet? . Osho

Always remember that you are the observer and not the doer. Do not take life to be anything more than acting. Don’t identify yourself too much with the action. Whether you are a wife or husband, a businessman or client, don’t get too involved. Don’t lose yourself in it, for you are simply playing a role in the play. Keep outside of it, and within yourself. These are all necessary parts of life. You must go to work, it is necessary. The play is delightful if you see it as play, but it is fatal if you take it to be life. There is no reason so disrupt your life. You have to play the part that life has given you. Osho

You never suffer nearly as much as you imagine you suffer. You never suffer the illnesses you most dread nor the miseries that you fear. Osho