Osho Quotes on Suicide, Osho Sayings and Insights on Suicide

Osho Quotes and Insights on Suicide

1. To feel that life is utterly meaningless is to be on a crossroads: either you choose suicide or you choose sannyas; either you choose madness or you choose meditation. It is a great turning-point!
2. Suicide leads nowhere, it simply enters your consciousness into another womb of a lower kind, because you could not manage to live on a higher level.
3. What are you going to gain out of suicide? Why this constant thinking about it? You will be born into another womb and will again start the same cycle.
4. The suicide rate is four times more than it is in the East. And in the East, people commit suicide because of hunger, starvation; you have to be compassionate towards them. In the West people commit suicide because they have everything, and they feel life is meaningless. They have all the money, they have all that money can purchase … but there are a few things which money cannot purchase. They cannot purchase silence, they cannot purchase joy, they cannot purchase love, they cannot purchase meditation.
5. Love is a basic need. You can escape from the world, but you will still need food. You can escape from the world; that doesn’t mean that now there is no need for food. And love is food for the soul, just as food is food for the body. One cannot avoid love. If one avoids love one is avoiding life. To avoid love means to commit suicide.
6. People commit suicide not because they are really finished with life but because life is not fulfilling their demands. But no life ever fulfills anybody’s demands. You will always go on missing something or other: if you have money, you may not be beautiful; if you are beautiful, you may not be intelligent; if you are intelligent, you may not have money.
7. Meaning is of the head, and if you go on searching through the head you will come to the same conclusions as Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist philosophers. They say, “Life is meaningless. The only thing worth doing is committing suicide, because why go on living a meaningless life?” Life is certainly meaningless, but tremendously joyful, hilarious… a dance, a song, a beauty. But you will have to change your gears from the head to the heart.
8. Unless the heart center starts functioning again man will not be capable of love, and the whole misery of modern life is because unless he loves he cannot feel any meaning in his life. Life looks meaningless. Love gives it meaning; love is the only meaning. Unless you are capable of love you will be meaningless, and you will feel that you are existing without any meaning, futilely, and suicide will become attractive. Then you will like to kill yourself, to finish with yourself, to end, because what is the use of existing?
9. Man’s creativity is fulfilled only when paradise is created inside. One can paint beautiful pictures and yet may live in hell. Van Gogh painted beautiful pictures and committed suicide; he lived constantly in hell. Many poets, like Mayakovsky and others, have written beautiful poems but committed suicide. Life must have been horrible. Their poetry was only superficial; their being could not become poetry. Great philosophers have gone mad, committed suicide, like Friedrich Nietzsche. Their philosophical understanding did not help. Only one thing is helpful: that I call love. Love infinitely. Love without any miserliness, because it is not a treasure that is exhaustible. In fact the more you give it, the more you have it. It is one of the most fundamental paradoxes of life: keep it, and you lose it; give it, and you have it.
10. The most vital thing in existence is attention. If no one loves you, you start withering away. If no one pays attention to you, death settles in. You want to die. If someone pays attention to you, you become alive again. Attention is life, elan vital. If no one loves you, you will commit suicide, because you are not capable of loving yourself. If you were capable of loving yourself, if you were capable of giving attention to yourself, you would not need anyone else’s attention. A Buddha can live alone on this earth. You cannot. If you are alone, you will immediately commit suicide. You will say, “What is the use? Why should I live? Who will love me? Whom shall I love?”
11. That’s the point Buddha would like you to reach. Where you start thinking of suicide, only there is sannyas possible — not before it. When you think the whole life is meaningless, only then does your energy start being concentrated on one point — that now some other meaning has to be searched for. “This life has failed, in toto. Now another life has to be searched for. I have lived outside myself and seen it is all sadness and agony. Now I have to turn inwards — a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.”
12. The spiritual suicide means that a man has come to understand that not only THIS life is futile, but life as such is futile. Then he starts thinking of how to get rid of being born again and again, how to get rid of getting into the tunnel of the body and of being confined and encased; then he starts thinking of how to remain absolutely free without any form. This is what moksha is, this is what liberation is — or you can call it salvation.
13. It is a very critical moment in the history of life. Either we will settle for this hopelessness — then only suicide is the way — or we will try to find out another way of reaching to higher planes. Not just by jumping but by creating the ladder. I call that ladder meditation.
14. Meditation can make you inwardly rich. Then suicide is out of the question; even if you want to destroy yourself, there is no way. Your being is indestructible. And to know this immortality is a great freedom — from death, from disease, from old age. All those things will come and go, but you remain untouched, unscratched. Your inner health is beyond any sickness. And it is there, just to be discovered.
15. People think that those who commit suicide are against life — they are not. They are too lusty for life, they have great lust for life; and because life is not fulfilling their lust, in anger, in despair, they destroy themselves.
16. You get the womb that is right for you. And dying in suicide is dying in such anguish, because it is one of the most unnatural things to do, most abnormal things to do. No animal commits suicide, no tree ever commits suicide — only man. Only man can go that insane. Nature knows nothing of suicide; it is man’s invention. It is the most ugly act. And when you do something ugly to yourself you cannot hope that you will get a better life. You will die in an ugly state of mind and you will enter an uglier womb.
17. Love is the ultimate in suicide. All other suicides are small suicides. Somebody commits suicide; that is only physical. Love is psychological suicide and meditation is spiritual suicide. In love you die psychologically, you drop the psychological ego, and in meditation you drop the very idea of the self, even of the supreme self. You become a nothingness…and in that nothingness blooms the white lotus of a Buddha
18. Sannyas is real suicide, because it destroys the mind, it takes you beyond the mind. And if you are beyond the mind you will not be born again. Why be born again and again? Why go on in this vicious circle? I know you are bored with life. If you are really bored, then meditation is the way, not suicide — because suicide will bring you to the SAME life, maybe an uglier life than you have right now, because suicide will create its own ugliness in you. To commit suicide is such an ungrateful act towards God. He gives you life as an opportunity to grow, and you throw away the opportunity.
19. Meditation is the method of inner transformation. When suicide and meditation remain the only two alternatives and nothing else is left — either destroy yourself because your whole life is meaningless, or transform yourself into a new plane of being — one has to choose between suicide and meditation.
20. To commit suicide in a single moment won’t do because in a single moment you can be deluded, you can be in an illusion. If you take poison, it can be done in a single moment. It is my feeling that if people who commit suicide are delayed for even a single moment, they will never do it; if delayed for even a single moment, they will change their mind. They commit suicide in a sort of madness. They are so fed up, they do it in a single moment, and they don’t have any chance to go back on their own decision. There is no time left. They jump. They may suffer in the ocean and they may start crying and weeping and shouting, ‘Save me!’ but now it is too late. Their whole being would like to come back to life. And soon they will be back in a womb. This is no suicide, a temporary suicide is no suicide. You will be back again in another womb, and, worse than that, the committing of suicide will hang around you, it will become a karma. It will be like a dark shadow, a gloominess around your face, around your being. You will move in life shrouded in death. That will not be good.
21. One basic thing about suicide is that it arises only in people who are clinging very much to life. And when they fail in their clinging, the mind moves to the opposite pole. The function of the mind is of either/or: either it wants the whole, or none of it. The lust for life cannot be fulfilled totally, because life as such is a temporal thing; it is bound to end at a point, just as it began one day at a point. You cannot have a line with only the beginning; somewhere or other there is bound to be an end. So the people who commit suicide are not against life; it only appears so. They want life in its totality, they want to grab it whole, and when they fail — and they are bound to fail — then out of frustration, out of failure, they start thinking of death. Then suicide is the only alternative. They will not be satisfied with whatsoever life gives them; they want more and more and more. Life is short, and the series of the desire for more and more is infinite, so the failure is certain. Somewhere or other there is bound to come a moment when they will feel they have been cheated by life. Nobody is cheating them — they have cheated themselves. They have been asking too much, and they have only been asking, they have not been giving anything, not even gratefulness. In anger, in rage, in revenge the pendulum of the mind moves to the other end — still they do not know with whom they are taking the revenge. They are killing themselves: it does not destroy life, it does not destroy existence.
22. People who commit suicide don’t want to commit suicide. They commit suicide because they expected too much from life and they could not get it. The failure was so great, that to live shamefully became difficult. They committed suicide not against life; they committed suicide because they could not manage to learn the art of life. They wanted life to be a great benediction, and it was a drag. It seems to be a fallacy all over the world that just because you are born you know how to live. This is not right. To be born is one thing. To know the art of living and of living fully is totally different. Birth is only an opportunity — you can make it or mar it. Birth is not equivalent to life. Almost everybody thinks that birth is equivalent to life; so it is bound to become a drag — just breathing, eating every day, going to sleep, waking up in the morning, going to the same office, the same files and the same routine. For idiots it is perfectly okay, but for anybody who has some intelligence it is bound to become drag. Because he can see — what is the point? Why after all am I living? If tomorrow is again going to be just a repetition of today, as today has been a repetition of yesterday, then why go on living? What is the point of unnecessarily repeating the same circle, the same routine, the same happenings? But the fallacy is in the fact that you have accepted a wrong concept, that birth is life. Birth is only an opportunity. Either you can learn to live a beautiful life or you can just drag yourself towards the graveyard.
23. Watch people who think of committing suicide. They are not against life. In fact, on the contrary, they are so attached to life that life cannot fulfill them. They take revenge, they complain. They murder, kill themselves, just to lodge a complaint against the whole existence — that it was not a fulfillment. They are grumbling; they are saying, “Life is not worth it.” But why is life not worth living? They expected too much; that’s why it is not worth it. They asked too much; they never earned it. They asked too much and it was not delivered. They are frustrated.
24. By committing suicide, by jumping into a river, or in the ocean, or from a hilltop, you can destroy the physical part of you. But your physical part is not basic, your mental part is the base. Your mental part carries the blueprint for the physical. Your mind will jump into another womb and will start gathering another physical part. It will be born again. Suicide is useless. I am not against suicide because it is a crime. I am against suicide because it is futile, it is foolish. It is stupid. If you really want to commit suicide, then become a sannyasin. Then you will be destroying the mind, the deep blueprint for your future lives.
25. When God is there, then creativity is simply a consequence of His presence, just His presence. You can attain to His presence through love or awareness, it doesn’t matter. How you annihilate yourself is irrelevant; the only thing is that you should be annihilated, that you should not be. Do it through love, that will do. How you commit suicide does not matter, with what kind of poison. Whether you jump from a cliff, or you lie down in front of a railway train, or you shoot yourself, or you hang yourself, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you should have committed the suicide of the ego: through love, through awareness; through Yoga, through Tantra, Taoism, Zen, Sufism, Hassidism. It doesn’t matter; these are different ways of committing suicide. I don’t mean the physical, I mean the metaphysical. Once you are not there, all that is left is God.
26. There is a deep desire in everyone to commit suicide for the simple reason, that life seems to be meaningless. People go on living, not because they love life, they go on living just because they are afraid to commit suicide. There is a desire to; and in many ways they do commit suicide. Monks and nuns have committed psychological suicide, they have renounced life. And these suicidal people have dominated humanity for centuries. They have condemned everything that is beautiful. They have praised something imaginary and they have condemned the real; the real is mundane and the imaginary is sacred. My whole effort here is to help you see that the real is sacred, that this very world is sacred, that this very life is divine. But the way to see it is first to enquire within. Unless you start feeling the source of light within yourself, you will not be able to see that light anywhere else. First it has to be experienced within one’s own being, then it is found everywhere. Then the whole existence becomes so full of light, so full of joy, so full of meaning and poetry, that each moment one feels grateful for all that god has given, for all that he goes on giving. Sannyas is simply a decision to turn in, to look in. The most primary thing is to find your own center. Once it is found, once you are centered, once you are bathed in your own light you have a different vision, a different perspective, and the whole of life becomes golden. Then even dust is divine. Then life is so rich, so abundantly rich that one can only feel a tremendous gratitude towards existence. That gratitude becomes prayer. Before that, all prayer is false.