Osho Quotes on Living in Present Moment

Osho Quotes on Living in Present Moment

1. To be initiated as a sannyasin means now you will try to be authentic; whatsoever the consequences, you will accept them and live in the present. You will sacrifice the future for the present; you will never sacrifice the present for the future. This moment will be the totality of your being, you will never move beforehand.
2. Miss the present and you live in boredom. BE in the present and you will be surprised that there is no boredom at all. Start by looking around a little more like a child. Be a child again! That’s what meditation is all about: being a child again — a rebirth, being innocent again, not-knowing.
3. What is the mind? It is the past, the memory, the accumulated experience. But the moment you have experienced the thing, it is dead. Experiencing is in the present, experience is in the past.
4. When you move in love, you cannot calculate the possibilities, you cannot calculate the results. You cannot be result-oriented. For love, future does not exist, only the present exists. You can be in this moment but you cannot think anything about the next moment. No planning is possible in love.
5. One has to be spontaneous. One has to live moment to moment, neither thinking of the past, nor thinking of the future, nor clinging to the present.
6. You are not in the moment. You are either in the past or in the future — both are non-existent. Neither can you do anything with the past, nor can you do anything with the future. All that you can do is with the present, and the present is such a small, split second that if you are engaged somewhere else, it simply slips by and you have missed the train. Learn to be in the present. Withdraw your energy from the past. Don’t waste your time in memories; what is gone is gone — say goodbye to it and close the chapter.
7. Learn how to live each moment and learn how to die each moment. Both are together. If you know how to die each moment, you will be able to live each moment — fresh, young, virgin. Die to the past. Don’t allow it to interfere with your present. The moment you have passed it, let it be no longer there. It is no longer there; it only goes on in your memory, it is just a remembrance. Let this remembrance also be released. This psychological hang-up should not be allowed.
8. Enlightenment is the realization that we have only the present moment to live. The next moment is not certain — it may come, it may not come. In fact, the tomorrow never comes. It is always arriving and arriving, but never arrives. And the mind lives in the tomorrows… and life is possible only in the present.
9. Past and future move in a horizontal line: A moves to B, B to C, C to D, in a line. Eternity moves vertically: A moves deeper into the A, higher into the A, not to B; A goes on moving deeper and higher, both ways. It is vertical. The present moment moves vertically, time moves horizontally. Time and present never meet. And you are the present: your whole being moves vertically. The depth is open, the height is open, but you are moving horizontally with the mind. That’s how you miss God.
10. A buddha lives moment to moment — and if you start living moment to moment, you become a buddha.
11. God is right now, this very moment. God is always in the present, now and here, and always now and here.
12. I never think of the yesterdays. And I never think of the tomorrows. That leaves me just a small moment, the present moment — unburdened, uncluttered, clean, free.
13. THE WHOLE IGNORANCE OF MIND consists in not being in the present. Mind is always moving: into the future, or into the past. Mind is never here and now. It cannot be. The very nature of mind is such that it cannot be in the present, because mind has to think, and in the present moment there is no possibility to think. You have to see, you have to listen, you have to be present, but you cannot think. The present moment is so narrow that there is no space to think about. You can be, but thoughts cannot be. How can you think? If you think, it means it is already past, the moment has gone. Or you can think if it has not come yet, it is in the future.
14. A rebellious person is one who says, “I’m not going to wait, I’m going to live right now.” The revolutionary hopes for the future. He says, “I am going to wait. I will wait for the right moment.” The rebellious person says, “The right moment is here-now, and I’m not going to wait for anybody, I’m going to live right now.” A rebellious person lives in the present.
15. The man of understanding dies every moment to the past and is reborn again to the future. His present is always a transformation, a rebirth, a resurrection. It is not a question of courage at all, that is the first thing to be understood. It is a question of clarity, of being clear about what is what.
16. Whatsoever happens — good, bad, success, failure — immediately become aware of what is happening. Don’t miss a single moment. Don’t lag behind — be present to it, and you will be surprised, errors will start disappearing from your life. And then whatsoever you do will be right.
17. If you are in the moment, in the present, the ego has no possibility of surviving even for a single moment. The present is and the ego is not, like light is and darkness is not. Bring light in, and darkness disappears. Even to say that it disappears is not right, because it was not there in the first place, so how can it disappear? It was a pure absence. The absence of light, that’s what darkness is.
18. Zen’s understanding is that in the present moment the whole past is hidden, and in the present moment the whole future also is hidden. The present moment contains the whole universe — past, present, future. If you can manage to understand the present moment, you have understood the whole phenomenon of eternity.