Osho Quotes on Awakening

Osho Quotes on Awakening

1. Awakening can happen to anybody: it has happened to Jesus, it has happened to Lao Tzu, it has happened to Basho — it can happen to anybody.
2. An awakening can be immediate, awakening can be sudden — in fact, awakening can ONLY be sudden. When you wake somebody up, it is not that slowly slowly, in parts, gradually, he wakes up. It is not that now he is ten percent awake, now twenty, now thirty, now forty, now ninety-nine, now ninety-nine point nine, and then a hundred percent — no. When you shake a sleepy person, he awakes immediately. Either one is asleep or one is awake; there is no place in between. Hence Buddha says enlightenment is a sudden experience; it is not gradual, it is not that you arrive in steps. Enlightenment cannot be divided into parts; it is an indivisible, organic unity. Either you have it or you don’t have it.
3. The most fundamental religious truth is that man is asleep — not physically, but metaphysically; not apparently, but deep down. Man lives in a deep slumber. He works, he moves, he thinks, he imagines, he dreams, but the sleep continues as a basic substratum to his life. Rare are the moment when you feel really awake, very rare; they can be counted on the fingers. if in seventy years’ life you had only seven moments of awakening, that, too, will be too much. Man lives like a robot: mechanically efficient, but with no awareness. Hence the whole problem! There are so many problems man has to face, but they are all by-products of his sleep.
4. Buddha says: It is only by awakening that one becomes victorious; not by conquering the world but by conquering one’s unconsciousness.
5.  Enlightenment is just an awakening out of sleep. It is to become aware.
6. Zen is a method of awakening, not a theology. It does not talk about God: it forces you into God. It hits you in many ways so that you can be awakened into God. To be asleep is to be in the world: to be awake is to be in God.
7. This is one of the most important emphases of Bodhidharma. That you all have — every human being has — the same space within you, the same no-mind, and the same potential to blossom into a unique flowering. Nobody is poor and nobody is rich as far as the inner being is concerned. You have always had it. Even this very moment you are all buddhas. But you have never looked into yourself, you have never discovered it. Remember buddhahood, enlightenment, awakening, liberation, moksha, nirvana; all these words mean the same thing.
8. You are already enlightened. You have simply forgotten it. You have to be reminded, that’s all. The function of the Master is to remind you, not to give you a path but to give you a remembrance; not to give you methods of cultivation, not to give you a character, virtue, but only awareness, intelligence, awakening. In a single moment it can be attained because you have never lost it in the first place. You are dreaming that you are unenlightened.
9. The moment mind disappears with all its illusions and dreams and thoughts and imaginations, you see within yourself the awakening, which you can call the buddha, you can call the Christ. These are simply names. But one thing is certain: the moment your mind disappears, something divine appears in you and starts growing into a huge tree with great foliage, with great flowers, with great fruit.
10. This is real awakening. Moving from ego to egolessness is the most radical change possible. There is no other revolution greater than that because it brings you to the ultimate peak of awareness, awakening. It makes you a Buddha, an awakened one.
11. Enlightenment is not something like an achievement; one cannot achieve it. One has to disappear for it to happen. It is a happening and it happens only in the absence of the ego. And whenever you are doing something the ego becomes more and more strengthened. The ego is a doer, and enlightenment happens in a state of nondoing. It is simply the realization of who you are; it is not a question of achievement. You are already it! Just an awakening, just a turning in!
12. The experience of enlightenment, awakening, illumination, happens when there is no mind present. Enlightenment is a no-mind experience. Words are not there, language is not there. In fact, you are not there either. It is such a silence, so profound and infinite.
13. If your consciousness is clean, pure, innocent, the moment is not far away when you will explode into a luminous splendor. That’s what is known as enlightenment, or awakening, or self-realization.
14. This state of watchfulness is your pure consciousness. And it is not yours, it is the universal consciousness. You can call it awakening, you can call it buddhahood, you can call it enlightenment, names don’t matter.
15. The only quality the buddha has is witnessing. Witness that you are not the body. Witness that you are not the mind. Witness that you are not the astral or the subtle bodies. Witness that you are only the witness and nothing else. This is your purest consciousness. This is your awakening.
16. “Sambuddha.” It means the awakened one. Man is asleep. Even while he is awake, he is not awake. This waking state is just a kind of subtle sleep — dreams Continue. Even while you are awake there is a substratum of dreams, a continuum. This is not true awakening. The true awakening is when there is no thought in the mind, no dream in the mind, no desire in the mind… when the mind is utterly empty of all content and there is only pure consciousness, when the sky is utterly empty of all the clouds. That is true awakening: consciousness without content. That’s the goal of all meditations, and that’s the search of all the religions: now to come to a metaphysical awakening.
17. Enlightenment is nothing but awakening. For the enlightened person, all our lives are just dreams.
18. There is no need of any God if you are awake. Your awakening, your enlightenment makes you laugh, that “I was looking for God in the sky and he was hiding within me.”
19. Gautam the Buddha is not the only buddha in the history of the world; there have been thousands of buddhas around the world, in different parts of the world. They may not be known as buddhas, because `buddha’ simply means the awakened one. It is not the name of Gautam Buddha; his name was Gautam Siddharth. Buddha is his awakening, his enlightenment, his knowing himself and existence. Anybody who becomes awakened can be called a buddha, it is nobody’s monopoly. The word does not belong to Gautam Buddha, it is not his name; it is the quality that has happened to him, his awakening. Anybody awake, anywhere in the world, has the right to be called a buddha.
20. I use the word `buddha’ as a symbol of total awakening, of absolute enlightenment.
21. Whenever there is an awakened person, in the context of his awakening God becomes real. This is the only possibility for God to be. To be really a man means to become a space for God to exist in you.
22. Buddha says: It is a great opportunity, a rare blessing  — because if you make a little effort you can become awake. A dog cannot become awake, whatsoever effort he makes. A tree cannot become awake; howsoever hard it tries, it is not possible. If a tree tries hard, it will become a dog. If the dog tries hard, the dog may become a man. But awakening happens only when you are a human being. The way towards God goes only from the human being. And in the east we think — and the thought has much validity in it — that even DEVAS, angels, gods, are not as blessed as a man. Why? Because man stands on the crossroads. Even if gods have to become liberated, they will have to be born as men.
23. The world may be attracted by the idea of awakening, but sleep has its own soothing calmness. So when you are talking with people about awareness, they may listen to it — they may even think that they will give it a try — but to remain unconscious is very consoling. And when you are surrounded by millions of sleeping people, their sleep is going to affect you, unless you have come to the highest peak of awareness — from where there is no turning back.
24. I cannot give you better sleep. I would like to give you better awakening, better awareness.
25. To me sannyas is an awakening, not an escape. It is an awareness of the whole phenomenon of life — that it is a game.
26. Sannyas means putting your total energy into awakening. Just a total effort is needed — passionate, intense. From this moment think of awareness as a question of life and death. In fact it is a question of life and death. Without awareness you are simply dying every day; with awareness you start living for the first time and then life goes on growing bigger and bigger, vaster and vaster.
27. Buddha is awareness, simple awareness. It is awakening, it is waking up. Buddha is nothing to do with Gautam Siddhartha; he is only one of the buddhas. Many more have preceded him, many more have succeeded him. And one day or other you are also going to become a buddha. You can become right now, because you are it. It is only a question of recognizing your reality, of remembering.
28. Sannyas cannot be accidental; it should be intentional. You should be ready to go into any transformation, any change. And the curious man is not ready for that — only a seeker, only one who is ready to risk his life. That risking of life is the beginning of a new consciousness within you. It is the awakening of your soul.
29. Except awakening, nothing is secure here. All is just… hallucination, all is just… deceiving yourself, creating newer and newer mirages. The oasis exists not! This world is a desert. The oasis exists in your awareness only. Create that oasis of awareness. And whatsoever is needed for it, do. Whatsoever price has to be paid, pay. Whatsoever has to be risked, risk — because all else is going to be taken away from you anyway. Death will come, and your job and your wife and your children and your name and fame — all will be taken away. Before death comes search for awareness, because those who become aware in life, for them, death never comes. They become deathless. They know what immortality is. Because in your awareness you come to know not the body, but the one who resides in it.
30. Yes, awareness, awakening, is arduous, but it is worth the difficulty. Compared to what you get, the difficulty is nothing. Everyone who has ever attained has declared that what they did was nothing, while what they gained was all. Hence they talk of attainment as the sacrament, prasad,  the gift: it cannot be achieved through effort, it has no relation to what we do. It is as though we did a dollar’s worth of work, and received a billion dollars in return. We have done nothing, and we receive all. There seems to be no cause-and-effect relationship between the work and the reward; hence the word prasad — the gift. It was not attained through our effort; it was offered to us out of grace.
31. The awakening of the buddha is a very easy and relaxed phenomenon. Now that so many people have awakened, the path has become clear-cut; it is no longer hard and arduous. You can playfully enter inside and joyously experience the awakening of awareness. It is not as far away as it was for Gautam Buddha.
32. The whole order of sannyas was created as group work. Awakening becomes more possible if there are ten thousand people working in a group, so even if one is awakened, he can create a chain of awakenings.
33. The whole science of religion can be reduced to the single art of awakening. All the religions basically are nothing but methods of awakening. Methods are different because people are different, but the goal is the same — the goal is awareness. The goal is utter, absolute, consciousness.
34. Sannyas is the beginning of getting out of the law of karma. Because sannyas is the beginning of awakening. Sannyas is your effort to get out of the rut in which you have lived for many lives. Sannyas is the insight that ‘Enough is enough, and I should get out of the routine life, I should get out of the mechanicalness of it. I should get out into a clearness, into clarity. Enough I have roamed in the jungle of unconsciousness, in the dark night of the soul. I should search for the dawn, for the morning.’
35. The truth is that awakening is the nearest reality to you, just by the side of you. It is not far away; hence it cannot be made a goal. All goals are dreaming, all achievements are dreaming. Awakening cannot be a goal because the man who is asleep cannot even think of what awakening can be. He cannot make, in his sleep, a goal of enlightenment — it is impossible. Or whatever he makes will be totally different from the reality of enlightenment. Enlightenment is part of your waking consciousness.