Osho Quotes on Indifference

Osho Quotes on Indifference

1. Indifference looks like detachment, but it is not; indifference is simply no interest. Detachment is not absence of interest — detachment is absolute interest, tremendous interest, but still with the capacity of non-clinging. Enjoy the moment while it is there and when the moment starts disappearing, as everything is bound to disappear, let it go. That is detachment.
2. With indifference there is no possibility that joy can grow. In fact, if you have any joy, that will disappear.
3. Indifference makes you dull, makes you mediocre, makes you unintelligent. If you are indifferent your sword will lose all sharpness. That’s how it happens to the monks in the monasteries. Look at their faces, in their eyes, and you can see that something is dead. They are like corpses walking, doing things robotlike because those things have to be done. They are not really involved; they have become utterly incapable of getting involved in anything.
4. The existence is made out of joy. That is its very stuff. Joy is the stuff existence is made of. So whenever you are moving towards becoming more existential you will be becoming more and more full of joy, delight, for no reason at all. If you are moving into detachment, love will grow, joy will grow, only attachments will drop — because attachments bring misery, because attachments bring bondage, because attachments destroy your freedom. But if you are becoming indifferent…. Indifference is a pseudo-coin, it looks like detachment, but it only LOOKS like detachment. Nothing will be growing in it. You will simply shrink and die.
5. The sannyas that teaches indifference is phony. The sannyas that teaches you how to live in the world and yet float above it like a lotus flower, like a lotus leaf, remaining in the water and yet untouched by the water, remaining in the world and yet not allowing the world to enter into you, being in the world yet not being OF the world, that is true renunciation. That true renunciation comes through witnessing; it is not indifference. Indifference will make you alienated, being alienated you will feel meaningless, joyless, accidental. Feeling accidental, the desire to commit suicide will arise, is bound to arise. Why go on living a meaningless life? Why go on repeating the same rut, the same routine, every day? If there is no meaning, why not end it all, why not be finished with it all?
6. Creativity can never be indifferent. Creativity cares — because creativity is love. Creativity is the function of love and care. Creativity cannot be indifferent. If you are indifferent, by and by all your creativity will disappear. Creativity needs passion, aliveness, energy. Creativity needs that you should remain a flow, an intense, passionate flow. If you look at a flower indifferently, the flower cannot be beautiful. Through indifference, everything becomes ordinary. Then one lives in a cold way, shrunken in oneself. This calamity has happened in the East, because religion took a wrong turn and people started thinking that you have to be indifferent to life.
7. That’s the difference between the old sannyas and my new vision of sannyas. The old sannyas teaches you indifference, neutrality: “Don’t go to the heights so you need not fall into the depths.” Simple mathematics! “Don’t be happy, then you will not be unhappy.” How can you be unhappy if you have never been happy? “Don’t rejoice, then there will be no sorrow, and don’t laugh, then tears will not be possible.” This is simple mathematics, but not the truth of transcendence, not the truth of real sannyas. The real sannyas means: laugh deeply, but remember you are not the laughter; and cry and weep deeply, let the tears flow, be total in it, and yet alert, a flame inside watching it all.
8. I am not indifferent. Indifference is negative, it is suicidal, it is escapist. Of course, if you become indifferent many things will not bother you; you will live surrounded by your indifference. You will not be distracted, you will not be disturbed, but just not to be distracted is not the point. You will never be happy and overflowing. In the East, many people think that to be indifferent is the way of religion. They move away from life, they become escapists. They have not created anything. They simply vegetate and they think they have attained something — they have not attained anything. Attainment is always positive and attainment is always creative. God is creativity — how can you reach God by being indifferent? God is not indifferent. He cares about even small blades of grass, he cares about them also. He takes as much care to paint a butterfly as he takes care to create a buddha. The whole loves. And if you want to become one with the whole, you have to love. Indifference is a slow suicide. Be in deep love, so much so that you completely disappear in your love, that you become a pure creative energy. Only then do you participate with God, hand in hand you move with him. To me creativity is prayer, creativity is meditation, creativity is life. So don’t be afraid of life, and don’t close yourself in indifference. Indifference will desensitize you, you will lose all sensitivity; your body will become dull, your intelligence will become dull. You will live in a dark cell, afraid of the light and the sun, afraid of the wind and the clouds and the sea — afraid about everything. You will wrap a blanket of indifference all around you and you will start dying. Move! Be dynamic! And whatsoever you do, do it so lovingly that the very act becomes creative and divine.
9. These two words have to be understood because the difference is very delicate and subtle: ‘indifference’ and ‘transcendence’. Indifference simply means you avoid the positive to avoid the negative. Transcendence means you avoid nothing, neither the positive nor the negative. You live the positive in its totality and you live the negative in its totality, with a new quality — and that quality is that of a witness. You live totally but at the same time you remain silently alert, aware.
10. When I say, “Let go of it all, the positive and the negative,” I simply mean don’t cling, don’t be identified. I am not saying, “Renounce!” Live, and yet live above. Walk on the earth, but no, don’t let your feet touch the earth. Yes, there is an art to it. And that’s what sannyas is all about: the art of living in the world without being part of it, the art of living life without being identified with it. That’s what real let-go is. The old sannyas is that of indifference. Exactly that is the word used in the old scriptures: a sannyasin becomes UDASIN — indifferent to all that is — VAIRAGYA. He becomes cold and detached. He escapes from the world of duality. He moves into a monastery or into the Himalayan caves, lives alone, lives without joy, without sadness. A kind of death he lives: he is already in his grave, he lives not. His life is not worth calling life. He has fallen below humanity; he is closer to the animals than to human beings. Hence his search for the caves, forests, jungles, mountains, deserts — he is afraid of being with human beings. He wants to fall below human beings, because human beings are bound to be divided by this great polarity, positive and negative, and he is afraid of it. But the real sannyasin — the sannyasin of my vision — lives in the world, in the thick of it, in the dense world. He renounces nothing. He lives life as totally as possible, because if God has given life it means there is something to attain through it. Only by living it can it be attained, only by living it is there something to be learned. Transcendence has to be learned; that is the great gift of life. If you become more and more conscious, let-go will happen and yet you will be here and now, and more than ever before. You will eat and you will taste more. You will love and you will have deeper orgasmic experiences. You will play and your play will have something of the spiritual in it. Your ordinary life will become sacred. Only one thing has to be introduced: witnessing.
11. There are three objects which can either function as three poisons or can become three bases of infinite virtue. Atisha is talking of the inner alchemy. The poison can become the nectar, the baser metal can be transformed into gold. What are these three objects? The first is aversion, the second is attachment, and the third is indifference. This is how the mind functions. You feel aversion to whatsoever you dislike, you feel attachment to whatsoever you like, and you feel indifferent to things which you neither dislike nor like. These are the three objects. Between these three, the mind exists. These are the three legs of the tripod called the mind: aversion, attachment and indifference. And if you live in these three as they are, you are living in poison. This is how we have created a hell out of life. Aversion, dislike, hatred, repulsion — that creates one-third of your hell. Attachment, liking, clinging, possessiveness — that creates the second one-third of your hell. And indifference to all that you are neither attracted to nor repulsed by — that creates the third part, the third one-third of your hell. Just watch your mind, this is how your mind functions. It is always saying, “I like this, I don’t like that, and I am indifferent to the third.” These are the three ways the mind goes on moving. This is the rut, the routine.
12. Tilopa says the emphasis should be on your own self, not on the things. Rest in yourself; don’t be even indifferent to the world, because that indifference still is a very subtle bridge with the world. The focus should not be on the other. Turn your lives completely inwards. You don’t bother about the world, not even to be indifferent to it. You neither ask for more, you neither try to give more, nor are you indifferent to the world either… as if the world has simply disappeared. You are self-centered, sitting inside, doing nothing. Your whole focus has turned, taken a total about-turn… as if the world has completely disappeared. There is nothing to give, nothing to take, nothing to be indifferent about. Only you are. You live in your consciousness and that is your only world. Nothing else exists.
13. What is virtue? Virtue is balance. Virtue is compassion not love. The distinction is subtle, but great. When you love a person the emotion is hot. When you hate a person then too the emotion is hot. One thing is the same, that you are in a HOT relationship. If you are indifferent to a person you are cold, no heat in you either way. You are simply unrelated; you don’t love, you don’t hate; you don’t bother, you don’t care. You are indifferent, you go on your own way. That’s why nothing hurts people more than indifference. If you hate a person it is not so much of a problem to him. He knows you are paying him attention — maybe negative, but you are paying attention. But if you are indifferent it hurts deeply. If people simply do not bother about you, you pass, and they don’t pay any attention this way or that, then you feel that you are almost dead! Indifference kills, not hate. Hate brings energy. Love brings energy. Love is a pleasant feeling, hate is unpleasant, but if you have to choose between hate and indifference, you will certainly choose hate. You will never choose indifference. Indifference is absolutely cold, killing. Compassion is not cold, compassion is cool. Cold means dead, cool means balanced. Let me tell you in another way. Compassion is cool, indifference is cold; if you compare compassion with love and hate, it is cool; if you compare compassion with indifference, it is warm. It is warm in comparison to indifference and its coldness. It is cool in comparison to love and hate and their heat. Virtue is compassion. It is not love, it is not hate, it is a balance between the two. It is not indifference either. It is life-giving. But if you don’t know, compassion will look like indifference. The distinction is very subtle. Coolness will look like coldness, but coolness is alive, fresh. Coldness is simply dead. Virtue is compassion.
14. Nothing seems to help the modern man — because the indifference is too heavy; it has created a dark cloud around him. He cannot see beyond his own nose; he is suffocating in his lonely world. The walls are so thick, thicker than the China Wall, that even when you love you are hidden behind your wall, your beloved is hidden behind her wall. There are two China Walls between you. You shout, but no communication seems to be possible. You say one thing, something else is understood; she says something, you understand something else. Husbands and wives sooner or later come to one understanding: that it is better not to talk. It is better to keep silent, because the moment you utter a word misunderstanding is bound to follow.
15. It is becoming more and more difficult to understand people, because such thick, dense indifference surrounds everybody that even if you shout you can’t be heard, or they hear something which you have not said at all. They hear that which they want to hear or they hear that which they CAN hear. They hear not what is said but what their mind interprets.
16. Poets, artists, thinkers, scientists, those who live in a kind of independence, at least in their minds, are impossible people to live with; they are eccentric people to live with. They give freedom to the other, but their freedom looks more like indifference than like freedom, looks more as if they don’t care, as if it doesn’t matter to them. They leave each other to their own spaces. Relationship seems to be only superficial; they are afraid to go deeper into each other, because they are more attached to their freedom than to love, and they don’t want to compromise.
17. When love does not grow it becomes something else. Love is a very delicate thing. If it does not grow, it becomes bitter, it becomes poisoned; it becomes hatred. It can even fall below hatred — it can become indifference, which is the farthest from love. Love is a hot energy. So is hate, hot. But indifference is cold, frozen. You can think about love and hate and indifference on this scale. Exactly between hate and love there is a zero point  — just like in a thermometer there is a zero point — below it is coldness, above it is warmth. Love is warmth. That zero point is hatred, below it you become even more cold, more cold: you can become ice-cold — indifferent. If love does not grow, it starts falling dowanwards. It has to move: love is energy; energy moves. If it moves, soon you will find it is no longer love. It has become meditation, it has become prayer. That’s the whole approach of Tantra: that if love grows rightly, if love is tended carefully, it becomes prayer. It becomes, finally, the ultimate experience of God. Love is the temple of God. So people who live in indifference cannot know God. Indifference is the real atheism.
18. Remember, anger or hate or not the real opposites of love — indifference is the real opposite. When someone is indifferent to you, love is lost. If someone is not even ready to be angry with you, then everything is lost. But ordinarily if your wife is angry you react more violently, you become aggressive. You cannot understand the symbolic meaning of it. You are not grounded in yourself. You have not really known your own anger; that’s why you cannot understand others’ anger. If you know your own anger, if you can feel it in its total mood, then you know others’ anger also. You are angry only when you love someone, otherwise there is no need. Through anger the wife is  saying that she still loves you, she is not indifferent to you. She has been waiting, waiting, and now the whole waiting has become anger.
19. Love is illogical. Love is irrational. Love is life. Love comprehends all contradictions in it. Love is even capable of comprehending its own opposite — hate. Have you not observed it? You go on hating the same person you love. But love is bigger. It is so big that even hate can be allowed to have its play. In fact, if you really love, hate is not a distraction; on the contrary, it gives color, spice. It makes the whole affair more colorful — like a rainbow. Even hate is not the opposite for a loving heart. He can hate and continue loving. Love is so great that even hate can be allowed to have its own say. Lovers become intimate enemies. They go on fighting. In fact, if you ask psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and psychologists, they will say that when a couple stops fighting, love has also stopped. When a couple no longer bother even to fight, have become indifferent to each other, then love has stopped. If you are still fighting with your wife or your husband, your boyfriend or girlfriend, that simply shows that life is still running in it, it is still a live wire, still hot. When love is no longer there and everything is dead, then there is no fight. Of course! For what to fight? It is meaningless. One settles into a sort of coldness; one settles into a sort of indifference. Love is like wild life — hence Jesus’ saying that God is love.
20. Try this. In any way become neutral, indifferent — suddenly mind has no function. If you are for, you can think; if you are against, you can think. If you are neither for nor against, what is left to think? Buddha says that indifference is the basis of the middle path. UPEKSHA indifference — be indifferent to the extremes. Just try one thing: be indifferent to the extremes. A balancing happens. This balancing will give you a new dimension of feeling where you are both the knower and the known, the world and the other world, this and that, the body and the mind. You are both, and simultaneously neither — above both. A triangle has come into existence.
21. When you are indifferent, the mind starts feeling as if there is nobody — what is the point of all the questions? Because you are interested, curious, you get involved, you are giving juice to the mind. Indifference to the mind is meditation. And all those questions will disappear, because they are absolutely meaningless. And when the chattering of the mind has disappeared, there is a silence, a peace, so that you can hear the still, small voice of your heart.
22. LOOK WITHIN. BE STILL. And the way to look within is: be still. Learn to sit silently, at least for a few hours, doing nothing, just being, breathing, watching your thoughts. That too without a strain — in a very relaxed way as if you are not much concerned with what is passing by; an indifferent watchfulness, aloof, unconcerned, cool. Go on seeing the traffic of the mind. Slowly slowly, as your coolness deepens, as your indifference becomes bigger, more crystallized, the thoughts will be coming less and less. And one day you are simply sitting there with no thought at all. You look around: no thought, the mind is empty. In that moment of inner emptiness all fear disappears, all attachment disappears, and one comes to KNOW THE SWEET JOY OF THE WAY.
23. Joy passes by and the mirror reflects it, but the mirror does not become joy itself; it never becomes identified. And sadness comes like a cloud, a dark cloud, and passes by, and the mirror reflects it. The mirror has no prejudice against it. The mirror is not favorable to joy and unfavorable to sadness. The mirror has no liking, no disliking; it simply reflects whatsoever is the case. It is not neutral, otherwise it will not reflect; it does not turn its back towards things. It is not indifferent, because indifference again means you are already prejudiced; you have a certain conclusion. It is not disinterested and you cannot say it is interested -either. It is a transcendence. Abhiyana, don’t get identified with the joy that comes — watch it. Remain a watcher on the hills, a mirror. Reflect it but don’t cling to it. A bird on the wing…and the lake reflects it.
24. Witnessing is not an effort. When you are unconcerned the witness arises. Be indifferent to the mind; in the climate of indifference the witness arises. The very idea that you have to stop it is wrong, that you have to still it is wrong, that you have to do something about this constant ongoing process is wrong. You are not required to do anything. If you do anything it won’t help — it will help the trouble, not you. That’s why when you meditate you feel the mind going more mad; when you don’t meditate it is not so mad. When you are meditating you are too concerned with the mind, trying your hardest to make it still. Who are you? And why should you be worried about the mind? What is wrong with it? Allow the thoughts, let them move like clouds. When you are indifferent, suddenly you are watching. With nothing left to do, what will you do? You can only watch, you can only witness — and in witnessing mind stops. Not that you can stop it. Nobody has ever been able to stop the mind, because the stopper is also part of the mind. The idea of meditation is part of the mind too — the idea that if you become silent you will attain to the ultimate is also of the mind. So don’t be stupid! The mind cannot silence the mind. Who is asking this question, you or the mind?
25. This silence is qualitatively different from a silence that you can practice. The real silence comes spontaneously, it is not something to be practiced. If you practice it you can create a false silence. The mind is so tricky, it can give you a false notion of silence — and that too will belong to the mind. So don’t try hard to still it. Rather, stand aside, by the side of the road, and let the traffic pass. Just watch it, just look at it with eyes of unconcern, indifference, and the thing that you have been desiring will happen — but not through desire. Because desire will not allow you to be indifferent. Buddha has used a word upeksha; the word means absolute indifference. And he says that you can never become meditative unless you have attained to upeksha, to indifference. That is the very soil. In that soil the seeds of meditation sprout — and there is no other way.
26. The first thing is to become an indifferent watcher. And the second thing is to remember that when beautiful gaps arise, don’t get attached to them, don’t start asking for them, don’t start waiting that they should happen more often. If you can remember these two things — when beautiful gaps come, watch them too, and keep your indifference alive — then one day the traffic simply disappears with the road, they both disappear. And there is tremendous emptiness. That’s what Buddha calls ‘Nirvana’ — the mind has ceased. This is what I call suicide — but mind has not committed it. Mind cannot commit it. You can help it to happen. You can hinder it, you can help it to happen — it depends on you, not on your mind. All that mind can do will always strengthen the mind. So meditation is not really mind-effort. Real meditation is not effort at all. Real meditation is just allowing the mind to have its own way, and not interfering in any way whatsoever — just remaining watchful, witnessing. It silences, by and by, it becomes still. One day it is gone. You are left alone.
27. Gautam Buddha has made it a meditation. He called it upeksha — indifference. Just be indifferent to the mind, and it won’t be a disturbance for long.
28. It depends on you, how much indifference you can create towards the mind, how much you can be watchful. The mind will become slowly, slowly rejected. It will stop doing its things, because now nobody is interested. For whom to do all the circus?
29. In fact, the only way mind has ever become silent is whenever you are utterly indifferent — as if it is not your mind and it does not matter whether it chatters or not. When your indifference is so deep that it does not matter if it chatters… Let him chatter. If the mind stops chattering, don’t start patting your back. Just remain calm and quiet, alert and watchful… and mind has always stopped. Meditation has never failed if you have followed the right rule.
30. If you don’t cooperate, if you just look unconcerned — Buddha’s word is indifference, upeksha: looking without any concern, just looking, not doing anything in any way — the mind will flow for a while and it will stop by itself When the momentum is lost, when the energy has flowed, the mind will stop. When the mind stops, you are in yoga: you have attained the discipline.
31. A man of meditation never becomes cold and never remains hot either: he becomes cool, calm and quiet. His love takes a totally new dimension, which will appear to ordinary people as indifference. To those who understand, his love becomes less noisy, less stupid, less retarded, less biological, but starts having a flavor of spirituality, which needs an understanding; otherwise the other person, your partner, is bound to think you have become cold. And coldness is a sign of death, not of life.
32. There exists a certain school of psycho-analysts in the West who have proposed that, unless children are brought up without their father and mother, the world will never be at peace. I don’t support them — because then they will never be brought up in any way. They have something of a truth in their proposal, but it is a very dangerous proposal. Because if children are brought up in nurseries without fathers and mothers, without any love, with total indifference, they may not have the problem of the ego, but they will have some other problems, in the same way dangerous, even more so. If a child is brought up in total indifference he will have no center in him. He will be a hotch-potch being, clumsy, not knowing who he is. He will not have any identity. Afraid, scared, he will not be able to take even a single step without fear, because nobody loved him. Of course, the ego will not be there, but, without the ego, he will have no center. He will not become a Buddha; he will be just a dull, inferior being, stupid and always feeling afraid. Love is needed to make you feel fearless, that you are accepted, that somebody loves you, that you are not useless, that you cannot be discarded in the junkyard. If children are brought up in such a situation, where love is lacking, they will not have egos, that’s right. Their life will not have so much struggle and fight. But they will not be able to fight at all, and they will be always in flight, escaping; escaping from everybody, hiding in caves in their own being. They will not be Buddhas, they will not be radiant with vitality, they will not be centered, at ease, at home. They will simply be eccentric, off-center. That will not be a good situation either.