Osho Quotes on Thoughts, Thinking and Ideas

Osho Quotes on Thoughts

1. Just remain here, and you will be surprised. If you are just now here, all thoughts disappear, because all thoughts are either of the past or of the future. No thought is of the present.
2. Drop the mind! Stop thinking! Become more alert! See the trees and listen to the birds, with no screens of thoughts hindering the path. Meet directly! Truth is immediate, radiant, herenow. It is not that truth has to be discovered — only you have to become aware. Truth is already here.
3. Truth is the ultimate guest. You will have to empty yourself utterly, only then can truth come in. Thoughts are a pre-occupation. People who are too much in thoughts remain in a private kind of world. They have their own world of thoughts and dreams and projections and desires. They go on rushing here and there, but they don’t look at the trees, the greenery, the flowers, the birds, the people, the children; they can’t see anything.
4. In a deep moment of love, thinking stops. The moment is so intriguing, the moment is so tremendously powerful, the moment is so intensely alive, that thinking stops. You are simply in awe, a great wonder surrounds you. Or in deep meditation, when the moment of silence has come and you are absolutely silent, still — no flickering, no wavering, no trembling, the flame of your consciousness is straight — then thinking stops. Then you are outside the grip of the mind. Otherwise, everything is a mind trip.
5. Remember, thoughts are also just like birds: they are moving on their own. And sometimes it happens that people who are around you, their thoughts enter into your sky, your thoughts go on entering into their sky. That’s why sometimes you feel that with some man suddenly you become sad; with some other man suddenly you feel an upsurge of energy and happiness and delight. Just looking at somebody, being near to him, something changes in your mood.
6. Change your inclination from the mind to the heart. That is the first change. Think less, feel more. Intellectualize less, intuit more. Thinking is a very deceptive process, it makes you feel that you are doing great things. But you are simply making castles in the air. Thoughts are nothing but castles in the air.
7. Get out of your head and get into your heart. Think less, feel more. Don’t be too much attached to thoughts; get deeper into sensations. Just see the change: it is only a change of gestalt. You are lost in your thoughts, you cannot hear the birds singing. Then you change the gestalt. Just the focus changes, it is a shift. You are no more worried by the thoughts: suddenly all the birds are there singing, the flowers blooming, the sunrays passing through the trees and the wind playing around with the old dead leaves. Just a shift.
8. 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.
9. These are the three layers: thoughts, the outermost; and being, the innermost; and feeling, in between, the bridge. Move from thoughts to feelings and from feelings to being, and start living from being. That does not mean that you don’t have any feelings — you will have feelings, but those feelings will follow being; they will have the flavor of being, the heartbeat of being. It does not mean that you will not be able to think — you will be able to think far more intelligently, but now your thinking will have the juiciness of your feelings and the light of your being; your thoughts will be luminous.
10. If you know a silent moment when there is no thought, you will be able to see that these thoughts are not realities. They are made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. They are waking dreams. You don’t have to fight with them, you have just to watch silently. As your watching becomes deeper, they will start disappearing. And in their place arises the experience of no-mind, of emptiness.
11. All thinking is out of fear. The more you become afraid, the more you think. Whenever there is no fear, thinking stops. If you have fallen in love with someone, there are moments with your beloved or your lover when thinking stops. Just sitting by the lake, doing nothing, holding hands, looking at the moon or the stars, or just gazing into the darkness of the night, sometimes thoughts stop because there is no fear. Love dispels fear just as light dispels darkness.
12. Right listening means you have becomes just your ears — the whole being is listening. No thinking inside, no thoughts, no thought process, only listening. Try it sometimes; it is a deep meditation in itself. Some birds are singing — the crows — just become listening, forget everything — just be the ears. The wind is passing through the trees, the leaves are rustling; just become the ears, forget everything — no thought process, just listen. Become the ears. Then it is right listening, then your whole being is absorbed into it, then you are totally present.
13. The ego can exist only in a goal-oriented vision; the mind can exist only in the future. The purpose brings future in; the goal creates the space for thoughts to move, desires to arise. And then naturally there is hurry, because life is short. Today we are here and tomorrow we are gone — maybe the next moment.
14. Meditation is clarity, absolute clarity, of vision. You cannot think about it. You have to drop thinking. When I say, ‘You have to drop thinking,’ don’t conclude in a hurry, because I have to use language. So I say, ‘Drop thinking,’ but if you start dropping, you will miss, because again you will reduce it to a doing. ‘Drop thinking’ simply means: don’t do anything. Sit. Let thoughts settle themselves. Let mind drop on its own accord. You just sit gazing at the wall, in a silent corner, not doing anything at all. Relaxed. Loose. With no effort. Not going, anywhere. As if you are falling asleep awake — you are awake and you are relaxing but the whole body is falling into sleep. You remain alert inside but the whole body moves into deep relaxation.
15. Understand the very motivation of all ideas, thoughts, desires. It is a seed-like thing. Watch inside — why can’t you be herenow? Why is it always that you are thinking of somewhere else? Why can’t you be happy as you are? Why are you thinking that tomorrow you will be happy? How can you be happy tomorrow if you are not happy today?. — because tomorrow is going to be born out of the moment. Out of this moment the next moment is going to be born. Today is going to become the parent of tomorrow. If you are unhappy today, you will be more unhappy tomorrow. You will have learned, by that time, many more tricks to be unhappy. You are practicing it, and you hope tomorrow to be happy? Then you are in a hopeless rut. You desire for tomorrow? — then you are continuously missing all that is here, and that is the only reality there is. If you can even for a single moment put aside desiring, then the projector stops, and the dreaming stops, and you are able to face reality.
16. Don’t give much energy to thoughts, that’s suicidal; you are poisoning yourself. Whenever thinking starts, if it is unnecessary — and ninety-nine percent of it is unnecessary — immediately bring yourself back to reality. Anything will help: even the touch of the chair you are sitting on, or the touch of the bed you are lying on. Feel the touch — it is more real than your thoughts about God, it is more godly than your thoughts about God because it is a real thing. Touch it, feel the touch, be the touch, be here and now. You are eating? — taste the food well, the flavor. Smell it well, chew it well — you are chewing reality! Don’t go wandering in thoughts. You are taking a bath? — enjoy it! The shower is falling on you? — feel it! Become more and more a FEELING center rather than a thinking center.
17. Meditation is fire — it burns your thoughts, your desires, your memories; it burns the past and the future. It burns your mind and the ego. It takes away all that you think that you are. It is a death and a rebirth, a crucifixion and a resurrection. You are born anew. You lose your own identity totally, and you attain to a new vision of life.
18. When the mind is with thoughts, the lake is with ripples; when the mind is without thoughts, the lake is without ripples. God is reflected perfectly when there is no ripple in you. Forget all about God — the only thing to be done is how to become ripple-less, how to become thoughtless, how to drop this constant obsession with thinking. It can be dropped — it is because of your cooperation that it continues. It is your energy that you go on giving to it that keeps it alive. It is just like a man on a bicycle: he goes on pedaling — it is his energy that keeps the cycle going on. Once he stops pedaling, the cycle may go a little further because of the past momentum, but then it has to stop.
19. Thinking is borrowed. All your thoughts are given by others to you. Watch — can you find a single thought that is yours, authentically yours, that you have given birth to? They are all borrowed. The sources may be known or unknown, but they are all borrowed. The mind functions like a computer, but before the computer can give you any answer you have to feed it. You have to supply all the information; then it will give you the answer. That’s what mind has been doing. Mind is a biocomputer. You go on collecting data, knowledge, information, and then when a certain question arises your mind supplies the answer out of that collection. It is not a real response; it is just out of the dead past. What is understanding? — understanding is pure intelligence. That pure intelligence is originally yours; you are born with it. Nobody can give you intelligence. Knowledge can be given to you, not intelligence. Intelligence is your own sharpened being. Through deep meditation one sharpens one’s being; through meditation one drops borrowed thoughts, reclaims one’s own being, reclaims one’s originality, redaims one’s childhood, innocence, freshness. Out of that freshness, when you act, you act out of understanding. And then the response is total, here-now; and the response is because of the challenge, not because of the past.