Osho Quotes on Dark Night of the Soul

Osho Quotes on Dark Night of the Soul

1. Love is rising sun, lust is the dark night of the soul.
2. A life of compromise is a life of the dark night of the soul.
3. Time is relative, not the clock time but psychological time. Those who have known glimpses of God, for them this world is really difficult to live in, and the night is very dark and very long. The Christian mystics have a right word for it; they call it’the dark night of the soul’.
4. The only way out of ignorance and out of this dark night of the soul is to be aware of your own being, aware of your own awareness. In that moment when you are aware of your own awareness, everything stops, time stops. Suddenly you are beyond time and beyond space, and a door opens which makes you part of the whole.
5. Just a little more, and you will come to the point where you will be troubled, so much troubled that your whole being will be at stake — and there is every possibility that you may escape. But if you escape, then for many lives you will not be able to gather courage to go in that direction, you will simply avoid that dimension. When trouble arises in your inner being, be alert. Don’t try to escape. Move, go ahead — everybody has to pass through that. The school to which Jesus belonged, the Essenes, they have a word for that state of trouble. They call it ‘the dark night of the soul’. Everybody has to pass through it. Only then does the dawn come, when you have passed the dark night of the soul. The darker the night, the happier you should feel, because the sooner there will be dawn. Soon, out of the womb of this night, a sun is going to be born; soon — it is not very far away. The darker the night, the nearer it is coming. Don’t try to escape, because every morning needs a dark night as a womb. The dark night prepares the ground for the morning to be. That troubled state is the womb through which ultimate blessing will be born.
6. A child has more light in his being; as he grows he becomes darker and darker and darker. By the time he is old he is just a dark night of the soul and nothing else. A child is more luminous, is more intelligent, more alert. And as time passes and dust gathers on him, layers and layers of dust, and all his intelligence disappears, he becomes mediocre. He starts behaving in stupid ways, because he falls a victim to the stupid crowd that surrounds him. He is helpless — he has to listen to the parents, to the teachers, to the politicians. They are the great leaders, they are the great priests — they know, and they all say, “We love you. Listen to us otherwise you will go astray. Obey us, otherwise you will go astray.”
7. Nobody wants to be lonely. Everybody wants to belong to a crowd — not only one crowd, but many crowds. A person belongs to a religious crowd, a political party, a rotary club… and there are many other small groups to belong to. One wants to be supported twenty-four hours a day because the false, without support, cannot stand. The moment one is alone, one starts feeling a strange craziness. Surabhi, that’s what you have been asking about — because for twenty-six years you believed yourself to be somebody, and then suddenly in a moment of loneliness you start feeling you are not that. It creates fear: then who are you? And twenty-six years of suppression… it will take some time for the real to express itself. The gap between the two has been called by the mystics “the dark night of the soul” — a very appropriate expression. You are no more the false, and you are not yet the real. You are in a limbo, you don’t know who you are.
8. Madness and meditation have a similarity: One is below mind, the other is above mind. Both are out of the mind. One is a breakdown, another is a breakthrough. Without the master there is every possibility you will go into a nervous breakdown if you lose your identity. The master goes on supporting you, goes on taking your personality layer by layer. And you allow him to take your identities away because of his love and trust; you know that he cannot harm you. You are ready to risk. The master’s art is to prepare you to risk. And once you have risked, once you have become naked of personality, a pure individuality — and still can retain your intelligence, your sanity — the dark night of the soul is over, the morning is very close. Soon you will see the dawn.
9. Everybody is missing every moment until they are enlightened. Whatever you are doing can either bring you close to the point of explosion, or can take you away from the point and make you more closed. These are the two possibilities within you: exploding into a lightning experience, or being closed in a dark night of the soul. So which way are you moving? If you are moving towards the dark night of the soul you are missing — and missing more every moment because you are going farther and farther away. And there is no end of going farther away. You can go away eternally; there is no time limit. One can remain unenlightened forever — that’s the danger. And one can become enlightened this very moment.
10. Remember and watch: somewhere deep in your soul you must have this jungle. A few people have it more, a few less, but the difference is of quantity, of degree. But this jungle is in every person. This is your unconscious, your dark night within. And from this dark night arise many instincts, impulses, obsessions, insanities, and they take possession of you and your consciousness is very fragile. Your unconsciousness is ninety-nine percent, and your consciousness is just one percent. You cannot depend on it. Watch it and don’t support the unconscious. Take your cooperation away, don’t cooperate with it. When anything happens and your unconscious starts taking possession of your consciousness, become watchful, become alert.
11. Ego exists only when you live in an unconsciousness, in a darkness. The ego exists only in the dark night of the soul. Bring a little light inside. Meditate a little bit. Sit silently, doing nothing, looking inwards. In the beginning you will find only rubbish. Don’t be worried — go on looking. Within three to nine months the rubbish will be gone, and a silence will start dawning on you and a stillness will arise. In that stillness you will become aware of yourself and of the whole that surrounds you. That state is samadhi, and to know it is to know all, to be it is to be all.
12. As you watch thoughts, thoughts disappear. As you watch feelings, feelings disappear. As you watch being, you are no longer separate. Only the witness remains, which is your eternal reality. And it has nothing to do with you; it is universal. Your witness and my witness are not separate. Wherever witnessing happens, it is the same. It knows no distance in space and no distance in time. For the witness there is no space and no time; it has no limits. Before you arrive at this point, all else is the dark night of the soul. Your arrival at this witnessing starts the beautiful day of the soul. It is a sunrise which never sets.
13. Witnessing has to become just like breathing. It in fact is the breathing of the universal soul in you. And once you have tasted just a moment of being universal, the morning has come. The dark night of the soul is over.
14. When Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is within,” he is absolutely true. But when you go in, first you will enter the kingdom of the devil, not of God. Dark night of the soul…. If you pass through it, if you dare to pass through it, if you are courageous to go alone in it, only then you will be capable, you will have earned; then you will have a right to claim the morning.
15. Buddha defines wisdom as living in the light of your own consciousness, and foolishness as following others, imitating others, becoming a shadow to somebody else. The real master creates masters, not followers. The real master throws you back to yourself. His whole effort is to make you independent of him, because you have been dependent for centuries, and it has not led you anywhere. You still continue to stumble in the dark night of the soul. Only your inner light can become the sunrise. The false master persuades you to follow him, to imitate him, to be just a carbon copy of him. The real master will not allow you to be a carbon copy, he wants you to be the original. He loves you! How can he make you imitative? He has compassion for you, he would like you to be utterly free — free from all outer dependencies.
16. Whatsoever is your inside is going to be your destiny. If the inner is full of light, the whole existence is full of light. If the inner is dark, then of course it is nothing but a dark night of the soul all around. You live through your inner core, so whatsoever is the case with your center is going to be reflected by your circumference. The whole world only reflects you, echoes you, resounds you. It is nothing but you multiplied a millionfold. So if you come across ugliness, it must be somewhere inside you. If you meet the enemy, you must have projected it. If you see death, that means something in you is rotten, something in you with which you have become identified corresponds to death.
17. When Buddha uses the word ‘light’ he means the state of no-mind, because the state of no-mind is a state of tremendous light, as if thousands of suns have risen simultaneously within your soul. And whenever Buddha says ‘darkness’ he means the state of mind. Mind is dark; it is a dark night, not even a ray of light. And we all live in the mind, we all live in the dark night, and we have no idea of the dawn because we never go out of the mind. We cling to the mind. Mind is our blindness.
18. To be unconscious of your actions, your thoughts, your feelings creates your dark night of the soul. The moment you are aware of all these three layers of your being…. Thought is the most superficial, feeling, a little deeper, and then being — the last thing that you have to lose into the ultimate. The process is simple, the process is the same. Watch, witness, observe your thoughts — without any judgment, without any condemnation or evaluation…. Because the moment you make any judgment for or against, you are no longer a witness; you have already become part of the thought process. Remain silent, and just see whatsoever is passing on the screen of your mind, the way you see a film. Just remember that you are only a seer. And the same process when you have succeeded on the first layer will make you capable of seeing your feelings which are more subtle. But the person who can see thoughts and remains silently a witness automatically becomes capable of the second step. Soon you will be able to see your feelings, sentiments, moods, emotions.
19. Coming along with me you will have to drop almost the whole of you. Only the essential will remain, only that which you cannot drop. Even if you want to drop it you cannot. Only that will remain. It is a great surgery in which all the cancerous growth that surrounds you has to be cut out completely. It is painful, it is hard. Just because it is so painful and so hard, I make it as light as possible, as joyous as possible. I try to make it a joke for the simple reason that the task is hard, and it is good to pass the dark night of the soul with laughter, with gossiping, with joking, with dancing, with singing. It is good to pass the dark night of the soul with joy. What is the point of crying and weeping and mourning and wearing the black habits of the Christian priests? The night is dark enough, why make it darker? To transform yourself, to change, is painful enough; why make it more miserable?
20. I can give you the encouragement which will be needed on the path many times. There will be dark nights of the soul and you would like to come back rather than go ahead, because it seems it is growing darker and darker. But the guide can say to you that, “My experience is, when the night is darkest the morning is closest.” So the guide is a friend in this sense, that he will help you to find your path. On your path, whenever there are difficulties he may be able to help you to understand them, to bypass them or overstep them. Whenever you will fall into a discouraged, depressed state, his presence, his love, will drag you out of your depression. His presence will make you feel that the goal is not far away. So the work of the guide is very intimate. That’s why I call it the friend, to make it more intimate.
21. The presence of the sun suddenly gets reflected in millions of ways and creates a network of light, life, joy, fullness, overflowing ecstasy. That’s what I mean by a buddhafield. One man getting awakened means the sun has risen. It is the declaration that the dark night of the soul is at an end.
22. It is exactly the definition of mysticism: the transformation of the dark night of the soul into a light night of the soul. It is my work and it is your work, too. All these people who have gathered here are in search of light, life, love, laughter; and all these divine qualities have been destroyed by centuries of exploitation — by all kinds of priests, bureaucrats, politicians, by all those who have been in some kind of power.