Osho Quotes – A meditative person lives in the present

Osho Quotes

1. Once a person has begun to experience satori, every type of seriousness becomes nonsense. That is the only indication there is that meditation has happened, and that is why a person who achieves satori becomes rebellious. There is no other reason. He becomes rebellious because he has to rebel against all types of seriousness.
2. The achieving mind can never sever itself from the future, the achieving mind is bound to be future-oriented. And a mind that is future-oriented must be past-based, because the future is nothing but a projection of the past. We project our past memories into future longings. Our dreams of the future are our experiences of the past painted more beautifully, longed for more aesthetically.
3. A meditative person lives in the present, because there is no other way to live. But if you want to postpone living, you can live in the past or in the future.
4. We are alone. The moment this realization is there — that man is alone — then there is no escape, because then you know that no escape is possible. It is just a wish. There is no escape! The wife is just as lonely with her husband as she was without him. But we create illusory escapes, illusions of togetherness. Our families, our nations, our clubs, groups, and organizations — this whole society is an escape from our aloneness.
5. A Yogi, a person who has come to Yoga, has come to know this naked fact, that it is everyone’s nature to be absolutely alone and there is nothing to be done about it; one has to live alone with it. Once this awareness is accepted, there is an explosion. Now there is no need to escape because now there is no escape. He has begun to live with himself and now he can live alone but will not be lonely. He will not go to the mountains, he will not go to a cave, because now he knows that wherever he is, even in the marketplace, even in a crowd, he is alone. Now everyone looks different to him — everyone is alone! Then compassion follows, compassion for everyone’s absolute loneliness.
6. Practice Dynamic Meditation. Do it to your fullest capacity — take it to a peak. You must go mad completely; only then will authentic sanity come, and only then will others begin to be helped by you.
7. The guru/disciple relationship is an understanding of the heart. The East has so many secret keys, but even a single key is enough because a single key can open thousands and thousands of locks. The relationship between guru and disciple is one such key.
8. Ambition is tension, and tension is the barrier to encountering the divine. Once you encounter it, you are no more — the encounter cleanses you completely, the encounter devours you completely. Only then is there love. The death of your ego is the birth of love.
9. Love comes when you are not, when the ego is not there. And the ego is not there, you are not, when you are not ambitious. A nonambitious moment is a moment of meditation. In a nonambitious moment, when you are seeking nothing, asking for nothing, praying for nothing; when you are totally satisfied with what you are, not comparing yourself with anybody else — in that moment you touch the deep reservoir of the divine. You are not just in contact with it, you are deeply in it: you are one with it.
10. Everything we do, we do with expectations. If I love someone, an expectation enters without my even knowing it. I begin to expect love in return. I have not yet loved, I have not grown into love yet, but the expectation has come and now it will destroy the whole thing. Love creates more frustration than anything else in the world because, with love, you are in a utopia of expectation. You have not even been on the journey yet and already you have begun to think of the return home.
11. Meditation is an attitude not an activity, so whatever you do can become meditative. The so-called meditation that people go on doing is not meditation. It is the attitude of being in the present which is the core, the central, the essential thing. Do whatever you are doing — walking on the street, running, taking a bath, eating, going to sleep, lying on the bed, relaxing — and remain with the activity totally. With no past, no future, remain in the present. It will be difficult in the beginning — very difficult and very arduous — but by and by you will get the feel of it and then a new door will open, a new realm. Then the thought process will no longer be there.
12. So be aware. Don’t waste the present anymore. Live in the present. Live in the meditative quality of the present.
13. To pretend good conduct is hypocritical. And suppression too is fatal. Both involve effort and struggle but achieve nothing. What is suppressed does not die: it simply moves down into deeper layers of the being.
14. Yoga is neither indulgence nor suppression. It is awakening from both. Both extremes of this duality should be avoided. We cannot transcend a duality by choosing only one of its sides. He who chooses and clings to to either of the sides gets himself caught and enslaved by it.
15. Desire by its nature is insatiable. Life runs out, and the life in which the other shore could have been attained — the life in which the journey could have been completed — is wasted, and it is discovered that the boat has not moved at all.