… you can feel that the whole existence needs you, that you will be missed, that if you are not here there will be a gap, you will be missed. You are not unnecessary, you are not superfluous; you have tremendous significance.
Hence, love yourself. You are needed as much as the trees, as the flowers, as the birds, as the sun, as the moon, as the stars. You have to be here and you have a right to be the way you are.
Osho
Osho left his body in 1990. He asks that in the context of his work, he is not spoken of in the past tense .
Osho is hard to characterise! He calls his approach to enlightenment, meditation and life “Zorba the Buddha” – the love of life of Zorba the Greek with the enlightened depth of silence of Gautamn Buddha.
On Buddha: “I am in immense love with this man, because nobody else has ever touched such depths and such heights as Gautama the Buddha. He remains the Everest, the highest peak human consciousness has ever reached.”
On meditation: “Take meditation as a play, a fun, enjoy it, and then the very quality changes. Then it is not something you are doing as a cause to gain some effect. No, you are enjoying it here and now. It is the cause and it is the effect, both. … Make it a play. Just like small children, play with it.”
On life: I would like you to be Zorba the Greek and Gautam the Buddha together, simultaneously. Less than that won’t do. Zorba represents the earth with all its flowers and greenery and mountains and rivers and oceans. Buddha represents the sky with all its stars and clouds, and the rainbows.
The sky without the earth will be empty. …
The earth without the sky will be dead. …
The earth and the sky dancing together – and there is laughter, there is joy, there is celebration.
Osho’s insistence is that the treasure of enlightenment lies unrecognised within every one of us, and we can recognise it any moment:
“Enlightenment is not somewhere waiting for you, it is already here. It surrounds you right now. It is within you and without you. It is in every beat of your heart. But YOU are not here — you are chasing your desires far away, somewhere in the future, on some planets. You are not to find enlightenment somewhere else, the only thing that you have to do is to come back home. Enlightenment is waiting for you there. You simply don’t go anywhere — that’s all. The whole effort is negative — don’t go anywhere. Enlightenment is not a journey, it is your deepest core of being.”
Osho is the first enlightened person to invent novel meditation techniques specifically for the modern mind. He calls these Active Meditations.
Full explanation of every meditation, videos, and buy music, on osho.com.
Older but still good explanations by Maneesha James.
People in the modern world often have traumas that get in the way when they start to meditatate. Osho makes groundbreaking use of Western personal development techniques as an initial part of the spiritual journey. See Resources page for more information.
Unique among enlightened teachers, Osho has a social vision. He looks beyond individual meditators to a future where not just individuals but humanity in its entirety, the whole planet, is transformed by deep meditation and enlightenment. He calls this the New Humanity. This is not humanity transformed by Westernised “mindfulness”. It’s also not a political theory about how the world should be organised. It’s trust that everyone – you, me – has a life-transforming hidden depth of silence and love, anyone – you, me – can attain that, and why not everyone? Why not? And that nothing else will work.
More on Osho’s vision: www.osho.com/read/osho/vision
Osho is 100% critical of all organised and traditional religion. I cannot suggest too strongly to always read Osho’s original words and never rely on anyone’s summary, including this one. But as the tersest indication of Osho’s approach:
In Osho’s vision organised religions, all of them, are bankrupt of true understanding of meditation and enlightenment; make men and women slaves who look to the priest as the outside authority instead of trusting themselves; hate and control sex as a means to make men and women weak; fear and oppress women; are in collusion with political power-possessors; preach love but create divisive religious identities that engender hate; and in any healthy world will not exist in any form.
Criticising religions in this way made Osho widely hated. He anticipated he would be killed.
Osho speaking about himself: www.osho.com/read/osho/osho-on-osho
In Osho’s vision there is no other authority in your life or my life except you yourself or me myself. Osho opposes all forms of belief and has zero wish for anyone to believe him or take anything he says simply because he says it. He has no wish for followers. He never in any way views himself as any kind of saviour or anyone to believe in. He is totally opposed to any devotional cult arising around him. He has no organisation for anyone to join and no wish to create any “follower of Osho” identity. His proposal is merely this: try some part of what he says with an open mind. If it works for you, then good; perhaps try another part. If you feel it’s not right for you then go your own different way, and with his full blessing.
In the widest variety of ways Osho’s approach and vision are creative and distinctive. But the underlying truth he expounds is the same one truth taught by Buddha and all other genuinely enlightened teachers. Again uniquely, Osho talks on many hundreds of famous spiritual teachers whose work in the modern world is unknown, misunderstood or indeed incomprehensible. His aim is to show that all genuine spiritual schools have one and the same truth, and to help restore to every one their currency and their vitality. Whatever your own school of meditation, you are quite likely to find he has not just spoken on, but fallen in love with, the founder. In particular, Osho has endless respect and love for Gautam Buddha. Osho has no wish to compete with those others, but on the contrary to bring their teachings alive in the modern world.
His work continues to deeply transform the lives of very many people around the world.
Love.
Look at yourself without thinking, evaluating, or judging,
without any liking or disliking;
that is, without any movement of the mind
or without the noise of the mind:
then you have eyes
which are altogether different from your eyes
because they are not burdened by the past.
They are innocent and silent,
and in this silence
there is neither the observer nor the observed —
but that which is,
undivided and one,
beginningless and endless.You can call it God or nirvana or anything
whatsoever —
the name does not matter
because the name is not the thing,
and when one has known the thing
one does not bother about the value.