Osho Quotes on Nirvana

Osho Quotes on Nirvana

1. No mind is the door of Nirvana.
2. The mind never reaches nirvana. In fact, mind cannot even conceive the idea of nirvana. Nirvana … the very word means cessation of mind, it is annihilation of the mind.
3. When you are in a state of no-mind, something unimaginable, unbelievable, unpredictable, inexpressible, is. experienced. You can call it God, you can call it truth, you can call it NIRVANA, or whatsoever you want to call it.
4. Everything is made of the same stuff, the same existence, the same consciousness of no-mind; only names differ. You can call it anything — nirvana; you can call it salvation; you can call it liberation. But these are different names of the same space which accurately described is just no-mind, or beyond the mind. You appear in a space which has no limits, no boundaries, and suddenly you become aware that your being has been here since eternity, and it is going to be here forever. This very no-mind is the buddha, and this very moment is the lotus paradise. You don’t have to go anywhere. You have to just sink inwards to find the bottom of your being.
5. Mind dissolves only when you don’t choose. And when there is no mind, you are for the first time in your crystal clarity, for the first time in your original freshness. For the first time your real face is encountered. Mind is not there — the divider. Now existence appears as one. Mind has dropped; the barrier between you and existence is no more. Now you can look at existence with no mind. This is how a sage is born. With the mind — the world. With no mind — freedom, MOKSHA, KAIVALYA, NIRVANA. Cessation of the mind is cessation of the world.
6. This is what we have called nirvana — cessation of your being completely, as if a drop has dropped into the ocean. and has become the ocean. The wave disappears, individuality is no more, you have become the whole. And when you have become the whole — only then you are really healthy; that is why Lao Tzu says: The sage is not sickminded. In fact the sage has no mind. How can he be sickminded?
7. Religious freedom is freedom not from somebody else, but from yourself. You are no more. Because you are no more, a few masters in the East have called it anatta — no-selfness. Buddha called it nirvana — which is very close to anatta, no-selfness, or selflessness — just a zero, a profound nothingness surrounding you. But it is not emptiness, it is fullness: fullness of being, of ultimate joy, fullness of being blessed, fullness of gracefulness. All that you have known before is no more there; hence is it empty of all that. But something new, absolutely new you had not even dreamt about, is discovered.
8. There are two laws. One law is of the mind. With the law of the mind you go on creating hell around you; friends become foes, lovers prove enemies, flowers become thorns. Life becomes a burden. One simply suffers life. With the law of mind, you live in hell wherever you live. If you slip out of the mind, you have slipped out of that law, and suddenly you live in a totally different world. That different world is nirvana. That different world is God. Then without doing, everything starts happening.
9. Each person has to come back to the Garden of Eden again. The doors are not closed. ‘Knock, and they shall be opened unto you. Ask, and it shall be given.’ But one has to turn back. The path is from doing towards happening, from the ego towards no-ego, from mind towards no-mind. No-mind is what meditation is all about. That different world is nirvana. That different world is God.
10. Heaven and hell are only two sides of your mind. The religions that were born outside India have remained with these two ideas, heaven and hell. They could not rise above them. Judaism, Christianity, Islam — all the three religions born outside India, have no idea of something transcendental. In India we have a third word MOKSHA, NIRVANA.
11. In the East the work has moved into a totally different dimension. We have to let this mind go. Each part of the mind has to be dropped slowly slowly. In deep awareness, meditativeness, thoughts disappear. Sooner or later mind becomes contentless, and when the mind is contentless, it is no-mind — because mind as such is nothing but the whole process of thought. When you are without thought, not even a single thought stirring in your being, then there is no-mind. You can call it individuation, you can call it SAMADHI, YOU can call it NIRVANA or what you will.
12. Look at life, and by and by you will understand that life has its own very logical logic. Be attuned to it and that will become the door for your ecstasy, samadhi, nirvana.
13. My whole effort is to take all the props away from you, all beliefs, Osho included. First I pretend to give you help… because that is the only language you understand! Then by and by I start withdrawing myself. First I take you away from your other desires and help you to become very passionate about nirvana, liberation, truth. And when I see that now all desires have disappeared, there is only one desire left, then I start hammering on that desire, and I say, ‘Drop it because this is the only barrier.’ Nirvana is the last nightmare. You cannot go back because once you have dropped those futile desires, you cannot get back into them. Once you have dropped them, the very charm, the very mystery disappears from them. You cannot really believe how you were carrying them for so long. The whole thing looks so ridiculous that you cannot go back. And I start taking the last desire from you. Once the last desire disappears, you are enlightened. Then you are Osho. My whole effort here is to make you capable of declaring yourself to be a God also — and not only declaring it, living it too.
14. A devotee is one who has not only dropped his mind but has brought his heart in, who listens from the heart — not from logic but from love. The disciple is on the way to being a devotee. The disciple is the beginning of being a devotee, and the devotee is the fulfillment of being a disciple. Only these few people understand a Buddha. And in understanding a Buddha they are transformed, transported into another world — the world of liberation, nirvana, light, love, benediction.
15. All the religions have fallen because of this simple innocence of the mystics. Gautam Buddha was the most cultured and the most educated, the most sophisticated person ever to become a mystic. There is no comparison in the whole of history. He could see where the innocent mystics had unknowingly given chances for cunning minds to take advantage. He decided not to use any positive term for the ultimate goal, to destroy your ego and any possibility of your ego taking any advantage. He called the ultimate, nothingness, emptiness, shunyata, zero. Now, how can the ego make zero the goal? God can be made the goal, but not zero. Who wants to become zero? — that is the fear. Everybody is avoiding all possibilities of becoming zero, and Buddha made it an expression for the ultimate. His word is nirvana. He chose a tremendously beautiful word, but he shocked all the thinkers and philosophers by choosing the word `nirvana’ as the most significant expression for the ultimate experience. Nirvana means blowing out the candle. The other mystics have said that you are filled with enormous light, as if thousands of suns together have suddenly risen inside you, as if the whole sky full of stars has descended within your heart. These ideas appeal to the ego. The ego would like to have all the stars, if not inside the chest then at least hanging on the coat outside the chest. “Enormous light”… the ego is very willing. To cut the very roots, Buddha says the experience is as if you were to blow out a candle. There was a small flame on the candle giving a small light — even that is gone, and you are surrounded with absolute darkness, abysmal darkness.
16. You have come to a point of nirvana, of cessation, of disappearance, of blowing out the candle. This is the ultimate experience. If you can gather courage, just one step more… Existence is only one step away from you.
17. Buddha said again and again, “That is the beauty of the word. All those words which create desire in you are not going to help you, because desire itself is the root cause of your misery. Longing for something is your tension. Nirvana makes you absolutely free from tension: there is nothing to desire. On the contrary, you have to prepare yourself to accept a dissolution. In dissolution you cannot claim the ego, hence the word remains unpolluted.” No other word has remained unpolluted. Its negativity is the reason — and only a great master can contribute to humanity something which, even if you want, you cannot pollute. Twenty-five centuries… but there is no way. Nirvana is going to dissolve you; you cannot do anything to nirvana. It is certainly the purest word. Even its sound, whether you understand the meaning or not, is soothing, gives a deep serenity and silence, which no other word — god-realization, the absolute, the ultimate… no other word gives that feeling of silence. The moment you hear the word nirvana it seems as if time has stopped, as if there is nowhere to go. In this very moment you can melt, dissolve, disappear, without leaving any trace behind.
18. There is nothing wrong in doing your own thing — just remember that it is accidental. First know thyself, and then do anything that happens, that comes up out of your nothingness. And out of nothingness always comes the lotus of nirvana.
19. Clean the lower mind and just a simple method of meditation will give you the wings to move upwards. There is no barrier. You get more and more into light, deeper and deeper into bliss, and finally you come to a point where even you are no more… nirvana.
20. This ocean of nothingness surrounding you is nirvana.
21. Your small flame of the ego, your small flame of the mind and its consciousness, is preventing the whole universe from rushing into you; hence the word nirvana — blow out the candle and let the whole universe penetrate you from every nook and corner. You will not be a loser. You will find, for the first time, your inexhaustible treasure of beauty, of goodness, of truth — of all that is valuable. Hence, mind cannot be said to reach nirvana; only no-mind is equivalent to nirvana. No-mind need not reach to nirvana. No-mind is nirvana.
22. You cannot make enlightenment an object of your greed. You cannot make it an object of your ambition. And that is where the so-called sages and saints come in. They have made enlightenment, liberation, moksha, nirvana, a goal — an achievement. Then it becomes an ego trip. They are trapped, badly trapped. Nirvana has to flower within you. When you have dropped the mind with all its desire, with all its ambitions, with all its program for achievements, when you have dropped your whole mind full of greed …. Whether the greed concerns money, or the greed concerns enlightenment, it does not make any difference. Mind can go on changing from object to object. But it remains the same mind full of greed. The moment mind is completely dropped, you suddenly find enlightenment is not a goal. It is your self-nature. Suddenly the lotus blossoms open their petals and you are full of fragrance. And this fragrance is not different in the arhatas or in the bodhisattvas. They both are buddhas; they both are enlightened people.
23. That’s why Bodhidharma is saying: Awareness, beholding the mind, is the most essential method to have a breakthrough. And once you have gone just a step beyond the mind, you have entered the world of nirvana, you have entered the world of light and eternal life. You have attained to spiritual integrity, freedom, and tremendous ecstasy which the mind cannot even dream about.
24. Man has been trying, down the ages, somehow to have some kind of immortality. The fear of death is so much, it haunts you your whole life. The moment you drop the idea of separation, the fear of death disappears. Hence I call this state of surrender the most paradoxical. You die of your own accord and then you cannot die at all, because the whole never dies, only its parts are being replaced. But if you become one with the whole, you will live forever: you will go beyond birth and death. That’s the search for nirvana, enlightenment, moksha, the kingdom of God —  the state of deathlessness. But the condition that has to be fulfilled is very frightening. The condition is: first you have to die as a separate entity. That’s what surrender is all about: dying as a separate entity, dying as an ego. And in fact it is nothing to be worried about, because you are not separate, it is only a belief. So only the belief dies, not you. It is only a notion, an idea.
25. Meditation, Zen, never promises you anything. It simply gives you here and now. Mind is a postponement, it says, “It will happen. It will happen gradually. Go by and by. Don’t be in a hurry, nothing can be done right now.” Mind says, “Time is needed. Long is the path. Much has to be done and unless you do it, how can you attain?” Mind always divides ends and means. In reality, there is no division. Every step is the goal, and every moment is nirvana. The present is all that exists. Future is the most illusory thing, it is a creation of the mind. But you believe in the mind, and it is really wonderful, you don’t even get dis-couraged!
26. You listen to the mind, you become miserable — otherwise, this today is paradise! And there is no other paradise, this today is nirvana. If you had not listened to the mind… just don’t listen to the mind, then you are not in misery; because misery cannot exist without expectations and without hopes. And when misery exists you need more hopes for it, to hide it, to live somehow.
27. When the mind has no question to ask, in that utter silence where no question is present, you come to know that which is — call it God, call it Tao, truth, NIRVANA, or what you will.
28. This is what Buddhists call Nirvana — cessation of desire. Buddha says that when there is no desire you will cease: you will disperse into the cosmos.
29. NIRVANA is to know that all that mind creates is useless. Why not move into that which is uncreated by mind? That is the ultimate. Then there is no misery and no happiness: no good, no bad, no heaven, no hell.
30. That not-knowing comes, that not-knowing is enlightenment. Buddha has not known a single thing. All that he has come to is, his questions have disappeared. Now there is no more any question buzzing in his mind; all that noise has gone. He is left alone in silence. He is no more a knower, he has no claim that he knows this or that. He knows only nothing. That’s what Buddha calls ‘nirvana’ — to know nothing, or to know ONLY nothing. To be in a state of not-knowing is samadhi.
31. Whatsoever the goal — it does not matter what that goal is — it may be God-realization, it may be attainment of nirvana — still it is a goal and any goal is against meditation. But our whole mind exists in the future; our mind is against the present. In the present the mind dies. How can the mind exist in the present? If you are utterly now, utterly here, there is no question of mind. You cannot think because thinking needs space and the present has no space in it. It is just like a needle point: it cannot contain anything, not even a single thought.
32. The day you become tired of this very coming and going you become religious. Then a new element has entered into your consciousness, a new ray of light. Then you start thinking of nirvana. Ordinary death is getting rid of one life so that you can live again; nirvana is getting rid of all lives so you don’t live as an individual, you start living as the universe, you start living as God. Then there is no need to come back to the body, to the mind, to the ego.